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2

The Divis Street Riots of 1964

Just after 3 pm on 7 October 1964, Terence O’Neill rose from his seat in the House of Commons of the Northern Ireland Parliament to make a statement on the civil disturbances which had occurred in Belfast during the course of the previous week. Since becoming Prime Minister in March 1963, he said, he had ‘had two principal aims in view’: firstly, ‘to make Northern Ireland economically stronger and more prosperous, so that all our people may enjoy a fuller and richer life’ and secondly, ‘to build bridges between the two traditions within our community’. It was clear that he believed the two objectives went hand in hand, for he expressed concern that the disturbances might hinder his government’s efforts to attract new industry to Northern Ireland. Although O’Neill recognized that ‘only a tiny minority of the citizens of Belfast either provoked or took part’ in them, he emphasized that:

‘[w]e cannot go back to the 1920s and 1930s, when 100,000 unemployed were the order of the day and misery and privation stalked the streets of Belfast. I pray God that as we advance in wealth and education and maturity the dreadful scenes which we witnessed will never be repeated, and I trust that men of good will throughout our Province will work to that end.’1

Less than five years later, and after he had been forced out of office, O’Neill’s vision of a peaceful and prosperous, but Unionist-controlled, province had been shattered. The Troubles had started. The Divis riots of 1964 are a good point of departure for the study of what happened, particularly in so far as the city of Belfast was concerned.

I

When O’Neill referred to ‘the two traditions in our community’, he meant Protestants (a term which included members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, Presbyterians, Methodists and other, smaller Christian denominations) and Catholics, or unionists and nationalists. These two divisions – the communal and the political – overlapped, but there was no complete correspondence between them. As O’Neill’s reference to building bridges between traditions implies, there had been a long history of intimate hatreds which, in Belfast, had begun in the early nineteenth century when large numbers of Catholics began to move into what had previously been an overwhelmingly Protestant town. They had come in search of work in the industries which were to make it the eighth biggest in the United Kingdom by 1911 and the home of ‘the largest weaving and tobacco factories, ropeworks and output of shipping in the world’.2 From less than 10 per cent in 1784, the proportion of Catholics in Belfast rose to 34 per cent in 1861. It fell to 23 per cent by 1926, but then slowly began to rise once more so that by 1961 it stood at 26 per cent.3

There were fifteen major riots in Belfast between 1813 and 1909.4 If Protestants fought with, and sometimes killed, Catholics in Belfast, and vice-versa, it was not, essentially, because of religious disputes and nor was it, essentially, because of ethnic rivalry (although there often were religious and communal dimensions to rioting). Instead, it was, essentially, because of political conflict, with serious rioting usually coming at times of political upheaval, specifically during election campaigns. Indeed, riots involving Irish Catholics in Scottish and English cities as well as in Belfast were rare until the electoral reforms of the 1820s and 1830s. Liverpool, for example, witnessed sectarian rioting after the Whigs took control of local government in 1835 and the Tories chose to use anti-Catholicism to take it back. The pattern of rioting in Belfast, though, changed somewhat after the decision in 1865 to take the responsibility of policing away from the town council and give it to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). So, while in 1864 Protestants and many police officers had battled against Catholics, in 1886 the clashes were largely fought out between Protestants, on one side, and the RIC and the British army on the other.5

Unsurprisingly, then, during the years 1920–22, political upheaval and the return of security powers to local politicians worked together to lead to the worst violence in the city’s whole history. However, we should be careful not to subsume everything within the Irish Revolutionary narrative because the start of the Belfast ‘Troubles’ came not with a shooting war between the IRA and the Crown forces but with expulsions from the city’s shipyards. This fitted in with a pattern of shipyard expulsions across the United Kingdom, as the post-war economic downturn and the return of servicemen led to ‘outsiders’ being pushed out in the battle for work. Beginning in July 1920, at Belfast shipyards, thousands of Catholics and left-wing Protestants were ejected from their jobs for being ‘Sinn Féin workers’.6 It was telling that these expulsions came after the annual commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne, on 12 July, where speeches had dwelt on ‘loyal’ Protestants being unemployed while ‘disloyal’ Catholics were in work. Trouble was not limited to the shipyards. Loyalist crowd violence was aimed at Catholic churches, convents, houses and businesses; more organized campaigns of intimidation, too, worked to drive Catholics out of Protestant areas. On a smaller scale, members of the Protestant community were also victims of the other side of this struggle for space and security.7 ‘The reciprocity of northern violence’, according to Peter Hart, ‘does not fit the pogrom model.’ The ‘battle for Belfast’ was ‘more like a miniature civil war’, one in which the wider war between the British empire and Irish republicanism allowed all manner of communal, social, economic and personal grudges and interests to be pursued.8

