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Before October
INTRODUCTION
‘Every Irishman,’ wrote John Steinbeck in 1953, ‘sooner or later makes a pilgrimage to the home of his ancestors.’ But, the American novelist continued, ‘He wouldn’t stay there if you gave him the place.’ Steinbeck and his wife found Derry to be a ‘city which is somber even … in sunlight’ – ‘and a desolation came over us’. He asked the ‘not-the-real-porter’ in their hotel: ‘“Has all illegality gone out of this rebellious island in three generations?”’ The ‘sad-looking man’ did not ‘make out my meaning’.1 When the fortieth anniversary of the start of the civil rights movement was marked in Derry, a veteran activist also did not make out his meaning. The Derryman somehow managed to claim that Steinbeck, ‘antenna alert’, ‘realised that this community around him would soon uprise’. ‘It [i.e. the civil rights movement] was a natural, organic, reflex uprising.’2
The metaphor that injustice produced a build-up of pressure which was not released by reforms and so eventually exploded in violence is a common one across history; it is also one that is powerful enough to result in evidence to the contrary being ignored. Metaphor clearly matters. It is a property of concepts and of words; it offers help with understanding ideas as well as with enjoying language; it often links together things that are not similar at all; it is an essential part of how humans think about their worlds.3 This chapter argues that for Derry before October 1968 and the emergence of the civil rights movement, another metaphor from the natural sciences is more appropriate. Evolution, put simply, involves adaptation, whereby an organism over time becomes better able to live in its habitat, and mutation, in which a dramatic change to a species – often induced by an external shock – leads to the pace of development being accelerated. Once Northern Ireland had been created during the early 1920s, the arrangements did not stay static: politics, society, economics and culture were always in flux, with each change opening up possibilities of further changes. Derry Catholics, workers and women as well as middle-class men, were able to find new ways to push at the boundaries of Unionist control and secure tangible reforms. What was important was not frustration with the lack of rights, but instead fresh power to fight for those rights. Most groups and individuals, though, shied away from direct confrontation, and the few which did not tended to launch futile attacks on the system’s strongest points. In the second half of the 1960s, however, radicals from the Labour Party and the Republican movement borrowed and adapted a new transnational form of political action – and this was to change the situation dramatically.
Although the chapter draws upon urban history, among other specialisms, its focus is not on the city itself but on local politics before October 1968. The first section introduces Derry through the stories of working-class Catholic women, which are developed into a contextualized case study of social and political activism prior to the civil rights era. The next section examines two of the main strategies employed by Derry Catholics in their efforts to reshape the city: direct action and self help. While they are separated out here to make them more convenient to study, the strategies were generally used in combination with each other. The third section explores the different approaches taken by the Unionists, in Derry and at Stormont, as they sought to retain control. Reform was seen by some Unionists to be a way of crushing and co-opting a range of internal and external challenges to the party’s dominant position. A reform could throw up temporary and uneasy coalitions between surprising allies, on both sides of the debate. The Londonderry Area Plan, for example, was backed not just by Unionists but by Nationalists as well. The moderate leadership of the self-help movement, in contrast, lined up with the radicals to oppose aspects of the plan to develop Derry. The final section describes how the leftists formulated a new strategy which broke out of the limits set by bounded reform and started a revolution. The chapter thus ends with the political actors who brought the ‘before-October’ period to an end.
WINTER IN SPRINGTOWN
‘Winter was for back lanes, cinema, Christmas presents, school competitions, dances and a sight that made my father smile: my mother standing with her back to the range, legs spread, skirt hitched up, warming her bum.’4 Nell McCafferty seems here to be selling her Irish childhood spent in the Bogside. With Ireland changing utterly in the years around the millennium, the reading public often clutched at books that carried them back to a lost time which was more innocent and more certain.5 In fact, Nell relates the young McCafferty’s uncertainties about herself to the larger uncertainties of living in Derry during the 1950s. ‘On winter nights,’ McCafferty recalls, she sat like a ‘cat’, ‘watching’: she saw husbands strike their wives, she saw two boys standing apart because they had been raped together, she saw a nervous girl who was pimped out by her father, she saw illicit affairs, she saw pregnancies outside of marriage and she saw teenagers of both sexes who desired her. This is community viewed in the harsh winter light or through the gloom, not bathed in the warm glow from hearths and oil lamps.6 Admittedly, while McCafferty may be recalling the memories that are remembered best and writing with scorching honesty, Nell should still be read as a reconstruction of her youth made in late middle age.7 Nonetheless, the book remains a warning against the will-o’-the-wisps of idealized communities. As another Derry civil-rights activist told an interviewer in 1979, ‘I never looked upon a sense of community born out of desperation as anything healthy’.8
It is a different winter and it is a different story from McCafferty, this time she is telling someone else’s – Peggy Deery’s. The ‘one thing for a Catholic mother to do in Derry on a fine, wintry, Sunday afternoon’, McCafferty explains, was to ‘stroll … in the city cemetery’. Deery was barely a decade older than McCafferty, but her biological clock had a mechanism that dated back to the Victorian era: she gave birth to her fourteenth child in her late thirties and may have had pregnancies into her forties if her husband had lived.9 At the start of the 1960s, one third of Derry’s population was under 14 years of age, as compared with one quarter in Britain.10 Nineteenth-century patterns survived in the shirt factories, too, where 90 per cent of employees were women – one fifth of the total workforce – and their hours varied as their lives and the economy changed.11 For many mothers, with two, demanding roles to fulfil, a Sunday in the cemetery was ‘a comparative treat’, offering ‘a rich source of gossip, speculation and tribal perspective’. The children, who came from homes that lacked gardens, played among the graves, and may have noticed that the Protestant high crosses tended to be grander than the Catholic low tombstones.12
Looking out from a hill of the dead upon a city that was slowly dying, the families could see this and other divisions among the 50,000 people living there. St Columb’s Church, Long Tower, sat at the heart of Derry and was dedicated to the monk who had founded a settlement there in the sixth century.13 Rising above this Catholic church was the Church of Ireland Bishop’s Palace and a short distance away was the Anglican cathedral of St Columb’s, which had been built by the City of London in the early seventeenth century. The new city of Londonderry, as it was named in the royal charter, was one of the last of Europe’s bastides, providing defences for the Protestants from England and Scotland who had been settled there during the plantation of Ulster. Derry’s walls were never breached, not even when James II’s soldiers laid siege to Derry in the second year of the War of the League of Augsburg. The loyal order of the Apprentice Boys, which had its hall inside the old city, continued to mark this epic with annual commemorations, remembering both triumph and treachery.14 At the end of the eighteenth century, the Catholic population outside the walls in what became the Bogside area, which had been reclaimed from the River Foyle, began to grow rapidly – and from 1920 to 1923 Derry was run by a nationalist and Sinn Féin council. When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began its offensive, the resulting loyalist backlash initiated a cycle of reprisals which left the city ravaged by fire and eighteen people dead in just a single week during the summer of 