Northern Ireland '68 - preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Dramatis Personae

ix

Foreword

xii

Preface to the New Edition

xiv

Introduction

1

Chapter One Unionism and its State

10

Chapter Two Nationalism and its Discontents

48

Chapter Three Republicanism and Socialism

88

Chapter Four The Civil Rights Campaign

115

Chapter Five Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Derry

127

Chapter Six The Derry Disturbances

163

Chapter Seven The Unionist Reaction

180

Chapter Eight People’s Democracy

196

Conclusion

215

Endnotes

222

Index

266

Foreword

C

ontroversy is the lifeblood of history. If Burke taught us that truth has a certain economy of expression, John Stuart Mill taught us that truth also has a necessary vitality. In history, at least, ideas which are not challenged tend to atrophy and harden into dogmas. Modern Irish history in recent years has been marked by many serious and important debates, which tend to spill out of the academic forum to engage wider public interest. Was the 1798 rebellion inspired by the modernising ideas of the French Revolution, or was it essentially a sectarian jacquerie? Were the victims of the Great Irish Famine of 1845–9 sacrificed to a narrow vision of political economy, or did the British governments of the time do the best that could have been done under the circumstances? Who were the real victors of the Irish Land War – the Irish peasantry as a whole, or simply a privileged rural bourgeoisie? One event alone in the war of independence – the Kilmichael ambush – has produced a growing literature, involving significant numbers of locally based historians as well as professional academics, about whether Crown forces staged a ‘false surrender’ to lure Republican ambushers into the open and were rightly refused quarter thereafter, or whether this is a story to justify the deliberate killing of disarmed prisoners.

All these controversies, even the more tedious and embittered ones, are in principle to be welcomed. The willingness to question and debate is one of the most striking and attractive features of modern Irish historiography. There is one great exception to this rule – the historical treatment of the Civil Rights crisis of 1968. Here the iron hand of consensus rules. This is not without good reason. Northern Ireland in 1968 was characterised by a dead weight of Unionist–Nationalist antagonism which expressed itself in the denial of equal citizenship to the Catholic and Nationalist minority. The most striking example of this denial was the gerrymander of the province’s second city to ensure that the control of local government remained in the hands of the Unionist minority – but there were other significant injustices, not only in electoral arrangements but in the allocation of jobs and housing. In

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this sense, then, a moral case definitely existed in support of the civil rights movement.

The strength of this moral case has, however, led to the suppression of all the more normal forms of historical enquiry. For example, what were the real motivations of the 68ers – in ’68, and not as reconstructed in later years? What was the relationship between the radical leadership of the movement and its support base on the street? What was its real international context? Here lies the importance of Simon Prince’s book. It applies all the techniques of historical questioning and research methodology one would expect from one of the most gifted young Cambridge historians (now teaching in Oxford) of his generation. Prince pushes aside the cobwebs and gives us a fresh look at one of the most important moments of modern Irish history. His book will provoke debate – and some disagreement – but it will shake up the subject and thus perform a great service.

Paul Bew Professor of Irish Politics Queen’s University, Belfast May 2007

Preface to the New Edition

Y

oung men throwing petrol bombs at police officers. This image has defined the summer of 2018 in Derry – just as it became visual shorthand for revolt during the early years of the Troubles.1 For modern historians, the temptation is always there to see the past in the present and to view things through a national lens.2 But Northern Ireland’s ’68 set out instead to look sideways, finding the global interconnectedness in the local story of the start of the Troubles. Eamonn McCann, who organised the first Civil Rights march in Derry, recalled coming home convinced that he ‘could sweep up the local, parochial politics … by introducing an international dimension’.3 He succeeded, transforming forever the contexts in which everyone in Northern Ireland thought and acted. Since the book’s publication over a decade ago, I have become even more convinced of the need for historians to write the long ’68 into the history of Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland into the history of the long ’68.4 Where the account offered here has activists on the Celtic fringe adopting and adapting ideas from the north American and western European core, I would now argue that Northern Ireland was central as well as peripheral. Myriad networks of people, objects, and ideas linked together disparate points around the western world in these years – and for some of these networks the central nodes lay in Northern Ireland.

