LITMIR.BIZ

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injustices: Stormont and its subordinate councils were providing houses and jobs to retain Unionist control.

      IRISH ACTION

      With the Second World War giving way to struggles to build a ‘New Jerusalem’ and to break the old colonial system, Eddie McAteer was elected to Stormont hopeful that Irish self-determination could finally be respected. He pushed out time-serving hacks within the Nationalist Party and led into office a younger political generation who wanted to pursue the interests of their constituents with greater energy.38 However, with the return of cold wars, international and Irish, McAteer wondered whether there were roads, other than those marked constitutional and physical force, for the nationalist people to advance down. In the pamphlet Irish Action, published in 1948, McAteer invoked ‘the mighty spirit of the late Mahatma [i.e. Mohandas Gandhi]’, who had ‘pointed a third road’, that of ‘non-co-operation, no violence [sic]’.39 A decade later, as another political generation stepped into the public sphere, self-help was mapped out by some as the road to take. When the first Credit Union branch was formed in Derry, the treasurer wrote an article about how ‘the spirit which brings men together to co-operate’ should be ‘brought to bear on…problems at the local level’, so as to ‘lead to…gradual growth and prosperity’.40 ‘If any community needs self-help,’ he later observed, ‘it is this one’.41 In Derry before October 1968, direct action and self-help played key roles in reshaping the city – within, of course, the limits set by Unionist control.

      Questions about the origins of the direct-action and self-help traditions are unanswerable and distracting (as such questions so often are).42 This section will instead consider early attempts in the post-war years to adapt these indigenous traditions to transnational trends and for changed local circumstances. With Irish Action, for instance, McAteer was recognizing that Gandhi had forged a new weapon (one that had helped end British rule) and that the welfare state had created new vulnerabilities. ‘If the British Government’s only answer to our pleadings is that the problem is not urgent,’ he argued, ‘then let us make it urgent!’ Non-violence is not about petitioning the powerful, it is itself a distinct form of power.43 McAteer laid out the methods he thought would make the problem urgent, would make the ‘local misgovernment’ practised by Unionists ‘impossible’. These ranged from ‘acting stupid’ when dealing with officials to holding back taxes and occupying public buildings.44 McAteer himself refused to pay his rates, which led to a court case in 1951. The following year, he tried to force his way onto the Mayor of Derry’s chair, a gesture which symbolized that power in the city rightly lay with nationalists.45 But, McAteer seemed to be the only one taking part in his campaign. Among the millions of other Irish nationalists, it was treated with indifference and, in some cases, outright hostility; as early as January 1949 the Irish Times commented: ‘McAteer’s formula can only lead to disaster’.46 There were flaws in the formula, not least of which were McAteer’s beliefs that ‘organisation has distinct disadvantages’ and that ‘[e]ach individual must constitute a complete action cell’; when, in fact, the success of a non-violent campaign depends heavily upon numbers and discipline.47 The ‘science of non-violence’, to use Gandhi’s phrase, would be experimented with again and again in Derry before October 1968.48

      McAteer’s experiences were not unique. Unearthing an idea that was rooted in the history and culture of India and transplanting it to foreign soil was far from easy, and many times the seed of the idea failed to bloom around the world.49 Pacifists and civil rights activists in the United States were among those who admired Gandhi’s ‘soul force’ and were ploughing on with efforts to grow non-violent movements. Indeed, by the second half of the 1950s, as the Springtown campaign showed, the variety of non-violent direct action that people were trying to introduce to Derry was American rather than Asian. As early as the inter-war years, the radical theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who sympathized with the black struggle and would later influence Martin Luther King’s thinking, had seen that it would be ‘hopeless’ to expect racial equality to come by ‘trusting in the moral sense of the white race’ or through ‘violent revolution’. He, too, believed that the way ahead was instead along Gandhi’s third road; ‘non-violence’, claimed Niebuhr, ‘is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority’.50 Although Gandhi maintained that the object of non-violent struggle was to convert rather than coerce the opponent, his civilized form of warfare had not just relied upon suffering love.51 Niebuhr noted that ‘political realism [had] qualified religious idealism’ and that Gandhi’s campaigns did ‘coerce and destroy’. Economic boycotts, the refusal to use courts and schools, the illegal production of salt and tax strikes compelled the British Viceroy to act – to crack down with violence or to start up negotiations. Non-violence was therefore best understood as a ‘type of coercion’. But, where violence would push the sides to a conflict increasingly apart, non-violence would keep open the lines of communication and the chance of a settlement. Niebuhr also drew attention to how using non-violence would further weaken an opponent by ‘rob[bing] [him] of the moral conceit by which he identifies his interests with the peace and order of society’. The authorities and their apologists might still try to brand the protesters as terrorists, traitors and criminals, yet neutral elements both inside and outside the dominant group would most likely see through these underhand tactics. Non-violence would help win widespread support at home and abroad, neutralize the security forces and bring about defections. Niebuhr predicted that the ‘emancipation of the Negro race in America probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy’; he was right.52 However, it took years to perfect the formula. Non-violence did not come naturally to African Americans anymore than it had to Indians or would to Derry’s Catholics; non-violence had to be taught and enforced, and that required institutions and organization. So, over three decades were to pass between the theologian making his prophesy and King using ‘a Niebuhrian stratagem of power’ to win the great non-violent victories for civil rights at Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, in 1963 and 1965.53

      With the IRA coming to terms with defeat in the early 1960s, these victories did not go unnoticed; some leading Republicans began to argue that military action alone would not succeed and that direct action, among other strategies, should also be tried.54 Once again, Irish traditions and foreign fashions were woven together and fitted to the local situation. In January 1964, a new IRA volunteer, Eamon Melaugh, took out an advertisement in the Derry Journal which asked, ‘are you concerned about unemployment, emigration?’55 Melaugh wished to ‘contact men of action prepared to do something concrete about these social evils’. Just ten people answered his call – and eight of them had jobs. ‘It seems incredible that out of a total of 2,740 unemployed men only two should inquire about my advertisement’, he complained to the Derry Journal six months later. Melaugh, though, still wanted to take Derry’s unemployed out of ‘apathy’ and into jobs, and he still believed that ‘Direct action must be taken’.56 At the start of 1965, Melaugh finally succeeded in forming the Derry Unemployed Action Committee (DUAC); but he continued to have problems finding men of action.57 The first protests were therefore more of a guerrilla marketing campaign than a campaign to disrupt local government so much that their opponents would be forced to negotiate a settlement. When Londonderry Corporation met in January 1965, Melaugh led in the DUAC and told the ‘bigots’ ‘We do not intend to allow the business of this meeting to go on’. He made the front page of the Derry Journal.58 From the thirty who had attended the inaugural meeting, the DUAC’s membership was grown over a number of weeks through meetings and marches until there were enough people to bring traffic to a halt around the Guildhall during a visit by the Minister of Commerce.59 This early momentum was not sustained, however, and the DUAC’s activities were limited to greeting politicians with pickets or being greeted by them at Stormont and Westminster.60 Ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, the IRA volunteers parked this protest vehicle – but they remained on what one of them had described as the ‘road’ of ‘action, passive resistance and self-help’.61

      The self-help tradition in Derry was closely connected with the Catholic Church. Rejected by Belfast, London and Dublin at the close of the Irish revolution, Northern Catholics were given a home by Rome: a Catholic counter-society within the new Protestant state. There were Catholic schools, hospitals and voter registration associations – all of which depended upon the laity giving both their money and their time.62

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