CHAPTER TWO
As far as the British were concerned, by the early 1960s Ireland was not a problem. The Government on the mainland was not really engaged in the affairs of the Province, nor was it involved in the activities of the Northern Irish Government. Despite this sanguine attitude, however, it was in this period that the Province entered its most unsettled period since partition. Indeed, the explosive resurgence of nationalist grievances in 1968–69 threatened to undo the settlement of 1921. This chapter examines how this happened and what, specifically, were the roots of the challenge to the governments in both Northern Ireland and on the mainland.
Reform and resistance
The apparent and immediate catalyst for ‘the Troubles’, as they became known, was the advent of a Civil Rights movement, which took to the streets in 1968. This symbolized the grievances of the Catholic minority who began to rebel against what it perceived to be the inherent discrimination of the political and economic structures of the Province. Rather ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly for students of history,1 these protests came about in a period during which Northern Ireland was undergoing a period of economic and political restructuring. The period of reform can be dated from 1963, when the newly elected Prime Minister, Captain Terence O'Neill, attempted to change the basis on which both society and industry operated in the Province. He took office determined to modernize and eradicate some, if not all, of the biases upon which government operated.2
It is interesting to ask what motivated O'Neill to undertake reform. Some analysts have argued that the character of the man was important to the endeavour and have pointed to the educated and enlightened nature of O'Neill's personality.3 He was, it has been argued, not like most Northern Irish politicians in that he was not trapped in the parochial nature of Irish politics. He had travelled extensively, been educated abroad and had a vision, which was quite radical for Ireland in the 1960s, that the Province could operate on lines of greater, if not full, equality between its two communitites.4 Specifically, he advocated toleration towards the Catholic minority. There was, however, another side to this liberal agenda. O'Neill believed quite pragmatically that the implementation of reform could incorporate the Catholics into the life of the Province, and resolve the continuing problem of the nationalist minority. To put it bluntly, this was a more civilized way of dealing with an ethnic minority than had hitherto been adopted by Protestant leaders.5
In addition to the pragmatic, but liberal, agenda, a substantial part of O'Neill's reform agenda was inspired by the economic situation in the Province. During the 1950s and early 1960s, dire predications had been made in economic forecasts for the region. In particular, experts argued that much of the industry in Northern Ireland was outdated and that the entire economic infrastructure needed modernizing.6 It was under O'Neill that economic planning began to be taken seriously, primarily because unemployment in the Province had risen quite dramatically. A number of important sectors, such as agriculture, shipbuilding, textiles and clothing had experienced a continuous decline. Employment in these four sectors, which dominated the Province's industry, declined by half between 1950 and 1979.7 As a consequence, social problems related to the high levels of unemployment developed. These were most marked in Catholic areas. Within the overall decline, it was notable that employment rates varied quite radically across the Province. In the south and west and in western Belfast, predominately Catholic areas, unemployment was double the regional average.8 In 1961, a joint working party of senior officials from the mainland and the Province was established to investigate the factors which were causing the high rate of unemployment. The outcome of these investigations, which became known as the Hall Report, was published in October 1962. It contained a bleak analysis of the prospects for dealing with employment.9 Worried by this prognosis, O'Neill commissioned Professor Thomas Wilson, of Glasgow University, to prepare a report on economic development. The subsequent Wilson Report, which was published in 1965, pointed to substantial weaknesses in the economy of the Province, but it also made positive recommendations for the improvement of a series of key sectors of the economy: in transport, tourism, agriculture and capital investment.10 It also recommended a wholesale house-building programme to replace slum dwellings.11
In attempting to implement reform, O'Neill's economic programme ran headlong into the problems of trying to modernize a divided society. There were numerous obstacles to change as far as both communities were concerned. Even what might appear as trivial questions to an outside observer had serious political ramifications. Many of these arose because of the peculiar resonance that the past still exerted over the populations in the North. This meant that the naming of a new bridge, town or college, evoked deep passions. One suggestion that a new bridge be named the Carson Bridge, after the key strategist of the Province, caused upset in the Catholic communities.12 Equally, the siting of a new university at Coleraine caused a stir in the rival site of Londonderry where Catholic leaders led a protest (which included some Protestant councillors) against the decision and alleged that the siting of the new institution reflected a bias against that part of the region and a desire not to upset the electoral geometry of the city. Some analysts have argued that this was part of a desire to uphold the Protestant east of the Province, which was always strengthened with new initiatives. In Londonderry itself, Catholics outnumbered Protestants by more than two to one, but manipulation of electoral boundaries ensured a Protestant dominance was maintained.13
Despite constant sectarian wrangling, O'Neill believed that his economic and modernization programme could eventually reduce inter-communal tensions and reconcile Catholics to the rule of Northern Ireland. Not least, he envisaged that a greater level of general economic prosperity would ameliorate rifts between the communities. In purely economic terms, O'Neill's reforms showed signs, albeit limited ones, of success. In the period 1963–68, numbers in employment rose; the population grew by 3 per cent and there was a substantial programme of new house-building.14
O'Neill also persisted in his attempt to normalize the relationship between the Government and the Catholic communities. To this end, the Prime Minster visited a number of Catholic institutions and organizations, something that his predecessors had neglected. Yet such gestures, while important, did not make any significant inroads into the Protestant domination of either employment or government structures.15 Catholics still remained under-represented on committees and government bodies.16 Despite the limited nature of the reform process, O'Neill's very attempts aroused deep resentment within his own community and it was from this quarter that he first began to encounter opposition.
