Northern Ireland’s ’68 - Simon Prince

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      Bernadette Devlin: Queen’s University student who was elected onto the Faceless Committee of People’s Democracy and became the star of the civil rights movement.

      Finbar Doherty: One of the Derry radicals. After the 5 October 1968 march, which he helped to organise, he agreed to join the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee.

      James Doherty: Nationalist councillor on Londonderry Corporation and Eddie McAteer’s chief lieutenant.

      Paddy Doherty: One of the leaders of Derry’s self-help movement and the man in charge of stewarding protests in the city during the civil rights crisis.

      Rudi Dutschke: The public face of West Germany’s Extra- Parliamentary Opposition.

      Michael Farrell: One of Northern Ireland’s leading leftists and a hugely influential figure within People’s Democracy.

      Brian Faulkner: The second man in Terence O’Neill’s government – but he entertained hopes that the premiership would soon be his.

      Gerry Fitt: Republican Labour politician who was elected to both Stormont and Westminster during the 1960s. As the civil rights campaign developed, he began to challenge for the political leadership of the minority population.

      Frank Gogarty: A key member of the Belfast Wolfe Tone Society and of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

      Cathal Goulding: The Irish Republican Army’s Chief of Staff from 1962.

      C. Desmond Greaves: The Communist Party of Great Britain’s Irish expert and the dominant figure within the Connolly Association – which pioneered many of the tactics used in the civil rights campaign.

      Cahir Healy: Veteran Nationalist politician.

      John Hume: Community activist and Vice-Chair of the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee.

      Roy Johnston: Socialist intellectual who searched for a political home first in the Communist Party, then in the Connolly Association, and finally in the Republican movement.

      Séan Lemass: Veteran of the Irish Revolution and Taoiseach from 1959.

      Eddie McAteer: Nationalist MP for Derry’s Foyle constituency from 1953 to 1969 and party leader from 1964.

      Eamonn McCann: One of Northern Ireland’s leading leftists and organiser of Derry’s first civil rights march.

      Conn and Patricia McCluskey: Civil Rights activists who helped to lead the Homeless Citizens’ League, the Campaign for Social Justice, and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

      Eamon Melaugh: One of the Derry radicals. Following the 5 October 1968 march, he too became a member of the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee.

      Séan MacStiofain: Traditionalist Republican who opposed Cathal Goulding’s turn to the left.

      Terence O’Neill: Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1963 to 1969.

      Ian Paisley: Pastor and politician who strongly resisted any liberalisation of the Protestant Churches and the Northern Irish state.

      Betty Sinclair: Veteran Communist and Chair of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

      Cyril Toman: A close comrade of Eamonn McCann and Michael Farrell.

      Eamon de Valera: The most important politician in the history of modern Ireland. De Valera served for long spells as both Taoiseach (1932–48, 1951–4 and 1957–9) and President (1959–73).

      Controversy is the lifeblood of history. If Burke taught us that truth has a certain economy of expression, John Stuart Mill taught us that truth also has a necessary vitality. In history, at least, ideas which are not challenged tend to atrophy and harden into dogmas. Modern Irish history in recent years has been marked by many serious and important debates, which tend to spill out of the academic forum to engage wider public interest. Was the 1798 rebellion inspired by the modernising ideas of the French Revolution, or was it essentially a sectarian jacquerie? Were the victims of the Great Irish Famine of 1845–9 sacrificed to a narrow vision of political economy, or did the British governments of the time do the best that could have been done under the circumstances? Who were the real victors of the Irish Land War – the Irish peasantry as a whole, or simply a privileged rural bourgeoisie? One event alone in the war of independence – the Kilmichael ambush – has produced a growing literature, involving significant numbers of locally based historians as well as professional academics, about whether Crown forces staged a ‘false surrender’ to lure Republican ambushers into the open and were rightly refused quarter thereafter, or whether this is a story to justify the deliberate killing of disarmed prisoners.

      All these controversies, even the more tedious and embittered ones, are in principle to be welcomed. The willingness to question and debate is one of the most striking and attractive features of modern Irish historiography. There is one great exception to this rule – the historical treatment of the Civil Rights crisis of 1968. Here the iron hand of consensus rules. This is not without good reason. Northern Ireland in 1968 was characterised by a dead weight of Unionist–Nationalist antagonism which expressed itself in the denial of equal citizenship to the Catholic and Nationalist minority. The most striking example of this denial was the gerrymander of the province’s second city to ensure that the control of local government remained in the hands of the Unionist minority – but there were other significant injustices, not only in electoral arrangements but in the allocation of jobs and housing. In this sense, then, a moral case definitely existed in support of the civil rights movement.

      The strength of this moral case has, however, led to the suppression of all the more normal forms of historical enquiry. For example, what were the real motivations of the 68ers – in ’68, and not as reconstructed in later years? What was the relationship between the radical leadership of the movement and its support base on the street? What was its real international context? Here lies the importance of Simon Prince’s book. It applies all the techniques of historical questioning and research methodology one would expect from one of the most gifted young Cambridge historians (now teaching in Oxford) of his generation. Prince pushes aside the cobwebs and gives us a fresh look at one of the most important moments of modern Irish history. His book will provoke debate – and some disagreement – but it will shake up the subject and thus perform a great service.

      Paul Bew Professor of Irish Politics Queen’s University, Belfast

      May 2007

      Young men throwing petrol bombs at police officers. This image has defined the summer of 2018 in Derry – just as it became visual shorthand for revolt during the early years of the Troubles.1 For modern historians, the temptation is always there to see the past in the present and to view things through a national lens.2 But Northern Ireland’s ’68 set out instead to look sideways, finding the global interconnectedness in the local story of the start of the Troubles. Eamonn McCann, who organised the first Civil Rights march in Derry, recalled coming home convinced that he ‘could sweep up the local, parochial politics … by introducing an international dimension’.3 He succeeded, transforming forever the contexts in which everyone in Northern Ireland thought and acted. Since the book’s publication over a decade ago, I have become even more convinced of the need for historians to write the long ’68 into the history of Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland into the history of the long ’68.4 Where the account offered here has activists on the Celtic fringe adopting and adapting ideas from the north American and western European core, I would now argue that Northern Ireland was central as well as peripheral. Myriad networks of people, objects, and ideas linked together disparate points around the western world in these years – and for some of these networks the central nodes lay in Northern Ireland. During 1970, for example, militants from the United States and France took direct inspiration from their Northern Irish comrades, who they believed had successfully bridged the gulf between western youth and Third World guerrilla fighters.5 The confrontations of the long ’68 – in places like Chicago, Paris, and Derry – were characterised by individuals drawing on the ideological positions

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