what Eamonn McCann has described as a ‘…horrific seventy-three-mile trek which dredged to the surface all the accumulated political filth of fifty Unionist years’. There was very little hostility from ordinary people along the way. But there was organised harassment. The students were frequently ambushed by groups of men armed with stones and clubs. The RUC only intervened to prevent the marchers from entering towns they wished to walk through, ‘for their own protection’. Otherwise the police offered no protection and were often observed chatting cordially with the attackers.