1920. Afterwards, however, Derry’s Irish Revolution was comparatively peaceful, as local Republicans thought violence was counter-productive and headquarters wanted recruits to be sent south to fight.15 Still, the new Northern Irish Government decided to abolish proportional representation and Derry duly returned a Unionist council again. As late as the mid-1930s, Stormont believed that ‘the fate of [the] constitution was on a knife edge’ and that it was therefore ‘defensible’ to gerrymander Derry ‘on the basis that the safety of the state is the supreme law’. In a ‘Nationalist city’, a ‘Unionist majority [was] secured by a manipulation of ward boundaries, for the sole purpose of retaining … control’.16 The gerrymander was copper-fastened by the property franchise, which put rateable values above population sizes and which deprived more Catholics than Protestants of the vote.17 In 1958, the Unionist Chief Whip cautioned party grandees that ‘if we were to allow universal suffrage’, ‘we may lose Derry’.18 Partition deformed the city in another way: Donegal, which had once been inside its hinterland, was now part of a different state and the local economy was hit by the loss. War and welfare eventually pulled the city out of the slump. On the slopes of the Creggan, which lay above the cemetery, a vast public housing estate was built in the post-war years – and on these foundations were being built dreams of indoor toilets and bathrooms.19 Some of the mothers had not waited for the state to solve Derry’s chronic housing problems and were living with their families in huts that had been put up for the American naval personnel stationed in the north east of Ireland during the Second World War. (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces posted to Derry were fighting the Cold War from new bases.) The Deerys were among the first squatters in Springtown Camp.20
Although desperation had pushed them to go outside the law, most of the Springtown squatters, Protestant and Catholic, had wanted to remain respectable. So, they worked hard to transform temporary barracks into permanent family homes and they were also happy for Londonderry Corporation to take over the management of the site and charge them rent.21 However, despite all that was achieved through self-help and pressurizing the authorities into action, Springtown was still a dangerous, depressing and disease-ridden place for the hundreds of people who lived there. Many residents, including Deery, chose to emigrate rather than suffer through another winter waiting for the council to give them a decent house – in a ward where their vote would not wreck the gerrymander.22 During the winter, families had, as one father put it, to risk ‘fire or freeze’, and in November 1959 an oil heater set fire to one of the huts and five children almost died. This was the spark that began an eight-year campaign to get homes for the remaining residents.23
On a march through the city in January 1963, one of the placards carried the slogan ‘Springtown – Derry’s Little Rock’.24 Comparing their plight to that of African Americans in Arkansas framed the Springtown struggle as a moral one conducted within the system. But, the two movements were linked by more than a metaphor. The protests of poor African American and Irish Catholic women were politicizing their identities as mothers and wives who were working for their homes, families and communities.25 The Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) in the United States referred to these local leaders as ‘mamas’. ‘There is always a “mama”,’ explained a SNCC activist in 1962, ‘usually a militant woman in the community, outspoken, understanding and willing to catch hell.’26 When Springtown’s ‘mammies’, led by Sadie Campbell, opened the campaign in November 1959 by occupying the council chamber, they stressed that they were there to demand their citizenship rights on behalf of their husbands, some of whom had served in the army, and of their young children.27 The respectability that they had battled so hard to hold onto in the camp was now another weapon in their hands. Respectability was a tactic that had long been used by American ‘mamas’, too. Racists defended segregation by portraying blacks as naturally lazy, ignorant and irresponsible. So, civil rights activists behaved in accordance with prevailing middle-class standards of respectability and thus turned this stereotype back on the segregationists; they made themselves seem deserving of full citizenship and their opponents appear as little more than animals.28 In Northern Ireland, as a prominent Tyrone Unionist told the party leadership in 1950, the authorities often assumed that ‘Respectable families’ were ‘PROTESTANT FAMILIES!’29 The Springtown ‘mammies’ employed respectability to overcome these sectarian and class prejudices. It helped them prove that they were not to blame for their problems and that the authorities were failing in their moral duties under the welfare state.30 (The welfare state was neither an historical inevitability nor a monolith, but rather a contingent and hybrid achievement – one that gave the ‘mammies’ new opportunities and new objectives.)31 The press photographs taken at the October 1960 occupation show that the protesters were smartly dressed, their faces were made up and their hair was in a permanent wave.32 The last was the ultimate symbol of post-war respectability, marking women out from those at the very bottom of society who had unkempt greasy hair.33 The ‘mammies’ fighting the Springtown campaign were to prove a greater threat to Unionist power than the ‘boys’ fighting the IRA’s Border Campaign.
That threat, though, should not be exaggerated nor should it be simplified. The Springtown campaign did prefigure some of the tactics that would be used at the end of the 1960s, yet it followed established political practices as well. The Springtown protesters occupied the council chamber, disrupted the corporation’s meetings, squatted in houses, staged marches that ignored the city’s sectarian geography and courted the media; they also asked their local MP to help, wrote to the Prime Minister, organized petitions, sent delegations to the authorities and appealed to the courts.34 The campaign did open with young, working-class women entering the political sphere, yet it closed with middle-aged, middle-class men cutting a deal. The Springtown Camp Housing Committee was all male, and they were negotiating with men in the corporation, Londonderry Rural District Council, the local business community and the Northern Irish Government.35 The campaign did show up the failings of Unionists and Nationalists, yet it demonstrated how flexible and effective they could be, too.36 Nationalist politicians gave constructive support to the campaign from the first protest and Unionist councillors and ministers re-housed hundreds of families and turned the empty site into an industrial estate.37 A range of strategies – direct action, self help and parliamentary politics – had together solved the immediate problem of Springtown Camp. That said, this approach was not capable of transforming Derry’s political injustices: Stormont and its subordinate councils were providing houses and jobs to retain Unionist control.
IRISH ACTION
With the Second World War giving way to struggles to build a ‘New Jerusalem’ and to break the old colonial system, Eddie McAteer was elected to Stormont hopeful that Irish self-determination could finally be respected. He pushed out time-serving hacks within the Nationalist Party and led into office a younger political generation who wanted to pursue the interests of their constituents with greater energy.38 However, with the return of cold wars, international and Irish, McAteer wondered whether there were roads, other than those marked constitutional and physical force, for the nationalist people to advance down. In the pamphlet Irish Action, published in 1948, McAteer invoked ‘the mighty spirit of the late Mahatma [i.e. Mohandas Gandhi]’, who had ‘pointed a third road’, that of ‘non-co-operation, no violence [sic]’.39 A decade later, as another political generation stepped into the public sphere, self-help was mapped out by some as the road to take. When the first Credit Union branch was formed in Derry, the treasurer wrote an article about how ‘the spirit which brings men together to co-operate’ should be ‘brought to bear on…problems at the local level’, so as to ‘lead to…gradual growth and prosperity’.40 ‘If any community needs self-help,’ he later observed, ‘it is this one’.41 In Derry before October 1968, direct action and self-help played key roles in reshaping the city – within, of course, the limits set by Unionist control.
