One Man's Terrorist

by Daniel Finn

  Unlike Nationalist politicians, whose support came exclusively from the Catholic minority, the pro-union NILP could eat into the Unionist Party’s support among working-class Protestants if it played its cards right. With regional unemployment well above the UK average, Basil Brooke’s languid approach to government was becoming a liability. In 1963 the Unionist hierarchy eased Brooke out of his position, to be replaced by Terence O’Neill.

  If the NILP’s electoral growth had enabled it to supplant the Unionist Party, its willingness to tackle discrimination against Catholics was open to question. Paddy Devlin, who was elected to Stormont as an NILP candidate in 1969, later described the party’s record on civil rights issues as ‘scandalous’.38 But by the time Devlin won his seat, the question of what a government led by the NILP might do was purely academic. After Brooke’s departure, the Unionist leadership worked hard to project a more dynamic image to Protestant voters, promising ‘a social and economic revolution’ that would ‘make Ulster a place where every man’s head is held high’.39 That proved to be enough to banish the spectre of defeat.

  One facet of Terence O’Neill’s modernizing image was an apparent willingness to venture out of the Orange bunker. He welcomed the Irish Taoiseach Seán Lemass on a visit to Stormont in 1965, and arranged some photo ops with Catholic nuns to show his ecumenical spirit. But that was about as far as such gestures went. O’Neill dismissed charges of systematic discrimination against Catholics as ‘baseless and scurrilous’, and certainly showed no appetite for sweeping reform.40 With the electoral road blocked and Harold Wilson’s government reluctant to intervene, opponents of Unionist rule now began to explore another path. O’Neill’s administration soon faced the challenge of a civil rights campaign in which Goulding’s IRA played a central part.

  ‘Where would unionism be then?’

  In January 1967, a meeting in Belfast set up the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). NICRA wanted a clean-up of local government, with fair electoral boundaries and no restrictions on the franchise, and an end to discrimination in housing and employment. In principle, none of these demands posed a direct challenge to the Union: indeed, their effect would be to bring Northern Ireland into line with British practice. However, many Unionist politicians insisted that a subversive conspiracy lurked behind NICRA’s respectable facade. Terence O’Neill’s home affairs minister, William Craig, dismissed the civil rights campaign as ‘bogus and made up of people who see in unrest a chance to renew a campaign of violence’.41 This view informed Craig’s handling of civil rights demonstrations when the movement took to the streets.

  Hard-line Unionists could certainly point to a substantial republican element in the civil rights campaign. Gerry Adams, then a young militant in Belfast, described the first NICRA meeting as having been ‘packed by republicans, who wielded the biggest bloc vote’. The commander of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, Billy McMillen, confirmed that the meeting was ‘attended in strength’ by republican activists, to the point that its decisions ‘could have been completely dictated by their votes’. However, both men went on to complicate this picture of NICRA as an IRA proxy by explaining that their comrades were instructed to vote for a broad-based committee.42 In any case, the fact that republicans had the strongest presence at NICRA’s launch does not prove that they remained in control over the next two years as the campaign developed into a mass movement.

  The civil rights association brought together a wide range of political forces around its call for reform, from Con and Patricia McCluskey, founders of a Dungannon-based lobbying group called the Campaign for Social Justice, to Nationalist politicians like Gerry Fitt and Austin Currie. None of these individuals had any interest in using NICRA as the platform for an uprising against the state, as their subsequent political trajectories clearly showed. But we still need to ask why republicans had chosen to involve themselves in a project of this kind at all. Was it simply, as Craig insisted, the prelude to a new IRA campaign? Or did it represent a break with tradition?

  However much the IRA might have transformed itself since the Border Campaign, it was still unclear what Goulding’s strategy meant for republicans in the North. According to Billy McMillen, the Belfast IRA was slow to embrace the new thinking: ‘We used to spend hours at meetings trying to conjure up ideas and excuses as to why we shouldn’t become involved in this type of political activity, and to tell Dublin GHQ why they were wrong.’43 McMillen eventually signed up to Goulding’s agenda and became a staunch ally for the leadership in Dublin, but other veterans like Joe Cahill, Seamus Twomey and Billy McKee dropped out of the IRA altogether.

  The movement’s first notable venture after the failure of Operation Harvest came in 1964, when McMillen ran as a candidate for West Belfast in the UK general election. Republicans displayed an Irish tricolour in the campaign office on Divis Street, flouting legislation that prohibited such emblems. The fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley demanded that the RUC remove the flag or he would do so himself. When police officers broke into McMillen’s office and took down the offending item, it provoked several days of rioting on the nationalist Falls Road.44 For McMillen, the Divis Street confrontation had proved that there were still ‘embers of patriotism’ among the city’s nationalists, needing only ‘a good strong Republican wind’ to spark a conflagration. But he also admitted that, in practical terms, the IRA only gained a couple of dozen new recruits on the back of the disturbances.45

  It was some time before the IRA leadership devised a plan of action for northern republicans that was informed by their new ideology. Tomás Mac Giolla made an early contribution with his speech at Belfast’s Easter parade in 1965, where he announced that republicans would soon begin a campaign for universal suffrage in local government elections. Mac Giolla was keen to stress that the movement could raise such demands without compromising on its ultimate goal: ‘The conduct of this campaign will not in any way distract Republicans from their primary objective which is to enforce the evacuation of British troops and British administration from Irish territory, to unite the whole people of the nation and to develop the resources of the nation in such a manner as to benefit the mass of the Irish people and not a limited capitalist class.’46 This was a foretaste of the ideological tensions that would become apparent when republicans lined up with the civil rights movement.

  By the time NICRA was founded, the United Irishman had published a detailed blueprint for republican involvement in civil rights agitation. It called for a campaign of protest that would put the Unionist leadership under intense pressure, confronting O’Neill’s administration with ‘popular demands from the disenfranchised, the gerrymandered, the discriminated against, the oppressed Catholic and nationalist minority within the North’. If the campaign was successful, it would lead to ‘the destruction of the machinery of discrimination to the maximum, the unfreezing of bigotry to the greatest extent, the achievement of the utmost degree of civil liberties possible, freedom of political action, an end to the bitterness in social life and the divisions among the people fostered by the Unionists’.

  This was certainly a very ambitious vision for political change when set against the realities of Northern Ireland at the time. But it still fell short of the republican demand for an end to British rule, and there was no mention of any role for the IRA as the spearhead of resistance. Indeed, the blueprint implied that partition would remain in place for some time to come, even if the civil rights movement was an unqualified success: ‘If things change too much the Orange worker may see that he can get by alright without dominating his Catholic neighbour. The two of them may in time join forces in the labour movement, and where would Unionism be then?’47

  For some of Cathal Goulding’s supporters, NICRA’s reform programme was a realistic platform that could be put into effect if it brought enough pressure to bear on the governments in Belfast and London. By compelling the authorities to grant such reforms, republicans would create a more hospitable environment in which to
work for their long-term objectives. Goulding’s young protégés Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston were the main advocates of this perspective in republican circles. The thinking of Desmond Greaves, a Marxist historian who had recruited them to the Connolly Association when they were living in Britain, strongly influenced the two men.48 Arguing that a civil rights campaign could undermine Unionist hegemony in Northern Ireland, Greaves worked tirelessly in the British labour movement to highlight discrimination against nationalists under Stormont rule. From his standpoint, there was no question of ending partition in a single bound: Northern Ireland had first to be reformed and democratized before it could unite with the South.49

  Greaves was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and saw the Irish communist movement as the main vehicle for progressive politics on the island. Irish communism, which had never been a substantial force, was divided into two organizations: the Communist Party of Northern Ireland (CPNI) and the southern Irish Workers’ Party. Although its membership was small, the CPNI did have some influence in Northern Ireland’s trade unions, with figures such as Betty Sinclair and Andy Barr occupying senior positions. Speaking at a party conference back in 1952, Barr had urged the labour movement to unite behind demands for franchise reform, repeal of the Special Powers Act, and ‘the removal of all forms of discrimination directed against the nationalist minority’.50 This was the NICRA programme in embryonic form, almost two decades before the civil rights movement got off the ground.

