LITMIR.BIZ

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OCTOBER 1968

      The protesters provoked the police; the police attacked the protesters. This pattern was repeated in cities throughout the world during 1968. On 5 October 1968, it was Derry’s turn to stage what had become a familiar drama for the world’s television viewers. The protesters who gathered at the city’s railway station for a civil rights march on that Saturday afternoon represented, according to a later commission of inquiry, ‘most of the elements in opposition to the Northern Ireland Government’.1 This was what brought them together, but the marchers were also engaged in a number of other struggles – some of which were with each other.

      The march was for civil rights, not Irish unity. It was part of a loose campaign to overthrow the sectarian system that relegated the Catholic minority to the status of second-class citizens. The authorities, however, insisted upon treating the march as a traditional Republican/Nationalist parade and banned it from entering the walled city – the Protestant citadel that had resisted Catholic armies in the past.2 Republicans and Nationalists were indeed well represented among those who assembled at the railway station.3 The disastrous Irish Republican Army (IRA) campaign of 1956–62 appeared to have marked the end of the armed struggle. Republican modernisers were instead hoping to unite Catholic and Protestant workers in a non-violent struggle for a socialist Ireland. Civil rights were seen as a stepping stone to this ultimate goal, a way of allowing the working class to recognise its common interests. The architects of this new departure, Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan, were there to witness their theories being tested. Johnston had joined the IRA; Coughlan had kept his distance from it. They were nonetheless both close to the IRA’s Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding, and had expected him to join them on the march – as had the Special Branch detectives who spied upon the movement. But Goulding’s car had broken down on the road to Derry.4 The leader of the Nationalist Party, Eddie McAteer, had encountered no such problems making his way to the outskirts of his home town. McAteer had spent his life campaigning against the partition of his country and to improve the lot of the Catholic community. In the last few years, however, his party’s main battle had been against political extinction. McAteer had recently warned those with ‘public voices’ to guard against having their words ‘enlarged into hideous actions’, yet he could not ignore the shift to street politics.5 He therefore lined up alongside his rivals against his better judgement.

      The young community activist tipped to replace McAteer as the leader of constitutional nationalism, John Hume, also preferred working within the system to direct action and had helped to set up a credit union as well as a housing association in Derry. However, the Northern Ireland government’s heavy-handed decision to ban the march from the city centre had pushed him onto the streets.6 The Republican Labour MP Gerry Fitt, another one of McAteer’s challengers, was more enthusiastic about the march, seeing it as an opportunity to advance the cause of civil rights – and his own political career. Fitt had arrived from the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool with three British MPs in tow to act as independent observers. They belonged to a ginger group that was struggling to persuade the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to impose reform upon the devolved government in Belfast.7

      One of the Labour MPs, Russell Kerr, had already witnessed another of ’68’s big set-pieces: he had been in Chicago when the anti- war movement had confronted the politicians at the Democratic Convention. Kerr was later to tell the General Secretary of the Connolly Association, the Irish emigrant organisation that had first suggested the idea of a civil rights campaign, that the two police forces ‘both play in the same league’.8 This was what the youthful radicals who had staged the march were counting on – indeed, their entire plan depended upon it. American activists believed that they had found a short cut out of the political margins: ‘You create disturbances, you keep pushing the system. You keep drawing up the contradictions until they have to hit back.’9 Northern Ireland’s activists adopted an almost identical approach. As the principal organiser of the march, Eamonn McCann, noted in his memoirs, the ‘strategy was to provoke the police into overreaction’.10 Another leading leftist, Michael Farrell, remembered the Derry protest as ‘our Chicago’, but it was also ‘our Paris, our Prague’. ‘One world, One struggle’ – that was the motto of ’68 according to McCann.11

      The leftists saw themselves as part of a global revolt against imperialism, capitalism and bureaucracy. At the local level, this meant that they were opposed to the ‘Green Tories’ – the Nationalists in the North and Fianna Fáil in the South – as well as to the ‘Orange Tories’ who controlled the state.12 It also meant that they were opposed to the bureaucratic socialism of the Old Left. A year earlier, McCann’s newspaper had denounced the Republican modernisers as ‘Stalinist fakers’.13 At a march from Coalisland to Dungannon held as the Soviets were suppressing the Prague Spring, leftists from Belfast and Derry had greeted the Communist Chair of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), Betty Sinclair, with shouts of ‘Russia’ and ‘jackboot’.14

      The leftists had tried to provoke the police at this protest too, but had been restrained by the stewards. The Communists, Republicans and Nationalists who sat on the NICRA executive felt that violence would wreck the civil rights campaign and had worked hard to ensure that the Coalisland–Dungannon march passed off without incident.15 However, NICRA was only acting as the sponsor of the Derry march – the city’s leftists had taken over responsibility for organising it. But this did not ensure that everything went the way that the young radicals wanted. Although an impressive number of politicians and activists had turned up at the railway station, the overall attendance fell far short of the planning committee’s prediction of ‘in the region of 5,000 people’.16 The Derry Journal estimated that only somewhere between 350 and 400 people assembled for the start of the march – five times fewer than the number that had paraded from Coalisland to Dungannon.17 Like so many other innovative challenges to the Northern state before it, the civil rights campaign seemed to be marching into obscurity.

      In the years since Derry’s last street protests, however, the new medium of television had acquired a mass audience. As veteran anchorman Walter Kronkite later explained, a demonstration now needed ‘only enough people to fill the frame of a television camera’ to be a success.18 Indeed, the publicity for the march was aimed as much at inducing the BBC, Ulster Television and Telefís Éireann to send camera crews as at bringing out the citizens of Derry.19 All the leftists had to do to have their protest covered by the network news programmes at home and abroad was to provide the drama demanded by television.

      Several clashes involving policemen and protesters occurred soon after the march got under way. These violent incidents were partly the result of the confusion over tactics that both sides were experiencing. The original route had been spontaneously abandoned and an unguarded road taken instead – forcing the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to move a reserve unit hurriedly into place.20 The first rank of marchers, which at the insistence of the organisers mainly consisted of MPs, had been pushed into the hastily assembled police line. Although no explicit order was given to draw batons, certain officers appear to have reacted by striking McAteer and Fitt.21 The latter was then arrested for disorderly behaviour and taken to the hospital via the police station.22 The RUC later claimed that a placard wielded by one of the marchers rather than a police baton had cut Fitt’s head. The explanation given for McAteer’s injuries was even weaker. The police report devoted an entire paragraph to an analysis of the ‘bruised area below the right groin’ before concluding that there was ‘nothing which would give any indication as to the exact nature of the blow causing the contusion’.23

      Following the initial scuffles, however, both sides backed away from each other.24 In the absence of anything else to do, Sinclair began to improvise a meeting. Her hope was that the same tactics that had kept the peace in Dungannon would work again in Derry. The police also adopted a conciliatory stance, providing Sinclair with a chair and making no attempt to disperse what was an illegal assembly. The NICRA Chair’s plea for the right of non-violent procession to be properly respected was echoed by McAteer.25 McCann’s speech was more ambivalent regarding the use of force.26 As McCann later testified in court, he had told his audience that he was ‘not advising anyone to rush the police cordon’ nor – being a ‘private individual’ – was he going to ‘stop anyone’.27 Indeed, given that the leftists were responsible for the marshals, anyone who wanted to attack the RUC was

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