Riotous Assemblies
Page 22
Gates scarred with bullet holes from long-ago riots, a corner where a sniper had once operated, a cul-de-sac in which an unfortunate company of dragoons had been successfully repulsed by stone-throwing crowds – these became landmarks of communal identity for the coming generations, reminders of collective victories or humiliations, urban monuments evoking feelings of triumph or recalling grievances to be avenged.29
The commemorative march from Divis Towers to Bombay Street, described above, is a good example of how such ‘working-class memories’ are formed and communicated. It is not insignificant that the parade route passed by St Comgall’s school where, even today, bullet marks caused by police gunfire in August 1969 are still visible on the front of the building – a symbolic repertoire (or ‘urban monument’) of past transgressions against that community.
However, if one were to take a map of Belfast as it looked in January 1969 with the Catholic neighbourhoods coloured in green and Protestant districts in orange, and then marked those areas with long histories of collective violence, it would only partly correspond to the map produced by the Scarman Tribunal of the ‘Main Riot Areas’.30 The spatial distribution of the disturbances, therefore, reveals that the nature of communal violence in Belfast is a much more complicated phenomenon than initially suggested by either the city’s sectarian topography or its ‘peculiar sort of folk memory’. This is reflected in the fact that potential flashpoints like the Short Strand and the New Lodge/Tiger’s Bay interface witnessed little unrest in that period. It is also shown in the way districts like Sandy Row, which had long histories of fraught community relations, saw little violence in the summer of 1969.31
To fully understand the nature of the disturbances that summer we should first focus on their local aspects, much as the fortieth anniversary commemorations did; and then we need to conceptualise these events as a series of localised narratives which played out simultaneously (and sometimes independently of one another), rather than being fixed within a general temporal framework starting with the 5 October 1968 Civil Rights march in Derry and marked by Burntollet, the ‘Crossroads’ election, the Apprentice Boys’ march and the ‘Battle of the Bogside’, before culminating in the Belfast ‘pogroms’ that we are examining here. In so doing we begin to see a plethora of triggers and small details which tell us a great deal more about why, when and where violence erupted in the city. This allows us to understand how, in the words of the Scarman Report, the ‘disturbances in Belfast were confined to a relatively small area’.32
Police actions and decisions made in and around certain ‘sensitive’ points during this period also played a key role in shaping events. There are numerous examples where police judgement and approaches in a certain neighbourhood had a positive effect on events, and also (tragically) many other instances where they did not.
In their submission to the Scarman Tribunal the Catholic residents of Ardoyne stated that ‘the major responsibility for the happenings ... must lie with the police’.33 Tellingly the germ of the deteriorating relationship between police and local Catholic residents lay in the mishandling of a seemingly innocuous bar-room incident.34 On 16 May 1969 a crowd gathered outside the Edenderry Inn – a public house with ‘a thoroughly bad reputation’ – to watch a customer who had fallen down some stairs being taken away by ambulance.35 They became agitated shortly after when an RUC patrol dressed in riot gear arrived and arrested a man.36 Stones and other missiles were thrown at the police, who called in reinforcements.37
There were disturbances outside the Edenderry the next night and the following weekend, and the public house (at the junction of Hooker Street and Crumlin Road) continued to be the main ‘site of violence’ in Ardoyne throughout the rest of that year. In analysing this incident, Vivian Simpson, Stormont MP for the area, noted how this ‘ill-feeling against the police tended to be localised’.38 However, as Simpson’s solicitor rightly pointed out, the ‘resentment such as existed in Hooker Street before the major troubles broke out always ran the risk of developing into something much more serious’.39 And so it proved, with this sensitive spot becoming a ‘running sore’ from May up until the arrival of British troops in the area in mid-August.40
By then, criticism of police actions was not limited to Ardoyne’s Catholic residents. The Sunday Times investigative team was highly dismissive of the RUC’s actions on 14/15 August, concluding that: ‘[t]he ultimate tragedy of Belfast is that, given better standards of policing that night, bloodshed need never have happened on the scale that it did’.41 The journalists were correct to reprimand the police over their use of Browning machine-guns in ‘the huddled streets’ of the Falls and Divis areas.42 The fact that some of the bullets fired from these heavy-calibre weapons landed up to a mile away, hitting a police station whose incumbents (ironically) believed they were under attack, attests to the reckless nature of this reaction.43 However, if RUC actions in the Lower Falls and Ardoyne helped feed into the violence being played out in those localities, the same cannot be said of other ‘sensitive’ parts of the city.
