LITMIR.BIZ

      First published in 2012; new revised edition published in 2019 by

      Irish Academic Press

      10 George’s Street

      Newbridge

      Co. Kildare

      Ireland

       www.iap.ie

      © Simon Prince & Geoffrey Warner, 2019

      9781788550932 (Paper)

      9781788550949 (Kindle)

      9781788550956 (Epub)

      9781788550963 (PDF)

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      An entry can be found on request

      Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

      An entry can be found on request

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

      Typeset in Classical Garamond BT 11/15 pt

      Cover: The Troubles: Derry riots, Derry, 1969.

      (Gilles Caron copyright: Fondation Gilles Caron/Clermes)

      Contents

       Preface to the New Edition

       Acknowledgements

       List of Abbreviations

       Maps

       Introduction

       CHAPTER ONE

       Before October

       CHAPTER TWO

       The Divis Street Riots of 1964

       CHAPTER THREE

       Between the IRA and the UVF

       CHAPTER FOUR

       The Day the Troubles Began

       CHAPTER FIVE

       The Civil Rights Movement

       CHAPTER SIX

       To the Brink in Belfast

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       The Battle of the Bogside

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       From the Ashes of Bombay Street …

       CHAPTER NINE

       The Weekend of 27–28 June 1970

       CHAPTER TEN

       The Falls Road Curfew

       ENDINGS

       Endnotes

       Index

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

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