The Freedom to Be Catholic: the Struggle to Control the Historical Memory of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland, 1968

Home , Craigavon Bridge, Eamonn McCann, Johnnie White, Sammy Ward, Starry Plough (flag), The Irish Catholic

THE FREEDOM TO BE CATHOLIC: THE STRUGGLE TO

CONTROL THE HISTORICAL MEMORY OF THE CIVIL

RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN NORTHERN IRELAND, 1968-1969

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Abigail Bernhardt

August, 2012

THE FREEDOM TO BE CATHOLIC: THE STRUGGLE TO CONTROL THE

HISTORICAL MEMORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN NORTHERN

IRELAND, 1968-1969

Abigail Bernhardt

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

______Advisor Dean of College Dr. Martin Wainwright Dr. Chand Midha

______Faculty Reader Dean of Graduate School Dr. Michael Graham Dr. George Newkome

______Department Chair Date Dr. Martin Wainwright

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………...1

II. USING THE NARRATIVE TO CONTROL THE MEMORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT……………………………………………….……...... ……….12

Foundations of the Civil Rights Movement………………………….……….….12

August 1968 – Coalisland to Dungannon………………………………………..23

October 1968 – Derry……………………………………………………………28

November and December 1968 – Escalation…………………………………….42

January 1969 – Belfast to Derry…………………………………………………45

August 1969 – Derry “The Battle of the Bogside”………………………………57

III. USING THE MEMORY TO CONTROL THE MEANING OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT...... …………………………...... ………………………69

Shaping the Meaning of the Civil Rights Movement...... ….....69

IV. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………84

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………..86

iii

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The civil rights movement of late 1960s Northern Ireland brought the question of

Ireland back to the British government’s attention with sudden violent urgency. What began as isolated local events escalated to a national issue that drew international attention. The civil rights movement focused on addressing inequalities that existed within Northern Ireland between the Protestant and Catholic communities. The main goals of the civil rights movement were to address housing inequality, electoral reform, employment discrimination, and brutality by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).1

These disparities led Catholics to believe that their society was structured specifically to exclude them. In 1968, several local groups came together under the banner of civil rights to address these grievances. From the beginning of the agitation for equal treatment for

Catholics, tensions escalated between the Catholic and Protestant communities, particularly the Nationalist and Unionist factions in each group. Between 1968 and 1969, there was a significant increase in violent clashes as Catholics staged more demonstrations and drew international attention to their situation. Conservative Protestant backlash fueled the conflict, which would eventually span three decades, a period

1 Christopher Hewitt, “Catholic grievances, Catholic nationalism and violence in Northern Ireland during the Civil Rights Period: a reconsideration”, British Journal of Sociology, 32 (Sept. 1981), 363.

commonly referred to as “the Troubles”. 2 As civil rights gave way to the Troubles, the struggle to control the memory of the movement began. The publication of memoirs and autobiographies contributed to the battle for meaning not only by outlining motives and rationales but also by designating the importance of events through page space and interpretation. By examining the language used and exploring the political motivations of the authors, this thesis seeks to understand the creation of the historical memory and how the individual purposes of each author came together in order to shape the common understanding of what happened. It also explores in the intersection of civil rights, nationalism, and socialism.

This thesis examines the period from August 1968 through August 1969 through the eyes of three men: Terence O’Neill, Gerry Adams, and Eamonn McCann.

Specifically, this paper seeks to determine how their writing reflects the ways in which they attempted to shape the historical memory of the events of those thirteen months years after the fact. As Catholic activists, McCann and Adams tend to interpret the events of 1968 and 1969 in a similar way with an equal view as to their importance, as opposed to O'Neill, who tries in his writing to minimize their importance.

Terence O’Neil was the moderate Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1963 to 1969. In contrast to McCann and Adams, both Catholics, O'Neill was an

Anglican. In 1972, three years after leaving office, he published The Autobiography of

Terence O’Neill, in which he gives an account of his life from birth to when he resigned

2 “The Troubles” refers to the period from roughly 1969 to 1998, starting with the rioting in the Bogside in Derry and ending with the Belfast “Good Friday” Agreement. Some sectarian violence has continued since 1998, which problematizes such a timeframe.

as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.3 In addition to the summary of his life, he argues that he did the best he could for Northern Ireland under the circumstances in which he was forced to operate. The civil rights movement, in his view, caused as many problems as it solved because of the ensuing societal upheaval.

Gerry Adams was a Catholic activist and a member of Sinn Féin, the republican political party often associated with the paramilitary Irish Republican Army, during the civil rights period.4 In 1986, he published The Politics of Irish Freedom, which serves as autobiography and political manifesto.5 Adams uses the book to explain how he came to be involved in groups such as the West Belfast Housing Action Committee and Sinn Féin and how his political activism shaped his politics to the time of publishing. In his opinion, the civil rights movement was a good start to improving the lives of Catholics, but ultimately only an independent, united Ireland could provide the desired outcome.

Eamonn McCann was also a Catholic activist, and a leading leftist in Derry.6 He was heavily involved in local organizing, especially in the Derry Housing Action

Committee (DHAC) and the planning of the civil rights march on October 5, 1968. In

1974, he first published War and an Irish Town, in which he describes what it was like growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland and gives his account of the civil rights

3 Terence O’Neill, The Autobiography of Terence O’Neill (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972).

4 Adams is currently president of Sinn Féin, has published multiple subsequent books calling for the unification of an independent Ireland, and remains an active figure not only in Northern Ireland but in Europe more generally.

5 Gerry Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom (Dingle: Brandon Book Publishers, 1986)

6 The name “Derry” is a point of contention. The official name of the town and province that share this name is “Londonderry”, but because of its British connotations, Nationalists refer to it instead as “Derry”. For the sake of clarity, Derry is used here because the two sources that refer to it most prominently used the Nationalist name.

movement, particularly the events in Derry in which he served as an active participant.7

For McCann, the civil rights movement was an immediate means to address the inequalities he saw in society, although he too had in mind the larger goal of full Irish independence.

Terence O’Neill placed a lot of the blame for the state of Anglo-Irish relations on the shoulders of Queen Victoria, claiming that if she had treated Ireland as she had treated Scotland then Ireland would have had a better relationship with Britain.8 It is interesting that O'Neill attributed so much responsibility to the symbolic power of the monarch, a reflection, it would seem, of his loyalty to Britain and particularly to the monarchy. However, the tensions, especially sectarian tensions, have a far longer history.

England first colonized Ireland in 1170 during the reign of Henry II, beginning a long and complicated relationship between the two islands. For at least half of their shared history,

Britain and Ireland also shared a common religion. This changed in 1534 when Henry

VIII broke with the Catholic Church.9 The English during the reign of Henry VIII established the first plantations in Ireland and began the attempt to convert the Irish to

Protestantism. With the exception of Queen Mary, who continued the plantation scheme of her father which would cause so many problems in later centuries and spawn the

Catholic nationalist movement, the increasing tendency for British monarchs to embrace

7 Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town, 3rd Ed. (London: Pluto Press, 1993). War and an Irish Town has gone into its third edition, though McCann claims at the beginning of the third edition that he has taken care not to make too many modifications to the text itself, despite the addition of a new sixty page introduction. McCann has since retired from activism, although he retains his journalist credentials and continues to reside in the Bogside.

8 O’Neill, Autobiography, 3.

9 Paul F. State, A Brief History of Ireland (New York: Checkmark Books, 2009), 93.

Protestantism led to tensions between the two groups, especially during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 Once Britain became a Protestant state, the nobles sent to Ireland to continue colonizing were Protestants after their monarch, while the majority of the Irish population remained Catholic despite numerous attempts by the

British to convert them. One of the results was that Irish elites tended to be Protestant, while Catholicism was the religion of the masses.11 Further complicating the matter was the fact that the division was more than simply Protestant versus Catholic: the settlers who came over in the Ulster plantation scheme in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were primarily Scottish Presbyterians. This served the dual purpose of removing perceived troublemakers from the borderland between England and Scotland while at the same time transplanting Protestantism to Ireland.12 It also created many of the tensions which would appear in later centuries between Catholics, Presbyterians, and

Anglicans.

The Protestant population was largely concentrated in the north of Ireland, a demographic arrangement which would become important when Ireland was granted independence in 1920 under the Government of Ireland Act of 1920. This was not a coincidence, however, but a lasting result of a plantation scheme backed by James I which targeted the province of Ulster for settlement because of its history and reputation as being a difficult area of the island to control.13 During this period, towns in Ulster

10 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 394.

11 MacCulloch, Reformation, 394.

12 MacCulloch, Reformation, 397.

13 Mac Culloch, Reformation, 397.

especially were renamed to reflect English supremacy; among the most significant was the renaming of Derry to Londonderry.14 Later nationalists would seize upon the older name of Derry as a way of making a political statement about who had the proper sovereign power in Ireland. Catholicism was even more stridently repressed under Oliver

Cromwell, a zealous Puritan, whose efficiency in suppressing a Catholic insurgency in

Ireland left a better imprint on Irish Catholic folk memory.15 Also important in Catholic historical memory was the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in which William of Orange, who became co-ruler with his wife Mary, succeeded James II in a relatively bloodless coup.16 The coup was decidedly less bloodless in Ireland and Scotland, where James II staged rebellions in an attempt to regain the throne.17 Two events in particular had a lasting effect on Catholic-Protestant relations in Ireland: the Siege of Derry, the start and end of which are commemorated by Protestants every December and August; and the

Battle of the Boyne, which James II was decisively defeated by William’s Protestant army.18 The annual commemorations of these events is a long-standing source of tensions between Catholics and Protestants, with Catholics viewing the commemorations as intentionally provocative, with the sole purpose of the events being to remind Catholics of their second-class status.19

14 State, History, 108.

15 State, History, 113-114.

16 MacCulloch, Reformation, 532.

17 MacCulloch, Reformation, 532.

18 MacCulloch, Reformation, 532; State, History, 119-121.

19 State, History, 121.

Catholic nationalism achieved a partial victory in the aftermath of the Easter

Rising of 1916 and the IRA campaign of 1918-1920. The Government of Ireland Act became law on December 23, 1920, creating the Irish Free State.20 The Act included a provision allowing for the six majority Protestant counties in the north to secede from the

Irish Free State and remain in the United Kingdom. They did so, forming themselves into

Northern Ireland. The creation of a divided Ireland did not end the republican sentiment which had pushed for an independent Ireland. In many ways, Catholics regarded partition as interfering with the completion of an unfinished revolution which would end Britain’s colonial presence in Ireland.21 Partition also did not create a state in which Catholic Irish were given the same rights as Protestant Irish. Catholics in Northern Ireland faced discrimination in housing and employment, and lived in a one-party state which did not allow for civil redress of grievances. The level of dissent among Catholics in Northern

Ireland varied from the state’s creation, but seems to have come to a peak starting in

1968. While most of the 1960s had been relatively calm following the failed IRA border campaign of 1956-62, the level of activism in 1968 and 1969 reached new levels, and

Catholics tried new approaches to improving their situation.22 The increased activism in

20 State, History, 240. The Irish Free State formally became the Republic of Ireland in 1949 (State, History, 279).

21 For more on the idea of the unfinished revolution, see Niall Ó Dochartaigh, From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of the Irish Troubles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

22 For a concise explanation of the history of Ireland with regard to Britain and religion, see Rosemary Sales, Women Divided: Gender, Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland (London: Routledge, 1997). In her first two chapters, Sales explains the history of Ireland’s relationship with Britain, and how that brand of imperialism led to the republican movement. She also explains how the demographic layout of Catholicism and Protestantism contributed to the formation of Northern Ireland, and also how policy built around preserving the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland has impacted Irish history.

turn led to conservative backlash as Protestants reacted to changes Catholics were trying to enact.

The historiography of Northern Ireland has relegated the civil rights movement to a largely supporting role. Bob Purdie published a book on the origins of the civil rights movement in 1990, although his is very much in the minority among what historians, sociologists, and journalists have written on Northern Ireland.23 Robbie Munck published an article in 1992 delving into the civil rights movement as the origin of the Troubles.24

Most scholars treat the civil rights period as either a starting point for writing about the

Troubles or as a brief stopping point when writing a narrative of paramilitary activity in

Northern Ireland. More recent works, particularly on paramilitaries, have taken a longer view of the twentieth century as more sources become available for research purposes, starting sometime around or before partition with the 1916 Easter Rising serving as a typical pivotal first event, and continuing through to sometime in the 1990s, depending on the date of publication. A few historians have continued past the 1998 Belfast

Agreement to examine the effects of the peace process on Northern Ireland. One of the most recent works by Simon Prince has taken a different approach, looking at the civil rights movement in a global context, with particular attention to how the events in

Northern Ireland in 1968 reflected events that happened elsewhere, primarily in the

United States and Europe.25 No scholars at this point have undertaken a memory study to

23 Bob Purdie, Politics in the Streets: The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990).

24 Robbie Munck, “The Making of the Troubles in Northern Ireland”, Journal of Contemporary History, 27 (Apr., 1992), 211-229.

25 Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt, and the Origins of the Troubles (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007). 8

explore the civil rights period. Although Munck acknowledges in his article that the filter of memory may play a role in how the participants recall this period, he does not explore that aspect in any great detail.

The civil rights movement and Irish nationalism were distinct, although not antithetical. One tendency which appears quite frequently in the historiography is for historians to assume that the civil rights movement was something of an anomaly, in which Catholics aimed for achieving the same constitutional rights as Protestants by working within the system. Bob Purdie’s articulation of this argument has influenced many of the books written in the past twenty years.26 Richard English summarizes the civil rights movement as anomaly stance quite succinctly: “there emerged during the

1960s a civil rights movement which was separate from Irish nationalism and which sought only equal treatment for Catholics”.27 In contrast, Christopher Hewitt argues that there is in fact a greater link between nationalism and the civil rights movement than has generally been acknowledged.28 While Hewitt’s position is largely ignored in the historiography and Purdie in particular is one of the most commonly cited sources, an examination of the language used by Adams and McCann shows that the nationalist position and rhetoric heavily influenced their politics. Some of the civil rights activists may have rejected the nationalist position in order to pursue civic equality without attempting to completely undermine the Northern Ireland state, but that was not true of all civil rights activists. It is also important to note the role of socialism in conjunction

26 Purdie, Politics, 2.

27 Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 81.

28 Hewitt, “Grievances”, 362. 9

with civil rights and nationalism. As was a common theme in the postwar period, socialism attracted many activists seeking a solution to the perceived economic exploitation of capitalism and the imperial systems which used it. For that reason, socialism and nationalism have a long, connected history.29

Hewitt discusses the fact that civil rights may have been used as a way of dismantling Northern Ireland from within. Because Catholics considered the existence of

Northern Ireland reliant on systemic discrimination in order to exist, there was the belief that eliminating the discrimination would remove the basis for Northern Ireland’s legitimacy, causing it to fade from existence, thereby ending partition in Ireland.30

Eamonn McCann, who was very active in the civil rights movement, mentions in his memoir that Catholics in Derry believed “It was our task to finish the job, to cleanse the remaining traces of foreign rule from the face of Ireland.”31 Quotes such as this reveal the extent to which republican sentiment still thrived in the late 1960s. One of the aims of this thesis is to show how, in the process of shaping the memory of the civil rights movement by portraying it as something apart from previous republican movements, the language of McCann and Adams in particular reveals the extent to which nationalist aims still affected the discourse.

