One Man's Terrorist Page 7
One of the most valuable documents of PD’s early phase is an interview published in the New Left Review, featuring some of the group’s dominant personalities, all of whom were in their twenties at the time. The way in which the young activists spoke was just as revealing as the content of anything they said: there was clearly no agreed policy, and one person contradicted the other at will. Bernadette Devlin made no bones about the group’s incoherence: ‘We are totally unorganized and totally without any form of discipline within ourselves. I’d say that there are hardly two of us who really agree, and it will take a lot of discussion to get ourselves organized.’31 One could not imagine the Communist Party or the IRA presenting themselves to the outside world in this fashion.
Unlike those groups, People’s Democracy did not have a long organizational history behind it. It was formed at a mass meeting of Queen’s University students soon after the 5 October march in Derry, and briefly provided a home for just about anyone at the university who disliked the status quo in Northern Ireland. Many of those who attended the early meetings in Queen’s were more liberal than Marxist in their thinking. But it was PD’s radical element that exercised the decisive influence on its trajectory.
Foremost among those radicals was Michael Farrell, a recent Queen’s graduate who now worked at a teacher-training college in Belfast. Farrell had spent time living in London, where he was active in the Irish Workers’ Group alongside Eamonn McCann. Insofar as Farrell and McCann brought Trotskyist ideology back to Northern Ireland with them, it was loosely defined – more a case of rejecting the Soviet Union and its orthodoxy than of aligning themselves with any particular fraction of Trotsky’s Fourth International. By the time he helped establish People’s Democracy, Farrell already had several years of political experience behind him, and he soon became its most influential figure.32 According to Farrell, the ‘hard core’ of People’s Democracy came from a pre-existing far-left group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA).33 Bernadette Devlin, who was a fledgling student activist at the time, also credited the YSA with making ‘a big contribution to our political education’ in the early days of PD.34
As a result, by the end of 1968 there were two potential seeds of the New Left youth culture that had recently left its mark on Paris, Chicago and Berlin: the Derry radicals, who conducted most of their public activity through the DHAC; and PD’s hard-left element, whose centre of gravity lay in Belfast. While the young leftists were certainly uncompromising in their militancy, they directed little of that energy against the partition of Ireland. ‘The partition issue’, McCann later recalled, ‘had for so long been the “property” of what we regarded as contending Tory factions that the mere mention of it smacked of jingoism.’35 Affinity with the New Left, distrust of sectarian politicians (‘Orange and Green Tories’), and belief in the primacy of class – these were the main strands of PD’s half-formed ideology on the eve of the New Year march.
The group’s decision to break the truce was controversial, and figures such as John Hume considered the marchers to be impetuous hotheads, or worse.36 But they also commanded a degree of sympathy from the older generation of activists. Paddy Devlin of the NILP later explained why he supported PD’s chosen course at the time. Devlin simply could not agree with those who were prepared to give O’Neill’s proposals a chance: ‘I was uneasy that they still did not go far enough to rectify the years of unionist abuse and misrule, and I favoured keeping up the pressure that had been created to achieve the fundamental and lasting changes in society that I knew in my bones were necessary.’37 Devlin spoke with more than two decades of hindsight, so he cannot be accused of lacking perspective on what was to follow.
The march set off on New Year’s Day from Belfast’s City Hall with about fifty people in attendance. Paisley’s associate Ronald Bunting led a small group of counter-demonstrators, but there was no serious trouble at the start. An RUC report noted that the PD marchers included Bunting’s son, Ronald Jr – a striking illustration of the group’s desire to reach across traditional boundaries.38 It did not take long for those boundaries to reassert themselves. The procession gradually increased in size over the next couple of days as it made its way along country roads accompanied by a police escort. Loyalist counter-demonstrators tried to block the route at several points, and the RUC sent the march on some lengthy detours. On 2 January, the marchers spent the night in a Catholic village near Maghera. The IRA’s local unit volunteered to protect them from a night-time attack and put an armed guard on the approaches to the village.39
By 4 January, the participants were almost ready to celebrate their arrival in Derry. Seven miles out, they ran into an ambush at Burntollet organized by Ronald Bunting. The loyalists, many of whom were later identified as off-duty B Specials, used stones, cudgels and iron bars to attack the march. The RUC escort proved unable or unwilling to intervene. Bunting himself appeared to be taken aback by the ferocity of his supporters, and made some effort to restrain them; it was mainly through luck that nobody was killed.40 Battered and bruised, with some in need of hospital treatment, the marchers limped their way into Derry, braving a last hail of stones as they passed by a Protestant district on the outskirts of the city centre. A huge crowd was waiting to greet them. Tempers were already running high in Derry after a rally staged the previous night by Ian Paisley in the city’s Guildhall. Now, several hours of rioting broke out – provoked, according to John Hume, by the RUC. Police officers went on the rampage in the Bogside that night, breaking windows and assaulting passers-by.41 In the days that followed, NICRA and John Hume’s DCAC tersely informed O’Neill’s government that the truce was over.
