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

by Tim Pat Coogan

How this system worked in practice can best be seen in Derry City, the capital of the county Farrell grew up in. It was also the storm centre where, in a real sense, the gerrymandering system blew up in the Unionists’ faces, bringing British troops on to the streets in 1969 and thus inaugurating the contemporary Irish Troubles. The population of Derry was roughly two-thirds Catholic to one-third Protestant, and the Catholic population kept growing. Nevertheless, the population increase did not mean that the Catholics could ever overtake the Protestants. Successive gerrymanders repeatedly redrew the electoral boundaries, so that the Unionist one-third were able to control the city. The results were that Catholics could not get municipal jobs or houses. Unemployment was rife and Farrell recalls: …appalling slum conditions in Derry and yet people just couldn’t get houses. They had to live in converted army huts. They had to live a couple of families to a house and so on. The enforcement of these conditions was not due to an inherent cruelty on the Unionists’ part. Inefficiency played a role, because they did not build enough houses anyway for either Catholic or Protestant, but, overall, housing policy had a basic political goal. It could be summed up in the same word that governed Sir James Craig’s action in turning down the recommendation of a British cabinet committee in 19195 which offered not a six- but a nine-county Ulster. The word is: control.