In no sphere was this more marked than in O'Neill's plan to recruit Catholics into the heart of Unionism — the Unionist Party itself. It had appeared possible to O'Neill that, as reform began, there could be a significant increase in the number of Catholics who were party members. This soon came to little since the power to accept or reject new applicants rested with local associations, many of which took the view that it was safer to exclude Catholics than to upset the current Protestant membership.17 The Unionist Party remained at its core deeply anti-Catholic. Part of the objection to Catholic membership rested not just on a sectarian bias, but also on the belief that it would fundamentally alter the raison d'être of the Party — the protection of Unionism and the Province.
Many in the Catholic community also remained wary of O'Neill's intentions. Not least, some believed that reform stemmed less from a desire to improve the lot of the minority, than from a scheme to reduce the rising Catholic birth-rate. It was claimed that the Prime Minister, like many in the Protestant community, feared that at some point in the future, a situation would develop in which Catholics could outnumber the Protestants. In 1969, O'Neill admitted that this concern was part of his agenda, bluntly explaining that ‘the basic fear of the Protestants in Northern Ireland is that they will be outbred and outnumbered by the Roman Catholics’,18 but he went on to say that it was only by raising the living standards of the minority group that the Protestants could be assured that they would conform to Protestant norms: ‘It is frightfully hard to explain to a Protestant that if you give a Roman Catholic a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and televisions and want to live like them.’19
Yet, even this type of pragmatic argument made little headway with many in the Unionist fold, who regarded it as foolish and dangerous to believe that Catholics could be conciliated to the regime. Some who opposed O'Neill's programme of reform, thought that he was naive to believe that the Catholics, who had traditionally been hostile towards the Province, could be made loyal. Yet, it was not just old sectarian prejudices, although these were many in number, underwriting Unionist objections to reform. There was also a genuine fear of any political change in the Province. O'Neill's politics challenged traditional assumptions in a way that all the old certainties of life in the Province were turned upside down. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the approach that O'Neill took to the Government in Dublin. The two Irish Governments moved closer than they had been at any time since partition. This new Irish—Irish relationship culminated in 1965, when the southern Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Sean Lemass, visited O'Neill at Stormont Castle, the seat of Northern Irish Government. The two parts of Ireland seemed poised, at this stage, for unprecedented economic collaboration and both leaders stressed the need for close cross-border cooperation. It should be stressed that O'Neill did not believe that the border could or should be abolished, but rather that the border need not be a political issue. In tune with the spirit of the Stormont meeting, newspapers and articles eagerly recorded the view that ‘ancient rifts had been binded’.20 In all his reforms, O'Neill was actively backed, and in some respects urged on, by the Labour Government on the mainland. In August 1966, Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, and the British Home Secretary held a meeting with O'Neill. During the course of the meeting they praised the attempts at reform that had already been made, but they also drew attention to the fact that the Province obtained heavy financial assistance from the British Treasury and that this was difficult to justify to some MPs and some members of the Cabinet without a continued liberalization of the regime in Northern Ireland.21
Even before civil disorder broke out on the streets of Northern Ireland in 1968, all of this proved too much for some Protestants. Some of the anger at the usurpation of traditional Unionism gathered around the figure of Ian Paisley, the son of a fundamentalist Baptist preacher from Ballymena, in North Antrim. This area was characterized by the term ‘bible belt’. Paisley studied theology at the Reformed Presbyterian College in Belfast and was a well-known figure in evangelical circles. He had long aspired to be a spokesman for the more conservative forces at work in the Province and in 1951 formed the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which opposed the growth of ecumenism in the church.22 He first publicly challenged the Unionist Party during a row with the then Prime Minister, Lord Brookeborough, over the failure of the Party to expel two of its MPs who had advocated the admission of Catholics to the Unionist Party.23
It was the advent of O'Neill's reforms and the relative liberalization of the Province that gave Paisley his chance to rail against change in the Province, but also specifically against O'Neill's liberalism vis-à-vis the minority community. In 1964, Paisley emerged more fully on to the political scene when he backed four Protestant Unionist candidates in the Belfast corporation elections. In the same year, he heightened his political and public profile by leading thousands of followers in protest at the display of a tricolour by Sinn Fein candidates at their headquarters in west Belfast (the display of nationalist emblems was actually illegal under the Flags and Emblems Act of 1954). The furore over the removal of the flag created a riot. In May 1966, he published the first edition of a virulently anti-Catholic paper, the Protestant Telegraph, which ritually condemned O'Neill's appeasement policies.24 Again in 1966, Paisley came to prominence when he organized demonstrations against a so-called ‘Roman way’ within the Presbyterian church. He was, however, subsequently convicted of ‘unlawful assembly’.25 Paisley publicly disavowed O'Neill's form of Unionism and of the Prime Minister's stated intention to act as a bridge to the Catholics, stating that: ‘A traitor and a bridge are very much alike, for they both go over to the other side.’26 All of this underlined the hostility and suspicion with which the majority regarded the minority community, but when the Protestant paramilitaries decided to use force against Catholic agitation, Paisley disassociated himself from the more violent acts of those who claimed to follow him. Paisley, although anti-Catholic, drew lines past which, at this stage, he was not prepared to go in defence of the Union. Paisley's reluctance stemmed partly from the composition of his base of support — the bulk of Paisley's adherents were individuals from rural areas who, although committed to the Union, had no desire to actually break the law.27 What is interesting and worthy of further analysis is why the Protestant community (or at least some parts of it) objected so virulently, and in some cases so violently, to O'Neill's reforms. Certain characteristics of those who supported Paisley have been identified. First, there were those Protestants who were attracted to his platform quite simply because of his anti-Catholic stance. This was premised on a strong, historic hostility towards Catholics that was part of a religious and cultural tradition within Northern Ireland. The Catholic church was regarded as malign and an enemy of the North, a view that was particularly prevalent among the skilled working classes.28 Secondly, many Protestants were suspicious of the Catholic adherence to the Pope in Rome which, to them, represented allegiance to an ‘alien’ force which held a manifesto to spread an ‘alien’ religion. This was, in itself, a challenge to Protestant Ulster. When, after 1962, the IRA began to identify itself as communist, Protestants regarded this as even more suspicious — an enemy which advocated Catholicism was now twinned with communism. When the Catholic communities began to protest against their ‘lot’ in the Province, many Protestants feared that this was the rising of an enemy within, inspired by malevolent external forces. Thirdly, there were others who were simply opposed to O'Neill's reform programme. Part of O'Neill's plans for economic modernization included a drive for external investment in the Province by powerful multinational corporations. The advent of such investment threatened the traditional dominance of the Unionist industrial classes. It also caused concern among the working classes, who saw that traditional industrial practices, not least that of a preference for Protestant workers, would not be upheld by the new companies that were more interested in pure profit than local prejudices.29
On the whole, Protestant objections to the reform process took fairly peaceful forms, such as the blocking of Unionist Party membership, but in the mid-1960s resistance took a more extreme form, orchestrated by the behaviour of the recently reformed Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The UVF had rearmed and regrouped in order to oppose nationalist plans to celebrate the anniversary of the 1916 Easter uprising. On 21 May 1966, the UVF declared war against the IRA and engaged in a spate of sectarian killings. As a result of these murders, O'Neill outlawed the organization in June 1966. This merely forced it underground until the spring of 1969.30
All of the above factors create the impression of a unified Protestant resistance against reform. This is, in one sense, accurate but in another, misleading. Any such discussion of the Northern Irish Protestant community must have a caveat attached — the difficulty of discussing the Protestant community in Northern Ireland as if it was a monolithic grouping. A key question which has been posed by analysts is: did (does) Protestant Ulster have a mind? As A.T.Q. Stewart has pointed out, this is not meant as an offensive question but as a deadly serious one.31 Can, he asked, one outlook be discussed when Protestant society was class-riven, economically divided and split between its Presbyterian roots and those of the established church? This is an important question and to answer it requires a certain boldness. There is little doubt of the complexity of discussing Protestant mindsets, but what is critical to the discussion of resistance to reform in the 1960s is that Northern Irish Protestants as a group had one defining quality — the entrenched siege mentality which had developed vis-à-vis the Catholics since 1921. Protestants agreed, in the 1960s, as they always had, that the minority had to be managed, but they were divided on what mechanisms could be used. For example, O'Neill had an approach that was essentially liberal, which was about managing the Catholics on a more equitable basis. Equally, Paisley had a view of management but it was rather less civilized and premised not on the inclusion of Catholics, but rather on their exclusion from Northern Irish structures. More radically, Protestant paramilitary groups such as the UVF, which represented the extreme edge of resistance to O'Neill, saw the Catholics as the enemy within, to be subdued and coerced.32 It was this issue of the management of the minority that defines Protestant struggles in the mid-1960s. How should the Catholic minority be treated? How far could or should reform go? Such questions were rendered increasingly critical for Protestants, not only by the reform process but also by the subsequent agitation for Civil Rights. The lack of consensus on the Protestant side meant that any reform was controversial, piecemeal and relatively slow to answer growing Catholic grievances.
Catholic grievances
While some in the Protestant community were quick to demonstrate their disapproval of change, signs of dissatisfaction with O'Neill's reforms were at first slow to come from the Catholic community. Initially, nationalist politicians were in favour of the notion of bridge-building between the two communities. Yet they would go only so far in their support of O'Neill, not least because they did not want to lose votes to the Ulster Unionists. More radical nationalists suspected that successful bridge-building between the communities would only delay the day when the border between the North and the south could be eradicated.33 It is also accurate to suggest that Catholics, although hopeful of O'Neill's reforms, were less concerned about his economic programme than their rights as citizens, and specifically their rights under local government legislation which oversaw housing and education.34
It was precisely this type of local government issue — specifically the allocation of housing — that gave rise to the first stirring of a Civil Rights movement. The first inkling of the storm to come was when the issue of housing Catholic families in Dungannon, in Co. Tyrone, was taken up. A local woman, Patricia McClusky, organized the Homeless Citizen League in the town to protest against the conditions in which Catholics were housed and to agitate for their removal to a group of good quality council houses which were literally standing empty.35 Despite the reservations of the Protestant-dominated council, she succeeded in rehousing the Catholics and, buoyed by this success, founded, along with her husband, the Campaign for Social Justice.36 This group was dedicated to publicizing cases of injustice within the Province. Initially it was non-political and non-partisan but was willing to use access to MPs of all persuasions to highlight the social injustices of the minority in the Province.37 The movement was also dedicated to non-violent methods of agitation. In 1965 the campaign became affiliated to the National Conference of Civil Liberties in London, and two years later the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association was formed (NICRA). This movement presented Stormont and the Unionist Party with a new threat. Previous Catholic challenges to its rule may have been violent but they had, on the whole, been episodic. The Northern Irish Government had been able to subdue such challenges quite easily through its police force. The non-violent methods of the street protesters was rather different. It represented, certainly in Irish terms, a modern form of peaceful protest that could not be easily coerced away.38
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was born more out of frustration within the Catholic community than from any other factor. For many Catholics, the years of reform were ironically ones which had fostered, not suppressed, growing frustration. Michael Farrell has described the situation as one in which Catholics were, it is true, enjoying greater levels of good housing and better access to higher education, but they were still suffering from relatively less opportunities than their Protestant counterparts. In the post-war era, he claimed ‘Catholics had benefited from a free education system and an increase in university scholarships. This in turn had created a much larger, better-educated, ambitious Catholic middle class, which was anxious to participate in politics and to end their second-class status’.39 What is interesting though is that the Catholic community did not look to Dublin, which in comparison with the North had a relatively underdeveloped welfare system, for redress of their grievances, but rather sought reform of the Northern Irish structures in a more equitable fashion.40 This dispute was therefore not about a united Ireland, but initially at least, about the rights of the minority within the Province.
Reform increased expectations but did little to deliver the goods quickly as far as Catholics were concerned. In particular, Catholics began to organize themselves to apply pressure for change in the political system and in areas of social policy. By 1968 much was made on the Catholic side of alleged discrimination in the political system in the Province. Catholics objected to the great dominance of the Unionist vote in Stormont. However, this was a tricky issue because the Unionist Party was the single largest party in the Province and so obviously dominated the Parliament; the other parties were smaller and more disparate in their outlook. Unless partition was to be removed, or unless proportional representation was introduced, there was little that could be done about such a ‘first-past-the-post’ system.41 This, therefore, was less of an issue than the abuses at the lower levels of government, specifically in the realm of local government, where most inequalities occurred. These arose primarily from the practice in the Province of allowing laws which restricted voting rights to property owners or tenants with statutory rights. Such restrictions meant that about a quarter of the people who qualified to vote in national elections could not vote in those for local governments. Compounding the problem of exclusion was the retention of laws that allowed multiple property owners multiple votes; company votes were also preserved. In addition to this, there was a denial of rights to some Citizens through a process known as gerrymandering. In Londonderry, for example, Catholics outnumbered Protestants by two to one, but on the council this situation was inverted, and Protestants outnumbered Catholics.42 The manipulation of ward boundaries ensured that a greater number of Protestant councillors were elected despite Catholic numerical superiority.
Historians disagree as to the extent of discrimination that existed in the Province before 1968. At one extreme, some depict it as all pervasive. At the other end of the spectrum, some claim that there was nothing wrong in the Province at all.43 The centre ground has tried to assess the evidence in a more balanced fashion, and in some of the best work on the issue, John Darby argues that although some of the allegations of discrimination against the Protestants cannot be upheld, there was ‘a constant and irrefutable pattern of deliberate discrimination against Catholics’.44 That discrimination existed at some levels and in some regions against Catholics does seem beyond dispute, but it should also be signalled that the electoral laws relating to property franchises in some areas disadvantaged working-class Protestants. By 1968, however, it was Catholic grievances about their status within the Province that sparked street protests.
The IRA
Nationalist protest has a long history in Ireland; nationalists have opposed the British Government, the Protestant landowners, the Irish Government after 1921, and in 1968 the Stormont regime. In nearly all of these battles after 1916, the IRA have been present. One of the key questions is whether the protests of 1968 were the same as those in the past that were orchestrated by the IRA. There has been much debate in the historical literature as to whether the IRA were directly responsible for the setting up of NICRA and the other protest movements of the late 1960s. The question has been posed as to whether NICRA was a guise for the activities of a regrouped IRA. Members of the IRA were indeed around and involved in some of the organizations, but in a quite different mantle from that of their traditional one. After the failure of the border campaigns of the 1950s, the IRA had entered a period of dissension and reflection on the failures of the decade. There was little military dynamism left and on 26 February 1962 the IRA announced that it ‘had ordered the termination of the campaign against the British occupation. All full-time service volunteers had been withdrawn.’45 Militarism ceased, apart from a series of raids on banks. The remainder of the IRA membership, under the leadership of Cathal Goulding, decided to take a more political role in Irish affairs and agitate for change from within bodies such as trade union organizations. Specifically, the organization was now communist and dedicated itself to the ideas of Marx. In the south, the IRA met in various groups, many of which were in Dublin. They were routinely monitored by the Irish Special Branch. In the North, members were involved in Republican clubs. Members of the IRA certainly attended some of the first meetings of the Civil Rights movement, but were not present in any paramilitary sense.46 Rather, they appeared as ideologues with little grasp of the reality of protest against government. Cathal Goulding admitted in 1970 that three years earlier the movement had become dormant:
It wasn't active in any political sense or even in any revolutionary sense. Membership was falling off. People had gone away. Units of the IRA and the Cumainn (local branches) of Sinn Fein had become almost non-existent.47
When the IRA conference took place in 1967, the leadership realized in a rather embarrassed fashion that they had no movement at all.48 The nadir of the movement was confirmed when Sinn Fein contested the local elections of 1967 but fared extremely badly. Even formerly loyal voters saw little point in wasting their votes when there was no real campaign to support.49 The Civil Rights movement consisted of a broad church of aggrieved groups and individuals which set out to reform the Northern Irish system. It was not a paramilitary force, at this stage, and the IRA as an organizational force was dead. This became obvious as the troubles began.
The Troubles
Austin Currie, a nationalist MP representing Co. Tyrone, decided to make the issue of housing for Catholic families the central plank of Civil Rights demonstrations. He had been refused by the Unionists in his bid to secure council accommodation for a large Catholic family. After a ‘sit in’ at the house that the family had been refused, a Civil Rights march was organized for 16 August in Dungannon.50 The march, inspired by the success of the black Civil Rights movement in the United States, passed off peacefully and another was planned for October. This one was to be in Londonderry.
The site of the march, like much else in Northern Ireland, evoked considerable controversy. Londonderry, or Deny as it was known to Catholics, had traditionally been a bastion of Protestantism. Gerrymandering had ensured, though, that Protestants dominated local structures.51 The thought of a Civil Rights march through the streets of the town brought strong Protestant opposition. The organizers of the march claimed that it was not sectarian but about the rights of citizenship. William Craig, the Minister of Home Affairs, banned the march.52 This gave the organizers a choice of whether to cancel or to demonstrate their disapproval of the regime. The march went ahead.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the Reserve Force (of the B-Special Constabulary or the riot squad) ‘policed’ the march in a way that brought widespread disapproval from outside the Province. The protesters were treated roughly and among the injured were seventy-seven demonstrators and four constables. The Northern Irish Government, along with the Secretary of State for the Home Department, James Callaghan, later claimed that the police did nothing to provoke the violence.53 An official commission found otherwise and criticized the police for its indiscriminate use of batons and the use of water canons.54
Despite the official line, as espoused by Craig, the Home Office Minister, that the RUC had not behaved badly, in November the Northern Irish Government admitted that the minority group had some grievances and suspended the Londonderry Council. Its powers were placed in the hands of a special commission.55 Stormont also recommended that new principles for housing allocation be formulated. As far as the Civil Rights people were concerned, this was too little, too late. The reforms did little to resolve the issue of ‘one man, one vote’ which had now become a central plank of the protesters' manifesto for change.
O'Neill's administration was increasingly under pressure. The concessions that O'Neill had made to the Catholics in November sparked an angry counter-protest led, once again, by Ian Paisley. He and his supporters held a vigil in Armagh cathedral that they used to try to prevent a Civil Rights march. Searches of the Protestant protesters led to a find of two guns and numerous home-made weapons. Paisley himself was later sentenced to a short term of imprisonment for his involvement.56 Afterwards, on 9 December, the Prime Minister went on television to outline a programme of change for the Province. This did little to prevent a further explosion of violence. In January 1969, the Civil Rights protesters decided to hold another march. On this occasion they were reinforced by a group of Civil Rights activists from Queens University known as ‘People's Democracy’.57 They decided on 1 January to stage a march from Belfast to Derry. On 4 January, along the route at Burntollet Bridge, the marchers were ambushed by a group of Protestants, including members of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). It emerged that RUC officers had chatted casually with the ambushers before the attack.58 On arrival in Londonderry the marchers were again set upon by indignant Protestants and in the few days that followed, RUC men entered Catholic areas and randomly attacked people.59 The only IRA activity at this time was stone-throwing and petrol-bombing.60
O'Neill decided to resolve the crisis and, in an attempt to regroup both his Party and the Province behind his reforms, called a general election for February. He failed to gain sufficient support. After the election the Unionist Party remained as deeply divided as ever over reform and Catholics had not been persuaded to place their confidence in the Prime Minister. In April, O'Neill announced his resignation. He was replaced by Major James Chichester Clark. Under him, the Government announced that it accepted the principle of ‘one man, one vote’.61 Yet again, this did little to prevent the escalation of violence between the Civil Rights protesters and angry Protestant groups. The climax was reached in August 1969 when a Protestant march, the annual march of the apprentice boys commemorating the relief of the city from the siege of 1689, was stoned by Catholics in Londonderry. August was always a sensitive month in the Province, marked by the tribal and ritualistic marching and counter-marching of the communities. On this occasion, the RUC's reserve force (the B-Specials) retaliated by storming the ‘bogside’ — the area inhabited by Catholics. They rampaged through the district, causing damage to both people and property. The inhabitants, fearing a Protestant invasion, responded by erecting barricades. The RUC attempted to bulldoze the barricades and a continual siege developed. The so-called ‘siege of the Bogside’ provoked riots and bloodshed throughout the Province. In Belfast, Catholics began building barricades on street corners and asked the IRA to provide arms. The IRA had little to offer — assessments made of IRA ammunition at the time put their total resources at ten guns! — although individuals, who later became centrally involved with the IRA, did lead individual defences of parts of Catholic areas.62 William McKee, who would later lead one of the Belfast brigades, conducted a defence of a church in the face of an attack. Angry Protestant mobs, who gathered at the edge of Catholic areas, burnt empty houses to intimidate the community. They were aided either directly by the RUC or abetted by them when the RUC did nothing to prevent the attacks.63
The subsequent investigations into the cause of the troubles, the Cameron Commission and the Scarman Tribunal, pointed to the lack of sufficient manpower available to the RUC to control such wholesale disturbances. Both commissions argued that the lack of people meant that the RUC was forced to depend on methods that inevitably caused casualties and escalated tensions: baton charging, water canon, tear gas and the use of gun fire.64 The Scarman Tribunal, in an understanding of the Protestant mindset, in particular pointed out that the behaviour of the RUC had not been aided by its belief that it was actually confronting an uprising by the minority community.65 It also underlined RUC fears that if the Protestant extremists should get out of control, the police were not certain of their ability to control the situation, but on past experience they believed they could deal with the rioting. Both investigations, however, were deeply critical of the behaviour of the RUC, not least its failure to act against crowds hostile to the Civil Rights protestors.66 The upshot of the rioting was a complete breakdown in the relationship between the communities in the Province and a crisis in the relationship between the Catholics and the police forces.