Questions about the origins of the direct-action and self-help traditions are unanswerable and distracting (as such questions so often are).42 This section will instead consider early attempts in the post-war years to adapt these indigenous traditions to transnational trends and for changed local circumstances. With Irish Action, for instance, McAteer was recognizing that Gandhi had forged a new weapon (one that had helped end British rule) and that the welfare state had created new vulnerabilities. ‘If the British Government’s only answer to our pleadings is that the problem is not urgent,’ he argued, ‘then let us make it urgent!’ Non-violence is not about petitioning the powerful, it is itself a distinct form of power.43 McAteer laid out the methods he thought would make the problem urgent, would make the ‘local misgovernment’ practised by Unionists ‘impossible’. These ranged from ‘acting stupid’ when dealing with officials to holding back taxes and occupying public buildings.44 McAteer himself refused to pay his rates, which led to a court case in 1951. The following year, he tried to force his way onto the Mayor of Derry’s chair, a gesture which symbolized that power in the city rightly lay with nationalists.45 But, McAteer seemed to be the only one taking part in his campaign. Among the millions of other Irish nationalists, it was treated with indifference and, in some cases, outright hostility; as early as January 1949 the Irish Times commented: ‘McAteer’s formula can only lead to disaster’.46 There were flaws in the formula, not least of which were McAteer’s beliefs that ‘organisation has distinct disadvantages’ and that ‘[e]ach individual must constitute a complete action cell’; when, in fact, the success of a non-violent campaign depends heavily upon numbers and discipline.47 The ‘science of non-violence’, to use Gandhi’s phrase, would be experimented with again and again in Derry before October 1968.48
McAteer’s experiences were not unique. Unearthing an idea that was rooted in the history and culture of India and transplanting it to foreign soil was far from easy, and many times the seed of the idea failed to bloom around the world.49 Pacifists and civil rights activists in the United States were among those who admired Gandhi’s ‘soul force’ and were ploughing on with efforts to grow non-violent movements. Indeed, by the second half of the 1950s, as the Springtown campaign showed, the variety of non-violent direct action that people were trying to introduce to Derry was American rather than Asian. As early as the inter-war years, the radical theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who sympathized with the black struggle and would later influence Martin Luther King’s thinking, had seen that it would be ‘hopeless’ to expect racial equality to come by ‘trusting in the moral sense of the white race’ or through ‘violent revolution’. He, too, believed that the way ahead was instead along Gandhi’s third road; ‘non-violence’, claimed Niebuhr, ‘is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority’.50 Although Gandhi maintained that the object of non-violent struggle was to convert rather than coerce the opponent, his civilized form of warfare had not just relied upon suffering love.51 Niebuhr noted that ‘political realism [had] qualified religious idealism’ and that Gandhi’s campaigns did ‘coerce and destroy’. Economic boycotts, the refusal to use courts and schools, the illegal production of salt and tax strikes compelled the British Viceroy to act – to crack down with violence or to start up negotiations. Non-violence was therefore best understood as a ‘type of coercion’. But, where violence would push the sides to a conflict increasingly apart, non-violence would keep open the lines of communication and the chance of a settlement. Niebuhr also drew attention to how using non-violence would further weaken an opponent by ‘rob[bing] [him] of the moral conceit by which he identifies his interests with the peace and order of society’. The authorities and their apologists might still try to brand the protesters as terrorists, traitors and criminals, yet neutral elements both inside and outside the dominant group would most likely see through these underhand tactics. Non-violence would help win widespread support at home and abroad, neutralize the security forces and bring about defections. Niebuhr predicted that the ‘emancipation of the Negro race in America probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy’; he was right.52 However, it took years to perfect the formula. Non-violence did not come naturally to African Americans anymore than it had to Indians or would to Derry’s Catholics; non-violence had to be taught and enforced, and that required institutions and organization. So, over three decades were to pass between the theologian making his prophesy and King using ‘a Niebuhrian stratagem of power’ to win the great non-violent victories for civil rights at Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, in 1963 and 1965.53
With the IRA coming to terms with defeat in the early 1960s, these victories did not go unnoticed; some leading Republicans began to argue that military action alone would not succeed and that direct action, among other strategies, should also be tried.54 Once again, Irish traditions and foreign fashions were woven together and fitted to the local situation. In January 1964, a new IRA volunteer, Eamon Melaugh, took out an advertisement in the Derry Journal which asked, ‘are you concerned about unemployment, emigration?’55 Melaugh wished to ‘contact men of action prepared to do something concrete about these social evils’. Just ten people answered his call – and eight of them had jobs. ‘It seems incredible that out of a total of 2,740 unemployed men only two should inquire about my advertisement’, he complained to the Derry Journal six months later. Melaugh, though, still wanted to take Derry’s unemployed out of ‘apathy’ and into jobs, and he still believed that ‘Direct action must be taken’.56 At the start of 1965, Melaugh finally succeeded in forming the Derry Unemployed Action Committee (DUAC); but he continued to have problems finding men of action.57 The first protests were therefore more of a guerrilla marketing campaign than a campaign to disrupt local government so much that their opponents would be forced to negotiate a settlement. When Londonderry Corporation met in January 1965, Melaugh led in the DUAC and told the ‘bigots’ ‘We do not intend to allow the business of this meeting to go on’. He made the front page of the Derry Journal.58 From the thirty who had attended the inaugural meeting, the DUAC’s membership was grown over a number of weeks through meetings and marches until there were enough people to bring traffic to a halt around the Guildhall during a visit by the Minister of Commerce.59 This early momentum was not sustained, however, and the DUAC’s activities were limited to greeting politicians with pickets or being greeted by them at Stormont and Westminster.60 Ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, the IRA volunteers parked this protest vehicle – but they remained on what one of them had described as the ‘road’ of ‘action, passive resistance and self-help’.61
The self-help tradition in Derry was closely connected with the Catholic Church. Rejected by Belfast, London and Dublin at the close of the Irish revolution, Northern Catholics were given a home by Rome: a Catholic counter-society within the new Protestant state. There were Catholic schools, hospitals and voter registration associations – all of which depended upon the laity giving both their money and their time.62 When Derrymen tried to reinvigorate their city’s self-help tradition, the foreign model that inspired them was also Catholic. The Credit Union movement, as the Derry branch’s treasurer, John Hume, explained in the press, was ‘Catholic in origin’ and had been ‘endorsed down the years by many eminent Church leaders’.63 Hume himself was a product of the Catholic counter-society and, in turn, felt a responsibility to this society; yet, he was a beneficiary of the welfare state, too, and an example of what could and could not be achieved under Stormont. The 1947 Education Act as well as the Catholic Church had provided the Bogside boy with a route – via St Columb’s College and Maynooth – out of poverty and into the professions. The Credit Union’s ‘practical Christianity’ now offered the chance of a route out for the community as a whole. Within eight years, the Derry branch had attracted around 6,200 members, loaned out over £1,000,000 and moved into a ‘splendid new £26,000 headquarters’.64 Such was the extent of this achievement that Hume advanced from a branch treasurer through the Northern chapter and the all-Ireland league to become a director on the world governing body.65 The local was tied to the global.
