Provos (1997)
Peter Taylor’s documentary miniseries on the history of the Provisional IRA provided space for the Republican narrative of the Troubles to be relayed – albeit not without criticism or pushback.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history. It is available in full only to paid subscribers.
Content warnings: Death; Murder; Anti-Catholic discrimination; Bereavement.
‘The Troubles’ were a three-decade long civil conflict over the future status of Northern Ireland, and whether it would remain part of the United Kingdom or form part of a united Ireland, contested between the Republican Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Loyalist paramilitary groups the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association, and British security forces.
Its legacy has remained influential and been mobilised within Northern Ireland and beyond since around the point the conflict ended in the late 1990s, in aspects of administration, in the partial and overlapping (rather than cohesive) transitional justice process, and in mediated representations of the conflict.
As the 1990s progressed, television provided a more nuanced portrayal of the Troubles and its combatants, at the point when the conflict was coming to a close1. It was in this context that Peter Taylor’s Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein was made and broadcast on BBC in late 1997. Yet this miniseries on the Republican movement, the first in a trilogy he made about the Troubles for the UK’s public broadcaster, was also the latest entry in the veteran journalist’s long career of covering political violence in Northern Ireland.
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I therefore wanted to use this post to examine Provos, as an encapsulation of Taylor’s journalistic approach to the Troubles, and as an example of how a certain liberal framework of recalling and representing the conflict functioned, at the point when it no longer seemed intractable. I also wanted to explore how Taylor’s, and the BBC’s, approach to documentary-making incorporated the Republican counternarrative of those events.
Peter Taylor and the Troubles
Born and raised in Scarborough, Peter Taylor joined ITV’s current affairs programme This Week in 1967. In the wake of Bloody Sunday, the 1972 massacre of 14 unarmed Catholic civil rights protestors by British soldiers in Derry, he gained particular prominence for his coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1980, Taylor moved to the BBC and its investigative journalism programme, Panorama, for whom he continued to cover the Northern Ireland conflict, as well as writing a number of books on the topic.2
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After the Troubles formally ceased with the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Taylor wrote and presented on political violence, security and espionage affairs more generally, including the rise of Al-Qaeda, and the intelligence that paved the way for Britain’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also perennially revisited the conflict in Northern Ireland and its legacy, with programmes such as Who Won the War? in 2014, and Peter Taylor: My Journey through the Troubles in 2019.
Responding to questions from BBC News Online users in 2000, Taylor outlined his stance on covering the Troubles and the British state’s response to it. He noted that he was regularly questioned as to why he made programmes so critical of the security forces, given the extent of the violent threat posed by terrorist organisations like the IRA. He explained:
But I think that if our security forces, or our police officers or our politicians do break the law then they should be brought to justice. A sign of the health of any liberal democracy such as ours is the ability and freedom of the media to investigate these sorts of areas. If we didn’t the democracy to which we all belong would be the weaker for it.
Being interviewed for BBC News 14 years later, Taylor also reflected on the challenges of interviewing terrorists, without simply providing them with the ‘so called oxygen of publicity’. He said that there was a balance to be struck between questioning interviewees robustly on their actions, while simultaneously retaining sufficient rapport with them to ensure continued access. The journalist’s honesty and integrity was crucial in this context, and he prized his reputation in this regard:
Trust is the key and it takes years to build it up. In the end you are judged by what you say you will do and what you actually do. There has to be a correlation between the two…There was/is a general recognition that I have a job to do and that job crucially involves being fair. When I’m in Northern Ireland, it means a lot when from time to time I’m stopped by people from both sides who say “thank you for being fair”. It’s quite a humbling experience.
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Taylor’s Troubles trilogy
During the mid-to-late 1990s, Taylor began making a trilogy of miniseries for the BBC on the history of the Troubles. At this point in time, the peace process that would eventually culminate in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the formal cessation of the Troubles was well underway.
Each miniseries examined the Troubles with a focus on one of the sides involved in the conflict. The first, Provos, was screened on BBC One in September 1997. The second, Loyalists, which considered the role of both Loyalist paramilitaries and hard-line Unionist politicians in the Troubles, was shown on BBC Two in February 1999. Finally, Brits, which explored the perspective and conduct of the security forces, was screened in May 2000.
