Four decades of bloodshed and tears the north could have avoided

Or was there just some ghastly inevitability about it?

FOR many, this week marks 40 years since the start of the Troubles.

The UVF claimed its first victim as early as 1966 and it wasn’t until October 1969 that the first RUC man died — again at the hands of loyalists — but October 1968 and the first civil rights march in Derry certainly marked a turning point.

The question is: now that we no longer have the sound of gunfire ringing in our ears, can we see any more clearly how a period of history that began with 400 people gathering in Derry’s Duke Street ended with 3,500 lost lives? It happened, but did it need to? Or was there just some ghastly inevitability about it? The Civil Rights movement had its origins in a radical new political departure.

Until the 1960s, nationalists contented themselves with arguing the partition settlement had been illegitimate. Civil Rights was different: its origins lay in a local campaign against discriminatory housing allocation in Dungannon. Actually, the north’s overall record on housing after the second world war was not wholly discreditable. Catholics had a disproportionately large share of local authority housing, comprising 26% of all households but occupying over 30% of local authority housing.

The problem was that where misallocation did occur — often in areas where the two communities were evenly balanced numerically — it was crude and blatant. In unionist-controlled Dungannon not one Catholic family had been allocated a permanent house for 34 years. Although such instances were not the norm, the understandable resentment tended to be dismissed by the unionist government at Stormont as the usual anti-partitionist whining.

What they failed to appreciate was that, far from turning their backs on Westminster as in the past, Catholics, inspired by the US civil rights campaign, very much had British opinion in their sights. The demand for British withdrawal was replaced by the demand for British re-engagement in a different form. English politicians were reluctant to be sucked into ‘the Irish bog’. They tended to accept unionist prime minister Terence O’Neill’s argument that if he were forced too far, too fast, a hardline unionist reaction might force Westminster to take over Stormont’s powers. “Leave it to Terence” became the mantra in London.

Derry changed that. A majority Catholic but unionist-run city, nowhere else would civil rights issues have such potency. The veteran unionist MP and former Attorney General Edmund Warnock confessed his part in the gerrymandering of the city in a letter to O’Neill: in Northern Ireland’s early years “the manipulation of the ward boundaries for the sole purpose of retaining unionist control [was] defensible on the basis that the safety of the state is the supreme law”. A “temporary measure” had been allowed to become a permanent and costly state of affairs. Needless to say, unionists tended to see the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association as a republican and communist front organisation with a hidden anti-partitionist agenda. And republicans and trade unionists with Communist Party affiliations did dominate NICRA’s executive. Indeed, NICRA was founded at the behest of the Wolfe Tone Society, a creature of the IRA, in 1966.

Anti-partitionism was no longer the IRA’s primary raison d’être though. Its focus was on reforming the south and, as far as the north went, its strategy was to tease progressive Protestants away from unionism. An armed assault had been rejected as likely to inflame sectarian passion. Besides, the IRA was a tiny organisation quite incapable of mobilising the thousands of Catholics that were on the streets of Derry by the end of October 1968.

Indeed, it was the new Catholic middle-class created by universal free education which provided the initial leadership in Derry. But Northern Catholic society was bifurcating: there was a new middle-class but burgeoning numbers of unskilled workers too relative to the declining number of skilled workers. Here was the raw material that turned an essentially bourgeois campaign into a much more combustible situation. Both saw civil rights as having the capacity to transcend both (middle-class) constitutionalism and (working-class) physical force republicanism, neither of which had many successes they could point to.

The old Nationalist party’s warnings about the dangers of street politics, however, proved to be prescient. For all President McAleese’s talk last weekend about civil rights being “free from the divisions of sectarianism”, old habits died hard as Eamonn McCann, the most prominent civil rights activist in Derry, admitted in an article in 1969: “It is perfectly obvious that people do still see themselves as Catholics and Protestants, and the cry ‘Get The Protestants’ is still very much on the lips of the Catholic working-class. Everyone applauds when one says in a speech we are not sectarian, we are fighting for the rights of all Irish workers, but really because they see this as the new way of getting at the Protestants.”

Understandably, this uncomfortable paradox has been downplayed at recent commemorative events. There was a serious civil rights problem, and as President McAleese says, “the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was about the business of ending wasteful sectarian divisions”. The uncomfortable reality, though, is that sectarianism was unleashed in the process.

There were clear contrasts with America. There, unlike in the north, integrated education was a central demand of the civil rights movement. And there was no dormant national question to contend with either.

When the first Derry march was met with strong-arm RUC tactics, the scene was set for the much bigger demonstration on October 16. O’Neill did rise to the occasion, spelling out a substantive package of reforms in his famous ‘Ulster at the Crossroads’ broadcast and sacking his obdurate Home Affairs minister, Bill Craig. The Irish lobby at Westminster were impressed and many middle-class Catholics adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Perhaps O’Neill was fundamentally too weak politically to see it through despite winning a vote of confidence from the Unionist parliamentary party by 28 votes to four abstentions. But there did appear to be a majority in both communities in favour of gradualism.

In December 1968, then, it appeared as if the Derry marches had their desired effect. This was never going to satisfy the radicals. Giddy at the prospect of a revolutionary situation, the brief window of opportunity for a civilised resolution of civil rights’ demands was slammed shut by the NICRA’s Trotskyite offshoot, People’s Democracy.

When that group decided to organise a march from Belfast to Derry, modelled on Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama, many mainstream Catholic and civil rights leaders — including John Hume — opposed it, knowing that it would likely provoke a violent backlash which indeed it did. After ‘the flowers of Catholic youth’ had their heads kicked in at Burntollet, O’Neill’s relationship with Catholic Ulster was destroyed and he never regained control of the situation. The rest, as they say, is history. It is important that the events of October 1968 are marked and the injustices that provoked them recalled, but it is important to bear in mind too that what followed was almost certainly unavoidable.