‘The movement creates self-help,’ Hume told the Chamber of Commerce in October 1966, ‘out of which will rise other things.’66 That summer, the Derry Housing Association, which had been founded by Father Anthony Mulvey and was chaired by Hume, had bought a two-and-a-half acre site at the edge of the city on which it was putting up thirty-two semi-detached houses. By the start of 1967, Hume was telling the first annual general meeting that the ‘only final answer’ was the ‘provision of homes on a large scale and at speed’.67 The help in reaching this ambitious goal, though, was not only going to come from within the community itself. When the association drew up plans to build 211 houses, the authorities agreed a loan of £800,000 to pay for the entire cost of the project.68 The housing associations created in Northern Ireland during the 1960s essentially owed their existence to the post-war expansion of the state. As Hume admitted, they had received ‘endorsement and excellent assistance from the Ministry of Development’.69 The Catholic counter-society in Derry was working with the Protestant state; social teaching which had been developed in opposition to socialism was being used by Hume and Mulvey in conjunction with collectivist legislation. Indeed, as early as 1947, the Catholic Church had set up a social services centre, funded by collections, to help their flock receive the benefits owed to them by the welfare state.70 The people of Derry were travelling down roads that merged and parted in ways that may have seemed surprising, but the debates over tactics and strategies were about what practical steps to take next rather than about academic points of interest. Hume’s attempts to guide both communities along twisting paths in 1965 led them to lose what they had set out to find and instead put them, by chance, on the road to what a Nationalist councillor described as the ‘prospect of a revitalised city’.71
THE WEST’S ASLEEP
In the autumn of 1958, the Unionist MP for the City of Londonderry wrote to the Northern Irish Prime Minister about the likelihood of more factories coming to his constituency. To Viscount Brooke-borough’s dismay, Teddy Jones was lobbying against this happening. ‘No government’, Brookeborough confided to his diary, ‘can stand idly by and allow possible industries not to develop’.72 This nonetheless was the approach that he and his successor, Terence O’Neill, generally ended up taking. From the late 1950s onwards, Londonderry Unionists, who saw ‘industrial expansion in Ulster [as] a most dangerous thing’, were allowed to let their city gradually die rather than risk losing control of it.73 With the staple industries of shipbuilding and linen in long-term decline and the major employer, Birmingham Sound Reproducers, laying off workers, the number of people signing on was to pass over 5,000 in the first months of 1967.74 But, this meant that Catholic emigration was far outstripping immigration and that the gerrymander was protected. Catholics were also being pushed out of Derry by the chronic housing shortage. In 1963, for example, thirty-three families moved into new homes provided by the corporation and ten times that figure put in fresh applications.75 The Northern Ireland Housing Trust (NIHT) – the public body charged with supplementing private and local authority house building – had made up for some of the corporation’s failings; the Unionist council, though, restricted most of the NIHT’s activities to the overwhelmingly Catholic South Ward, as the trust did not allocate tenancies on a directly sectarian basis.76 So, by 1966, the NIHT was giving notice that there was ‘virtually no land left for housing within the city boundary’.77 The corporation had helped make Derry one of the most overcrowded cities in the whole of Britain and Ireland and had stranded hundreds of families on the waiting list for public housing.78 But, this meant that the North and Waterside wards kept their Protestant majorities and that the gerrymander was protected. Stormont only abandoned its malign neglect when the local Unionists came close to losing control of Derry in 1965, during a crisis which was sparked by British officials deciding that the second city should not get the second university and which saw Jones fighting for the best interests of all his constituents.
The Lockwood Committee, which was charged by the new O’Neill Government with making recommendations about higher education, was led by its British members.79 They followed long-standing British practices for selecting a location for a new university, which was to leave the process mired in the bog of Northern Irish politics. The authorities in Coleraine, a solidly Unionist town in County Londonderry, had noticed that the new universities of Sussex and Essex had been built near to the south coast because of the availability of seaside lodgings.80 Putting up students in boarding houses cost much less than providing them with halls of residence. Coleraine’s bid as a result focused on how close it was to the resort towns of Portrush and Portstewart. The Derry bodies, in contrast, had not done such thorough research; so, the city’s Magee University College was presented as an asset rather than a liability. The committee recognized Magee for what it was: a college that had a Byzantine system of administration, incompetent staff and bad relations with Queen’s University Belfast. Magee could not be used as a nucleus for the second university. The committee therefore dealt Derry a double blow by advising the government at the end of 1964 to choose Coleraine and to close Magee.81 O’Neill, who had been part of the 1949 enquiry into the college’s affairs and still recalled his bruising encounters with the Magee lobby, had no intention of agreeing to this second recommendation. Jones concurred with his Prime Minister that a future had to be found for Magee. Working closely with the Minister of Education, he started to broker a settlement that was acceptable to Magee’s trustees and faculty.82 Admittedly, when other figures in the local party came to Stormont on 19 February 1965, they again brought up concerns to do with how industrial development would make it difficult to ‘retain our position’ – yet, they also begged O’Neill to give Magee one of the new university’s departments.83 The government, however, was more impressed by the previous day’s visitors from Derry: a motorcade made up of about 2,000 vehicles that had carried ‘all creeds and classes and all shades of political opinion’ to the seat of power as a protest against Lockwood preferring Coleraine to their city.84 ‘What happens there is my problem,’ Jones had told the Cabinet Secretary two weeks before the demonstration, ‘but only to some extent because … such an infection could well spread’.85 Derry was ‘in revolt’ and was now Stormont’s problem.86
The University for Derry Committee had been formed by a group of ‘business and professional men’, Protestants and Catholics, in January 1965 after news about the Lockwood report leaked out to Magee’s trustees.87 Hume was chosen to front the campaign; he did not belong to any political party, his Credit Union work had made him a community leader and he was young enough not to have any serious enemies. Derry’s four main Churches were brought on board and issued a joint statement welcoming the ‘beginning [of] a period of greater co-operation among all the citizens for the … development of their city’.88 To show that there was also ‘no suggestion of any division of opinion in our ranks by reason of differing political views’, Hume chaired a meeting in the Guildhall at which Nationalist, Liberal and Labour MPs as well as the Unionist Mayor, Albert Anderson, spoke.89 The drive to unite Derry behind the campaign accelerated with the motorcade and with the plan to bring the city to a ‘standstill’.90 ‘Clergy of all denominations’, purred the Derry Journal, ‘joined with business and professional men, factory workers, dockers, school teachers and students in a motorcade which varied from the stately limousine to furniture vans, coal lorries and bread vans’. They left behind a city where ‘shops, schools and public houses [were] closed’ and ‘most traffic [was] stopped’. When the motorcade arrived, Hume stood on the steps of Stormont with the leaders of Nationalism and Unionism in Derry by his side and with thousands of citizens at his back.91
What worried Jones was not so much the civic unity as the unionist divisions.92 The president of the Rotary Club, a prominent member of the chamber of commerce and the city solicitor were on the committee; so, not everyone in the local elite was prepared to keep placing control above development.93 Inside the parliamentary party, there were backbenchers who were also unhappy that the west of the province was losing out on investment. For other MPs, those who resented how O’Neill was taking power to the centre and taking the hand of Irish nationalism, the second university was just another issue on which they could attack their leader.94 Although the government made the vote on the Lockwood Report into a vote of confidence, four Unionist backbenchers sided with the opposition or abstained.95 One of the rebels, Robert Nixon, would later whisper to the press that ‘nameless, faceless men’ in the local party had conspired to stop the new university being built in a ‘Papist city’.96 But, as the Derry Journal pointed out, ‘apart from the colourful touch which Dr Nixon gave to them, the … same allegations have been going the rounds in the city for a considerable time’.97 In February 1964, for instance, the newspaper had claimed that there was a ‘deep political motive’ behind ‘the grandiose project of a brand new city in North Armagh – planted … where there is the most solid support for the Unionist Government’.98 These suspicions were seemingly confirmed when the Englishman heading up the project resigned on the grounds that Craigavon was ‘basically unwise’ and that Derry should have been developed into ‘the city in the playground’ instead.99 For the Derry Journal, this was ‘both an indictment of and a challenge to [the] glaring indifference to the future of Derry’ shown by ‘the kept Corporation’.100 The controversy over the new university caused this infection to spread. By the end of March 1965, the Londonderry Sentinel was reporting that the ‘cries that the West is being isolated are just as strong from the Government’s supporters as from its enemies’.101 Jones sent a copy of the newspaper to the cabinet office so Stormont could ‘see how the wind blows’: ‘The Editor, as the Prime Minister knows, is a member of the Council of the Londonderry and Foyle Unionist Association, no less’ and he ‘is … urg[ing] that the Unionist Party should select “new blood” – candidates who will oppose Government policy’.102 While Jones was not thrown aside by the local association, he nonetheless faced a serious challenge from the Liberal Claude Wilton in the November 1965 elections. Hume, who was serving as Wilton’s election agent, told a rally that the origin of the ‘plan’ to ‘destroy Derry’ could be traced to ‘fourteen years ago when the Unionist Party met to select … Jones’.103 The Unionists came away from the election with a victory that felt more like a defeat, as Jones’s majority was cut to only 1,014 and he left the count to be greeted by shouts of ‘Lundy’, the name of the man who was remembered as the traitor of the 1689 siege.104 Three centuries later, a sizeable number of Protestants saw Derry beset by socio-economic forces and Jones as someone who was selling out its future.
