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The Journey towards Politics,
1964–74
John Hume, the man who did more than anyone else to break one of Europe’s most bitter and intractable stalemates by creating a constituency of support for peace at the highest levels of the United States, made his first major political statement at a national level in May 1964. The editor of The Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, asked him – then an unknown school teacher from Derry – to write two articles to illustrate for the Irish Times readership in the South of Ireland the political dilemmas faced by the Catholic minority in the North. Hume’s arguments in those articles were every bit as revelatory as Gageby had hoped, and they underlay much of Hume’s political thinking since that time.
In 1964, Northern Ireland was conspicuously absent from print reportage in the South, and consciously avoided by the national broadcaster. Radharc in Derry, a documentary film made in August 1964, a few months after the appearance of Hume’s Irish Times articles, only aired on RTÉ twenty-five years later, and was introduced thus: ‘In an act of self-censorship the then controller of RTÉ, Gunnar Rugheimer, decided that this material was too sensitive for transmission and the programme was shelved.’ The sensitive aspects of the material meant the way division and discrimination were highlighted. The plight of the Northern Ireland Catholic was met with official indifference in Dublin.
Yet the articles Gageby commissioned were novel. They argued that the question of Northern Ireland was neither resolvable through the irredentist claims of the Irish Constitution, nor was it a matter which Dublin could properly ignore and the Irish government, led by Seán Lemass, was beginning to acknowledge that fact. A few months after the articles were published, a tentative detente began between Dublin and Belfast: Taoiseach Seán Lemass and Prime Minister Terence O’Neill met at Stormont in January 1965 and in Dublin in February 1965, the first time that the Taoiseach and Prime Minister of Northern Ireland had met since partition.
In the 1960s, Hume was beginning to gain prominence in Derry – as a public debater and as a businessman in an initiative to smoke the salmon catch in Derry and export it. He had written an MA thesis focusing on the North-West region, which later led to his making a documentary about Derry, A City Solitary. It was on the basis of A City Solitary that Hume was asked to write the articles for The Irish Times. Entitled ‘The Northern Catholic’, Hume addressed the complete disaffection and disenfranchisement felt by the Catholic population who lived in Northern Ireland. Equally, though, Hume expressed the inadequacy of the response of the Nationalist Party to these dilemmas. In the minds of young people in the Catholic minority, he wrote, there was a ‘struggle for priority’ between the realities of social problems – unavailability of housing, unemployment, the push to emigration – and the hackneyed slogans championing a United Ireland.
Hume was anxious to highlight the faults of Nationalism in Northern Ireland for holding up the ideals of a United Ireland as a panacea to cure profound underlying problems, which would endure irrespective of any alteration to the constitutional arrangements. The magical thinking of Nationalism was, he argued, an excuse for having failed to deliver any real political gains to its electorate:
In forty years of opposition [the Nationalist Party] have not produced one constructive contribution on either the social or economics plane to the development of Northern Ireland which is, after all, a substantial part of the United Ireland for which they strive. Leadership has been the comfortable leadership of flags and slogans … It is this lack of positive contribution and the apparent lack of interest in the general welfare of Northern Ireland that has led many Protestants to believe that the Northern Catholic is politically irresponsible and immature and therefore unfit to rule.1
Having stated the negative perception of the Northern Catholic, Hume then proposed a new approach which would enable an exit from the futile bind that the Nationalist Party represented:
The position should be immediately clarified by an acceptance of the Constitutional position. There is nothing inconsistent with such acceptance and a belief that a thirty-two county republic is best for Ireland. Such a change would remove what has been a great stumbling block to the development of normal politics in the North. Catholics could then throw themselves fully into the solution of Northern problems without fear of recrimination.
Hume acknowledged the blatant discrimination in the North, but also called for the minority to address the apparatus of exclusion in the State through constructive politics, modernisation from within rather than boycott. Accepting this premise, Hume suggested that the initiative lay with the ‘Northern Catholic’ to create a politics of change by evolution:
The necessity for a fully organised democratic party which can freely attract and draw upon the talents of the nationally-minded community is obvious. It is to be hoped that the new Nationalist Political Front will create such an organisation so that we shall never in future be embarrassed by one of our political representatives declaring on television that he was not an encyclopedia when asked to produce figures to substantiate his charges of discrimination.
Finally, throwing down the gauntlet to would-be political activists, Hume asserted the centrality of an inclusive economic programme to transcend the division: ‘Community activity, in which all sections play their part can do nothing but create mutual respect and, above all, build the country with our own hands.’2 Read more than a half century after their publication, Hume’s articles were extraordinarily prescient. In his insistence that the mode of change needed to be gradualist, participatory and inclusive; in his identifying the endgame for the divided people in Northern Ireland, Hume identified the Northern problem correctly. Even before the eruption of the Troubles, Hume was a diagnostician of the core principles required to heal the society’s ills.
Since the remit of the articles is an examination of the ‘Northern Catholic’, there is perhaps a disproportionate emphasis on the Catholic role as an agent of change in the political landscape of Northern Ireland. It is important to remember that other political reforms intrinsic to the Protestant community were also necessary. As Seamus Deane has written: ‘As soon as sectarianism is seen to be the basis upon which many Protestants accept unnecessary poverty (and thereby uphold the grotesquely large property holdings of this small group of [wealthy Unionist] families) then the feudal basis of Unionism will have vanished.’3 Even if the articles appear to ask a lot of the minority and not enough of the majority, they are outstanding in identifying the essential elements required of the minority to achieve an equitable settlement in the North. Remembering that the embrace of violent methods to advance political aims was at that time dormant in Northern politics, Hume’s constructive vision was a necessary antidote.
The softness of tone in Hume’s articles hardly matched the desperate circumstances in which Northern Catholics found themselves, nor did it match the fervid tone which John Hume would later, as a practising politician, often take in criticising the intransigence of Unionism and the British government which validated it. In protests such as the one to establish the second university of Northern Ireland in Derry, the ‘University for Derry’ campaign, fought throughout the 1960s, the doctrinaire indifference to the minority’s plea for justice hardened Hume’s stance. By the time he became an elected representative of the Foyle constituency in February 1969, Hume was firmly of the view that well-intentioned cross community cooperation alone would not move the Unionist government to concede basic civil rights demands.