The end of the Civil War in the South and the survival of the Northern state in some ways marked a return in Belfast to an earlier pattern of politicized communal violence. During the Great Depression, for example, efforts by Marxist-Leninist groups to organize across the communal divide had some successes (in 1932, unemployed Protestants and Catholics rioted together in protest against the low levels of welfare payments), but were thwarted when the Orange card was played. In the 1935 marching season, sectarian riots left ten dead and hundreds forced from their homes – and also resulted in a sharp decline in Communism.9 One consequence of the regular outbreaks of violence was the residential segregation which prevails in Belfast to this day. A natural tendency on the part of the Catholic minority to cluster in certain parts of the city where they would not only benefit from living near others who shared their values and from the many social outreach activities of their Church was reinforced by a heightened desire for security in the event of trouble. Indeed, people were often forced to move into more ‘friendly’ areas during or after rioting, a phenomenon which also affected Protestants.

By 1969, this process had produced a situation in which two-thirds of Belfast’s households lived in streets in which 91 per cent or more of the households were of the same religion.10 Catholics were concentrated in five main areas. By far the biggest was the Falls in the west of the city, which contained 70 per cent of the households in streets which were 91 per cent or more Catholic. The next largest was Ardoyne, which was just off the Crumlin Road in the north-west of the city, with 11 per cent of the households in question. Then there was an area to the north-west of the city centre which stretched from the Unity Flats along North Queen Street to the New Lodge Road (8 per cent); another, the Markets, which was to the south of the city centre on either side of Cromac Street (4 per cent); and, finally, Ballymacarrett (or the Short Strand), which was sandwiched between the Newtownards and Albertbridge Roads just across the River Lagan in east Belfast (4 per cent).11 The division between Protestant and Catholic areas could occur within the width of a single street and much of the inter-communal violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took place along these dividing lines, or interfaces as they are often called.

Patterns of behaviour also varied sharply between those living in these segregated districts. A survey carried out between December 1967 and January 1968 in the Catholic Clonard district, just north of the Falls Road, and an adjacent Protestant district just south of the Shankill Road, showed huge differences between the people in each area in terms of their marital ties, their circle of friends, where they shopped, where they caught a bus into the city centre, which football team they supported and which newspaper they read.12 Children’s education was not included, but presumably only because everyone knew that Catholic parents sent their children to Church schools while Protestant parents sent theirs to state schools. Segregation was widely seen as a simple fact of life. Violence, however, was not.

II

The riots of September–October 1964 were the worst in Belfast since 1935. No-one was killed and no-one has calculated the total of those injured, but speaking in the Northern Ireland Parliament on 7 October 1964 the Minister of Home Affairs, Brian McConnell, stated that seventy-two people were arrested, forty-six police were injured, and fifty-three business premises, fifty private houses, fourteen police vehicles, seven private vehicles and twenty public transport vehicles were damaged.13 What happened and why? The answers to these questions enable us more fully to understand the political situation in Belfast in the 1960s.

Although Northern Ireland had its own devolved government, complete with Governor, Cabinet, House of Commons and Senate, it also returned twelve MPs to the United Kingdom Parliament in London and the riots occurred during the run up to the General Election of 15 October 1964. All twelve of Westminster’s Northern Irish MPs were Unionists – that is, members of the party which had ruled the province without interruption since the devolved government was established in 1921. The Unionists at Westminster took the Conservative Party whip – much to the irritation of the Labour Party. But, while their outlook was similar to that of the Conservatives on many issues, the principal plank in their policy, and that of their colleagues at Stormont, was to defend the integrity of Northern Ireland and its membership of the United Kingdom. Neither the Conservative Party nor the Labour Party existed in Northern Ireland itself, although there was a separate Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) which had links with the British Labour Party. Since 1949, it too had been in favour of the Union with Britain, but it was not nearly as strident about it as the Unionists, the latter portraying the NILP as a half-way house on the rocky road to Dublin. It also had more sympathy with the grievances of the Catholic minority over such issues as discrimination in housing and employment.14 In the late 1950s the NILP had begun to gain support in Belfast, a largely working-class city suffering from high unemployment,15 and in the 1962 Stormont elections it gained over 40 per cent of the vote in the city and won four seats.16

Those in the North who opposed the Union with Britain and who favoured a united Ireland of some kind were broadly divided into two political groupings: those who adhered to the constitutionalist tradition, which had (usually) characterized the old Irish Parliamentary Party, and those who favoured a revolutionary approach (usually) involving armed struggle, the republican tradition which was now embodied in Sinn Féin and the IRA. It was the IRA, of course, which had played a central role in winning independence for the bulk of Ireland back in the early 1920s, but its descendants of the 1960s, the children of numerous splits, were very different. For one thing, they now represented only a minority of nationalists; for another, they were illegal in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and although Sinn Féin was permitted in the latter, its political influence was negligible.17

The IRA had not seriously embarrassed the authorities in Northern Ireland since the early 1920s, thanks largely to the powers the government possessed under the notorious Special Powers Acts, to suppress it,18 although it played a part in the wider campaign against the United Kingdom which was launched in 1939.19 Another IRA campaign, this time specifically directed against Northern Ireland, was launched in December 1956. Codenamed ‘Operation Harvest’, it is also known as ‘the border campaign’, since most of the action was carried out close to the frontier areas of the province. Some claim that Belfast was deliberately excluded from the border campaign in order to avoid a repetition of the bloodshed of the 1920–2 fighting, but it has also been pointed out that the Belfast IRA had drawn up plans for attacks on targets in the city which ranged from RUC stations and the homes of policemen to contractors working for the security forces.20 In any event, the campaign failed. Internment, on both sides of the border, undoubtedly contributed to its defeat, but the main reason, as the IRA frankly admitted in its statement of 26 February 1962 which called a halt to hostilities, was ‘the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people – the unity and freedom of Ireland’.21

Among the Northern Irish candidates presenting themselves for election to Westminster in October 1964 were twelve ‘Republicans’, a pseudonym for Sinn Féin, a disguise which fooled no one, but which was sufficient to get around the government ban on the party. The Republican candidate in the constituency of West Belfast, which included the solidly Catholic Falls district, was William (Billy) McMillen, a 35-year-old scaffolder, described as ‘stocky and short, a fluent Irish-speaker who was active in the Gaelic League (where he was generally referred to as Liam) …’22 More important than all of this, he was the Officer Commanding of the Belfast IRA.

Although the other three Belfast seats were safe for Unionism, West Belfast promised to be a more interesting contest. Apart from the Catholic Falls, it included solidly Protestant districts too. Indeed, it had been a Unionist seat prior to the election, although there was a new Unionist candidate, James Kilfedder, a London barrister, albeit one with Irish roots. In addition, there were two other strong, local candidates: Harry Diamond, a left-wing nationalist standing under the rubric of Republican Labour and the sitting Stormont MP for the Falls constituency; and Billy Boyd (NILP), who also sat at Stormont for the Protestant Woodvale constituency.

As his campaign headquarters McMillen had chosen an unoccupied shop at 145 Divis Street, a thoroughfare which ran from the edge of the city centre to the Falls Road. McMillen displayed an Irish Tricolour in the window. The Tricolour was like a red rag to unionist bulls and, indeed, the Northern Ireland Government had passed a Flags and Emblems Act in 1954 which prohibited displays that were likely to cause a breach of the peace. McMillen had already fallen foul of this legislation the previous year when he was involved in one of the commemorative parades which were a feature of political life in Northern Ireland: a celebration of the anniversary of the birth of Wolfe Tone, one of the leaders of the United Irishmen rising in 1798. The organizers asked the IRA to provide a colour party for the parade, but the government invoked the Flags and Emblems act to prevent it. McMillen was all for defying the ban, but the then Officer Commanding in Belfast, Billy McKee, argued for acceptance. This led to a blazing row inside the IRA which eventually led to McKee quitting as Belfast commander and to his leaving the organization altogether. Nevertheless, the Tricolour was not carried in the parade and McMillen later noted that ‘the IRA colour party marched up the Falls minus the colours!’23