  Republicans were keen to get the CPNI on board, seeing its trade union base as a potential route into the Protestant working class, and Betty Sinclair became NICRA’s first chairwoman, with the help of republican votes. Sinclair proved to be one of the most cautious figures in the civil rights movement. She wanted NICRA to emulate Britain’s National Council for Civil Liberties by taking up individual cases of discrimination and lobbying politicians at Westminster, and opposed a decision to begin organizing street demonstrations in the summer of 1968.51

  Sinclair was old enough to remember both the tentative cross-sectarian unity forged in the struggle against unemployment during the Great Depression, and the vicious communal rioting that followed a few years later.52 Anything that brought sectarian passions to the fore threatened to split Northern Ireland’s trade unions down the middle. But with other avenues seemingly blocked, Sinclair’s NICRA allies decided to go ahead with a campaign of protest, beginning with a march from Coalisland to Dungannon in August 1968.

  Class and Creed

  It was hardly surprising if Unionist politicians like William Craig fell back on traditional stereotypes as they got to grips with the civil rights movement. A campaign that had the IRA demanding equal rights under British rule, while their communist allies pleaded for caution and restraint, was bound to confuse its adversaries. Craig’s bewilderment would have been shared by many IRA activists as they tried to absorb the new line on civil rights. For republicans, the tactics now being urged upon them were as unconventional as NICRA’s plea for reform.

  The United Irishman told civil rights activists to study the experience of their US counterparts and challenge the Unionist government by defying its laws: ‘The secret of effectiveness in acts of civil disobedience is careful planning, well-prepared publicity and the avoidance of undisciplined, provocative actions which would alienate rather than increase public sympathy and support.’53 Of course, republicans had no problem with the idea of breaking the law, but they had not been trained to turn the other cheek when they encountered violence from the state and its agents.

  If the reformist civil rights strategy prevailed in the long run, it was difficult to see what place it would hold for the ‘Army of the Republic’. But NICRA’s programme could also be seen in a very different light, as a way for republicans to expose the true character of the Northern Irish state and prepare the ground for its destruction. According to this line of thought, the nationalist population would not support a direct military challenge to that state, but could be mobilized to take part in demonstrations calling for its reform. If the authorities responded with hostility and repression, nationalists would then be open to more radical ideas, and the IRA might once again come to the fore, this time with the popular support that had been lacking in the 1950s. Gerry Adams later spoke about the civil rights movement in precisely these terms, describing it as ‘a means of confronting an apartheid state, exposing its contradictions and building popular opposition to them and to the state itself’.54

  In a 1970 interview, Cathal Goulding implied that he had been thinking along similar lines. For Goulding, physical force could not be the starting point of a successful movement, as the US experience showed: ‘We first had to try to inject some militancy into ordinary people who wouldn’t join a violent struggle but would support a peaceful one, people whom you could organize to march, to demonstrate, sit-in, and things like that. It was this peaceful activity that really brought the situation to a head in the Six Counties.’55

  This does not mean that Craig’s suspicions about the movement were correct. At the time, such distinctions were not as clear-cut as they might appear in hindsight, and it was quite possible for individuals to waver between the two perspectives on civil rights agitation. According to Adams, a junior figure at the time, his own view took shape gradually as the struggle gathered momentum. He believed that the IRA leadership had embarked on ‘a serious attempt to democratize the state’, during which ‘the national question would be subordinated in order to allay Unionist fears’.56