The Early Years
John Hume was born in Derry in 1937 and was the beneficiary of radical educational reform (the 1947 Education Act) which enabled children from working-class backgrounds to access free education. Hume’s secondary education took place in St Columb’s College in Derry and he attended university at Maynooth where he specialised in French and History. He was, as his wife Pat Hume recounts, ‘the eldest of seven children, born in very poor circumstances in the gerrymandered city. So he was very conscious of politics, not the tribal politics but practical politics’.4 Practical politics for Hume took the form of a variety of jobs, roles and initiatives when he was in his twenties: he was a key member of the Irish League of Credit Unions and became its president at the age of 27; he taught full-time at St Columb’s College in Derry; he was a member of the Housing Association of Derry; he was a leader of the University for Derry campaign. Pat Hume remembers that he was ‘always very conscious of restoring dignity to the Catholic people of the North’.
James Sharkey, a teaching colleague at St Columb’s and later Irish ambassador, recalls that Hume was deeply rooted in history, which also informed his political views: ‘I used to drop in at the back of his modern history class. It was clear that the great constitutionalists – Grattan, O’Connell and Parnell – for Hume were not simply admirable historical figures, but they were also exemplars on whom you could base political judgements and political approaches.’ Through Hume’s reading of the ways in which Irish constitutional leaders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had used the political process to advance their aims, he arrived at a firm conclusion about his own tactical approach: to move away from the traditional Northern Nationalists’ self-definition as Anti-Partitionists. As Phil Coulter, a school friend of Hume’s, observed, ‘any party defining itself under an anti-anything rubric, does not speak volumes about what are they for’.
Thus, one of the things that Hume managed to do from the very beginning of his public life in the sixties was to work from within the political structure of Northern Ireland to benefit the Catholic minority, deploying the logic that if there is a one-man, one-vote system in England, then why not the same in the Northern Irish State? What rankled the Nationalist minority in the North of Ireland more than the fact that they lived in a State into which they had been corralled without their democratic consent, was the way in which the administration of that State had from the point of its foundation systematically excluded them from participation and stymied their prosperity. As former Irish Ambassador Sean O’hUiginn has noted:
Hume is a conservative in an Edmund Burke sense, in that he has a keen sense that a community that rejects the framework in which they operate, that they do not have any sense of identity with institutions governing them, is an unstable community. When you, as it were, superimposed the red lines of the different forces that play in Northern Ireland, you got quite a small area where a compromise might be found. Hume focused on that with great persistence.
After the publication of the Irish Times articles, Hume was encouraged by some friends and supporters to run for election, but he declined. He instead acted as election agent for Claude Wilton (‘Vote for Claude the Catholic Prod’) in 1965, while Hume retained his job as a teacher. However, the latter part of the 1960s was a period of a rapidly rising political temperature in Derry, with several aspects of governmental callousness converging to prompt Hume’s decision to become prominently active in public affairs.
The first augury of the Civil Rights Movement was the University for Derry protest in February 1965, which was remarkable in that it represented the entire community of Derry. Hume fronted this cross-community rally and motorcade to Stormont Parliament in February 1965 to establish the ‘second university’ in Derry, the ‘second city’ of the Northern Irish State. This 25,000-strong motorcade was one of the earliest and strongest expressions of non-violent protest in Northern Ireland, and was comparable in intent and conviction to the Selma to Montgomery march, led by Martin Luther King the following month, March 1965.
The campaign to establish a university in Derry failed when, on the basis of the Lockwood Report (1965), the second university was established in Coleraine, a predominately Protestant market town, rather than in largely Catholic Derry City. This decision was entirely in line with other bigoted policies emanating from Stormont: the Benson Report (1963) cut rail infrastructure to the western part of the North dramatically; the Matthew Report (1963) situated Northern Ireland’s ‘new city’ at Craigavon and consequently the infrastructure in the North orientated still more on the eastern and predominantly Protestant part of the State. Moreover, economic woes attended these political injustices: the shipping line between Derry and Glasgow was closed and the Birmingham Sound Reproducers (BSR) factory, which had employed 1,700 people, closed in 1967. Poverty in Derry City had noticeably worsened just as the political grievances accumulated.
Above all, the rigged system of allocating houses embittered the predominately Nationalist electoral ward of Derry. As journalist and activist Eamonn McCann observed: ‘We had thousands of people on a housing list and everybody in Derry knew that one of the reasons that more houses were not being built was that … to give a person a house was to give them a vote: only householders could vote and the Unionist Party in Derry had to be very circumspect about to whom it handed a vote.’ Unsurprisingly, then, it was more than anything else the housing situation that made it inevitable for John Hume to enter parliamentary politics. The property qualification for franchise in Derry meant that unequal housing allocation (in addition to being a source of misery in itself) produced a concomitant political injustice – it deprived Catholics of the vote. Having been corralled into confined and overcrowded areas, like the working-class Bogside, their surroundings continually reminded them of the inequality of the State. A visitor to Derry at the time, who viewed the Bogside from the higher grounds of St Columb’s College, commented on the rising chimney smoke of the area and remarked on ‘the smouldering fires of Derry’.5
In 1968, Paddy ‘Bogside’ Doherty, an influential community activist, asked Hume to consider running for election. Hume judged, based on the five years of activism leading up to the 1969 election, that to effect decisive political change required becoming an elected representative. It was both the next logical and necessary step: community activism, documentary film-making, publishing journalistic articles, becoming the President of the Irish Credit Union and taking business initiatives was still not enough.
The Catholic minority, and Hume too, had lost patience with the putatively reformist Terence O’Neill (Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, 1963–9). O’Neill’s persona, in stark contrast to his predecessors, was relatively ecumenical and open to interaction with Catholics. He exuded a fresh, well-meaning approach to including the Catholic minority in the affairs of Northern Ireland, to make them stakeholders. Yet, as a reformist he was ineffective. In his Autobiography, O’Neill expressed disappointment that the Catholics of Northern Ireland did not support him enough to pass ‘liberalising’ legislation.
His disappointment was naïve. Despite his well-meaning rhetoric, O’Neill’s tenure as Prime Minister was characterised by retrograde steps to marginalise and to alienate the minority, which even the more reasonable strands of the Catholic minority perceived as a provocation. O’Neill faced decisive opposition to his tentative reform from the ranks of his own Unionist Party (which ultimately conspired to remove him from office) and he was unable to carry his reform measures. Hume was later to say:
I cannot forget that the administration which is about to go out of office is the administration which created Craigavon [the Matthew Report] as a second city, instead of Derry. I cannot forget that it produced development plans for Ballymena, Bangor, Antrim, Larne, et cetera, before one was forced out of it for Derry. I cannot forget that it is the administration of Benson and the closure of the railways … it was also the administration of Lockwood and the creation of the second university in a market town … No economic risks were taken to develop the Indian territory that lies on the other side of the Sperrins. What we have received we have received because it has been forced.6
Having been cut off from its natural hinterland of Donegal/Inishowen by partition, Hume believed that only cross border cooperation consolidated by governmental support would help to develop the North-West. Yet, given how Stormont was constituted, such cooperation was very remote. Remembering Frederick Douglass’s dictum that ‘power concedes nothing without a demand’, the move towards politics on the part of Hume was animated by a profound sense of alienation from the political structures that existed. The ‘awakening of conscience’ (as Hume had called the University for Derry campaign) was not followed by the requisite recognition of the Catholic minority, especially in the western part of the State, nor any acknowledgement that it was being deliberately immiserated by its government.
A fundamental aspect of Hume’s political life was to reimagine a politics capable of transcending ancient historical constraints and to envisage Ireland benefiting from wider international partnerships; his will to seek and ability to find support for his reconciliation agenda in broader spheres – Europe and America. In the case of the latter, when he went to America and read, on the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, E pluribus unum ‘Out of many, we are one’, he believed that Northern Ireland’s divided people also had much to learn from such a cultivation of diversity. As his wife Pat explained: ‘He felt that here were people who had had to leave the place of their birth because of conflict, because of intolerance and they went to the United States and they were able to come together under the one constitution. He felt that this was the model, why can we not get over our differences?’ Eamonn McCann elaborates:
John saw things, unlike the old Nationalist Party, in a European context. Even before he became a Member of the European Parliament he would talk about the resolution of conflicts within Europe after World War Two. He also was very acutely aware of the American dimension, right from the very beginning and, from the beginning, he was relating to US power. It did not make sense to him to talk in Harlem to Black Panthers. He wanted to talk to the White House.
A more extensive analysis of the wider circles of Hume’s influences will come in subsequent chapters. However, before Hume formally entered parliamentary politics, he became engaged in the most dramatic and far-reaching shift in the political landscape of Northern Ireland since its foundation: the Civil Rights Movement.
The Civil Rights Movement
One of the defining moments of modern Irish history was the first civil rights march in Derry on 5 October 1968: due both to the march itself and the RUC violence that repelled it. The civil rights campaign was a radical new direction in a society that very badly needed it. From the first it was an inclusive movement, open to everyone who wished to establish civil rights in Northern Ireland. Even so, the difficulties of creating a broad-based political movement in a society where politics had resolutely broken down on sectarian lines persisted. As James Sharkey, who was there, recalls:
On the fifth of October I remember having a debate with someone and I said, ‘I wonder how many unionists, how many working class Protestants are here today?’ I felt that maybe things were just a little bit too early, because if you got off on the wrong foot you could be seen as sectarian. The great success of John Hume, I would argue, has been his persistent focus on the concept of reconciliation.7
Whatever is said about its necessity, inevitability or desirability, the efficacy of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland is undeniable: it gained many of its core demands almost immediately on the basis that it remained non-violent and determined. Even in his earliest awakening as a civil rights campaigner in the streets of Derry, it was always clear that it simply did not occur to Hume to resort to throwing stones at the police. Much as that temptation was prevalent in the community, and the provocation was strong, Hume did not believe in the efficacy of violence. Film footage exists of Hume lecturing Derry teenagers to ‘have a bit of sense’ rather than to fight back physically against the Unionist government’s security forces. Hume’s Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) colleague, Denis Haughey, remembers that the importance of that stance was to ‘preserve the integrity’ of the moral case that a rights-based reform programme sought. Another of Hume’s colleagues, Seamus Mallon, elaborates:
Hume had the vision to see that violence wasn’t going to solve the problem, that the British Government was never going to really tackle the problem, that the Irish Government had just wakened up to the fact that there was a Northern Ireland. The Civil Rights Movement in America inspired John. It started with this very simple phrase: ‘things can be done, if we do them the right way’.
Mallon remembers a defining moment of the type that led both he and Hume to fully embrace politics:
One day somebody who I had gone to school with came to me. He lived in a hovel and had no running water, no toilet facilities. He said, ‘Seamus, I went to George Woods [the local Unionist councillor] and I asked for a house. He told me “no Catholic pig or his litter would get a house in Markethill” as long as he was there’. I could not get that out of my mind.
Mallon, like Hume and many others, was a beneficiary of the 1947 Education Act and had obtained a university degree. As a teacher he was, like Hume, economically comfortable. He also had, like Hume, a strong sense of responsibility for those of his own community who did not have the education to adequately defend themselves against such institutional prejudice and contempt. Mallon elaborates:
The Civil Rights Movement was beginning to expand and I knew it was the way to go. I could not have walked away from it without trying to do something. There was a man selected to become a councillor in the first council election: I got home from school, and my wife said to me, ‘that guy has pulled out’. Between four o’clock and five I had to get a candidate. There came a crucial point where I had to accept that I was not going to get one. Were we going to give this seat to the Unionists and let them do what they were doing? Going into politics was no decision of mine.
The Unionist Reaction
The intensity of the depravations suffered by the Northern minority had crystallised in the Civil Rights Movement’s protests. However, rather than having the emancipatory effect of bringing both sides closer together to create an equitable political structure, the movement exposed demons within Unionism and the bias of the British parliament which supported it. This combination eventually fuelled the rationale for an alternative response to the injustice of Northern Ireland, the armed guerrilla struggle launched by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In the following, James Sharkey gives a comprehensive sweep of the declension of Unionist responses to the changes demanded in Northern Ireland in 1968–72:
Equality for all was the determining motif of the civil rights campaign. Unionism could not accommodate this demand; it imploded, it factionalised, it fragmented. Unionists eventually found solidarity in a sort of sectarian intransigence and they operated with very severe policing. They saw IRA conspiracies everywhere at a time when the IRA barely existed in Northern Ireland. Through their inflexibility, their heavy-handedness, their discrimination, they provoked the revival and recruitment of the IRA, the force in history which they hated and feared most. The two of them became locked in a sort of lethal, cadaverous embrace and that set the scene for the early 1970’s: spirals of violence and counter-violence, the British got drawn into it in a one-sided way. And it fell to people like Hume and other leaders to point the way forward, to look for political structures that could accommodate all these different tensions, including a role for the Irish government – and that was broadly the message that Hume carried to the United States.
The reaction within Unionism to reasonable demands on the part of the minority in Northern Ireland was extreme: the security forces of the State countered non-violent protest with violence; Unionism also spawned the illegal UVF in 1966 and later popular movements such as Vanguard, which had David Trimble as its legal advisor and whose leader, Bill Craig, said in a famous speech in Belfast’s Ormeau Park: ‘we’ll liquidate the enemy’. Was such language, and the position he was taking, unsettling to adherents of the movement? David Trimble recalls: ‘Bill was using that language in the hope that it would make London stop and think. Unfortunately, they didn’t.’ Even so, as a matter of principle or morality, and recalling twentieth- century history, was the language ‘to liquidate the enemy’ not disturbing? ‘No, look, I don’t think one should pay too much attention to those words and what was said,’ recalls David Trimble. ‘The substance of the matter was that at the time, governments were driving towards what became the Sunningdale Agreement [in 1973]. The Sunningdale Agreement was a mistake.’
Hume was representative of a generation of young Catholic graduates who used politics and the legal apparatus to take cases and adopt a civilised approach to resolving this – is that fair to say? David Trimble: ‘I don’t find it particularly helpful to be going back over that. If we take the issue of housing, it was suggested that local councils were discriminatory in housing and that is acknowledged. You can point to the fact that there was some inventive boundary drawing.’ Trimble acknowledged that the Unionist point of view ‘would have regarded the Civil Rights Movement as being unnecessary and as being something that opened the door to violence. In the early days, the Unionist man in the street, I’m afraid, would have lumped all the Catholic political leadership together as being the people who effectively created the violence. Not a particularly fair judgement but that was the general view’.
Trimble’s reflection, that Unionism viewed the Civil Rights Movement as unnecessary, is correct in the sense that it was unnecessary for the perpetuation of the Unionist monolith. His second point, that it opened the door to violence, was given amplification in the South by writer and former Irish Labour Party politician, Conor Cruise O’Brien: ‘Would the removal of the disabilities of Catholics in the Northern Ireland electorate be worth taking at the risk of precipitating riots, explosions, pograms, murders?’8 The argument propounded by Conor Cruise O’Brien was that a Civil Rights Movement could easily beget a violent movement and that such a movement could be hijacked. How can such risks be weighed against the injustices that the Civil Rights Movement sought to remedy? Austin Currie, John Hume’s close political colleague and co-founder of the SDLP, recalls: ‘It was John Hume who said that when you throw a rock into a lake it will cause ripples but you [weren’t] quite sure where the ripples would continue. You do something that you see as being an objective which will be successful and useful and there can be other consequences. It’s always the danger to any agitation.’
As David Trimble has indicated, there were a variety of Unionist perspectives about this new rights-demanding movement. The more hardline people were in denial that the rights demanded were ever withheld. There was also a perception that the Civil Rights Movement was merely a vehicle for the IRA to generate enough chaos to gather itself into an armed struggle for a United Ireland. It was never going to be ecumenical, even though it might have started with that ideal. As Irish political and constitutional expert, Brendan O’Leary, says: ‘The truth is that the Civil Rights Movement was a coalition. It contained communists, it contained socialists, it contained Republicans disillusioned with previous IRA and Sinn Féin activity. It included Northern Nationalists unhappy with the Nationalist Party.’
It also contained Protestants, particularly those who had been to Queen’s University Belfast in the 1960s and who were willing to discuss options for building a new society together. There was a pervasive view that when people from a Unionist background made any form of coalition with those from a Nationalist background it was tantamount to ceding political ground. When Ivan Cooper, for example, a liberal from a Church of Ireland background, became a civil rights activist and formed a political alliance with John Hume, friends and neighbours from his village, Killaloo in County Derry, were openly contemptuous of his ‘betrayal’. Even among younger and educated Unionists, there came to be a clash between conscience and tribal instincts; typically, the latter won out. Brendan O’Leary relates: ‘We know from the archives that the O’Neill cabinet, right up to 1968, knows that it’s wrong not to have universal suffrage in local government but it’s obsessed by the fact that if they apply universal local government suffrage, Nationalists are going to gain twice as many votes as Unionists and they’re going to lose all of the west.’ As previously noted, the legacy of the O’Neill cabinet was not only a failure to reform the rigged franchise, making mass protest and civil disobedience to force them to do so practically inevitable, for good measure it also disinvested the west.
Parallels between the Irish and American Civil Rights Movements
A future US leader from the American South, Bill Clinton, who in 1968 was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, observed:
I first became aware of John Hume when he became widely written about in the news and the SDLP was attempting to do the most difficult of all things, which is to be an inclusive political party in a polarising time. We know what works in the world is inclusive politics, inclusive economics, [and] inclusive social policies, but the more people are polarised and distrusting – and particularly if they’re shooting guns – the more difficult it is to say, ‘I’m for inclusive cooperation, I’m for peace’, and John just held the line. He wanted an inclusive peace and he thought that non-violence was the best way to pursue it. He was the Irish conflict’s Martin Luther King or Gandhi and I thought as a tactical matter he was right.
Informed by the American Civil Rights Movement, the leaders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement saw that rights could be very rapidly obtained through non-violent mass protest. In the United States, the events from Bloody Sunday in Selma on 7 March 1965, to the successful march in Selma under federal protection on 21 March 1965, to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act on 6 August 1965, showed that enormous strides towards full participation in society could be achieved, and quickly. In the view of Brendan O’Leary, ‘by adopting the methods of the American Civil Rights Movement, what Hume and a range of others did, particularly Austin Currie inside the Nationalist Party, was to reorient the strategy, both as a strategy of protest against the Belfast government and to be heard by the London government in insisting on British rights for British citizens’.
This strategy put the British government in an untenable moral position. As Gandhi had done in the 1940s, the Civil Rights Movement used the principles that the British government purported to uphold against them by demonstrating that they were being honoured in the breach. Similarly, in the United States, the appeal to sacred ideals of the founding documents by the Civil Rights Movement also eventually turned the tide in American public opinion. At all times Hume, despite the escalation of violence, nevertheless continually looked to the model of Martin Luther King, and his insistence, especially when circumstances became very intense in the US, that the movement must remain non-violent. Other parallels with the American Civil Rights Movement abound, as Brendan O’Leary elucidates:
In both the American and Northern Irish contexts, communities were subject to local control, and in both cases a local majority discriminated against a local minority. The local majorities organised themselves, sought exclusive patronage over public appointments, they monopolised the local policing, the local security forces, the local judiciary, and in some jurisdictions they disenfranchised the minority. In both cases, the local majority also discriminated against the local minority. The discrimination extended to both public employment and private employment – members of the minority community were not hired or, if hired, were not promoted. As African-Americans mobilised behind the banner of their constitutional rights as American citizens, Northern Nationalists in the Civil Rights Movement mobilised behind the demand for equal rights as British citizens.
The February 1969 Election
In a State which had raised parliamentary elections to a high level of irrelevancy, the February 1969 election was a dramatic break with tradition, a crucible in which radically differing goals and aspirations and methods for achieving them were, for the first time in the history of the Northern Irish State, exposed to the reality of the ballot sheet. Eamonn McCann, a candidate in that election in the Derry (Foyle) constituency, describes the principles defining that election, in its Derry context, as follows:
People like John were looking for what was called British rights for British citizens. It seemed a rather modest ambition. I had a more radical agenda, a socialist agenda. The election in February 1969 was called with the prime minister of the day, Terence O’Neill, and a famous broadcast said: ‘What kind of Ulster do you want, Ulster is at the crossroads’. It was a crossroads election. John won the election beating the old Nationalist Party leader Eddie McAteer and myself. That signalled and demonstrated that John’s style of looking for … not a United Ireland, but looking for equal rights within Northern Ireland and advocating a strong but moderate way of pursuing that, matched the mood of the people to a greater extent … than Eddie McAteer or myself.
McCann’s socialist approach failed to command broad appeal and the Nationalist Party, with its age-old strains of indignation and abstentionism, was effectively wiped away. Throughout its decades of existence, it had achieved nothing other than managing to speak to the Nationalists’ sense of being a minority, of being deprived. The party that effectively swept it away, though still in formation in 1969, was the SDLP.
Hume’s approach spoke to the electorate and it was to continue to do so for the next three decades, as Hume topped the poll again and again. In 1969, he had stood for the principles of inclusion and justice. Neither socialism nor nationalism had appealed to the Derry electorate as much. The words ‘justice’ and ‘inclusion’ may well resemble the pat words of many politicians at the hustings, yet the degree of injustice and exclusion that the Catholic electorate in Derry faced meant that the mandate Hume sought went to the core of their dilemmas. It also had resonance beyond Northern Ireland, first in Britain where the media attempted to convey the causes of the Northern problem, which helps to explain why, that same year, Hume’s profile was noticed by Senator Ted Kennedy.
Terence O’Neill was later to say that he called what he termed the ‘crossroads’ election to give the people of Northern Ireland the chance to break the mould of sectarian politics.9 In electing a candidate such as Hume, the electorate had availed of that chance, since one of the four basic principles Hume articulated in seeking a mandate to form a social democratic movement was that it ‘must be completely non-sectarian and must root out a fundamental evil in our society, sectarian division’.10 But the tragedy was that the Unionists did not perceive it so.
Hume the Parliamentarian
The newly minted MP, elected to represent the Foyle constituency at the Parliament of Northern Ireland, had never before held political office. Nevertheless, he gave the impression of one who had considerably more experience than his thirty-two years and novice status might indicate. He had already represented Ireland in the United States during his presidency of the Irish Credit Union, and he was alert to the wider movements of the world, which were gathering pace: from Prague to Memphis equality movements were challenging traditions and demanding new approaches to politics. Such changes were the nub of what the Parliament of Northern Ireland in Stormont had stood against. Even so, Hume had considerable confidence in himself and in his approach to politics. The least parliamentary of parliaments, the atmosphere in Stormont towards the new, articulate generation hungry to establish themselves in Northern Ireland could hardly have been less welcoming. Yet, in spite of such intolerance, the sclerotic and self-perpetuating cycle of the rigged parliament was about to be unsettled by a parliamentarian of uncommon ability.
As Parnell and his party had done in Westminster in the 1880s, Hume and others managed to use the parliamentary process to shame Stormont into facing up to the injustices of the State. Those injustices included gerrymander, sectarian housing allocation and hiring policies. Increasingly, those injustices – when challenged by public protests – had in turn spawned further injustices: in the judiciary, in policing and in legislation to give validation to them. On 3 April 1969, for instance, on the floor of parliament Hume spoke of the nexus between housing allocation and political patronage: ‘Each petty potentate in each little rural electoral division allocates all the houses in that division and perpetuates himself in power. That is part of the housing policy … the political jobbery which has been a root cause of the social injustices.’11 In so doing, Hume challenged politicians for lacking the communal instincts which would have tended to the needs of all of the people they represented: ‘If the Government were to take a referendum they would find that the people would be in favour of reform. The people who would resist it would be the local Caesars who would lose their power and would not be able to shove their cronies and party hacks into jobs.’
Another consequence of this, for Hume, was that the Unionist government, by abdicating from its responsibilities to govern fairly, invalidated both its own authority and made it harder for anyone in the parliament to assert the need for democratic processes. By energetically hacking away at the root of sustainable government – respect for authority – Unionists were, Hume argued, destroying the possibility of people having faith in the State itself:
One fine day some students in this community announced that they were going to hold sit-downs and occupy public buildings. The Government react immediately like frightened rabbits and decide to make them illegal without giving any real or due consideration to what they are doing. What they have done is that they have refused to listen to grievances aired in Parliament and have left a large section of the community with very little faith in Parliament or in parliamentary democracy by refusing to listen to grievances.12
Fearing the growth of the IRA, Hume urged Unionist MPs to understand that, when the rule of law falls into disrepute, then people will feel that ‘they have a duty to break that law’.13 How, when such pleas were consistently ignored, did Hume respond? When rational argument failed, Hume, along with Ivan Cooper and Paddy Devlin – future co-founders of the Social Democratic and Labour Party – and others, would occasionally take over the floor in the middle of the House and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’, thereby replicating in parliament the modality of protest that existed on the street. In addition, this ongoing dialogue of the deaf in Stormont naturally elicited from Hume and his colleagues the obstructionism tactic that Parnell and his party had practised in Westminster a century earlier. (Parnell remained a central influence on Hume throughout his political life: shortly after being elected to Westminster, when he discovered that there was no recognition of Charles Stewart Parnell in the Houses of Parliament, he sought donations from MPs to ensure that a bust of Parnell was sculpted, which was placed close to Committee Room 15, where Parnell’s party had split.) Throughout his time in Stormont, Hume’s unqualified belief in parliamentary politics remained steadfast: his eagerness to put an argument on the record in Hansard, even when its practical impact seemed elusive, indicates not only a respect for parliamentary politics, but also a sharp sense of history.
Hume was later to say in Westminster that the central problem of the British having created in Northern Ireland a system based on a sectarian headcount was that ‘When one tells the majority that it can protect itself only by remaining in majority, one invites it to maintain sectarian solidarity as the only means of protection. Therefore, one makes sectarianism the motive force of politics.’14
That deeply rooted fault line of the Northern Irish State, since it was created through partition, vitiated any realistic prospect of reform from within: a perception that Hume was to reluctantly accept after the possibilities of reform from within had been exhausted. Power in Northern Ireland was so perniciously enmeshed with religious justifications for its possession that its holders had comprehensively absorbed the myth of their own entitlement. From the opposition benches Hume faced not merely political intransigence but a deeply tribal confederacy whose identity depended on not admitting any modification to the Orange State.
Membership of the Orange Order (and of the Freemasons) was almost a prerequisite for Unionist MPs. Therefore, for Unionist MPs the breaking with the orthodoxy of banning civil rights marches would have had the consequence of losing caste within their own community. If their pretext for banning civil rights marches was that they posed a risk to public security, Hume asked how (given that they identified as Orangemen) those MPs could possibly be called on to ban an Orange march, when there were grounds to believe it would equally threaten the peace? He put it to them that when members ‘have so much regalia around their necks the flow of blood to the brain is affected’.15 Under threat of a form of excommunication, the Orangemen and Masons who ran the Unionist parliament sustained its sectarian character. The effect of this tribal clustering was to block the possibility of compromise; it was a design which ensured sufficient Unionist solidarity in parliament so the majority could always prevail, but at the cost of perpetuating division within the society at large. The Ulster Unionist Party’s operation at the Parliament of Northern Ireland was like a wall prescribing clear positions: those hidden behind the wall were unable and unwilling to hear any form of opposition; those who were banished to live outside the wall, and who launched attempts to be included, were all but foredoomed.
In contrast to the bowler-hatted insularity of Unionist MPs, Hume continued to add growth rings of internationalism to his perspectives. In the following quotation (ironic given the support he later received from President Reagan), Hume traces a repressive measure in then Governor Reagan’s California through to Stormont’s legislative measures intended to contain non-violent protest. The connection between the Sacramento and Belfast administrations reveals the power of mass media as well as the butterfly effect of both civil disobedience and measures to contain it:
At the end of November last a local newspaper contained an article indicating that Governor Ronald Reagan intended that it should be an offence in California to sit, kneel or lie down on a road. The wording of this provision is rather peculiar. Who dreamt it up? It does not exist in many laws elsewhere. We must assume that someone read this newspaper report. The paper went further and referred to one of its favourite themes‚ the rebelliousness of modern youth, particularly the grant-aided miscreants of Queen’s University, and commended the proposed Californian measure to this Parliament.16
Yet the Unionist Party continued to ban marches and stymie reform. In one instance, when Prime Minister Brian Faulkner removed protesters’ barricades, Hume said angrily in an improvised interview in Derry: ‘If Faulkner thinks that the taking down of the barricades here today means that the people of this area have withdrawn their opposition to the regime, then of course he is being very deluded.’ When hope of effecting change through their political representatives, through demonstrations or sit-in protests diminished, Hume warned that then some people would embrace hopeless methods out of frustration. Hume was to give this message to senior American politicians when he began his process of educating them about the origins of the IRA, and as an MP in the Parliament of Northern Ireland he conveyed the same point. In one of the great counterfactual propositions of twentieth-century Irish history, the question raised by Hume – how could political leadership have contained the anger of the minority by making basic concessions and allowing their voice to be heard – still rings down the years:
A large section of this community are a permanent political minority and over a long period of time they have felt that they have no part in the decision-making process. This causes frustration and the frustration is all the greater when those same people know that their elected representatives are not being listened to … What does a person do then? He turns to another method of drawing attention to grievances, and in any democratic society these methods should be left open. The people then go on to the streets in the mass demonstration … It has been quite clear that this is a method of protest which is not permitted for long in this community … The third or final method of protest is the protest whereby a person draws attention to his problems by sitting or kneeling down in a public place. Now that is to be wiped out. Surely any intelligent person judging this situation would see that, when one systematically removes all means whereby people can air their grievances democratically, one thereby creates an explosive situation … militancy can only be strengthened by such intransigence.17
Here, Hume attempts to expose the connection between incitement to hatred and acts of violence on the street and, as a corollary, to impugn the actions of Ian Paisley, who was to cloak himself in violent rhetoric for the duration of his political career until the peace process in the 1990s. Hume identifies the ways in which extreme Loyalists and Republicans became objective allies in word and deed:
Nothing at all is to be gained from extreme speeches. It is worth pointing out that when one takes up an extreme position in politics one depends upon extreme opponents, on the development of extremism for one’s survival … The victory of the policies and politics of people like the hon. Member for Bann Side [Ian Paisley] depend on a break-down of law and order. If law and order do not break down they are defeated and shown to be wrong.18
As both a preacher and politician, Paisley had, even in the 1960s, perfected the dual approach of rallying people by infusing theology in politics, which meant that when he had a political setback, he could always retreat to the comfort of theological justifications.
The political process that Hume and his colleagues from the minority sought to promote was animated more and more by a belief that power-sharing in the divided community was the precondition for any sustainable political change in Northern Ireland. Embracing violence to force their objectives upon others, he argued, ‘may appear at one time or another to achieve short-term objectives, but in society as it exists here violence inevitably leads to polarisation and civil war between Catholic and Protestant … We are going nowhere unless there is a breaking down of the barriers between the religious divide’.19
Getting Organised: The Formation of the SDLP
The Social Democratic and Labour Party was formed in August 1970, and its foundation was a fulfilment of one of Hume’s election campaign pledges the previous year. The SDLP was one of several parties to emerge in the two years following the start of the Troubles. Hume understood the weakness of a fragmented opposition in such a recalcitrant administration as Stormont Parliament. Therefore a central motivation for forming the SDLP was to organise against the Unionist bloc, which went hand-in-hand with another core objective: the establishment of Proportional Representation in Northern Irish elections to replace the first-past-the-post Westminster model of elections, which had been so schismatic in the North and which the SDLP believed would enable fairer representation. Beyond that, the SDLP wanted to establish a Bill of Rights and a Council of Ireland to replace the outmoded (and entirely theoretical) territorial claims to the North in the Irish Constitution of 1937.
The SDLP was determined to break with tribal politics and to plot a third way through the vehicle of social democracy around which, it was hoped, diverse elements of Northern Ireland could rally. In its earliest composition, the SDLP was an umbrella organisation in that it gathered together Belfast Socialists, Derry and Mid-Tyrone Nationalists, and liberal Protestants all under the banner of social democracy. From the outset, it was a party of leaders, of strong personalities and of sharp regional cleavages which led in time to conflicts as well as common cause among its members. As a sitting MP in London, Gerry Fitt had the highest political standing of the founding members and was appointed party leader. While not the party leader until 1979, many people saw Hume as the de facto leader, the person whose capacity for strategic thinking and planning was clearly the best. Ivan Cooper remembers that Hume had a particular talent for forming policy and remembers ‘one occasion that he dictated policy for a period of three hours and that became the SDLP policy’.
Parliament and the Street: Civil Disobedience
Hume married his activities as a leader of street protests with his parliamentary life. It was not atypical that he would attend Stormont throughout a given a week and on Saturday or Sunday participate in street demonstrations. This became a form of double duty whereby one role reinforced the other. Hume combined his considerable skill in stewarding marches with his authority as an MP: men, women and children understood that, with Hume in the lead, a march was much more likely to pass off safely; they knew, too, that the objective of the march was more likely to succeed. The often suggested parallel between Hume and Martin Luther King was particularly apt for the ways in which he channelled the power of street demonstrations into a parliamentary campaign for justice.
Hume’s participation in protest events in Derry City has been captured in iconic photographs which includes images of Hume, Hugh Logue and Ivan Cooper being arrested, put up against the wall, and doused with water cannon. Hugh Logue recalls one such incident:
John went forward – he was the MP for the area and had the authority – and spoke to the officer in charge of the operation and said: ‘If you guys move back and withdraw, I’ll get the people to go home and there won’t be any more trouble’. My recollection is that the officer on the ground agreed, and went through to headquarters, and told them what he was doing. He was countermanded and told by his commanding officer in Derry that they were not going to have a precedent of people sitting in the street and that they were going to drive through, at which point Hume said: ‘Well if you’re going to go through, you’re going to drive over all of us, we’ll be in your way’. The people, I think, expected him to lead them. The people would not have expected him to step aside for the British army.
Logue explains how the face-off progressed:
They [the British Army] charged, firing rubber bullets, and dousing us at that stage with purple dye – and to this day I still admire the courage of the people who still sat their ground and did not move. Then the army charged [again]. I got hit with a rubber bullet, was dragged out of a garden by the hair that I once had. We got arrested. We were paraded up and put against a wall, frisked, searched. But we did not give up, and that was as much John’s leadership as anything else. We took the case with a very good lawyer, Charlie Hill, and we appealed it. We proved that the British Army did not have the right in Northern Ireland to arrest anyone under Northern Irish law. For the first time in British parliamentary history they sat up all night and legislated retrospectively to allow that.
The tactic of civil disobedience took various forms aside from sit-ins. The rate and rents strikes in Fermanagh (1970) and Derry (1971) constituted a peak of the civil disobedience tactic in Northern Ireland, and Hume was deeply involved with both strikes. Speaking in parliament of the case of Fermanagh, he defended his course of action thus:
In the course of his speech the right hon. Member for Enniskillen (Mr. West) referred to a speech made by me at the Diamond in Enniskillen on Saturday, 10th October [1970]. He wondered whether the police had given the Attorney-General a full report of my speech. Lest the police did not give a full report to the Attorney-General I shall tell him exactly what I said. I make no apology for opposing tooth and nail by every peaceful means at my disposal Fermanagh County Council in the same way as I opposed Derry Corporation. I shall continue to oppose it until we have done to Fermanagh County Council what we did to Derry Corporation. On that day I advised the people of Fermanagh to withhold their rents and rates. I advised them to elect local committees and to pay their rents and rates to those committees until such time as there was a democratic council. I advised them that if the county council retaliated by withdrawing its services they should organise lorries, collect the refuse and then go and empty it into the garden of the chairman of Fermanagh County Council. Dr. Paisley [Bann Side]: Shame. Mr. Hume: Or the garden of the nearest Unionist councillor.20
By 1971, however, Hume was beginning to believe that prioritising the political process over civil disobedience would ultimately be necessary to counter the IRA; that he needed to create a system of authority that could be acceptable to all communities in Northern Ireland. The idea of electing a local committee to usurp the authority of Fermanagh County Council was an intelligent tactic to force the State into exhibiting some modicum of accountability. However, it was also potentially dangerous because leading a programme of civil disobedience was riddled with risks: how to measure the exact length to which civil disobedience could go? How to ensure that the inevitable retaliation would not lead to lethal consequences for its practitioners? How to ensure that extremists did not exploit it to their own ends?
Moreover, civil disobedience also begged an important strategic question. The more civil rights privations were highlighted, the more the state was undermined; the effect of this process, which to an extent was redemptive, also reinforced a perception that the State was irredeemable through politics alone. When the balance tipped towards such a conclusion, a peculiar genie emerged from the bottle. The tactic of civil disobedience presupposes a way back to the normality of civil obedience once certain concessions are won. If the belief in society erodes sufficiently through the acts (and brutal reactions to) civil disobedience, how can civil society prevail? As David Trimble conceded, ‘we Unionists built effectively Northern Ireland, and we built it a good house there, but it was a cold house for Catholics’. In the hope of replacing the cold house with another more inclusive one, civil disobedience nevertheless ran the risk of eroding the foundation upon which such a house could stand.
Background to Bloody Sunday
Since 1968, for three and half years the people in Northern Ireland had demonstrated by turns in organised and in ad hoc ways to establish their rights. There had been immediate gains in 1968, but significant losses as well, through repressive legislation and in particular with the introduction of internment without trial. Codenamed Operation Demetrius, internment without trial was introduced in Northern Ireland on 9 August 1971, and oversaw the ‘lifting’ of Catholics by the security forces and their imprisonment in internment camps (such as Magilligan) where they were unaccountably held and, in many cases, tortured. Catholic victims of these practices were interned on the slightest pretence – membership of an Irish language club or of the Gaelic Athletic Association, for instance.
Internment without trial discredited Stormont’s already diminished reputation in the eyes of the Catholic population still further: while the British army was directly responsible for interning, it was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner, who had introduced the measure. The fact that he and his cabinet could preside over such outrages made Stormont’s claims to be a government of law and order risible. For all the evidence of brutality within the walls of the internment camps, the nadir of the army’s misconduct was still to come in its reaction to the protest marches first at Magilligan on 23 January 1972 and then in Derry on 30 January 1972.
On 23 January 1972 (one Sunday before Bloody Sunday), Hume led a protest on Magilligan beach to demonstrate the anger in the Catholic community about internment. In response to the peaceful demonstration, the British Army’s Parachute Regiment fired plastic bullets at point-blank range at men, women and children, all of which was recorded by film cameras. The following exchange between Hume and the British army official responsible for the firing, likened by James Sharkey to the ‘encounter between Hugh O’Neill and the Earl of Essex four centuries earlier’,21 does indeed suggest a face-off not only between protesters and security forces, but a collision of civilisations:
Hume:Could you tell me on what authority that you’re holding us back from walking in there?
Soldier:This is a prohibited area. You are not allowed into a prohibited area.
