Saturday, October 04, 2008
It was forty years ago today…
It wasn’t Bunker Hill nor Bastille Day nor yet Easter Monday because there was no victory, not many were hurt nor was there a clear outcome. But October 5th 1968 has to be the landmark day of the death of a kind of innocence when the civil rights march in shabby little Duke St in Derry was batoned by the police, launching more or less continuous violence that never really stopped for thirty years. It was too an early example of the power of television. Northern Ireland was suddenly famous. We could all pile in and create our own nasty little Truman Show. The civil rights were to come tumbling in right enough, but too little too late, and disastrously dismissed as a sign of weakness in the State not only by the beneficiaries but by the State’s own supporters. Each side brought about the other’s worst fears. The best hummed and ha’d, the worst were full of divilment. The movement of “ too many chiefs” (right Edwina), they had tactics but no strategy and even worse, neither had the government, beyond affronted arrogance and total ineptitude.
Adds Bernadette is still in struggle, wants to remain a living icon not a celluloid one. “At the Cannes film festival this year a biopic of Devlin was announced, to be called The Roaring Girl. She will be played by Sally Hawkins, star of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, apparently. But not if Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (as she has been for years) gets her way. “The whole concept is abhorrent to me,” she says, revealing that her lawyers are challenging the film. “How dare anybody make a pretend life for me while I’m still living the real one?”
On the “might have beens”
“Lord Paul Bew argued that an opportunity was lost sometime between the October 5th civil rights march in Derry and the attack on the People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry at Burntollet the following January. He felt the then unionist prime minister, Terence O’Neill, had taken on his hardliners and was preparing to reform the Northern state. “Burntollet changed it all,” he argued, adding that the response to the challenge posed by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was amateurish.”
“Amateurish” is too kind. On the other hand, “the jackboot heel of the of unionism” is an absurd exaggeration. The RUC had only 4000 officers and the B Specials of the post war, post 1956-62 IRA campaign were barely in existence as a disciplined force. It might have been John Bull’s political slum, but it was a sleepy slum most of the time. And as for the downtrodden? Who am I to deny them, but as a student at the time I had learned the maxim of Tocqueville, the peerless early historian of both the French and American revolutions, that revolutions happen among people on the rise.
We all have our preferred version of the political reform that never was. My dream counterfactual question is: Had O’Neill gone into the February 69 election offering a temporary grand coalition with the nationalists or the young civil righters who became the SDLP, could he have gained a majority of the 52 Stormont seats? It would have been worth a try, better than hoping that his threadbare charisma could have pulled it off with “O’Neill Unionists” alone. Instead, incited by the paranoid Paisley, the unionist split opened wide and never healed. Nothing has so far taken its place, not even an empowered civil society.
And so today at an anniversary event, the former chief of staff posing as an inheritor of the civil rights movement, scolds the successors of the supposed unionist monolith for their pusillanimity.
Two last thoughts. Some lessons have been learned, at enormous cost. The governments whose agents attacked demonstrators in the US, France and Northern Ireland in that era all paid a heavy price. Governments are cannier now. And two: the superstructure of the Northern Ireland state collapsed quite quickly into the chaos of three decades, but the infrastructure proved surprisingly durable, surviving to be recast, albeit with painful slowness today. Nowhere better than NI provides a better example of the wisdom of political evolution over revolution. The terrible pity of it that it took nearly 40 years to learn it , and even now, not everybody has fully grasped the point. It wasn’t a terrible beauty. It was a terrible bloody waste of time and no one should dignify it as some great international object lesson for the sake of some politician’s ego.
Brian Walker @ 07:41 PM
“the B Specials of the post war, post 1956-62 IRA campaign were barely in existence as a disciplined force."-the b specials since their incption were never a disciplined force.that was the fundamental problem with them.
paul bews revisionest outlook is hilarious as well.they shouldnt have demanded their equal rights because oneill was about to triumph over his hardliners!!!Posted by on Oct 04, 2008 @ 08:32 PMI don’t know Brian, the 6 county ‘administration’ is possibly more disempowering and incestuous than the Unionist only regime way back then. Neither operated in the interests of all and this one doesn’t operate at all. Direct challenges from people to a failed politcal elite should really have a much broader base of potential support and revolutions tend to come from nowhere.
Posted by on Oct 04, 2008 @ 08:58 PMhe B Specials of the post war, post 1956-62 IRA campaign were barely in existence as a disciplined force
When were they ever a disciplined force. murderers in uniforms is what they were
Posted by on Oct 04, 2008 @ 09:42 PM“The governments whose agents attacked demonstrators in the US, France and Northern Ireland in that era all paid a heavy price.”
So what price did the Dublin government pay in 1966, Brian, when the Guards batoned folks off the streets?
Posted by on Oct 04, 2008 @ 10:30 PM“When were they ever a disciplined force. murderers in uniforms is what they were”
Well, they were a cheap paramilitary, the IRA were also cheap, the money wasn’t there for salaried conflict.
When General Collins people bombed shipyard workers in trams, what part of the Laws and Customs of War on Land was tram splintering in?
A yardie, is a prod, is a UVFer, I suppose so, many were armed, in many cases, but the same goes for tossing a grenade into a bar on the Falls Road.
I don’t see the the profit ( or the glory) in low-intensity civil war, it doesn’t fix anything quickly enough to be worth the trouble.
I predict that very few Catholic youngsters in the future will attend upon the last thirty years as a patriotic journey, because it wasn’t.
Posted by on Oct 04, 2008 @ 10:52 PM“So what price did the Dublin government pay in 1966, Brian, when the Guards batoned folks off the streets? “
Nevin - where and when was this? And in what context?
(codeword - ill !!!)Posted by on Oct 04, 2008 @ 11:31 PMCertainly thought provoking.I know that some of my own relatives were subjected to the brutality of the B-Specials,and harassment,men who had known them all their lives,stoppinng them and searching them and asking their personal details- when they already knew them,for no other reason than their Catholicism,which was perceived as anti state.
Truth be told a bag of potatoes cost the same in Derry as it did in Londonderry ,and the poor were kept that way.
Had Unionism seriously tried to address the concerns that were arising,the last 40 years could have been avoided,and,the protagonists of violence would not have had the excuse that it was their(the Unionist Government’s) fault and therefore somehow justifiable .
No cause can ever justify those who claim to be Irishmen killing their fellow Irishmen.Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 02:36 AMIt’s a pity I think to get too hung on the Specials in the context of the whole Troubles starting from October 5. The comparative point I had in mind was their role in the border campaign of 1956 -61 in which they were mainly deployed in border patrolling unlike the 20s, doing the things Danny describes above. The NI government learned the wrong lesson from that campaign, believing firm military type action plus internment mainly had defeated it, whereas the crucial factor had been the opposition of the great majority of the Catholic community. It was clearly counter-productive for the NI government, even by their own lights, quite apart from the views of those of many Slugger contributors, to retain a fundamentally untrained force with access to arms into the late sixties in what was a military, not a policing role. Their survival was one of the best examples of the failure of politics to reform the state after its emergence. As a student in Derry Aug 69, I froze at the sight of young men in ill-fitting uniforms, waving batons in Waterloo Place, clearly at sea, immediately attracting a hail of petrol bombs which threatened to engulf the whole city centre, only thankfully to be stopped by the arrival of the troops. I also don’t forget the sight of one of them brandishing a lighted petrol bomb on the city walls and throwing into the Bogside. This deployment was made very reluctantly by the NI government because PM Wilson and Defence Secretary Healy would not send in the troops until all local resources had been exhausted.
“So what price did the Dublin government pay in 1966, Brian, when the Guards batoned folks off the streets?” Nevin, I’m scratching my head here. Do you mean by any chance:
“Rioting in Dublin in protest at the marching of the Orange Order on Sat February 25th 2006..
A crowd of 500 counter-demonstrators burnt cars, smashed British-owned businesses and threw missiles and a petrol bomb at Gardai in the center of Dublin as they attempted to stop the march by the loyalist paramilitary associated “LoveUlster” group. Several Gardai were hospitalised.”Embarrassment and concern is the answer, but it wasn’t going to rock the State.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 09:20 AMDewi and Brian, can I suggest you try the noble tradition of googling ;) How’s about a little search with, er, ‘garda baton dublin 1966’ and then click on ‘more results ...’ under the first item on the list.
Inquiry into Dublin street incidents
Dr. O’Connell: Does the Minister agree that this baton-swinging democracy serves as a showpiece as suggested by the Taoiseach, when we have disturbances like this provoked by the police?
Mr. B. Lenihan: The Deputy and certain other members of his Party appear to want to bring parliamentary democracy in Ireland into a state of anarchy in which anything might happen.
Do you suppose any member of the Republican fraternity got clattered in Dublin in 1966 and Derry in 1968 and if it was noted which of the baton-wielding forces delivered the greater oomph?
Did RTE bring both of these displays of ‘brutality’ to the attention of the world’s press?
[contd]
Mr. Corish: Surely we have a right to ask questions in this House without the Minister’s alleging sinister motives about the putting down of a question?
Mr. B. Lenihan: I have to know the facts surrounding this and other matters connected with recent subversive activities in the State.
So it was all the fault of those bloody Socialists. Unionists and Nationalists, on the other hand, were more inclined to performance art ie getting ‘Stoned’.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 10:17 AM“the landmark day of the death of a kind of innocence”
Ah, yes, good old (Stratton) Mills and Boon.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 10:25 AM[aside]Imagined comment on an imagined scene from the Roaring Girl involving the young Bernadette and the younger Ian:
We filmed it with and without the kiss, so he had both options.
“But by that point of the story you’re just so desperate for them to get it together. And I was desperate for it to happen,” she laughs again. “He had no choice. I came at him. No, it was lovely. It was a kind of magic. And I’m really glad it was kept in.”
She adds: “I think the purists will have something to say about that but I hope they’re forgiving and understand that we’re appealing to a modern audience who expect it now.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 11:00 AMBrian,
As a primary school student, didn’t you learn to tell the difference between dates, between October 1968 and August 1969? The Troublse did not start as a result of Duke Street - absolutely not, and to suggest that they did is frankly indefensible. What did happen as a result of Duke Street was the end of the old Stormont regime of discrimination, which became untenable as a result of the pictures of police brutality being flashed round the world. Just as Eamon Melaugh had predicted when he secured the agreement of NICRA to sponsor the march.
I heard Melaugh talk yesterday about this at The Workers’ Party Northern Ireland Regional conference. Yes, he and the other organisers knew that by attempting to march into the Diamond they would be banned, and meet a heavy-handed response. But that heavy handed response was a long way from the Troubles. Although the UVF carried out some murders in 1966, no shots were fired again until August 1969, and the situation even then would not have been irretreviable but for a number of mistakes made, which gave encouragement and a breeding ground for support for a small number of people on both sides to acrry out terrorists campaigns.
After Duke Street, the unionist regime was finished. That much is clear. London was insisting on reform, and O’Neill and others knew they would have to give in, though very significant sections of unionism remained intransigent. If we want to understand why the Troubles broke out when they did, let’s look at what London and Belfast were doing between October 5th and August 1969. The answer is not moving fast enough. That is why the Troubles did not begin in October 1968 - had they moved fast enough, there wouldn’t have been any Troubles.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 11:47 AM“had they moved fast enough, there wouldn’t have been any Troubles”
No. Really? That other socialist, Eamonn McCann, was on Sunday Sequence this morning. He invited listeners to read the banners that were being carried on October 5. Perhaps someone could post a selection of the slogans. They might help to explain Lenihan’s anxieties about anarchy back in 1966.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 12:01 PMMcCann on the significance of the Oct 5 date in Sunday Sequence:
“It is the day commonly identified with the day the Troubles, you know, actually began ... and it’s as good a day as any other ..”
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 12:17 PMbrian walker,
‘The terrible pity of it that it took nearly 40 years to learn it , and even now, not everybody has fully grasped the point. It wasn’t a terrible beauty. It was a terrible bloody waste of time’
And it’s still a waste of time even if much less bloody:(. The NI State in it’s present format remains a nonsense .
garibaldy,
‘ If we want to understand why the Troubles broke out when they did, let’s look at what London and Belfast were doing between October 5th and August 1969. The answer is not moving fast enough.
Fast forward to 2008 . Note the deja vu as the DUP struggle with the parts of devolution they don’t want . Most DUP members and some of their politicians would prefer to break a blackthorn stick over the heads of SF than yield another millimetre . The ‘battle of 40 years’ has now evolved to a ‘battle a day’ in the words of First Minister Robinson.
‘Governments are cannier now.’
Perhaps in the UK and ROI and elsewhere . The evidence from Stormont would suggest that the degree of canniness is directly correlated to the least amount of time the DUP actually have to talk directly to SF and vice versa .
Both parties will achieve the highest level of canniness -out cannying even both governments if they stop talking to each other completely .
It sounds like a plan .
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 12:18 PMHere are a few of the slogans on the placards that Eamonn highlighted as being from the Labour tradition. They complement Lenihan’s comments about anarchy and state subversion in the earlier post.
“Tories out, North and South”
“Terence O’Neill is a two-faced Tory trickster”
“Tories are vermin”
Much of the nuance is lost in any simplistic ‘two sides’ analysis.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 12:34 PMNevin,
There were of course people who wanted revolution, sectarian violence, a campaign against Britain, etc but the point is that the conditions for them to develop support would never have emerged had there been reform in time. And is October 5th commonly identified with teh start of the Troubles? I genuinely don’t think so. Hence the dates people usually give for the Troubles being 1969.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 12:34 PMGaribaldy, IIRC local government reform had been progressing very slowly in Stormont from about 1966. The Stormont papers are online.
I spotted a proposal from Phelim O’Neill in early 1968(?) for IIRC the retention of a local authority in Belfast alongside six county authorities. It seems this was too radical for political and other vested interests here.
You’ve already noted that the organisers of the October 5 march had confrontation in mind and, historically, confrontation was likely to lead to riots and, seemingly, everyone is surprised when stones are replaced by guns. Check out A T Q Stewart’s “Narrow Ground” sometime if you have time for his reflections on sermons in stones.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 12:55 PMBenadette Devlin answers the point re Oct 68 or Aug 69 in an interview in the English Independent with Cole Moreton .
‘extract’
She can’t help herself, though. McAliskey (nee Devlin ) loves to talk. The march in Derry on 5 October 1968 was, she says, “the beginning of it all. I can still see, in my mind, the absolute hatred on the faces of police officers. My understanding of the society I was in was irrevocably changed.”It had been organised by the newly formed Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, to protest at discrimination against Catholics. Some participants have admitted they were trying to provoke the authorities.
Not her. “Until then I thought of policemen as the ones who kept the rowdy drinkers in line at my grandmother’s pub.”
Newspaper reports described a baton charge by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. “This wasn’t a baton charge,” she says bitterly. “This was a pent-up hatred. This was naked violence. This was three or four men with long cudgels standing over someone on the ground and hitting and hitting them.”
This is the old Bernie Devlin, phrase-making through clenched teeth. “This was police following those who had dragged away the injured, and beating them up as well. This was a realisation that your worst enemy was in a uniform and had the power,” she almost spits it out, “to kill you.” She still feels deeply about it. “I hate them. Hate the police.” Surely she has to work with them now? “It’s not personal. But it is my deepest prejudice.”
In 1968 Devlin had just begun her last year studying psychology at Queen’s University. “I was a first-class honours profile student. Then it was all swept away. My degree and my career. It says something about the cataclysmic impact things had on me at the time that I just didn’t care.”
She started a radical student movement called People’s Democracy, and was taken up by the media.
Remarkable things happened within a year. She was thrown out of university, but elected as a unity candidate for Mid Ulster. She wrote a book. She was carried on the shoulders of Irish Americans on a trip to New York. She was jailed for inciting a riot and served six months in prison. She also started to upset a lot of people who had voted for her. “I went away to London and knocked about with the socialists and the Gypsies and the feminists. Best education I could have. But people here said, ‘Confine yourself to our issues. And please cut your hair and lengthen your skirt. And don’t smoke.’ I said, ‘I think youse were looking for somebody else!’”
She horrified them further by having a daughter, Roisin, out of wedlock (although she married the father, Michael McAliskey. They are still together). She was defeated in the next general election, by which time Bloody Sunday had happened. “That was when the civil rights movement ended and the armed struggle began.”
How so? “That was the point of realisation for me that the penalty for demanding equal rights in your society was that your government would kill you. Then you say,
‘If it’s OK for the government to declare war on the people, the people have a right to declare war on the government’
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 03:17 PMGaribaldi, No, I do believe there was a continuum from October 5, not an IRA conspiracy but as Prince puts it quite well, an even which proved to be a trigger point. Nothing is inevitable except death so I don’t think it was quite inevitable that O’Neill was immediately doomed. I acceptthough that firm and sensitive intervention from Westminster to bring unionists and nationalist together in the manner of later negotiation might have helped but nobody in London knew the music; they knew more about Aden than Belfast.There were a few moments of hope left I would suggest, at the time of the O’Neill election of Feb 69 - and there would have been more hope still if there had been PR, because this was one election in which cross community voting might have made an impact. The final glimpse of hope might have been the Give Peace a Chance surge just before Aug 69, but this had no political expression. I fear there were enough in the Bogside who had their dander up and enough in Belfast on both sides who wanted to set the highly combustible situation alight. In other words, enough wanted a fight without having any idea of the outcome.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 04:46 PM“not an IRA conspiracy” - Brian Walker
So what were the subversive activities that Lenihan appeared to be dealing with in 1966, other than those referred to by Sean Garland and printed in Stormont Hansard prior to October 5, 1968? Why was there a need to form the Derry Citizens Action Committee a few days after the march?
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 06:04 PMBrian,
Death and taxes surely? Sorry for my rather narked tone earlier by the way. But I cannot see how October 5th triggered anything. Except that London made clear in meetings with Stormont in the weeks that followed that the situation could no longer go unaddressed. In that sense, October 5th is not the beginning of anything, but it is the end of the unionist regime as it had existed since 1921.
From what I remember of his book, Prince is contradicting himself here, because I think he argues in the book that it is the Long March organised by a faction of the PDs, and the loyalist attacks on it, that mean that the Troubles will follow. But again, I want to see someone outline what this chain of events actually is, and how it follows that either a civil rights march on October 5th or in January 1969 led to a loyal order procession in Derry sparking such massive violence not only in Derry but also in Armagh, and especially Belfast. The trigger was not Duke Street,or Burntollet. It was the Apprentice Boys march - and let’s not forget that the grounds given for the ban on the October 5th march was that the Apprentice Boys (though it may have been another of the loyal orders) moved a march traditionally held in the morning to the afternoon to clash with the NICRA march.
What made the riots in August the start of something new was the fact that the forces of the state not only attacked those challenging the status quo, they did so fairly indiscriminately in the Bogside and in the lower Falls and Springfield Road, and allowed the loyalist mob - a constant presence in NI politics since the Divis Street riots in 1964 and something that had reared its head in opposition to every peaceful civil rights march - to attack and burn houses. Without the actions of the state forces in doing this, the riots may have remained just that. But in facilitating the attack on Bombay Street et al, the forces of the state created a new situation.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 07:02 PMGaribaldy, O’Neill resigned on 28 April 1969 and the day before the Sunday Times Insight team reported:
The monster of sectarian violence is well out of its cage. The issue now is no longer Civil Rights or even houses and jobs. The issue now is whether the state should exist and who should have the power, and how it should be defended; and this is an issue on which the wild men on both sides have sworn for 40 years, frequently in blood, that they will never back down. [Bardon: “A History of Ulster"]
The genie would appear to have been out of the bottle quite some time before events of August 1969.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 08:47 PMNevin
‘The genie would appear to have been out of the bottle quite some time before events of August 1969. ‘
Indeed the UVF were the first to go for the guns in 1912 with the ‘smuggling in’ a shipload of arms from Germany.
The genie could have been put back in the bottle in 1974 with Sunningdale. That failed too . The latest attempt is also failing .
This unloosed ‘genie’ will never again go back into the NI bottle as it is presently constituted .
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 09:03 PMGreenflag, guns were in use here prior to 1912.
It had been a popular movement in rural Donegal where it provided a secret network for the poteen makers, and was transplanted into the Bogside from the early 1800s. It came to public notoriety in Derry in 1813 after armed Ribbonmen clashed with the Catholic Bishop of Derry, whom they termed ‘Orange Charlie’ (Charles O’Donnell, 1747-1823), and with Apprentice Boys in 1822.
Lenihan was very concerned for the fate of the genie in 1966 [see earlier post].
Posted by on Oct 05, 2008 @ 09:37 PM