Whether McMillen chose to display the Tricolour in his campaign office in 1964 as a deliberate act of defiance is not clear. He remarked in 1972 that the government had made no attempt to ban its display in the 1964 Belfast parade commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916, although an IRA member was arrested and jailed for three months for carrying it elsewhere in the province. Moreover, one of his electoral opponents, Diamond, pointed out that it was on display in Divis Street – a solidly Catholic area – for almost three weeks in September 1964 without anyone taking exception to it.24 It was at this point, however, that following ‘a number of complaints’, the RUC intervened. According to McConnell, ‘the police had an interview with some of the occupants of the premises at No. 145. They expressed to them their fears that trouble might be caused by continuing to display the Tricolour in the window, but at that interview no duress was used by the police. It was entirely a friendly approach …’25

Whence did these ‘complaints’ originate and how many were there? We do not know the whole story, but it is clear that McMillen’s Unionist opponent, Kilfedder, was involved as he sent a telegram to O’Connell urging him to ‘remove [the] Tricolour in Divis Street which is aimed to provoke and insult loyalists of West Belfast’.26 So, too, was a fundamentalist Protestant preacher, the burly, 38-year-old, six-foot-three-inches tall Reverend Ian Paisley, who announced that since representations made to both the Hastings Street RUC barracks – which was responsible for policing Divis Street – and Unionist Party headquarters had not resulted in any action, he would organize a march on Divis Street.27

Paisley had plenty of predecessors in the province, notably perhaps Reverend (‘Roaring’) Hugh Hanna, the Presbyterian minister whose fiery speeches and sermons were alleged to have played a part in more than one of the nineteenth-century Belfast riots.28 Like Hanna, Paisley wove together religion and politics. In 1951, he founded his own Free Presbyterian Church and soon acquired a reputation for intemperate attacks on Catholicism and any form of ecumenism, which he regarded as selling out to the Vatican. He was politically involved as early as January 1949, when he campaigned on behalf of the successful Unionist candidate in the marginal Dock ward in central Belfast during the elections to the Stormont Parliament. In the late 1950s, he was a leading member of Ulster Protestant Action, a militant unionist ginger group, but broke with it in 1961.29 Although he had supported the Unionist candidate in Dock ward in 1949 and was now supporting Kilfedder in West Belfast, Paisley was deeply suspicious of the Unionist leadership, and particularly of O’Neill. Here he was resurrecting a dormant dissenting discourse which doubted the motives of all elites, be they political or religious. As Paisley’s Protestant Telegraph put it in May 1967, ‘the hoards of Romanism and the compromise of O’Neillism’ had placed ‘our Protestant heritage’ in danger.30 Paisleyism, its supporters claimed, was offering new vehicles in which to pursue traditional religious and political beliefs and practices. Although the 1961 Census counted only 344 declared members of Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast out of a total of 416,000 religious believers,31 his political influence was much greater than these figures suggest. People who were not particularly religious were giving their support to this fundamentalist preacher because he represented the Protestant tradition that had historically defined their community. At a time when some felt that Unionism was under threat, Paisley appeared to be a reliable and relentless defender.32

III

Paisley’s intervention galvanized the Northern Ireland Government into action. The march was banned, but on the evening of 28 September 1964, policemen broke into 145 Divis Street and removed the Tricolour. There was no resistance from McMillen and his election agent, the only two people in the building, at the time, but as the then senior officer at the Hasting Street police station, Head Constable John Hermon, subsequently recorded:

Tension inevitably mounted. The ban on Paisley’s march did not prevent him holding a rally at the City Hall. Crowds gathered in the vicinity of the Republican Party’s office, and police patrols reported an uneasiness and growing hostility amongst local residents, especially the younger ones. The situation was becoming very ugly. Although no serious incidents occurred in Divis Street that particular evening, it was well after midnight before the crowd disappeared, leaving me apprehensive about the rest of the week.33