As Protestants were fighting each other behind the old walls on that November night, resources were already starting to flow towards Derry to relieve this new siege.105 A month before, the Minister of Development, Bill Craig, had informed the corporation that he was ‘anxious for the creation of a “masterplan” for the development of the north west’ and that he intended to ‘get rid of the idea that the Government … is neglecting Derry’.106 Professor Tom Wilson’s 1965 economic programme for Northern Ireland, which was published at a time when over 400 urban renewal schemes were underway across the United Kingdom, had also concluded that ‘a development plan [for Derry] is needed, and should be put in hand’; but, the civil service had cautioned that ‘the attitude of the City [i.e. the corporation] to modern planning [is] so completely obstructive that one cannot conscientiously advise this course at present’.107 The crisis, however, had made the problem urgent and had forced Stormont to change its position. O’Neillism was now going to be extended to the western borders: jobs and houses would be provided, with the short-term aim of buying off discontent and with the ultimate goal of helping Irish nationalism and the coarser aspects of unionism to wither away.108 Out of office, O’Neill put this latter idea in a particularly patronizing way when he explained to a journalist that ‘cars and television sets’ would lead ‘Roman Catholics’ to ‘live like Protestants’.109 Nonetheless, northern Europe’s ruling classes had long believed in ‘the civilizing effect of things’ – that things would guide the poor away from ‘superstition and sloth’ towards a (Protestant) regime of ‘domestic economy and self-improvement’.110 Border Unionists, in contrast, remained ‘sure that the Nationalists here with us who would prefer the butter on their bread in this world are very few compared to those who would prefer it in the next’.111 The clash over the different approaches to retaining control was at its most raw when the leading Londonderry Unionist, Gerald Glover, met Junior Development Minister Brian McConnell at the end of 1966 to discuss housing. Glover was fixated upon holding on to a rural district council ward, paranoid about what the NIHT was doing, doubtful that any houses were needed at all and unwilling to address the wider questions. ‘What really mattered,’ McConnell countered, ‘was the preservation of Londonderry itself.’ The Minister insisted that at least 7,000 new homes were on the way over the next fifteen years and that the ‘sensible thing appeared to be that we should build up our majority in electoral divisions that we were likely to win rather than create large minorities in ones that we were going to lose’. The former Mayor was reminded that Craig had ‘asked for an all-over plan from the Londonderry Unionists but this had never been received’ – and now it was too late. Despite threatening to walk out, Glover eventually accepted that Stormont was in control.112
The Belfast-based James Munce Partnership, which had been awarded the contract to produce the area plan, also had to put up with the tantrums of Londonderry’s grandees. When the planners were introduced to the steering committee in February 1966, Anderson reproached them for trying to involve the wider public in the process and claimed that ‘WE are the people’. While the Unionists on the steering committee were working to hold the planners back, the Nationalist councillors were working with them to push things forward. James Doherty, McAteer’s closest political ally, believed that here was his city’s last, best hope and he therefore devoted himself to the project.113 His faith was rewarded. At the launch of the approved plan in March 1968, Doherty praised ‘this vital programme’, especially the ‘scientific analysis of our besetting problems of employment and housing’.114 He had embraced the language of post-war British planning, which spoke of ‘seemingly logical and unambiguous solutions to previously intractable urban problems’; Derry had become a problem to be solved rather than a place of history, memory and identity.115 The plan promised an ‘expanded Londonderry Urban Area … at the heart of a Crescent of population growth and industrial expansion’ that was to be linked up to the ‘Belfast Region’ by ‘improved road communications’. Vacant factories were to be used again, existing businesses were to recruit more workers, new industrial estates were to be occupied – and, as result, ‘the minimum manufacturing employment needs of the Area will be met’.116 Just over a year before the launch, Glover had told McConnell that the ‘figure of 7,000 houses by 1981 was quite fanciful and unrealistic’, but the plan now set a ‘conservative’ target of 9,600 new homes.117 Within the expanded urban area, a population of close to 100,000 were going to live, work and play (the plan provided for new restaurants and cafes, more parkland, a regional sports complex and a marina on the Foyle) in a city that was ‘landscaped’ and ‘open’. The old walls were to be ‘cleared of adjacent buildings’ and ‘floodlit’; the socio-economic forces that had been kept at bay were to be welcomed by them into a city that nonetheless was to remain Unionist.118
The Londonderry Area Plan was a major victory in the city’s struggle against poverty. However, while the plan was being given atriumphant reception in London’s Guildhall, the man who had led the campaign that had manoeuvred Stormont into changing its strategy was fighting against this very settlement. Hume’s Housing Association had appealed against the corporation refusing planning permission for a residential development on a site that the James Munce Partnership had instead zoned for industry. In his evidence at the hearing, Hume maintained that the housing situation was not ‘a problem’ but rather ‘an emergency that requires immediate attention’; how much longer would the ‘29 families where husband and wife lived apart, usually with their parents, their children divided between them or, in a few cases, in children’s homes’ be asked to wait?119
This was a question that divided those people in Derry who were opposed to Unionism. After Doherty had voted to turn down Hume’s application, the Nationalist councillor had used a speech in Manchester to argue that the ‘present position in [the] city was that development meant loss of Unionist power – and power means everything’.120 The Derry Journal, which usually backed the party line, had found this reasoning ‘unconvincing’: ‘The provision of no less than 700 homes is too substantial a measure of relief in such an acute housing situation to be turned down in favour of a proposed, but still … distant future’.121 This split over whether to be patient with the plan or to act immediately drained away yet more of the momentum that had built up behind Hume during the early protests over the second university. The urgency that had existed in February 1965 had faded. Starting with Magee’s trustees and faculty, the government had succeeded in buying off large parts of the uneasy coalition put together by the University for Derry Committee.122 Hume, too, had unwittingly played a role brought Derry to a standstill and had pushed Stormont into getting involved. Although the campaign had continued even after MPs had voted for Coleraine, O’Neill had been left unmoved by Hume’s speeches and by a petition calling for an inquiry into Nixon’s accusations.123 The tight City election and the disturbances following the count had been more of a concern to Stormont, yet they were still just weak echoes of what had happened at the beginning of 1965.124 In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King explained that: ‘The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation’.125 The University for Derry Committee had almost accidentally achieved this goal, if only for a brief moment; the Republican and Labour lefts now consciously set out to find the formula for non-violence that would send the city into sustained disorder.126
WHAT’S LEFT
Another McCafferty story: it is one that has been misremembered, yet in such a way as to lend a suitably cinematic quality to her introduction to the men and women who transformed her life and her city. ‘One gloomy autumn afternoon [in 1967]’, she begins, ‘Eamonn McCann came down the street, bursting with energy…I complained of boredom. Why didn’t I come up to the Londonderry Labour Party headquarters that night and help in the forthcoming general election campaign? he asked.’127 In fact, McCann was in London during 1967, the next election in Derry was a May 1968 by-election and McCafferty was away for almost the whole of that spring.128 While these details had faded, certain memories of McCafferty’s old comrades continued to blaze bright: Cathy Harkin was ‘separated from her violent husband’, ‘rearing a son’ and believed that ‘one day we would run Derry’; Dermie McClenaghan ‘loved Frank Sinatra’, ‘worried about his family’ and lived near a ‘corner bookies’ on which someone had graffitied ‘We want better odds’; Ivan Cooper, ‘the only Protestant’, ‘managed [a] factory’ and ‘thought life was a breeze’. But, they were all outshone by McCann, with his ‘Elvis sideboards’, ‘brilliant orator[y]’ and ‘breathtaking’ good looks.129
Other Derry radicals, such as McClenaghan and Melaugh, also remember how McCann ‘brought a lot of energy’ and ‘a lot of positive ideas’ back with him from London in the spring of 1968.130 McCann himself recalled coming home convinced that he ‘could sweep up the local, parochial politics…by introducing an international dimension’.131 ‘Youthful dissidence’ was ‘a world-wide phenomenon’, the Central Intelligence Agency told President Lyndon Johnson in September 1968: ‘Because of the revolution in communications, the ease of travel and the evolution of society everywhere’.132 The State Department agreed that the upheavals were ‘truly international’, that young people facing similar political problems were looking to their contemporaries in foreign countries for help solving them.133 McCann, thinking back forty years on, linked ‘direct action’ with this ‘wider perspective’: ‘direct action was … the hallmark of the radical movement …in London and across the world’, the ‘tactic of the civil rights movement [and] of the anti-Vietnam war movement’.134 (Although there is, of course, an element of recasted memories here, McCann has consistently taken this line over the decades.) The ‘global Sixties’ was an external shock to the local political system.
During the second half of the 1960s, the civil rights and anti-war movements radicalized non-violence and helped build up links between activists around the world. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael, the then chair of SNCC, began calling for ‘black power’ – which came to stand for armed self-defence, for political and cultural self-determination and for international solidarity. This did not, though, mark the end of the civil rights movement after a decade of successes. Black power grew out of the long-standing black self-help tradition and of the general black opposition to imperialism.135 These were roots that black power shared with the civil rights movement, too, and both sets of activists worked together to transform citizenship and democracy in America.136 Carmichael’s ambitions also went beyond the United States, leading him to embark upon a tour of foreign countries throughout 1967 that was to bring him to London in July for the Dialectics of Liberation Congress.137 The head of its planning committee wanted this event to bring together ‘groups [from] all over the world [that] are doing much the same’ and to ‘get this transnational network established’.138 One of the connections made was between Carmichael and McCann.139 When Carmichael addressed the congress, he declared that black militants were ‘going to extend our fight internationally and hook up with the Third World [because] the fight must come from the Third World’.140 A few months later, McCann’s Irish Militant newspaper, which ‘carried’ the ‘banner’ of the ‘Fourth International’, urged its readers to ‘do what the Afro-Americans are doing’.141
An African-American radical was also among the star performers at another European congress which had been organized to ‘commence the co-ordinated battle against imperialism’: the International Vietnam Congress held in West Berlin during February 1968.142 Although she did not mention his name in her article, Ulrike Meinhof, who was on a winding road from pacifism to armed struggle herself, quoted him urging the packed hall to move from ‘protest to resistance’.143 The West German New Left had been taking inspiration from African Americans since the start of the decade; exchange students had returned home after participating in civil rights campaigns as evangelists for non-violent direct action.144 With the escalation of both police brutality and the Vietnam War, however, radicals were now borrowing and adapting the black power narrative and its fantastic promise of global revolution. As one of them summarized it, ‘the intelligentsia … must unite with the suffering masses of the Third World and themselves employ illegal, direct action against the state apparatus to weaken the imperialist powers’.145 Black power – especially the strand that posed as urban guerrillas fighting a national liberation struggle in America’s ghettos – served as a stepping stone between very different worlds and helped make the leap of imagination taken by the New Left appear more plausible.
