Belfast and Derry in Revolt - Simon Prince

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modern Irish historians are right to be proud of how our discipline punches above its weight – however, we would be wrong to let our skill at the sweet science blind us as to what division we belong in. For example, two recent, impressive publications on the Troubles from our academic neighbours cite as the standard works for this period political science books from the last century.14 Bob Purdie’s Politics in the Streets and Niall Ó Dochartaigh’s From Civil Rights to Armalites owe their continuing relevance to the quality of the writing and the research; they also owe it to having had the field largely to themselves. History students starting post-graduate research today that touches on the start of the Troubles will start off reading political science books based on doctoral dissertations which were started before they were born. Of course, as we have made clear above and will below, too, the existing literature consists of much more than these two books. Nonetheless, the frequency with which both Politics in the Streets and From Civil Rights to Armalites appear in footnotes and reading lists deals a body blow to the received wisdom that the start of the Troubles has been overburdened with research.

      What, then, is ‘new’ about our ‘New History’? Firstly, this book has drawn upon new sources. ‘Much of what has been written about this period,’ as Henry Patterson pointed out in 2008, ‘has as yet made little use of the wealth of governmental archive material now available.’15 There are, of course, exceptions, notably the pioneering work of Thomas Hennessey on the origins and evolution of the Troubles.16 Following in the footsteps of Hennessey and others, following different research questions and following different methodologies, we have used primary sources that were overlooked by and/or unavailable to previous scholars. We therefore have also been able to relate the streets to the authorities much more closely than even Hennessey could do – which matters because the actions and identities of the people on the streets cannot be understood without examining the actions and identities of the people in authority, and vice versa.17 Secondly, this book has drawn upon new scholarship. In the last decade or so, historians of the American civil rights movement have pushed back its chronological and geographical boundaries; this has transformed the comparisons that can be made between developments on either side of the Atlantic. Research on the complicated linkages between non-violence, self-defence and armed struggle has been especially useful here. As has recent work on gender, material culture, riots, social movements, individual memory, collective memory, narrative and the dynamics of violence in civil wars.

      So, we have tested ideas, hypotheses and arguments against a wealth of systematically gathered and interrogated primary sources – and we have changed our views as the evidence has compelled (indeed, we have broken away from our earliest work on Northern Ireland). After all of this, what basic conclusion have we reached about the Troubles? That it was, essentially, a political conflict.18 The concept of ethnic conflict, in contrast, depends upon people, either as perpetrators, participants or victims, being completely interchangeable; cultures, in this interpretation, are given agency, while individual actors are reduced to following a script handed down to them.19 Arguments that ‘natural’ ties can inspire communal action are falling out of favour in the academy, but the view nonetheless lingers that there is something special about ethnic identities compared to other identities in the turn to violence. Despite this seeming to be simple common sense, however, making direct causal links between ethnicity and conflict is much more problematic than it first appears. Inter-communal relations across the world and across history are usually peaceful and co-operative, even where and when inequality and discrimination exists.20 Ethnic identity, moreover, is a subset of a broader identity category in which membership is determined by attributes associated with, or thought to be associated with, descent and in which the intrinsic characteristics are constrained change and visibility; most arguments about how ethnic divisions lead to violence, though, require ethnic identities to be fixed and assume that they can be distinguished from other group identities, including descent-based ones.21 The example of India since independence is helpful here. The political scientist Paul Brass has found ‘an overarching discourse of Hindu-Muslim relations’ that explains ‘all incidents involving members of these … communities in terms of the eternal differences between them’. This discourse, among other things, displaces blame from democratic politics, which is the context that gives meaning to the idea of a Hindu ‘majority’ and a Muslim ‘minority’ and which fixes these identities. Hindu-Muslim riots are not a spontaneous upsurge in ethnic animosities, but rather a particularly brutal form of electioneering that only happen in certain Indian states.22 Similarly, the start of the Troubles was not the beginning of the latest round in a centuries-old quarrel between Protestants and Catholics; it was part of the unfinished Irish revolution, the struggle over what democracy meant in theory and how it should then be applied in practice. Peter Hart, following Charles Tilly’s classic definition of revolution, calculates that the Irish one ended with the Civil War.23 That said, when it comes to answering our question, it is more appropriate to borrow and adapt François Furet’s definition of the French Revolution, according to which the Revolution ended, in a narrower political sense, with the second founding of the Third Republic and, in a wider ideological sense, with the decline of communism.24 In Northern Ireland, during our period of study, the modern democratic ideologies of constitutional nationalism, republicanism, socialism and unionism were still struggling for mastery. The question of who ruled and by what right had not been settled: the Irish revolution, in this sense, had not ended.

      Prioritizing politics does not mean overlooking Northern Ireland’s many fiscal, economic, social and cultural problems or, indeed, people’s personal problems. (It should be noted here that while we have questioned the role of ethnic cleavages in the production of violence, there is no question that the communal divide was important.) We are political historians; nonetheless, as James Vernon recommends, ‘the questions we ask, not the territories we claim dominion over, should be our guide’.25 This book is a ‘fox’, not a ‘hedgehog’, and we have chosen to let it race through different fields, including social, cultural, intellectual, military, international and urban histories.26 That said, Northern Ireland’s other problems entered into the production of the violence of the start of the Troubles by becoming objects of political contention within a political ‘game’ which was gaining new players and new rules. It is the production of the violence, not the causes of the conflict, that concern us. Violence, it is usually assumed, is something that naturally emerges when a conflict boils over, yet there is, as the sociologist Rogers Brubaker and the political scientist David Laitin point out, a ‘lack of strong evidence showing that higher levels of conflict … lead to higher levels of violence’. They conclude that ‘Violence is not a quantitative degree of conflict but a qualitative form of conflict’.27 Although the violence of the start of the Troubles was linked to the unresolved Irish revolution, the underlying conflict cannot explain where, when and how violence was produced – nor who produced it.

      Politics, it should be conceded here, was marginal to most people’s lives at the start of the Troubles. Consequently, there are many Belfasts and Derrys, each with their own history and their own memory, which have not made it into this book. Certain readers may not recognize their memories of ‘their’ city in how we, two outsiders, have chosen to present our research. This is not something we can choose simply to ignore, especially as everybody who takes part in a public debate should show equal respect to all people. But, what does this, in practice, mean for us? As far as matters of reason and evidence are concerned, we have not thought of our readers as primarily members of particular communities, but instead have thought of them as individuals capable of evaluating and criticizing our arguments and sources. History is universal: its writers and its readers cannot claim special privileges for themselves just because they belong to a specific group, even if they are victims.28 Indeed, the novelist and critic Zadie Smith, writing about America’s ‘civil rights generation’, warns that ‘bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways’, such as instilling the ‘idea that one should speak one’s … allegiance first and the truth second’. That said, as Smith goes on to acknowledge, ‘the black movement had to yell with a clear and unified voice, or risk not being heard at all’, and so criticisms should not be made without ‘context’, ‘empathy’ and ‘understanding’.29 The Derry Citizens Defence Association, through its lawyers, asked for the same thing – pleading with the Scarman Tribunal, which was inquiring into the events of the Battle of the Bogside, to ‘place’ ‘individual acts’ in a ‘more

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