During 1970, for example, militants from the United States and France took direct inspiration from their Northern Irish comrades, who they believed had successfully bridged the gulf between western youth and Third World guerrilla fighters.5 The confrontations of the long ’68 – in places like Chicago, Paris, and Derry – were characterised by individuals drawing on the ideological positions of the time in an effort to mobilise support. At the start of the Troubles, the assorted forms of street politics and the variety of reactions they brought from the authorities produced dynamic processes which carried Northern Ireland in unanticipated directions and away from what was originally in dispute. The conflict should be viewed as a series of interrelated phases rather than as a

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seamless whole. So, while the images of petrol bombers from half a century apart may look similar, they represent very different struggles.

The Derry violence weakly echoes the early Troubles; another news story from the summer of 2018 is explicitly about this history and about how to deal with it. Starting in May, the United Kingdom government has been consulting on the best way to address Northern Ireland’s past.

The proposals have elicited emotional responses from Cabinet minsters and other public figures as much as from victims and their families.6 Past events are still very much present politics. I did not fully appreciate this was the case until after I had finished writing Northern Ireland’s ’68, however. During the fortieth-anniversary commemorations, I witnessed political groups furiously battling to take control over the narrative.

The Derry-born Republican Martin McGuinness claimed ‘we marched along Duke Street and along many other roads and country lanes across the northern state, as we demanded change’. Irishmen and women were subsequently forced to take up arms and fight to make the British treat with them as equals. But, throughout the long war, the ‘march for civil rights and national rights’ always remained the same.7 The Social Democratic and Labour Party pushed back against this reading of events, insisting that ‘Civil Rights are part of our DNA’. Republican violence was not only unnecessary, it had also held up ‘a journey that took a community from grievance to governance’.8 McCann founded ‘Reclaim the Spirit of ’68’ to challenge both these narratives. According to this group’s press release, the Civil Rights movement was about ‘the struggle of working class people for economic and social rights’.9 What all the interventions in the ‘memory wars’ have in common are neat frames which do not fit with the messy pictures I found in the archives and presented in this book. The narratives, though, are much more robust than I had originally thought them to be. They resist evidence that contradict them and play more of a role than precise, qualitative information does in how individuals make sense of things.10 Significantly, these things help the men and women whose actions – whether directly or indirectly – produced violence live more easily with the choices they made. Outsiders are not in a position to understand, let alone to judge.

‘He sees it from his side,’ explained one bomb victim of the view taken by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer who planted it.11 The main reason for the primacy of narrative in public debates on the past in Northern Ireland is because they have endings as well as

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beginnings and middles: real evidence cannot refute imagined futures.

While the Republican narrative promises a future free from Britain, the Unionist one envisages an endless siege, with enemies outside the walls and traitors inside them. One more push could bring victory; one more compromise could bring defeat. The two principal narratives, then, are simply impossible to bridge, spiraling around each other without ever touching. This problem is not just about historical events being read in radically different ways. Even supposing that a consensus could be reached on a factual account of, say, the long march undertaken by the People’s Democracy from Belfast to Derry in January 1969, the narratives would arrive at this shared site from different starting points in the past and would head off in different directions towards the present and on to their respective imagined futures.12 Unsurprisingly, then, previous attempts to deal with the past in a systematic manner have failed to gain enough public support to go ahead.

The main stumbling block has typically been the differences which exist in Northern Ireland over the legitimacy of the paramilitary campaigns.

Historians cannot resolve those disagreements – and no document discovery or fresh analysis will change that state of affairs. Attitudes to Republican and Loyalist violence are, in turn, shaped by differences over to what extent Northern Ireland in 1968 was the ‘Orange State’. Yet again, it is difficult to see how these narratives of democracy subverted or of tyranny overthrown can be either proved or disproved by historical research. The people of Northern Ireland are divided not so much over questions of fact and interpretation as over moral issues: the ultimate responsibility for the violence, the underlying motives of the principal actors to the conflict, and the fundamental meaning of victimhood.

When I was writing Northern Ireland’s ’68, I did not properly understand just how passionately my dispassionate account could be read.

Historians have to work with concepts that have a political dimension and I also made the choice to use, wherever possible, the language of the time. An unintended consequence of writing this way was to give certain readers the false impression I was making firm moral judgements.

