But there was more to it than the complacent ignorance bred by decades of social and cultural segregation. While not reflecting an active discriminatory intent, it was in part a product of what Barritt and Carter described as a feeling of superiority amongst Protestants, which they explained in part as a relic of the former Protestant Ascendancy but also as a result of ‘the present day fact that a Catholic is more likely to be unskilled and poor than a Protestant’.56 Thus, as Charles Brett noted, the usual excuse was made that ‘it's hard to find a suitable person’. But when such feelings of social superiority were confronted with lists of suitable Catholics that had been submitted to the cabinet secretariat57 and still no action was forthcoming, even such a stalwart of the regime as the Belfast Newsletter criticized the timidity and bad faith of O'Neill's government. When in March 1965 John Taylor, a leading Young Unionist and a member of the Executive of the Ulster Unionist Council, told a National Council of Civil Liberties conference that discrimination was confined to private firms, a Newsletter leader set him straight and challenged the Prime Minister to address Catholic complaints directly:
There are local authorities which cannot show clean hands and they are not in all cases Unionist… Discrimination breeds discrimination but in a community which is predominantly Protestant and which has such distasteful slogans as ‘a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’ to live down the lead must come from the majority party and the government it forms.
Captain O'Neill, by the initiative he has shown in his summit talks with Mr Lemass, has created the proper atmosphere for a new approach to community problems inside Northern Ireland. The need now is for the government to follow up the signal success it has attained in external relations by similar conciliatory moves inside the province which will persuade Roman Catholics to play their full part in the affairs of the country.58
But the core of O'Neil approach had been articulated by Taylor when he focused on the image of O'Neill's ‘new Ulster’: ‘In the social and economic programmes now being outlined there is neither place nor time for discrimination.’59 Even if the new town project and the Lockwood Report had not provided room for serious doubt on this claim, there remained the fact that O'Neillism offered economic growth in exchange for collective amnesia on the part of the Catholic community about past and present grievances. Behind this bland appeal to shared material interests there was a steely resolve to do nothing that would add to the strains that his anti-NILP strategy was placing on Unionist Party unity.The result was a failure to grasp a very brief historical moment when timely and rather minimalist concessions might have tied the Nationalist Party and the Catholic middle class into a more positive, if still subordinate, relationship to the Unionist state.
The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement
The most radical shift in nationalist strategy since partition originated in a local campaign against the housing policy of Dungannon Urban District Council by a group of young Catholic housewives who claimed they were living in cramped and unsanitary conditions because of the council's policy of discrimination in favour of Protestants. The Homeless Citizens' League, which they established with the help of two local doctors, Conn and Patricia McCluskey, in May 1963, adopted novel tactics such as protests at council meetings, lobbying of Stormont and squatting.60 As alleged discrimination in the allocation of public housing was to be the central precipitating factor in the civil rights movement, it is important to emphasize the very localized nature of this and other central civil rights issues. As the most systematic and judicious of the analyses of the issue puts it,
A group of local authorities in the west of the province provide a startlingly high proportion of the total number of complaints. All the accusations of gerrymandering, practically all the complaints about housing and regional policy, and a disproportionate amount of the charges about private and public employment come from this area.61
The overall record on housing in Northern Ireland after 1945 was not a discreditable one. Between June 1944 and December 1964, 45,920 council houses were built; the Northern Ireland Housing Trust erected 28,513; and 3,102 were built by other public bodies. This was a reasonable achievement when compared with the 100,000 new dwellings that the 1943 Northern Ireland Housing Survey showed were needed.62 Allegations of wholesale discrimination against Catholics in the allocation of housing simply do not stand up to serious scrutiny. This can be seen in the 1971 census of population taken in the dying months of the Stormont regime. In that year there were 148,000 local authority dwellings in Northern Ireland, of which between 45,000 and 55,000 were occupied by Catholic families (depending on what is assumed about the religion of those who declined to answer the religion question in the census). Catholics had a disproportionately large share of local authority housing – even allowing for the lower average incomes of the Catholic community – comprising 26.1 per cent of households but occupying 30.7 per cent of local authority households.63
However, misallocation where it did occur could be crude and blatant and was usually associated with situations where the two communities were closely balanced numerically or where an actual Protestant and Unionist minority controlled a local authority through the manipulation of electoral boundaries. In Dungannon there was a slight Catholic majority in the population but control of the council was firmly in Unionist hands through boundary manipulation.64 Although much of the council's housing efforts went into slum clearance, from which Catholics benefited substantially since they were disproportionately affected by slum housing, there had been a marked reluctance to allocate houses to new Catholic families. The result was that in 1963 there were upwards of 300 families on the housing waiting list, some for as long as twelve years; and not one new Catholic family had been allocated a permanent house for thirty-four years, though a few houses had been allocated to comfortably-off Protestants.65
While such malpractices were confined to a small number of local authorities, their capacity to embarrass the regime was aided by its complacent tendency to dismiss complaints as part of the failed anti-partitionist agenda. This simply refused to recognize the radical shift in the tactics of protest associated with the Dungannon agitation, which from the beginning sought to increase its potency by drawing on media images of the ongoing struggle for black civil rights in the US. Just as blacks claimed equality and justice as part of their constitutional birthright and were prepared to use a range of tactics from ‘sit-ins’ at segregated lunch counters to mass marches to force action from the federal government, now Catholics were urged to turn to Westminster, to demand not British withdrawal but rather a new form of British involvement in Northern Ireland.
