Ireland Since 1939
Page 29
There had indeed been a major expansion of the Catholic middle class under Stormont. The proportion of Catholics in professional and managerial occupations more than doubled between the censuses of 1911 and 1971, and this was clearly linked to the substantial expansion of the education, welfare and health services after 1945. Yet this stratum remained a narrow one, and the much broader appeal of the civil rights movement remains to be explained. What provoked mass support was a unique and very temporary fusion of 1960s ultra-leftism with a much more rooted sense of ethnic exclusion and oppression, which saw the movement, however inchoately, as an opportunity for striking a blow not simply at structures of discrimination but at the fundamentals of the northern state itself. Civil rights appealed precisely because it seemed to have the capacity to transcend the passivity that was a product of the failure of the two dominant traditions in Catholic politics: constitutional anti-partitionism and physical-force republicanism.
Hemmed in by the rhetoric of O'Neil and Lemass and responding to the pressure of criticisms from such groups as National Unity and the Campaign for Social Justice, the Nationalist Party unenthusiastically shuffled towards modernity. In November 1964 it produced its first ever general policy statement, with McAteer declaring that ‘The Party is now anxious to step into the twentieth century.’ However, this proved premature as many of the MPs resisted the idea of a modern party structure.83 The first annual conference of the party did not occur until December 1965, and by then some of its younger members were pushing for a more radical realignment that would bring in the republican labour tradition in Belfast and for the adoption of ‘left of centre’ policies.84 Fitt's return to Westminster and his high profile and good relations with many CDU MPs increasingly made him, rather than McAteer, seem the spokesman for Northern Ireland's nationalists. Fitt's main publicity coup was the tour of three CDU MPs on a fact-finding mission across the province in April 1967. Yet, while the visit may temporarily have raised hopes of Labour intervention, there was little indication that this was even on the horizon when 1968 began. For all their activities, the CSJ, CDU and NICRA had remarkably little to show in the way of results. The first year and a half of NICRA's existence was, according to the best scholarly account, ‘a period of general ineffectuality’.85
But, if there was little to show in the way of action by O'Neill or Wilson, there had been a noticeable loss of political and moral authority on the part of the Nationalist political leadership. Increasingly attacked as ineffectual ‘Green Tories’ by a coalition of Nationalist modernizers, republicans and young leftist members of the NILP, Nationalist Party notables like McAteer were ignored even when their warnings about the dangers of street politics were to be proved prescient. McAteer's own experience of the polarizing effect of contested marches in Derry in the early 1950s may have contributed to his unease with the radical tactics suggested by Austin Currie, a young Queen's University graduate who won the Stormont constituency of East Tyrone in 1964. Currie supported the squatting of homeless Catholic families in houses owned by Dungannon Rural District Council and told a student audience at Magee College in Derry that what was needed was ‘more squatting, more acts of civil disobedience, more emphasis on “other means” and less on traditional political methods’.86
Nationalist leaders' reluctance to go down this road reflected social conservatism and the knowledge that their republican critics were better placed to exploit the housing issue at a local level. But there was also a deeper comprehension of the underlying sectarian geography of town and countryside in Ulster and of the danger that a more confrontational strategy would produce not reform but major communal conflict.Younger nationalist modernizers, socialist republicans and an increasingly influential group of leftist students all had a typically 1960s contempt for middle-aged politicians and what were seen as antiquated Orange and Green traditions. Yet the first civil rights march showed that, despite the non-sectarian language of the march organizers, many of the marchers and their opponents defined ‘civil rights’ in terms of traditional aspirations and antagonisms. The executive of NICRA had not initiated the march, from Coalisland to Dungannon, on 24 August 1968; the idea had come from Currie, who had recently grabbed the headlines by squatting in a vacant house in Caledon, County Tyrone, to highlight a particularly obtuse decision by Dungannon Rural District Council to award a house to a young, single Protestant woman.87
