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Preface

‘Once upon a time’ was how the Derry radical Eamonn McCann began an August 1969 pamphlet that told his story of the civil rights movement.1 Everyone was putting together their own narratives to make sense of the extraordinary events they were living through at the start of the Troubles. From the moment that the civil rights movement came into being on 5 October 1968, people felt a need to remember and commemorate it. Memorabilia was created, songs were composed, records were produced, special anniversary issues were published, and documentary films were made.2 Narratives of the start of the Troubles were personal, but they were also political. During the February 1969 Stormont election campaign, the three candidates in the Foyle constituency presented voters with different accounts of the origin, course, and future direction of the civil rights movement.3 Northern Ireland’s ‘memory wars’ often began before the event had even ended. In Belfast, while the conflagration of August 1969 was still happening, the Bishop of Down and Connor telephoned police headquarters to ‘contradict official Press, TV & Radio reports’.4 The struggle to shape how the event was described and interpreted – to control the narrative – was an integral part of the event itself. Definitions were imposed and rejected, blame was assigned and displaced, responsibility was claimed and contested, and past causes and future courses were suggested and debated.5

Activists have worked hard to construct and sustain narratives about how a civil war began in a devolved region of the United Kingdom. Indeed, as the fiftieth anniversaries roll round, the tales are getting told again. Belfast and Derry in Revolt: A New History of the Start of the Troubles challenges those narratives. The book serves four closely related purposes. First, it rejects the story of a loyalist backlash to the civil rights movement and the republican campaign of violence, showing instead that they were the first to march and to shoot. Second, it questions the twin assumptions that the civil rights movement was a unitary actor and that non-violent direct action was a peaceful form of protest. Third, it refutes claims that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) acted defensively and that the Belfast brigade failed to protect ‘their’ neighbourhoods. And finally, it casts doubt on the idea that the start of the Troubles had a single cause, shifting attention over to how violence was produced by a set of developments that, in turn, triggered further developments. The outbreak of civil war in Belfast and Derry cannot be explained in terms of a unique underlying cause.

Before the IRA fired a gun and before civil rights marchers took a step, a small number of loyalists were on the streets fighting phantoms. They believed that ‘rebels’ were on the brink of attacking Northern Ireland; they believed ‘the people’ needed to take the actions that their representative government was failing to take. But republicans were not ready for another armed campaign and Stormont had taken thorough precautions ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. When a Protestant widow from the Shankill was murdered in the spring of 1966, the perpetrators were from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), not the IRA.6 Belfast experienced a loyalist ‘frontlash’. Northern Ireland’s top police officer warned the Ministry of Home Affairs that ‘Protestant extremists’ now posed ‘an equal or even greater threat’ than the IRA. He also had intelligence on the ‘Paisleyite Movement’ that suggested the UVF was the ‘militant wing of the organisation’.7 Contrary to what the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had concluded, the incendiary preacher Ian Paisley never directly assisted loyalist paramilitaries. He did, however, inspire many of them to get involved in militant politics. The combination of agitation and assassination weakened Stormont and strengthened those republicans and leftists who were seeking revolutionary change. In other words, it achieved the opposite of what Paisley and the UVF claimed they had set out to do.

The second purpose of the book is to better understand how the civil rights movement could be so successful, so quickly, and yet fall apart so soon afterwards. The people who met in Derry on 5 October 1968 to march for civil rights represented, according to the commission of inquiry, ‘most of the elements in opposition to the Northern Ireland Government’.8 They had opposed each other, too, in the past – and they would do so again. When three of the marchers contested the same seat in the Stormont election, the civil rights movement had its obituary notice printed in the Derry Journal.9 The movement was made up of shifting, short-lived alliances of individuals and organisations. By April 1969, the chairman of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, Frank Gogarty, was complaining that ‘the movement was in a disgracefully fragmented state’. Organizations, he continued, ‘acted independently of each other and ... held each other in mutual suspicion’.10

The fragmentation and competition within the civil rights movement gave it dynamism. A tiny band of leftists, who had embraced direct action, pushed more moderate figures into taking up non-violent strategies. As McCann recalled in February 1969, he had been in the street when it was ‘a fairly lonely place to be [and when] respectable gentlemen ... were noticeable by their absence’.11 The ban on the 5 October 1968 march brought moderates out to line up alongside radicals that day; the brutal way that the police enforced the ban brought many more people on to the streets and the shocking television footage brought international media attention. The former mattered more than the latter. It was pressure from below, not above that ultimately forced the Stormont government into making concessions. The movement in Derry kept the city in a constant state of disorder. Finally, in late November 1968, police chiefs and leading businessmen told ministers they had to take the ‘heat ... out of events by political means’ and make ‘the decisions which would restore normal conditions’.12 Fragmentation and competition, however, meant that the civil rights movement was divided over how to respond to the government’s reform package. While the moderates chose to pause their protests, the radicals decided to maintain the pressure. The disorder therefore did not end. For those individuals and organizations willing to use violence in pursuit of their goals, opportunities now began to open.

