One Man's Terrorist

by Daniel Finn

  Some comments made by republican leaders during this period do lend substance to the charge of reckless myopia. Tomás Mac Giolla let his imagination run free when he addressed Sinn Féin’s annual conference at the end of 1967: ‘There is welcome evidence of change among the Protestant community of the North. They are beginning to think for themselves. Once they open their mind to new ideas, no one will be more receptive than they to Republican principles.’66

  But the reformist strategy put forward by Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan did not count on any sudden and dramatic shift in the political consciousness of Northern Ireland’s unionist majority. According to their arguments, the change sought by left-wing republicans would have to come about in stages.

  First, the civil rights demands were to be won through a peaceful but militant campaign of protest. Northern Ireland’s political system would be democratized, its unorthodox features swept away. That would open the way for the second stage, during which the republican movement and others would struggle to bring class politics to the fore. Only when this had been achieved and left-wing forces had come to power on both sides of the Irish border would it be possible to dissolve the border between the two states and establish an all-Ireland workers’ republic.67 The real flaw with this blueprint was not that it anticipated support from Protestants for the civil rights platform. Rather, it was the tacit assumption that the unionist population would remain largely passive as NICRA set about winning those demands.

  The realism of this political vision can be measured on two different timescales, long and short term. If the civil rights programme had been carried out in full, the political class at Stormont would have been constrained in a number of ways. From below, universal suffrage and fair electoral boundaries would have resulted in areas such as Fermanagh and Derry City passing out of Unionist control altogether. From above, a Bill of Rights guaranteed by Westminster would have blocked discrimination by the Unionist Party against its political opponents. Any regional government would have found itself partly ‘defanged’, having lost its most important legislative tool of repression, the Special Powers Act, and its access to a paramilitary police force. The assembly itself would have been opened up to some extent by the adoption of a new voting system – or to be precise, the restoration of an old one, the PR system abolished by James Craig in 1929. Under such conditions, a transformation of Northern Ireland’s political life would surely have been the result, whether or not the final outcome was in line with republican hopes.

  But that scenario required time and patience, two commodities that were in short supply as the civil rights movement began to pick up steam. The NICRA leadership was satisfied with its first public outing, from Coalisland to Dungannon in August 1968, which brought 2,000 people onto the streets. However, the police redirected the march from its original route after Ian Paisley and his associate Ronald Bunting threatened to obstruct the marchers with a demonstration of their own. Gerry Fitt denounced the RUC as ‘bastards’ from the platform, and claimed that he would have led the marchers into police lines ‘but for the presence of women and children’.68 Fitt’s rhetoric contrasted sharply with the nature of the protest, as the stewards worked hard to prevent any clashes with the police.69

  The tactics deployed by Paisley and Bunting could be expected to come into play at any subsequent demonstration. Sooner or later there would have to be a clash, whether with loyalist ultras or the police. In that case, another assumption underpinning the civil rights strategy would be put to the test. If the Unionist Party proved unwilling to reform the sectarian state, Westminster could, it was argued, be forced to act over their heads. In effect, once the civil rights campaign got going in earnest, there would be a race against time: the British government would have to intervene and take the heat out of the situation before the sectarian pot came to the boil. When NICRA announced its plan to march through Derry’s city centre in October 1968, the countdown to crisis had begun.

  3

  Points of No Return

  Paris, Derry and Berlin

  5 October 1968 can justly be ranked as the second most important date in twentieth-century Irish history, surpassed only by the Easter Rising.1 The protest held that day is best seen as one moment in a sequence that culminated in the civil rights march from Belfast to Derry three months later. The two demonstrations did more to unsettle the politics of Northern Ireland than anything that had happened since partition, forcing the British government to abandon its policy of non-intervention. This cycle of protest, the work of left-wing radicals who took their bearings from international youth culture, brought Stormont to its knees. Of all the movements that challenged the status quo that year, none had a greater impact on its own country than Northern Ireland’s (frequently neglected) contribution to the ‘spirit of ’68’.2

  Unionist hardliners saw every NICRA protest as a challenge to legitimate authority, but the symbolism of a Derry march lent it particular force. The city had long occupied a central place in Northern Ireland’s political culture. In 1689, its Protestant garrison held out for three months against the Catholic army of King James, enduring terrible hardship before a Williamite force relieved them. A loyalist marching order, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, marked the end of the siege every summer with a parade that most nationalists saw as an exercise in sectarian triumphalism.

  Over the course of the nineteenth century, Catholic immigration transformed the city’s demographics, and its council briefly fell under Nationalist control during the War of Independence. Unionist leaders, determined to avoid any repeat of that trauma, made sure to rig the local election boundaries in their favour. The year before NICRA’s march in 1968, Unionist candidates won half as many votes as their opponents yet still had a majority of seats.3 To add to the sense of nationalist grievance, Derry was one of the poorest regions in Northern Ireland, an unemployment blackspot that had received little of the investment solicited by Terence O’Neill’s government in the 1960s. By the time NICRA announced its plan to march through Derry, there was a rich seam of local discontent ready to be tapped.

  A local activist group, the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC), had been trying to do just that for the previous year. The DHAC brought together republicans enthusiastic about Goulding’s move to the left with another group of militants who had taken over the local branch of the NILP. Prominent figures in this milieu included Eamonn McCann, Terry Robson and Johnnie White.4 McCann, who came from a working-class family in the city’s Bogside, had passed the eleven-plus exam to win a place at St Columb’s, a Catholic grammar school whose other graduates included the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. He went on to attend university in Belfast and achieved some renown as a student debater before moving to London, where he joined a Trotskyist organization called the Irish Workers’ Group (IWG). Gery Lawless, a veteran of the Border Campaign, was the IWG’s dominant figure, and McCann became the editor of the group’s newspaper, the Irish Militant, where he and Lawless first honed their journalistic skills.5 On returning to Derry, McCann quickly made an impression with his eloquence and force of personality, but the DHAC had little success with its first attempts to rally the city’s working class.

  The modest turnout on 5 October suggested that this NICRA-sponsored protest might also prove to be a flop. While estimates vary, there may have been fewer than 1,000 marchers on the day.6 Significantly, the crowd included the Westminster MP Gerry Fitt, who had invited three colleagues from the British Labour Party to witness the day’s events.

  Meanwhile, the unionist Apprentice Boys, taking their cue from Ian Paisley, claimed that they were planning a traditional march along the same route as NICRA, and at the very same time. In response, Stormont’s home affairs minister, William Craig, hastened to ban the NICRA demonstration from Derry’s city centre. A civil servant at Craig’s ministry, writing to his counterpart in London on the eve of the march, dismissed NICRA’s aims as ‘largely Nationalistic, although these are cloaked by other alleged pretensions’.
He claimed that NICRA’s proposed route trespassed upon areas that were the ‘traditional preserve’ of Derry’s unionists.7

  The IRA leader Billy McMillen believed that Craig’s decision was a blessing for the civil rights campaign: without it, NICRA ‘would have died a quiet and natural death that day as had so many similar anti-Unionist movements before it’.8 When the marchers reached Duke Street and received orders to disperse, a section of the crowd refused to budge, ignoring a plea from Betty Sinclair. Eamonn McCann’s uncompromising speech fortified their resolve, and Sinclair later said that she would never share a platform with McCann again.9 The RUC then tried to clear the street with a chaotic baton charge that a television crew from the Irish state broadcaster recorded on camera. Gerry Fitt was one of those injured in the fracas: as McMillen gleefully recalled, Belfast republicans had been given orders to push dignitaries like Fitt into the police ranks if the RUC stopped the march.10

  What the demonstration lacked in numbers, it quickly made up for in impact. As word spread through Derry about what had happened, angry locals converged on the city centre to confront the RUC, and three days of rioting ensued.11 But the footage of police officers swinging their truncheons with reckless abandon posed a much greater problem for the authorities in Belfast. Harold Wilson also received an eyewitness report from the Labour MPs who had attended the march that was scathingly critical of the RUC. Terence O’Neill soon had to face unwelcome questions from his political superiors about what had happened in Derry, and about his plans for reform.

