Riotous Assemblies

by William Sheehan

  The Fianna Fáil government’s ruthless crackdown on the IRA was not welcomed by a vocal minority in the party. In the summer of 1962 a Fianna Fáil supporter living in London wrote to Lemass expressing his anger that the government had done nothing about partition, but instead imprisoned those IRA men who had fought for Irish unity. ‘Instead of sending soldiers to the Congo’, he pronounced, ‘couldn’t they send them into Northern Ireland?’80 In early February 1962, a disgruntled Fianna Fáil sympathiser, Rev. P. F. Malone, from Roshery, Westport, County Mayo, wrote to Lemass denouncing the government’s decision to imprison ‘freedom fighters’. Rev. Malone asserted that those IRA men arrested had acted on the ‘same principles’ that caused many within Fianna Fáil to fight the British during the Irish War of Independence. He was angry that ‘even tinkers’ (members of the Travelling community) had the right to trial by jury, but not members of the ‘once historic Sinn Féin’,81 and he could not forgive politicians for constantly expressing their desire to end partition but never offering any plan to achieve this:

  I honestly say – that if certain members of the Dáil came to confession to me and admitted that they were lax regarding it [ending partition] – and that suffering is caused by it, I could not in conscience absolve them ... some make a terrible error. They think there’s no practical sin – that anything ‘put over’ is o.k. They believe that what they don’t do is no harm in politics – whereas sins of omission can be and are frequently the greater sins of all.82

  Rev Malone’s closing comments epitomised the ambiguous attitude of many supporters of Fianna Fáil to the use of violence to secure Irish unity. For some anti-partitionists, constitutionalism had merely been a strategy, worth trying just as long as ‘it proved promising’.83 The renewed IRA campaign resonated in the collective consciousness of Fianna Fáil supporters. Many of them began articulating anew the party’s underlying obsession with the perceived injustice of partition; some of them allowed emotion to distort their grip on the reality of the situation. As Seán Mac-Carthy, Fianna Fáil TD for Cork South, told Lemass: ‘if you listen to the ordinary citizens in the bars and buses ... they have become increasingly supportive to the IRA activity.’84

  This was the first occasion since becoming Taoiseach that Lemass had been strongly criticised by party supporters over his approach to the renewed IRA and the government’s Northern Ireland policy. Like his predecessor, Lemass was determined to retain absolute control of the government’s handling of the latest IRA campaign. In a strongly worded reply to an American attorney in Buffalo, New York, in November 1961, Lemass made clear his policy against the resurgent IRA. He condemned suggestions from Mr Heaney that IRA members were ‘brave men’, explaining: ‘A government which failed to take action to protect their people’s democratic rights would not be worthy of the name.’85

  Speaking at the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis in January 1962, Lemass returned to his theme that the use of violence by ‘irresponsible elements’ was a futile exercise and ‘such actions cannot serve the cause of national unity’. What was required, he insisted, was ‘for all Irishmen of all classes and creeds to work together through democratic institutions to achieve re-unification’.86 Privately, he saw the recent IRA campaign as putting the goal to end partition ‘back generations’.87 By February 1962 the Fianna Fáil government’s actions proved successful and the IRA leadership, realising that its military position was futile, issued orders for the movement to ‘dump arms’. Its campaign had resulted in the deaths of six members of the RUC and eleven members of the IRA, the introduction of internment in Northern Ireland and in the south, and the mobilisation of 13,000 B-Specials.88

  Lemass had been fortunate not to experience the levels of discontent over the party’s official stance towards the IRA that de Valera faced in his final years in government; indeed, an examination of the records of the parliamentary party minutes while Lemass was Fianna Fáil leader reveal that Northern Ireland policy was never discussed.89 He had nevertheless seen for himself how some in Fianna Fáil felt they must live up to the aspirations of a bygone generation. For this minority in the party, ideological reverence for the past, and specifically for the popular narrative of Ireland’s struggle for independence, outweighed the pragmatic consideration (generally accepted by informed opinion then) that the use of physical force in pursuit of Irish unity was a futile exercise.

  In conclusion de Valera’s last years as Taoiseach had witnessed unprecedented levels of discontent among Fianna Fáil grass-roots members over his handling of partition policy. The unrest among party supporters challenges the perceived opinion, as put forward by de Valera’s official biographers, that he secured the ‘devoted loyalty of his followers’.90 Indeed, the observation by Tom Gallagher that under de Valera Fianna Fáil was seen as united, loyal and unshakable is misleading.91 In fact, de Valera was routinely attacked by grass-roots supporters for not adopting ‘an active policy’ on partition.92

  During Lemass’ period in office as Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach, the party leadership did manage to retain control over the anti-partitionist wing. The IRA’s decision to end its campaign in 1962 no doubt came as a relief to Lemass. Nevertheless, like his predecessor, Lemass had been confronted with the reality that, whatever the party did to counteract rank-and-file support for the IRA, the party was always going to have an anti-partitionist wing that viewed physical force as a legitimate policy.

  For that vocal anti-partitionist minority, the IRA campaign was logically the next step following years of perceived failure by Fianna Fáil to make any concessions – or indeed any progress – on partition. How small was that minority? The resolutions passed by Fianna Fáil county councillors and cumainn and the numerous letters of protest written by party members could not be dismissed as the work of an extremist fringe. The IRA border campaign exposed the fact that many within Fianna Fáil sympathised with the use of physical force to achieve Irish re-unification. To the ‘conditional constitutionalists’ of Fianna Fáil, the armed struggle remained a logical and legitimate option until a united Ireland was achieved; perhaps more significantly, it carried such emotional force that it clouded their judgement.

  12

  BELFAST, AUGUST 1969

  The limited and localised pattern(s) of violence

  LIAM KELLY

  Belfast, Sunday 16 August 2009: smoking bandsmen, families, neighbours, community leaders and political representatives gather at the base of Divis Tower, West Belfast. Less than a mile away, the transatlantic Tall Ships slip their moorings and set sail down Belfast Lough after a four-day festival in which three quarters of a million people visited the re-imaged capital of Northern Ireland1 – the city of the B-shaped heart.2 A few hundred feet up, two aerobatic planes (with coloured smoke tracking their gravity-defying movements) entertain the thousands gathered below on the banks of the River Lagan. For those forming up in procession this display proved a distant distraction, for they were assembling to remember an event which, in the tourist-friendly Belfast of 2009, seemed even further away than those planes: the fortieth anniversary of August 1969. In that month a different type of smoke and spectacle gripped the city as hundreds of buildings (mostly people’s homes) blazed, seven people lost their lives, hundreds of households were displaced and British soldiers first set foot on the streets of Belfast.3

  As this description of the march by Sinn Féin’s publicity department attests, the procession carefully recounted a historical and communal narrative:

  It progressed up the Falls Road, passing Saint Comgall’s Primary School which was attacked by unionist mobs ... It made its way through Conway Street and Cupar Street where homes were burned out, before moving up Clonard Street past Clonard Monastery which was targeted by petrol bombs ... The march ended in Clonard Gardens and Bombay Street which was completely destroyed in the burnings.4

  At the parade’s destination a number of speeches were made to the thousand or so people assembled and a mural was unveiled. In the small, intimate space of
now-reconstructed Bombay Street, overshadowed by a 40-foot-high ‘peace wall’ (a direct legacy of 1969),5 Daniel Jack of the Commemoration Committee reiterated the ‘significance’ of the journey they had just made: it ‘incorporated all the area that was on the receiving end of the pogrom’.6 The story of 1969 was being re-traced, re-told and re-inscribed upon the narrow streets of the Lower Falls and Clonard for the benefit of the 2009 generation.

