Belfast and Derry in Revolt - Simon Prince

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readers, however, may be concerned that we have not turned our book into a site of resistance. If we have not sided with the ‘victims’, does that not mean, then, that we have sided with the ‘perpetrators’? (We will not pursue here the argument that it would be anachronistic to work as historians within these terms.) Well, ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ made their way into historical writing via research on the Third Reich (although most historians now reject these labels because they fail to capture the complexity of what happened); so, like the leading authority on the Holocaust, we will answer that ‘Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving’.31 Richard J. Evans has gone further still, complaining that the ‘growing tendency’ ‘in favour of the exercise of moral judgment’ has led to ‘analysis, argument and interpretation’ getting pushed aside.32 This holds for Northern Ireland, too, as assigning blame – stating that the origin of the conflict lies in, say, imperialism or a clash of cultures – fails to explain how, where and when violence was produced at the start of the Troubles in Belfast and Derry. Moreover, making moral judgments is not as simple as handing out white and black hats.33 For example, John Hume, the ‘apostle of non-violence in this part of the world’, faced forceful accusations during the autumn of 1969 from both Unionists and socialists that he partly bore responsibility for the violence on the streets.34 According to the Derry Labour Party, Hume had taken the ‘tiger for a walk on a leash made of thread’ and was now, with ‘sick-making … saintliness’, ‘whining that “it’s not my fault”’.35 Anyway, is it actually in the interests of those for whom the struggle continues to present the past as a morality play? ‘By idolizing those whom we honor,’ a close friend of Martin Luther King once cautioned, ‘we fail to realize that we could go and do likewise’.36

      ‘[I]t must be understood that it is none of our function to make moral judgments,’ announces the character of the judge who chairs the tribunal in Freedom of the City into the deaths of three civilians at the hands of the British army. Later, in the theatre of the play, the sociologist’s oral evidence is interrupted as the victims stagger on to the stage to tell their own stories.37 Their truth has broken through the totalizing narrative mouthed by the academic outsider. But, has it? Objectivity lies at the sum total of all possible subjectivities; although it can never be reached, it can be approached by shifting perspectives. While Friel’s account provides us with a recognizable portrayal, which transcends factual detail, of what pain and loss feel like, a historical account offers a different route back to the past, one which can answer different questions.38 We have chosen to look closely at what was happening on the streets in Belfast and Derry and at how this was situated in local, regional and international contexts. Of course, there is still much that we have overlooked. So, while we believe we have something new to say, we do not pretend to have said everything that there is to say.

      Before October

      INTRODUCTION

      ‘Every Irishman,’ wrote John Steinbeck in 1953, ‘sooner or later makes a pilgrimage to the home of his ancestors.’ But, the American novelist continued, ‘He wouldn’t stay there if you gave him the place.’ Steinbeck and his wife found Derry to be a ‘city which is somber even … in sunlight’ – ‘and a desolation came over us’. He asked the ‘not-the-real-porter’ in their hotel: ‘“Has all illegality gone out of this rebellious island in three generations?”’ The ‘sad-looking man’ did not ‘make out my meaning’.1 When the fortieth anniversary of the start of the civil rights movement was marked in Derry, a veteran activist also did not make out his meaning. The Derryman somehow managed to claim that Steinbeck, ‘antenna alert’, ‘realised that this community around him would soon uprise’. ‘It [i.e. the civil rights movement] was a natural, organic, reflex uprising.’2

      The metaphor that injustice produced a build-up of pressure which was not released by reforms and so eventually exploded in violence is a common one across history; it is also one that is powerful enough to result in evidence to the contrary being ignored. Metaphor clearly matters. It is a property of concepts and of words; it offers help with understanding ideas as well as with enjoying language; it often links together things that are not similar at all; it is an essential part of how humans think about their worlds.3 This chapter argues that for Derry before October 1968 and the emergence of the civil rights movement, another metaphor from the natural sciences is more appropriate. Evolution, put simply, involves adaptation, whereby an organism over time becomes better able to live in its habitat, and mutation, in which a dramatic change to a species – often induced by an external shock – leads to the pace of development being accelerated. Once Northern Ireland had been created during the early 1920s, the arrangements did not stay static: politics, society, economics and culture were always in flux, with each change opening up possibilities of further changes. Derry Catholics, workers and women as well as middle-class men, were able to find new ways to push at the boundaries of Unionist control and secure tangible reforms. What was important was not frustration with the lack of rights, but instead fresh power to fight for those rights. Most groups and individuals, though, shied away from direct confrontation, and the few which did not tended to launch futile attacks on the system’s strongest points. In the second half of the 1960s, however, radicals from the Labour Party and the Republican movement borrowed and adapted a new transnational form of political action – and this was to change the situation dramatically.

      Although the chapter draws upon urban history, among other specialisms, its focus is not on the city itself but on local politics before October 1968. The first section introduces Derry through the stories of working-class Catholic women, which are developed into a contextualized case study of social and political activism prior to the civil rights era. The next section examines two of the main strategies employed by Derry Catholics in their efforts to reshape the city: direct action and self help. While they are separated out here to make them more convenient to study, the strategies were generally used in combination with each other. The third section explores the different approaches taken by the Unionists, in Derry and at Stormont, as they sought to retain control. Reform was seen by some Unionists to be a way of crushing and co-opting a range of internal and external challenges to the party’s dominant position. A reform could throw up temporary and uneasy coalitions between surprising allies, on both sides of the debate. The Londonderry Area Plan, for example, was backed not just by Unionists but by Nationalists as well. The moderate leadership of the self-help movement, in contrast, lined up with the radicals to oppose aspects of the plan to develop Derry. The final section describes how the leftists formulated a new strategy which broke out of the limits set by bounded reform and started a revolution. The chapter thus ends with the political actors who brought the ‘before-October’ period to an end.

      WINTER IN SPRINGTOWN

      ‘Winter was for back lanes, cinema, Christmas presents, school competitions, dances and a sight that made my father smile: my mother standing with her back to the range, legs spread, skirt hitched up, warming her bum.’4 Nell McCafferty seems here to be selling her Irish childhood spent in the Bogside. With Ireland changing utterly in the years around the millennium, the reading public often clutched at books that carried them back to a lost time which was more innocent and more certain.5 In fact, Nell relates the young McCafferty’s uncertainties about herself to the larger uncertainties of living in Derry during the 1950s. ‘On winter nights,’ McCafferty recalls, she sat like a ‘cat’, ‘watching’: she saw husbands strike their wives, she saw two boys standing apart because they had been raped together, she saw a nervous girl who was pimped out by her father, she saw illicit affairs, she saw pregnancies outside of marriage and she saw teenagers of both sexes who desired her. This is community viewed in the harsh winter light or through the gloom, not bathed in the warm glow from hearths and oil lamps.6 Admittedly, while McCafferty may be recalling the memories that are remembered best and writing with scorching honesty, Nell should still be read as a reconstruction of her youth made in late middle age.7 Nonetheless, the book remains a warning against the will-o’-the-wisps of idealized communities. As another Derry civil-rights activist told an interviewer in 1979, ‘I never looked upon a sense of community born out of desperation as anything healthy’.8

      It is a different winter and it is a different story from McCafferty, this time she is telling someone else’s – Peggy Deery’s. The ‘one thing

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