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October 3 - October 14, 2019
Wilson was instinctively anti-Unionist and was not well-disposed towards the Stormont regime.
one of the few channels of communication was provided by rugby matches in Dublin, where Belfast and Dublin officials would meet discreetly to sort out mutual problems.
Most of Unionism voiced approval of the visit, though protests were staged by the Reverend Ian Paisley, a hardline young fundamentalist clergyman with a talent for self-publicity.
The scornful Paisley verdict on O’Neill’s bridge-building summed up what one end of the Unionist spectrum thought: ‘A traitor and a bridge are very much alike, for they both go over to the other side.’
The idea was ingrained in many in the Unionist community that Catholics per se were enemies of the state; indeed Craig and Brooke had defined them almost literally in those terms.
an important component of Unionism has been a distrust of the English and a suspicion of English motives. This derives in part from the fact that many Protestants come from Scottish Dissenting stock,
A rise in tension in 1966, as republicans celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 rising, led to three killings carried out by a group styling itself the Ulster Volunteer Force.
made up of at most a couple of dozen men who met in backstreet pubs, many in the Shankill Road district, to discuss over drinks means of combating the practically nonexistent IRA.
Westminster Unionist MP was dragged from the stage and beaten unconscious when he remonstrated with anti-O’Neill hecklers. Early the next year the prime minister himself was attacked with stones, flour and eggs by Paisleyite demonstrators while attending a Unionist party meeting in Belfast:
British post-war educational reforms produced a Catholic middle class which was both larger and much more assertive than ever before. This new generation regarded the Nationalist party as outmoded and ineffectual, and viewed the IRA and Sinn Féin as belonging to a past age.
Harold Wilson as prime minister presented a very different figure since, instinctively anti-Unionist and representing a largely Irish Catholic constituency in Liverpool, he made no secret of his disdain for the Unionist party.
Opinions differ on the exact effect the introduction of one man – one vote might have had, though an unpublished Unionist government study concluded that nationalists would have benefited significantly in Tyrone, Fermanagh and Londonderry city.
even the more moderate civil rights figures were not inclined to give O’Neill the benefit of the doubt. By 1968 he had been in office for five years, yet his reform proposals still seemed largely confined to the realms of rhetoric.
an attempt to give the Unionist party a more accommodating aspect without affecting its hold on power.
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,
a move which swelled the numbers attending it. Then the RUC spectacularly overreacted, using water cannon and batons on an obviously peaceful group of marchers.
An official report later concluded that he had been struck ‘wholly without justification or excuse’ and that RUC men had used their batons indiscriminately.
to some Unionists the civil rights movement was simply the IRA and other anti-partitionists in a different guise, ostensibly asking for civil rights but actually intent on attacking the British connection.
The IRA itself had had a major rethink since the abject failure of its 1950s campaign, and in the process had swung sharply to the left with prominent Marxists taking control. It moved away from the idea of using violence as its only tactic and became a left-wing pressure group agitating on issues such as housing, particularly in the south.
The civil rights banner gave the new-style IRA the chance to operate on another front and it enthusiastically backed the new phenomenon.
O’Neill responded by saying he had resolved to do everything he could to break down old animosities, adding he had been successful to the extent that the RUC had advised him that his personal safety was at risk, not from the IRA but from extreme loyalists.
Craig, in spite of the repeated threats to cut off money, asked for additional financial help for a large Belfast company. This caused Wilson to snap, in what may have been a loss of prime ministerial temper,
The Stormont cabinet as a whole concluded it was not a bluff and set about assembling a set of reforms which it hoped might satisfy London while proving acceptable to the Unionist party. In fact such a balancing act was never to be achieved.
The police were accused of standing by as the ambush took place, and even of helping to engineer it, while a number of off-duty members of the B Specials were said to be among the attackers.
Lord Cameron, the Scottish judge who headed the commission, would eventually produce a report highly critical of the Unionist government, but by the time he did so far worse disturbances had broken out.
The attacks were attributed by the RUC to the IRA, though much later it emerged that the devices were the work of the loyalist UVF,
Protestant mobs charged in after the RUC, smashing windows in Catholic houses. By all accounts the police had not planned this, but its effect was nonetheless galvanising.
the authorities had, despite the deployment of a large proportion of the entire RUC, lost control of a substantial part of Londonderry city.
violence involving large numbers of Protestants and Catholics, centring on the Falls and in the Ardoyne–Crumlin Road area of north Belfast.
if troops did go in, the political balance between Belfast and London would change fundamentally, since they would not place the army under Stormont control.
The arrival of the soldiers was welcomed by Catholics and brought a temporary respite from the violence,
In addition to the eight deaths at least 750 people were injured, 150 of them having suffered gunshot wounds. 180 homes and other buildings were demolished, and 90 required major repair. Compensation was estimated to cost at least £2.25 million.
Part of the Bogside became a ‘no-go area’, sealed off by barricades which remained in position until 1972.
an eight-year-old boy was killed in his Falls Road bedroom when a bullet from a heavy machine gun fired from an RUC armoured car ripped through walls and hit him in the head.
many stories of B Specials and on occasion RUC officers acting in concert with loyalist rioters
Loyalists rioted on the Shankill Road in protest against the reforms, the irony being that when the Protestant guns came out they killed a member of the RUC. Constable Victor Arbuckle, the first member of the force to die in the troubles, was shot by loyalists protesting in defence of the RUC.
Although Callaghan said in his memoirs that he did not really believe the south would invade, he added that officials discussed deploying British troops on the border, just in case.
the violence of August 1969 brought the southern state into the northern political equation. In the years that followed, Dublin never again extricated itself from the Northern Ireland issue,
Of the 1,800 families who fled their homes, the Catholic community had very much come off worst. 1,500 of those who moved were Catholic, which meant that more than 5 per cent of all Catholic households in Belfast were displaced. More than 80 per cent of the premises damaged were occupied by Catholics, and six of the eight people killed in mid-August were Catholics.
feelings of working-class nationalists in west and north Belfast that the IRA had failed them.
The consensus in the Catholic ghetto backstreets was that an effective defence force was needed, and so a new IRA came into being.
the fateful split occurred, late in 1969, which brought into being the Official and Provisional wings of the IRA. Broadly speaking the Officials were Marxists while the Provisionals were republican traditionalists,
the first IRA fatality of the troubles, killed in a car crash while on active service: with him in the car at the time was the future president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams.
This dissension in the grassroots was evident when votes drained away from the main Unionist party to Ian Paisley, who in this year was elected first to Stormont and then to Westminster.
Billy McKee, who was seriously injured in the St Matthew’s church clashes, entered republican folklore by reputedly holding off Protestant gunmen almost single-handed and preventing a loyalist invasion of the Short Strand. His action did much to restore the ghetto credibility of the IRA as defenders of Catholic districts.
a large area of the Lower Falls district was sealed off by the army for several days while soldiers were sent in to conduct rigorous house-to-house searches.
The sense that the army was being deployed against the general Catholic population was compounded when troops brought in two Unionist ministers to tour the area in armoured cars.
Internment without trial, sealing the border, and flooding republican areas with troops were among the popular Unionist solutions.
in the second half of 1970. The civil rights movement faded in importance, to be superseded by a new grouping, the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP), as the principal voice of nationalism in the north.
the Scottish soldiers were the first to be killed off-duty; two of them were brothers who were aged only seventeen and eighteen.