In a feature for the BBC News site to mark the launch of Brits, Taylor wrote:
The trilogy of the Troubles – Provos, Loyalists and now Brits – has been a massive undertaking. We didn’t set out to make a conventional history of the Troubles but wanted to explore, in the political context of the time, the actions and psyche of those at the sharp end of the conflict – the Republicans, Loyalists and Brits who did the killing and the dying.
In the aforementioned online question and answer forum for BBC Online, Taylor was asked whether he had received any threatening pushback from any of the sides for making these programmes, and replied that he had not. He noted that his team had relied on a degree of assistance from Republicans to make Provos, and that they generally saw it as ‘a pretty fair report on the history of their movement’.
Taylor also rejected the implication that the trilogy risked stirring up tensions again and jeopardising the peace process, arguing that it was rather a testament to its importance:
Memories are short unless you happen to have been a member of a family who has lost loved ones. I think it’s a very timely reminder, in particular at this critical point historically, to people of where we have all come from and why we cannot go back to it. I think that is the single most important purpose of the trilogy.
Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein
Provos was comprised of four episodes. The first, ‘Born Again’, centred on the establishment of the Provisional IRA. It set this event within the context of the legacy of partition in 1922, and of Catholics’ experiences of state-led discrimination and then of escalating violence from their Protestant neighbours as the 1960s drew to a close.
Hopes that the recently deployed British Army might prove a more honest broker than the Royal Ulster Constabulary were also swiftly disappointed. With the existing IRA effectively a spent force militarily, the Provisionals broke away, committed to renewed armed struggle. It began accumulating arms and targeting military personnel, along with bombing commercial districts, ostensibly with the intention of only causing damage to buildings, but with frequent loss of civilian life as well.
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The second episode, ‘Second Front’, concentrated on the period between the early 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, the IRA took its bombing campaign to the British mainland, proposals for a power-sharing regime foundered on Unionist recalcitrance and direct rule from Westminster was introduced, internment was introduced and then discontinued, and Republican prisoners responded to the removal of their special status with escalating protests, culminating in the 1981 hunger strike in which ten men starved to death.
The documentary presented this as a period in which Republicans were demoralised by rising numbers of arrests and the failure of negotiations with the British government, but then reinvigorated by the leadership of Gerry Adams, and the launch of a political strategy involving electoral politics and the building of a broader coalition of support.
Episode three, ‘Secret War’, examined the attrition of the 1980s. The British government deployed an effective but controversial counterinsurgency strategy, involving firstly the recruitment of ‘supergrasses’ within the IRA to inform on other paramilitaries, and then the usage of British Army special forces, the SAS, to ambush and often kill IRA members.
The episode covered the FBI’s success in shutting down the supply line of arms from America to Northern Ireland too, but also the IRA’s acquisition of large quantities of advanced weaponry from Libya. The outcome of this manoeuvring on both sides was an effective military stalemate. At the same time, Adams’ political strategy was both bearing fruit electorally, and becoming increasingly hegemonic within Sinn Fein.
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The final episode, ‘Endgame’, brought the series up to the then-present day. It was the most high politics-focused of the four episodes, concentrating on the developing peace process as negotiated between existing Republican leadership, the more mainstream Nationalist Social and Democratic Labour Party, the Irish government, and the British government (as well as the belated involvement of Bill Clinton and his administration in the US).
‘Endgame’ presented a Republican leadership determined to end the war, but also needing to bring the broader, far less convinced wider membership with it, calling an indefinite ceasefire in 1994. It also covered the positive moves made in this direction by Albert Reynolds’ government in Ireland and John Major’s in the UK, including the 1993 Anglo-Irish agreement.
Disagreement over decommissioning weapons and the increasingly weak Major government’s reliance on Unionist support in Parliament threatened to derail the peace process, resulting in the IRA halting the ceasefire in 1996. However, the series concluded on a more positive note, with the election of Tony Blair as prime minister in 1997, and the IRA’s resumption of its ceasefire.
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