The scope of this study covers events in Northern Ireland from August 1968 through August 1969. In August 1968, the first civil rights march was held as demonstrators organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA)

29 Henry Patterson discusses the link between socialism and Irish nationalism in The Politics of Illusion: Republicanism and Socialism in Modern Ireland (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989).

30 Hewitt, “Grievances”, 373-374.

31 McCann, War, 65.

marched from Coalisland to Dungannon. On October 5, 1968, a second civil rights march was held in Derry. In January 1969, members of the People’s Democracy marched from

Belfast to Derry, but were attacked by loyalists at Burntollet. April 1969 saw more violence as tensions between nationalists and unionists escalated. August 12-14, 1969, is often referred to in primary and secondary sources as the Battle of the Bogside. Three days of rioting after the Apprentice Boys’ annual march on August 12 culminated in the government calling in the British Army in an attempt to diffuse the situation.

Finally, a brief note about terminology: Nationalist and Catholic tend to be used synonymously in the literature; Unionist, Loyalist, and Protestant are similarly linked.

Republican is also used to refer to Catholics, but usually denotes a specific political position that is sometimes linked with paramilitary activity, whereas Nationalist usually refers to a peaceful stance without the paramilitary linkage. It should be pointed out that none of these labels are all-inclusive: not all Catholics embraced Nationalist ideologies, while not all Protestants were strictly Unionist in their politics. As with any political agenda, even within movements there were varying degrees to which people bought into the espoused ideology. However, for the sake of ease of understanding, the terms

Catholic and Protestant here are used to refer to Nationalists and Unionists as other historians have done. There is an effort here to attempt to problematize these labels, however, especially when doing so aids the main argument.

CHAPTER II

USING THE NARRATIVE TO CONTROL THE MEMORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS

MOVEMENT

Terence O'Neill, Eamonn McCann, and Gerry Adams each used their writings to give meaning to the civil rights movement. By retelling the events of the movement, each gives his own interpretation of what was important and what it meant. Thus, they attempted to use the narrative to emphasize what they considered the importance of what had happened and how it ought to be remembered. This chapter will focus on the structuring of the narrative to reflect what each believed to be the important message for the readers to gain from the accounts.

Foundations of the Civil Rights Movement

Civil rights in Northern Ireland came to national and international attention starting with the October 5 march, but it had begun on a local level months before that. In most of Northern Ireland, the civil rights movement first took shape in the form of housing action committees aimed at addressing the disparity in available housing and the allotment of that housing. Groups such as NICRA and the Campaign for Social Justice

(CSJ) only gradually came to symbolize what Catholics thought was wrong with

Northern Ireland on a national level. Before the movement grew and tensions escalated,

most of the activism began at the local level. This local activism was largely aimed at addressing the housing discrimination which Catholics experienced.

While the events in Northern Ireland were to some degree purely local in their nature and context, to a certain extent they were also part of a larger global phenomenon of the 1960s. Gerry Adams places the events of 1968 and 1969 firmly in the context of the global nature of the 1960s.32 He argues that there was something in the air which lent itself to the formation of the civil rights movement and a challenge to the way things were: “This was the promise of the ‘60s, that the world was changing anyway and the tide of change was with the young generation. This produced a sense of impatience with the status quo allied to a young, enthusiastic and euphoric confidence.”33 It might not be overly surprising that in 1986 Adams would remember the 1960s as a period of massive upheaval and change, especially considering events that had happened since the early days of housing action committees.

Gerry Adams was actively involved in the civil rights movement as a Catholic agitator, first becoming involved in the West Belfast Housing Action Committee, which he describes as an impromptu formation whose aim was to provide direct action in response to housing discrimination. In many places, the local housing corporations denied Catholics housing based on their religion, while some houses and apartments sat empty.34 The West Belfast Housing Action Committee and other local housing action

32 Simon Prince’s recent work, Northern Ireland’s ’68, explores the global context to which Adams refers. Prince, however, argues that instead of drawing parallels to South Africa or Israel-Palestine, as Adams does, the better comparison is to France and West Germany.

33 Gerry Adams, Politics, 10.

34 According to Eamonn McCann, housing was assigned by a Protestant-dominated body. The Derry Housing Corporation was very much aware that only householders could vote in Northern Ireland, which 13

committees helped homeless families squat in empty houses. Often their efforts were successful, and the housing corporations granted housing to Catholic families on the waiting list. It was this sort of direct action, with its immediate results, that formed the basis for what would later build into the civil rights movement.35 As Adams relates in The

Politics of Irish Freedom, much of the civil rights movement in Ireland began as smaller ad hoc initiatives that later fitted together to form the civil rights movement.36 It is important to notice, however, how Adams and McCann both frame the activities of the housing action committees as noble and humane when in fact they were encouraging people to trespass, something which often involved breaking and entering. By framing it in a positive light and emphasizing how they were acting in the best interests of their fellow Catholics, McCann and Adams were able to portray the housing action committees as groups of heroes rather than potential criminals.

Eamonn McCann was similarly involved in the Derry Housing Action

Committee. He describes a comparable situation in terms of housing discrimination in

Derry to what Adams describes in Belfast:

The housing situation too was very bad and enmeshed in the complexity of the local government structure. Only householders could vote at local government elections. To give a person a house, therefore, was to give him a vote, and the Unionist Party in Derry had to be very circumspect about the people to whom it gave votes. It would have been political suicide for it to have given Catholics

led to housing discrimination against Catholics as a way to prevent them from gaining an electoral majority (80). The Housing Action Committees focused on government bodies because they would have been able to exert more influence over them than over private landlords who would have been less subject to public opinion.

35 Adams, Politics, 11.

36 Adams, Politics, 12.

houses and votes outside the South Ward where most Derry Catholics were corralled.37

Both McCann and Adams were acutely aware of the political implications of housing discrimination. In the above quote, McCann characterizes the implementation of discrimination as a way to keep the Catholics where the Protestants could control them, all penned together, rounded up like unwanted animals that needed to be contained.

Because suffrage in Northern Ireland was tied to having a house, the Protestant housing corporation had a strategic aim in restricting Catholic access to housing, especially in areas over which it wanted to maintain electoral control. 38 If the aim was the preservation of a Protestant state for Protestant people, it was necessary to suppress

Catholic votes. The knowledge that being Catholic somehow made them different and politically inferior to Protestants echoes through McCann’s and Adams’ writings. In discussing the ongoing struggle for Irish freedom, McCann observes, “An essential part of the Irish Freedom for which patriots had fought through the centuries was, we understood, the freedom to be Catholic.”39 In a few words, McCann describes what is at the heart of the matter for civil rights agitators: the Protestant government has made it as difficult as possible for the Catholics living in Northern Ireland, and in response they are

37 McCann, War, 79-80.

38 The University of Ulster's Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) provides an overview of the issues at stake in the Troubles. Brendan Lynn, “Introduction to the Electoral System in Northern Ireland,” Conflict Archive on the Internet,http://www.cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/election/electoralsystem.htm (accessed April 30, 2012). Included in the discussion is the fact that in the 1960s, Northern Ireland franchise was based on ratepayer suffrage, which meant that only the owners or tenants of a dwelling and their spouses were eligible to vote in local elections. These restrictions would have looked fair on paper, similar to literacy or property requirements enacted in the American South following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. The practice of gerrymandering was not confined to Northern Ireland. Here, however, it manifested itself as controlling the placement of the population rather than as redrawing district lines to reflect demographic changes.

39 McCann, War, 69.

seeking only as much as the Protestants already have. That is, the civil rights movement as McCann portrays it was about achieving equal status for Catholics.40

The fact that Catholics had a higher birthrate than Protestants did not alleviate the housing situation because it tended to lead to overcrowding in the areas where Catholics were allotted houses. According to McCann,

Since Catholics, who were in an overwhelming majority on the housing waiting list, were not ‘eligible’ for the estates outside the South Ward, houses in these were, for Protestants, very easy to come by. Or so it seemed to us. When building land in the South Ward began to run short the corporation was faced with the problem of either housing Catholics in other wards or not housing them at all. It opted for the latter.41

McCann acknowledges, however briefly, that some of the disparity may have been only a matter of perception. The Catholics felt that there was rampant discrimination against them, and whether this was in fact the case matters very little compared to how that perception affected Catholic activism.42 The increasing population only seems to have fueled the feelings that Catholics were the disadvantaged group in Northern Ireland.

Housing discrimination in particular contributed to the outcast feeling because having proper shelter is an essential concern for any group of people. McCann focuses on the housing situation not only because it was his entrée into the civil rights movement, but also because it provides dramatic proof of the injustice of the system they were fighting.

40 One view which opponents pushed was that the movement intended to either cause as much havoc as possible or to overthrow the state. There was the constant fear that it was really a front for the Irish Republican Army.

41 McCann, War, 80.

42 Christopher Hewitt’s article “Catholic grievances, Catholic nationalism and violence in Northern Ireland during the Civil Rights Period: a reconsideration”, British Journal of Sociology, 32 (Sept. 1981), 362-380, delves into the disconnect between Catholic perceptions of discrimination and the reality by examining evidence from within Northern Ireland and comparing the data with other comparable countries, including the United States and Australia.

It was only natural that they would rebel against being denied something as basic as a place to live.

This feeling of being the unwanted element of society did not immediately lend itself to action, however. It took some time for discontent to evolve into a political movement. After all, the partitioning of Ireland had occurred in the 1920s and it was not until the 1960s that activists began to mobilize against the inequities in Northern Ireland.

It was not until the postwar generation came of age that Catholics mounted a serious challenge to the status quo. McCann describes the relative acquiescence felt by the

Catholic community in the 1960s toward their situation:

There was no revolutionary ferment arising at all. Expectations were little higher than the reality. As long as the state existed there would be discrimination, and as long as there was discrimination we would suffer unemployment and slum housing. Everyone knew that. Demands were made, of course, that discrimination be stopped, but more for the record than in real hope of result.43

Based on McCann’s analysis of the level of Catholic dissent, he does not consider it a given that there would be an organized movement to agitate in favor of Catholic rights.

This does explain why it was nearly fifty years after the creation of Northern Ireland before Catholics mounted a visible opposition to the state. The Catholic-Protestant tensions dated back centuries, and the existence of Northern Ireland after the independence of the Republic of Ireland reinforced that Protestants would remain the privileged group in the north. After centuries of discrimination against Catholics at the hand of British Protestants, McCann points out that the level of acceptance was expected.

Previous demonstrations had not achieved the same position for Catholics in the north as they had in the south. Gerry Adams’ description of the Catholic community’s general

43 McCann, War, 81.

attitude is slightly harsher than McCann’s: “Most working class Catholics were overwhelmingly fatalistic and apathetic.”44 In Adams’ view, even more obviously than in

McCann’s, it is amazing that the Catholic community managed to cobble together a movement at all. Adams blames the Catholic community in part for the state of their affairs. He considers the disparity largely systemic, but acknowledges that had the

Catholics been more active and less apathetic, their reality might have been better.

By March 1968, at least in Derry, it seemed that for the younger generation enough was finally enough. McCann recounts how the Derry Housing Action Committee began to take action against the housing discrimination by staging a demonstration at the

Londonderry Corporation meeting:

In March they and some others had organized themselves, if that is not too strong a word, into the Derry Housing Action Committee, which set out with the conscious intention of disrupting public life in the city to draw attention to the housing problem. The DHAC introduced itself to the public by breaking up the March meeting of Londonderry Corporation.45

Throughout his narrative, McCann takes care to underline the lack of organization in the movement. This may be a reflection of how impromptu most of their actions really were, or it may be McCann’s attempt to imagine the people in the group as behaving in a largely disorganized fashion because that would undermine any attempt to portray them as acting on behalf of another group, such as the Irish Republican Army, as would become common particularly in the early 1970s. If McCann and his compatriots were truly as unorganized as he makes them seem, then the civil rights movement was a genuinely spontaneous attempt to end the inequity within Northern Ireland and was not a

44 Adams, Politics, 30.

45 McCann, War, 83.

front for paramilitary activity. The fact that their actions were spontaneous meant that they could not have been sinister.

We invaded the public gallery of the council chamber with banners and placards and demanded that we be allowed to participate in the meeting. The mayor naturally refused, and made it clear that he was not going to tolerate hooliganism in the chamber. From the Nationalist benches Alderman James Hegarty voiced the opinion that we were ‘under the control of card-carrying members of the Communist Party’... It was a very successful ‘demonstration’. We repeated it at the April and May meetings of the corporation.46

By embracing the role of hooligan and underlining the importance of hooliganism to initiating change, McCann argues that such behavior was really the only way to accomplish anything. While the disruption of the housing corporation meeting angered the members of the corporation and resulted in the removal of the DHAC members by the police, McCann describes the events of the meeting with pride at having succeeded in forcing the corporation to take notice of their displeasure. He proudly takes on the labels communist and hooligan as a way of setting himself up as an agitator and someone who would make things happen. It also allows him to further emphasize the movement's spontaneity and disorganization.

It was a modest start to their campaign for change through civil disturbance. For six months afterward, activists largely confined themselves to disturbing corporation meetings. But through this small scale activity, McCann and company gained confidence in their ability to eventually force change through disruption. After a few months, they shifted their focus to look more broadly at areas where they could force the issue of discrimination against Catholics. The DHAC’s success in interfering with the business of

46 McCann, War, 83-84.

corporation meetings would eventually lead them to attempt bolder actions, including the

October 5 civil rights march.

Despite the modest success at causing a disturbance that the DHAC enjoyed in

Derry, some other activists felt stymied by repeated encounters with resistance.

According to Gerry Adams, “this apartheid system was supported at every turn by the assurances of senior British political figures or the British government itself.”47 By invoking the racial segregation of South Africa, Adams makes a powerful connection between Catholic Irish and black Africans. He also argues the complicity of the British government in allowing such gross inequalities to continue. By choosing South Africa as his point of comparison, as opposed to Paris or West Germany, Adams underlines the systemic nature of the inequality, particularly the fact that South Africa had also been part of the British Empire.48 In doing so, Adams is framing it as a problem of empire and not drawing parallels with other equal European nations. Without the support of the

British government, Adams implies, the Protestants would not be to continue enforcing the status quo.

Unionists refused, and refuse still, to deal with their Catholic neighbours as equals because they didn’t need to. Unlike their black counterparts in South Africa, however, the Irish Catholic labour force, both rural and urban, wasn’t necessary for the well-being of the state.49

Employment discrimination was also a major point of contention for the civil rights movement. Protestant employers routinely blocked Catholic workers from certain jobs,

47 Adams, Politics, 28.

48 Like many other African nations, South gained its independence in the early 1960s when it voted to leave the British Commonwealth.

49 Adams, Politics, 28.

especially working class positions. The economic divide provided another motivation for activists such as McCann and Adams, and clearly shaped the rhetoric Adams used to defend his republican politics. It also contributed to the popularity of socialism as an alternative to imperialist capitalism.

