Читать книгу Northern Ireland’s ’68 - Simon Prince - Страница 11

Introduction

5 OCTOBER 1968

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

The march was for civil rights, not Irish unity. It was part of a loose campaign to overthrow the sectarian system that relegated the Catholic minority to the status of second-class citizens. The authorities, however, insisted upon treating the march as a traditional Republican/Nationalist parade and banned it from entering the walled city – the Protestant citadel that had resisted Catholic armies in the past.2 Republicans and Nationalists were indeed well represented among those who assembled at the railway station.3 The disastrous Irish Republican Army (IRA) campaign of 1956–62 appeared to have marked the end of the armed struggle. Republican modernisers were instead hoping to unite Catholic and Protestant workers in a non-violent struggle for a socialist Ireland. Civil rights were seen as a stepping stone to this ultimate goal, a way of allowing the working class to recognise its common interests. The architects of this new departure, Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan, were there to witness their theories being tested. Johnston had joined the IRA; Coughlan had kept his distance from it. They were nonetheless both close to the IRA’s Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding, and had expected him to join them on the march – as had the Special Branch detectives who spied upon the movement. But Goulding’s car had broken down on the road to Derry.4 The leader of the Nationalist Party, Eddie McAteer, had encountered no such problems making his way to the outskirts of his home town. McAteer had spent his life campaigning against the partition of his country and to improve the lot of the Catholic community. In the last few years, however, his party’s main battle had been against political extinction. McAteer had recently warned those with ‘public voices’ to guard against having their words ‘enlarged into hideous actions’, yet he could not ignore the shift to street politics.5 He therefore lined up alongside his rivals against his better judgement.

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

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

The leftists saw themselves as part of a global revolt against imperialism, capitalism and bureaucracy. At the local level, this meant that they were opposed to the ‘Green Tories’ – the Nationalists in the North and Fianna Fáil in the South – as well as to the ‘Orange Tories’ who controlled the state.12 It also meant that they were opposed to the bureaucratic socialism of the Old Left. A year earlier, McCann’s newspaper had denounced the Republican modernisers as ‘Stalinist fakers’.13 At a march from Coalisland to Dungannon held as the Soviets were suppressing the Prague Spring, leftists from Belfast and Derry had greeted the Communist Chair of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), Betty Sinclair, with shouts of ‘Russia’ and ‘jackboot’.14

The leftists had tried to provoke the police at this protest too, but had been restrained by the stewards. The Communists, Republicans and Nationalists who sat on the NICRA executive felt that violence would wreck the civil rights campaign and had worked hard to ensure that the Coalisland–Dungannon march passed off without incident.15 However, NICRA was only acting as the sponsor of the Derry march – the city’s leftists had taken over responsibility for organising it. But this did not ensure that everything went the way that the young radicals wanted. Although an impressive number of politicians and activists had turned up at the railway station, the overall attendance fell far short of the planning committee’s prediction of ‘in the region of 5,000 people’.16 The Derry Journal estimated that only somewhere between 350 and 400 people assembled for the start of the march – five times fewer than the number that had paraded from Coalisland to Dungannon.17 Like so many other innovative challenges to the Northern state before it, the civil rights campaign seemed to be marching into obscurity.

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

Several clashes involving policemen and protesters occurred soon after the march got under way. These violent incidents were partly the result of the confusion over tactics that both sides were experiencing. The original route had been spontaneously abandoned and an unguarded road taken instead – forcing the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to move a reserve unit hurriedly into place.20 The first rank of marchers, which at the insistence of the organisers mainly consisted of MPs, had been pushed into the hastily assembled police line. Although no explicit order was given to draw batons, certain officers appear to have reacted by striking McAteer and Fitt.21 The latter was then arrested for disorderly behaviour and taken to the hospital via the police station.22 The RUC later claimed that a placard wielded by one of the marchers rather than a police baton had cut Fitt’s head. The explanation given for McAteer’s injuries was even weaker. The police report devoted an entire paragraph to an analysis of the ‘bruised area below the right groin’ before concluding that there was ‘nothing which would give any indication as to the exact nature of the blow causing the contusion’.23