By this stage the arrangements of 1921 were increasingly under threat and the regime was engaged in a last-ditch enterprise to hold it together. What had brought the Province to the brink? The interpretations, like so much else in Irish history, are hotly contested.67 One explanation was that of the problem of the minority. Nine teen-sixty-eight was, it could be argued, the endpoint of Irish nationalist rebellion against the Protestant regime in the North. A second and alternative explanation was that of the problem of the majority. The dogged resistance to change by parts of the Protestant community meant that minority rights were not conceded easily. History is full of ifs, buts and maybes, but if O'Neill had succeeded in reforming the Province, at least only partially, perhaps the Catholics might have been reconciled to the rule of Ulster. The indications were in 1967–68 that the protests were about rights within the regime, not about the right to dismantle it. But the problem in Northern Ireland was always the problem of how to ‘rule’ and how to respond to the minority. The Province had been set up to ensure Protestant rights in Ireland. Any political change vis-à-vis the minority challenged that fundamental premise. The years 1968–69 saw the knee jerk reaction of a traditional regime confronted with political change. The use of violence in the summer of 1969 saw the regime's authority and legitimacy crumble as far as the minority was concerned and, as in the past, Stormont appealed to the Government on the mainland to uphold the line established in 1921. In August 1969, British troops were deployed into Ireland once again to shore up a contested regime.68
1. On this point in Ireland see Sabine Wichert, Northern Ireland since 1945 (London: Longman, 1991), p. 113. For a broader perspective on historical reform see Alexis de Toqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Revolution, trans. Henry Reeve (London: John Murray, 1856), p. 333.
2. Martin Wallace, Northern Ireland: 50 Years of Self-Government (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1971), p. 71.
3. Ibid., p. 71.
4. Ibid., p. 71.
5. See David Millar, Queens's Rebels (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978) and A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster 1609–1969 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977).
6. See Report of the Working Party on the Economy of Northern Ireland, Cmd 446, 1962. See also Wallace, op. cit., pp. 136–7.
7. Leslie McClements, ‘Economic Constraints’ in David Watt (ed.), ‘The Constitution of Northern Ireland: Problems and Prospects’, Studies in Public Policy 4 (National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Policy Studies Institute, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London: Heinemann, 1981) p. 101.
8. Ibid., p. 102.
9. Hall Committee (Report) 8 Nov 1962, House of Commons Debate (hereafter HC), vol. 666, cols 1134–7, 30 October–9 November 1962, pp. 1134–7.
10. See The Wilson Report, Economic Development in Northern Ireland, Cmnd 479, 1965 (Belfast: HMSO, 1965).
11. Ibid.
12. See Richard Rose, Governing Without Consensus: An Irish Perspective (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 98.
13. Ibid. See also Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), p. 190; and Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace (London: Hutchinson, 1995), p. 42.
14. Rose, op. cit., p. 99.
15. Rose, op. cit., pp. 442–3.
16. Ibid., pp. 442–3.
17. For O'Neill's view of how the Unionist Party should operate, see ‘Speech, Queen's University and Conservative and Unionist Association’, 26 Jan. 1968, quoted in Terence O'Neill, Ulster at the Crossroads (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 59.
18. Wallace, op. cit., p. 73.
19. Radio interview with O'Neill quoted in Wallace, op. cit., p. 73.
20. Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–1985 (London: Fontana, 1985) p. 280. See Terence O'Neill, Ulster at the Cross-roads (London: Faber &Faber, 1969), pp. 157–9.
21. D.G. Boyce, The Irish Question and British Politics 1868–1986 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 104. See Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–1970: A Personal Record (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).
22. Sarah Nelson, Ulster's Uncertain Defenders: Protestant Political, Paramilitary and Community Groups and the Northern Ireland Conflict (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1984), p. 55. See also Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster! The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
23. Nelson, op. cit., p. 55.
24. Ibid., p. 55.
25. Ibid., p. 55.
26. Rose, op. cit., p. 101.
27. Ibid., p. 351.
28. Ibid., p. 351.
29. See Coogan, op. cit., p. 41.
30. Steve Bruce, The Red Hand: Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 14–15.
31. A.T.Q. Stewart, ‘The Mind of Protestant Ulster’ in Watt, op. cit., p. 31.
32. See Steve Bruce, The Red Hand, op. cit., pp. 14–19.
33. See Paul Arthur, The People's Democracy 1968–1973 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1974), pp. 14–15.
34. See Rose, op. cit., p. 101.
35. Ibid., p. 101.
36. See Lord Cameron's Report, Disturbances in Northern Ireland (Belfast: HMSO, Cmd532, 1969).
37. For an analysis of the various groups that made up NICRA, see Rose, op. cit., p. 161.
38. Ian McAllister, ‘Political Parties: Traditional and Modern’ in John Darby (ed.), Northern Ireland: The Background to Conflict (New York: Appletree Press, Syracuse University Press, 1983).
39. M. Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London: Pluto, 1976), p. 238.
40. Ibid., p. 238. See also Rose, op. cit., pp. 298–300.
41. On this issue, see Rose, op. cit., p. 441. As he points out, the Northern Irish system was of a type that was and remains quite customary in the Western world.
42. Rose, op. cit., p. 442. See also Wright, op. cit., pp. 190–1.
43. John Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 166–7.
44. John Darby, Conflict in Northern Ireland: The Development of a Polarised Community (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1976), p. 76, quoted in Whyte, ibid., p. 167.
45. Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA (Glasgow: Fontana, 1980), p. 418.
46. See Coogan, The Troubles, op. cit., p. 63.
47. Interview with Cathal Goulding, This Week (31 July 1970), quoted in M.L.R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 80.
48. Ibid., p. 80.
49. J. Bowyer Bell, The Secret Army: A History of the IRA (Dublin: The Academy Press, 1970), p. 346.
50. Rose, op. cit., p. 102. Terence O'Neill hardly noticed the march; he was in England on holiday. Terence O'Neill The Autobiography of Terence O'Neill, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland 1963–1969 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972), p. 99.
51. Rose, op. cit., p. 103.
52. Rose, op. cit., p. 103.
53. Minister of Home Affairs, Craig, vol. 788, col. 50, 13 October 1968. Quoted in Ronald Weitzer, Policing Under Fire: Ethnic Conflict and Police—Community Relations in Northern Ireland (New York: State University New York, 1995), p. 60.
54. The Cameron Commission Report: Disturbances in Northern Ireland, Cmnd 532 (Belfast: HMSO, September 1969).
55. Rose, op. cit., p. 103.
56. See M. Farrell, op. cit., p. 62.
57. The relationship between the People's Democracy and the NICRA was problematic and grew increasingly so from 1968–70. Although a ginger group within the NICRA, the declaration of the People's Democracy as a socialist organization caused problems. See Paul Arthur, The People's Democracy 1968–1973 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1974), p. 75.
58. See The Sunday Times, 27 April 1969, and for a full story of the march, Bernadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul (London: Pan, 1969).
59. The Cameron Report, op. cit.
60. Coogan, The IRA, op. cit., p. 468.
61. Brian Faulkner, Memoirs of a Statesman, ed. John Houston (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), p. 54.
62. Coogan, The IRA, op. cit., p. 461.
63. Max Hastings, Ulster 1969 (London: Gollancz, 1970), p. 145.
64. See Weitzer, op. cit., p. 60.
65. Scarman Tribunal: Violence and Civil Disturbances in Northern Ireland in 1969, Cmd 566 (Belfast: HMSO, April 1972), p. 16.
66. The Cameron Report, op. cit.
67. See Whyte, op. cit., pp. 113–94.
68. A small garrison of British troops had been maintained in the Province since the time of partition. British politicians maintained and continued to maintain that the troop deployment in 1969 was merely additional and not extraordinary. See for example H. Atkins in HC, vol. 6, col. 1172, 18 June 1981.