  Seemingly oblivious to such pressures, William Craig congratulated the police at Stormont for handling the marchers with ‘a tolerance which some members of this House may feel was undeserved’. He dismissed the civil rights movement as an IRA front and angrily reproached the opposition MPs who had boycotted the debate: ‘Perhaps the real reason for their absence today is that they know they are guilty.’12 In private, O’Neill took a more circumspect line, warning his colleagues that a retreat into uncompromising attitudes would result in ‘a period when we govern Ulster by police power alone, against a background of mounting disorder’.13

  In a government-commissioned report published the following year, Lord Cameron claimed that ‘left-wing extremists’ had infiltrated the civil rights movement in the build-up to the Derry march, believing that their cause ‘would benefit from violent conflict with the authorities’.14 Cameron specifically excluded the Communist Party from these strictures, and even praised IRA members for their conduct as stewards on NICRA demonstrations, which left the more youthful, freewheeling militancy of the Derry Housing Action Committee as the sole remaining culprit.15

  In making this charge, Cameron blurred the distinction between two concepts of political action that must be clearly separated: on the one hand, a desire to engage in ‘violent conflict’ with the state; on the other, a willingness to defy the state and its laws, even if that means exposing oneself to violence. The latter approach was the one followed by Martin Luther King and the US civil rights movement, whose tactics the campaigners in Northern Ireland sought to emulate.

  The confusion became apparent when Cameron addressed the events of 5 October in detail: ‘Some of the marchers were determined to defy the Minister’s order. They accepted the risk that some degree of violence would occur, believing that this would achieve publicity for the civil rights cause.’16 This assertion matches the recollections of Eamonn McCann: ‘Our conscious, if unspoken, strategy was to provoke the police into over-reaction and thus spark off a mass reaction against the authorities.’17 From Cameron’s perspective, this was a thoroughly disreputable strategy. Whether or not it had been right for William Craig to ban the march from the centre of Derry – ‘and in all the circumstances we are of opinion it was not’ – once he had made that decision, the marchers should have accepted it without question.18 In which case, one might add, little more would have been heard of the civil rights campaign. If the Derry marchers had not been willing to flout the law, a de facto ban on all forms of effective protest would have taken hold. As Cameron made clear in his own delicate fashion, the RUC was prepared to use the ‘Derry strategy’ to ban civil rights demonstrations even when local Unionists raised no objections to a march.19

  McCann, it should be said, immediately qualified his avowal of responsibility for what had happened on Duke Street: ‘We had indeed set out to make the police over-react. But we hadn’t expected the animal brutality of the RUC.’20 At any rate, the initiative quickly passed from the left-wing radicals to a group of prominent Derry nationalists. Their leading spokesman was John Hume, a St Columb’s graduate like McCann, but one whose relationship with the city’s Catholic establishment was much less fractious. Hume was best known for his work with the credit-union movement and had no sympathy for militant leftism.

  A few days after the 5 October march, Hume and his associates set up the rival Derry Citizens’ Action Committee (DCAC). They invited the left-wing activists to join its steering committee, but in a clearly subordinate role. McCann stormed out in disgust, while some of his comrades decided to go along with Hume’s initiative for the time being.21 The DCAC was much more cautious than the radicals would have liked, and began its work with a couple of symbolic protest actions. But it went on to organize a full-scale demonstration in Derry’s city centre on 16 November, in defiance of another ban imposed by William Craig. This time there was a huge turnout, over 15,000 strong, and the RUC was simply overwhelmed.22