Adams argues that the religious divide and it civic correlation were created along with the Northern Ireland “statelet”, and that that system was a means of maintaining control over the Irish people. By using a diminutive such as "statelet," which serves as a variation on "the six counties" as a way of referring to Northern Ireland without calling it by name, Adams calls its legitimacy into question while simultaneously portraying it as a puppet of the British government, allowing him to reinforce the necessity of full Irish independence through an indictment of the current situation:

Partition was, and remains, the main means by which equality is denied us and the principal method by which self-determination is withheld from us. Partition aborted a national independence struggle in the 1920s, secured Britain a toehold in part of Ireland from which she could influence all of Ireland; it divided the Irish people into two states, and within one state it established a Unionist monopoly which divided us once more.50

Such plain language succinctly lays out Adams’ political modus operandi, and explains why he became involved in local activism and supported the activities of other republicans. He understood that this division of the Irish people against themselves was exploited by certain Protestant elements in order to preserve the status quo. To Gerry

Adams and Eamonn McCann, this division of Irish society was precisely the problem. If they could find a way to end the discrimination and injustice inherent in the makeup of

Northern Ireland, then they might ultimately be able to end the partition of Ireland. While

50 Adams, Politics, 23.

most historians have dismissed the ending of partition as one of the goals of the civil rights movement, both Adams and McCann discuss how partition and Protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland have affected their understanding of what it means to be

Catholic in a state where Catholicism is not the preferred religion. This understanding, paired with their knowledge of Irish history, is laid out from the beginning of their books and colors their writings. While ending partition was not an explicitly stated aim of the civil rights movement, and there were activists who did not embrace this purpose, that goal was accepted by many Catholic activists and certainly drove their actions.

Adams describes a situation when the Catholics and Protestants in Ballymurphy came together to build a pedestrian crossing; what began as nonsectarian cooperation was derailed when Unionist followers of Reverend Ian Paisley, a conservative Presbyterian minister and one of the most vocally reactionary opponents of the civil rights movement, descended on the town and brought religious differences back into the situation.51 Adams saw the conclusion of this episode, during which he first became aware of the negative words thrown at Catholics, as indicative of the struggle that Catholics would face in their quest for equality: “If the state would not allow Catholics and Protestants to get a pedestrian crossing built together, it would hardly sit back and watch them organize the revolution together.”52 He paints the episode with the pedestrian crossing as a utopian attempt by Catholics and Protestants to work together to improve their community, at least until the extremists stepped in and prevented such cooperation. This analogy implies

51 Ian Paisley was a prominent figure in Northern Ireland. A conservative Presbyterian minister, he is often portrayed as the major right-wing adversary. He was very much a vocal reactionary as the civil rights movement unfolded. In many instances, Paisley’s name became shorthand for conservative Protestantism.

52 Adams, Politics, 15.

that if both sides had worked together to build crossings more often, then the entirety of the civil rights movement might have been unnecessary.

In Adams’ view, intolerance in the form of state restrictions and Protestant extremism were the main obstructions to peaceful progress. As much as he embraced and promoted the political goals of nationalism, he occasionally reveals that the ultimate goal was a functioning, harmonious society. While for the bulk of his writing independence is the only solution, in this moment it might not be. In this instance at least, his perspective is not all that different from Terence O'Neill's in emphasizing the importance of cooperation. This example is somewhat contradictory given how adamant Adams is throughout his writing that this struggle is ultimately about Irish nationalism and the importance of independence to Catholics in particular. However, this anecdote reveals some of the tensions between Catholic religious and Irish national identity. The fact that

Adams remembers sectarian cooperation so favorably demonstrates that the situation in

Northern Ireland was not nearly as simple as some have tried to make it, including

Adams himself.

August 1968 – Coalisland to Dungannon

Several diverse groups including NICRA, the Belfast Wolfe Tone Society, the

CSJ, and the local housing action committees all came together under the banner of the civil rights movement.53 The first organized march that NICRA sponsored went from

Coalisland to Dungannon on August 24, 1968, a distance of about four miles. Terence

O’Neill recorded in his Autobiography that while he was aware of the first march, he and

53 Adams, Politics, 12.

his government treated it as being relatively unimportant in the larger scheme of events:

“Northern Ireland being a country of marches, one tended to accept these things as normal.”54 There was no sense in O’Neill’s mind initially that this might be the start of something bigger. At the time, it had simply seemed like more of the same, something for which he seems almost relieved, as more of the same meant that the march was not the portent of massive societal upheaval to come. O’Neill writes four years later about how the August march was in fact something far bigger than his government had initially considered:

Had we all known it, that unreported Civil Rights march was to be the start of something which would shake Northern Ireland to its foundations, split the ruling Unionist Party, and initiate more reforms in two years than I had thoughts possible in ten. Moreover, Westminster, our sovereign Parliament, had Northern Ireland thrust on its plate as never before since the Government of Ireland Act of 1920.55

O’Neill traces every difficulty he faced from sectarian opposition back to the upheaval caused by the civil rights movement. This march, as he sees it, marked the beginning of a movement that would change the face of politics in Northern Ireland. For him, despite the lack of media attention, it was not an insignificant event. O’Neill was very much aware of how important the civil rights movement became after the fact, with the benefit of knowing what happened between the start of the civil rights movement in 1968 and the time he sat down to write in 1972: “1968 was to usher in a new era. The repercussions from the first Civil Rights march are still with us as I write these words and are likely to

54 O’Neill, Autobiography, 99.

55 O’Neill, Autobiography, 99.

remain with us for a long time to come.”56 With the benefit of hindsight, O’Neill could confidently state that the civil rights movement was an important turning point in the history of Northern Ireland, or especially his own history.

It should be noted that, in principle, O’Neill was not opposed to reforming

Northern Ireland. He was aware that the inequalities which existed between Catholics and

Protestants were only harming the country, and as a result, he was willing to work toward the needed reforms. His major objection to the civil rights movement was that it forced the changes to come swiftly, rather than allowing them to be enacted in due time. Despite the criticisms lobbed at him by men such as McCann and Adams who were of a far more radical disposition, when compared with the years leading up to his premiership, O’Neill was in fact a progressive leader, even if his progressivism was mitigated by a desire to let things come when they would and not force too much on an unwilling people.

In his discussion of the Catholic civil rights movement and its ramifications,

O'Neill does not discuss the connection between the movement and Irish nationalism.

Given the ways in which McCann and Adams both make an effort to connect the two, it is interesting that O'Neill chooses to isolate the two and focus exclusively on the civil rights movement to the point of ignoring the issue of nationalism. Likely, O'Neill's

Protestantism and Unionism influence his interpretation of events and what he considers important. However, this means that he ignores the impact of nationalism on events as a driving force behind the activists' actions. O'Neill sees the movement in an entirely different light, focusing instead on the outcomes over the motivations.

56 O’Neill, Autobiography, 96.

Eamonn McCann remembered the August 1968 march in very modest terms, and gives it at best a cursory mention while setting up his discussion of the subsequent civil rights activities. While he mentions the large number of people who participated, he takes care to underline that the march had little lasting impact:57

The CRA had organized a march – the first civil rights march in Northern Ireland – from Coalisland to Dungannon in August to protest against discriminatory housing allocations in that area. About four thousand had marched and it passed off peacefully despite being prevented by the RUC from reaching its objective, Dungannon market square.58

McCann’s mention of the march has an obligatory quality, because it shared many of the same goals as his group in Derry. However, in his narrative, he gives far more weight to the events in which he was personally involved, to the point of dismissing the first civil rights march in order to give more importance to the second march in Derry.59 The lack of dramatic confrontation in the march provided an interesting measure for future marches: in several instances in the following year, march organizers made a point of seeking a violent, and therefore dramatic, confrontation. The goal was to draw more attention by provoking a disproportionate response to the actions of the marchers, something which the police and RUC could generally be relied upon to provide. Even if the number of participants was not as many as the number who marched in August 1968, the increased coverage was in some ways an adequate trade off for those who were

57 In terms of the civil rights movement as a whole, the first march in August 1968 was perhaps most important for marking a visible beginning of the movement. Its peaceful nature also set the bar for the aims of subsequent marches especially with regard to the desired media attention. In the following months, when planning additional marches organizers such as McCann looked to both the August 1968 march and to international examples such as those in the United States, particularly Selma and Montgomery.

58 McCann, War, 92-23.

59 McCann, War, 83.

organizing the marches. In many ways this reflected one of the lessons learned through the housing action committees and the deliberately low profile of the Coalisland-

Dungannon march, which was that peaceful demonstration was not always the way to achieve the desired results.60

The lack of coverage of the Coalisland-Dungannon march did not provide

Catholics with a broader forum in which to broadcast their message. According to

McCann, something that he had learned through his activism in Derry was that

[i]t had been very publicly made clear that outrageous tactics worked, that blocking roads worked better than an MP’s intervention – if the latter worked at all. The court proceedings provided us with a platform; fines and suspended sentences conferred on us an aura of minor martyrdom.61

To McCann, the aftermath would be just as important as the event itself. If they could land themselves in court, it might be possible for them to extend the message of the march into a new venue, one that would come with an official record to keep their grievances. Creating the circumstances in which they could continue to keep the public eye on their cause would be far more effective for their long-term goals than pulling off a peaceful march which did not generate headlines.62

60 Simon Prince also discusses the tactic of provoking a disproportionate response in Northern Ireland's '68, which he then links to the US civil rights movement, particularly evenings in Birmingham, Alabama.

61 McCann, War, 90.

62 This is a different tactic than that seen in the US Civil Rights Movement, as discussed by Steven E. Barkan, "Legal Control of the Southern Civil Rights Movement", American Sociological Review 49, no. 4 (August 1984): 552-565. According to Barkan, in the United States the legal system served as an effective way to block progress by civil rights activists in a way not seen in Northern Ireland. Whereas in the United States the courts were a means of using up the time and monetary resources of activists by dragging out the proceedings, in Northern Ireland activists considered the courts a way of creating a public account of their grievances through public trials and court records. McCann in particular discusses the ways by which activists saw the courts as a tool for further publicizing their cause. For the activists in Northern Ireland, arrest and court appearances did not necessarily mean they had been defeated. 27

October 1968 - Derry

After the August march, a contingency in Derry which included Eamonn McCann organized a second march, scheduled for October 5, 1968. The goal was to build momentum from the first march, while also gaining national attention for the Catholic cause. According to Terence O’Neill,

On Saturday, 5 October there was a second Civil Rights march. After their first march they had been criticised for lack of publicity by the Irish Times. On this occasion, they made their plans and saw to it that the media were well briefed in advance. Left-wing MPs from Westminster were invited to attend and Gerry Fitt, then Republican MP for West Belfast, appeared on the front page of the Observer with blood streaming down his head. The Civil Rights movement had arrived.63

O’Neill continually links the civil rights movement to violence, often bringing out the tendency for marchers to clash with the RUC, which usually meant that the march ended in a riot. He also expresses frustration at how the movement prevented him from continuing his planned path of moderation: “As soon as the Civil Rights movement got underway further progress based on peace became impossible. From then on the pattern which developed was one of rioting, followed by British intervention, followed by forced reforms.”64 O’Neill was the most progressive Prime Minister Northern Ireland had had to date, but he disagreed with the sharp demands of the civil rights agitators, especially the fact that their actions pushed reforms through more quickly than moderates would have preferred. While he saw Catholics as equal participants in Northern Irish society, he preferred a parliamentary route to marches and rioting. There is also a slight note of

63 O’Neill, Autobiography, 102.

64 O’Neill, Autobiography, 138.

bitterness in his writing, given that the increasing violence ultimately forced him to resign.

Eamonn McCann describes the Derry march as a move calculated to provoke a response. If that response was excessively violent, McCann’s hope was that it would serve to bring attention to the inequities in Northern Ireland. Through his experience with the Derry Housing Action Committee, McCann had learned that sometimes it was necessary to force the other side’s hand in order to bring about any change. However, the civil rights movement had yet to really move beyond a few scattered local elements before October. According to McCann, referring to the planning of the march in Derry,

“A delegation from the executive of the Civil Rights Association (CRA) came to Derry to discuss the project with us. The CRA had no branch in Derry. At that point it had few branches anywhere.”65 McCann’s mention of the lack of branches illustrates how improvised the movement was at this point, and how in the few months since the

Coalisland-Dungannon march, it had really failed to move beyond local initiatives into a coordinated national movement. NICRA was not established or entrenched, and so it was easier for the local activists to use the banner without necessarily conforming to the organization. It also underscores McCann's importance in planning the October march because if there is no local NICRA branch then the locals would be in charge by default, something which reinforces his position as a radical activist.

In many ways, the movement grew quickly after the October march because a few people began to push it from within. In planning the Derry march, several factors were kept in the forefront of the planning committee’s mind, especially McCann’s. One of

65 McCann, War, 93.

those was planning a strategically important route. The one they chose would certainly disturb the balance in Derry, according to McCann:

It was immediately clear that the CRA knew nothing of Derry. We had resolved to press for a route which would take the march into the walled centre of the city and expected opposition to this from moderate members of the CRA. But there was none.66

McCann’s tone suggests a degree of surprise that the proposed route was adopted so easily. It raises the question of whether the CRA was really as uninformed about Derry as

McCann portrays them, or whether they were simply going along because they wanted to allow the local activists more control. They may have been outside agitators, but the relatively small size of Northern Ireland suggests that they must have been at least somewhat aware of what they were getting into in Derry.

Nevertheless, the Derry contingent expected resistance from the CRA and were surprised when that resistance was not forthcoming:

No one in the CRA delegation understood that it was unheard of for a non- Unionist procession to enter that area. The route we proposed – from Duke Street in the Waterside, across Craigavon Bridge, through the city walls and into the Diamond – was accepted without question.67

The proposed route started on the east bank of River Foyle, which was opposite from where most of the Catholics lived in the neighborhood known as the Bogside. It then crossed the river via Craigavon Bridge and entered the walled citadel which had long been a Protestant stronghold. The Diamond is the main square in the middle of the walled portion of the city. The route was planned in order to take the Catholic marchers into the

66 McCann, War, 93.

67 McCann, War, 93.

heart of the Protestant citadel, something McCann must have known would provoke a response from the police and RUC in particular.

Another factor at play in planning the Derry march was concern over who would ultimately be involved. In order to ensure the largest turnout and create a coalition across several groups, it was necessary for McCann and the other organizers to determine whether to invite other groups to participate and which should be invited. McCann recalls the discussion with the NICRA delegation over inviting other political organizations to participate in the civil rights march, as well as the reasoning for why they chose October

5 as the date of their march:

The CRA proposed that all political organizations in the city – including the Unionist Party – should be invited to attend. We argued down the proposed invitation to the Unionists, but accepted that the Nationalists should be asked. We knew that the invitation would put them in a very embarrassing position. If they accepted they would be seen as coming in behind us – a demeaning position for the elected representatives of the people. If they refused we could denounce them as deserters. [emphasis in original]68

There was a lot of politicking involved in determining who to invite to participate in the march. McCann was also aware of the importance for his group to retain control of the march if they wanted to achieve their aims. However, he was also aware that the more groups they could involve would strengthen their message and add legitimacy to the march.

