Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  Concerned that the civil rights movement would come to a stop because its leadership was prepared to accept O'Neill's ‘miserable reforms’,105 Michael Farrell and his couple of dozen supporters in the Young Socialist Alliance promoted the idea of a ‘Long March’ from Belfast to Derry. Modelled on the Selma–Montgomery march in Alabama in 1966, it aimed to force British intervention and reopen the Irish question. A mass meeting of the PD at Queen's had rejected the idea in early December, aware as many were of the probability of attacks on the march as it passed through strongly loyalist areas. However, using the New Left commitment to direct democracy for a more traditionally Leninist purpose, Farrell's supporters convened another meeting at the end of term when most students had gone home and got the decision reversed. Criticized by the mainstream leaders of the civil rights movement and with the support of only a few dozen students, the march set off on 1 January accompanied by eighty policemen. O'Neill had rejected loyalist demands to ban it but did remarkably little to ensure that it was adequately protected. The marchers were harried by loyalists at various places along the route, while local republicans guarded them at night. On the final day of the march, when its size had grown from forty people to several hundred, it was attacked by 200 loyalists, some of whom were identified as off-duty B Specials, at Burntollet Bridge near Derry. Farrell had predicted that if the marchers were subject to a serious attack there would be an uprising in Derry, and he was proved correct.106 When the marchers arrived in the centre of the city, after another attack by loyalists in the Waterside, they unleashed a wave of anti-RUC rioting that transformed the situation and strengthened the hostility of many Catholics to the state. It marks the pivotal point at which the civil rights phase of the ‘Troubles’ ended and the conflict began to focus on more ancient disputes over national and religious identities.

  O'Neill saw the Derry violence as the end of his hopes of gradual reform from above and was dissuaded from resigning only by pressure from Wilson and Edward Heath, the Leader of the Opposition.107 If the march had not taken place, he might at last have been forced to grasp the nettle of franchise reform. With Craig gone the only substantial voice of opposition would have been Faulkner. But Faulkner had made clear in cabinet that he had an open mind on the issue but was opposed to being seen to act under Westminster pressure. The strengthening of O'Neill's position after the ‘Crossroads’ speech and the favourable response of NICRA would have allowed him to present a change of policy as an expression of his government's own reformist intent. The ‘Long March’ destroyed this possibility. John Hume, who had emerged as the leader of more moderate opinion in Derry, now declared that the ‘truce’ on marching was over and that there would be a return to militant action.108

  O'Neill pleaded with his cabinet to see that a simply repressive response would fail. Anticipating pressure from Wilson and Callaghan, he argued for an independent public inquiry into the disturbances and for acceptance of universal suffrage in local government: ‘in resisting this molehill of reform we are allowing a mountain to fall upon us.’109 Rebuffed on the central suffrage issue, he was able to extract support for the decision to set up a commission of inquiry into the recent disturbances to be headed by the Scottish judge Lord Cameron. A week later, on 23 January, Faulkner, who had opposed the idea of an inquiry in cabinet, resigned, declaring that the decision to set up the commission was an ‘abdication of authority’: the Prime Minister should have persuaded the party of the need for a change of policy on the franchise issue. Yet, as O'Neill pointed out at the last discussion of the franchise issue in the parliamentary party in November 1968, change had been opposed by the ‘vast majority’.110 Perhaps if Faulkner had come out earlier in support of reform this opposition could have been significantly reduced. O'Neill's anger at his colleague's late conversion was understandable. His decision to call a general election in February, a course of action that he had specifically rejected in the ‘Crossroads’ broadcast, reflected this anger as well as increasing desperation.