Looking back, I regret not explaining those decisions more carefully. For example, the word ‘provoked’ – which appears in the very first line of the book – has implications for the issue of responsibility for the violence of the start of the Troubles. I used the term because contemporary activists throughout the western world often employed it. The leader of

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an American anti-war group said in September 1967 that its aim was to ‘provoke confrontation’, West German leftists said the ‘protest violence’ of the Easter 1968 marches was a way of ‘provoking the state’, and an article in the New Left Review that summer urged student radicals to behave ‘provocatively’.13 What I should have made clear in Northern Ireland’s ’68 was exactly how these activists were employing this term.

The protest repertoire of the late 1960s was a radicalised version of the one showcased a few years earlier in Birmingham, Alabama, during Project ‘C’ for Confrontation. As Martin Luther King explained in the midst of the campaign to ‘the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice’, ‘we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.’14 So, McCann’s ‘provocation’ on 5 October 1968 was about seeking to reveal the violence – broadly defined – that he believed lay behind the Northern Irish Prime Minister’s liberal mask. ‘[Terrence] O’Neill talked about progress but,’ McCann predicted, ‘he would go back to the old Unionist background of open suppression.’15 Suspending ‘one’s own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into … alien and possibly repugnant perspectives,’ writes Thomas Haskell, is what separates a historical narrative from a political one.16 Indeed, a historical approach to understanding the past can incorporate multiple conflicting viewpoints. A historical narrative can also move between different scales of space and time, from subjective individual experiences to the local, the national, and the transnational and from fleeting moments to days, weeks, months, years, and decades.

These are all things that Northern Ireland’s ’68 sets out to do. As a result, the book asked new questions, identified overlooked patterns, processes, and trajectories, and highlighted the complexities and contradictions of the time. But, will this (still) fresh account unsettle the political narratives during the fiftieth-anniversary commemorations? I fear a more consensual version of the past will become tolerable only after the combatants in the memory wars seek détente.

Unlike a political narrative, Northern Ireland’s ’68 presents itself as personal and provisional rather than truthful and definitive. To quote Mary Fulbrook’s ‘basic code of historical practice’, historians are committed to ‘accepting the possibility of revision of particular interpretations in the light of further evidence’.17 As I have explained already in this preface, I have subsequently changed my mind about how the transnational

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diffusion of ideas worked and about the importance of narrative to how people thought and acted. I have also had my mind changed on other matters by the excellent scholarship that has been produced over the last decade. For instance, Richard Bourke has persuasively argued against the Troubles being viewed as an ethnic conflict; Marianne Elliott has highlighted how religious divisions in Belfast neighbourhoods did not stop close-knit communities developing; Brian Hanley and Scott Millar have seen evidence that the pre-split IRA remained committed to armed struggle; and Maggie Scull has brought into sharper focus the roles played by the different parts of the Catholic Church.18 Writing history is very much a collective effort. Indeed, what has made me cringe the most about revisiting my earliest work is that I did not acknowledge in the introduction the debt I owed to the many well-grounded and valuable histories of modern Ireland. The person who had the most right to be offended was Bob Purdie, author of the first book-length history of the Civil Right movement, but he instead showed me great kindness during his final years. I hope I will one day prove worthy of it.

Introduction

5 October 1968

T

he protesters provoked the police; the police attacked the protesters.

This pattern was repeated in cities throughout the world during 1968. On 5 October 1968, it was Derry’s turn to stage what had become a familiar drama for the world’s television viewers. The protesters who gathered at the city’s railway station for a civil rights march on that Saturday afternoon represented, according to a later commission of inquiry, ‘most of the elements in opposition to the Northern Ireland Government’.1 This was what brought them together, but the marchers were also engaged in a number of other struggles – some of which were with each other.

The march was for civil rights, not Irish unity. It was part of a loose campaign to overthrow the sectarian system that relegated the Catholic minority to the status of second-class citizens. The authorities, however, insisted upon treating the march as a traditional Republican/Nationalist parade and banned it from entering the walled city – the Protestant citadel that had resisted Catholic armies in the past.2 Republicans and Nationalists were indeed well represented among those who assembled at the railway station.3 The disastrous Irish Republican Army (IRA) campaign of 1956–62 appeared to have marked the end of the armed struggle. Republican modernisers were instead hoping to unite Catholic and Protestant workers in a non-violent struggle for a socialist Ireland.

