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June 13 - June 22, 2020
The defining feature of the new entity was its demographics: it was two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic, the guiding concept in deciding its borders having been that it should have a decisive Protestant majority.
Catholic representatives of the time tended to hope not for some new shared system, but for its collapse. They often resorted to boycotting the new institutions, both political leaders and Catholic bishops making no secret of their hope that Northern Ireland would not last.
the 1920 settlement had ensured that nationalists were forever excluded from power and that Unionists forever wielded it in unbroken one-party rule.
The government system put in place in the 1920s is one of the keys to explaining the later troubles, since there was such extraordinary continuity in its workings over the decades, and since the outbreak of the troubles was so directly related to it. The Catholic civil rights movement would take to the streets in 1968 with complaints which related directly to the arrangements of the 1920s.
Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, James Craig, responded quickly by revising the voting system and later altering boundaries so that Unionists could deal with such mutinous councils by simply assuming control of them.
The first-past-the-post system introduced in its place, together with the highly partisan redrawing of local government boundaries, was of huge benefit to the Unionist party.
Judges and magistrates were almost all Protestants, many of them closely associated with the Unionist party. Between 1937 and 1968, for example, thirteen sitting Unionist MPs were appointed judges, moving effortlessly from making laws to enforcing them.
The police had no real operational independence, responding directly to directions from ministers, with senior police officers sometimes attending cabinet meetings. The political, legal and policing worlds were thus inextricably linked: one community governed, judged and policed the other.
Unsurprisingly, Catholic unemployment was generally more than double Protestant unemployment, partly because of these patterns and partly because a higher proportion of Catholics lived in areas of high unemployment such as the west.
It's all about the money money money
What made house building and allocation so sensitive was that voting in local government elections was limited to ratepayers and their spouses.
Since only ratepayers and their spouses had the vote, others such as subtenants, lodgers and anyone living at home with their parents could not vote.
In 1963 the Unionist chairman of Enniskillen housing committee made clear their approach: ‘The council will decide what wards the houses are to be built in. We are not going to build houses in the South Ward and cut a rod to beat ourselves later on. We are going to see that the right people are put in these houses, and we are not going to apologise for it.’
But Catholics and nationalists were clearly regarded as second-class citizens, as intrinsically dangerous to the state, and as being less deserving of houses and jobs than their Protestant neighbours.
This was not Nazi Germany or anything like it. But it was institutionalised partiality, and there was no means of redress for Catholic grievances, no avenue of appeal against either real or imagined discrimination. Freed from any effective oversight the Unionist machine was able to function without any checks or balances or mechanisms which might have curbed excesses.
The most potent of these was the demand for one man – one vote, a reference to the different voting arrangements in Stormont and council elections. In council elections subtenants, lodgers and anyone living at home with their parents could not vote, so that around a quarter of Stormont voters had no say in local government elections.
The civil rights movement encompassed supporters of the Nationalist party, members and supporters of the IRA, communists, liberals, trade unionists, assorted left-wingers and radicals, exuberant students, middle-class professionals and many more, united in a fluid coalition which was not to last for long before splitting back into its constituent components.
The movement was much influenced by the model of Martin Luther King and the black civil rights movement in America, though it was also to draw inspiration from the street activities of students and others in Paris, Prague and elsewhere.
Austin Currie, a young Nationalist MP, staged a protest by squatting in a house in the County Tyrone village of Caledon near Dungannon. The episode has come to be regarded as a seminal moment in Northern Ireland’s history, some even regarding it as the start of the troubles, or at least as the spark which ignited the bonfire.
The most senior official sent over to Belfast reported back to London on the Stormont cabinet: ‘In my view they were not evil men bent on maintaining power at all costs. They were decent but bewildered men, out of their depth in the face of the magnitude of their problem. I was convinced that not only did they want to do the right thing; they also wanted to be told what was the right thing to do.’
Although that was the high mythic theory of republicanism, the practical reality was that the majority of Catholics did not support the IRA, and looked to them only in times of high tension.
Broadly speaking the Officials were Marxists while the Provisionals were republican traditionalists, many of whom had been unhappy for some time with the IRA’s direction.
On the Protestant side too men were forming vigilante groups and defence organisations, some of which would in time mutate into fully fledged paramilitary groups.
On the surface, calm had been restored by the arrival of troops, but in the backstreets both republicans and loyalists were readying themselves for future bouts of confrontation.
A moderate local councillor wrote: ‘Overnight the population turned from neutral or even sympathetic support for the military to outright hatred of everything related to the security forces. I witnessed voters and workers turn against us to join the Provisionals. Even some of our most dedicated workers and supporters turned against us.’
Allegations that soldiers had in the process often used brutal methods were denied by the authorities but often substantiated by later inquiries and court proceedings.
It later emerged that more than a dozen suspects had been given special experimental interrogation treatment. They were subjected to sensory deprivation techniques which included the denial of sleep and food and being forced to stand spreadeagled against a wall for long periods. Taped electronic ‘white noise’ sounds were continuously played to complete the disorientation. Years later the European Court of Human Rights characterised this episode as ‘inhuman and degrading’ treatment.
Republicans often denied the IRA was involved in sectarian killings and sometimes used a cover name to claim responsibility for attacks. The UVF and UDA, by contrast, made little secret of the fact that they regarded the Catholic population in general as legitimate targets, and made no bones about attacking Catholic bars and other targets with the aim of killing as many as possible.
Both republicans and loyalists claimed brutality had become routine within Castlereagh and that convictions were being secured ‘through the systematic application of torture techniques’.
To the republican mind, Unionists were not a major problem, being merely puppets of British imperialism. In republican theory the real enemy was Britain; and once Britain had been defeated Unionist resistance would simply collapse.
Interrogation was not a gentle business. Questioning, by rotating teams of detectives, could go on for six to eight hours a day with few breaks, and even long into the night. The courts threw out some cases, but for the most part allowed detectives a great degree of latitude, one senior judge ruling that a blow to the face which left the nose ‘swollen and caused it to bleed’ did not necessarily mean a subsequent confession was inadmissible as evidence.
Republican groups estimate that there are 15,000 republican ex-prisoners while at a rough guess around the same number of loyalists also served sentences. In other words, more than 30,000 men were involved with groups that have carried out killings and a great deal of other violence, a statistic which illustrates how deeply society was permeated by paramilitarism.
Academics Neil Jarman and Dominic Bryan summarised the clash of perspectives: ‘Each parade which is challenged is a symbolic threat to Protestant security and the Unionist position, while each parade which passes through a nationalist area is a re-statement of the dominance of the Protestant community and the inferiority of nationalist rights.’