  Undue Hazard

  So far, such marches were a Derry phenomenon, and Terence O’Neill’s government was in no great hurry to act. On 15 October, the Labour opposition at Stormont suggested a cross-party appeal for thirty days of calm, at the end of which O’Neill would make a statement setting out his government’s policy on civil rights. The prime minister welcomed the idea of a ‘cooling-off period’, but was not prepared to offer the NILP anything in return: ‘I have no intention of committing myself, or my colleagues, to the making of any statement in parliament within a period to be prescribed by you. Frankly, this savours somewhat of an ultimatum.’23

  However, O’Neill did announce a reform package by the end of November, after a meeting with the British government during which Harold Wilson threatened to apply financial pressure if there was no change of course.24 Derry’s city council was to be replaced with an appointed commission. O’Neill promised to scrap multiple voting by company directors in local elections and introduce a points system for the allocation of public housing. An ombudsman would be appointed to scrutinize the workings of government, and there was to be a review of the Special Powers Act, as soon as the authorities in Stormont felt this could be done ‘without undue hazard’.25

  O’Neill also promised reform of local government, but this was to proceed at a languid pace, with deliberations to conclude by the end of 1971. There was no reference to universal suffrage, even though ‘one man, one vote’ had been a central plank of civil rights agitation.

  Before announcing the package, O’Neill pleaded with his cabinet to accept the need for a concession on the franchise, and warned that the reforms were unlikely to satisfy either Westminster or NICRA.26 But he allowed no glimpse of that anxiety to reach the public eye. The official statement accompanying the reform package made it clear that, as far as Stormont was concerned, there could be no justification for any further protests: ‘The Government must be firm in ensuring that law will be respected and enforced. Any who now continue to disturb the peace and dislocate the life of the country will be exposed as trouble-makers, concerned not with change but with disruption.’27

  O’Neill turned up the rhetorical heat with a televised address on 9 December, warning that Northern Ireland stood ‘on the brink of chaos where neighbour could be set against neighbour’. He urged the leadership of the civil rights movement to ‘call your people off the streets’.28 This ‘crossroads’ speech struck an emotional chord, and the prime minister’s office received countless telegrams of support. NICRA
and the DCAC agreed to call a marching ‘truce’ for the month that followed.

  O’Neill then sacked William Craig from his cabinet, after the home affairs minister delivered a speech opposing any concessions to the civil rights movement. Some historians have argued that Craig’s sacking was a crucial watershed, the point at which the Unionist leader was about to grasp the nettle and commit his government to ‘one man, one vote’.29 However, such claims are speculative, as we cannot know what would have happened if the truce had endured. O’Neill might have chosen to act on franchise reform; or he might have slipped back into comfortable inertia once the pressure of street agitation was removed. In any case, there is no guarantee that universal suffrage would have been enough to satisfy the protesters. Without reform of the security apparatus and its legislative framework, NICRA might well have found it necessary to resume its campaign.

  As it turned out, it was not the official leadership of the civil rights movement but a newly formed group of student activists, People’s Democracy (PD), that decided to break the truce. The students announced their intention to ring in the New Year with a march from Belfast to Derry that proved to be a landmark in the history of the Troubles. Historians have rarely given the group responsible for organizing it the attention it deserves. To some extent that omission reflects the amorphous nature of People’s Democracy itself, which makes it unusually difficult to analyse. Lord Cameron’s report is by no means an infallible source of information about PD, but its description of the group’s organizational culture was accurate: ‘People’s Democracy has no accepted constitution and no recorded membership. At any meeting any person attending is entitled both to speak and to vote: decisions taken at one meeting may be reviewed at the next – indeed during the currency of any given meeting.’30 PD gradually adopted a more cohesive structure, publishing a regular newspaper from the autumn of 1969 and transforming itself into a well-drilled Leninist organization. But we must piece together any account of its thinking before that point from fragmentary evidence, and cannot speak of a People’s Democracy ‘line’ as readily as if we were dealing with a more conventional political movement.