For example, the residents of Unity Flats – a ‘Catholic fortress in Protestant territory’44 – in their submission to the Scarman Tribunal paid tribute to the police for stopping an attempted attack on their area on 3 August and for doing so ‘in a determined and forceful manner’.45 Harold Wolseley, Belfast City police commissioner, described his force’s reaction to the assault thus: ‘Let’s face it, my Lord [Scarman], we took on the Shankill for two nights and beat them to their knees, putting it rather crudely, and made 100 or something arrests. There was no bias in that.’46 In fact the ferocious nature of the confrontations between the RUC and Protestant rioters in the Shankill in that period led to the police withdrawing from the district; it was only the introduction of the Special Constabulary and Loyalist institutions (both Orange Order and Royal Black members) patrolling the streets that brought calm to the area.47
Events in and around the predominantly Catholic Short Strand, which was isolated and vulnerable in much the same way as Unity Flats, were also telling. On three successive nights from 14 to 17 August, Protestant mobs tried to enter Catholic streets and on each occasion the police were able to stop these incursions. Indeed the RUC officer in charge of that area praised the role played by Catholic vigilantes in helping to prevent ‘a clash between the different factions’.48 The good relationship between local Catholic residents and the police can be gauged by the fact that when barricades were constructed on 16 August, blocking off all access routes into the Short Strand, the area did not become a ‘no-go’ for the RUC (unlike ‘Free Derry’ and ‘Free Belfast’). In return the police seemed to show a high degree of sensitivity in how they approached their duties in that locality:
We did not go into the area unnecessarily for the purpose of ‘flag showing’. We went in there when we had to go in and dealt with ordinary matters and we went up and down Seaforde Street [in Short Strand] every day at different times.49
Good working relationships between police and other Catholic working-class neighbourhoods where barricades were set up can be seen elsewhere in the city. For example, on the two occasions when barricades were constructed in the Market(s) the police were able to successfully negotiate with the residents and reassure them that if they took them down no attacks would follow.50 Such dialogue would not have been possible if relations between the RUC and local residents had deteriorated in the way they had in Ardoyne and the Falls.
The above examples are not meant to provide a comprehensive analysis of the RUC and policing in the city of Belfast during 1969; instead they are meant to be one prism of many through which we can view the unrest of that year. They highlight how the nature of those events, in particular the nature of the violence, may be better understood within a local conceptual framework rather than within a general narrative structure. So, for instance, in the case of Ardoyne we see a situation where a small event in a specific locality could become a defining trigger. The evidence suggests that the arri
val of the police in the aftermath of the Edenderry Inn incident changed the nature of the crowd which had gathered there. What is less clear is whether it was just the police presence or the fact that they were clothed in riot gear that caused the atmosphere to become agitated. What is certain is that by the following night (17 May) the RUC’s visibility in the area was being viewed by (some) patrons of the public house as a provocative act, with a crowd from the Edenderry Inn attacking two ‘uniformed constables’ who during the course of their ‘normal patrol’ were standing opposite the establishment.51 A full-scale riot broke out and, tellingly, residents from the Hooker Street/Herbert Street area were drawn to this ‘site of violence’, driving up the number of citizens involved in the riot from 80 to 200.52
With these two incidents we can see the beginnings of the dynamics of future disturbances in that area, particularly the fact that the junction of Hooker Street and the Crumlin Road became the locale for much of the violence that followed. The way the RUC policed the neighbourhood also began to change as these events informed the force’s perceptions (at institutional and individual levels) of the district. Just as significantly, these events similarly influenced local (Catholic) residents’ attitudes to the police. The relationship between the police and Catholic residents in that area, though not across the whole of Belfast, was now fundamentally altered. We should not completely separate these events from the city’s recent experience of rioting (in the Falls from 20 to 22 April) or the tumultuous political and social changes in the rest of Northern Ireland, but the fact is that the contours of these events (in this example, in Ardoyne) were defined at a street and neighbourhood level, not at a city-wide or national one.
I have put forward two arguments about August 1969 in the city of Belfast. Firstly, I argue that the violence in that period was significant not only in and of itself but also because it was spatially quite limited. The highly concentrated nature of the rioting (geographically) was what the Scarman Report described as the ‘one remarkable fact’ of the Belfast disturbances that year, and this characteristic continued to define much of the violence during the subsequent ‘Troubles’.53 As John Darby noted, Northern Ireland as a case study was interesting for ‘the limitations of its violence rather than for the violence itself’.54 Similarly, Elliott Leyton emphasised that the ‘true enigma’ facing researchers working on the Troubles was ‘not why so many have died: rather, it is why so few have been killed’.55
Secondly I am arguing that, though Belfast’s intricate sectarian geography and its collective folk memory together help explain the shape and distribution of the violence that marred the city in that period, they do so only to an extent. In fact, to gain a fuller understanding of these disturbances we need to begin to view them from another perspective – the local. As Niall Ó Dochartaigh has rightly argued, in ‘conditions of civil disorder and conflict the world contracts and the local situation becomes the central political concern of many more people’.56 It has been easy when exploring the long history of communal rioting, intimidation and violence in Belfast to analyse events somewhat too deterministically, identifying and rarefying a number of causal factors.57 By looking at these events through the prism of multiple local narratives (each instructive in its own way) we can start to gain a fuller understanding of the nature of communal violence – and communal non-violence – in Northern Ireland’s largest city.
13
WHEN IS AN ASSEMBLY RIOTOUS, AND WHO DECIDES?