The NICRA leaders were divided on the wisdom of taking their demands on to the streets. The veteran Belfast communist Betty Sinclair opposed the whole idea of marches, and it was only local pressure from the leaders of the CSJ and republicans that ensured NICRA support for the march. Both the Inspector-General of the RUC and Bernadette Devlin, the young Queen's University student from Cookstown, County Tyrone, who would have brief media fame as the ‘La Pasionaria’ of the civil rights movement, agreed that, despite the marchers singing ‘We Shall Overcome’, the anthem of the black civil rights movement in the US, the march's dynamic was robustly nationalist. The 2,000 or so marchers were accompanied by bands that played traditional nationalist and republican tunes, and when the RUC prevented the march reaching the centre of Dungannon, where local unionists and Paisley supporters had organized a counter-demonstration, they were denounced as ‘black bastards’ by Gerry Fitt while Currie attacked O'Neill and ‘the Orange bigots behind him’.88
The Inspector-General of the RUC described the march as ‘a republican parade rather than a civil rights march’ and criticized NICRA for allowing its platforms to be used by ‘extremists and trouble-makers’. In fact, the leadership of the IRA was as keen as northern communists such as Betty Sinclair to prevent conflict with the RUC and loyalists, and the prominent role that republicans played in stewarding the march reflected this concern. However, as Bernadette Devlin subsequently pointed out, there was a naivety in the NICRA executive's belief that their own non-sectarian reformist intent gave them the right to march where they wanted in Northern Ireland. Coalisland was ‘ninety per cent republican’,89 and Protestant and unionist perceptions of the civil rights movement were increasingly that it was just a new way for nationalists to undermine the state.
The crisis of the Unionist regime was not the execution of some ‘republican-communist’ conspiracy to destroy the state under the guise of civil rights. Like all significant historical events, it was brought about by a combination of factors. Amongst the most crucial were O'Neill's reluctance to move quickly on reforms because of divisions within his cabinet and party, Wilson's desire to ‘leave it to O'Neill’ rather than risk a confrontation with Stormont, and the Nationalist Party's loss of direction. Nationalist disarray ushered in a period of fluidity and competition in Catholic politics that allowed relatively small groups of local militants to exert a powerful influence on events.
This would have particularly momentous results in Derry. Here the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC), a coalition of leftist republicans and the Trotskyist-influenced Derry Labour Party led by the charismatic activist Eamonn McCann, had already initiated a civil disobedience campaign against the Corporation's housing policies. In the aftermath of the Coalisland-Dungannon march, the DHAC asked NICRA to march in Derry. McCann and his comrades proposed a march that would enter the historic walled centre of the city, where previous attempts to organize nationalist parades had been banned. Although the leadership of NICRA went along with this plan on the basis that theirs was not a nationalist march but one for civil rights within the UK, there were severe misgivings about the potential for confrontation and violence. This was especially the case as the day chosen for the march was one on which the Protestant Apprentice Boys had an annual initiation ceremony attended by members from all over the North. William Craig banned the Apprentice Boys' parade and excluded the civil rights march from the predominantly Protestant Waterside, where it was supposed to start, and from the centre of the city. Although McAteer advised a postponement, as did Conn McCluskey of the Campaign for Social Justice, the leadership of NICRA was d
ivided and a small but determined group of Derry radicals prevailed.
Although to the organizers' disappointment only 400 turned up for the start of the march in Duke Street,90 the RUC's response and the presence of television cameras ensured that it would have an unprecedented effect in politically energizing the Catholic community throughout Northern Ireland. Gerry Fitt had brought three Labour MPs from England and local republicans ensured that the MPs and McAteer were pushed up against the RUC line blocking the march's route to the city centre. Although the Cameron Commission found that Fitt's conduct was ‘reckless, and wholly irresponsible in a person occupying his public positions’,91 the RUC response to relatively low-level verbal abuse and jostling was to baton both him and McAteer. Nationalist MPs had been batoned in the 1950s, but, as one of the regime's most formidable opponents has noted, ‘there had been no TV then and meanwhile expectations had changed.’92 A group of student radicals from Belfast, who had arrived late, were able to complete the RUC's disgrace by throwing their placards and banners at the police, who responded by assaulting the politicians at the front of the march. They then baton-charged the rest of the demonstrators.
