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Introduction

‘The beginning, in which was conceived the end, could not but continue to shape the middle part of the story’

– Elizabeth Bowen

We could have chosen any number of beginnings. In Derry, at the close of the 1950s, five children almost died in the fire that burned down the hut which was their family’s home.1 In Belfast, on the night of 14/15 August 1969, a 9-year-old boy was killed by machine-gun fire as nearby streets burned.2 In Derry, during the last week of June 1970, two young girls died in the fire that burned through their house after their father’s attempts to make a bomb in the kitchen caused an explosion.3 But, the choice of beginnings that has been offered here would lock in different narrative meanings. Brian Friel’s play Freedom of the City, which is set in Derry at the start of 1970, brilliantly illustrates how narrative brings together identity, causality, agency and trajectory across time. An American sociologist’s expert testimony, a children’s rhyme, a priest’s sermon and an army officer’s press statement give different explanations of what has caused the violence: poverty, the unfinished Irish revolution, the injustice inflicted upon the local Catholic community and terrorism.4 All narratives, including historical ones, are constructions and all narratives, even ones which insist they are simply stories, offer ways of viewing the world. So, we have chosen to begin by explaining how we constructed our historical narrative and why we are asking, not what caused the Troubles to start, but rather, how the violence of the start of the Troubles was produced.

There are books that are perfect and then there are books that actually get published. This, obviously, is one of the latter. We will make no attempt to pass off our work as the definitive history or the full story of the start of the Troubles, especially as our focus is just on Belfast and Derry. This book is not the final word on the subject, and we expect our arguments to be assessed and tested by others. To lubricate this communication – which we hope will be with historians of different countries, with academics from related disciplines and with wider publics – some methodological niceties need to be observed. Our aim is to present the most convincing interpretation of the past which we can construct from available sources. As Peter Mandler has reasoned, ‘while our evidence is partial, some of it is better than the rest, and some better suited than the rest to addressing certain problems’.5 We are not asking, once again, what the origins of the Troubles were, but instead how the form of the conflict in Northern Ireland changed.6 The violence produced in Belfast and Derry at the end of the period examined in our book was such that the conflict had taken on the form of a civil war. (We are using here the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas’s broad definition of civil war as ‘armed conflict within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities’.)7 As we are addressing a new question, we have drawn on primary sources that have not been used before and we have also examined for ourselves ones that have because other scholars were pursuing other problems when they were in the archives. That said, this book could not have been written without the pathbreaking work done on Northern Ireland by historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers and literary critics; the choice we have made to try, wherever possible, to base our arguments upon primary sources is a methodological one. Most of our extensive debts are paid, as much as they can be, up front in the acknowledgements rather than in instalments spread throughout the text.

‘Historians,’ Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd claim, ‘in contrast [to social scientists], tend to work more empirically and intuitively’– and, ‘without explicit theoretical reflection’, ‘crucial issues can be elided’.8 (The use of ‘explicit’ matters here: all historians employ theories, it is just that some are more explicit and thoughtful about this than others.) This criticism is echoed by Mandler. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘are we so conservative in our use of theory?’ Mandler suggests not only that ‘we refresh ourselves with … draughts of theory’, but also that ‘we need to explore [the] theoretical work being done … not thirty or a hundred years ago, but recently’.9 This is advice worth following. So, when our archival research carried us to a point where our intuition told us we needed help from our neighbours in the academy, we chose to look for it. Contemporary theory, to use Mandler’s term, is indeed refreshing, but we have tried to drink responsibly by testing these theories with our own evidence and keeping hold of the historian’s sober recognition of how alien and complex the past is. Still, objections could be raised that we have merely been taking small sips of contemporary theory; we would counter, however, that we have again been simply staying within our limits, as we have been given a fixed number of words in which to answer our question. Similar complaints could be made about our use of comparison, and we would give a similar explanation for our approach. While, ideally, a comparative framework should be set out and primary research should be conducted, this is actually just one end of a continuum: every historical narrative is comparative, even when the comparisons are implicit.10 We have chosen to draw explicit, albeit brief, comparisons in our book because, first and foremost, contemporaries often located themselves within international contexts. Answering our question has required us to take account of how people’s mental worlds stretched beyond the streets of Belfast and Derry.