‘A calculated martyrdom’
Lord Cameron later bemoaned the political fallout from the Belfast–Derry march, and accused its organizers of wanting to undermine ‘moderate reforming forces’: ‘Their object was to increase tension, so that in the process a more radical programme could be realized. They saw the march as a calculated martyrdom.’42 So many writers have endorsed this damning verdict that it constitutes a hardened orthodoxy.43 But its empirical basis is much shakier than this consensus would suggest.
Cameron’s report was one of the first attempts to codify a perspective on the civil rights campaign that became increasingly prevalent and remains so to this day. Rejecting the view of NICRA propagated by William Craig and Ian Paisley, Cameron argued that the recent unrest stemmed from well-founded grievances on the part of the Catholic minority that had to be addressed. However, the civil rights agenda had been misappropriated by reckless militants who wanted to overthrow the state by violent means. One motivation for reform was to wean the moderate majority of NICRA supporters away from their extremist fellow-travellers. As we have seen, Cameron accused the Derry radicals of seeking to provoke violence on the 5 October march, and his view of People’s Democracy reflected the same concern to identify ‘troublemakers’.44
On the other hand, Cameron was keen to avoid drawing negative conclusions about the RUC; or, if that proved impossible, to attribute its failings to incompetence rather than malice. This desire was very much in evidence when he addressed the violence at Burntollet:
It is clear that the police were taken by surprise by the scale of the attacks on the march, that the march had heavily over-strained their available resources and that, not expecting the march to get so far, or their numbers by that time to be so great, they neglected to make adequate use of their opportunities for forward planning.45
In its response to Cameron, People’s Democracy suggested that this section should be enough to discredit his entire report, since it gave ‘two quite separate and contradictory explanations’ for the RUC’s failure to protect the march: ‘First, they expected no real trouble, and this despite a Paisleyite meeting in the Derry Guildhall on the previous night. Second, the police expected such trouble at earlier stages that they did not expect the march to reach Burntollet.’46 Cameron’s report also dismissed allegations that the RUC had led the marcher
s into a trap as ‘wholly unjustified … baseless and indeed ridiculous’, without any further discussion.47
How did Cameron establish that the goal of the march organizers was to ‘increase tension’? On the evening of 3 January, a large and hostile crowd of Derry Catholics had gathered outside the meeting called by Ian Paisley in the Guildhall. Eamonn McCann, as the leading spokesman for ‘extremism’ in the Bogside, might have been expected to take advantage of this splendid opportunity for increasing tension. But in his speech to the crowd, McCann did nothing of the sort:
I want to see a lot of radical changes in our society, and I want to see them as soon as possible. Tonight I would achieve this if it could be done. But nothing, nothing whatsoever, can be gained by attacking or abusing the people in the Hall. Don’t you see that this kind of action is precisely what the clever and unscrupulous organizers expect and hope will happen?48
While Cameron noted the efforts of John Hume and other DCAC members to get the crowd to disperse, he said nothing about McCann’s intervention.49 Elsewhere in the report, Cameron did acknowledge that McCann and the People’s Democracy leaders had ‘urged moderation and sought to dissuade demonstrators from violent action on several occasions’, without allowing this to compromise his indictment.50
The effect of the Belfast–Derry march may have been to exacerbate communal divisions, but that does not mean its organizers had that goal in mind when they set out. The main inspiration for Michael Farrell and his comrades was the US civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized in 1965. SNCC’s model appeared to have particular relevance for Northern Ireland: a minority facing discrimination at the hands of regional power-holders had taken to the streets in a bid to force intervention by the federal government that would open the path to reform. Farrell studied the history of the movement in the US, taking much of his analysis from a pamphlet by the Trotskyist writer George Breitman called How a Minority Can Change Society. The possibility of applying the same tactics in Northern Ireland excited him. According to Bernadette Devlin, Farrell and McCann were the only people involved with a clear strategic vision at the time: ‘The general plan seemed to be to draw into conflict the British and the Unionists.’ She confirmed that Farrell took the SNCC march as his template ‘in terms of effect, slogans and everything’.51
This, then, appears to have been the main reason PD decided to break the truce at the beginning of 1969: not to ‘increase tension’ in some aimless way, nor to realize a fantasy of instant revolutionary change, but to pressure the authorities in London into confronting the Unionist establishment. Henry Patterson has suggested that PD’s activist core ‘saw in the burgeoning civil rights marches the possibility of the North’s own revolutionary situation’.52 But the goal of SNCC’s protest had been to quicken the pace of reform, not to overthrow the state. It may be reasonable to question the wisdom of PD’s approach, but to caricature them as irresponsible fanatics who sabotaged any hope of a peaceful future in pursuit of a Marxist pipe dream is profoundly unjust.
Conor Cruise O’Brien did more than most to help establish that hostile caricature. Nevertheless, O’Brien’s work States of Ireland can be used to develop a more fair-minded critique of People’s Democracy. In one of the book’s autobiographical passages, its author recalled speaking at a public meeting in Queen’s during the period between the 5 October march and Burntollet, where he put forward an argument barely distinguishable from that of Michael Farrell, suggesting that London could be forced to intervene over the heads of the Unionist administration through a well-organized campaign of civil disobedience, following the US example. O’Brien then added his thoughts from a later date on the limited scope of his analogy:
It would be perfect, either if Northern Ireland were an island to itself, off the shores of Great Britain, or if there was a sovereign black-majority state to the South of Dixie, which claimed to incorporate Dixie. In the first case, Northern Ireland would now be a fairly peaceful part of the United Kingdom. In the second case, Dixie, not long after Little Rock, would have become a theatre of guerrilla and race-war, with Federal troops being fired on by blacks, and whites preparing for the day of Federal evacuation and the final show-down.53
O’Brien did not claim to have grasped this vital distinction at the time when he spoke in Queen’s. His audience, which most likely included some of those who went on to join the march to Derry in a few weeks’ time, can be forgiven for making the same error. This was the point at which lessons from the US civil rights movement began to lose their relevance. Protests in Mississippi or South Carolina never called the existence of the state itself into question. For all practical purposes, black nationalism in the US was a form of cultural self-assertion, rather than a movement with specific territorial demands, and there was no tradition of African Americans making war on the state that could be compared with the insurrectionary heritage of Irish republicanism.
The basis for non-violent civil disobedience in Northern Ireland was always likely to prove fragile, quite apart from the absence of a leader with Martin Luther King’s charismatic authority. If the state responded to civil rights agitation with violence, it was only a matter of time before someone started firing back.54
A House Divided
Burntollet dealt a hammer-blow to Terence O’Neill’s standing among the nationalist population. The prime minister might have been able to salvage something from the wreckage if he had chosen to express himself differently in the wake of the march, with a few words of sympathy for those who were attacked on the road to Derry. While O’Neill’s statement did criticize the ‘disgraceful violence’ of Bunting’s supporters, he directed the main force of his polemic against the student marchers, condemning their protest as a ‘foolhardy and irresponsible undertaking’ that should have been greeted with ‘silent contempt’.
The Unionist leader suggested two steps that might be taken by his government in response: wider deployment of the B Specials, who had contributed so many of the attackers at Burntollet, and the introduction of new public order legislation to ‘control those elements which are seeking to hold the entire community to ransom’. Both measures would have delighted Ronald Bunting. O’Neill’s concluding words made his emphasis clear: ‘We have heard sufficient for now about civil rights: let us hear a little about civic responsibility.’55
On 6 January, O’Neill’s cabinet listened to a presentation from the RUC’s top brass, who explained that their officers had withdrawn temporarily from Derry’s Catholic neighbourhoods: ‘Considerable strength, possibly even involving the use of firearms, would be required to re-enter the area in the current atmosphere.’56 Ministers agreed that this situation could only be tolerated for a short period of time, and issued a press statement strongly defending the adequacy of O’Neill’s five-point reform package, which left ‘no justification whatsoever’ for continued protests.57
However, O’Neill returned to the cabinet nine days later with a memo that dismissed the package as ‘proposals which most of us knew in our hearts would not really meet the situation’. He now called for a royal inquiry into the recent disturbances, which might bring to light ‘the complexities of the situation, and not least the involvement in Civil Rights of some extremely sinister elements’. Carrying on with the present course was not an option, as the government’s ‘loss of prestige, authority and standing’ since the Derry march had been ‘incalculable’.58 Weeks later, O’Neill decided to call a snap general election as a referendum on his leadership.
People’s Democracy saw the February poll as another opportunity to put its ideas before the people of Northern Ireland, and ran a slate of candidates in eight constituencies that spanned the sectarian divide. Its manifesto combined the civil rights demands for ‘one man, one vote’ and repeal of the Special Powers Act with left-wing economic policies, calling for a crash public housing programme and state investment in industry to guarantee full employment. PD dismissed the
question of partition as ‘irrelevant in our struggle for Civil Rights’.59 There was no standard-bearer for the group in Derry’s Foyle constituency, where Eamonn McCann ran as a Labour candidate. McCann and his associates still intended to work through the NILP, and discouraged efforts to set up a PD branch in the city.60
Michael Farrell ran against Terence O’Neill in his strongly unionist Bannside constituency, where another challenge to the prime minister came from Ian Paisley, who demanded a clamp-down on the civil rights movement. In the Unionist camp, pro- and anti-O’Neill candidates stood against each other throughout the region. The divergence in vote share seemed to be emphatic – almost two to one in O’Neill’s favour. But the breakdown of parliamentary seats still left the hardliners in a strong position, while many of O’Neill’s erstwhile supporters were at best lukewarm in their commitment to reform.61 The newly elected parliament passed a public order bill that outlawed many of the tactics used in recent protests.
A series of bombings at power and water installations prompted O’Neill’s ultimate departure from office in April 1969. Police attributed the bombings to the IRA at the time, but they were actually carried out by the banned Ulster Volunteer Force as part of a ‘strategy of tension’ to undermine O’Neill.62 James Chichester-Clark became the new Unionist leader after narrowly defeating the right-wing candidate Brian Faulkner, and finally committed the government to universal suffrage in local elections. This step might have been greeted with jubilation by NICRA a few months earlier, yet it now proved insufficient to take the heat out of civil rights agitation.