The McCluskeys along with other Catholic professionals signalled the new departure with the establishment of a Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) on 17 January 1964. The campaign was a self-conscious break with the approach of the Nationalist Party. As Conn McCluskey explained to Eddie McAteer, the time had come to ‘concentrate on getting our rights and trying to overcome gerrymandering… to mention the border just puts the Unionists' backs up and some other poor devils lose their chance of a house or a job.’66 The CSJ now turned to British politicians particularly within the Labour Party, with a captivatingly simple argument: ‘we lived in a part of the UK where the British remit ran, we should seek the ordinary rights of British citizens which were so obviously denied us.’67
The leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, had written to Patricia McCluskey in July 1964 ‘deploring’ religious and other kinds of discrimination and supporting the NILP's proposals for new and impartial procedures for the allocation of public housing and a tribunal to deal with cases of alleged discrimination in public appointments.68 In a second letter in September he pledged that a Labour government would do everything in its power to deal with infringements of justice in Northern Ireland. However, he also pointed out that this would be ‘no easy task’ and claimed that the most immediate way of getting progress would be to vote for NILP candidates in the forthco
ming general election. As Bob Purdie has pointed out, ‘Making the will-o'-the-wisp of an NILP electoral breakthrough a precondition for action by a Labour government was a safe way of putting off any action whatsoever.’69
Wilson's Huyton constituency had a large number of voters of Irish extraction, and such grand gestures as his decision to have the remains of Roger Casement, executed for treason in 1916, returned to Ireland convinced many unionists that he was sympathetic to Irish nationalism. Yet in his first years in power Wilson did little to pressurize O'Neill on the discrimination issue. He and his Home Secretary, Frank Soskice, relied on the advice of senior Home Office officials traditionally sympathetic to the Stormont government:
Section 75 of the 1920 Act certainly provides technical authority for the United Kingdom parliament to impose legislation on Northern Ireland against the wishes of that government, but the consequences of such an act could only be a disastrous rupture between the two governments. Allegations of religious discrimination against Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland have a very long history. The commonest allegations are of gerrymandering in local government, favouritism in the making of appointments and bias in the allocation of houses by local authorities. There is no question that all these matters are squarely the area of ‘peace, order and good government’ for which the Northern Ireland government has full responsibility.70
Rather than give any public indication of concern about the Stormont regime, Soskice used the one and only visit by a Labour Home Secretary to the province between 1964 and August 1969 to declare of O'Neill's administration: ‘From England we watch it, we admire it and we rejoice in it.’71
Part of the reason for Wilson's lack of action was O'Neill's own success in impressing on London that he was serious about change by his meeting with Lemass in January 1965. There was also the advice from the security services that, despite the end of the IRA campaign in 1962, the organization was preparing for a new assault. An alarmist report from the Special Branch in New Scotland Yard in November 1964, although discounting the likelihood of an imminent campaign, estimated that there were 3,000 men who had received some degree of training in the use of arms and explosives, of whom it was estimated that several hundred were sufficiently well trained to undertake active operations.72 As O'Neill kept stressing to London the problems he faced in getting his cabinet and party colleagues to accept change, this report of an added threat by republicans may well have encouraged sympathy for an administration facing such conflicting challenges.
However, much more important factors were Labour's narrow parliamentary majority of three and the UK's difficult economic situation, which dominated Wilson's concerns for the seventeen months of his first administration. Sir Oliver Wright, his Private Secretary at the time, subsequently commented, ‘I cannot remember in my time in Number 10… that Ireland ever really rated very high in Wilson's preoccupation.’73 Other priorities and the tendency of the Home Office to defend the constitutional status quo encouraged Wilson to give the benefit of the doubt to O'Neill's modernizing intentions. However, his own clear sympathy for improved relations with Dublin,74 and his increasing frustration with the support that Ulster Unionist MPs gave to the Conservative opposition in Westminster, alarmed O'Neill and was conducive to growing Labour backbench interest in a more interventionist posture towards Northern Ireland affairs.