  During that same summer of 2009 two further events (both photographic exhibitions) were put on in Belfast to mark and reflect upon the awful violence that defined 1969 in the city. The first was a series of ‘fifty stunning images’ taken by Gerry Collins, a keen local amateur photographer, in and around Bombay Street in the immediate aftermath of its destruction and the arrival of British troops in the district.7 These pictures had not been viewed in public before and only came to light when Collins approached Frankie Quinn (director of Belfast’s Red Barn Gallery) in early 2009 to tell him about the photographs. Quinn recalled how he thought nothing more of it until Collins turned up some time later with, in his words, an ‘incredible box of history’.8

  The success of the subsequent exhibition (‘Bombay Street – Taken from the Ashes’) and the publicity it attracted led the family of Hugh McKeown to present the gallery with a number of pictures that he too had taken forty years previously. This second collection recorded the effects of rioting in Ardoyne in 1969 and was displayed alongside Collins’ originals under the title: ‘Ardoyne – The Aftermath’. In the book that accompanied the exhibition, the foreword picked out one particular snapshot for further comment:

  In one ironic image, two young children play at the driver’s seat of a bus with its route – Falls Road via Ardoyne [sic] – clearly visible. As Ardoyne burned, so did Bombay Street on the Falls. Indeed, at one point the following day, Hugh [McKeown] travelled to West Belfast to witness and photograph the devastated Falls, and the powerful pictures he took there reflect the shared experience of the two communities.9

  A damaged bus used by two children for play © Hugh McKeown

  One of the most noticeable characteristics of all the above reflections is how geographically limited and spatially concentrated in scope they were. The march from Divis Towers to Bombay Street conspicuously ignored events outside that district. The speeches made a few fleeting (almost apologetic) mentions of events in Ardoyne, but the individuals commemorated on the new mural were all from the Greater Clonard area and the image used was that of a burnt-out Bombay Street.10 The titles and contents of the two photographic exhibitions showed the horrific concentration of destruction wrought upon these two tightly packed Catholic working-class neighbourhoods, but the lens did not move beyond those areas to contextualise these pictures. The ‘one ironic image’ of the two boys in the burnt-out bus may have symbolically reflected the ‘shared experience of the two communities’ (the Falls and Ardoyne) but it did not capture what the majority of Belfast’s residents and most of its neighbourhoods experienced during that tumultuous summer. The fact that these retrospectives told only part of the narrative(s) of August 1969 in the city of Belfast can be understood within the general processes of selectivity that surround all commemorative acts. However, this chapter argues that the nature and shape of these commemorative events tells us much more: in fact they highlight a defining characteristic of that year’s disturbances – their limited and localised nature.

  In 1969 the city of Belfast was divided into six police districts, A to F. The majority of disturbances in August 1969 occurred in police districts B and C (the northern and western parts of the city).11 Police district A remained the ‘most peaceful part of the City’ despite having at times only a dozen or so policemen available for patrol.12 District A covered the central parts of Belfast, including two potential sectarian flashpoints: the working-class neighbourhoods of Sandy Row (predominantly Protestant), and the Market(s) (predominantly Catholic). There was no ‘sharp dividing line’ between the two; instead a ‘mixed area’, made up of people from both religious groups, separated them.13 Both Sandy Row and the Market(s) remained ‘quiet’ during August and relationships between residents were noted as being ‘very good’. In fact on 16 August 1969 two peace committees were created, one operating out of Sandy Row and the other from the Market(s), and in time they ‘collaborated well and worked together to maintain peace’.14

