Belfast and Derry in Revolt - Simon Prince

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the groups brought on board by the VSC to help organize the first Grosvenor Square march was the Stop-it Committee, whose chair had collected Carmichael at Heathrow airport back in July 1967.154 On 4 December 1967, the committee held a meeting at Conway Hall to announce that the anti-war movement had reached ‘a new stage – resistance’: ‘Because the American Government has so callously ignored marches, protests and reasoned dissent on an international … level, more extreme forms of action are necessary’. Three weeks before the march, in late February 1968, the Metropolitan Police Special Branch was expecting it to be ‘violent, paralleling recent demonstrations on the continent’.155 It was and it did. The Guardian concluded that ‘the demonstrators seemed determined to stay until they had provoked a violent response of some sort from the police, and this intention became paramount once they entered Grosvenor Square’.156 Whitehall was convinced that a ‘disciplined gang’ from West Germany – ‘acknowledged experts in methods of riot against police’ – had played a leading role in this confrontation.157 Some qualifications need to be made here: newspapers were framing marches as law-and-order issues and so were panicking about violence and praising the police; officials were predisposed to find evidence of subversion; leftists were making exaggerated claims to pull in the media and push the authorities into overreacting.158 Still, as a Special Branch report from September 1968 noted, there had been a ‘radical change over the last few years … from orderly, peaceful, co-operative meetings and processions to passive resistance and “sit downs” and now to active confrontation’.159

      McCann returned to Derry after the first Grosvenor Square march.160 Whenever McCann was asked to remember the civil rights era during the lead up to the fortieth-anniversary commemorations, he was keen to stress this hostility to his new strategy and to its global frame of reference.161 His ‘memory of it’ was that ‘the moderates’ ‘resented the Socialist element … importing other experiences and other ideas’.162 McCann could have drawn a dividing line between the Old and New Lefts, too. C. Desmond Greaves, the chief of the London-based Connolly Association and a veteran British Communist, had identified civil rights as Unionism’s weak spot back in 1955; he had also taken the orthodox position that a movement should be patiently built up from within Ireland’s Labour parties and trade unions.163 Although the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), which was founded in Belfast at the start of 1967, fell short of Greaves’s original vision (the Labour movement was underrepresented, other opposition groups were overrepresented), a close comrade, Betty Sinclair, came to head up the committee. She resisted attempts to take politics on to the streets and then, having lost the internal debate, restricted the protests that did take place.164 As a young Communist in the inter-war years, Sinclair had witnessed what had happened when the Marxist Revolutionary Workers’ Group had gone on to the streets: the 1935 Orange marching season in Belfast had brought communal violence and the decline of Sinclair’s party.165 This fear of sectarian confrontation was shared by many within the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) as well.166 So, recalled McClenaghan, ‘when Eamonn came to Derry and joined the Labour Party he immediately, immediately caused division … just because of what he was politically’.167 By May 1968, the Derry Journal was reporting rumours that the branch was split and Anderson, the Unionist candidate in the by-election, was claiming a ‘red fringe’ had taken ‘control’.168 A new formula of non-violence was going to be trialled in Derry.

      The Labour candidate, the English-born Janet Wilcock, was calling for the same far-reaching reforms as the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC), which had recently brought together left-wingers in her party and in the local Republican Club.169 Barely a month after the area plan had been launched, the DHAC burst into the Guildhall to tell Nationalists as well as Unionists that change needed to come immediately. The group’s spokesman demanded that the corporation should extend the city boundary to make more space available for new homes and should embark upon a crash house-building programme.170 The novelty of direct action attracted the attention of the local media, with this disruption of the March meeting of the council making the front page of the Derry Journal.171 The radicals returned the following month, yet this time the report was tucked away in the inside pages.172 During June 1968, the DHAC succeeded in getting back into the headlines by blocking the main road through the Bogside for three hours with a caravan that had been home to a young family of four for three years. While the disorder did force the corporation to promise to take up this family’s case, the radicals nonetheless warned that there would be ‘a much bigger demonstration’, ‘if nothing materialised by Saturday next’.173 This was an unrealistic deadline, and so, a week later, the DHAC and the caravan returned.174 When a policeman asked Melaugh why he was stopping traffic, the officer was told to ‘bring this matter to Court’ – ‘then I will get the publicity I am looking for’. Wilcock was bound over to keep the peace for two years and afterwards issued a statement reaffirming the DHAC’s commitment to ‘non-violent, militant action although it be illegal’.175

      Like their foreign comrades, the Derry radicals were now seeking confrontation. As McCann wrote in his 1974 memoir, ‘our conscious, if unspoken, strategy was to provoke the police into overreaction and thus spark off mass reaction against the authorities’.176 The term ‘provocation’, with its implications for the question of who was responsible for the violence of the start of the Troubles, is controversial; yet, it was also one which was often used by activists around the world in the late 1960s. For example, the leader of the Resistance, an American anti-war group, said in September 1967 that its aim was to ‘provoke confrontation’. West German leftists claimed the ‘protest violence’ of the Easter 1968 marches was a way of ‘provoking the state’ and an article in the July–August 1968 issue of the New Left Review advised student radicals to behave ‘provocatively … to the extent that they [i.e. the university authorities] need to use force’.177 What, though, did contemporaries mean when they referred to ‘provocation’ and indeed to ‘violence’? During the Birmingham campaign, King explained to ‘the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice’ that ‘we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.’178 A month after her husband was murdered, Coretta Scott King ‘remind[ed]’ Americans about this hidden violence: ‘starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence … Contempt for poverty is violence.’179 McCann wanted to reveal the violence, broadly defined, that he believed lay behind the Prime Minister’s liberal mask: ‘O’Neill talked about progress but he would go back to the old Unionist background of open suppression’.180 The radicals intended to test this hypothesis. On 5 September 1968, the DHAC informed the media that they were going to ‘fight to force the powers-that-be to act’ – to build ‘houses for the homeless or a new wing to Crumlin Road Prison’.181

      Everyone in Derry, McCann acknowledged, knew that the ‘one certain way to ensure a head-on clash with the authorities was to organize a non-Unionist march through the city centre’.182 As the Derry Journal pointed out in the summer of 1968, during ‘the past twenty years several attempts have been made by the Nationalist Party … to demonstrate in … the main thoroughfares of the city. They were met by the imposition of the Special Powers Act and on two occasions police batons were out’.183 The theory was simple, but putting it into practice was not. In line with other western countries (including Britain and the Republic of Ireland), Northern Ireland had become less repressive throughout the ‘long 1960s’.184 Rome in March, West Berlin in April, Paris in May and Chicago in August – these vicious clashes were the exceptions rather than the rule in 1968. Brutal repression of demonstrations by the forces of law and order was relatively rare.185 This development had, in fact, helped to create the space for direct action to operate; the West German sociologist Jürgen Habermas argued that the leftists were ‘exploiting the unexpected latitude granted by liberal institutions’.186 So, the failure of the Derry radicals to engineer a confrontation at their first attempt was to be expected. In July 1968, the Labour and Republican left proposed to mark the centenary of the Marxist martyr James Connolly’s birth by holding a march that would pass through the city walls. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) responded by entering into a series of discussions with the organizers about finding a different, less provocative route and, after finally choosing to ban the march, by stationing only a few officers at the edge of the rally which was held instead. The leftists had cautioned that ‘If peaceful demonstrations are to be banned, can

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