Hermon’s apprehension was justified. In the small hours of 29 September, an emergency meeting of the Republican Election Directorate upped the ante by announcing that unless the RUC replaced the Tricolour it had removed within two days, McMillen would put up another in its place.34 That evening a second vigil was staged outside 145 Divis Street. According to the Belfast Telegraph, about 100 children gathered opposite the Republican headquarters around 7:30 pm singing rebel songs. By 9 pm they were joined by a number of adults and ‘there was loud cheering when a group of boys ran along Divis Street flaunting the … Tricolour and an anti-Paisley banner’. The flag was placed beside the election headquarters and garbage and stones were thrown at police officers who were trying to persuade the crowd to disperse. It finally did so around midnight and a disgruntled Divis Street shopkeeper remarked the following morning that the whole business had been started by teenagers and that ‘if there had been a heavy shower of rain … the whole thing would have been over in ten minutes’.35

At the same time as these incidents in Divis Street, Paisley was holding his rally in Donegall Square, brandishing a message from the hardline Ulster Loyalist Association that congratulated him on his ‘stand against the Tricolour’. He called for the prosecution of Republicans and criticized the RUC for its handling of the matter. Although he had appealed for order, about 100 of his followers had to be dissuaded by a sizeable police presence from proceeding to the Shankill via the Falls.36

Serious trouble broke out on the following night. As on the previous day a crowd began to gather in Divis Street at about 7:30 pm. Two hours later, bottles were being hurled at passing vehicles. By 10 pm the road was covered in broken glass. The appearance of a police Land Rover prompted a shower of bottles and four vans, containing fifty policemen, were rushed in as reinforcements. The police marched up Divis Street and the crowd scattered into the side streets whence they continued to bombard the police with missiles. The crowd was estimated at about 1,500 when the violence reached its peak at around 11:30 pm. The demonstrators began to chant ‘Burn, Burn, Burn the Bastards!’ while cursing Paisley. The police drew their batons. According to one report, ‘women screamed, and children scattered and policemen clashed with the demonstrators. Several were knocked underfoot and hundreds ran for the shelter of nearby Percy Street and other adjoining streets … One young girl ran into a side street with blood streaming from her head’.37 McMillen blamed the Minister of Home Affairs. ‘To appease mob law’, he said, ‘he ordered armed police into a 100 [per cent] nationalist area and created a situation the consequence of which has been to destroy respect for the civil law and set a deplorable example to the more unruly elements.’38

McMillen duly replaced the Tricolour on 1 October 1964, as he had threatened to do. The police promptly broke in to remove it. This precipitated further mayhem which escalated into what the nationalist Irish News called ‘a night of fear’ during which petrol bombs exploded around police vehicles, a Belfast Corporation trolleybus was set on fire, plate-glass windows in shops were smashed and blood flowed from more than thirty injured heads as iron gratings, bottles and stones showered down from the side streets.39 Across the Lagan in east Belfast, the author of the parish chronicle of the Catholic St Matthew’s Church wrote in an entry dated 2 October 1964, ‘it looked as if serious trouble might develop and partisan strife be again violently enkindled [sic] in the City. Also alarming – to the police [–] was their helplessness against and the devastation that could be caused bythe “Molotov cocktail” … used for the first time in Belfast against the hithertofore invincible police tenders’. A local milkman, he claimed, could not lay his hands on many empty milk bottles for his Saturday morning delivery.40

Paisley stirred the pot still further by issuing a statement in which he and one of his colleagues demonized all Catholics. ‘The disgraceful acts on the Falls Road’, it declared, ‘which have been instigated by the Republican associates of the murderous IRA demonstrate the real character of the Catholic population’. No responsible spokesman of the Catholic community, it claimed, had condemned the violence, but had instead slandered Protestants and loyalists who, despite provocation, had remained orderly and law-abiding. The replacement of the Tricolour, it thundered, was ‘a challenge which cannot be ignored, and the Catholic community better know that the loyalist and Protestant people will not capitulate to this illegal and riotous behaviour’.41 As the peak number of rioters was estimated at 1,500 and the entire Catholic population of Belfast was over 114,000 in 1961,42 this blanket condemnation of the latter was absurd. Indeed, it was even claimed subsequently that some of the rioters were Protestant agents provocateurs.43

As it happened, both Protestant and Catholic Church leaders did appeal for calm on Friday, 2 October 1964, as did O’Neill. Even the Republicans seemed to realize the danger posed by what they had helped produce when they issued a statement which said: ‘We wish to avoid injury to innocent people and do not intend to allow the issue of flying the Tricolour to overshadow other issues. The flag is merely a symbol of freedom’.44 But there was further rioting on the night of 2/3 October 1964 in which petrol bombs were again thrown and shops looted, although a police spokesman was quoted as saying, ‘We don’t think it has been as severe as last night.’45

