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Belfast and Derry in Revolt. Simon Prince
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isbn 9781788550956
Автор произведения Simon Prince
Издательство Ingram
The Derry radicals were given their second chance by NICRA’s choice in August 1968 to ‘challenge … by more vigorous action than Parliamentary questions and newspaper controversy’.191 ‘[I]nspired by the Poor People’s March to Washington,’ a NICRA committee member remembered in April 1969, the ‘Association … decided to carry out a programme of marches.’192 The DHAC pledged its support to the first march from Coalisland and Dungannon and offered to transport to Tyrone anyone who wished to take part.193 Dungannon was different from Derry: NICRA had ties in this rural area and the Nationalist MP Austin Currie was working with the Brantry Republican Club in a local non-violent campaign.194 As the march was to show, they were experimenting with a more basic and less volatile formula than the second city’s non-violent activists. Indeed, without knowing it, the organizers went against all the advice that King had publicly given during the Selma marches about how to stage a successful protest. King stated that ‘the goal of the demonstration’ should be to bring about a ‘confrontation with injustice’ which would ‘reveal … the continued presence of violence’.195 Confrontation and violence, though, were not what most of the 2,000 or so people marching from Coalisland to Dungannon wanted. The first civil rights march instead resembled a traditional nationalist parade – with five bands, Nationalist MPs in the front ranks, IRA stewards and renditions of ‘The Soldier’s Song’. At the rally held afterwards, Sinclair praised the crowd for making the march a ‘peaceful one’. Currie and Gerry Fitt, the Republican Labour MP for West Belfast, gave more confrontational speeches, using sectarian insults such as ‘Orange bigots’ and ‘black bastards’, yet their actions did not match this rhetoric. Fitt claimed that he would have led the people into the police lines which were blocking them from reaching the town centre, ‘if it weren’t for the presence of women and children’.196 King, in contrast, had actually sent children into the arms of policemen, the teeth of German Shepherds, the water hoses of fireman and the cells of the local jail to save his Birmingham campaign.197 Although Republicans were more comfortable with confrontation than constitutional politicians, the stewards were still under orders to keep the crowd away from the police. A confidential document acquired by the RUC Special Branch stressed that they were to ‘march peacefully’, ‘sit down’, ‘if stopped’ and offer ‘no resistance’.198 Leftists from Derry and Belfast tried to resist by throwing ‘stones, broken placards and poles’ at officers, but, as Currie remembered, they were ‘prevented by the stewards from engaging in confrontation with the police’.199 When the marchers finally began to disperse, some of the radicals clashed with loyalist counter-demonstrators before being cleared off the streets by the RUC – who made only two arrests on the day and were made to appear the neutral guardians of law and order. The next week, St Patrick’s hall in Coalisland was filled with parishioners waiting to hear the senior curate’s verdict. The police reported that the priest ‘expressed the view that the march was a failure’ and that the ‘meeting endorsed these views’.200 As King’s ‘long years of experience’ had taught him, it was ‘ineffective’ to stage ‘token marches avoiding direct confrontation’.201 Despite claims to the contrary, NICRA and Dungannon’s non-violent activists had not borrowed and adapted King’s tactics to Northern Ireland.
In Dungannon, the Derry radicals were just one part of a coalition made up of almost all the country’s opposition groups as well as individuals who were not caught up in the politics of the politicians. Most marchers were there for a peaceful protest, not confrontation and violence; most marchers were there to call for reform rather than revolution. But, with their colourful language and behaviour, the leftists were able to attract a disproportionate level of attention. A similar argument could also be made about their place in the mass movement that emerged in Derry after 5 October 1968. However, what happened in between simply cannot be characterized in this way, as the second civil rights march – the event which transformed the situation – was wholly planned by the Derry radicals. The DHAC secured NICRA sponsorship, and then exploited the Belfast-based body’s ignorance of the second city to get complete control of the organizing committee and to get a route agreed which ended within the walls.202 A comparison with narratives of West Germany’s ‘red decade’, 1967–77, is useful here. Stories about the passage from protest through resistance to armed struggle in the Federal Republic disagree about the particulars and the politics, yet they all tend to agree that it is a German story – a story about the unmastered Nazi past. While the national context is clearly important, failing to look beyond it has distorted representations; ‘Hitler’s children’ were also the children of the (global) revolution, and the Achtundsechzigers, as this chapter has argued, drew upon a transnational discourse and protest repertoire.203 The Derry radicals did the same. This, though, is obscured in narratives which assume that the Northern Irish past can only be understood in terms of Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist. When the march’s fortieth anniversary came round, McCann objected to how the ‘international dimension [had] virtually been written out of history’: ‘in Derry at least, the activists who triggered the civil rights campaign didn’t see themselves as Orange or Green, but of a hue [i.e. Red] which, we believed, would … obliterate the colour-coding’.204 The march was much more a break with the past than a logical continuation of it.
CONCLUSION
In late August 1968, the local Labour Party moaned that ‘there were not people in Derry prepared to fight for their rights as the blacks in America were fighting’.205 However, just as there was no such thing as a single Derry Catholic life experience, there was no such thing as a single Derry Catholic protest agenda. People in the city were actually fighting for a wide range of rights, often using strategies that were similar to those employed by African Americans – they were just not backing the radical left’s attempts to engineer a confrontation. The previous twelve months alone had seen campaigns to do with poor television reception, rent increases, resettlement grants, vandalism, new water charges, road safety, policing and inadequate midwifery.206 Contending against marginalization, people in Derry had fought for welfare rights and better standards of living, and in the process they had fought to play an active role as citizens in the decisions that the state was making about their lives. They had shown stamina, courage and flexibility over tactics; they had shown that it was possible to win reform (there was no such thing as a single unionist reaction, either). People in Derry were ‘neither passive, disciplined dupes nor heroic agents of antidiscipline, but “co-producers” of systems of provision’.207 These campaigns, then, were not on straight roads or indeed twisting paths to Duke Street and the civil rights movement (this metaphor leads down a dead end): the strategies and goals that these groups and individuals chose to pursue were limited by Derry’s existing, albeit shifting, political, social, economic and cultural contexts. The radicals escaped from these constraints by taking an international perspective, one which held that reform was not enough and that a revolutionary transformation was possible. As a result, they reconfigured the constellation of power in Northern Ireland as well as in Derry, and, when power changed dramatically, so did protest. Life in the city was going to evolve rapidly.
2
The Divis Street Riots of 1964
Just after 3 pm on 7 October 1964, Terence O’Neill rose from his seat in the House of Commons of the Northern Ireland Parliament to make a statement on the civil disturbances which had occurred in Belfast during the course of the previous week. Since becoming Prime Minister in March 1963, he said, he had ‘had two principal aims in view’: firstly, ‘to make Northern Ireland economically stronger and more prosperous, so that all our people may enjoy a fuller and richer life’ and secondly, ‘to build bridges between the two traditions within our community’. It was clear that he believed the two objectives went hand in hand, for he expressed concern that the disturbances might hinder his government’s efforts to attract new industry to Northern Ireland. Although O’Neill recognized that ‘only a tiny minority of the citizens of Belfast either provoked or took part’ in them, he emphasized that:
‘[w]e