LITMIR.BIZ

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the election by O’Neill at two meetings held at Stormont on 2 November 1964: the first with the Cabinet and a Unionist Party official; the second with the Minister of Home Affairs and senior police officers. He was ‘anxious’, he told the first meeting, ‘to clarify certain details of the West Belfast election’, both in response to speeches made in Stormont and because he thought the matter might come up in his forthcoming meeting with the newly elected Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harold Wilson. The reference to ‘speeches at Stormont’ is obscure, but it may have included the somewhat fanciful accusation by the two Republican Labour MPs, Diamond, and Gerry Fitt, the loquacious and pugnacious former merchant seaman who had won the Dock constituency from the Unionists in 1962, that the riots had been the consequence of a plot hatched by the Unionist Party, the government and Paisley to ensure the victory of Kilfedder in West Belfast.51 O’Neill wanted to know about the contents of the election leaflets circulated during the campaign and was told that the one issued by the Ulster Loyalist Association, which was sympathetic to Paisley, was ‘hard-hitting but not politically objectionable’, whereas ‘the really objectionable leaflet’, which asked ‘do you want Catholics in your street?’ was published by his erstwhile associates in Ulster Protestant Action. It was further emphasized that although Paisley had supported Kilfedder, he and his followers ‘were in no sense part of the official Unionist organization’. Indeed, Paisleyite candidates had stood against official Unionists in previous elections and might well do so again.52

      At the second meeting, O’Neill enquired what could be done to forestall a repeat performance of the rioting. The answers were disappointing. There were no powers to ban the establishment of a Republican headquarters in any particular place. A curfew could only be imposed under emergency powers and was almost impossible to enforce. Little advance preparation could be done with the Catholic Church, as it would only be willing to take a line when it thought it would be followed, and in any case, ‘some of the people who fomented trouble were beyond Church influence’. The prevailing view in the police was that ‘the only way of avoiding trouble was prompt, informal and friendly contact with those who might foment it’.53

      The document in question clearly equated ‘those who might foment’ trouble with the Republicans on this occasion. But was this altogether fair? It was, after all, Paisley and his associates who turned the display of the Tricolour into a political issue in the first place. If they had not done so, it is unlikely that its display, occurring as it did in a Catholic and nationalist area, would have given rise to any trouble. It could also be argued that the government was to blame for rising to the bait, although the Unionist leadership had few other options, especially as one of their own candidates had linked himself with Paisley on the issue and they clearly wished to prevent a possible sectarian confrontation on the streets. The police, moreover, did not go in mob-handed in the first instance, but tried to employ a tactic of persuasion. Where McMillen and his supporters contributed to the problem, and in so doing played into the Paisleyites’ hands, was when they issued their own ultimatum demanding the replacement of the Tricolour which had been removed. They must have realized that such an ultimatum would not be accepted and the two days’ breathing space given to the police to comply, far from lowering tension, gave more time for it to build up.

      It is more difficult to evaluate the consequences of the riots. George Clarke, a beat policeman in the area at the time, has recently claimed that, ever since the violence of the early 1920s, the RUC ‘had been slowly but surely building up trust with the Catholic population’ only to see it shattered by ‘one idiot policeman who smashed a shop window and removed a small Tricolour on display’. He goes on to say that ‘[t]he two communities in the North started to move apart again’, and that he ‘firmly believed that the Divis Street riots lit the fuse for the Civil Rights movement … [which] in turn led to the involvement of the IRA, and out of this rose the Provos and thirty years of death and misery’.54 But this is surely overstated. Clarke suggests that his relations with the Catholics on his beat in the Falls were excellent, but while this may have been true, it would be misleading to equate his personal experience with relations between Catholics and the police in general. The RUC, in the words of a senior British policeman, was ‘not a police force in the English sense. It is a para-military organisation accountable to a Minister’.55 Along with the Unionist Party and the Orange Order, it was one of the pillars upon which the Northern Ireland state rested. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that it had a negative image amongst the Catholic population, an attitude which probably accounts as much for the fact that the proportion of Catholics in the RUC was a mere 10.5 percent in 1966 as the alleged discrimination against those Catholics who applied to join the force.56

      In so far as the overall relationship between Catholics and the Unionist regime was affected by the Divis riots, the judgement of a moderate nationalist who had experienced and strongly disapproved of the RUC’s handling of them is probably nearer the mark. ‘Divis Street’, he subsequently wrote, ‘marked the end of the honeymoon period for Terence O’Neill. As nationalists saw it he had had a chance to tell Ian Paisley to get lost but instead had capitulated to his huffing and puffing.’57

      As for the direct link between the Divis riots, the civil rights movement and the rise of the Provisional IRA, it needs to be emphasized that Dr Conn and Patricia McCluskey had already set up their Campaign for Social Justice in Dungannon earlier in the year, that NICRA was not launched until January 1967, that marches did not start for another year and that the IRA split and military campaigns lay far ahead. Eight years later, McMillen was to claim that the riots ‘embittered the nationalist population against the Stormont regime, revived all their frustrations and resentment against the Government repression, and set the stage for future confrontation between the youth of the nationalist areas and the RUC’ and that ‘a couple of dozen new recruits’ joined the Belfast IRA in their wake. The same source stated that there were only twenty-four members at the end of the border campaign, so that even if we accept that the organization had begun to revive in 1964, it was still very small beer in a city of over 415,000 people, which included 114,000 Catholics.58

      McMillen also observed that the ‘trail of lost Republican deposits’ in the 1964 election was ‘a costly demonstration that people with the vote were not willing to vote for abstentionist candidates – that abstentionism was dead, and that it was time to bury the corpse’.59 This strategy, which meant that even a victorious Republican candidate would not take his or her seat in the parliament of a state the legitimacy of which it refused to recognize – and this included the Dáil, too – was not exactly an inducement to voters to turn out.

      All we can conclude with some assurance is that the Divis riots showed that O’Neill’s bounded reforms could easily be undermined by Republicans and loyalists. The events of the next few years saw this perplexing partnership undermine many other attempts at reform.

3

      Between the IRA and the UVF

      Tahere appeared, in June 1973, a booklet by ‘P. Ó Néill’, the nom-de-plume which adorns authorized statements from the Provisional IRA. It gives a version of the origins of the Provisionals which the latter have cultivated ever since the split of 1969. Referring to the riots of August 1969, the author states that although it must have been clear from 1966 onwards ‘to anyone with a modicum of sense that major violence on the nationalist areas was at hand’, when it actually occurred, ‘the victims to their horror found themselves without protection from the one source they hitherto trusted – the Irish Republican Army’.1 But was Belfast in these years caught between aggressive loyalists and ineffectual Republicans?

      I

      ‘P. Ó Néill’ blamed ‘the policy pursued by the then leadership [of the IRA], or a majority of them, throughout the mid-sixties’ for leaving the ‘nationalist areas’, supposedly, without defenders. ‘[F]ormer members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who came back to Ireland with the intention of setting up an ultra-left wing front based on the Republican Movement’ had, it was alleged, ‘diverted the movement to political and social agitation to the almost total exclusion of the traditional military role’.2 There is something to this account: the Republican movement did move to the left. As the new IRA Chief-of-Staff, Cathal Goulding, recalled in an interview with an Irish journalist in early 1972, if the border campaign had failed due to the

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