The third aim of Belfast and Derry in Revolt is to challenge the narrative that presents IRA violence as defensive in nature. Republican militants were not backed into taking a stand against a police force that had united with loyalist mobs. Our case is driven home by an analysis of the August 1969 violence in north and west Belfast, during which eight people died and many more were injured. The IRA was, in fact, behind the first incidents on 13 August 1969. Following the Belfast commander’s order to ‘get the people on to the streets’, IRA volunteers led a march from Divis Flats to the local police stations, one of which had petrol bombs thrown at it.13 When a RUC platoon blocked the march from going into a mixed area, the IRA men responded with gunfire and a grenade.14 In Ardoyne, although firearms were not used and loyalists were also involved, republicans were again pushing the violence.15 The next day, the brigade prepared for loyalist reprisals by taking up defensive positions,16 but the leadership had not prepared for the ferocity of those attacks nor for the firepower of the security forces. On 15 August 1969, in just under two hours, gunshots wounded twelve Catholics and killed a teenage member of the Fianna in the Clonard area. The IRA did not run away, however. From 6 pm until the early hours of the morning, only Protestants were shot: thirteen in total suffered injuries.17 The republicans turned the tide.

It is a ‘remarkable fact’, to use the tribunal of inquiry’s phrase, that other parts of Belfast remained quiet during those hot summer nights.18 Disturbances were sparked on the Falls Road and in Ardoyne, where the IRA was active; similarly, they were instigated around the Shankill Road, where the Shankill Defence Association (SDA) was on the streets and the UVF was lurking in the shadows. In each case, political action by militant entrepreneurs set the pattern of events. Organizations mobilized individuals, provided them with the chance to participate, and co-ordinated their actions. Indeed, organizations – paramilitaries but also political parties, state agencies, Churches, trade unions, and interest groups – were the principal actors in the drama.

This point can be illustrated further by examining the Shankill riots of 11/12 October 1969. In Belfast and Derry in Revolt, we rather overlooked the significance of this event. New archival material, however, shows that the clashes were not an improvised response to the release of the Hunt Report into policing that day. Over a week before the riots, reports came in to the intelligence services that the SDA and UVF were planning multiple demonstrations to overstretch the RUC and drag in the army. Finally, on 10 October, Special Branch sources confirmed that the loyalist plan to ‘confront’ the security forces was about to be put into action. Beginning with a lunchtime sit-down protest, the sequence of demonstrations stuck to the timetable acquired by Special Branch. As day turned to night, the RUC struggled to shield Unity Flats – seen by loyalists as an IRA citadel – from a crowd of around two thousand men. With the pubs letting out Saturday-night drinkers, the police chose to call in the army. According to the Irish News, the soldiers were greeted with shouts of ‘Englishmen go home’.19 Bottles and bricks followed and were met with CS gas; the smoke drew gunfire and petrol bombs; and automatic weapons were countered with armoured vehicles. The battle between British soldiers and the suspected ex-servicemen in the UVF went on until dawn. Following up their advantage, the security forces carried out a search operation in the Shankill, capturing two petrol-bomb factories, a small supply of arms and ammunition, and equipment and literature belonging to a pirate radio station.20 ‘Events,’ the weekly intelligence summary judged, ‘had been pre-planned.’21

Taken together, these three main arguments lead to a conclusion that justifies the claim in the book’s subtitle to be offering ‘a new history’. It is a mistake, we argue, to collapse the complex web of action and reaction that marked the start of the Troubles into a long-running confrontation between self-mobilizing ‘communities’. Popular protests and militant collisions cannot plausibly be represented as the inevitable product of underlying ethnic differences. Instead, the confrontations of the time were characterized by individuals and organizations seizing initiatives, appealing to ideological positions, and mobilizing support. When people burned someone out of their home, marched for civil rights, demonstrated against a protest, attacked a police station, or provoked a riot, they were engaging in an organized political action.

In the period between 1964 and 1970, several ideological positions attracted varying degrees of support. For unionism, the most popular position at this time, the United Kingdom was the state and the Crown-in-Parliament exercised sovereignty. But that sovereign had devolved power to an elected government at Stormont to manage the region’s own affairs. Nationalism, the other mainstream ideology, claimed that the Irish nation, understood as a cultural group, was the people and had the right to a state that took in the whole nation. Republicanism, which appealed to only a minority, aspired to establishing a state that was both wholly united and completely independent. The IRA styled themselves the provisional representatives of the people’s will, holding its sovereignty in trust until an all-Ireland vote elected a constitutional assembly. Loyalism, another fringe ideology, stretched democratic principles even further: its leading figures insisted that they know the will of the majority of the people. Revolutionary socialism, which had the least support, held that the workers of the world needed to be free of both representative government and the state.

Around this central conflict over competing democratic visions were arrayed multiple dynamic and intersecting conflicts. When this conflict turned violent, violence started to be used much more in other conflicts, too. Belfast and Derry in Revolt focuses largely on political conflicts, but intimate ones also became more prone to erupting into violence. The politicization of private life and the privatization of politics helped shape the start of the Troubles. As the new chapter on the Falls Road Curfew highlights, the biggest battle between Irish republicans and the British army since 1916 began with a woman falling out with her husband for storing arms in the family home. The violence of the Troubles was creative as well as destructive: individuals and organizations responded to it by constructing new identities, institutions, and ideas. These processes had logics of their own, giving rise as time progressed to conflicts that were scarcely connected to those charted in this book. The original issue in contention, however, was not marginalized. Indeed, Brexit has shown just how much the conflict over who the people are remains at the centre of public life.

This new edition of Belfast and Derry in Revolt has added a chapter on the Falls Road Curfew and taken out one on how narratives mapped out the contours of the conflicts. Both these choices came in response to feedback from readers. Extending our narrative by another week has allowed us to develop further our argument about how political competition produced violence. Removing a chapter that explored at length how human memory operates keeps up the momentum of our narrative. This preface has presented the relevant conclusions of that cut chapter; it has also set out our purposes for the book more directly and addressed an event whose significance is overlooked. As the last line of Belfast and Derry in Revolt acknowledges, there will always be something new to be said about the start of the Troubles.