The success and failure of police attempts
to criminalise protest
EALÁIR NÍ DHORCHAIGH & LAURENCE COX
This chapter explores the sensitive topic of police violence at political protests in Ireland in more recent times and in particular the question of when and how it is legitimised. Long experience of discussing the matter with students, colleagues, journalists and members of the public makes it clear that many people see police acts using force as per se legitimate and therefore not ‘violent’, a term thus reserved for illegitimate acts. Yet police behaviour can be contested publicly and on occasion found to be illegitimate (by expert opinion, by media commentators, by internal inquiries or indeed by courts of law). The question of how the use of force is legitimised – and what conditions make this achievement of legitimacy more or less likely – is then an interesting one, as is the broader question of why a police decision is made to use force in the first place, and at what level.
Thus a central theme of our chapter is the need to separate acts involving force (injury to civilians on Dublin’s Dame Street, for example) from the question of whether or not they are subsequently legitimised (in the case of Dame Street in 2002 they were not; in the case of Rossport in Mayo in the years up to 2010 they consistently have been). In the contexts in question, police acts of force – far from being seen as automatically legitimate – have been widely condemned in the media and, on occasion, by internal inquiries; they have also been denied (rarely) or ignored (far more commonly), and (on occasion) explicitly justified.
Our general argument here is that (a) police officers commit violent acts, but are (sometimes) licensed to do so; (b) the question of when they are licensed to do so is an interesting one and worthy of research; (c) it has to do with a range of social actors, notably the media, courts and politicians; (d) all of this is separate again from the question of whether in some other sense they are justified or not, on which opinions will no doubt continue to differ.
A separate question centres on why particular acts of police violence are committed. A particular act may originate with a strategic decision by senior police management (or indeed a general directive by politicians); it may also be a decision by the immediate commander or it may indeed represent a loss of ‘command and control’ over individual officers. Given that some policing decisions will never be recorded, and others will be fully discoverable only in the event of independent legal inquiries or the subsequent release of state papers, a whole series of problems arise.
In this context, researchers have to draw on the available evidence and make reasonable arguments about (i) when genuine choices are being made – as with the ‘no-arrests’ policy, which was publicly stated in Garda Review, or the withdrawal of batons from front-line police at protests, visible between May and September 2002; (ii) at what level such choices are made – for example, the involvement of the navy in responding to the Erris protests and the borrowing of water cannon from the PSNI for the May Day protests were clearly not decisions within the remit of junior officers; and (iii) what explanations for such decisions can plausibly be suggested.
In other words, as citizens or (sociological) researchers, we have to do the best we can to understand why, when citizens protest, they are occasionally attacked (legitimately or not), though we remain aware that in some cases we may never know the answer. Comparable limitations, of course, apply to events in the past, where the data is also limited (albeit differently) and researchers also need to rely on chains of evidence, assumptions and reasoning to make convincing arguments about the reasons for particular acts.
Here we discuss some choices in the recent policing of protest in the Republic, and possible explanations for these choices; we also ask about the processes through which the outcomes of such choices – in terms of the use of particular levels of violence against citizens – have been found legitimate or otherwise, and the conditions which influence these outcomes. We start, however, in the eighteenth century.
In 1787, Irish law introduced the ‘reading of the Riot Act’. In this ritual, once the Act was read, a popular gathering – irrespective of the participants’ actions – became illegal, and subject to physical attack by the authorities. Similar ‘warnings to disperse’ are still employed by the Irish police at demonstrations in Ireland today, and the charge of ‘refusal to obey the instructions of a garda’ is routinely brought against protestors, whereas the 1994 Criminal Justice Act makes ‘riot’ an offence in itself, separate from any specific actions. In other word
s, if the police publicly define protests or other collective actions as riotous, they are entitled to make extensive use of force in repressing them, and both participation and mere physical presence become criminal. Another way of describing such laws is to say that an assembly is riotous when the authorities say that it is. Such statements are what Jürgen Habermas calls ‘performative utterances’, statements which make something real by saying that it is so, like ‘I do’ at a wedding.1 The implication is that the state can legitimate its use of violence against social movements, restrict the freedom of assembly and criminalise participants just by saying so.
However, police decisions to define a specific protest as illegitimate and illegal – and hence a legitimate target of violence – is not automatically the end of the matter. Protestors try, sometimes successfully, to undermine such decisions; and other social groups like the media and courts do not always give the consent needed to legitimise coercion. As the broad history of the popular assertion of political rights like the right of assembly suggests, the authorities’ routine attempts to restrict such rights often fail.
The key feature of all these events – as with the series of simultaneous protests around the use of Shannon Airport by the US military, which deserve separate discussion – is their combination of peaceful protest with disruptive tactics (non-violent direct action) and a consequent refusal to negotiate protest events in advance with the police. This disruptive power is one of the major tools that those who are formally powerless have at their disposal.2 Struggle over the legitimacy of such action is therefore a key site of political conflict. It is also important that we are discussing events which broadly fit within the ‘alter-globalisation’ (anti-capitalist, global justice, etc.) movement; policing strategies are very different in relation to different movements.3 Our analysis leads us to ask three further questions: