LITMIR.BIZ

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was to defend the integrity of Northern Ireland and its membership of the United Kingdom. Neither the Conservative Party nor the Labour Party existed in Northern Ireland itself, although there was a separate Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) which had links with the British Labour Party. Since 1949, it too had been in favour of the Union with Britain, but it was not nearly as strident about it as the Unionists, the latter portraying the NILP as a half-way house on the rocky road to Dublin. It also had more sympathy with the grievances of the Catholic minority over such issues as discrimination in housing and employment.14 In the late 1950s the NILP had begun to gain support in Belfast, a largely working-class city suffering from high unemployment,15 and in the 1962 Stormont elections it gained over 40 per cent of the vote in the city and won four seats.16

      Those in the North who opposed the Union with Britain and who favoured a united Ireland of some kind were broadly divided into two political groupings: those who adhered to the constitutionalist tradition, which had (usually) characterized the old Irish Parliamentary Party, and those who favoured a revolutionary approach (usually) involving armed struggle, the republican tradition which was now embodied in Sinn Féin and the IRA. It was the IRA, of course, which had played a central role in winning independence for the bulk of Ireland back in the early 1920s, but its descendants of the 1960s, the children of numerous splits, were very different. For one thing, they now represented only a minority of nationalists; for another, they were illegal in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and although Sinn Féin was permitted in the latter, its political influence was negligible.17

      The IRA had not seriously embarrassed the authorities in Northern Ireland since the early 1920s, thanks largely to the powers the government possessed under the notorious Special Powers Acts, to suppress it,18 although it played a part in the wider campaign against the United Kingdom which was launched in 1939.19 Another IRA campaign, this time specifically directed against Northern Ireland, was launched in December 1956. Codenamed ‘Operation Harvest’, it is also known as ‘the border campaign’, since most of the action was carried out close to the frontier areas of the province. Some claim that Belfast was deliberately excluded from the border campaign in order to avoid a repetition of the bloodshed of the 1920–2 fighting, but it has also been pointed out that the Belfast IRA had drawn up plans for attacks on targets in the city which ranged from RUC stations and the homes of policemen to contractors working for the security forces.20 In any event, the campaign failed. Internment, on both sides of the border, undoubtedly contributed to its defeat, but the main reason, as the IRA frankly admitted in its statement of 26 February 1962 which called a halt to hostilities, was ‘the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people – the unity and freedom of Ireland’.21

      Among the Northern Irish candidates presenting themselves for election to Westminster in October 1964 were twelve ‘Republicans’, a pseudonym for Sinn Féin, a disguise which fooled no one, but which was sufficient to get around the government ban on the party. The Republican candidate in the constituency of West Belfast, which included the solidly Catholic Falls district, was William (Billy) McMillen, a 35-year-old scaffolder, described as ‘stocky and short, a fluent Irish-speaker who was active in the Gaelic League (where he was generally referred to as Liam) …’22 More important than all of this, he was the Officer Commanding of the Belfast IRA.

      Although the other three Belfast seats were safe for Unionism, West Belfast promised to be a more interesting contest. Apart from the Catholic Falls, it included solidly Protestant districts too. Indeed, it had been a Unionist seat prior to the election, although there was a new Unionist candidate, James Kilfedder, a London barrister, albeit one with Irish roots. In addition, there were two other strong, local candidates: Harry Diamond, a left-wing nationalist standing under the rubric of Republican Labour and the sitting Stormont MP for the Falls constituency; and Billy Boyd (NILP), who also sat at Stormont for the Protestant Woodvale constituency.