  For the first time in its history the Unionist Party entered an election campaign divided. The existence of at least twelve MPs who were now openly calling for his resignation led O'Neill to impose a loyalty pledge on all candidates, who had to support a reformist manifesto. The ultra-democratic structure of the Unionist Party, which left the choice of election candidates to individual constituency associations, resulted in the Prime Minister supporting ‘unofficial’ candidates against ‘official’ candidates from the right. Thirty-nine Unionists were returned: twenty-four ‘official’ Unionists and three ‘unofficial’ Unionists who supported O'Neill; ten ‘official Unionists’ who opposed the Prime Minister; and two undecided. Support for O'Neill was greatest in suburban constituencies in the greater Belfast area, while anti-O'Neillism was strongest in the border counties and in working-class Belfast constituencies.111

  O'Neill had gambled on a comprehensive vote of confidence and a repudiation of his critics, but the result, as a key aide has subsequently admitted, was ‘muddied and inconclusive’.112 All twelve of his Unionist critics were returned, and in his own Bannside constituency he was returned on a vote of 7,745, with Ian Paisley polling 6,331 and the PD leader Michael Farrell 2,310. With the parliamentary party split and a narrow majority of support in the Ulster Unionist Council, O'Neill eventually delivered one-man-one-vote on 22 April, although only after a very narrow vote. The resignation of the Minister of Agriculture, James Chichester-Clark, in protest at the timing of the decision was a final and stunning blow, the effect of which was amplified by bomb attacks on Belfast's water supply. Blamed on republicans, these were in fact an attempt by loyalist paramilitaries to create an atmosphere of crisis.

  O'Neill resigned on 28 April and within a week a deeply divided parliamentary party chose Chichester-Clark over Brian Faulkner by a narrow majority of seventeen to sixteen. Although the government had finally conceded the core demand of the civil rights movement, developments since 1 January had shifted the conflict on to a different level, where what was at issue was the relationship between the police and an increasingly militant section of the Catholic working class. Derry would be the focus of this new and increasingly violent phase. The riots that had followed the arrival of the ‘Long March’ prefigured what was to come. Hours of rioting in the city centre were followed by the collapse of discipline amongst sections of the RUC, some of them drunk, who attacked people and property on the fringes of the Bogside, the city's oldest concentration of Catholic housing. Barricades were erected, and traditionalist republicans began to carve out a role in ‘citizens' defence’ committees.113 By the spring of 1969 confrontations between a hard core of unemployed Derry youth and the police had become regular events. Derry's violence had also an increasingly sectarian dimension as Catholic youths clashed with members of the small Protestant working class that lived on the predominantly Catholic west side of the River Foyle.

  O'Neill's divided and pressurized government had introduced a Public Order Bill in March 1969 outlawing many of the tactics used in the civil rights campaign. Protests against this culminated in a major confrontation between Catholic crowds, the RUC and loyalists in the centre of Derry on 19 April, which developed into three days of rioting. RUC men pursuing a group of rioters entered a house in the Bogside and assaulted several members of the household, including the father, Samuel Devenny, who died from his injuries in July. The April riots completed the process by which in Derry the issue of ‘civil rights’ had given way entirely to that of ‘defence’, and that of ‘discrimination’ to complaints about the RUC.114 The riots also had an impact on other parts of Northern Ireland, where NICRA and the PD organized solidarity demonstrations. Many of these ended in rioting, which was particularly severe on the Falls Road. With a weak and divided government and an Opposition whose demands focused no longer on reforms but on the security apparatuses of the state, the Stormont regime had passed the point of no return.

  8. Northern Ireland from Insurrection to the Anglo-Irish Ag
reement

  The British State and the Birth of the Provisional IRA

  By the spring of 1969 the violence in Londonderry was producing reverberations in Belfast. The city's IRA commander, Billy McMillen, a loyal supporter of Cathal Goulding's shift to the left, was under increasing criticism from a number of formidable traditionalist figures. These accused the leadership of neglecting the IRA's military role and leaving Catholics vulnerable to attack. McMillen had maintained a residual military role for the hundred or so volunteers who had to share twenty-four weapons between them.1 Any major outbreak of communal violence was bound to overwhelm such paltry resources, and McMillen was conscious of Goulding's determination that the IRA should not be drawn into sectarian warfare.