McCann mentions that the date of the march, October 5, was chosen based on the

Derry City Football Club’s schedule, which serves as a way of justifying how many people showed up for the march: "5 October was selected as the date for the march because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that Derry City Football Club was playing

68 McCann, War, 93. 31

away that Saturday."69 The march had a lower turnout than McCann had hoped, something that could be attributed to the fact that the Derry City Football Club was playing at home that weekend. Many of the people who might have turned up for the civil rights march were probably at the football game, therefore it was not the fault of the march organizers that the turnout was so low.

Much of the Derry march was calculated in such a way that it would get the maximum impact for their time and energy. McCann certainly expected the march to draw national attention. Although from the way he describes it after the fact, the youthful impetuousness of the organizers was as much a factor in how the march turned out as anything else. The confrontational decision to take the march into the walled citadel that had been a Protestant stronghold for centuries was made knowing that it would provoke a response. McCann also remembers the importance for the Derry contingent of being the leaders of the march. Despite inviting other groups to join them, McCann and the others wanted to be the most important people on the scene. Retaining control of the march would put them in the spotlight, and if charges were filed in the aftermath then it would be they who appeared in court.

Those involved in the march knew that they were involved in something important. The numbers might have been smaller than the organizers hoped, but nevertheless McCann paints an atmosphere of awareness that this was an important event in which they were involved. There was an understanding that the civil rights agitation, if it drew enough attention to the state of affairs in Northern Ireland might bring down the

Parliament at Stormont in Belfast: "We had no doubt that 5 October was going to be a

69 McCann, War, 93.

very significant day. (After the meeting at which the CRA had accepted our route

[Eamonn] Melaugh had remarked: ‘Well, that’s it. Stormont is finished.’)."70 McCann discusses his sense of accomplishment following the march with a feeling of triumphalism:

For six months we had been making steady and seemingly inexorable progress. We began as a small, disparate group and by simple direct action tactics we had month by month accumulated support. Despite all splits, confusions and inefficiencies everything that we did seemed to turn out right. Now we were in control of an event which was seriously perturbing the government and exciting concerned editorials in the Belfast papers.71

The heady feeling of organizing something important had not left McCann, despite the separation of five years between when he was involved in planning the march and when he sat down to write War and an Irish Town. If anything, the passage of time only served to reinforce exactly how important the march he helped organize really was. Despite the involvement of NICRA, the Derry march remained very much in the hands of the local organizers. Expectations were high about what the march could accomplish: “There seemed no reason to suppose that 5 October would not be our most significant advance to date.”72 However, McCann tempers his assurance that this was important by discussing the lack of organization in the group, something which had the potential to undermine their successes:

There were one or two problems. The CRA was a liberal body with no pretensions to revolutionary politics. But then we were paying little attention to them. Their sponsorship of the march was nominal. We had no common political organization. But this had proved no real drawback in the last six months. Indeed

70 McCann, War, 95. The Parliament was commonly referred to as “Stormont” because of its location in the Stormont area of Belfast.

71 McCann, War, 95.

72 McCann, War, 95.

the absence of organization, the fact that we rarely sought formal approval of our actions from the Labour Party, the Republican Club or anyone else, appeared to have been a positive advantage.73

The group of political misfits that McCann recalls does not quite fit the image scholars have portrayed of the civil rights movement as dedicated to change within the system without an underlying motive to force British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.74 It also does not support the notion of the civil rights movement as an organized movement; if anything it was still several smaller movements at this point. While there were certainly members of the movement whose primary goal was to address the inequalities in

Northern Ireland without the largely Nationalist focus, there were also individuals, such as McCann and Adams, who saw the British government in Northern Ireland as propped up by the political inequality between Catholics and Protestants, and by extension saw that ending the inequality would end the basis for British rule. The Nationalist faction within the movement would occupy a position of varying supremacy compared with the faction that truly wanted to work within the system without overthrowing the state.

McCann made a point of ensuring the local government banned the march in order to secure more attention for it. It was a sound strategy: banning the march would likely increase the numbers who showed up and it would mean that the police would crack down on the march, which could cause the situation to escalate and become a major news story. According to McCann,

We expected about five thousand people to turn out. There had, after all, been four thousand at Dungannon. Our calculation all along had been that a ban would

73 McCann, War, 95

74 Richard English and Bob Purdie in particular portray the civil rights movement as organized and peaceful rather than disorganized and chaotic as Eamonn McCann portrays it.

encourage thousands of outraged citizens who would not otherwise have marched to come and demonstrate their disgust.75

By employing such tactics, McCann was playing on the politically charged atmosphere in

Northern Ireland. By tapping into the outrage of Catholics at the heavy-handed tactics of local government by banning Catholic marches while at the same time allowing

Protestant marches, the hope was that they would be able to use the simmering anger of the Catholic population to their advantage. Indeed, there seemed to have been some truth to McCann’s assumption, even if the march turn-out did not live up to his hopes:

"Commentators afterwards were unanimous that the imposition of a ban had indeed doubled the number of marchers. If this is so, then without the ban the turn-out would have been pathetic indeed."76 It is possible that McCann and company overplayed their hand, which affected their success in terms of numbers.

About four hundred people formed up in ranks in Duke Street. About two hundred stood on the pavement and looked on. It was a very disappointing crowd. People may have been deterred not by the ban but by the expectation of violence. And our somewhat melodramatic advance publicity had probably done little to reassure them. The march would proceed, we had said, ‘come hell or high water’, and the overwhelming majority of people in the Bogside and Creggan were not yet ready for either.77

McCann attempts in his recollection to rationalize why the march had not lived up to expectations. He had been optimistic beforehand that this march would draw several thousand people and prove through sheer force of numbers that the civil rights cause resonated with the Catholics of Northern Ireland. The low turn-out, especially compared

75 McCann, War, 97

76 McCann, War, 97.

77 McCann, War, 97.

with the numbers that had marched from Coalisland to Dungannon, was clearly disappointing even though he still tried to paint the march as a major success. While the numbers were low, the media attention for the march drew widespread attention, especially on British television, something the first march could not claim.78

Perhaps the most important lesson of the day, especially for planning future demonstrations, was the importance of the march’s location, not just where it ended but also where it started:

Moreover, the whole route of our march lay outside the Catholic ghetto. We were to learn in time that when organizing a march towards confrontation it is essential to begin in ‘home’ territory and march out, so that there is somewhere for people to stream back to if this proves necessary.79

While the organizers, especially McCann, wanted to stage as confrontational a march as possible to draw attention to their cause, there was still an awareness that perhaps they were starting too strongly. By pointing out the starting place outside the Catholic neighborhoods as a planning error, McCann also offers that as further explanation for why the turnout was lower than he had wanted. By choosing Duke Street as their starting point, the marchers were positioned across the river from the Catholic area of Derry.

They marched toward the walled section of the city from the east, while the Bogside lay to the west. This route did not provide the marchers with an open avenue of retreat when they clashed with the police and also did not give the marchers much of a sense of security. Because they were outside their territory, the march was more likely surrounded by people who were not sympathetic to their cause. The police were then able to block

78 Simon Prince discusses the media attention from the BBC and Telefís Éireann, Northern Ireland's '68, 5.

79 McCann, War, 97.

both ends of the street, and the marchers were trapped in the middle. In the days leading up to the Battle of the Bogside the following August, this lesson proved to be well learned. The Catholics stayed safely inside the Bogside, rather than venturing into the

Protestant areas of Derry.

The march escalated to the point of violence with the involvement of the RUC. As

McCann points out, it did not really matter that the turn-out was not as high as they had hoped: “On the day, however, numbers soon became irrelevant.”80 While part of this assessment may be McCann trying to control the memory of the march in a positive way and portray the ultimate outcome as a success, the fact that there were television news crews covering the march lends some credence to his assertion. While they did not have the benefit of coverage showing thousands of marchers crossing Craigavon Bridge, something which would have been dramatic indeed, when the RUC started to move in on the marchers, the footage was of a violent clash. In the end, the numbers were less important than the media coverage of the march.81 Despite leading members of the march such as Betty Sinclair urging calm, the confrontation between marchers and the RUC escalated. “Some of the crowd were demanding action. ‘There must be no violence,’ shouted Miss Sinclair, to a barrage of disagreement. But the decision as to whether there would be violence was soon taken from our hands.”82 As McCann had anticipated when he worked to get the march banned, the RUC responded to the demonstration with

80 McCann, War, 97.

81 Simon Prince also discusses the importance of media coverage in the introduction to Northern Ireland's '68. Prince draws on Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004). Kurlansky discusses how changes in technology such as live satellite transmission made it easier for populations to view events from around the same world on that same day that they happened.

82 McCann, War, 98. Betty Sinclair was a prominent member of NICRA and a vocal advocate of maintaining a separation between civil rights and republicanism. 37

characteristic force, cracking heads and spraying water cannons. This use of excessive force was precisely what McCann had expected and hoped for, and it garnered the desired media response.

News of events in Derry spread quickly. McCann remembers, “By the next morning, after television newsreels and the newspaper pictures, a howl of elemental rage was unleashed across Northern Ireland, and it was clear that things were never going to be the same again.”83 Part of that was due to the way that the RUC had handled the march, which included beating some of the marchers. While a dramatic response had been the goal, McCann admits that he wasn’t quite expecting the level of violence that occurred: “We had indeed set out to make the police over-react. But we hadn’t expected the animal brutality of the RUC.”84 While it was not what they had expected, as McCann argues, the disproportionate response made it that much bigger of a story. It also brought national and global attention to the Catholic cause.

“Derry was big news. The prime minister, Captain Terence O’Neill, delivered a liberal homily appealing for moderation and restraint. Mr Craig praised the police for their tactful handling of the affair. Eamonn Melaugh, Finbar Doherty and I were arrested on Sunday afternoon and charged with contravention of the Public Order Act.”85

McCann had anticipated his arrest, but considered the possibility a reasonable trade off for pushing the movement to a wider audience. The fact that they had forced a statement from the prime minister showed how far reaching the consequences might be.

83 McCann, War, 99.

84 McCann, War, 99.

85 McCann, War, 99.

Despite the attention, there were still a few things lacking in the movement: “We had a mass movement, but no organization.”86 McCann repeatedly stresses the lack of organization, a curious stance that calls into question how much responsibility he wants to take for the events in Derry. While he was a major force in planning the march, including taking the step to get the march banned, McCann is careful to step back from claiming an overarching plan for what was happening. By playing up how disorganized the group was, McCann underlines that while he had been instrumental in getting the movement going, he was not taking as much responsibility for where it went. While stressing the lack of organization, McCann makes it clear that is was hardly a deterrent:

“All seemed to be going according to plan – insofar as there was a plan. At a stroke we had shaken the government, fatally undermined the Nationalist Party in the city and made

Derry world news. Who needed organization? Who needed theory?”87

McCann’s portrayal of the civil rights movement at this point as a loosely organized amalgam of rebels is an interesting characterization. That he was able to pinpoint where the August march had failed to draw national attention and then take the steps to ensure that the October march would not suffer the same lack of coverage reveals that he and others understood how to use the movement to enact the changes that they wished to see from the government. There may have been a lack of organization but there was certainly not a lack of strategy. McCann and the others were very aware of what they

86 McCann, War, 99.

87 McCann, War, 100. It is unclear why exactly McCann was opposed to the Nationalist Party, other than because they could be considered part of the political establishment.

were doing, even if he tried to portray the movement after the fact as a group without organization or theory.

The Derry march gave the movement, such as it was, a degree of momentum that spurred them forward. McCann describes the aftermath of the march, which included local and national responses:

So for the time being a fractious alliance held together. And it seemed to be getting some results. The civil rights demonstrations which took place throughout Northern Ireland, but most frequently and dramatically in Derry, in the weeks after 5 October forced concessions from the Unionists... Shortly afterwards O’Neill announced a five-point package of reforms. These involved a plan to abolish Derry Corporation, universal franchise, and a promise that sections of the Special Powers Act would be ‘put into cold storage’ (but not so cold as to prevent rapid re-heating when the occasion arose).88

The civil rights movement was seeing some of the results for which they had pushed, but there was still a feeling among activists that these reforms were not enough. This brings up the question of focused versus unfocused movements. The civil rights movement was focused, with four specific goals. This should have helped the movement achieve success, as it provided clear benchmarks to measure their results. However, though they achieved success with O'Neill's plan, the demonstrators were not willing to abandon their movement even though they were starting to see changes.

From McCann's account, one gets the feeling that had the government adopted these measures before the October 5 march, the public might have received them more favorably. But, McCann states, the lengths to which the demonstrators had gone made these concessions come off like the government was merely trying to placate them:

Had such measures been announced in Stormont three months previously they would have been hailed as a dramatic advance. Now they were far too little far too

88 McCann, War, 104.

late. What they did was to confirm to the Catholic masses that the power which they were beginning to feel was real.89

McCann’s explanation aims at justifying why the movement did not stop when the government granted many of the reforms for which they had been aiming, particularly the inclusion of universal franchise. Instead of stopping, the movement continued to grow and clash with the conservative factions. McCann attributes this to the Catholics’ growing awareness that they could influence the actions of the government. Their sudden realization of agency was not going to simply stop just because they had achieved some small measure of success. It was likely, as McCann sees it, that the movement would continue until Catholics realized full equality with Protestants.

Gerry Adams is equally critical of the attempts by O’Neill’s government to quell the growing unrest:

The state could have undermined the civil rights agitation by moving swiftly on what were normal democratic demands; and perhaps in the global sense if wider issues had occurred earlier the natural consequence of EEC [European Economic Community] membership would have been to modernise the state. But movement came too late. In fact, whatever civil rights reforms were granted were only granted after the holocaust, after the whole thing was up in the air.90

Adams displays his understanding of the power of language repeatedly. By referring to the violence that would occur in 1969 as a holocaust, he compares the Ulster government's action to Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews by depicting the rising tension as an attempt by Protestants to eradicate the Catholics in Northern Ireland. Or, if not to eradicate them, then at the very least to push them back into the comfortable box in which Catholics had existed for half a century and force them to remain there. Adams

89 McCann, War, 104.

90 Adams, Politics, 31.

remains highly critical not only of O’Neill’s premiership but of the continued partition of

Ireland, something he views at the root of the problems in Northern Ireland. Adams is also critical of the government’s response to the civil rights movement. He shares many of Eamonn McCann’s criticisms, but uses more powerfully colorful language to express those criticisms.

In particular, Adams saw self-interest as the determining factor in resistance to the civil rights movement. He writes, “All political ideology is based on either the self- interest of those who support it or on what they perceive to be their self-interest. The self- interest of Unionism was to keep the papists down.”91 If Adams’ assessment is correct, then no amount of agitation for equal civil rights would have had a long-term impact.

Because of the way the state was structured, in Adams’ thinking, the Unionists would always have the power and would always do what they could to keep the power. Any small gestures of reform would just be token motions to give the impression that the system might change, though it never would.