  To complicate things further, the proposal to begin a campaign of street marches came not from the republicans in NICRA but from the Nationalist MP, Austin Currie.57 Currie had already organized a protest against housing discrimination in Dungannon in June 1968. Another Nationalist politician, Gerry Fitt, delivered a fiery speech from the platform on that occasion, calling for civil disobedience to undermine the Unionist government. Fitt even hinted that he would be willing to go further if the need arose: ‘If a day came when we had to fight in the street for the protection of our future, for the protection of our wives and children, then that day can’t come soon enough.’58 However, both Currie and Fitt proved to be staunch opponents of republican violence in the years to come.

  One thing soon became obvious. Neither republicans nor the wider civil rights movement would be able to discuss these questions at their leisure without taking account of the response they encountered from the Unionist state and its Protestant supporters. Terence O’Neill was already under pressure from Unionist hardliners for alleged backsliding before NICRA had started its campaign, and Ian Paisley continued to nip at the heels of the Unionist establishment after his role in the Divis Street riots of 1964.59

  Paisley was a larger-than-life character in more than one sense: with a booming voice and a mountainous physique, he could deploy his rhetorical skills and encyclopaedic knowledge of scripture in defence of traditional Unionist values. If NICRA took its cue from Martin Luther King, Paisley looked to King’s opponents for inspiration, brandishing an honorary doctorate in theology from Bob Jones University, a bastion of the segregationist cause. He kept up a steady stream of religious publications throughout his career – including the imperishable Sermons with Startling Titles – but did not hesitate to use more robust methods when the situation required, greeting the Irish premier Seán Lemass with a hail of snowballs on his ground-breaking trip to Stormont.

  In 1966, the Orange Order’s Grand Master, George Clark, warned that Paisley and his supporters might ‘succeed in doing what the IRA failed to do in Northern Ireland at Easter’, by ‘attracting television cameras and newsmen from all over the world to Ulster’.60 To many observers of the Northern Irish scene, Paisley seemed like a farcical throwback, with his doom-laden rhetoric evoking a conspiracy between Moscow and Rome against the Protestant way of life. But the journalist Jack Bennett warned readers of the United Irishman that he should be taken very seriously indeed: ‘The Paisleyites are not the wild
men on the outskirts; they are the hard core of Unionism per se. Nothing Paisley preaches is offensive to the spirit of Unionism; rather it is the pure essence of Unionist Party ideology as nourished in local Unionist associations throughout the Six Counties.’61

  Paisley’s rhetoric helped inspire a British Army veteran called Gusty Spence to organize a new paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which took its name from Edward Carson’s militia.62 Spence had fought in Cyprus against the EOKA guerrillas whose campaign inspired the IRA commander Seán Mac Stíofáin. The UVF leader and his associates wanted to assassinate a republican activist in Belfast, but only managed to kill three civilians in the space of two months in 1966. O’Neill’s government banned the UVF after the murders, and Spence received a life sentence. Paisley’s Protestant Telegraph disclaimed any responsibility for the killings, blaming the ‘hell-soaked liquor traffic’ instead.63

  Many writers have accused Cathal Goulding and his comrades of woeful naivety about the potential for class politics in Northern Ireland. Conor Cruise O’Brien was willing to grant that the IRA leadership was ‘sincerely committed to an anti-sectarian policy’, albeit one grounded in sheer fantasy: ‘It thought that, if class issues were emphasized, and a revolutionary situation created, the “false consciousness” of the Protestant proletariat would be eliminated, and all the workers would join together in the attack on the political and industrial establishment and on British imperialism.’64 In his own critique of the Goulding line, Gerry Adams recalled a modest attempt by republicans in Belfast to organize a pan-sectarian campaign that was scuppered by the intervention of Unionist tub-thumpers: ‘If the state would not allow Catholics and Protestants to get a pedestrian crossing built together, it would hardly sit back and watch them organize the revolution together.’65