  In April 1969 anti-RUC riots in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast had increased pressure on McMillen to prepare the IRA for ‘defensive’ action, and on 12 July IRA members were mobilized during clashes between Orange marchers and Catholics living in the inappropriately named Unity Walk flats complex at the bottom of the Shankill Road. In the same month, in an oration during the reinterment of two IRA men executed in England in 1940, Jimmy Steele, a Belfast IRA veteran, launched a bitter attack on Goulding's leadership. Although he was suspended from the movement, the speech became a rallying point for those who were soon to emerge as the leaders of the Provisional IRA. The traditional march by the Apprentice Boys in Derry on 12 August was to give them their opportunity.

  After the April clashes with the RUC the influence of the more moderate leaders of the civil rights movement in Derry had gone into precipitous decline. In July, soon after the death of Samuel Devenny, popularly believed to be a direct result of his beating by the RUC in April, the ‘middle-aged, middle class and middle of the road’2 Derry Citizens’ Action Committee was superseded by the Derry Citizens' Defence Association (DCDA). This was dominated by local republicans, and Seán Keenan was its chairman. But, as Eamonn McCann, the Derry Trotskyist, noted, events were increasingly determined by ‘the hooligans’: the unemployed youth of the Bogside whose energy and aggression had done much to power the early civil rights movement but who were now set on a major confrontation with the police and loyalist marchers.3 Although the DCDA had met with leaders of the Apprentice Boys and promised to provide effective stewarding on the day of the march, it put much more energy into preparing for the defence of the Bogside. Barricades were erected in anticipation of an RUC and loyalist ‘invasion’, heaps of stones were piled at strategic points, and over the four days that culminated in the march a local dairy lost 43,000 bottles as large numbers of petrol bombs were prepared.4 The DCDA made little more than a token effort to prevent the march being stoned, and for more than two hours a police cordon shielding marchers was subject to a constant hail of missiles before launching the series of baton charges that began ‘The Battle of the Bogside’. An attempt by the RUC to follow the rioters into the Bogside was repulsed with barricades, bricks and a rain of petrol bombs from the top of a block of high-rise flats, and by 13 August ‘Free Derry’ had effectively seceded from the northern state.

  With NICRA calling marches and demonstrations to relieve Derry nationalists by stretching the limited manpower of the 3,000-strong RUC, Chichester-Clark's government was told by Callaghan and his Home Office advisers that it must exhaust all the resources under its control, including the 8,500 B Specials, before a request for army assistance would be contemplated.5 The result was disastrous. Robert Porter, the liberal Unionist whom O'Neill had appointed to Home Affairs shortly before his resignation, was told by the Home Office that he could allow the RUC to use a new weapon, CS gas, against rioters. Over two days, huge amounts were used, and the Bogside became blanketed with gas.6 This served simply to stiffen resistance, as did the television broadcast by the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, on the evening of 13 August, in which he declared that his government could ‘no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse’. By the next morning the RUC commander in Derry told Chichester-Clark that his men were exhausted and incapable even of holding the centre of the city.7 Stormont then ordered a general mobilization of the B Specials. The Specials, who had been conceived as a counter-terrorist force, had no training in crowd control or dealing with rioters. After forty-eight hours of rioting, with the RUC depleted by casualties and exhausted and with the prospect of a murderous confrontation between Derry Catholics and the Specials, Wilson and Callaghan agreed to the dispatch of troops.

  In Belfast, where there had been attacks on RUC stations and some rioting on 13 August, the Lynch broadcast and the mobilization of the Specials contributed powerfully to the worst outbreak of communal violence since the 1920s. It centred on the streets that linked the Falls and Shankill Roads. While Catholics erected barricades on the Falls Road, crowds of Protestants, amongst whom were members of the recently mobilized Specials, gathered on the Shankill. The Derry conflagration was the subject of two conflicting and destructive ethnic myths in Belfast. For Catholics it was a case of the Bogside residents being besieged by bloodthirsty RUC men and loyalists, while for Protestants, including many members of the RUC and Specials, the Bogside was in a state of IRA-sponsored insurrection. Both communities feared that their ethnic nightmare was about to become a reality in Belfast and acted accordingly.

