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August 12 - October 22, 2022
On the other hand, at least until O’Neill effectively destroyed the party in the 1965 Stormont election, the NILP for a period entertained the hope that it could either one day form the Government of Northern Ireland, or become an effective opposition. Therefore the NILP was not overly keen on promoting measures which might have had the effect of whittling away the powers of the Northern Ireland Government and Parliament.
In fact, the hopes of the NILP were never well grounded in reality. The party was always susceptible to being squeezed between Orange and Green extremism.
To a rising generation of young Catholics, reaping the benefits of the Butler Acts, the NILP seemed to offer a vehicle for change. But mindful of the need to attract fundamentalist support, the party voted with extreme Unionists in 1964 against a proposal that corporation swings should be opened to children on Sundays.
Would he further agree that in the 46 years which have elapsed since this Act was put on the Statute Book it has been made increasingly obvious that democracy does not exist in Northern Ireland?
Wilson’s reply in turn was a distillation of all the Westminster equivocation and evasion that led to twenty-five bloody years in British–Irish history:
I am not taking sides in this because there are allegations and counter-allegations by one side or another within Northern Ireland.
I think that the right thing would be for my Hon. friend the Home Secretary and myself to have informal talks with the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland to see whether some of the difficulties which all of us recognise exist might be overcome in an informal way.
The ginger group within the Labour Party which came to form the vehicle for those seeking Northern Ireland reform was the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster.
‘That group was always interested just as there is always a group interested in relations with Namibia, or with South Africa or with any other part of the Commonwealth at the time. That was the basis of it and I think there was as much interest and as much detachment as that.’
But before the situation matured to the point where this could happen, a great number of organised Nationalists had had to be convinced that the issue was civil rights and not the border and the existence of the northern state.
who at this stage almost invariably took their cue from the ‘Free State’, as it was still spoken of, indicating that the south contained a degree of flexibility they did not possess in Northern Ireland.
The principle of consent was important because there was a de facto arrangement within the ranks of nationalism whereby constitutional-minded Nationalists colluded to a certain degree with Sinn Fein.
The Nationalist Party was in reality a largely uncoordinated protest grouping of rural representatives and some businessmen, few of them of outstanding calibre.
There was much vehement criticism of old-guard attitudes which could be summed up as: ‘Go home, learn Irish and the Catholic birth rate will eventually take care of the problem.’
The Front only survived for some months before a split developed over lack of consultation on the issue of contesting a seat in Fermanagh–South Tyrone. From this split there evolved the National Democratic Party. This consisted largely of teachers and helped to contribute ideas and organisational talent to the Nationalist movement, but had little success in its own right.
This pledged the party to working within the constitution to achieve various goals, including a democratisation of party structures, action on unemployment, an end to discrimination and gerrymandering, and the initiation of training schemes. It was in effect a recognition of the state, and a move away from concentration on the partition issue and towards civil rights.
Northern Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom, therefore it should have United Kingdom standards. This was a major shift within Nationalism; no longer was the problem seen as inextricably bound up with the necessity of removing the border.
The plain truth about the North today is that the secret wish of most Northern Catholics is not for union with the South (entailing a fall-off in social benefits) but for an end to discrimination and for a fairer share of the Northern spoils.
and for most of that time was assured on all sides that a new day was dawning throughout Northern Ireland.
there was no IRA activity. And for a very good reason: there was no IRA. The IRA’s last border campaign had officially concluded
Like the 1916 insurgents they were execrated on all sides. Unlike the Easter rebellion, however, no dragon’s teeth were sown by their martyrdom.
The campaign was subsequently referred to in the north as ‘the incidents’. That is what it was, a series of incidents along the border which aroused no significant supportive chord either in Nationalist rural areas or in major centres like Belfast and Derry. In fact the IRA had in a sense recognised their lack of support in one vital area, the Republic, as far back as 1954.
This order had been prompted by a recognition of the fact that the years since the civil war, particularly those of World War II, when de Valera ruthlessly made use of emergency powers to cripple the organisation, had demonstrated that the south would not tolerate a physical force policy against the state. Partition had worked in that part of Ireland anyhow. The failure of the ‘incidents’ seemed to indicate that it had worked north of the border also.
the then IRA leadership decided to recognise the inevitable.
The movement began to devote itself increasingly to political activities.
Sit-ins to further housing protests, agitations over mineral or riparian rights, the gaining of influence within trade unions – these became the targets of the former physical force movement.
the Marxist theoreticians who now influenced republicanism steered towards the grail of a brotherhood of the Orange and Green proletariat.
It was decided to take advantage of the new currents stirring in Ireland, north and south, by setting up a broad-based north of Ireland civil rights movement.
the ending of the plural voting system in council elections, simplified into a call for ‘one man, one vote’; an end to discrimination and gerrymandering; machinery to deal with complaints against public authorities; the disbandment of the B-Specials; fair play in public housing allocation; and an end to the Special Powers Act, which basically permitted the Stormont authorities to do whatever they wished in opposing dissent.
the NICRA shopping list was like a red rag to a bull in the eyes of Unionist fundamentalists, constituting a root-and-branch attack on the whole idea of a Unionist state.
fearing a left-wing hand in the puppet’s glove of civil rights.
One of the greatest contributions, therefore, that the Catholic in Northern Ireland can make to a liberalising of the political atmosphere would be the removal of the equation between nationalist and Catholic.
Humorous, with a passionate compassion for the underdog, the mercurial McCann, like his supporters, was the antithesis of the dour, cautious Hume and the forces he attracted.
McCann’s creed seemed to be: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in the name of revolutionary socialism, therein lies the possibility of a split.’
The HAC was to be the motor force in one of the seminal events in Northern Ireland, the 5 October 1968 civil rights march in Derry.
The march had been organised by a loose group of radicals who had been trying for months, with some success, to create general political mayhem in the city.
which set out with the conscious intention of disrupting public life in the city to draw attention to the housing problem.62
Once again the catalyst for this type of protest was Austin Currie – or probably more accurately, British indifference to the need for reform in Northern Ireland and/or the impossibility of Terence O’Neill’s being able to bring it about.
During this period between 1965 and 1968 the Catholics came to realise that I was interested in their welfare.
The real point was that while some Catholics, not all, accepted O’Neill’s interest, very few were confident that he could translate it into action against the wishes of his party.
The only hope was vigorous action from London.
‘You’re making no impact. You’ll never get anywhere over here until you force this government to take action.’
FOUR THOUSAND PEOPLE took part in the march on 24 August 1968.
Nevertheless, unlike the repeat performance at Derry in October, the march passed off peacefully.
Here it should be explained that it was not merely the idea of marching for civil rights that was new, it was the idea of Catholics marching.
After the march, one of its leaders, the Revd John Brown, a B-Special commandant, said that the object of the march was to show that Orangemen could march anywhere they liked in the Six Counties. There was, he said, ‘No such thing as a Nationalist district… Dungiven has been restored to the Queen’s Dominions.’
it now began to appear that the march planned for 5 October 1968 was designed to remove Derry City from ‘the Queen’s Dominions’.
Their followers at the corporation meeting following the demonstration, who had numbered only some thirty in March, were so numerous that they ‘overflowed the council chamber out into the foyer of the Guildhall building and into the street’.
NICRA agreed, both to the holding of a march, and, not knowing anything about Derry, to McCann and company’s inflammatory choice of route.
Melaugh and McCann confidently expected 5 October to be a considerable occasion, perhaps even the day that would bring Stormont down. It was anticipated that the attendance would be bigger than at the Dungannon march.