Hume:Under what law – would you ask those men to stop firing rubber bullets at men and women please?
Soldier:They will not. They will stop it provided you keep away from the wire and don’t try to enter this prohibited area.
Hume:Under what law is it prohibited, or under what authority is it prohibited? Can you tell me?
Soldier:It has been prohibited by the police and by the government.
Hume:The police tell me that it is you who is in charge here, not them … Are you proud of the way your men have treated this crowd today?
Soldier:This crowd has tried to come into a prohibited area. You as a Member of Parliament could try to stop them.
Hume:You shot them with rubber bullets and gas. The crowd was marching over there. The leaders were going to speak to you. Before we even got here you opened fire … I wouldn’t be very proud of the conduct of your men today. They opened fire on a crowd of people and they were totally unarmed people …
Soldier:You are not allowed to march in there.
Hume:Why not? It does not belong to you.
Soldier:It is prohibited.
Hume:It does not belong to you. You cannot prohibit it ...
Soldier:It has been prohibited by your government.
Hume:[shouts] Who’s government?
Soldier:The government of Northern Ireland.
Hume:Not our government. And that’s why you’re here – because it is not our government.22
In his final response, John Hume MP had come to the point of repudiating the Northern Irish government. After years of commercial initiatives, of civil rights demonstrations or raising awareness through teaching, campaigns and journalistic articles and three years as an elected representative, Hume’s conclusion was simply that a government which would sanction such actions was not his. Now, Hume intimated, there was a palpable risk that people could be shot dead for simply expressing themselves through marches, and Magilligan was the moment when Hume ultimately rejected the tactic of civil disobedience. Hume later explained that he realised something new was happening, that the power of decision-making now lay with the military and there was no negotiating with the Parachute Regiment. Hume realised at Magilligan beach that something terrible could happen. Robert Fisk, who at that time covered Northern Ireland for the Times in London, remembers:
I realised there was something wrong with the Parachute Regiment. I do not know if it was a Parachute Regiment decision or whether the politicians and military people in Lisburn knew what the Parachute Regiment would do. But John was right. He spotted right at the start something had changed. I mean, when you looked at the soldiers of the Parachute Regiment – they were trained to fight and kill and beat.
The Parachute Regminent solider who Hume was remonstrating with in the iconic footage maintains that the British government had legitimised their presence, and that they could open fire with plastic bullets if people insisted on marching beyond the barbed wire boundary. Hume disputed his authority entirely and demanded to know the law that permitted his Regiment to act as it did. So wherein did authority lie for what happened at Magilligan? In Robert Fisk’s opinion:
For a long period in Northern Ireland, there was clearly among most Brits, however well educated [and] whatever their roles, politicians (not Whitelaw but beneath him) and certainly army officers, there was a very colonial mentality. Remember most of the senior officers in the British Army at that time had taken part in the retreat from Empire. They had been in Aden or they had been in Cyprus or they had been in some cases in Kenya. So they had seen the withdrawal of the Brits, the weakening power of Britain. As the years moved on, the army officers became slightly less colonial in their minds but the politicians became more so (Roy Mason is a classic example).
Hume’s view was that if the Parachute Regiment was willing to open fire with plastic bullets on the beach, they would do that and worse on the streets of Derry. Three days later, he spoke at a meeting at the Ardowen Hotel in Derry and made it clear that he would not participate in the march scheduled in Derry on 30 January. Not unlike Martin Luther King’s decision on ‘Turn Back Tuesday’, Hume urged people to regroup in the new political context engendered by the Magilligan attacks. Was Hume vindicated in urging people not to proceed with a march on the streets of Derry the following Sunday? Eamonn McCann, who was not present at the Magilligan Beach march on 23 January 1972, but did participate in the Bloody Sunday march the following Sunday in Derry, remembers:
There was a number of possible reactions to what had happened at Magilligan. One was John’s reaction to say well if that’s the way it is going to be, we want to draw back from it, that these people are going to kill us. The other reaction was we are not going to be intimidated, we are not going to be driven off the streets by these people. I thought myself at the time that the bigger the crowd we had, the less likely it was that there was going to be violence from the State. Nobody could foresee the future. Nobody knew how things were going to unfold. After half a century of stasis, events were moving very quickly in the North. We were hurtling into the future, and I think that people did not have time to stand back and try to work out what exactly was happening. John did not seem to grasp that what had happened at Magilligan made a big march in Derry the following week absolutely inevitable.
Like the march at Magilligan beach the weekend before, the march scheduled for 30 January 1972 in Derry City was an anti-internment march. However, the brutality exhibited by the Parachute Regiment at Magilligan had to a considerable degree reconfigured the march as a contest; it was the people’s defiance of the Parachute Regiment, which had been called in to ‘police’ the Derry demonstration. The presence of a multitude of television cameras and journalists was also certain to make the Derry march an even higher-profile event.
Of all the acts of terror and aggression that were to follow over the course of over twenty years of war, the Parachute Regiment’s firing of live rounds against innocent demonstrators in Derry on 30 January 1972 remains the most transformative act of the Troubles because it was perpetuated by a ‘professional’ army which instantly lost any integrity it had left in the eyes of the Catholic minority. In the aftermath of 30 January 1972, as Eamonn McCann put it: ‘to suggest to people after that that they should seek redress for their problems through constitutional means was just laughable … Bloody Sunday was the definitive moment when the real trouble started’.23 Hume’s position of holding the constitutional line became exceptionally difficult after Bloody Sunday. Eamonn McCann further elaborates:
One of the big mistakes made by the State in relation to the early civil rights marches was to attack them. Had they not attacked them, had they just allowed these marches to proceed peacefully and a few people make their speeches and everybody go home ... It was no longer possible after Bloody Sunday for John or anybody else to say what we are looking for are British rights for British citizens. That slogan was gone. That perspective was shot off the streets on Bloody Sunday.
Embarrassed by international outrage and protest, within two months of Bloody Sunday, British Prime Minister Ted Heath summoned Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner to London and peremptorily informed him that he was proroguing the Parliament of Northern Ireland. Without any further discussion, Northern Ireland would be ruled directly from London. The first phase of Northern Irish history (1920–72) was over. The parliament which had symbolised a half century of injustice towards the minority was finished. Its demise represented the failure of any form of self-government in Northern Ireland without substantial oversight from London and Dublin. While the removal of its powers gave the minority occasion for relief, the fall of Stormont also left a political vacuum – 1972 was one of the bloodiest years of the Troubles – with an attendant sense of hopelessness. For Hume, while a solution within Northern Ireland had been unworkable, there was still one more option to work towards and it involved winning support for his strategy from Dublin and London.