There was no serious trouble after that; even though there was a 5,000-strong march through Catholic west Belfast on 4 October 1964 in the course of which people waved miniature Tricolours and sang Irish songs. The march ended in a rally at which seven out of the twelve Republican candidates in the election were present on the platform, together with Ena Connolly, daughter of James Connolly, who presented McMillen with a ‘lucky Tricolour horseshoe’. The proceedings concluded with the singing of ‘The Soldier’s Song’, in Irish.46 None of this had much effect on the results of the election, which took place eleven days later. As a Metropolitan Police Special Branch report of 16 November 1964 pointed out, they brought ‘little joy’ to the Republicans. They obtained 101,619 votes out of a total of 633,263 throughout the province and although this was an improvement upon their position in 1959, it was almost 50,000 votes fewer than they had polled in 1955.47 McMillen came bottom of the poll in West Belfast and lost his deposit. Kilfedder won the seat with a majority of 6,659 over Diamond, with Billy Boyd in third place. The new Unionist MP reportedly stated that he owed his victory to Paisley.48

IV

A ‘Top Secret’ report of February 1966 by the RUC Special Branch claimed that the Divis riots ‘were not casual riots but an organised attempt to incite sectarian troubles. While firearms were not used, incendiary bombs were thrown at police vehicles … It was noticed that important members of the IRA who presumably thought they were unknown to the police, worked secretly in the background playing a major part in creating troubles during the elections.’49 But this was not what the police were saying at the time. On 3 October 1964 the RUC’s City Commissioner for Belfast, Graham Shillington, said of the rioting, ‘It is not controlled by anyone, but is entirely undisciplined, a lot of young hooligans running wild’.50 Nor was there any hint of deliberate IRA orchestration of the riots in government statements during the parliamentary debate on the subject. If there was ‘an organised attempt to incite sectarian troubles’, it was singularly badly planned, as there was no attempt to confront Protestants, but only the police, and all the rioting took place in a Catholic area. If there was any sectarian threat, it came not from the Catholics but from Paisley and his supporters. As for the presence of ‘important members of the IRA’, this was no surprise. They were the Republican candidates in Belfast and their principal helpers. As we shall see, the organization was not particularly thick on the ground.

A private post-mortem on the Divis riots was carried out after the election by O’Neill at two meetings held at Stormont on 2 November 1964: the first with the Cabinet and a Unionist Party official; the second with the Minister of Home Affairs and senior police officers. He was ‘anxious’, he told the first meeting, ‘to clarify certain details of the West Belfast election’, both in response to speeches made in Stormont and because he thought the matter might come up in his forthcoming meeting with the newly elected Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harold Wilson. The reference to ‘speeches at Stormont’ is obscure, but it may have included the somewhat fanciful accusation by the two Republican Labour MPs, Diamond, and Gerry Fitt, the loquacious and pugnacious former merchant seaman who had won the Dock constituency from the Unionists in 1962, that the riots had been the consequence of a plot hatched by the Unionist Party, the government and Paisley to ensure the victory of Kilfedder in West Belfast.51 O’Neill wanted to know about the contents of the election leaflets circulated during the campaign and was told that the one issued by the Ulster Loyalist Association, which was sympathetic to Paisley, was ‘hard-hitting but not politically objectionable’, whereas ‘the really objectionable leaflet’, which asked ‘do you want Catholics in your street?’ was published by his erstwhile associates in Ulster Protestant Action. It was further emphasized that although Paisley had supported Kilfedder, he and his followers ‘were in no sense part of the official Unionist organization’. Indeed, Paisleyite candidates had stood against official Unionists in previous elections and might well do so again.52

At the second meeting, O’Neill enquired what could be done to forestall a repeat performance of the rioting. The answers were disappointing. There were no powers to ban the establishment of a Republican headquarters in any particular place. A curfew could only be imposed under emergency powers and was almost impossible to enforce. Little advance preparation could be done with the Catholic Church, as it would only be willing to take a line when it thought it would be followed, and in any case, ‘some of the people who fomented trouble were beyond Church influence’. The prevailing view in the police was that ‘the only way of avoiding trouble was prompt, informal and friendly contact with those who might foment it’.53

