LITMIR.BIZ

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they were also bloody, brutal and murderous.

      —Joe Nicholas, letter to the editor, Sunday Press, November 1, 1970

      At the bottom of the Falls Road, in the Divis area of west Belfast, one wall has become a dedicated site for murals. It is called the “international wall,” and the murals there draw connections between Northern Ireland and other countries. Periodically, the murals are changed; exemplary paintings have commemorated the Basque struggle, expressed sympathy with besieged Gazans, and celebrated historical figures like Che Guevara. A long-standing trope of the murals is comparison of nationalist experiences in Northern Ireland with African American experiences in the United States. So, for example, in 2010, nine years after the Holy Cross protests discussed in Chapter 1, a mural juxtaposed images of the Holy Cross children and Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine black students who attended the desegregating Little Rock High School in Arkansas, as she was harassed by white students in 1957.

      Comparisons of Irish experiences in the north with the U.S. civil rights struggle have persisted since the 1960s, when local civil rights campaigners appropriated the strategies of the U.S. activists. The civil rights movement began in protest of practices under the unionist-dominated Stormont parliament—including gerrymandering, limited enfranchisement, and anti-Catholic discrimination in public services, especially housing. Their demonstrations and marches were met with violent opposition from police and loyalists. Street politics spiraled into violent conflict. In this sense, rights discourse was implicated in the conflict’s emergence.

      Those living in the most impoverished and violent areas of the city quickly embraced the protest tactics of the civil rights movement, as working-class nationalists and unionists in west Belfast incorporated rights discourse into their political vernacular. This appropriation, as much as the civil rights movement itself, was an early determining influence on the contemporary function of rights talk as war by other means. The appropriations of rights talks in the 1970s swiftly translated grander assertions of civil rights into more quotidian claims for socioeconomic rights, such as the right to public housing in communally identified areas of the city. Territorial boundaries of political and communal blocs hardened, and swathes of people were put out of their homes, often violently. As riots, mass displacements, bombings, and shootings became everyday events, rights talk, especially about housing rights, became inseparable from profound social and political cleavages, as well as new forms of political action.

       Rights Enter the Lexicon

      “Patrick,” a former member of People’s Democracy (PD), one of the 1960s civil rights organizations, still recalls some of their work with a sense of accomplishment. But he is also rueful and contemplative. The subsequent loss of life, he says, makes his heady days of student activism seem naïve. In 2011, he still questions PD’s role in the conflict, and he is still shaken by memories as he makes his way through the city. Recently, he says, driving past the Divis area, he remembered Patrick Rooney, the first child to die, killed in his bed as police fired on Divis Flats during the riots of 1969.¹ He began to cry and pulled to the side of the road to compose himself. Questions and doubts plague him, not about the injustices of the Northern Irish state they confronted but about the different paths they might have taken. “It’s not whether those things didn’t happen; it’s whether the response to them could have been different,” he said sadly.

      In contrast to Patrick’s doubts about civil rights strategies and categorical rejection of violence, contemporary accounts of the peace process causally link past violence to the postpartition state’s rights deficits. The curative potential of human rights is celebrated for helping end the conflict. A pivotal moment in this account is the late 1960s campaign for civil rights, the violent reactions of police and loyalists, and the subsequent street-level, intercommunal violence that escalated in 1969. But the movement from rights protest to violent civil conflict was not a straightforward historical trajectory—the journey was more complex, just as the role of rights discourse in peacemaking is more ambiguous.

      The commonly understood impetus for civil rights grievances is the way unionists dominated government in Northern Ireland after partition in 1921. Under the devolved Stormont regime, anti-Catholic discrimination occurred in private and public employment and public services, particularly those provided by local councils. Although some debate the character of the postpartition state in both politics and scholarship, a broad consensus agrees that, from 1921 to 1968, the devolved political system supported and legitimated widespread discrimination against the Catholic minority (e.g., Darby 1976; Whyte 1983).

      State discrimination was most pronounced in local government. Local authorities preferentially allocated public housing to Protestants, and the system for voting in local elections meant housing discrimination had electoral consequences. That is, under Northern Irish voting laws, only “ratepayers”—either property owners or public housing tenants, both of whom paid a local property tax called “rates”—or their nominated representatives could vote in local elections. Private tenants did not pay rates—their landlords did—so these tenants were not automatically entitled to a local council vote. These rules applied only to local council elections; all adults were enfranchised for Northern Irish and UK parliamentary elections. Yet this system, combined with discrimination against Catholics in public housing, amplified the political representation of unionism. Ratepayers’ provisions also entitled owners of commercial property to nominate special voters (non-ratepayers) for each £10 ($28) value of the property, for up to six voters.² Given disproportionate Protestant ownership of commercial property, this, too, increased unionists’ political representation (see Darby 1976). Furthermore, the practice nurtured a culture of patronage within unionism, as nonratepaying Protestants were dependent on property owners for nominations to vote in local council elections. There was also a pattern of gerrymandering, whereby electoral boundaries were drawn to ensure unionist dominance, most strikingly in Derry. Policing and justice also operated in a biased fashion, with the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act 1922 allowing internment without trial.³

      Brice Dickson (2010), a respected human rights scholar and advocate (he was a founding member of the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the former head of the Human Rights Commission), makes clear the underlying difficulty of approaching Stormont’s repressions as human rights violations. Although these practices disenfranchised the minority, he explains, international frameworks that define human rights do not prescribe particular political or voting arrangements. In this sense, these frameworks offer limited tools. For Dickson (2010), stretching human rights principles to denounce the Stormont regime’s practices obscures the essentially political nature of its abuses (15). Extending this observation helps clarify a central insight: rights conflicts were political from the moment of their emergence in Northern Ireland. Broader narratives took longer to emerge, such as identifying human rights violations as causes of conflict or, later, human rights culture as a cause of peace.

      In the 1960s, however, political and economic shifts occurring throughout western Europe dramatically changed the region’s politics. A growing Catholic middle class and radicalized university students (from both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds) challenged the region’s governance. The civil rights movement they created, and opposition to it, became a catalyst, rather than a simple cause, for the conflict. The local movement combined tactics from both the U.S. civil rights movement and European student uprisings. These tactics were introduced at a moment of increasing local tensions, as nationalists and unionists, respectively, celebrated the fiftieth anniversaries of the Easter Rising and the World War I Battle of the Somme.⁴

      In the 1960s, pressures for state reform were acknowledged by some of the unionist elite. Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, who took office in 1963, attempted to reform the state by proposing the elimination of the commercial owners’ vote and a boundary commission in 1966. Two years later he added review of the Special Powers Act and fair public housing allocation to his reform proposals. Civil rights campaigners felt the reforms were too modest, and unionists felt that any concessions were dangerous. O’Neill’s efforts appear motivated more by a concern to preserve and modernize the unionist state than by a commitment to civil rights (Dixon 2001).

      An early civil rights

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