      As his campaign headquarters McMillen had chosen an unoccupied shop at 145 Divis Street, a thoroughfare which ran from the edge of the city centre to the Falls Road. McMillen displayed an Irish Tricolour in the window. The Tricolour was like a red rag to unionist bulls and, indeed, the Northern Ireland Government had passed a Flags and Emblems Act in 1954 which prohibited displays that were likely to cause a breach of the peace. McMillen had already fallen foul of this legislation the previous year when he was involved in one of the commemorative parades which were a feature of political life in Northern Ireland: a celebration of the anniversary of the birth of Wolfe Tone, one of the leaders of the United Irishmen rising in 1798. The organizers asked the IRA to provide a colour party for the parade, but the government invoked the Flags and Emblems act to prevent it. McMillen was all for defying the ban, but the then Officer Commanding in Belfast, Billy McKee, argued for acceptance. This led to a blazing row inside the IRA which eventually led to McKee quitting as Belfast commander and to his leaving the organization altogether. Nevertheless, the Tricolour was not carried in the parade and McMillen later noted that ‘the IRA colour party marched up the Falls minus the colours!’23

      Whether McMillen chose to display the Tricolour in his campaign office in 1964 as a deliberate act of defiance is not clear. He remarked in 1972 that the government had made no attempt to ban its display in the 1964 Belfast parade commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916, although an IRA member was arrested and jailed for three months for carrying it elsewhere in the province. Moreover, one of his electoral opponents, Diamond, pointed out that it was on display in Divis Street – a solidly Catholic area – for almost three weeks in September 1964 without anyone taking exception to it.24 It was at this point, however, that following ‘a number of complaints’, the RUC intervened. According to McConnell, ‘the police had an interview with some of the occupants of the premises at No. 145. They expressed to them their fears that trouble might be caused by continuing to display the Tricolour in the window, but at that interview no duress was used by the police. It was entirely a friendly approach …’25

      Whence did these ‘complaints’ originate and how many were there? We do not know the whole story, but it is clear that McMillen’s Unionist opponent, Kilfedder, was involved as he sent a telegram to O’Connell urging him to ‘remove [the] Tricolour in Divis Street which is aimed to provoke and insult loyalists of West Belfast’.26 So, too, was a fundamentalist Protestant preacher, the burly, 38-year-old, six-foot-three-inches tall Reverend Ian Paisley, who announced that since representations made to both the Hastings Street RUC barracks – which was responsible for policing Divis Street – and Unionist Party headquarters had not resulted in any action, he would organize a march on Divis Street.27

      Paisley had plenty of predecessors in the province, notably perhaps Reverend (‘Roaring’) Hugh Hanna, the Presbyterian minister whose fiery speeches and sermons were alleged to have played a part in more than one of the nineteenth-century Belfast riots.28 Like Hanna, Paisley wove together religion and politics. In 1951, he founded his own Free Presbyterian Church and soon acquired a reputation for intemperate attacks on Catholicism and any form of ecumenism, which he regarded as selling out to the Vatican. He was politically involved as early as January 1949, when he campaigned on behalf of the successful Unionist candidate in the marginal Dock ward in central Belfast during the elections to the Stormont Parliament. In the late 1950s, he was a leading member of Ulster Protestant Action, a militant unionist ginger group, but broke with it in 1961.29 Although he had supported the Unionist candidate in Dock ward in 1949 and was now supporting Kilfedder in West Belfast, Paisley was deeply suspicious of the Unionist leadership, and particularly of O’Neill. Here he was resurrecting a dormant dissenting discourse which doubted the motives of all elites, be they political or religious. As Paisley’s Protestant Telegraph put it in May 1967, ‘the hoards of Romanism and the compromise of O’Neillism’ had placed ‘our Protestant heritage’ in danger.30 Paisleyism, its supporters claimed, was offering new vehicles in which to pursue traditional religious and political beliefs and practices. Although the 1961 Census counted only 344 declared members of Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast out of a total of 416,000 religious believers,31 his political influence was much greater than these figures suggest. People who were not particularly religious were giving their support to this fundamentalist preacher because he represented the Protestant tradition that had historically defined their community. At a time when some felt that Unionism was under threat, Paisley appeared to be a reliable

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