  Police district D covered the greater part of north Belfast, from Peter’s Hill/York Street to the west of the city centre and the docks to the east, going as far north as the city’s boundary.15 Its main residential roads included the Antrim Road, York Street and the Shore Road. There were a number of ‘sensitive’ points within the division, all of which saw a general ‘heightening of tension’ but no violence at the peak of the unrest in mid-August.16 This was somewhat surprising as significant rioting had occurred in and around the Unity Flats on 12 July and again in early August. In fact the disturbances there, and in the Crumlin Road/Ardoyne area, in early August led to British troops being ‘quietly posted ... in police stations surrounding the trouble areas’.17 The only sign of potential violence in district D in the mid-August period was after 16 August when rival crowds gathered and barricades were erected at the New Lodge/Tiger’s Bay interface. However, there were no signs of ‘serious’ disturbance and the rival crowds merely exchanged ‘catcalls, shouts and songs’.18 Head Constable Thomas McCluney, in his testimony to the Scarman Tribunal (the inquiry established to explore the events of that year in Northern Ireland), highlighted the co-operation between the various Protestant and Catholic streets directed through Newington Presbyterian church and St Patrick’s church, respectively, as being key to taking the ‘whole explosive tension out of the area’.19

  Police district E covered much of the (predominantly Protestant) eastern part of the city. Its western boundary was marked by the River Lagan, which it followed northwards from the Albert Bridge and Beersbridge Roads.20 The only major Catholic area in the district was the Short Strand, a small tightly packed working-class neighbourhood surrounded mainly by Protestant streets. This area did see some unrest when tension became ‘dangerously high’ on the nights of 14 and 16 August, but on both occasions Protestant mobs were stopped from entering the neighbourhood by the police and ‘no clashes between civilians’ occurred.21 It was only after the second attempt to attack the district on 16 August that the first barricades were erected by Catholic vigilantes. The local Catholic street committee and the (mainly Protestant) ‘East Belfast Peace Committee’ worked well with one another and with the RUC. Again, like police district A, what makes the events in that area even more remarkable is that the police presence was ‘at the barest minimum’ as reinforcements had been sent to other parts of the city and to Derry.22

  Finally, police district F, although the scene of a number of attacks upon properties, in particular Catholic-owned licensed premises, ‘remained outside the area of civil disturbances’. This district included most of the southern part of the city, with a population between 100,000 and 120,000. There were two potential flashpoints within the district: the Protestant Woodstock Road boundary with the Catholic Short Strand; and the Protestant Donegall Road, near the motorway, which faced onto the Catholic Falls Road. In August a number of barricades were put up in certain parts of the district but interestingly those on the Donegall Road ‘were manned by both Catholics and Protestants working in harmony’. Subsequently there was no occurrence of violence in this ‘sensitive’ area and ‘clergy of all denominations came together and achieved a measure of success in keeping the peace during August and September’.23

  This brief overview of events outside the major riot areas during July and August 1969 shows how remarkably limited (in geographic terms) the disturbances actually were. The violence which did occur in police districts B and C was further concentrated in three areas: the ‘Orange–Green’ line separating the Shankill and Falls neighbourhoods (from Divis Street to the Springfield Road); the Hooker Street/Crumlin Road area;
and the Unity Flats/Peter’s Hill/Upper Library Street interface. On the surface this pattern seems understandable in that the riots occurred in places where Catholic and Protestant working-class streets abutted each other. The ‘extremely constricted physical spaces’ which this type of terrace housing created have been seen as significant in providing ‘conditions ripe for sectarian conflict’.24 When densely populated Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods were established within these tightly knit urban spaces a principle of ‘territorial dominance’ began to underwrite communal rioting,25 and there was an emphasis on the use of violence as a mechanism for marking out the future development of single-denomination areas.26 Seemingly these ‘seismic zones’27 were where disturbances would inevitably manifest themselves during periods of civil unrest, so that the violence was literally ‘embedded’ in Belfast’s built environment.28

  On further initial analysis, the location of rioting in August 1969 seems to be explicable in terms of the role played by local collective histories of violence, which have been noted as another key factor determining the spatial shape of communal disturbances in the north of Ireland. For example, Mark Doyle has described how in 1919 local journalist James Winder Good noted the significance of ‘a peculiar sort of folk memory among the working-class Protestants and Catholics of Belfast’. Good went on to argue that this knowledge was passed down from generation to generation: