Northern Ireland's '68

Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles ~ New Edition

Simon Prince

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788550383
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

The Troubles may have developed into a sectarian conflict, but the violence was sparked by a small band of leftists who wanted Derry in October 1968 to be a repeat of Paris in May 1968. Like their French comrades, Northern Ireland's 'sixty-eighters' had assumed that street fighting would lead to political struggle.

The struggle that followed, however, was between communities rather than classes. In the divided society of Northern Ireland, the interaction of the global and the local that was the hallmark of 1968 had tragic consequences.

Drawing on a wealth of new sources and scholarship, Simon Prince's timely new edition offers a fresh and compelling interpretation of the civil rights movement of 1968 and the origins of the Troubles. The authoritative and enthralling narrative weaves together accounts of high politics and grassroots protests, mass movements and individuals, and international trends and historic divisions, to show how events in Northern Ireland and around the world were interlinked during 1968.

CHAPTER ONE

Unionism and its State

BUILDING A PROTESTANT STATE

Sir Basil Brooke sat underneath an oak tree on his family’s estate of Colebrooke, Fermanagh, one night a week for much of 1920 and 1921.1 Brooke began his vigil after accompanying his pregnant wife to Dublin, which he found had been transformed in the four years since the Easter Rising. Sinn Féin, which had won a majority of Irish seats in the 1918 Westminster election, was striving to bring into being the republic that had been proclaimed during the insurrection. The struggle to end British rule was spearheaded by the movement’s military wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During Lady Brooke’s confinement, from March to May 1920, the IRA scored a significant victory: Dublin Castle capitulated to Republican hunger strikers and released hundreds of prisoners. Brooke returned from the capital determined to stop the lawlessness that he had seen there from spreading to his part of Ireland. With a dozen other local men, Brooke formed an illegal vigilante force. He had spent the previous decade in the British army – defending the Empire in India and South Africa, at Ypres, Suvla, Vimy, Cambrai and Arras.2 In 1920, the same ‘loyalty and devotion to empire’ required Brooke to ‘fight the agents of murder, anarchy, and terrorism’ in the place of his birth.3

Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned to their homes after the First World War to fight similar battles against revolutionary change. Frenchmen formed the Union Civique, Italians the Organizzazione Civile and Germans the Freikorps and the Einwohnerwehr. In rural, conservative and Catholic Bavaria, war weariness allowed a left-wing Jewish journalist from Berlin to transform a massive peace demonstration into a revolution. Between November 1918 and April 1919, this unlikely revolution regressed into an absurd attempt to erect a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Munich’s rag-tag ‘Red Army’ was easily defeated by regular German troops and Bavarian Freikorps units. The brutal suppression of the Räterepublik and the vengeance visited upon its leaders failed to exorcise the fear of revolution. Bavaria’s small farmers and middle classes believed that when the next insurrection came the police and the army would be no match for the Bolsheviks. Concerned citizens reacted by organising themselves into ‘civil guards’, the Einwohnerwehr. By the start of 1920, around 357,000 men had volunteered to serve in the Einwohnerwehr. The Allied governments saw these paramilitary forces as a way for Germany to get round the commitment it had made to reduce its army to 100,000 men. At the Spa disarmament conference in July 1920, Germany agreed to disband the Einwohnerwehr after the Allies had threatened to occupy the Ruhr. David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, had admitted to the conference that if millions of guns were in the hands of English civilians he would not be able to sleep at night.4

During that same month, Lloyd George agreed to consider enrolling vigilante forces in the North of Ireland into the service of the state. Brooke was one of the men lobbying for official recognition: he told the top British general in Ireland that ‘If the government will help [the people] they will do all they can to help the government.’5 With the war in the South against the IRA escalating, the overstretched British state welcomed the idea of letting loyalists defend the North. In return, Westminster consented to bear the huge costs of arming, equipping and maintaining a Special Constabulary. For leading Ulster Unionists and the British government, this arrangement also had the benefit of calming Protestant fears that they had been left unprotected. Brooke was not alone in worrying that the more extreme loyalists might otherwise have taken matters into their own hands, sparking an accelerating cycle of attack and reprisal.6 Serious sectarian violence did occur – men wearing Special Constabulary uniforms did murder Catholics. But the battle for the North did not degenerate into a full-scale communal conflict. Indeed, it was the new Southern state that descended into civil war following the IRA split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, which had established the Irish Free State. Both factions, however, remained allies in the North. Brooke, County Commandant of the Fermanagh Special Constabulary, led an unsuccessful amphibious assault on the village of Belleek, which had been occupied by IRA irregulars with the help of pro-Treaty forces at the end of May 1922. Although the Belfast government had to turn to the British army to recover the village for the empire, the IRA’s Northern campaign was ultimately defeated by the resistance of the Special Constabulary. When the new Irish Free State army moved against the anti-Treaty IRA in June 1922, incursions across the border ended and Northern volunteers flocked south to fight.7 The immediate threat to the existence of Northern Ireland faded away.

The Special Constabulary not only guarded against the irredentist South, but also against perfidious Albion. With Britain desperately searching for a way out of the Irish bog, Ulster started to lose its friends. The Special Constabulary reduced the North’s dependence upon its doubtful ally. However, the formation of the force did not make the Protestant community master of its own fate. Self-determination required self-government – something that the Unionist population lacked as the crisis came to a head. During the Anglo- Irish truce, which began in July 1921, the British had the Special Constabulary stand down. The IRA’s observance of the truce was not so strict.8 In Fermanagh, volunteers drilled, enforced the economic boycott of Belfast, carried out kidnappings, and attacked police barracks.9 For the British, securing a deal with Sinn Féin mattered more than the security of Northern Ireland. The Unionists therefore were relieved to assume responsibility for law and order under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act at the end of 1921 – just before the IRA’s spring offensive. The Act established the devolved institutions of government, the division of responsibilities between the British and Northern Irish parliaments, the legal requirement for the regime to exercise its legislative and executive powers free from discrimination, and Westminster’s supreme authority. Despite its beginnings as a movement that defended direct rule from Westminster, Unionism had come to embrace devolution as a defence against being abandoned by London. As Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader at the time, explained in the House of Commons debate on the legislation, ‘you cannot knock Parliaments up and down as you do a ball, and, once you have planted them there, you cannot get rid of them.’10 By the summer of 1922, Northern Ireland had become a political fact.

Northern Ireland’s difficult birth marked the state and its inhabitants. A senior British civil servant who was assigned to Belfast in June 1922 was reminded of a previous posting to the Baltic states: ‘The Protestant community of the North feels that it is an outpost of civilisation set precariously on the frontiers of Bolshevism.’ The victorious but embattled unionists believed that they had been ‘misunderstood’ and ‘betrayed’ by Britain.11 The long-standing alliance between Ulster Unionism and the British Conservative Party had faltered, while the cross-class alliance of Protestants had held firm. In March 1922, under pressure from London and under attack from Dublin, the Northern Irish government had agreed that Belfast’s mixed districts should be policed by a force made up of equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics. As the South turned in on itself and Britain turned away from Ireland, the need to build a non-sectarian state disappeared. Without allies to please and enemies to appease, the Unionist leadership was left only with supporters to indulge. The power compromise between the party elite and its grass-roots was continually being renegotiated. Extreme Protestants successfully pushed for the law to be strictly enforced against Catholic offenders and to be applied with discretion when loyalists were accused of criminal acts.12 Plans to establish a secular public education system fell foul of the Churches. Integration gave way to segregation: Protestants attended state schools while Catholics were catered for by the voluntary sector. Unionist associations campaigned for changes to the structure of local government that would allow them to take control of councils previously held by Irish Nationalists.13 In Fermanagh, the abolition of proportional representation and the redrawing of boundaries ensured that when the 1924 local elections were held a county with a Catholic majority returned a Unionist council. Brooke represented the new ward of Brookeborough.14 The safeguards for minorities contained in the Government of Ireland Act proved no more effective than similar provisions in the treaties of recognition concluded between the Allies and the new states of central Europe. Britain had more pressing concerns than protecting minorities.15

By pandering to Protestants, the Northern Irish government further alienated Catholics from the new state. But peace could never have brought reconciliation. The two communities could not forget the riots, the shipyard expulsions, the burning houses, the bombings, the kidnappings and the assassinations. As the violence receded, the conflict mindset persisted in the form of conspiracy theories. They described a society marked by a binary divide between patriots and a diverse – often incongruous – collection of traitors.16

In Bavaria, the Right portrayed the short-lived Soviet as a Jewish– Bolshevik conspiracy that had stabbed the Germany army in the back and unleashed a reign of red terror. This myth was embraced by a Bohemian corporal serving with the Munich garrison: Adolf Hitler.17

In Northern Ireland the unionist population believed that the global conspiracy was being orchestrated by the Vatican, not the Kremlin. A Catholic civil servant ‘learned’ that his Protestant colleagues were convinced that he was ‘subject to malevolent direction by black-robed priests to whom Rome had entrusted its master plan for world domination’.18

Conspiracy theories disfigured Northern life. They even gripped the mind of the otherwise phlegmatic Brooke. On 12 July 1933, the anniversary of the Protestant William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne, Brooke warned that Northern Ireland was being undermined by its enemies. The new MP for Linaskea explained: ‘There was a definite plot to overpower the vote of unionists in the north. He would appeal to loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ protestant lads and lassies … catholics … had got too many appointments for men who were really out to cut their throats if opportunity arose.’19 Brooke was never allowed to forget these comments. When he claimed that ‘his own view was that a man’s religion was his own affair’ during a 1967 television interview, the Derry Journal reminded its readers that this was the man who had once boasted that ‘he had not a Roman Catholic about his place’.20 But Brooke’s plot was not a figment of a rabidly sectarian imagination. In June 1933, the Unionists had lost the previously safe council ward of Linaskea to an independent farmers’ candidate. Brooke blamed the defeat upon the way that the rural depression was being exploited to weaken Unionism’s cross-class alliance and upon the ‘peaceful penetration’ of Southern workers. There was no doubt in his mind that the new government in Dublin was behind both these threats. Eamon de Valera, one of the leaders of the Irish revolution, and Fianna Fáil, the successor to the Sinn Féin faction that had rejected the Treaty, had taken office in 1932 promising to end partition. A slight increase in Catholic numbers and the defection of part of the Protestant vote to independent candidates would deliver Fermanagh to de Valera. Brooke’s speech was warning the unionist people to stand firm and remain vigilant against Irish nationalism.21

Conspiracy theories, therefore, were not irrational: they constituted the dark reflection of competing visions of the future. Conspiracy theories gave expression to anxieties and reduced them to order. This was implicitly acknowledged by Sir James Craig,...