Civil rights were seen as a stepping stone to this ultimate goal, a way of allowing the working class to recognise its common interests. The architects of this new departure, Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan, were there to witness their theories being tested. Johnston had joined the IRA; Coughlan had kept his distance from it. They were nonetheless both close to the IRA’s Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding, and had expected him to join them on the march – as had the Special Branch detectives who spied upon the movement. But Goulding’s car had broken down on the road to Derry.4 The leader of the Nationalist Party, Eddie McAteer,

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had encountered no such problems making his way to the outskirts of his home town. McAteer had spent his life campaigning against the partition of his country and to improve the lot of the Catholic community. In the last few years, however, his party’s main battle had been against political extinction. McAteer had recently warned those with ‘public voices’ to guard against having their words ‘enlarged into hideous actions’, yet he could not ignore the shift to street politics.5 He therefore lined up alongside his rivals against his better judgement.

The young community activist tipped to replace McAteer as the leader of constitutional nationalism, John Hume, also preferred working within the system to direct action and had helped to set up a credit union as well as a housing association in Derry. However, the Northern Ireland government’s heavy-handed decision to ban the march from the city centre had pushed him onto the streets.6 The Republican Labour MP Gerry Fitt, another one of McAteer’s challengers, was more enthusiastic about the march, seeing it as an opportunity to advance the cause of civil rights – and his own political career. Fitt had arrived from the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool with three British MPs in tow to act as independent observers. They belonged to a ginger group that was struggling to persuade the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to impose reform upon the devolved government in Belfast.7 One of the Labour MPs, Russell Kerr, had already witnessed another of ’68’s big set-pieces: he had been in Chicago when the anti- war movement had confronted the politicians at the Democratic Convention.

Kerr was later to tell the General Secretary of the Connolly Association, the Irish emigrant organisation that had first suggested the idea of a civil rights campaign, that the two police forces ‘both play in the same league’.8 This was what the youthful radicals who had staged the march were counting on – indeed, their entire plan depended upon it. American activists believed that they had found a short cut out of the political margins: ‘You create disturbances, you keep pushing the system. You keep drawing up the contradictions until they have to hit back.’9 Northern Ireland’s activists adopted an almost identical approach. As the principal organiser of the march, Eamonn McCann, noted in his memoirs, the ‘strategy was to provoke the police into overreaction’.10 Another leading leftist, Michael Farrell, remembered the Derry protest as ‘our Chicago’, but it was also ‘our Paris, our Prague’. ‘One world, One struggle’ – that was the motto of ’68 according to McCann.11

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The leftists saw themselves as part of a global revolt against imperialism, capitalism and bureaucracy. At the local level, this meant that they were opposed to the ‘Green Tories’ – the Nationalists in the North and Fianna Fáil in the South – as well as to the ‘Orange Tories’ who controlled the state.12 It also meant that they were opposed to the bureaucratic socialism of the Old Left. A year earlier, McCann’s newspaper had denounced the Republican modernisers as ‘Stalinist fakers’.13 At a march from Coalisland to Dungannon held as the Soviets were suppressing the Prague Spring, leftists from Belfast and Derry had greeted the Communist Chair of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), Betty Sinclair, with shouts of ‘Russia’ and ‘jackboot’.14 The leftists had tried to provoke the police at this protest too, but had been restrained by the stewards. The Communists, Republicans and Nationalists who sat on the NICRA executive felt that violence would wreck the civil rights campaign and had worked hard to ensure that the Coalisland–Dungannon march passed off without incident.15 However, NICRA was only acting as the sponsor of the Derry march – the city’s leftists had taken over responsibility for organising it. But this did not ensure that everything went the way that the young radicals wanted.

Although an impressive number of politicians and activists had turned up at the railway station, the overall attendance fell far short of the planning committee’s prediction of ‘in the region of 5,000 people’.16 The Derry Journal estimated that only somewhere between 350 and 400 people assembled for the start of the march – five times fewer than the number that had paraded from Coalisland to Dungannon.17 Like so many other innovative challenges to the Northern state before it, the civil rights campaign seemed to be marching into obscurity.

In the years since Derry’s last street protests, however, the new medium of television had acquired a mass audience. As veteran anchorman Walter Kronkite later explained, a demonstration now needed ‘only enough people to fill the frame of a television camera’ to be a success.18 Indeed, the publicity for the march was aimed as much at inducing the BBC, Ulster Television and Telefís Éireann to send camera crews as at bringing out the citizens of Derry.19 All the leftists had to do to have their protest covered by the network news programmes at home and abroad was to provide the drama demanded by television.

Several clashes involving policemen and protesters occurred soon after the march got under way. These violent incidents were partly the

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result of the confusion over tactics that both sides were experiencing.

The original route had been spontaneously abandoned and an unguarded road taken instead – forcing the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to move a reserve unit hurriedly into place.20 The first rank of marchers, which at the insistence of the organisers mainly consisted of MPs, had been pushed into the hastily assembled police line. Although no explicit order was given to draw batons, certain officers appear to have reacted by striking McAteer and Fitt.21 The latter was then arrested for disorderly behaviour and taken to the hospital via the police station.22 The RUC later claimed that a placard wielded by one of the marchers rather than a police baton had cut Fitt’s head. The explanation given for McAteer’s injuries was even weaker. The police report devoted an entire paragraph to an analysis of the ‘bruised area below the right groin’ before concluding that there was ‘nothing which would give any indication as to the exact nature of the blow causing the contusion’.23 Following the initial scuffles, however, both sides backed away from each other.24 In the absence of anything else to do, Sinclair began to improvise a meeting. Her hope was that the same tactics that had kept the peace in Dungannon would work again in Derry. The police also adopted a conciliatory stance, providing Sinclair with a chair and making no attempt to disperse what was an illegal assembly.

The NICRA Chair’s plea for the right of non-violent procession to be properly respected was echoed by McAteer.25 McCann’s speech was more ambivalent regarding the use of force.26 As McCann later testified in court, he had told his audience that he was ‘not advising anyone to rush the police cordon’ nor – being a ‘private individual’ – was he going to ‘stop anyone’.27 Indeed, given that the leftists were responsible for the marshals, anyone who wanted to attack the RUC was probably not going to be stopped. The stewarding was not completely reckless: they had succeeded in moving the marchers back from the police line before the meeting and the chief marshal had called for the crowd to depart at its conclusion. But the stewards lacked the numbers, the training and the inclination needed to contain any trouble in a crowd that had swollen to almost 1,000 people.28 Consequently, when the Belfast leftists started to insult the police and hurl placards at the cordon, their bid to provoke the RUC was not checked by the marshals as it had been in Dungannon.29 The police officer in charge later gave sworn testimony that he had ordered his men not to react. After about five minutes of

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being subjected to ‘Sieg Heil’ taunts and a fusillade of missiles, they were told to draw batons and ‘clear the mob’.30 The commission of inquiry found that ‘nothing resembling a baton charge took place but that the police broke ranks and used their batons indiscriminately on people’.31 The strategy of provoking the police into an overreaction had succeeded.

The ensuing violence was made worse by an earlier decision to move a party of police from the original route to the opposite end of the street. The RUC later claimed that the officers had been sent to guard a ‘demolished building, containing more than ample ammunition for violent demonstration’. However, the unintended consequence of stationing men here was that the marchers were effectively trapped. This ‘tactical error on the field’, to employ the term used by headquarters, was compounded by another: the party was not informed that the crowd was being dispersed nor given orders to allow people through.32 As the commission of inquiry observed, ‘when a number of marchers hurried towards them some violence was almost inevitable’.33 With the demonstrators seemingly reluctant to leave, the RUC called in water cannons to clear the area. The water wagon, which was making its first appearance in Derry, sprayed people indiscriminately.34 As well as sweeping both sides of the street, the water cannons also sprayed Saturday afternoon shoppers on the bridge leading to the city centre.35 The water wagon directed a jet through an open window on the first floor of the house where the Ulster Television camera crew was stationed.36 The BBC team’s filming was also impaired.37 The Telefís Éireann cameraman, however, managed to record several hundred feet of film. A former BBC employee living in Derry contacted the current affairs department about this footage. Since the Irish Television Service’s launch in 1961, the two national broadcasters had co-operated extensively. The BBC was therefore allowed to screen the dramatic Telefís Éireann film of the march on its regional and network news bulletins.38 The television coverage transformed the political situation. When one of the Unionist MPs at Westminster described the RUC as ‘probably the finest police force in the world’ during Prime Minister’s Questions, Wilson referred him to the BBC’s reporting. ‘Up to now we have perhaps had to rely on the statement of himself and others on these matters,’ he explained.

‘Since then we have had British television.’39 Events in Northern Ireland were to remain on British television screens into the next century.