The document in question clearly equated ‘those who might foment’ trouble with the Republicans on this occasion. But was this altogether fair? It was, after all, Paisley and his associates who turned the display of the Tricolour into a political issue in the first place. If they had not done so, it is unlikely that its display, occurring as it did in a Catholic and nationalist area, would have given rise to any trouble. It could also be argued that the government was to blame for rising to the bait, although the Unionist leadership had few other options, especially as one of their own candidates had linked himself with Paisley on the issue and they clearly wished to prevent a possible sectarian confrontation on the streets. The police, moreover, did not go in mob-handed in the first instance, but tried to employ a tactic of persuasion. Where McMillen and his supporters contributed to the problem, and in so doing played into the Paisleyites’ hands, was when they issued their own ultimatum demanding the replacement of the Tricolour which had been removed. They must have realized that such an ultimatum would not be accepted and the two days’ breathing space given to the police to comply, far from lowering tension, gave more time for it to build up.

It is more difficult to evaluate the consequences of the riots. George Clarke, a beat policeman in the area at the time, has recently claimed that, ever since the violence of the early 1920s, the RUC ‘had been slowly but surely building up trust with the Catholic population’ only to see it shattered by ‘one idiot policeman who smashed a shop window and removed a small Tricolour on display’. He goes on to say that ‘[t]he two communities in the North started to move apart again’, and that he ‘firmly believed that the Divis Street riots lit the fuse for the Civil Rights movement … [which] in turn led to the involvement of the IRA, and out of this rose the Provos and thirty years of death and misery’.54 But this is surely overstated. Clarke suggests that his relations with the Catholics on his beat in the Falls were excellent, but while this may have been true, it would be misleading to equate his personal experience with relations between Catholics and the police in general. The RUC, in the words of a senior British policeman, was ‘not a police force in the English sense. It is a para-military organisation accountable to a Minister’.55 Along with the Unionist Party and the Orange Order, it was one of the pillars upon which the Northern Ireland state rested. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that it had a negative image amongst the Catholic population, an attitude which probably accounts as much for the fact that the proportion of Catholics in the RUC was a mere 10.5 percent in 1966 as the alleged discrimination against those Catholics who applied to join the force.56

In so far as the overall relationship between Catholics and the Unionist regime was affected by the Divis riots, the judgement of a moderate nationalist who had experienced and strongly disapproved of the RUC’s handling of them is probably nearer the mark. ‘Divis Street’, he subsequently wrote, ‘marked the end of the honeymoon period for Terence O’Neill. As nationalists saw it he had had a chance to tell Ian Paisley to get lost but instead had capitulated to his huffing and puffing.’57

As for the direct link between the Divis riots, the civil rights movement and the rise of the Provisional IRA, it needs to be emphasized that Dr Conn and Patricia McCluskey had already set up their Campaign for Social Justice in Dungannon earlier in the year, that NICRA was not launched until January 1967, that marches did not start for another year and that the IRA split and military campaigns lay far ahead. Eight years later, McMillen was to claim that the riots ‘embittered the nationalist population against the Stormont regime, revived all their frustrations and resentment against the Government repression, and set the stage for future confrontation between the youth of the nationalist areas and the RUC’ and that ‘a couple of dozen new recruits’ joined the Belfast IRA in their wake. The same source stated that there were only twenty-four members at the end of the border campaign, so that even if we accept that the organization had begun to revive in 1964, it was still very small beer in a city of over 415,000 people, which included 114,000 Catholics.58

McMillen also observed that the ‘trail of lost Republican deposits’ in the 1964 election was ‘a costly demonstration that people with the vote were not willing to vote for abstentionist candidates – that abstentionism was dead, and that it was time to bury the corpse’.59 This strategy, which meant that even a victorious Republican candidate would not take his or her seat in the parliament of a state the legitimacy of which it refused to recognize – and this included the Dáil, too – was not exactly an inducement to voters to turn out.

All we can conclude with some assurance is that the Divis riots showed that O’Neill’s bounded reforms could easily be undermined by Republicans and loyalists. The events of the next few years saw this perplexing partnership undermine many other attempts at reform.