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

by Tim Pat Coogan

By highlighting the repressive nature of the state they would force an intervention by the federal government, in this case Westminster.

the fact that NICRA had officially decided on a marching moratorium presented no obstacle to the PD’s resolution not to observe the decision.

Several of the prominent figures in the civil rights movement, including Cooper, Currie and Hume, criticised the PD for being deliberately provocative and indulging in a dangerous coat-trailing exercise by setting out to walk through Loyalist towns.

contained some of the brightest young people in Northern Ireland – some of them Protestant – many of whom subsequently made considerable careers for themselves.

Major Bunting and a group of followers turned up to see the students off with promises that they would be ‘harassed and hindered’. The promises were kept, along 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.

One prominent northern personality who had a daughter on the march contacted some former colleagues in the IRA to ask th...

the pendulum of public sympathy already swinging massively towards the bloodied but unbowed students,

By now, hundreds of sympathisers had joined the marchers, who were accompanied by around eighty policemen.

…from lanes at each side of the road a curtain of bricks and boulders and bottles brought the march to a halt. From the lanes burst hordes of screaming people wielding planks of wood, bottles, laths, iron bars, crowbars, cudgels studded with nails, and they waded into the march beating hell out of everybody…

Apart from being stoned and beaten, sometimes with cudgels with nails driven into them, a number were driven into the freezing waters of the River Fahan.

and the police were standing around chatting and smoking quite happily. There was no attempt by the police to disperse them, arrest them or anything like that.

Again the marchers had to run a gauntlet of some hundred yards while stones and a new invention, petrol bombs, were hurled at them.

Again the attackers, some 150 strong, had obviously been stockpiling the stones, petrol bombs and other weapons for some time, but the police had made no effort to interfere.

After the bloodstained marchers had described their experiences to a large crowd in Guildhall Square, serious rioting broke out.

They smashed windows and demanded that ‘the Fenian bastards’ come out and fight. Even if they did not come out to fight, unwary householders who came to doors or windows were either beaten up or stoned.

The drunken mob, bawling and brawling outside his door, were the police.

The next day the slogan ‘You are now entering Free Derry’ appeared at the entrance to St Columb’s Well.

The New Ulster Movement came into being to combat sectarianism by demanding the setting-up of a Central Housing Executive and a Community Relations Commission. It also demanded the abolition of the B-Specials. It was chiefly supported by professionals and business people.

not only by the fact that its proposals were ultimately largely adopted, but by being the seedbed from which sprouted the liberal Alliance Party

He had already told Wilson and Callaghan that he wanted to resign, but they had refused to hear of the idea.15 Even a wobbling prime minister who could not get much done was better than the prospect of no prime minister and having to do something themselves.

O’Neill decided to go for confrontation rather than resignation.

O’Neill was under fire from Craig, Lord Brookeborough, Paisley, the PD and a new influx of opposition candidates who had cut their teeth in the civil rights movement.

He stood for reform; his opponents within Unionism accused him of taking the Six Counties towards a united Ireland.

While overall the Unionists won a substantial majority of the fifty-two seats, they were fractured into pro- and anti-O’Neill Unionists.

Some twenty-four out of a total of thirty-nine were reckoned to be pro-O’Neill.

The new men, along with Austin Currie, Gerry Fitt and another Republican Labour colleague, Paddy Kennedy (see p. 110), constituted the most formidable opposition in the history of the state.

He had in fact only one more month in office ahead of him. After a series of those infallible guides to the existence of implacable political hostility, votes of confidence, he was, in his own words, ‘blown out of office by the Protestants’.

explosions which destroyed a large electricity substation

causing serious water shortages.

O’Neill himself was never in any doubt that these were the work of Protestant extremists. But Loyalists attempted, for a time, to pretend they were the work of the then quiescent IRA, so as to smear O’Neill’s ‘Republican’ policies.

The Protestant Telegraph hailed the explosions as proof of the IRA’s ...

It was at once his greatest asset and his heaviest liability – good for foreign consumption, but difficult to retail at home… It was right for O’Neill to make the attempt and a great pity that more of his party had not made the move earlier…

It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants,

If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness, they will live like Protestants in spite of the authoritative nature of their Church.

Chichester-Clark was elected leader by Ulster Unionist MPs.

…since there can be no justice while there is a Unionist Party, because while there is a Unionist Party they will by their gerrymandering control Northern Ireland and be the government of Northern Ireland… consider the possibility of abolishing Stormont and ruling from Westminster…

in view of the apathy, neglect and lack of understanding which this House has shown to these people in Ulster whom it claims to represent,

is how in the shortest space it can make up for fifty years of neglect, apathy and lack of understanding.

Derry had been in a state of suppressed ebullition all summer. There had been fierce rioting on 19 April. It arose after police banned a planned civil rights march from Burntollet to Derry, following the use of the familiar Paisleyite ploy of threatening to stage a counterdemonstration. While chasing a group of stone-throwing youths, police burst into a house they mistakenly thought the youths were sheltering in, and batoned the occupants.

The CAC decided after the riots that it was time to call a halt to demonstrations.

Because of the civil rights demonstrations they had been able to take their frustrations out on the system to some degree. Indeed, their volatile, aggressive energy had been a principal strength of the movement in Derry.

Lurid reports of collusion between the RUC and Orange mobs, which lost nothing in the telling, filled the Bogside with expectation that its people would get the Unity Flats treatment on 12 August.

The stoning increased and a mob consisting of both Apprentice Boys marchers and police made an attempt to force its way into the Bogside. They were beaten back by a hail of missiles.

The barricades went up and a rerun of the siege of Derry commenced, with the Catholics playing the defensive role of the original apprentice boys.

A group of teenagers got on to the roof and pelted the police with petrol bombs. Impromptu factories were set up all over the Bogside to ensure that the bombs kept falling.

Permission to use CS gas, ‘tear smoke’, as it was euphemistically termed, was given by London, the first time it had been used in the UK.

Only Bernadette Devlin seemed impervious to its effects. She kept telling people that ‘it’s OK once you get a taste of it’, as she led the Bogsiders’ resistance in the main war-zone area of Rossville Street.

Incredibly, no guns were used by anyone during the fighting.

This came into the hands of McCann and those working with him in Derry, who used it to broadcast rebel songs