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Belfast and Derry in Revolt. Simon Prince
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isbn 9781788550956
Автор произведения Simon Prince
Издательство Ingram
Less than five years later, and after he had been forced out of office, O’Neill’s vision of a peaceful and prosperous, but Unionist-controlled, province had been shattered. The Troubles had started. The Divis riots of 1964 are a good point of departure for the study of what happened, particularly in so far as the city of Belfast was concerned.
I
When O’Neill referred to ‘the two traditions in our community’, he meant Protestants (a term which included members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, Presbyterians, Methodists and other, smaller Christian denominations) and Catholics, or unionists and nationalists. These two divisions – the communal and the political – overlapped, but there was no complete correspondence between them. As O’Neill’s reference to building bridges between traditions implies, there had been a long history of intimate hatreds which, in Belfast, had begun in the early nineteenth century when large numbers of Catholics began to move into what had previously been an overwhelmingly Protestant town. They had come in search of work in the industries which were to make it the eighth biggest in the United Kingdom by 1911 and the home of ‘the largest weaving and tobacco factories, ropeworks and output of shipping in the world’.2 From less than 10 per cent in 1784, the proportion of Catholics in Belfast rose to 34 per cent in 1861. It fell to 23 per cent by 1926, but then slowly began to rise once more so that by 1961 it stood at 26 per cent.3
There were fifteen major riots in Belfast between 1813 and 1909.4 If Protestants fought with, and sometimes killed, Catholics in Belfast, and vice-versa, it was not, essentially, because of religious disputes and nor was it, essentially, because of ethnic rivalry (although there often were religious and communal dimensions to rioting). Instead, it was, essentially, because of political conflict, with serious rioting usually coming at times of political upheaval, specifically during election campaigns. Indeed, riots involving Irish Catholics in Scottish and English cities as well as in Belfast were rare until the electoral reforms of the 1820s and 1830s. Liverpool, for example, witnessed sectarian rioting after the Whigs took control of local government in 1835 and the Tories chose to use anti-Catholicism to take it back. The pattern of rioting in Belfast, though, changed somewhat after the decision in 1865 to take the responsibility of policing away from the town council and give it to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). So, while in 1864 Protestants and many police officers had battled against Catholics, in 1886 the clashes were largely fought out between Protestants, on one side, and the RIC and the British army on the other.5
Unsurprisingly, then, during the years 1920–22, political upheaval and the return of security powers to local politicians worked together to lead to the worst violence in the city’s whole history. However, we should be careful not to subsume everything within the Irish Revolutionary narrative because the start of the Belfast ‘Troubles’ came not with a shooting war between the IRA and the Crown forces but with expulsions from the city’s shipyards. This fitted in with a pattern of shipyard expulsions across the United Kingdom, as the post-war economic downturn and the return of servicemen led to ‘outsiders’ being pushed out in the battle for work. Beginning in July 1920, at Belfast shipyards, thousands of Catholics and left-wing Protestants were ejected from their jobs for being ‘Sinn Féin workers’.6 It was telling that these expulsions came after the annual commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne, on 12 July, where speeches had dwelt on ‘loyal’ Protestants being unemployed while ‘disloyal’ Catholics were in work. Trouble was not limited to the shipyards. Loyalist crowd violence was aimed at Catholic churches, convents, houses and businesses; more organized campaigns of intimidation, too, worked to drive Catholics out of Protestant areas. On a smaller scale, members of the Protestant community were also victims of the other side of this struggle for space and security.7 ‘The reciprocity of northern violence’, according to Peter Hart, ‘does not fit the pogrom model.’ The ‘battle for Belfast’ was ‘more like a miniature civil war’, one in which the wider war between the British empire and Irish republicanism allowed all manner of communal, social, economic and personal grudges and interests to be pursued.8
The end of the Civil War in the South and the survival of the Northern state in some ways marked a return in Belfast to an earlier pattern of politicized communal violence. During the Great Depression, for example, efforts by Marxist-Leninist groups to organize across the communal divide had some successes (in 1932, unemployed Protestants and Catholics rioted together in protest against the low levels of welfare payments), but were thwarted when the Orange card was played. In the 1935 marching season, sectarian riots left ten dead and hundreds forced from their homes – and also resulted in a sharp decline in Communism.9 One consequence of the regular outbreaks of violence was the residential segregation which prevails in Belfast to this day. A natural tendency on the part of the Catholic minority to cluster in certain parts of the city where they would not only benefit from living near others who shared their values and from the many social outreach activities of their Church was reinforced by a heightened desire for security in the event of trouble. Indeed, people were often forced to move into more ‘friendly’ areas during or after rioting, a phenomenon which also affected Protestants.
By 1969, this process had produced a situation in which two-thirds of Belfast’s households lived in streets in which 91 per cent or more of the households were of the same religion.10 Catholics were concentrated in five main areas. By far the biggest was the Falls in the west of the city, which contained 70 per cent of the households in streets which were 91 per cent or more Catholic. The next largest was Ardoyne, which was just off the Crumlin Road in the north-west of the city, with 11 per cent of the households in question. Then there was an area to the north-west of the city centre which stretched from the Unity Flats along North Queen Street to the New Lodge Road (8 per cent); another, the Markets, which was to the south of the city centre on either side of Cromac Street (4 per cent); and, finally, Ballymacarrett (or the Short Strand), which was sandwiched between the Newtownards and Albertbridge Roads just across the River Lagan in east Belfast (4 per cent).11 The division between Protestant and Catholic areas could occur within the width of a single street and much of the inter-communal violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took place along these dividing lines, or interfaces as they are often called.
Patterns of behaviour also varied sharply between those living in these segregated districts. A survey carried out between December 1967 and January 1968 in the Catholic Clonard district, just north of the Falls Road, and an adjacent Protestant district just south of the Shankill Road, showed huge differences between the people in each area in terms of their marital ties, their circle of friends, where they shopped, where they caught a bus into the city centre, which football team they supported and which newspaper they read.12 Children’s education was not included, but presumably only because everyone knew that Catholic parents sent their children to Church schools while Protestant parents sent theirs to state schools. Segregation was widely seen as a simple fact of life. Violence, however, was not.
II
The riots of September–October 1964 were the worst in Belfast since 1935. No-one was killed and no-one has calculated the total of those injured, but speaking in the Northern Ireland Parliament on 7 October 1964 the Minister of Home Affairs, Brian McConnell, stated that seventy-two people were arrested, forty-six police were injured, and fifty-three business premises, fifty private houses, fourteen police vehicles, seven private vehicles and twenty public transport vehicles were damaged.13 What happened and why? The answers to these questions enable us more fully to understand the political situation in Belfast in the 1960s.
Although Northern Ireland had its own devolved government, complete with Governor, Cabinet, House of Commons and Senate, it also returned twelve MPs to the United Kingdom Parliament in London and the riots occurred during the run up to the General Election of 15 October 1964. All twelve of Westminster’s Northern Irish MPs were Unionists – that is, members of the party which had ruled the province without interruption since the devolved government was established in 1921. The Unionists at Westminster took the Conservative Party whip – much to the irritation of the Labour Party. But, while their outlook was similar to that of the Conservatives on many