  Overreaction by the police led to the use of armoured cars mounted with machine-guns to disperse rioters. Protestant mobs pushing down towards the Falls Road petrol-bombed Catholic houses as they proceeded. In these confrontations and in similar ones in the Ardoyne area over 150 houses were destroyed. Seven people were killed including a nine-year-old Catholic boy, Patrick Rooney, who was asleep in his bedroom when he was struck by a stray RUC bullet. The small number of IRA members with a few handguns and a Thompson sub-machine gun could do little to prevent the carnage. They were equally powerless the next day when, before British troops could be effectively deployed in the city's trouble spots, Protestants launched an attack on the Clonard district, a small Catholic enclave near the Shankill Road, after rumours that there were IRA snipers on the roof of Clonard Monastery. Gerald McAuley, a member of the Fianna, the IRA's youth wing, was shot dead, and a whole Catholic street, Bombay Street, was razed. The burning of Bombay Street would become integrated into the founding mythology of the Provisional IRA, in which it was depicted as the inevitable consequence of the defenceless state of Belfast Catholics that resulted from the misguided policies of the ‘Marxist’ leadership in Dublin.8

  British troops were on the streets of Belfast and Derry for the first time since 1935, but Wilson and Callaghan, who had both threatened to introduce direct rule if troops were sent in, now backtracked. For, although direct rule had been on the British cabinet's agenda since the early months of 1969, there was an undercurrent of horror at the possibility of such a deepening of involvement. As early as February 1969 Callaghan had told the cabinet that direct rule was a ‘serious option’, although he added that independence for the North might be a ‘preferable alternative’.9 The truth was that, although direct rule was held like a sword of Damocles over the heads of Chichester-Clark and his colleagues, neither Wilson nor Callaghan had the stomach for it. In part this reflected an understandable desire not to be drawn into what was seen as the bog of Irish politics, but it also reflected a fear of a Protestant backlash. Sir Harold Black, the Northern Ireland Cabinet Secretary, warned senior Whitehall figures that in the event of direct rule, ‘there would be a fright-ening reaction by the Protestant community which would make anything that had happened up to now seem like child's play.’10 The warning seemed to have the desired effect.

  But if the British government recoiled from direct rule, it also made clear that Stormont could continue to exist only as a client regime under constant supervision at both ministerial and official levels. Called to Downing Street on 19 August, Chichester-Clark pre-emptively emasculated his government by proposing to give the army's GOC in Northern Ireland supremacy over the RUC and Specials in security matters. Although t
he declaration issued after the meeting affirmed Northern Ireland's constitutional status, it had an implicitly critical tone, affirming that ‘every citizen in Northern Ireland is entitled to the same equality of treatment and freedom from discrimination as obtains in the rest of the United Kingdom irrespective of political views or religion.’11 Two senior civil servants were sent from Whitehall to work within the Stormont Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Home Affairs, and Chichester-Clark accepted a British proposal for a committee of inquiry into policing, to be chaired by Sir John Hunt. The humiliation of the Stormont regime was complete when, in a subsequent television interview, Wilson indicated that the Specials were finished.

  Callaghan's arrival for his first visit to the North deepened the impression of a new Westminster overlordship. Joint working groups of officials from Belfast and London were to examine how far Stormont's existing practices and commitments would ensure fair allocation of houses and public employment, and promote good community relations. Greeted as a conquering hero when he entered the Bogside, which, like large sections of Catholic West Belfast, was a ‘no-go’ area for the RUC and the British Army, he had a much less positive reception on the Shankill Road.