Following the initial scuffles, however, both sides backed away from each other.24 In the absence of anything else to do, Sinclair began to improvise a meeting. Her hope was that the same tactics that had kept the peace in Dungannon would work again in Derry. The police also adopted a conciliatory stance, providing Sinclair with a chair and making no attempt to disperse what was an illegal assembly. The NICRA Chair’s plea for the right of non-violent procession to be properly respected was echoed by McAteer.25 McCann’s speech was more ambivalent regarding the use of force.26 As McCann later testified in court, he had told his audience that he was ‘not advising anyone to rush the police cordon’ nor – being a ‘private individual’ – was he going to ‘stop anyone’.27 Indeed, given that the leftists were responsible for the marshals, anyone who wanted to attack the RUC was probably not going to be stopped. The stewarding was not completely reckless: they had succeeded in moving the marchers back from the police line before the meeting and the chief marshal had called for the crowd to depart at its conclusion. But the stewards lacked the numbers, the training and the inclination needed to contain any trouble in a crowd that had swollen to almost 1,000 people.28 Consequently, when the Belfast leftists started to insult the police and hurl placards at the cordon, their bid to provoke the RUC was not checked by the marshals as it had been in Dungannon.29 The police officer in charge later gave sworn testimony that he had ordered his men not to react. After about five minutes of being subjected to ‘Sieg Heil’ taunts and a fusillade of missiles, they were told to draw batons and ‘clear the mob’.30 The commission of inquiry found that ‘nothing resembling a baton charge took place but that the police broke ranks and used their batons indiscriminately on people’.31 The strategy of provoking the police into an overreaction had succeeded.

The ensuing violence was made worse by an earlier decision to move a party of police from the original route to the opposite end of the street. The RUC later claimed that the officers had been sent to guard a ‘demolished building, containing more than ample ammunition for violent demonstration’. However, the unintended consequence of stationing men here was that the marchers were effectively trapped. This ‘tactical error on the field’, to employ the term used by headquarters, was compounded by another: the party was not informed that the crowd was being dispersed nor given orders to allow people through.32 As the commission of inquiry observed, ‘when a number of marchers hurried towards them some violence was almost inevitable’.33 With the demonstrators seemingly reluctant to leave, the RUC called in water cannons to clear the area. The water wagon, which was making its first appearance in Derry, sprayed people indiscriminately.34 As well as sweeping both sides of the street, the water cannons also sprayed Saturday afternoon shoppers on the bridge leading to the city centre.35

The water wagon directed a jet through an open window on the first floor of the house where the Ulster Television camera crew was stationed.36 The BBC team’s filming was also impaired.37 The Telefís Éireann cameraman, however, managed to record several hundred feet of film. A former BBC employee living in Derry contacted the current affairs department about this footage. Since the Irish Television Service’s launch in 1961, the two national broadcasters had co-operated extensively. The BBC was therefore allowed to screen the dramatic Telefís Éireann film of the march on its regional and network news bulletins.38 The television coverage transformed the political situation. When one of the Unionist MPs at Westminster described the RUC as ‘probably the finest police force in the world’ during Prime Minister’s Questions, Wilson referred him to the BBC’s reporting. ‘Up to now we have perhaps had to rely on the statement of himself and others on these matters,’ he explained. ‘Since then we have had British television.’39 Events in Northern Ireland were to remain on British television screens into the next century.

John Hume, the community activist, had been a writer and performer on BBC Northern Ireland’s answer to ‘That Was The Week That Was’. The British show’s satirical assault on the establishment had made it a hit with critics and viewers alike. But Northern Ireland’s attempt to build up a domestic satire industry proved a failure.40 It was difficult to deliver topical comedy in a political culture where the topics never seemed to change. Four decades later, this is still a problem for people seeking to satirise Northern Irish politics. Newton Emerson, editor of the spoof Portadown News website, mined the hypocrisy of the peace process for material. However, he eventually decided to ‘decommission’ the website as he feared that he was on the verge of repeating himself. Emerson had been able to get away with attacking men who were normally intolerant of criticism for the simple reason that he was funny. Northerners on both sides of the communal divide pride themselves on their sense of humour. In 2006, the Cambridge University Ireland Society held a forum on ‘Humour in Northern Irish Politics’. Most of the panel and the audience members had come to praise Northerners for learning to laugh in the face of adversity. Emerson, by contrast, rubbished this cliché. He recalled how when he had lived in England he had not found that the natives lacked a sense of humour – and suggested to the students that they had probably made the same discovery. Northerners had not forged a unique brand of comedy that set them apart from the rest of humanity.41

The central theme of this book is that Northern Ireland was different, but not exceptional. Thirty years of virtual war while the rest of the continent experienced a period of uneasy peace has encouraged some people to forget that Northern Ireland has always been part of Europe. Fleets of tugs did not spew forth from Harland and Woolf’s great shipyards to tow the six counties to a new mooring off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Northern Ireland should be compared to France and West Germany, not to apartheid-era South Africa and Israel-Palestine. This does not lead to the injustices of the Unionist regime being ignored. Western Europe in these years was a place where former Nazis held high office, the police invoked laws from the fascist era, and a counter-insurgency war was fought in one of its greatest cities.42 Northern Ireland under the Unionists was not outside the mainstream in this Europe.

The civil rights movement was part of the rising tide of radicalism that swept the continent during the 1960s. This, however, has often been obscured in accounts of both the global revolt of 1968 and the origins of the Troubles. In 1988, the street protests of twenty years earlier were commemorated in Western Europe as the post-war generation’s coming of age.43 When they reached maturity, the baby boomers had supposedly found themselves in conflict with an adult world where conservative values and institutions had not kept pace with economic modernisation.44 ’68 was presented as the beginning of a cultural revolution that had delivered personal freedom. This view was championed by the handful of former activists who had established themselves as spokesmen for the ’68 generation.45 By contrast, Northern Ireland was regarded as having a civil rights generation. Roy Foster’s history of modern Ireland warns against making ‘analogies with student movements’ of the late 1960s. The ‘absence of a distinct youth culture in Ulster society’ has led Foster and others to conclude that Northern Ireland was not part of the international festival of liberation and therefore not part of ’68.46

The intensity of the Northern Irish conflict suggested that the Troubles must have been an inevitable product of the sectarian divide. The creation of a Protestant-dominated state with a sizeable Catholic minority in the years following the First World War did not solve the Irish question so much as rephrase the problem. For decades, Northern Ireland apparently remained the ‘static society’.47 Unionists presided over an unjust system and both Nationalism and Republicanism failed to challenge it. According to the official story, this only changed when the first generation of Catholics to benefit from the education reforms of the mid-1940s came of age in the late 1960s. The minority population then began to protest in the streets against the crimes of the Protestant supremacist state – and was met with police batons.48 This time, however, the traditional hardline response split the Unionist Party rather than binding it together, led to condemnation not support from Britain and, instead of crushing the movement, brought more Catholics into the streets.49

By the thirtieth anniversary of ’68 and the start of the Troubles, historians had begun to challenge these dominant narratives. The media’s favourite ’68ers had retrospectively claimed that the movement’s leftist rhetoric should be ignored. Activists had supposedly resorted to outdated Marxist terminology to describe the fledgling struggle for individual autonomy as nothing else was available to them at that time. Historians have preferred, however, to research the political language of ’68 for themselves rather than rely upon the self-appointed translators.50 As the fortieth anniversary nears, this approach has resulted in what is becoming the new consensus on ’68. Examining the flood of words spouted out in the late 1960s, it becomes obvious that political change mattered more than experimenting with new lifestyles. Sixty-eighters were not turning away from politics in the pursuit of pleasure; isolated individuals were finding fulfilment in collective action. They believed that they were part of a global struggle to free humanity from imperialism, capitalism and bureaucracy, not the individual from old-fashioned ways of living. Instead of a fleeting festival of liberation, ’68 emerges as the climax of post-war radicalism. There was a ‘long ’68’ dating back to at least the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s.

This political interpretation allows events in Northern Ireland to be written back into the story of ’68; it also allows the events of ’68 to be written back into the story of Northern Ireland. The region’s leftists had believed that by initiating an escalating cycle of provocation and repression the dictatorial face of the Unionist government would be unmasked. The divided working class would then unite in opposition to the ‘Orange Tories’ and in pursuit of a socialist vision that transcended those offered by the Labour and Communist parties. Like the nineteenth-century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui, Northern Ireland’s ’68ers had thought, ‘Why discuss what it is like on the other side of the river? Let us cross over and see.’51 When they marched over the River Foyle into the centre of Derry, they hoped to discover a society polarising along class lines. Instead, they soon found that sectarianism was gaining in strength. Sixty-eight was a global revolt, but across the world it took place in national and local contexts. The Troubles is perhaps the most tragic outcome of this coming together of international trends and historic divisions.

Northern Ireland lends itself well to a case study of the global revolt. Thousands and thousands of pages would be required to do proper justice to the ‘long ’68’ in France or the Federal Republic of Germany – to look at the shape of the state; the way mainstream political parties struggled to adapt to a changing world; the attempts made by the extremes of Right and Left to escape the political margins; the rise and fall of social movements; activism at a local level; the impact of international politics and intellectual fashions; and the bewildering array of marches, riots, occupations, meetings, speeches, negotiations, sit-downs, and strikes that made up the revolt itself.

Examining these developments in Northern Ireland is an altogether more manageable task. It is also just as worthwhile. Northern Ireland might have been seen as a provincial backwater, but it was home to no fewer than three of the world’s greatest contemporary poets: Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley.52 Similarly, Northern Ireland’s leading activists should be counted among the star ’68ers. Telling the story of the ‘long ’68’ in Northern Ireland and tying it in with recent research on other Western countries is therefore one way of trying to pin down this ‘elusive revolution’.53 As the nineteenth-century French traveler Gustave de Beaumont observed, ‘Ireland is a small country where the greatest questions of politics, morality and humanity are fought out.’54