As will soon become clear, one of us has made more use of theory and comparison than the other. We are advancing broadly the same arguments in this book, yet we nonetheless have chosen to allow each other plenty of room for personal styles, emphases and interpretations by writing separate narratives on Belfast (Geoffrey Warner) and on Derry (Simon Prince). Our different voices reinforce and open up reflection on the fact that our new history is a narrative and therefore is contingent upon the choices we have made as historians. Such a structure has other advantages, too, as it keeps calling the reader’s attention to the differences between the start of the Troubles in the two cities that were, usually, at the heart of developments. We, it is perhaps worth stressing again, are not claiming to be presenting an Olympian view of the whole of Northern Ireland. Despite these narrative demands, we are confident that readers will take in their stride the book’s shifts of perspective, place and period; after all, to quote Roy Foster, modern Irish writers have had ‘neither the time nor the inclination for novels that were formal in conception and linear in structure’.11 This book is meant to be read from cover to cover because from conception to completion, this has been our intention. Indeed, we would have chosen to construct our respective narratives quite differently if they were going to be separated out into two books instead of being put inside the same covers. That said, while the whole is greater than its parts, we have accepted that, in these hard-pressed times, this is a lot to ask of readers and so we have tried, in various ways, to make it easier to consume the book in bits. For those reviewers who are in a hurry, we will treat you to sweeping statements about our underlying assumptions in the introduction’s remaining paragraphs.

‘It is quite possible,’ muses John Whyte, ‘that, in proportion to size, Northern Ireland is the most heavily-researched area on earth’.12 For our particular period, this famous quotation should be reworked: It is quite possible that, in relation to its importance, Northern Ireland is one of the least researched areas of the ‘global Sixties’. The ‘Surrealist Map of the World’ depicts an island of Ireland which, due to its contribution to art, dwarfs Britain and many other European countries; a map of the ‘global Sixties’ that reflected political impact would almost certainly feature a huge Ireland as well.13 But, even on this expanded area, are we not still covering well-trodden ground? Well, modern Irish historians are right to be proud of how our discipline punches above its weight – however, we would be wrong to let our skill at the sweet science blind us as to what division we belong in. For example, two recent, impressive publications on the Troubles from our academic neighbours cite as the standard works for this period political science books from the last century.14 Bob Purdie’s Politics in the Streets and Niall Ó Dochartaigh’s From Civil Rights to Armalites owe their continuing relevance to the quality of the writing and the research; they also owe it to having had the field largely to themselves. History students starting post-graduate research today that touches on the start of the Troubles will start off reading political science books based on doctoral dissertations which were started before they were born. Of course, as we have made clear above and will below, too, the existing literature consists of much more than these two books. Nonetheless, the frequency with which both Politics in the Streets and From Civil Rights to Armalites appear in footnotes and reading lists deals a body blow to the received wisdom that the start of the Troubles has been overburdened with research.

What, then, is ‘new’ about our ‘New History’? Firstly, this book has drawn upon new sources. ‘Much of what has been written about this period,’ as Henry Patterson pointed out in 2008, ‘has as yet made little use of the wealth of governmental archive material now available.’15 There are, of course, exceptions, notably the pioneering work of Thomas Hennessey on the origins and evolution of the Troubles.16 Following in the footsteps of Hennessey and others, following different research questions and following different methodologies, we have used primary sources that were overlooked by and/or unavailable to previous scholars. We therefore have also been able to relate the streets to the authorities much more closely than even Hennessey could do – which matters because the actions and identities of the people on the streets cannot be understood without examining the actions and identities of the people in authority, and vice versa.17 Secondly, this book has drawn upon new scholarship. In the last decade or so, historians of the American civil rights movement have pushed back its chronological and geographical boundaries; this has transformed the comparisons that can be made between developments on either side of the Atlantic. Research on the complicated linkages between non-violence, self-defence and armed struggle has been especially useful here. As has recent work on gender, material culture, riots, social movements, individual memory, collective memory, narrative and the dynamics of violence in civil wars.

So, we have tested ideas, hypotheses and arguments against a wealth of systematically gathered and interrogated primary sources – and we have changed our views as the evidence has compelled (indeed, we have broken away from our earliest work on Northern Ireland). After all of this, what basic conclusion have we reached about the Troubles? That it was, essentially, a political conflict.18 The concept of ethnic conflict, in contrast, depends upon people, either as perpetrators, participants or victims, being completely interchangeable; cultures, in this interpretation, are given agency, while individual actors are reduced to following a script handed down to them.19 Arguments that ‘natural’ ties can inspire communal action are falling out of favour in the academy, but the view nonetheless lingers that there is something special about ethnic identities compared to other identities in the turn to violence. Despite this seeming to be simple common sense, however, making direct causal links between ethnicity and conflict is much more problematic than it first appears. Inter-communal relations across the world and across history are usually peaceful and co-operative, even where and when inequality and discrimination exists.20 Ethnic identity, moreover, is a subset of a broader identity category in which membership is determined by attributes associated with, or thought to be associated with, descent and in which the intrinsic characteristics are constrained change and visibility; most arguments about how ethnic divisions lead to violence, though, require ethnic identities to be fixed and assume that they can be distinguished from other group identities, including descent-based ones.21 The example of India since independence is helpful here. The political scientist Paul Brass has found ‘an overarching discourse of Hindu-Muslim relations’ that explains ‘all incidents involving members of these … communities in terms of the eternal differences between them’. This discourse, among other things, displaces blame from democratic politics, which is the context that gives meaning to the idea of a Hindu ‘majority’ and a Muslim ‘minority’ and which fixes these identities. Hindu-Muslim riots are not a spontaneous upsurge in ethnic animosities, but rather a particularly brutal form of electioneering that only happen in certain Indian states.22 Similarly, the start of the Troubles was not the beginning of the latest round in a centuries-old quarrel between Protestants and Catholics; it was part of the unfinished Irish revolution, the struggle over what democracy meant in theory and how it should then be applied in practice. Peter Hart, following Charles Tilly’s classic definition of revolution, calculates that the Irish one ended with the Civil War.23 That said, when it comes to answering our question, it is more appropriate to borrow and adapt François Furet’s definition of the French Revolution, according to which the Revolution ended, in a narrower political sense, with the second founding of the Third Republic and, in a wider ideological sense, with the decline of communism.24 In Northern Ireland, during our period of study, the modern democratic ideologies of constitutional nationalism, republicanism, socialism and unionism were still struggling for mastery. The question of who ruled and by what right had not been settled: the Irish revolution, in this sense, had not ended.

Prioritizing politics does not mean overlooking Northern Ireland’s many fiscal, economic, social and cultural problems or, indeed, people’s personal problems. (It should be noted here that while we have questioned the role of ethnic cleavages in the production of violence, there is no question that the communal divide was important.) We are political historians; nonetheless, as James Vernon recommends, ‘the questions we ask, not the territories we claim dominion over, should be our guide’.25 This book is a ‘fox’, not a ‘hedgehog’, and we have chosen to let it race through different fields, including social, cultural, intellectual, military, international and urban histories.26 That said, Northern Ireland’s other problems entered into the production of the violence of the start of the Troubles by becoming objects of political contention within a political ‘game’ which was gaining new players and new rules. It is the production of the violence, not the causes of the conflict, that concern us. Violence, it is usually assumed, is something that naturally emerges when a conflict boils over, yet there is, as the sociologist Rogers Brubaker and the political scientist David Laitin point out, a ‘lack of strong evidence showing that higher levels of conflict … lead to higher levels of violence’. They conclude that ‘Violence is not a quantitative degree of conflict but a qualitative form of conflict’.27 Although the violence of the start of the Troubles was linked to the unresolved Irish revolution, the underlying conflict cannot explain where, when and how violence was produced – nor who produced it.

Politics, it should be conceded here, was marginal to most people’s lives at the start of the Troubles. Consequently, there are many Belfasts and Derrys, each with their own history and their own memory, which have not made it into this book. Certain readers may not recognize their memories of ‘their’ city in how we, two outsiders, have chosen to present our research. This is not something we can choose simply to ignore, especially as everybody who takes part in a public debate should show equal respect to all people. But, what does this, in practice, mean for us? As far as matters of reason and evidence are concerned, we have not thought of our readers as primarily members of particular communities, but instead have thought of them as individuals capable of evaluating and criticizing our arguments and sources. History is universal: its writers and its readers cannot claim special privileges for themselves just because they belong to a specific group, even if they are victims.28 Indeed, the novelist and critic Zadie Smith, writing about America’s ‘civil rights generation’, warns that ‘bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways’, such as instilling the ‘idea that one should speak one’s … allegiance first and the truth second’. That said, as Smith goes on to acknowledge, ‘the black movement had to yell with a clear and unified voice, or risk not being heard at all’, and so criticisms should not be made without ‘context’, ‘empathy’ and ‘understanding’.29 The Derry Citizens Defence Association, through its lawyers, asked for the same thing – pleading with the Scarman Tribunal, which was inquiring into the events of the Battle of the Bogside, to ‘place’ ‘individual acts’ in a ‘more sympathetic light’ by considering ‘background and circumstances’.30 We have chosen to be critical, yet we have also chosen to try to be civil.

Some readers, however, may be concerned that we have not turned our book into a site of resistance. If we have not sided with the ‘victims’, does that not mean, then, that we have sided with the ‘perpetrators’? (We will not pursue here the argument that it would be anachronistic to work as historians within these terms.) Well, ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ made their way into historical writing via research on the Third Reich (although most historians now reject these labels because they fail to capture the complexity of what happened); so, like the leading authority on the Holocaust, we will answer that ‘Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving’.31 Richard J. Evans has gone further still, complaining that the ‘growing tendency’ ‘in favour of the exercise of moral judgment’ has led to ‘analysis, argument and interpretation’ getting pushed aside.32 This holds for Northern Ireland, too, as assigning blame – stating that the origin of the conflict lies in, say, imperialism or a clash of cultures – fails to explain how, where and when violence was produced at the start of the Troubles in Belfast and Derry. Moreover, making moral judgments is not as simple as handing out white and black hats.33 For example, John Hume, the ‘apostle of non-violence in this part of the world’, faced forceful accusations during the autumn of 1969 from both Unionists and socialists that he partly bore responsibility for the violence on the streets.34 According to the Derry Labour Party, Hume had taken the ‘tiger for a walk on a leash made of thread’ and was now, with ‘sick-making … saintliness’, ‘whining that “it’s not my fault”’.35 Anyway, is it actually in the interests of those for whom the struggle continues to present the past as a morality play? ‘By idolizing those whom we honor,’ a close friend of Martin Luther King once cautioned, ‘we fail to realize that we could go and do likewise’.36

‘[I]t must be understood that it is none of our function to make moral judgments,’ announces the character of the judge who chairs the tribunal in Freedom of the City into the deaths of three civilians at the hands of the British army. Later, in the theatre of the play, the sociologist’s oral evidence is interrupted as the victims stagger on to the stage to tell their own stories.37 Their truth has broken through the totalizing narrative mouthed by the academic outsider. But, has it? Objectivity lies at the sum total of all possible subjectivities; although it can never be reached, it can be approached by shifting perspectives. While Friel’s account provides us with a recognizable portrayal, which transcends factual detail, of what pain and loss feel like, a historical account offers a different route back to the past, one which can answer different questions.38 We have chosen to look closely at what was happening on the streets in Belfast and Derry and at how this was situated in local, regional and international contexts. Of course, there is still much that we have overlooked. So, while we believe we have something new to say, we do not pretend to have said everything that there is to say.