From Civil Rights to Armalites

Transcription

1 From Civil Rights to Armalites

2 Civil rights pl. n. 1. the personal rights of the individual citizen, in most countries upheld by law, as in the US. 2. (modifier) of, relating to, or promoting equality in social, economic, and political rights. Armalite n. Trademark. a lightweight high-velocity automatic rifle of various calibres Definitions from Collins English Dictionary (3rd edn), HarperCollins, Glasgow, 1994.

3 From Civil Rights to Armalites Derry and the Birth of the Irish Troubles Second Edition Niall Ó Dochartaigh Lecturer in Political Science and Sociology National University of Ireland, Galway

4 Niall Ó Dochartaigh 1997, 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 1997 by Cork University Press Second edition published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

5 Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations A Short Historical Background to the Conflict viii ix xi Introduction 1 1 Civil Rights: October 1968 July Civil rights 17 5 October The Derry Citizens Action Committee 19 Unionist resistance 24 Sectarianism and the civil rights campaign 30 Free Derry and the Republicans 35 The 1969 election and the demise of the DCAC 42 Outside attention 47 After civil rights 53 Notes and references 54 2 Unionist Collapse and Adaptation: January 1969 June Unionist collapse 62 The First Unionist split 64 The election 70 Class 75 Social activism: adapting to the new order 79 Paisleyism 84 The Alliance party 86 The Londonderry Development Commission 88 Unionism without power 92 Notes and references 92 3 Free Derry: August October The approach to 12 August The Derry Citizens Defence Association 99 The battle of the Bogside 104 Free Derry and the British army 114 v

6 vi Contents The failure of reform 123 Notes and references The British Army: August 1969 April Honeymoon 134 Protestant reactions 140 Hearts and minds 142 A new regiment 145 Easter The end of the honeymoon 156 Notes and references Republican Revival: August 1969 August Republican revival 162 Officials and Provisionals 171 Public order and the courts 180 The Derry Citizens Central Council: moderates on the streets 183 Republicans and moderates 191 Notes and references Reform and Repression: August 1970 July From reform to repression 199 An IRA offensive begins 201 Provisional politics 207 Official Republicans and Labour 209 Forces for stability 212 The Nationalist party 217 The Unionist party 220 The SDLP and the DCCC 223 On to another plane 225 Notes and references On to a New Plane: After July On to a new plane 230 Towards internment 231 Catholics and the state 236 Protestants and the city 252 Notes and references Bloody Sunday in Context 269 Well-established patterns of communication and negotiation 270

7 Contents vii Frank Lagan s network 273 Lagan, MacLellan and Ford 275 Secret negotiations and communication around Bloody Sunday 278 Planning the army operation on Bloody Sunday 281 On the day: direct rejection of contact 284 Putting the Lagan Duddy connection in context 285 Rejecting contact and accepting risks 287 Notes and references 288 Conclusion 290 Maps 302 Bibliography 307 Index 322

8 Acknowledgements Thanks to my parents, Niamh and Eóin, and to my grandparents, Labhrás and Frances Ó Nualláin, whose support and encouragement was invaluable. Thanks are due to my supervisor, Professor Paul Bew, for his encouragement and help throughout the writing of the Ph.D thesis which formed the basis for this book. Thanks too to Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh who supervised my MA dissertation and helped me immensely when I was just starting to carry out research. I was given generous help by staff at the libraries of Queen s University, Belfast, Magee College, Derry and Boston College, and Belfast city library, Derry city library, and Public Records Office Northern Ireland and by Robert Bell at the Linenhall Library, Belfast and Tom Horan at the American Irish Historical Society in New York. I am grateful to all who agreed to be interviewed by me and to others who gave me the benefit of their time and knowledge on an informal basis: among them Garbhan Downey, Eoghan McTigue, Elaine Huey, Pádraig de Paor, Danny Sokatch, Tamara Metz, Aogán Mulcahy, Alice Feldman, Eric Reginensi, Máire Lynch, Tanya Power, Robbie and Claire Dobbins, Andy and Terry Barr, Guus Meijer, John Darby, Pat Curran, Gillian Robinson and everyone at INCORE, Patrick King, Alan Finlayson, Paul O Connor, Laura Pozo, Colin Burns, Lisa Rodgers, Eileen King and James Tierney. Thanks are due too to Zoe Watson in Belfast who typed much of the manuscript and to Frank Canavan in Galway who drew most of the maps. Thanks to Eamon Melaugh who let me pore through his photos from Derry in the early 1970s and trusted me enough to loan me the negatives. Thanks to the reviewers, who made several helpful suggestions and to my examiners, Margaret O Callaghan and Paul Arthur, who were of great help. Some material from the book previously appeared in a different form in an article in Irish Political Studies and I am grateful for permission to reproduce it here. I m grateful for the generous help I was given by Brendan Duddy, Garbhan Downey, Eamonn McCann, Angela Hegarty, Paul O Connor, Ivan Bailey, Colin Burns and Lisa Rodgers when I was writing the new chapter Bloody Sunday in Context in Most of all, thanks to Carol-Ann Barr, who gave me the motto No panic just adventure. viii

9 Abbreviations (a) In Endnotes DJ IP IT LS Derry Journal Irish Press Irish Times Londonderry Sentinel (b) In the Text APC CBSI CCTA CESA CI CJNI CLF CND CO CSJ DCAC DCCC DCDA DHAC DI DUA DUAC DUP GAA GOC IAC IDF INLA IRA IRSP JSC LAW Armoured Personnel Carrier Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland Central Council of Tenants Associations (Derry) Catholic Ex-Servicemen s Association County Inspector (RUC) Committee for Justice in Northern Ireland (Boston) Commander Land Forces Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Commanding Officer Campaign for Social Justice (Dungannon) Derry Citizens Action Committee Derry Citizens Central Council Derry Citizens Defence Association Derry Housing Action Committee District Inspector (RUC) Democratic Unionist Association Derry Unemployed Action Committee Democratic Unionist Party Gaelic Athletic Association General Officer Commanding Irish Action Committee (USA) Internees Dependants Fund (Derry) Irish National Liberation Army Irish Republican Army Irish Republican Socialist Party Joint Security Committee Loyalist Association of Workers ix

10 x Abbreviations LDC MP NAIJ NICRA NIHE NILP OC PUA PD RUC SDLP UDA UDR ULDP UPV UVF WAC WUUC YRA YUHAC Londonderry Development Commission Military Policeman (or Member of Parliament) National Association for Irish Justice (USA) Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association Northern Ireland Housing Executive Northern Ireland Labour Party Officer Commanding Protestant Unionist Association People s Democracy Royal Ulster Constabulary Social Democratic and Labour Party Ulster Defence Association Ulster Defence Regiment Ulster Loyalist Democratic Party Ulster Protestant Volunteers Ulster Volunteer Force Womens Action Committee (Derry) West Ulster Unionist Council Young Republican Association Young Unionist Housing Action Committee (Derry)

11 A Short Historical Background to the Conflict The conflict which broke out in Northern Ireland in October 1968 emerged out of a situation of rapid social and political change that began after the end of the Second World War in These changes disrupted a set of relationships, in particular a tradition of quiescence by the Catholic population in Northern Ireland, on which the very existence of the Northern Ireland state had been based. The political effects of these changes were focused in the city of Derry where by the late 1960s a large Catholic majority was still being ruled by a Protestant Unionist corporation dominated by local businessmen and minor gentry. The walled city of Londonderry in the north-west of Ireland was built in the early 1600s as part of the plantation of Ulster by Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. It was built as a Protestant town and served as a refuge for Protestants during the rebellions of 1641, 1650 and Only in the late 1700s did Irish Catholics begin to settle around the walled city as penal laws against Catholics were relaxed. But if Protestants thought the native Catholic population had been accommodated or tamed by then, the large-scale rebellion of 1798 shattered this belief. The Catholic population of Derry grew quite rapidly from about 1800 but there was considerable sectarian tension in the town and throughout the early 1800s there were regular sectarian riots in Derry, often breaking out during nationalist or loyalist parades. 2 By 1850, Catholics formed a majority of the population of Derry but, in an age of very limited suffrage, had no influence on the political life of the city which was ruled by a wealthy Protestant oligarchy. However, as the franchise was extended in the late 1800s, Catholics formed an ever-increasing proportion of voters. By 1920, a majority of voters in the city were Catholic, though the determinedly Protestant Unionist party continued to hold power because Catholic voters were concentrated in certain areas of the city. But then, in 1920, the British government, appalled at Sinn Féin victories throughout Ireland, introduced proportional representation in local government elections in Ireland to strengthen smaller parties. The effect in Derry was to return to power in 1920 the first Catholic mayor in the history of the city and a corporation controlled by Irish nationalists and republicans. 3 xi

12 xii A Short Historical Background to the Conflict Shortly after this, however, Ireland was partitioned and Derry became part of the Northern Ireland state set up to cater specifically for northern Irish Protestants who did not wish to be part of the independent Irish state. The border curved around Derry in a semicircle four miles from the town centre, cutting the city off from its economic hinterland of Co. Donegal. The new Unionist government of Northern Ireland abolished proportional representation. Derry once again had a Unionist corporation and as the Catholic population increased gradually in the succeeding decades, the ward boundaries were redrawn on a number of occasions with the effect of retaining control in the hands of a Unionist minority. Over the following half century Unionists retained control of Derry as the Catholic majority steadily increased. 4 Unionist control was buttressed by voting restrictions. Only ratepayers could vote in local government elections. One-third of voters in the Catholic Bogside in 1964 did not have a vote in local elections. In the neighbouring Protestant working-class area, the Fountain, one-quarter of voters could not vote in local elections. 5 Derry stagnated economically in the 1920s and 30s and then briefly enjoyed a dramatic but temporary economic boom during the Second World War. After the war a Labour government was elected to power in Great Britain. In 1948, the new British government began to introduce radical new social legislation which the Unionist government, somewhat reluctantly, implemented in Northern Ireland. In Derry, the social changes which this legislation produced had direct political effects and would ultimately threaten not just the local power structure but the Northern Ireland state itself. 6 One result of the new welfare state which the British government began to construct was a massive expansion of the public health service, of public education and of related areas in the public sector. The welfare state created many more jobs in middle-class occupations such as teaching or medicine where service professionals in Northern Ireland generally served their own religious community. To take the most dramatic example, in 1948/9 there were 1,450 second-level (i.e. secondary) school teachers in the North. By 1968/9 there were 6, The school system was almost completely segregated by religion and the new expanded Catholic middle class, working in this and other service professions, did not become integrated into the dominant Unionist middle class. In addition they often served working-class Catholic communities and were aware of the grievances in these communities. In Derry, as elsewhere in the North, teachers, doctors and businesspeople from the newly expanded Catholic middle class saw nothing

13 A Short Historical Background to the Conflict xiii attractive in the stagnant politics of the Nationalist party and looked to other forms of organisation. From the mid-1960s onwards a loose group of Catholic moderates, in alliance with a few Protestants in the Liberal and Labour parties, was extremely active in Derry in the 1965 campaign to have the North s new university located in Derry, in tenants associations and housing groups and in local election campaigns but without aligning themselves with any party. This loose group, involving people such as John Hume, Michael Canavan and Claude Wilton among others, provided the sort of respectable but energetic leadership which had simply not existed a decade or two before. By 1968, the group had the political and organisational experience, and the range of contacts necessary, to head a civil rights campaign in the city which had been initiated by local radicals. Many of these moderates would later be founder members of the SDLP. If the development of a new expanded Catholic middle class provided a corp of leaders and organisers, it was probably the expansion of public housing in the new welfare state which created the conditions for mass political action and for the development of a relatively strong radical left-wing movement in Derry, which had long had a strong Labour tradition. 8 In 1948, virtually everyone in Derry still lived in private housing. In working-class Catholic areas like the Bogside and the Brandywell the overwhelming majority of people were the tenants of private landlords. There was no central agency with which tenants as a body could negotiate or to which they could protest and they were on their own against often unscrupulous landlords in a city with a chronic housing shortage. In 1950, the newly established Northern Ireland Housing Trust, which had been set up to make up the chronic shortfall in accommodation in Northern Ireland after the war, began work on its first estate in Derry: Creggan. In 1963, the trust began work on the redevelopment of the Bogside. For the first time tenants had a central agency to bring their grievances to and they gradually began to take advantage of this. The first tenants association in Derry was established in Creggan in By the summer of 1968, there were several active tenants associations, all in Catholic areas of the city. The various associations had links either with Catholic moderates, with the Nationalist party, with Republicans or with the radical wing of the local Labour party. They mobilised a number of community activists who would later play a role in the civil rights movement. Housing discrimination by the Protestant-controlled corporation had always been bound up with the need to ensure that Catholics were not housed in areas where their votes might tip the balance against the

14 xiv A Short Historical Background to the Conflict delicate Unionist control of the city. In 1965, the Stormont government decided not to locate the North s new university in Derry. It was claimed by a Nationalist MP at Stormont that the leadership of the Unionist party in Derry had used its influence to prevent the university being sited in Derry because it would create population changes which the party could not manage. The claim was widely believed in Derry, even by many Unionists. After this, anti-unionists in Derry began to argue that the Unionist corporation was an active hindrance to the development of the city, most importantly because of its housing policy. By 1961, Derry was 67 per cent Catholic but it was still under Protestant control. In 1967, elections to Londonderry Corporation were contested for the first time in decades as the local Labour party challenged both Nationalist and Unionist candidates. The Unionist party took 32.1 per cent of the vote but took 60 per cent of the corporation seats, retaining control of the corporation and illustrating precisely why these elections were so rarely contested. 9 The Unionist control of the corporation, which had been maintained in earlier years by the creative adjustment of ward boundaries, was being perpetuated in the 1960s by simply not building any more houses. There were 1,400 families on the city s waiting list in 1967 but in that year the corporation built not a single house. Houses were being built by the Housing Trust but it was generally allowed by the corporation to build only in the overwhelmingly Catholic South Ward where there was virtually no building land left by In this context, the aims of local housing and community groups had wider political implications as the very fact of Unionist control of the corporation was seen as the central obstacle to progress on housing issues. It was in this context that, in early 1968, the Derry Housing Action Committee (hereafter DHAC), a small group of radicals co-operating in housing agitation in the Bogside began to mount public protests; picketing the Guildhall, occupying the corporation chamber and carrying out acts of civil disobedience. The radicals were a loose alliance of local Republicans, who had been agitating on social issues since 1964, local members of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (hereafter NILP), and a few others. By the summer of 1968, the corporation was under severe pressure from these direct-action tactics. In July 1968 the local radicals announced a plan to march into the old walled city centre, the heart of the Protestant plantation city and long a symbol of Unionist control of the city. The last time an anti-unionist group had tried that was in 1952 when a Nationalist party march was banned and then batoned off the streets, provoking one night of rioting. The July 1968 march was banned

15 A Short Historical Background to the Conflict xv from entering the walled city and the organisers did not attempt to challenge the ban. Then, in August 1968, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (hereafter NICRA) held the first civil rights march in Northern Ireland, from Coalisland to Dungannon, Co. Tyrone where the Unionist-controlled council was accused of housing discrimination. The Derry radicals took part in the march, part of a crowd several thousand strong. On the way back from Tyrone they decided to ask NICRA to sponsor a march in Derry. 11 The local radicals in Derry now organised another march, this time under the sponsorship of NICRA, to take place on 5 October 1968 and to march into the walled city centre of Derry. This march too was banned but this time the organisers decided to defy the ban. They aimed to provoke the government and the RUC into an overreaction and thereby create wide publicity and spark off a popular response. They hoped that this would put the radical left at the forefront of anti-unionist politics in Derry. 12 Every indication is that the Unionist government decided that it was time to put an end to the agitation in Derry by traditional methods. The marchers were batoned off the streets by the RUC. But things had changed dramatically since the Nationalist march had been broken up in In October 1968, repression sparked off three days of rioting, followed by a massive popular civil rights campaign and then a series of events which would culminate in armed conflict and the disintegration of the Unionist state. Notes and references 1 For the background to the Londonderry Plantation see T.W. Moody, The Londonderry Plantation, The City of London and the Plantation in Ulster (William Mullan and Sons, Belfast, 1939). 2 D. Murphy, Derry, Donegal and Modern Ulster, (Aileach Press, Derry, 1981), pp. 41, 50, Frank Curran, Ireland s Fascist City (Derry, Derry Journal, 1946), pamphlet, p. 13 and pp See Frank Curran, Derry. Countdown to Disaster (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1986). 5 Figures calculated by the author from the 1964 Londonderry County Borough Register of Electors. The precise figures are 34 per cent in the Bogside and 26 per cent in the Fountain. 6 For this and following paragraphs see Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Before the Troubles: Derry in the 1960s. An Examination of the Origins of a Violent Conflict (MA, UCG, 1989); Niall Ó Dochartaigh, The Politics of Housing; Social Change and Collective Action in Derry in the 1960s, in Derry and Londonderry: History and Society (Geography Publications, Dublin, 1997).

16 xvi A Short Historical Background to the Conflict 7 Statistical Abstract of Ireland, the Stationery Office, Dublin, ; six counties (later Northern Ireland) section, Table xxxiii. 8 See Ó Dochartaigh, Before the Troubles, pp Ibid., pp See Ó Dochartaigh, The Politics of Housing. 11 Interview with Eamon Melaugh, member of the Republican movement in Derry from the early 1960s until c Prominent in the Derry Unemployed Action Committee in the mid-1960s and the Derry Housing Action Committee in the late 1960s. Member of the DCAC and prominent civil rights activist. Later active in the Workers Party. 12 See Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974), pp