The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

Two days before the march, William Craig issued an order banning it on the grounds that an Apprentice Boys march was scheduled for the same route at the same time. Moderate opinion within Derry and NICRA, two of whose members had eventually signed the application to march, urged that either the ban be obeyed or that the march be postponed.

resulted in only some four hundred marche...

But a police cordon halted the march before it had cleared Duke Street. Another group of police then formed up behind the marchers, thus trapping them.

What they saw was approximately five minutes of speeches from Fitt, McCann and Betty Sinclair, followed by a simultaneous police baton charge from either end of Duke Street. Men, women and children were batoned to the ground, the marchers adding to the confusion by colliding with each other as they fled in panic from either end of the street. Those who succeeded in running the gauntlet of the batoning, and breaking through to Craigavon Bridge, faced another hazard. A water cannon, the first to be deployed in Derry, hosed them back across the bridge.

he and other moderate figures, like Eddie McAteer, felt compelled to march, though they disagreed with the organisers’ provocative tactics.

What gave the events of 5 October their significance was the fact that millions of other people also saw that hate.

An RTE cameraman, Gay O’Brien, filmed the whole thing, and his images went around the world.

That night the Catholic Bogside area had its first riots. The destructiveness, with which Derry was to become all too familiar, manifested itself in stoning police cars, petrol-bombings and smashing shop windows.

British public opinion was shaken, but not stirred into action.

‘…a howl of elemental rage was unleashed across Northern Ireland, and it was clear that things were going to be the same again. We had indeed set out to make the police overreact. But we hadn’t expected the animal brutality of the RUC.’

However, Craig praised the police for their handling of the affair.

They reacted by calling a meeting in the City Hotel the following Tuesday which agreed, all fifteen of them, to hold another march the following Saturday.

The group consisted of representatives of clergy, Nationalists, liberal Unionists, the professions and trade unionists.

They proceeded to form a new organisation, the Citizens’ Action Committee, as an umbrella organisation for all the existing protest organisations in the city.

The CAC’s first action was to cancel the planned Saturday march as being too dangerous in the perfervid atmosphere of the time.

Throughout its short life it remained non-violent, non-sectarian, a genuinely cross-party (and creed) mass movement, aimed not at a united Ireland, but at reform within the system. Its song was ‘We Shall Overcome’, not ‘A Nation Once Again’.

In fact, this absence of a Nationalist goal disgusted many old-guard Republicans and was a major contributory factor in the emergence of the Provisional IRA just over a year later.

Nevertheless, the Unionists persisted in seeing the civil rights movement...

But the behaviour and tactics, of civil rights, the civil rights movement, soon clarified the matter and one felt after seeing the way that they actually behaved on the streets that this was really just the Republican movement in another guise.

‘the activities of the Civil Rights movement appeared to the Party to be nearly treasonable’.

the People’s Democracy movement was formed by a group of radical Queen’s University students after a demonstration in Belfast against police brutality. Its aims were one man, one vote, an end to gerrymandering, discrimination, and the Special Powers Act, and the beginning of freedom of speech and of assembly.

On 2 November, the CAC committee traced the route of the October march through Derry without any more serious incident occurring than a few stones being thrown, and a brief halt being called by police.

Marshalled by an army of stewards, many of them either former members of the IRA or Republican supporters, perhaps as many as 15, 000 people confronted the inevitable police barricade. This time good sense prevailed.

Catholic Derry was jubilant. In the following week workers left their jobs to hold impromptu celebratory parades through the centre of the city by way of putting further breaches in the ban.

However, on 20 November there were serious clashes between Protestants and civil rights demonstrators in which dozens of people, twelve of them police, were hurt.

The Leicester vignette epitomises the British reaction, not to Ulster’s lingerie, but to her dirty linen being displayed.

The idea was that passions would have had time to cool, and the Unionists be given a chance to come up with their own proposals. The former did not occur and the latter was not availed of.

It would also have been more effective for the British Cabinet to have been seen to firmly support O’Neill in pushing through reform. Either that, or take control of the situation directly.

Craig made speeches denouncing the civil rights movement as a creature of the IRA and the Trotskyites, while further to the right Paisley turned up the decibels in the chant ‘O’Neill must go’.

The O’Neill reform package contained five points: the abolition of Derry Corporation; the appointment of an ombudsman; a new system of housing allocation; a promise that the Special Powers Act would be abolished when it was safe to do so; and an end to the company vote.

‘In just forty-eight days since the first Derry march, the Catholic community had obtained more political gains than it had in forty-seven years.’9 Now it proved to be too little, too late to appease all sections of Catholic opinion; and at the same time it inflamed and frightened the Protestants.

In order to prevent trouble the RUC halted not the Paisleyites but the civil rights march. The counterdemonstration tactic was a favourite Paisleyite ploy.

‘One of these days one of these marches is going to get a massive reaction from the population. Ordinary decent people have been at boiling point for some time. It’s not just Mr Paisley.’

There are, I know, today some so-called loyalists who talk of independence from Britain – who seem to want a kind of Protestant Sinn Fein. These people will not listen when they are told that Ulster’s income is £200 million a year but that we can spend £3000 million a year only because Britain pays the balance…

Where are the Ulster armoured divisions and the Ulster jet planes?

What kind of Ulster do you want? A happy and respected province in good standing with the rest of the United Kingdom? Or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations and regarded by the rest of Britain as a political outcast?

He concluded by making it clear that if he could not get support for his policies he would resign, and asked ‘all our Christian people, whatever their denomination’ to go to church the following Sunday to pray for ‘the peace and harmony of our country’.

Borne up by a tide of goodwill, O’Neill promptly sacked him.

More importantly, the civil rights leadership in both Belfast and Derry agreed to call a halt to marches for the time being. For a moment a pie crust of optimism formed over the bubbling, poisonous northern stew.

It soon crumbled under the marching feet of the student activist group, the People’s Democracy.

E...

ww1 ireland at peace?

The People’s Democracy was partly inspired by the student demonstrations in Paris in May 1968 and by those in Czechoslovakia which led to the brief Prague Spring.

After a sit-down protest near City Hall, the students had marched back to Queen’s University and set up an organisation modelled on the Paris assemblies. It was to be leaderless, a form of mass democracy.

Clearly the State was fully behind this type of repression, of civil rights protests.

My reaction was we should do two things. One, mobilise protest as widely as possible within Northern Ireland and two, demonstrate to the outside world that this is what Northern Ireland was like.

The crucial demand at the time of the civil rights movement was one person, one vote.

I thought the speech was a sham.

we felt that nothing had changed and that in fact O’Neill was trying to defuse this movement which had gained tremendous momentum…

we were trying to force the British government to intervene and we felt the momentum should be continuing to do that.

Farrell and his companions modelled their march on the American civil rights march from Se...