The formation of the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU) in early 1965 by a group of Labour Party activists with strong left-wing republican influence provided an increasingly effective Westminster echo of the Campaign for Social Justice's anti-Stormont crusade. The CDU focused on Section 75 of the Government of Ireland Act with its assertion of the ultimate supremacy of the Westminster parliament over ‘all persons, matters and things’ in Northern Ireland. This, it claimed, should allow for the appointment of a Royal Commission to investigate charges of discrimination and, if necessary, direct intervention by the British government to establish full civil rights for Catholics.75
The CDU soon had the support of around one hundred Labour MPs,76 and after the general election of March 1966 Wilson's attitude towards O'Neill showed some indication of a toughening. Labour now had a majority of ninety-seven and CDU pressure was intensified by the return of Gerry Fitt as Republican Labour MP for West Belfast. This tough and shrewd former merchant seaman used his maiden speech to launch a passionate onslaught on the ‘injustice’ of the Stormont regime, ignoring the convention that domestic Northern Ireland affairs were not discussed at Westminster. At their first meeting after the election Wilson told O'Neill of the pressure he was under from the CDU and urged O'Neill to make ‘a real effort… to meet some of the grievances which had been expressed; otherwise Westminster would be forced to act.’77 O'Neill emphasized the fraught conditions in Northern Ireland that had followed the large republican celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising and the growing Paisleyite backlash and pleaded for breathing space before taking the reform process forward. The Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, warned that any backsliding on reform would lead to direct rule, but Wilson did express his continuing support for O'Neill and when he met the Irish Prime Minister in December he asked Jack Lynch to understand O'Neill's ‘problem’: ‘if he went ahead with reform too quickly he could face problems from within his own party.’78
When O'Neill returned to London in January 1967 he and his colleagues William Craig, Minister of Home Affairs, and Brian Faulkner got a rougher ride. Wilson again emphasized the pressure he was under from 150 Labour MPs, many of them from the 1966 intake: ‘a new and irreverent generation who were challenging everything’. These MPs were already questioning the financial assistance given to Stormont by the British Exchequer and would ask why Northern Ireland should continue to be subsidized ‘to operate a franchise system that no British government would consider for any independent Commonwealth state’. Jenkins claimed that pressure for reform in Derry was bound to grow. O'Neill's response was minimalist. He indicated his government's willingness to set up a statutory boundary commission to review all Stormont constituencies and to abolish the business vote in local elections. Craig used a forthcoming review of local government structures to procrastinate on the issue of universal suffrage in local government.79
But it was soon obvious that, while Wilson and Jenkins might be frustrated with Stormont's prevarication, they accepted O'Neill's argument that any attempt to push him too far would split his government and perhaps spark a Protestant uprising, forcing direct rule. For all Wilson and Jenkins's willingness to threaten intervention and direct rule, there could be little doubting their profound reluctance to be sucked into the ‘Irish bog’. When Eddie McAteer wrote to Jenkins at the end of 1967 complaining of lack of progress on nationalist complaints, he got the standard brush-off: the matters in dispute were ‘wholly within the constitutional ambit of the Parliament and Government of Northern Ireland’. He was advised to seek direct discussions with O'Neill.80 The lack of movement by O'Neill combined with the increased debate on discrimination issues at Westminster encouraged those within the opposition who favoured more robust ways of publicizing their grievances.
Radicalization: Northern Ireland's 1960s
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was to play a central role in the intensifying crisis of the unionist state from October 1968. Founded in February 1967, NICRA was subsequently alleged by William Craig to be a front for republicans and communists with a hidden anti-partitionist agenda. It was the case that republicans and some trade unionists with Communist Party affiliations dominated the executive committee of NICRA and that the leadership of the republican movement had decided to commit much of the energy of its northern members to the development of the civil rights movement. After the calling off of the 1956–62 campaign, the new Chief of Staff of the IRA, the republican socialist Cathal Goulding, had shifted the focus of the movement towards social agitation and left-wing politics. The Wolfe Tone Society, founded in 1963 and named after the Protestant
leader of the United Irish insurrection of 1798, was created as part of Goulding's strategy of building a coalition of ‘progressive and nationally-minded forces’. It was at a meeting of the Wolfe Tone Society in the house of a leading republican in Maghera, County Tyrone, in August 1966 that the decision to create NICRA was made.
Yet the view of NICRA and the subsequent development of the civil rights movement as a republican–leftist conspiracy is oversimplified. First, the priority of Goulding was to build the republican movement as a radical ‘anti-imperialist’ alternative to the Irish Labour Party: the focus of republican strategy was the South. Second, in Northern Ireland the priority was the reform of the Northern Ireland state, not its abolition. Pressure on Stormont from within Northern Ireland and from Westminster would, Goulding believed, force reforms on a reluctant Unionist Party that would split apart under the strain, thus freeing sections of the Protestant working class for ‘progressive’ politics and ultimately for republicanism. There was much that was naive in the approach of Goulding and his leftist advisers on the North. In particular they consistently underestimated the strength of Paisleyism. However, for all their inadequacies, the Goulding group did realize that any armed assault on the northern state risked a major sectarian conflagration. Third, it was most unlikely that the mass mobilization of the Catholic community that occurred after October 1968 could have been the work of such a small group, no matter how dedicated. The IRA in Belfast comprised a mere twenty-four members in 1962, and this number had grown to a less than formidable 120 by 1969.81
A less conspiratorial explanation of the growth of the civil rights movement was provided in the report of the Cameron Commission set up by O'Neill to investigate the violence that broke out in October 1968. The report argued that the determining factor in the unrest was the emergence in the 1960s of a ‘much larger Catholic middle class… which is less ready to acquiesce in the situation of assumed (or established) inferiority and discrimination than was the case in the past’.82 This stratum was created by the extension of secondary and higher education to working-class Catholics after 1945. Children of the British welfare state, they were less interested in the national question than in the fact that post-war expansion had disproportionately benefited Protestants.
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