Foreign delegations came away from the International Vietnam Congress eager to put into practice what they had seen and heard in West Berlin.146 French militants, for example, took illegal, direct action against the Paris offices of American Express by smashing its windows in March 1968. A number of student radicals from the Nanterre campus were arrested and this, in turn, led to rival leftist groups coming together to invade the administration building.147 Like their comrades at West Berlin’s Free University, the Nanterre activists disrupted classes, occupied buildings, staged pickets, showed films on Cuba and China, went on marches, insulted staff and their fellow students, covered walls in political and obscene graffiti and held seemingly endless meetings.148 They also turned non-violence into a euphemism. The March occupation caused 15,000 francs’ worth of property damage; the Enragés in particular were referencing, not King or even SNCC, but the Watts rioters, who had set their black Los Angeles ghetto ablaze in August 1965.149 The French philosopher Raymond Aron described these tactics as ‘non-violent violence’.150
Britain’s Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), with which McCann was heavily involved, had also sent a delegation to West Berlin, and they had asked their German hosts to act as movement consultants.151 While London’s demonstrations may not have matched the militancy of those taking place on the continent, British-based Trotskyites were nonetheless part of the global trend.152 In the autumn of 1967, ahead of the March on the Pentagon and the solidarity marches around the world, the Irish Militant argued that one of the ‘duties to Vietnam’ owed by ‘socialists in Western Europe’ was to provide a ‘diversion of attention’. ‘It [i.e. the day of marches] will be the first occasion that the imperialists have been confronted in all countries of the world at the same time’.153 Activists in London confronted the police outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, which left thirty-nine officers injured and fifty-three people in the cells; the VSC was pleased with these results and planned to return in greater numbers the following spring. Among the groups brought on board by the VSC to help organize the first Grosvenor Square march was the Stop-it Committee, whose chair had collected Carmichael at Heathrow airport back in July 1967.154 On 4 December 1967, the committee held a meeting at Conway Hall to announce that the anti-war movement had reached ‘a new stage – resistance’: ‘Because the American Government has so callously ignored marches, protests and reasoned dissent on an international … level, more extreme forms of action are necessary’. Three weeks before the march, in late February 1968, the Metropolitan Police Special Branch was expecting it to be ‘violent, paralleling recent demonstrations on the continent’.155 It was and it did. The Guardian concluded that ‘the demonstrators seemed determined to stay until they had provoked a violent response of some sort from the police, and this intention became paramount once they entered Grosvenor Square’.156 Whitehall was convinced that a ‘disciplined gang’ from West Germany – ‘acknowledged experts in methods of riot against police’ – had played a leading role in this confrontation.157 Some qualifications need to be made here: newspapers were framing marches as law-and-order issues and so were panicking about violence and praising the police; officials were predisposed to find evidence of subversion; leftists were making exaggerated claims to pull in the media and push the authorities into overreacting.158 Still, as a Special Branch report from September 1968 noted, there had been a ‘radical change over the last few years … from orderly, peaceful, co-operative meetings and processions to passive resistance and “sit downs” and now to active confrontation’.159
McCann returned to Derry after the first Grosvenor Square march.160 Whenever McCann was asked to remember the civil rights era during the lead up to the fortieth-anniversary commemorations, he was keen to stress this hostility to his new strategy and to its global frame of reference.161 His ‘memory of it’ was that ‘the moderates’ ‘resented the Socialist element … importing other experiences and other ideas’.162 McCann could have drawn a dividing line between the Old and New Lefts, too. C. Desmond Greaves, the chief of the London-based Connolly Association and a veteran British Communist, had identified civil rights as Unionism’s weak spot back in 1955; he had also taken the orthodox position that a movement should be patiently built up from within Ireland’s Labour parties and trade unions.163 Although the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), which was founded in Belfast at the start of 1967, fell short of Greaves’s original vision (the Labour movement was underrepresented, other opposition groups were overrepresented), a close comrade, Betty Sinclair, came to head up the committee. She resisted attempts to take politics on to the streets and then, having lost the internal debate, restricted the protests that did take place.164 As a young Communist in the inter-war years, Sinclair had witnessed what had happened when the Marxist Revolutionary Workers’ Group had gone on to the streets: the 1935 Orange marching season in Belfast had brought communal violence and the decline of Sinclair’s party.165 This fear of sectarian confrontation was shared by many within the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) as well.166 So, recalled McClenaghan, ‘when Eamonn came to Derry and joined the Labour Party he immediately, immediately caused division … just because of what he was politically’.167 By May 1968, the Derry Journal was reporting rumours that the branch was split and Anderson, the Unionist candidate in the by-election, was claiming a ‘red fringe’ had taken ‘control’.168 A new formula of non-violence was going to be trialled in Derry.
The Labour candidate, the English-born Janet Wilcock, was calling for the same far-reaching reforms as the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC), which had recently brought together left-wingers in her party and in the local Republican Club.169 Barely a month after the area plan had been launched, the DHAC burst into the Guildhall to tell Nationalists as well as Unionists that change needed to come immediately. The group’s spokesman demanded that the corporation should extend the city boundary to make more space available for new homes and should embark upon a crash house-building programme.170 The novelty of direct action attracted the attention of the local media, with this disruption of the March meeting of the council making the front page of the Derry Journal.171 The radicals returned the following month, yet this time the report was tucked away in the inside pages.172 During June 1968, the DHAC succeeded in getting back into the headlines by blocking the main road through the Bogside for three hours with a caravan that had been home to a young family of four for three years. While the disorder did force the corporation to promise to take up this family’s case, the radicals nonetheless warned that there would be ‘a much bigger demonstration’, ‘if nothing materialised by Saturday next’.173 This was an unrealistic deadline, and so, a week later, the DHAC and the caravan returned.174 When a policeman asked Melaugh why he was stopping traffic, the officer was told to ‘bring this matter to Court’ – ‘then I will get the publicity I am looking for’. Wilcock was bound over to keep the peace for two years and afterwards issued a statement reaffirming the DHAC’s commitment to ‘non-violent, militant action although it be illegal’.175
Like their foreign comrades, the Derry radicals were now seeking confrontation. As McCann wrote in his 1974 memoir, ‘our conscious, if unspoken, strategy was to provoke the police into overreaction and thus spark off mass reaction against the authorities’.176 The term ‘provocation’, with its implications for the question of who was responsible for the violence of the start of the Troubles, is controversial; yet, it was also one which was often used by activists around the world in the late 1960s. For example, the leader of the Resistance, an American anti-war group, said in September 1967 that its aim was to ‘provoke confrontation’. West German leftists claimed the ‘protest violence’ of the Easter 1968 marches was a way of ‘provoking the state’ and an article in the July–August 1968 issue of the New Left Review advised student radicals to behave ‘provocatively … to the extent that they [i.e. the university authorities] need to use force’.177 What, though, did contemporaries mean when they referred to ‘provocation’ and indeed to ‘violence’? During the Birmingham campaign, King explained to ‘the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice’ that ‘we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.’178 A month after her husband was murdered, Coretta Scott King ‘remind[ed]’ Americans about this hidden violence: ‘starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence … Contempt for poverty is violence.’179 McCann wanted to reveal the violence, broadly defined, that he believed lay behind the Prime Minister’s liberal mask: ‘O’Neill talked about progress but he would go back to the old Unionist background of open suppression’.180 The radicals intended to test this hypothesis. On 5 September 1968, the DHAC informed the media that they were going to ‘fight to force the powers-that-be to act’ – to build ‘houses for the homeless or a new wing to Crumlin Road Prison’.181
Everyone in Derry, McCann acknowledged, knew that the ‘one certain way to ensure a head-on clash with the authorities was to organize a non-Unionist march through the city centre’.182 As the Derry Journal pointed out in the summer of 1968, during ‘the past twenty years several attempts have been made by the Nationalist Party … to demonstrate in … the main thoroughfares of the city. They were met by the imposition of the Special Powers Act and on two occasions police batons were out’.183 The theory was simple, but putting it into practice was not. In line with other western countries (including Britain and the Republic of Ireland), Northern Ireland had become less repressive throughout the ‘long 1960s’.184 Rome in March, West Berlin in April, Paris in May and Chicago in August – these vicious clashes were the exceptions rather than the rule in 1968. Brutal repression of demonstrations by the forces of law and order was relatively rare.185 This development had, in fact, helped to create the space for direct action to operate; the West German sociologist Jürgen Habermas argued that the leftists were ‘exploiting the unexpected latitude granted by liberal institutions’.186 So, the failure of the Derry radicals to engineer a confrontation at their first attempt was to be expected. In July 1968, the Labour and Republican left proposed to mark the centenary of the Marxist martyr James Connolly’s birth by holding a march that would pass through the city walls. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) responded by entering into a series of discussions with the organizers about finding a different, less provocative route and, after finally choosing to ban the march, by stationing only a few officers at the edge of the rally which was held instead. The leftists had cautioned that ‘If peaceful demonstrations are to be banned, can anyone be surprised if there are demonstrations in future of a non-peaceful nature?’187 However, under pressure from some of the politicians who had agreed to take part, the radicals had made a tactical retreat and had put on an event that the Derry Journal described as ‘very orderly’.188 Fionnbarra Ó Dochartaigh, an IRA volunteer who had been involved with both McCann and the Connolly Association during a brief stay in London, hinted that this would not happen again.189 ‘On future occasions,’ he told the crowd of around 600 people, ‘the question of a police ban … would be a matter for meeting in a different manner.’190
The Derry radicals were given their second chance by NICRA’s choice in August 1968 to ‘challenge … by more vigorous action than Parliamentary questions and newspaper controversy’.191 ‘[I]nspired by the Poor People’s March to Washington,’ a NICRA committee member remembered in April 1969, the ‘Association … decided to carry out a programme of marches.’192 The DHAC pledged its support to the first march from Coalisland and Dungannon and offered to transport to Tyrone anyone who wished to take part.193 Dungannon was different from Derry: NICRA had ties in this rural area and the Nationalist MP Austin Currie was working with the Brantry Republican Club in a local non-violent campaign.194 As the march was to show, they were experimenting with a more basic and less volatile formula than the second city’s non-violent activists. Indeed, without knowing it, the organizers went against all the advice that King had publicly given during the Selma marches about how to stage a successful protest. King stated that ‘the goal of the demonstration’ should be to bring about a ‘confrontation with injustice’ which would ‘reveal … the continued presence of violence’.195 Confrontation and violence, though, were not what most of the 2,000 or so people marching from Coalisland to Dungannon wanted. The first civil rights march instead resembled a traditional nationalist parade – with five bands, Nationalist MPs in the front ranks, IRA stewards and renditions of ‘The Soldier’s Song’. At the rally held afterwards, Sinclair praised the crowd for making the march a ‘peaceful one’. Currie and Gerry Fitt, the Republican Labour MP for West Belfast, gave more confrontational speeches, using sectarian insults such as ‘Orange bigots’ and ‘black bastards’, yet their actions did not match this rhetoric. Fitt claimed that he would have led the people into the police lines which were blocking them from reaching the town centre, ‘if it weren’t for the presence of women and children’.196 King, in contrast, had actually sent children into the arms of policemen, the teeth of German Shepherds, the water hoses of fireman and the cells of the local jail to save his Birmingham campaign.197 Although Republicans were more comfortable with confrontation than constitutional politicians, the stewards were still under orders to keep the crowd away from the police. A confidential document acquired by the RUC Special Branch stressed that they were to ‘march peacefully’, ‘sit down’, ‘if stopped’ and offer ‘no resistance’.198 Leftists from Derry and Belfast tried to resist by throwing ‘stones, broken placards and poles’ at officers, but, as Currie remembered, they were ‘prevented by the stewards from engaging in confrontation with the police’.199 When the marchers finally began to disperse, some of the radicals clashed with loyalist counter-demonstrators before being cleared off the streets by the RUC – who made only two arrests on the day and were made to appear the neutral guardians of law and order. The next week, St Patrick’s hall in Coalisland was filled with parishioners waiting to hear the senior curate’s verdict. The police reported that the priest ‘expressed the view that the march was a failure’ and that the ‘meeting endorsed these views’.200 As King’s ‘long years of experience’ had taught him, it was ‘ineffective’ to stage ‘token marches avoiding direct confrontation’.201 Despite claims to the contrary, NICRA and Dungannon’s non-violent activists had not borrowed and adapted King’s tactics to Northern Ireland.
In Dungannon, the Derry radicals were just one part of a coalition made up of almost all the country’s opposition groups as well as individuals who were not caught up in the politics of the politicians. Most marchers were there for a peaceful protest, not confrontation and violence; most marchers were there to call for reform rather than revolution. But, with their colourful language and behaviour, the leftists were able to attract a disproportionate level of attention. A similar argument could also be made about their place in the mass movement that emerged in Derry after 5 October 1968. However, what happened in between simply cannot be characterized in this way, as the second civil rights march – the event which transformed the situation – was wholly planned by the Derry radicals. The DHAC secured NICRA sponsorship, and then exploited the Belfast-based body’s ignorance of the second city to get complete control of the organizing committee and to get a route agreed which ended within the walls.202 A comparison with narratives of West Germany’s ‘red decade’, 1967–77, is useful here. Stories about the passage from protest through resistance to armed struggle in the Federal Republic disagree about the particulars and the politics, yet they all tend to agree that it is a German story – a story about the unmastered Nazi past. While the national context is clearly important, failing to look beyond it has distorted representations; ‘Hitler’s children’ were also the children of the (global) revolution, and the Achtundsechzigers, as this chapter has argued, drew upon a transnational discourse and protest repertoire.203 The Derry radicals did the same. This, though, is obscured in narratives which assume that the Northern Irish past can only be understood in terms of Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist. When the march’s fortieth anniversary came round, McCann objected to how the ‘international dimension [had] virtually been written out of history’: ‘in Derry at least, the activists who triggered the civil rights campaign didn’t see themselves as Orange or Green, but of a hue [i.e. Red] which, we believed, would … obliterate the colour-coding’.204 The march was much more a break with the past than a logical continuation of it.
CONCLUSION
In late August 1968, the local Labour Party moaned that ‘there were not people in Derry prepared to fight for their rights as the blacks in America were fighting’.205 However, just as there was no such thing as a single Derry Catholic life experience, there was no such thing as a single Derry Catholic protest agenda. People in the city were actually fighting for a wide range of rights, often using strategies that were similar to those employed by African Americans – they were just not backing the radical left’s attempts to engineer a confrontation. The previous twelve months alone had seen campaigns to do with poor television reception, rent increases, resettlement grants, vandalism, new water charges, road safety, policing and inadequate midwifery.206 Contending against marginalization, people in Derry had fought for welfare rights and better standards of living, and in the process they had fought to play an active role as citizens in the decisions that the state was making about their lives. They had shown stamina, courage and flexibility over tactics; they had shown that it was possible to win reform (there was no such thing as a single unionist reaction, either). People in Derry were ‘neither passive, disciplined dupes nor heroic agents of antidiscipline, but “co-producers” of systems of provision’.207 These campaigns, then, were not on straight roads or indeed twisting paths to Duke Street and the civil rights movement (this metaphor leads down a dead end): the strategies and goals that these groups and individuals chose to pursue were limited by Derry’s existing, albeit shifting, political, social, economic and cultural contexts. The radicals escaped from these constraints by taking an international perspective, one which held that reform was not enough and that a revolutionary transformation was possible. As a result, they reconfigured the constellation of power in Northern Ireland as well as in Derry, and, when power changed dramatically, so did protest. Life in the city was going to evolve rapidly.
