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Northern Ireland’s ’68. Simon Prince
Читать онлайн.Название Northern Ireland’s ’68
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isbn 9781788550383
Автор произведения Simon Prince
Издательство Ingram
The ensuing violence was made worse by an earlier decision to move a party of police from the original route to the opposite end of the street. The RUC later claimed that the officers had been sent to guard a ‘demolished building, containing more than ample ammunition for violent demonstration’. However, the unintended consequence of stationing men here was that the marchers were effectively trapped. This ‘tactical error on the field’, to employ the term used by headquarters, was compounded by another: the party was not informed that the crowd was being dispersed nor given orders to allow people through.32 As the commission of inquiry observed, ‘when a number of marchers hurried towards them some violence was almost inevitable’.33 With the demonstrators seemingly reluctant to leave, the RUC called in water cannons to clear the area. The water wagon, which was making its first appearance in Derry, sprayed people indiscriminately.34 As well as sweeping both sides of the street, the water cannons also sprayed Saturday afternoon shoppers on the bridge leading to the city centre.35
The water wagon directed a jet through an open window on the first floor of the house where the Ulster Television camera crew was stationed.36 The BBC team’s filming was also impaired.37 The Telefís Éireann cameraman, however, managed to record several hundred feet of film. A former BBC employee living in Derry contacted the current affairs department about this footage. Since the Irish Television Service’s launch in 1961, the two national broadcasters had co-operated extensively. The BBC was therefore allowed to screen the dramatic Telefís Éireann film of the march on its regional and network news bulletins.38 The television coverage transformed the political situation. When one of the Unionist MPs at Westminster described the RUC as ‘probably the finest police force in the world’ during Prime Minister’s Questions, Wilson referred him to the BBC’s reporting. ‘Up to now we have perhaps had to rely on the statement of himself and others on these matters,’ he explained. ‘Since then we have had British television.’39 Events in Northern Ireland were to remain on British television screens into the next century.
John Hume, the community activist, had been a writer and performer on BBC Northern Ireland’s answer to ‘That Was The Week That Was’. The British show’s satirical assault on the establishment had made it a hit with critics and viewers alike. But Northern Ireland’s attempt to build up a domestic satire industry proved a failure.40 It was difficult to deliver topical comedy in a political culture where the topics never seemed to change. Four decades later, this is still a problem for people seeking to satirise Northern Irish politics. Newton Emerson, editor of the spoof Portadown News website, mined the hypocrisy of the peace process for material. However, he eventually decided to ‘decommission’ the website as he feared that he was on the verge of repeating himself. Emerson had been able to get away with attacking men who were normally intolerant of criticism for the simple reason that he was funny. Northerners on both sides of the communal divide pride themselves on their sense of humour. In 2006, the Cambridge University Ireland Society held a forum on ‘Humour in Northern Irish Politics’. Most of the panel and the audience members had come to praise Northerners for learning to laugh in the face of adversity. Emerson, by contrast, rubbished this cliché. He recalled how when he had lived in England he had not found that the natives lacked a sense of humour – and suggested to the students that they had probably made the same discovery. Northerners had not forged a unique brand of comedy that set them apart from the rest of humanity.41
The central theme of this book is that Northern Ireland was different, but not exceptional. Thirty years of virtual war while the rest of the continent experienced a period of uneasy peace has encouraged some people to forget that Northern Ireland has always been part of Europe. Fleets of tugs did not spew forth from Harland and Woolf’s great shipyards to tow the six counties to a new mooring off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Northern Ireland should be compared to France and West Germany, not to apartheid-era South Africa and Israel-Palestine. This does not lead to the injustices of the Unionist regime being ignored. Western Europe in these years was a place where former Nazis held high office, the police invoked laws from the fascist era, and a counter-insurgency war was fought in one of its greatest cities.42 Northern Ireland under the Unionists was not outside the mainstream in this Europe.
The civil rights movement was part of the rising tide of radicalism that swept the continent during the 1960s. This, however, has often been obscured in accounts of both the global revolt of 1968 and the origins of the Troubles. In 1988, the street protests of twenty years earlier were commemorated in Western Europe as the post-war generation’s coming of age.43 When they reached maturity, the baby boomers had supposedly found themselves in conflict with an adult world where conservative values and institutions had not kept pace with economic modernisation.44 ’68 was presented as the beginning of a cultural revolution that had delivered personal freedom. This view was championed by the handful of former activists who had established themselves as spokesmen for the ’68 generation.45 By contrast, Northern Ireland was regarded as having a civil rights generation. Roy Foster’s history of modern Ireland warns against making ‘analogies with student movements’ of the late 1960s. The ‘absence of a distinct youth culture in Ulster society’ has led Foster and others to conclude that Northern Ireland was not part of the international festival of liberation and therefore not part of ’68.46
The intensity of the Northern Irish conflict suggested that the Troubles must have been an inevitable product of the sectarian divide. The creation of a Protestant-dominated state with a sizeable Catholic minority in the years following the First World War did not solve the Irish question so much as rephrase the problem. For decades, Northern Ireland apparently remained the ‘static society’.47 Unionists presided over an unjust system and both Nationalism and Republicanism failed to challenge it. According to the official story, this only changed when the first generation of Catholics to benefit from the education reforms of the mid-1940s came of age in the late 1960s. The minority population then began to protest in the streets against the crimes of the Protestant supremacist state – and was met with police batons.48 This time, however, the traditional hardline response split the Unionist Party rather than binding it together, led to condemnation not support from Britain and, instead of crushing the movement, brought more Catholics into the streets.49
By the thirtieth anniversary of ’68 and the start of the Troubles, historians had begun to challenge these dominant narratives. The media’s favourite ’68ers had retrospectively claimed that the movement’s leftist rhetoric should be ignored. Activists had supposedly resorted to outdated Marxist terminology to describe the fledgling struggle for individual autonomy as nothing else was available to them at that time. Historians have preferred, however, to research the political language of ’68 for themselves rather than rely upon the self-appointed translators.50 As the fortieth anniversary nears, this approach has resulted in what is becoming the new consensus on ’68. Examining the flood of words spouted out in the late 1960s, it becomes obvious that political change mattered more than experimenting with new lifestyles. Sixty-eighters were not turning away from politics in the pursuit of pleasure; isolated individuals were finding fulfilment in collective action. They believed that they were part of a global struggle to free humanity from imperialism, capitalism and bureaucracy, not the individual from old-fashioned ways of living. Instead of a fleeting festival of liberation, ’68 emerges as the climax of post-war radicalism. There was a ‘long ’68’ dating back to at least the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s.
This political interpretation allows events in Northern Ireland to be written back into the story of ’68; it also allows the events of ’68 to be written