The television footage of RUC violence brought an abrupt end to Wilson's policy of ‘leaving it to Terence’. The next civil rights march in Derry, on 16 October, saw over 15,000 marchers sweep into the city centre, swamping RUC lines by force of numbers. The small group of activist students, grouped around the Young Socialist Alliance at Queen's University, exploited the RUC's overreaction, and Craig's crude defence of it, to become the self-styled ‘vanguard’ of an unprecedented mobilization of what had hitherto been one of the most docile campuses in Western Europe. Its leading figure was Michael Farrell, a formidable debater influenced by both republican socialism and Trotskyism. Craig's ban on a student protest march about the Derry events led to the formation of People's Democracy (PD), a mass-based student organization with Farrell's militants styling themselves as its hard core.
Influenced by the upsurge of student radicalism in Europe and the US, and particularly by the ‘May Events’ in France, PD militants saw in the burgeoning civil rights marches the possibility of the North's own revolutionary situation. Although some were genuine, if naive, in their belief that their commitment to a socialist project equally dismissive of unionism and nationalism could appeal to the Protestant working class, others such as Farrell were prepared to settle for a solely Catholic insurgency dressed up in the Leninist notion that an uprising of Derry's Catholic proletariat would create a situation of ‘dual power’.93 With a sharp sense of the impact that Catholic mobilization and intensifying pressure from London was having in dividing and demoralizing the Unionist regime, the student radicals gave little thought to what would result if they succeeded in bringing down O'Neill. Adopting a crude Trotskyist approach that was contemptuous of ‘mere’ reforms aimed at ‘buying off the just rage of the masses, the radicals in the PD were to prove disastrously successful in undermining the real support for O'Neill's reformism that still existed despite the events of October.
Disintegration
In a memorandum for his cabinet colleagues, O'Neill set out the agonizing choices likely to face them in the aftermath of the Derry events:
Can any of us truthfully say… that the minority has no grievance calling for a remedy? Believe me, I realise the appalling political difficulties we face. The first reaction of our own people to the antics of Fitt and Currie and the abuse of the world's Press is to retreat into old hard-line attitudes. But if this is all we can offer we face a period when we govern Ulster by police power alone… concessions… could well be the wisest course. We would have a very hard job to sell such concessions to our people, but in this critical moment may this not be our duty? We may even have to make a bitter choice between losing Londonderry and losing Ulster.94
Anticipating a demand for universal suffrage in local government elections from Wilson, O'Neill was faced with total inflexibility from his Minister of Home Affairs. Initially an ally of O'Neill, who regarded him as bright and progressive when he made him one of the youngest-ever Unionist cabinet ministers, Craig proved disastrous in Home Affairs. Blunt and outspoken, he had been used as O'Neill's ‘battering ram’ against local Unionist resistance to his original attempts to modernize government and party. However, as Minister of Home Affairs he made it clear that for him modernization did not extend to any indulgence of the civil rights agenda. Over-impressed by Special Branch reports on communist and republican involvement in NICRA, he publicly denounced its supposed ulterior agenda. He was also an early and strident voice against ‘Westminster dictation’. O'Neill could have dealt with Craig's resistance – he did sack him in December – but Craig's obduracy was reinforced by the much more substantial figure of Brian Faulkner. Although Faulkner did not oppose franchise reform in principle,95 he was at one with Craig in demanding that O'Neill stand up to pressure from Wilson.
At a Downing Street meeting on 4 November with Wilson and James Callaghan, who had replaced Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, Craig refused to be moved by the Prime Minister's strongly expressed desire for the quick introduction of one-man-one-vote. He and Faulkner were also unsettled by Wilson's criticism of the police behaviour in Derry and his recommendation of an inquiry.96 O'Neill tried to convince his government that Wilson would not be satisfied without franchise reform and that the UK government was not bluffing, but the cabinet could not agree on the core issue, with Faulkner declaring that he was not prepared ‘to yield to financial or economic duress’.97 In the short term it was Craig and Faulkner who were vindicated in their assessment of the British Prime Minister as a paper tiger. For, despite a direct threat from Wilson to impose universal adult suffrage if Stormont did not introduce it, when O'Neill informed him that it was not politically possible, he and Callaghan capitulated.98
A five-point reform package was announced on 21 November: the introduction of a points system for the allocation of public housing; the appointment of an ombudsman for Northern Ireland; the abolition of the business vote in local government elections; a review of the Special Powers Act; and the replacement of the Londonderry Corporation by an appointed Development Commission. O'Neill feared that without a commitment to one-man-one-vote it would be impossible to satisfy the UK government or restrain the civil rights movement, and he would soon be vindicated.99 The longer franchise reform was delayed, the more debilitating were the effects on O'Neill's position. On the one hand it encouraged more civil rights marches, while on the other it strengthened the impression amongst the unionist grass-roots that the government was reeling ineffectively before internal and external pressures. Even before the Londonderry events, the Unionist Party headquarters was receiving increasing numbers of letters complaining about the adverse media coverage of the situation in Northern Ireland and the government's failure to counter it effectively.100 For a sizeable section of the party's grass-roots, if Catholics did have real grievances, then the extent of them was being grossly exaggerated by the civil rights movement, a movement that was perceived to be simply a more effective and dangerous incarnation of the traditional nationalist enemy. O'Neill was seen as running a government that was more responsive to its opponents than to its supporters. A report on discussions with grass-roots members in September 1968 revealed the extent of the problem:
The ordinary loyalist no longer believes that the Unionist Party is an effective influence on the course of events… There is a feeling in many associations that those at the top of the Party are reaching out over the heads of the people who put them there. There was criticism that much of the legislation ‘does not help Unionists and favours non-Unionists’.101
With William Craig publicly condemning the civil rights movement as ‘bogus’, blaming the Catholic Church's teaching on birth-control for any Catholic disadvantage in housing and employment, and warning Westminster that ‘interference’ would be resisted,102 O'Neill made one last, desperate effort in a broadcast on local television on 9 De
cember. He declared that ‘Ulster stands at a crossroads’ and appealed to the civil rights movement to ‘take the heat out of the situation’, claiming that his government was totally committed to a reforming process. To unionists he emphasized the financial and economic support from Britain and attacked ‘Protestant Sinn Feiners’ who would not listen ‘when they are told that Ulster's income is £200 million a year but that we can spend £300 million – only because Britain pays the balance’. He said that Wilson's declared willingness to act over their heads if adequate reforms were not forthcoming would be fully within the terms of Section 75 of the Government of Ireland Act. Most significantly, he tried to drain the local government franchise of the exaggerated importance it had assumed for many loyalists by pointing out that the adoption of the civil rights agenda would not lose the Unionist Party a single seat at Stormont.103
The response was encouraging. ‘I Back O'Neill’ coupons printed in the Belfast Telegraph were signed and returned by 150,000 supporters within days, and NICRA announced that there would be a moratorium on marches until the middle of January. When Craig made another defiant speech vowing to resist any British interference, O'Neill sacked him. Then on 12 December the Unionist Parliamentary Party supported a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister by twenty-eight to four abstentions. Yet O'Neill still had to win the argument for one-man-one-vote in his own cabinet, and he knew that the party in the three western counties of the province was solidly against any change. Some leading Unionists in the west were convinced that O'Neill had decided to sacrifice them in order to consolidate the Unionist cause in the greater Belfast area.104 If O'Neill had decided to save Unionist control of Northern Ireland by sacrificing Unionist local domination in Derry and other peripheral areas, he needed a period of calm on the streets. While the leadership of NICRA was prepared to concede this, his ultra-left critics in the PD were not.