November and December 1968 - Escalation

With the government’s reform measures came Protestant backlash, especially from more conservative individuals, such as Reverend Ian Paisley. Eamonn McCann recounts how civil rights demonstrations after the October march led to escalating tensions between Protestants and Catholics:

There was a civil rights march in Armagh on 30 November. The Rev. Ian Paisley called a counter-demonstration. With hundreds of followers, most of them armed with sticks and clubs, he occupied the centre of the city, the march’s objective,

91 Adams, Politics, 24.

from early morning. The march had not been banned, but the RUC blocked its path and prevented the two sides coming into contact. There was no clash, but the gruesome possibilities were not missed by many people.92

Conservative elements in Northern Ireland were clearly not going to allow change to come without putting up a fight. McCann mentions that the Protestant counterdemonstration was armed, while he does not mention whether the Catholic demonstration was. His portrayal of the potential clash reflects a desire on his part to portray conservative Protestants as the enemy who was more than willing to respond with physical violence to any attempt by Catholics to create an equal society.

The escalating situation necessitated a government response. Terence O’Neill’s moderation came through in the speech he delivered on December 9, 1968, which was titled “Ulster at the Crossroads”.93 In the speech, O’Neill made an appeal to the people of

Northern Ireland to consider how their actions would affect the future of their state and urged that they asked themselves, “What kind of Ulster do you want?”94 Eamonn

McCann, however, was less than kind in his assessment of the speech:

Then on 9 December Captain O’Neill apparently had the biggest success of his career. He made a dramatic prime-ministerial broadcast immediately after the news on local television. It was ten minutes of emotional clichés delivered in the whining nasal drawl which is, apparently, his natural voice. He ended by asking ‘What kind of Ulster do you want?’ and appealing to ‘men of goodwill to come together’.95

McCann’s assessment reflects a certain disillusionment with the prime minister’s approach to policy. As one of the prominent agitators, McCann was unmoved by the

92 McCann, War, 104.

93 O’Neill, Autobiography, 145.

94 O’Neill, Autobiography, 149.

95 McCann, War, 105.

emotional appeal of O’Neill’s speech. His disapproval even comes through in his characterization of O’Neill’s voice as a whining nasal drawl. In addition to criticizing the content of the speech as clichéd, McCann takes the opportunity to criticize O’Neill’s delivery as a way of further emphasizing his cynicism with the symbolism that the speech represented. Instead of considering the speech as a means to foster better relations between Catholic and Protestants, McCann viewed the speech as merely theatrical.

After the address, O’Neill sacked William Craig, one of the more conservative members of O'Neill's cabinet whose remarks in support of the police against Catholic marchers had increased Catholic animosity toward him, and there was a general feeling of goodwill in Northern Ireland for a brief period. Peace prevailed during a month-long moratorium on marches.96 McCann describes the aftermath of O’Neill’s address and the sacking of Craig as having a very heady effect on the Catholics of Northern Ireland:

“Actually, what the Catholics had been given was a sense of achievement. It was a new experience, and for the moment it sufficed.”97 By firing Craig, O’Neill was giving yet another concession to the Catholic activists that served to further bolster Protestant opposition. The move was important however because it showed that the demonstrations and marchers had forced the government to pay attention to the Catholic situation. The

Unionist parliament could not continue to ignore the disparity as it had for half a century.

In a way, December 1968 proved to be a rare moment of sectarian cooperation in the history of Northern Ireland according to McCann: “A casual visitor to Northern Ireland might have wondered who it was, apart from William Craig and Ian Paisley, who had

96 McCann, War, 105.

97 McCann, War, 105. 44

ever been against reform.”98 Parliament and the majority of Northern Irish society seemed to have come together for the improvement of the Catholic situation, and the momentary goodwill that existed between the two gave the impression that a lasting truce was indeed possible.

January 1969 – Belfast to Derry

The fragile peace was not to last. By the end of December, another march was announced, this time by the slightly more radical People’s Democracy. The involvement of the People's Democracy on a national level brought ideological questions involving civil rights, nationalism, and socialism to the fore. This march would start in Belfast and end in Derry, a distance of about seventy miles which would take several days.

According to McCann:

The ‘truce’ was broken when the People’s Democracy announced that it was marching from Belfast to Derry, starting on 1 January. The PD had been formed by students at Queen’s University, Belfast, who had been in Derry on 5 October. It was a loose organization without formal membership and with an incoherent ideology comprising middle-class liberalism, Aldermaston pacifism and a Sorbonne-inspired belief in spontaneity. At its core was a small group of determined left-wingers who had been in close liaison with the Labour left in Derry before and after 5 October, most of whom retained simultaneous membership of the Northern Ireland Labour Party.99

The People’s Democracy added another dynamic to the predominantly working class movement. As a student organization, they represented a class element apart from those who had been at the front to this point. In several ways, they were closer to the Campaign for Social Justice, particularly in terms of their predominantly middle class affiliation.

98 McCann, War, 106.

99 McCann, War, 106.

Most of the activists who had been in charge to this point, including McCann and Adams, were part of the working class, so there is a logical explanation for McCann dismissing them as a group of loosely organized students, although it is curious that he lists spontaneity as part of their incoherent ideology when he was clearly proud of the lack of organization or planning in his own group. Where the lack of organization or coherent theory had been a benefit for the working class movement of Derry, the same attributes were a way of separating the Queen’s students from the rest of the movement. By referencing the Sorbonne, McCann links the People's Democracy to students in Paris who were involved in the protests there in May of 1968, and by further extension to an international intelligentsia.100 While McCann does not entirely dismiss their contributions to the movement, he does not grant them full legitimacy either, in the choice of words he uses to describe them.

Terence O’Neill used the opportunity afforded by the January march to once again criticize the radical elements of the civil rights campaign, expressing a negative view of the People’s Democracy in particular:

There was, however, an extreme left-wing element which had jumped on to the Civil Rights bandwagon. Based on the Queen’s University of Belfast, they called themselves the ‘People’s Democracy’. They were determined to break the Civil Rights truce, and break it they did. They celebrated the New Year by marching from Belfast to Derry. The police felt that if a ban were imposed then a very small group of people would turn into a large rabble with yet another grievance. However, even assuming that this interpretation was correct, the events along the route of the march were so violent that the Christmas spirit of peace was completely shattered.101

100 For more on the events of May 1968 in Paris, see Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “May 1968 in France: The Rise and Fall of a New Social Movement,” in 1968: The World Transformed, ed. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 253-76.

101 O’Neill, Autobiography, 110.

If O’Neill’s opinion of NICRA was unfavorable at best, his opinion of the People’s

Democracy was even worse. Far more than just agitators, he considered them responsible for the violence that occurred along the route. The lack of a police ban reflects the tensions from Derry and the October march. Whereas in Derry, McCann had succeeded in securing a ban which played into public outrage, for the People's Democracy march, civic authorities did not repeat the ban in hopes of avoiding playing into Catholic emotions. The politics of banning Catholic marches had become clearer in the intervening months, and local authorities in Belfast in particular made a concerted effort to reduce the number of people marching in order to reduce the likelihood of violent confrontations and subsequent negative publicity for Northern Ireland. Because the

People’s Democracy marchers were continuing to draw attention to issues that O’Neill would have preferred to consider resolved, he was highly critical of both their message and their methods.

The January march marked an escalation in tensions and violence that would eventually force O’Neill’s resignation from the premiership, and culminate in the rioting in the Bogside. What had been a movement of demonstrations and marches began to devolve into a movement of riots. McCann recounts the January march:

About eighty people, Queen’s students and half a dozen supporters from Derry, set off from Belfast city Hall at nine in the morning of 1 January... The march was a horrific seventy-three mile trek which dredged to the surface all the accumulated political filth of fifty Unionist years. Every few miles groups of Unionist extremists blocked the route. Invariably the police diverted the march rather than open the road, so that much of the time it wound a circuitous way through country lanes from stopping place to stopping place.102

102 McCann, War, 107. 47

McCann's account stresses the opposition the marchers faced on the way from Belfast to

Derry. By mentioning that the police chose to divert the path of the march rather than clear the counterdemonstrators from the road to allow the marchers to continue on their way, McCann emphasizes to the reader that the police really sided with the counterdemonstrators and not the People's Democracy marchers. This would become even more evident when the counterdemonstrators stopped the marchers a few miles outside Derry at Burntollet Bridge:

On the final day of the march, at Burntollet Bridge a few miles outside Derry, a force of some hundreds, marshalled by members of the B Specials and watched passively by our ‘escort’ of more than a hundred police, attacked with nailed clubs, stones and bicycle chains. Of the eighty who had set out fewer than thirty arrived in Derry uninjured.103

The march as McCann describes it served as a turning point in the civil rights movement.

The government’s concessions had not changed Protestant attitudes toward Catholic equality. If anything, the situation McCann describes reveals an increase in Protestant opposition to the goals of the civil rights movement. The hostility aimed at the January marchers certainly was not indicative of the feelings of every Protestant in Northern

Ireland, but the conservative element was still out en masse to express their opposition to the demonstration. There was also an increase in support of the Catholic demonstrators though, which McCann describes while recounting the arrival of the marchers in Derry:

But they had gathered hundreds of supporters behind them on the way and were met in Guildhall Square by angry thousands who were in no mood for talk of truce. Emotion swelled as bloodstained marchers mounted a platform and described their experiences. Rioting broke out and continued for some hours.104

103 McCann, War, 107. The B Specials, formally known as the Ulster Special Constabulary, were a reserve police force that had developed a reputation for brutality toward Catholics.

104 McCann, War, 107. 48

The rioting, so casually mentioned here, reflected the growing frustration felt by civil rights activists. The clash at Burntollet Bridge is regarded as one of the defining moments in the escalation from the peaceful demonstration in August 1968 to the violent confrontations of 1969. The fact that police forces stood by and watched as Protestants counter-demonstrators attacked Catholic marchers with clubs and chains only increased

Catholic hostility toward the police, the RUC, and the B Specials.105

Gerry Adams discusses the government’s reaction to the January march, focusing on O’Neill’s public remarks especially:

O’Neill attacked the Burntollet march as ‘a foolhardy and irresponsible undertaking’ and civil rights marchers as ‘mere hooligans’. He ignored the violence inflicted upon peaceful demonstrators by the sticks and stones of loyalists, ignored the fact that about a hundred of the ambushers were members of the ‘B’ Specials, ignored the assault by drunken RUC men on the Bogside in Derry.106

Adams draws attention to the actions of the Unionists in order to illustrate how the marchers, who O’Neill viewed as breaking the truce, were as much the victims as the instigators. While the march was certainly provocative, the Unionists made the premeditated decision to react with violence. Because the marchers took four days to reach Burntollet Bridge, the Unionists who met them had plenty of time to make the decision to turn out in opposition to the march. It was hardly an impromptu affair.

After the January march from Belfast to Derry, tensions increased again. Marches gave way to rioting, and violence continued to spread throughout the country. Eamonn

105 Bernadette Devlin discusses what she calls "The Long March to Derry" in her book, The Price of My Soul (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 122-151. While an interesting description of events from the perspective of a marcher, it is outside the scope of this thesis.

106 Adams, Politics, 26.

McCann describes how the tensions escalated over the months of January and February:

“There was rioting in Newry on 11 January and sporadic trouble in other areas. In Derry unemployed teenagers, of whom there were and are no small number, took to the casual stoning of any police car which came into view.”107 The almost blasé attitude toward throwing stones at police cars reflects the growing dissatisfaction with police handling of the confrontations between Protestants and Catholics. It is also indicative of the rising discontent felt by Catholics, especially youths, who were seeing no tangible changes in their lives.

McCann also recounts O’Neill’s attempts to control the political situation in spite of the actions of Craig and Paisley leading up to the Parliamentary elections in March:

Dr Paisley continued to stomp the country telling Protestants that ‘O’Neill must go’. Mr Craig was appealing to the rank and file of the Unionist Party. Captain O’Neill was being given almost weekly votes of confidence by various executive organs of the party, each of which was immediately interpreted by commentators as further evidence of the good sense and moderation of the Protestant people and the isolation of Craig and Paisley.108

Craig and Paisley were pushing the conservative Protestant line, reacting both to the civil rights demonstrations and to the O’Neill government’s moderate responses. These two men represent the most visible elements of the conservative bloc, and in 1969 they were devoting themselves to undermining O’Neill’s government and its reforms. The three- way conflict between O'Neill, the Catholic activists, and Craig and Paisley exemplifies the different religious tensions in Northern Ireland. It bears reminding that while the primary divide was Protestant and Catholic, the Protestant side was hardly unified. There

107 McCann, War, 111.

108 McCann, War, 111.

were in fact two main branches of Protestantism: Anglicanism and Presbyterianism.

O'Neill represents the Anglicans, who tended to be from older, more noble families in

Ireland, whereas Paisley and Craig represent the Presbyterians, who tended to be from

Scottish, peasant families. The class element and country of origin for these groups is in many ways just as significant as their religious affiliation.

The concessions O’Neill made were intolerable to Paisley in particular, who continued to lobby the Protestant population in order to create a stronger opposition to

O’Neill’s premiership. According to McCann,

In February Captain O’Neill put the matter to the test when he dissolved Parliament and called an election. He put up ‘O’Neill Unionists’ in constituencies where the local organization had selected a pro-Craig candidate. It was said that Captain O’Neill’s team was ‘very impressive’. It included the Duke of Westminster, the son of Lord Carson and the husband of Lady Moira Hamilton. They were slaughtered. For some reason it took months for press commentators, the British government and some other interested observers to realize this.109

Despite attempts by O’Neill to continue his moderate course of action and to drum up support for his agenda, voters supported the extremists over moderates. It should be noted from the names McCann mentions that the major candidates in O'Neill's party were clearly aristocratic, and therefore would not have attracted quite the same support from the working class Catholics actively involved in the civil rights struggle.

O’Neill’s government was rapidly losing ground, largely because of the disturbances caused by the civil rights movement. O’Neill continually places the blame on the extremists in his autobiography as he argues that without their interference his premiership would have ended more peaceably than it did. As he was writing, he clearly

109 McCann, War, 111.

had not forgiven the extremists on both sides of the religious divide for preventing him from controlling the circumstances under which he stepped down as prime minister.

The March elections, instead of helping the situation as McCann believes O’Neill had hoped, if anything made things worse:

After the election things went from bad to worse for moderates of all hues. It had been hoped that the decision of the people expressed through the ballot box would be accepted by everyone in the proper democratic spirit and that politics would, as a result, return to the chamber at Stormont. The problem was that it was by no means clear what the people had, in fact, decided, and in such a situation all tendencies retain their hopes. O’Neill was still prime minister but most of his critics in the Parliamentary Unionist Party had won their way back to Stormont. Dr Paisley had run him close in Bannside and could justifiably feel that his star was still rising. The unexpected performance of the PD against both ‘liberal’ Unionist and Nationalist candidates showed that Catholic working-class resistance to the blandishments of O’Neill was stronger and deeper than had generally been supposed.110

Interestingly, here McCann seems to be embracing the People's Democracy candidates as part of his movement, whereas before when they were marching to Derry he was far more critical of the group. Politics in Northern Ireland remained in the streets and the situation did not resolve itself with through the parliamentary electoral process. The decision to hold elections did not shore up O’Neill’s support in the way that he had hoped. The return of opposition Unionist candidates indicated that Protestant reaction against the reforms was strong. The election of more radical Catholic candidates also reflects a reaction against O’Neill. McCann uses the word “blandishments” to describe O’Neill’s political actions, indicating his view that O’Neill’s government had thus far been acting in a calculated way to pander to the Catholic working class in order to pacify them.

O’Neill’s tactics were not working, and instead of succeeding in getting politics off the

110 McCann, War, 112.

streets, the divisions in Northern Ireland only became more visible, and thus harder to ignore. The election results created a political situation which if anything was primed for further clashes between Catholics and Protestants. The election of members of Parliament who were politically divided and unlikely to work together illustrated how deeply divided

Northern Ireland really was.

In April, the rioting continued to escalate. McCann describes the situation in

Derry, where rioting had become the order of the day:

Rioting started in Derry within a few weeks. It was on a small scale at first, teenagers stoning police cars at the edge of the Bogside. It built up and, on 19 April, erupted into the bloodiest violence the city had seen to date, with youths from the Bogside using stones and petrol bombs to hold the police off. The police burst into a house in William Street and, probably out of frustration, beat up everyone present. The man of the house, Sammy Devenney, was subsequently to die from his injuries. A policeman cornered in Hamilton Street drew his gun and fired two shots. No one was hit but the point was well taken. Afterwards the talk was of the next time and there were some who said that we ought to be prepared. No one doubted that there would be a next time. There was rioting on and after 12 July when the Protestants celebrated the result of the Battle of the Boyne.111

The focus of Catholic frustrations in April was the police, largely because they presented a visible target. This only heightened tensions between the two groups, the relief of which was found in more violence. The police did not ignore the fact that Catholics were targeting them as the enemy. Despite McCann framing the situation as unwarranted police brutality when they beat Catholics like Sammy Devenney supposedly out of frustration and retaliation, the fact that Catholics had been throwing stones and petrol bombs exacerbated the situation. It would have been unreasonable to assume that there would not be a response to such provocation. However, the tendency of the police to

111 McCann, War, 112-113. The Battle of the Boyne was fought in 1690 between the Catholic forces of James II of England and the Protestant forces of William III of Orange. William III deposed James II as king of England in 1688, and in 1690 James II was attempting to reclaim the throne.

support Protestants in any confrontation had set up the situation in the first place. This was a situation in which none of the parties were entirely innocent. Derry was not the only place that saw rioting, according to McCann: “The Derry riots were a minor affair, but around Unity Flats in Belfast and in Dungannon there were fierce clashes between

Catholics and Orange marchers, with the RUC intervening on the Protestant side.”112

McCann portrays Derry as less violent than other cities and in doing so makes the argument that his city wasn’t as bad as Belfast or Dungannon, but rather were more peaceful or under control. The RUC and police response to marches and demonstrations only fed Catholic frustrations with the situation in Northern Ireland.

It was this escalation in violence that led O’Neill to resign at the end of April.

“O’Neill had resigned in April and taken himself off, ennobled, to the boardroom of a merchant bank in the City of London, where he is believed still to be,” McCann recalls.113

In 1970, O’Neill was created Baron O'Neill of the Maine of Ahoghill in County Antrim.

Apparently, McCann felt that O’Neill cut his losses and got out of town, leaving the problem to his successor, James Chichester-Clark. In his own writings, O’Neill insists that his plan had been to retire in October 1969 regardless, and the increasing tensions and pressures brought by the civil rights movement forced him to tender his resignation in April 1969 instead.114

112 McCann, War, 113.

113 McCann, War, 113.

114 O’Neill, Autobiography, 129.

The increased violence led some of the groups that had initially been involved in the civil rights campaign to slow down or stop their efforts entirely. McCann considers that this fear of violence may have only led to more rioting:

But in the Bogside and elsewhere the rioting classes were not impressed. The unemployed youth of areas like the Bogside had, at the outset of the civil rights campaign, been regarded as marching fodder. Energetic and instinctively aggressive, they could be counted on to turn out for sit-downs, marches, pickets or any other protest activity which was organized. It was they who had turned out on 5 October. It was their impatience which had then impelled the CAC [Citizen’s Action Committee] into more activity, and more militant activity, than its leading members would have wished. It was their energy and aggression which had powered the civil rights campaign through its first frenetic months. In the end it was they, not the RUC, who frightened organizations like the CAC off the streets. The CAC died in Derry after the riots of 19 April.115

McCann stresses the importance of the youth in Northern Ireland to the civil rights movement. He argues that it was their commitment to the movement which had driven it, and that they were justified in their malcontent when the demonstrations ended. The youth were the ones who took to the streets most frequently. McCann himself was in his mid-twenties during this period, so he was among those coming of age in the 1960s.

While he was older than some of the participants that he describes, he would have considered himself one of them. Particularly in this section, his sympathies with the younger, unemployed Catholics who were most in need of systemic change come through.

However, it was also their tendency to riot which contributed to the decision by those in charge to stop organizing marches because of the violence. McCann states fairly simply that it was an internal rift which caused the demonstrations to stop. They had not

115 McCann, War, 113.

been intimidated into stopping by the RUC, but rather by divisions from within the movement.

It was difficult after that to organize a demonstration which did not end in riot, and the CAC was not about to assume such responsibility. But by ending demonstrations the moderates took away from the youth any channel for expression other than riot. [emphasis in original]116

Here McCann argues that the riots which took the place of demonstrations happened because the demonstrations were no longer taking place. Whereas civil rights demonstrations had given the youth an outlet for their frustrations and a means for expressing their dissatisfaction, ending the marches took away that outlet and they were forced to find other means of expressing themselves.

The rage and frustration which lay just beneath the surface of life in the Bogside could no longer be contained within the thin shell of the CAC’s timid respectability. The ‘hooligans’ had taken over, and the stage was set for a decisive clash between them and the forces of the state. Everyone knew it would come on 12 August, when the Apprentice Boys were scheduled to march past the Bogside in their annual celebration of the Relief of Derry in 1689.117

The civil rights movement had stirred the Catholic community to the point that the youth especially could not simply accept that the status quo in 1968 was the way that things would be because that was how they had been. Interestingly, the marches had given “the rioting classes”, as McCann calls them, an outlet for their unrest that they lost in the spring of 1969. McCann argues that the decision to halt the marches because of rioting only served to increase the tendency among young Catholics to riot because that was the only outlet left to them. This places some of the blame for the escalation of violence on the more moderate factions who wanted to avoid such an eventuality.

116 McCann, War, 113.

117 McCann, War, 113-114.

August 1969 – Derry “The Battle of the Bogside”

As McCann mentions, the anticipated confrontation occurred in Derry on August

12, 1969, and was precipitated by the Apprentice Boys’ march.118 The annual march was a continual source of antagonism because it commemorated a Protestant victory over a

Catholic siege. The residents of the Bogside considered the commemorations a deliberate move by Protestants to remind the Catholics who had ultimately won supremacy in the province of Ulster. The Apprentice Boys, an adult Protestant fraternal organization who took their name from the group of boys who shut the gates of the citadel against the approaching Catholic army, marched past the Catholic area of the Bogside as part of the traditional route of their parade, and in 1969 residents of the Bogside were primed to respond. After almost a year of agitating for civil rights, Catholics in Derry were prepared to challenge the Protestant march and its associated connotations of Protestant superiority over the Catholic population. The results would be some of the worst violence that

Northern Ireland had seen to date. The rioting in the Bogside lasted for three days, and ended only with the arrival of British Army troops to act as an intermediary between the

Catholics and the police.

Catholic citizens of Derry felt that it was necessary, in advance of the Apprentice

Boys’ march, to prepare themselves for the confrontation, which included setting up a

118 The Apprentice Boys are a Protestant fraternal organization based in Derry. In 1689, as part of the war between James II and William III over the throne of England, James II laid siege to the walled city of Derry, which served as a Protestant stronghold. When James II approached the walls, Apprentice Boys closed the gates of the city, and vowed never to surrender. The Apprentice Boys hold commemorations in December for the closing of the gates and in August for the lifting of the siege. The August commemoration parade is one of the biggest Protestant demonstrations in Northern Ireland, although recent shifts in attitude toward a more conciliatory relationship between Protestants and Catholics have led to a decrease in the number of violent confrontations during commemorations.

group to organize the defense that they felt would be necessary if and when the Protestant marchers decided to attack the Bogside. Eamonn McCann discusses some of the preparations that he and others undertook in order to respond to the march:

At the end of July the Republican Club announced that they had formed a ‘Derry Citizens Defence Association’, to protect the area against attack on the Twelfth. They invited all other organizations in the area to nominate two representatives to sit with them on this body. There was some annoyance that the Republicans, before inviting to co-operation any other group had parcelled out the leading positions among themselves. Sean Keenan was chairman, Johnnie White secretary, Johnnie McAllister treasurer. But most political groups in the area accepted the Republican initiative, reasoning that something decisive was going to happen on the Twelfth and it was as well to lay title to some of the action in advance.119

In a way, the residents of the Bogside behaved as if the Apprentice Boys’ march was a direct assault on their neighborhood. The preparations, particularly forming the Derry

Citizens Defense Association (DCDA), seem like a response to a frontal attack rather than preparing for a hostile group to march past. McCann portrays the atmosphere before the march as similar to preparation for a pitched battle. By joining with the Republican

Club to form the DCDA, other Catholic groups agreed that the threat was imminent and real.

Events elsewhere in Northern Ireland made it clear to those in Derry, or so

McCann argues, that preparation for a conflict was in their best interest:

The matter was clinched by what appeared to be a joint assault by the RUC and Orange demonstrators on Unity Flats in Belfast on 2 August. One man was beaten to death and many others were injured. Reports of this sent a frisson through the area. Obviously something similar might happen in Derry on the Twelfth. We had better be prepared. The CAC met, nominated two people to sit on the DCDA and quietly went out of existence. At the time no one noticed.120

119 McCann, War, 114.

120 McCann, War, 114.

The CAC, which had been active in Derry until the spring of 1969, quietly folded after months of inactivity. The demise of a group which had grown timid in the face of the rioting associated with civil rights marches was hardly noticed in the build up to the anticipated monumental clash. McCann considers the loss decidedly insignificant in the face of what was coming: some of the worst rioting that Northern Ireland would experience. A group that had made a concerted effort to avoid violent confrontations for several months would have been of very little use to those who were actively preparing for the biggest clash yet. The Catholics of the Bogside were no longer interested in a nonviolent approach which activists like McCann considered naïve and ineffective.

The atmosphere leading up to August 12 was almost excited as people in the

Bogside prepared for the confrontation they were sure was coming. McCann describes some of the preparations under way:

The stated purpose of the DCDA was to try to preserve the peace and, as soon as this failed, to organize the defence of the area. Maps were procured and we counted out the forty-one entrances to the area. Materials for making barricades were stored adjacent to each.121

In this section, McCann presents a very tightly woven narrative which draws the reader in by evoking an emotional reaction to an insider's account. He relates a high degree of anticipation as the residents of the Bogside prepared themselves for the confrontation they expected in August:

Enthusiasm was high. The 12 August procession was regarded as a calculated annual insult to the Derry Catholics. There was a surge of resentment and much bitter muttering every year. But this time, after all we had come through in the last nine months, the attitude was very different. This year at last they were going to

121 McCann, War, 114.

be shown that things had changed drastically. And if they dared to attack… The first barricades went up on the night of the 11th in anticipation.122

McCann’s confrontational tone reveals the importance of the Catholic response to the

Apprentice Boys’ march. His recollection of the preparations reflects the growing trend toward rioting and clashes between Catholics and Protestants. Compared with prior years, the increased tensions were visible in the days leading up to the commemoration. Having been primed by reactionary violence to any of their demonstrations, the Catholics in

Derry were prepared to strike back at the slightest provocation, knowing that the defense of their homes would be entirely up to them.

McCann describes the events in the Bogside as he witnessed them, taking great care to record how the residents were defending their neighborhood:

On the Twelfth stewards made a token effort to prevent the march from being stoned as it passed the end of William Street... Some of the stones tended to fall short... As the volume of stone-throwing increased a mixed force of RUC and supporters of the Apprentice Boys made a charge into the area, which was the signal for the hostilities to begin.123

Interestingly from McCann’s description, the Protestant charge into the Bogside occurred after Catholics had thrown stones at the marchers. The charge, then, was less an unwarranted attack than a response to Catholic aggression. Given that the commemoration which served as the impetus for the march and Catholic counterdemonstration had a centuries-long tradition, McCann still portrays this as the culmination of generations of annual insults.

The battle lasted for about forty-eight hours. Barricades went up all around the area, open-air petrol-bomb factories were established, dumpsters hijacked from a

122 McCann, War, 114-115.

123 McCann, War, 115.

building site were used to carry stones to the front. Teenagers went on to the roof of the block of High Flats which dominates Rossville Street, the main entrance to the Bogside, and began lobbing petrol bombs at the police below. This was a brilliant tactical move and afterwards there was no shortage of people claiming to have thought of it first. As long as the lads stayed up there and as long as we managed to keep them supplied with petrol bombs there was no way – short of shooting them off the roof – that the police could get past the High Flats. Every time they tried it rained petrol bombs.124

McCann still describes the throwing of stones and petrol bombs as a response to a very real and imminent Protestant threat, using that explanation as validation for the confrontation and three days of rioting that ensued. He also praises some of the tactics employed, such as using the roof of the High Flats as prime place from which to lob petrol bombs, as brilliant and well-conceived, using a tone which presents these tactics as heroic. By dubbing the riots “the Battle of the Bogside”, activists and historians have created an almost mythic quality about these three days in August that raises what might otherwise have just been another, longer riot to an importantly decisive confrontation.125

One of the police responses to the stones and petrol bombs was the use of tear gas. McCann describes how, during the course of the Battle of the Bogside, the Catholics found ways to overcome tear gas and other assaults in order to continue their offensive against the Protestants:

The DCDA set up headquarters in Paddy Doherty’s house in Westland Street. Throughout the battle all doors in the area were open. Tea and sandwiches were constantly available on the pavement. The police started using tear gas after a few hours, which nonplussed us momentarily. A call to the offices of the Red Mole in London – they seemed the most appropriate people – produced an antidote involving vinegar and a series of instructions for lessening the effects.126

124 McCann, War, 115.

125 Niall Ó Dochartaigh also discusses the legacy of the Battle of the Bogside in From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of the Irish Troubles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 103.

126 McCann, War, 116. The Red Mole was an underground leftist newspaper based in London.

McCann portrays the residents of the Bogside as banding together in opposition to the

Protestant menace. He discusses the actions of Catholics as if there were no dissent among them. From his account, one gets the impression that everyone was of the same mind about the situation in which they found themselves. This suggestion of solidarity in important because McCann wants to project an image of Catholics united against oppression and reactionary violence. The way McCann describes the rioting, even those who weren’t actively involved in the throwing of rocks and petrol bombs still supported the cause in one form or another; McCann mentions Molly Barr and her supply of

Vaseline for combating the effects of the tear gas. Whether there were any people who opposed the use of force remains undiscussed. It is implied that those who weren’t actively involved stayed out of the streets in order to avoid what was happening around them.

Communication and morale were also important during the battle. It was necessary to find a way for groups in different sections of the neighborhood to communicate with each other. McCann discusses some of the ways by which those in the

Bogside remained in contact with other parts of the neighborhood:

Four walkie-talkie sets were taken from a television crew. One was installed in Doherty’s house and the other three used to report back on the state of play in the battle. Our possession of those instruments was later to be adduced as evidence of the massive, subversive conspiracy behind the fighting. When the batteries ran out after a few hours the sets were given back to their owners. On the evening of the 13th Mr Jack Lynch appeared on television and said that he could ‘not stand idly by’. Irish troops were to be moved to the border. This put new heart into the fight.127

127 McCann, War, 116. Jack Lynch was Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland from 1966 to 1973 and again from 1977 to 1979.

The presence of a television crew indicates media coverage of what was happening in

Derry to a broader audience. The fact that Jack Lynch, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the

Republic of Ireland, criticized the situation publically indicates the level of public interest in the rioting. However, Irish troops were not moved to the border, and did not come to the aid of the Catholics in the Bogside. This did not change the fact that the perceived support from the Republic of Ireland gave the Catholic citizens of Derry a renewed sense of optimism that with the backing of a group outside Northern Ireland they might yet win the day. The difference between perception and reality may have mattered very little so long as it boosted morale. McCann does not discuss the fact that no troops were actually sent, though. He simply mentions that Mr Lynch had publically expressed his support and that they believed Irish troops were on their way to offer reinforcements.

In addition to the anticipated numbers of troops from the Republic of Ireland, other attempts were made to increase the numbers fighting in the Bogside:

Phone-calls were made to contacts in other areas begging them to get people on to the streets and draw off some of the police from Derry. We appealed through Telefis Eireann for ‘every able-bodied man in Ireland who believes in freedom’ to come to Derry and help us. ‘We need you, we’ll feed you.’ In the main battle area, Rossville Street, the fighting was being led by Bernadette Devlin, who had seemingly developed an immunity to tear gas and kept telling people, implausibly, that ‘it’s O.K. once you get a taste of it’.128

Again, however, McCann does not mention whether anyone answered the calls for support. He does not provide the reader with even an estimated figure of how many people were fighting in the Bogside, or whether anyone arrived after the rioting started in order to help. This lack of figures lends itself to the impression that everyone who lived in the Bogside must have been involved in the conflict.

128 McCann, War, 116.

Fighting was not just confined to Derry, according to McCann: “On the morning of the 14th we heard reports of fighting in Belfast, Coalisland, Dungannon, Armagh and other places; we took this as encouragement. Other people were coming to our aid. The

Tricolour and the Starry Plough were hoisted over the High Flats.”129 The Tricolour and the Starry Plough are both flags with symbolic importance to the Catholics of Northern

Ireland. The Tricolour is the national flag of the Republic of Ireland and consists of three vertical fields: green on the left, white in the middle, orange on the right. Hoisting the

Tricolour would signify their allegiance with the Republic. The Starry Plough is a flag used by republican and socialist organizations and depicts the constellation Ursa Major as white stars on a blue background. Hoisting the Starry Plough would demonstrate their desire for an independent Ireland. The visual imagery of the two flags and the symbolic importance linked to raising both reflects the optimism of the Bogside Catholics that the resolution of the fighting would be to their satisfaction.

By the afternoon of August 14, the Catholics in the Bogside had defeated the police, or so McCann informs his readers. After a tense moment when there was concern that the B Specials would be called in, the British army arrived and secured the area.

McCann describes the tension as people in the Bogside began to worry that the Specials would enter the fray and escalate the violence to the point of shooting:

Then, looking through the haze of gas, past the police lines, we saw the Specials moving into Waterloo Place. They were about to be thrown into the battle. Undoubtedly they would use guns. The possibility that there was going to be a massacre struck hundreds of people simultaneously. ‘Have we guns?’ people shouted to one another, hoping that someone would know, inching forward, more

129 McCann, War, 116.

slowly now, as the police retreated, suddenly fearful of what was about to happen.130

McCann’s description conveys the very real concern that the situation had just spiraled out of the Catholics’ control. The question about guns also illustrates the nature of the conflict: while stones and petrol bombs were the weapons of choice, and could inflict a lot of damage, they were not guns. They were an imprecise weapon, whereas guns were much more deliberate and far more deadly. The damage from a petrol bomb could be significant, but it did not have the same meaning as firing a shot from a gun. The introduction of guns to the battle would have brought in a new, deliberate quality to the violence that had not been part of it yet.

There was almost an atmosphere of relief at the sight of the British Army moving into position between the Specials and the Bogside, a fact that would cause some controversy among more radical republicans. Long standing opposition to the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland meant that it was difficult for Catholics to welcome the Army’s presence this time. However, the involvement of the Army was preferable to that of the B Specials. With the Army’s appearance, the battle was ended, and the rioters in the Bogside would not have to face the RUC or the Specials. McCann portrays this development as a victory for the residents of the Bogside: “The specials disappeared, the police pulled out quite suddenly and the troops, armed with sub-machine-guns, stood in a line across the mouth of William Street. Their appearance was clear proof that we had won the battle, that the RUC was beaten.”131 The fact that the RUC had not participated

130 McCann, War, 117.

131 McCann, War, 117.

in the confrontation is a point that McCann conveniently ignores. What victory they might claim with the ending of the confrontation was against civilians, not any armed force. For the purposes of his narrative, it was more convenient for McCann to state that

“[t]he RUC was beaten; the soldiers had prevented the Specials coming in and had not attempted to encroach on the area. They had deployed themselves around the edges.”132

The Army may have stationed themselves between the two groups, but McCann does not address whether in addition to keeping the RUC out of the Bogside it was also to keep the residents from continuing their aggression against the Protestants. Still, because the Army arrived to intercede before the Specials could advance or shots were fired, McCann is able to twist the ending of the riots into a sort of glorious victory, despite the fact that nothing was really gained in the process.

The peacekeeping role of the Army in Derry was not disputed, though, regardless of whether people were resentful of the mostly conciliatory attitude adopted by Catholics toward the troops. In other areas of Northern Ireland where there was rioting, the Specials had been brought in, with deadly results:

Later we were able to listen to the news from other areas. The Specials had killed a man called Gallagher in Armagh. Belfast was desperate. Police, Specials, and Protestant extremists had wreaked what appeared to be a mini-pogrom on Catholic areas. Tracer bullets had been used on blocks of flats. Whole streets of houses had been burned out and there were refugees living in school halls. There were some dead. And it went on the next day, burning and shooting. It sounded very different from Derry, inconceivably horrific. But by afternoon of the fifteenth soldiers were deployed in all the troubled areas and it seems that the situation had stabilized.133

132 McCann, War, 118.

133 McCann, War, 118.

Compared with the situation in Derry, Belfast in particular experienced worse violence.

McCann’s description attributes the difference to the fact that in Belfast the Specials were deployed in addition to the police.

In his attempt to shape the meaning of events, O’Neill mentions August 1969 repeatedly in his autobiography, foreshadowing it as a terrible event in Northern Ireland’s history. He does not chronicle the events of the month, though, stating that others have already done so. He does, however, offer his assessment that the British Army saved the day by intervening: “August 1969, when five hundred houses were burnt down and ten people shot in the streets, before the British army intervened, in the nick of time, was indeed a civil war situation.”134 In his opinion, had the British Army not arrived on the scene, the confrontation would have escalated from civil disturbance and rioting to civil war. O’Neill briefly discusses the Battle of the Bogside with the same disapproval he voices whenever the peace is broken:

Far the most serious results from this civil war situation was the hatred it engendered. Starting in Derry after the celebrations on 12 August, it soon spread to other centres, notably Belfast. Here some five hundred houses were burnt down and ten people were killed in the streets. With the British Army coming in, almost too late, further arson and bloodshed were avoided – at least for the time being.135

In calling the rioting in August 1969 a civil war situation, O’Neill reveals how much of a danger he considered the violence to be to the future of Northern Ireland. In stating that the arrival of troops was almost too late, his description shows O’Neill’s concern for avoiding unnecessary confrontation. It is a situation on the brink, though, as far as the moderate former prime minister is concerned. O’Neill and McCann seem to agree that the

134 O’Neill, Autobiography, 120.

135 O’Neill, Autobiography, 134.

arrival of the British Army was essential to ending the violence of August 12-14. They differ, though, in their opinion of whether this was ultimately in the best interests of

Northern Ireland.

CHAPTER III

USING THE MEMORY TO CONTROL THE MEANING OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS

MOVEMENT

Having determined the importance of individual events in the civil rights movement, O'Neill, McCann, and Adams also needed to shape the meaning of the movement as a whole. They used their memoirs to craft the meaning of the movement by utilizing language which imbued their words with the historical memory they hoped to create.

Shaping the Meaning of the Civil Rights Movement

Despite crediting the civil rights movement with advancing reforms that otherwise would have taken much more time to enact, O’Neill generally took a negative view of the civil rights movement. That negative view was balanced by equal dislike of the more militant Protestants, and Paisleyites in particular. He was adamant in his support of a moderate approach: “As so often happens in life, those who are most adamant are those who are most likely to fail and ruin their cause.”136 The extremists on either side of the divide were unwilling to compromise, which left little room for O’Neill in his capacity as

Prime Minister to enact reforms that would be palatable to all. As a moderate Unionist,

136 O’Neill, Autobiography, 80.

O’Neill already faced opposition because he was willing to reach out to Catholics in ways that hardliners such as Paisley considered unacceptable.

Gerry Adams criticizes the memory of O’Neill’s premiership and his moderation in particular: “O’Neill has largely escaped criticism and has in a quite unrealistic manner been portrayed as a liberal who, if only he had been given a chance, would have achieved social progress.”137 Adams is very dismissive of the portrayal of O’Neill as a liberal. For

Adams, the liberals were the Catholic activists who agitated for civil rights. Anyone else could not be considered liberal. O’Neill’s own writings on the subject of civil rights reveal that he was at most a cautious liberal. While he had his misgivings about the religious divisions of Northern Ireland and the negative ramifications of how society treated Catholics, he did not advocate rapid change. As much as he wanted to see equality for Catholics for what it would do for Northern Ireland more generally, he did not want to upset the balance or force a reaction from Protestants in order to achieve that equality.

Once the civil rights movement began garnering media attention, especially internationally, O’Neill felt increasing pressure from both sides which he thought jeopardized his position as Prime Minister, especially considering how unlikely it was that he would ever be able to adequately appease both sides of the sectarian divide, a fact of which he was acutely aware. “Ever since the first Civil Rights march had taken place in October 1968, and fighting in the streets had become the order of the day, I felt that my policy of trying to improve relations between the two sections of the community was

137 Adams, Politics, 25.

lying in pieces on the floor.”138 O’Neill makes several references to how negatively the civil rights movement affected his premiership in Northern Ireland.

My policy had been to try and improve community relations, despite the albatross of a reluctant Party hanging round my neck. But if now we were going to have Civil Rights marches and fights in the streets, obviously my policy of trying to improve community relations had received such a severe setback that you could really say it was lying in pieces in the gutter.139

By repeating the theme of street fighting, which he links to renegade violence, O’Neill connects the civil rights movement to uncontrollable fighting and emphasizes how that violence became the focus not only of the marches but of the media attention. O’Neill’s representation of the civil rights movement reflects his opinion that it had negatively affected Northern Ireland, although he mitigates that view by attributing some of the blame to the Unionist Party. He claims he might have acted sooner if he had not had his hands tied by the rest of the Party. He goes on to state that “in November 1968, the activities of the Civil Rights movement appeared to the Party to be nearly treasonable.”140

Such strong language reflects his belief that the agitation for civil rights was undermining society. While drawing attention to the fact that the civil rights movement was not without blame in how events had played out, O’Neill also distances himself from his own party by stating that they were the ones who considered the civil rights agitators to be committing treason by challenging the state. He displays a noticeable ambivalence toward the Unionist Party, something which might have grown in the time between when he left office and when he wrote his autobiography. Despite that distance, he still

138 O’Neill, Autobiography, 112.

139 O’Neill, Autobiography, 103.

140 O’Neill, Autobiography, 106.

expresses the belief that the behavior of the civil rights agitators was driving Northern

Ireland to the brink, and for that O’Neill could not forgive them.

Adams on the other hand considered the civil rights movement a necessary step because other attempts at equality had not worked. He tries to claim a certain degree of innocence as he first became involved in republican activities, suggesting that he maybe had not fully thought about what he was involving himself in: “I was also naïve, like most of my generation, and thought that a few rational, sensible changes could easily be made which would improve the quality of life and bring about equal opportunities for all.”141 Adams mentions his naïveté as a way of demonstrating how the civil rights movement had innocent motives. By extension, if there others involved were equally naïve, then how could they have been involved in anything sinister? It was about making rational changes to Northern Ireland that would improve the lives of everyone. By framing the movement as rational and sensible, he argues that any logical person would see that the movement was clearly in the right. The Catholic activists were not looking to incite violence or destroy property, according to Adams; they simply wanted the same opportunities as the Protestants.

Adams further rationalizes the goals of the civil rights movement by laying out the historical tendencies of the republican movement:

There have always been three tendencies within the republican movement: a militaristic and fairly apolitical tendency, a revolutionary tendency, and a constitutional tendency. Throughout the history of the movement one or other of these has been in the ascendancy. Since partition, however, there had been no dominant tendency capable of giving proper and relevant leadership to the mass of Irish people.142

141 Adams, Politics, 3.

142 Adams, Politics, 7-8. 72

By stating that there was no viable dominant tendency in the decades since partition,

Adams is allowing for the possibility that the civil rights movement could be both constitutional and revolutionary. The fact that historians view the civil rights movement as something different from the other movements which had come before had to have originated somewhere. Adams’ and McCann’s efforts to counter O’Neill’s portrayal of the civil rights movement as disorderly hooligans have resulted in them playing up aspects such as the disorganization or the fact that while they were republicans overthrowing the government was not their goal. Part of McCann's strategy is to take on the label of hooligan but redefine it so it becomes a positive attribute. In order to argue against the accusations that were levied against them, McCann and Adams have emphasized the points most likely to enhance their image in history. This also extends to

Adams’ efforts to distance the civil rights movement from the militaristic tendencies of the IRA. Adams, more so than McCann possibly because of his involvement in Sinn

Féin, takes care to separate the movement, particularly before 1969, from the IRA.

By the mid-‘60s the movement had shed most of its militaristic leanings and a small, politically conscious organisation was developing and beginning to examine critically the role of republicanism and the task of finding a strategy towards the goal of an independent republic.”143

Adams is deliberately vague about whether this organization was following the revolutionary tendency or the constitutional one, or even managing to blend the two. He is implying that because it was not militaristic violence could not have been its aim.

143 Adams, Politics, 8.

Because it did not display militaristic leaning, Adams argues, it could not have been a front for the IRA, a charge sometimes levied at the movement, especially after August

1969.

Participation in the civil rights movement did not automatically lend itself to a feeling that the solution was just around the corner, however. Adams records an increasing sense among activists that the system itself would prevent them from making any meaningful change without a drastic action.

The contrary position was dawning slowly upon those of us who were deeply involved in grassroots agitation. We were beginning to realise that the 6 county statelet could not be reformed, that by its very nature it was irreformable and that the major effects of the civil rights struggle would be to show clearly the contradictions within the state, its colonial nature and the responsibility of the British government for this situation.144

The argument here is that they could not change the state, so they set about to expose it for what it really was: the last vestiges of colonialism. Adams makes several references to the colonial relationship between Britain and Northern Ireland. By doing this, he is linking the current situation back to the relationship that had existed between Britain and

Ireland before the Republic of Ireland gained its independence. Adams argues that

Northern Ireland’s relationship with Britain continues to be that of the colony to the metropole, a connection that supports his republican ideology and provides a framework for his continued criticism of partition. With the decline of empire after the Second

World War, the fact that Britain has managed to somehow hold on to this last, repressed piece of its empire means that it is natural and acceptable for the civil rights agitators to

144 Adams, Politics, 14.

criticize imperialism and attempt to finally end the colonial relationship between

Northern Ireland and Britain.

Many historians, especially from the 1990s onward, date the start of the Troubles from the Battle of the Bogside, although McCann argues that in the early 1970s, October

5, 1968, was the given start date, “which is as good a date to start from as any other.”145

He tries to sound arbitrary in picking October 5, but really wants that date to be the most important because it gives more prominence to the Derry march which he was actively involved in organizing. Regardless of which date is ultimately chosen as the start of the

Troubles, it was the civil rights period that seems to have ultimately started the conflict which engulfed Northern Ireland for the better part of three decades. The civil rights movement destabilized Northern Ireland and created the tensions which led to violence.

The books published by those who were involved with the events of 1968 and 1969 have served to shape the memory of the time period. O’Neill, McCann, and Adams all had a vested interest in finding an audience sympathetic to their version of events.

As mentioned above, Terence O’Neill was not only critical of the civil rights movement; he denounced Protestant extremism as well, declaring that

if Ulster does not survive, then historians may well show that it was the Protestant extremists, yearning for the days of the Protestant ascendancy, who lit the flame which blew us up. This, of course, was coupled with the fact that for far too long no effort had been made to make the minority feel that they were wanted or even appreciated.146

145 McCann, War, 83. For dating the start of the Troubles, see Niall Ó Dochartaigh, From Civil Rights to Armalites. See also Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal and the Search for Peace (New York: Palgrave for St. Martin's Press, 2002).

146 O’Neill, Autobiography, 80.

For O’Neill, the extreme ends of either side were equally at fault for the rising tensions that occurred in 1968 and 1969. His tone in describing the civil rights period is very apocalyptic, as if the upheaval of the end of the 1960s signaled the end of the world as he knew it. That tone further underlines his belief in the importance of moderation.

The continuing push from the extreme right-wing to maintain a Protestant ascendancy played out in several venues, including the messages from the clergy. O’Neill notes with a touch of irony:

How often I have heard the clergy in Ulster preaching in favour of toleration. So long as it is kept in general terms then everyone is happy. If, however, they actually say something specific about welcoming their Catholic neighbours into their homes or their church halls, then the trouble really starts.147

Rhetorically, toleration worked well, mainly because as an abstract idea it is easy to promote. In actual practice, O’Neill argues, it was far more difficult for either side to accept the changes at hand. This rationale worked well for O’Neill’s justification of why the civil rights movement caused so many problems for his premiership. The Catholic activists were forcing the government to move beyond rhetoric into actuality, and conservative Protestants hated them for it.

As the civil rights movement escalated and Catholics disrupted the fragile peace that existed in Northern Ireland, O’Neill saw their efforts to gain equality as dangerous because of the potential for violence. He explains:

There was widespread resentment among moderate people at what was now appearing to be an increasing tendency towards demonstration and violence, but I don’t think anyone then realized that the Protestant marches of 1966 would be copied by the Civil Rights marches of 1968. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Civil Rights movement would not have got underway in any case, and presumably the example of Martin Luther King was in the forefront of their minds

147 O’Neill, Autobiography, 46-47.

when they started in October 1968. Nevertheless, when they saw the notoriety which Paisley achieved for himself in 1966, they must have realized that only in such a manner could they achieve fame and TV coverage in 1968.148

In June of 1966, Ian Paisley and his supports had marched through Catholic areas, provoking a riot; Catholics then mimicked this tactic in 1968 and 1969.149 O’Neill implies that the Catholics were more interested in being famous and getting themselves on television than they were in valid reforms as a way of discrediting the purposes of the movement. O’Neill also links the civil rights movement to a larger global context, similarly to Gerry Adams. O’Neill, however, considers that there was a certain inevitability to the events because of what was happening elsewhere in the world. The impact of an international television broadcasts showed itself in many of the movements of the late sixties. Gerry Adams also recognized the importance of television: “An important factor in the difficulties which Unionism faced with the civil rights movement was television.”150 The ability to broadcast worldwide meant that exceptionally dramatic events would bring international attention to what before television would just have been a local event. Because the activists had seen the effects of movements elsewhere on television, they were aware of how the projection of their movement around the world would sway global opinion in support of their cause. The hope was that international pressure would help bring about the reforms they sought.

The upheaval of 1968 and 1969 threatened Northern Ireland’s position within the

United Kingdom, something that O’Neill lamented:

148 O’Neill, Autobiography, 80.

149 State, History, 289.

150 Adams, Politics, 25.

So far as Northern Ireland is concerned, she could have continued to enjoy her privileged position of being the only part of Ireland to enjoy a British standard of living. Instead, she chose to put all this at risk in the interests of maintaining a Protestant ascendance that had ceased to have any meaning anywhere else in the United Kingdom.151

Here O’Neill places the blame on the Protestants for the escalating tensions because they were trying to maintain a status quo which he considers outdated. Despite his frustrations with the Catholics for creating the situation, O’Neill displays even more frustration with the Protestants for allowing it spiral out of control. The continued importance of religion in Northern Ireland affected the ability of any of the parties involved to make meaningful change without facing fierce resistance. It also fed a continued republican movement that sought the ultimate goal of a united, independent Ireland. O’Neill’s focus on the economic advantages of being a member of the United Kingdom downplays the religious tensions by underlining what Northern Ireland would be giving up with independence. In comparison, Adams and McCann focus on the political aspects instead of the economic.

This difference in the perception of what was at stake, an economic position or a political position, reflects the immediacy of each man’s involvement in the movement.

Gerry Adams saw the general atmosphere of the 1960s as contributing to the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. He suggests that there was something in the air in the 1960s which created the circumstances from which the civil rights movement emerged. For Adams, the movement was less influenced by what they had witnessed

Paisley and his followers doing, as O’Neill suggested, than it was by events elsewhere in the world, especially Vietnam War protests and black civil rights marches in the United

States:

151 O’Neill, Autobiography, 139.

The Vietnam War was one of those issues [people were talking about] and I was one of many who went along to rallies against the war. Similarly, the black civil rights campaign in the United States not only had its obvious influence in terms of the anthem of ‘We Shall Overcome’ but also in terms of its affinity with what was happening in the 6 counties. Courtesy of television we were able to see an example of the fact that you didn’t just have to take it, you could fight back.152

By linking the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland to a larger global movement,

Adams argues that it was part of something bigger than just the politics of Ireland and again brings up the importance of television in making the citizens of Northern Ireland aware of what was going on in the rest of the world. He also underscores that the civil rights movement was connected to an international movement aimed at civil rights for the disenfranchised.

Terence O’Neill was highly critical of the radical elements, and was constantly aware of the threats that he thought they posed.153 Whether the threats were real is insubstantial because the specter of radicalism was enough to make O’Neill cautious.

Among the groups O’Neill treated with suspicion was the People’s Democracy: The threat posed by radical elements seems to have never been far from Terence O’Neill’s mind: “There was, however, an extreme left-wing element which had jumped on to the

Civil Rights bandwagon. Based on the Queen’s University of Belfast, they called themselves the ‘People’s Democracy’.”154 Gerry Adams was not directly involved in the

People’s Democracy, but he refutes the claim that the left-wing only joined the movement later:

152 Adams, Politics, 9-10.

153 O’Neill, Autobiography, 110.

154 O’Neill, Autobiography, 110.

Contrary to later claims by the Unionists that republicans took over the civil rights movement, we were there from the very beginning. Republicans were actually central to the formation of NICRA and far from using it as a front organisation those of us who attended the inaugural meeting were directed to elect only two of our membership to the executive.155

Republicans did not simply join with the civil rights movement in order to give their actions some legitimacy, nor was it a front for more radical action. Adams argues that the civil rights campaign was a valid, independent movement that just happened to dovetail with the republican agenda. However, his insistence that republicans were in the civil rights movement from the beginning raises the question of how independent the movement was of the republican cause. The considerable use of republican language and reference to republican ideology suggests that the two causes were closely linked.

In many ways, Gerry Adams considered the civil rights movement to be a natural development based on the course that Irish history had taken to that point. This view of the movement as an organic continuation reflects the feelings that the republican independence movement had somehow failed in its ultimate goal, and that a new approach was therefore necessary.

Apart from some of the more obvious features, ‘Northern Ireland’ was a police state similar to South Africa’s apartheid system. It was a one-party state, ‘a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’. Efforts to change this by physical force activity, by publicising the injustices or by the development of a party political alternative had failed. There were none of the usual manifestations of normal class politics; partition and sectarianism ensured that this was the case.156

When Adams wrote this in 1986, he had the benefit of more than fifteen years separating him from when the civil rights movement took place. This space of time gave him

155 Adams, Politics, 12.

156 Adams, Politics, 5.

perspective to see how this supposedly peaceful attempt to publicize the injustices that existed in Northern Ireland failed to reach its objective. He evokes the apartheid system in South Africa as a way of calling attention to the stratification in Northern Ireland. Not only does he equate the divisions with the racial politics of South Africa, but he is further reinforcing his understanding of Northern Ireland’s relationship with Britain as a colonial one.

By placing “Northern Ireland” in quotation marks, Adams places the authenticity of the state in question in addition to underlining the unequal bias toward the Protestant population. Throughout his writing, Adams is very deliberate in how he refers to

Northern Ireland, whether is it to place the name in quotation marks, or by referring to it as either the six counties or a statelet. Each of these tactics accentuates the fact that he does not support partition and considers the continuation of British rule in Northern

Ireland a remnant of imperialism which has outlived its time. Adams argues that “the everyday aspects of our situation were obvious enough: bad housing, poverty, political structures with which we could not identify and above all, the endemic, structural unemployment.”157 By referring to the structures as something that they could not overcome, Adams links the Catholic situation to the British government as a way of saying that as long as Northern Ireland remained linked to Britain then the problems they faced would be unresolved.

As civil rights activists disturbed the fragile peace that had existed in Northern

Ireland before August 1968, tensions between Catholics and Protestants escalated. Each subsequent civil rights march brought more attention to the struggle, and increased the

157 Adams, Politics, 3.

attempts by those in the right-wing to maintain the status quo at all costs. O’Neill recalls,

“It was not until the start of the Civil Rights movement – a picnic compared to what happened in August 1969 and beyond that the more intelligent members of the Party realised that this problem had to be dealt with. By then it was too late.”158

Gerry Adams discusses the convergence of events through the civil rights movement that made it seem like the outcome was predetermined:

In hindsight it was inevitable, as we approached 1969, that we were headed for a major confrontation. Something had to give and it wasn’t going to be us. At the moment that the RUC smashed their way into the crowd in Duke Street it was as if all the small things that had been happening suddenly came together in a more coherent and a more ominous shape. The civil rights movement, the creation of the republican leadership, was out of their control. There would be no turning back. What had started as a campaign for civil rights was developing into the age- old struggle for national rights.159

For Adams, the issue of a unified, independent Ireland is paramount to how he envisions the future of his country. For O’Neill, there is a constant sense of frustration as he ponders “what might have been possible if extremists had not insisted on committing suicide in public.”160 For McCann, the more immediate concerns of housing and employment remain front and center as he writes about his experiences on the ground.

For Gerry Adams, Eamonn McCann, and Terence O’Neill, the memory of the civil rights movement was a powerful thing. Each considered it important to somehow shape the public memory of events by writing his own interpretation of what had happened. By examining what these three men have written about the civil rights

158 O’Neill, Autobiography, 137.

159 Adams, Politics, 17.

160 O’Neill, Autobiography, 120.

movement and exploring how their memories differ from each others, it is possible to understand how the public memory was shaped by their accounts.

CHAPTER IV

CONCLUSION

Establishing a narrative, figuring out what happened and who was involved, is the first and often easiest step in writing history. The next step is to determine what the events mean. The purpose of this thesis has been to blend the two. By using the narrative as a starting point, and looking at how those involved have written about the events, it is possible to construct a picture not just of what it means, but of how that meaning was created through an intellectual struggle on all sides.

This thesis has utilized three of the most important primary sources concerning the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. The writings of Gerry Adams, Eamonn

McCann, and Terence O’Neill are among the most often cited sources used by historians.

Of their writings, the books selected for this paper are the ones most frequently consulted.

In many ways, though, the intellectual struggle to make sense of the civil rights movement and the Troubles more generally remains an on-going quest. Gerry Adams in particular continues to publish books promoting his vision for Ireland.

These three sources are important for a variety of reasons. Not least are the viewpoints which their authors present. Analyzing the three in conjunction reveals themes of religion, civil rights, nationalism, and socialism; the intersection of these themes provides valuable insight into the forces at play in Northern Ireland in the late

1960s. While religion is the most obvious area of analysis for anyone wishing to study the ongoing conflict at any point in its history, the economic and political factors involved are equally important. One of the goals of this thesis has been to make connections between civil rights, nationalism and socialism in particular.

By drawing on these commonly utilized sources, but looking at them in a new and different light, it becomes apparent how these three men have affected how historians view the events they discuss. How critically the historian interrogates each source to determine an underlying motive affects the value of each source. If one looks at the writings of Eamonn McCann, for example, with an uncritical eye, it is more likely that the reader will accept McCann’s account at face value. Looking more critically, and examining McCann’s purpose, reveals much not only about McCann but about the greater historical understanding of the events about which he wrote. The same is true for

Terence O’Neill and Gerry Adams. Keeping their respective purposes in mind, while examining their writing, reveals interesting perspectives about their attempts to control the meaning of the civil rights movement.

While Eamonn McCann and Gerry Adams may have had differing views of the civil right movement than Terence O’Neill, or even than each other, in many ways their ultimate goal was very similar: a better future for Northern Ireland. The main ways in which they differed were in their views of what a better future entailed. O’Neill was more than satisfied with Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom, and in fact considered that the best possible course. McCann and Adams, on the other hand, believed that only a united, independent Ireland would ultimately prove to be the best possible course.

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O’Neill, Terence. The Autobiography of Terence O’Neill. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972.

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