2

Fish through a Desert

Army of the People

The task of rejuvenating the IRA after Operation Harvest fell on the shoulders of its new chief of staff, Cathal Goulding, a working-class Dubliner who was about to turn forty. From a wellknown republican family, Goulding already had an IRA record dating back to his teens. He had been interned during the Second World War, and watched the Border Campaign unfold from a British jail cell after being captured on a mission to steal weapons from an armoury in Essex. Like his childhood friend, the playwright Brendan Behan, Goulding combined a republican outlook with left-wing sympathies and was not afraid to call the movement’s orthodoxy into question. Now he would have to draw upon all the authority bestowed by his track record, as he guided the IRA’s dwindling core of faithful activists into uncharted territory.

The Belfast republican Billy McMillen later described the shattering impact of the campaign’s failure upon the movement: ‘The IRA had to face the fact that armed resistance to British rule in the North was getting the cold shoulder from the overwhelming mass of the Irish people.’ In the immediate aftermath, McMillen recalled, many IRA Volunteers ‘succumbed to the general feeling of hopelessness and despair and drifted off to attempt to build their personal lives again’. For those who remained, ‘the task of rebuilding the organization in the face of paralysing apathy and lack of support from the ordinary people was a daunting one.’1

Confronted with this challenge, the leadership team that crystallized around Goulding decided to broaden the focus of the movement and tilt it sharply to the left. Republicans would no longer confine themselves to preparation for a guerrilla campaign against British rule in the North. In addition to their clandestine work, IRA members were now expected to take part in open political activity, performing a new role as social agitators. Their goal was to organize a mass movement among workers and small farmers that could overthrow the two Irish states, north and south, and replace them with an all-Ireland socialist republic.

The IRA’s house publication, An tÓglách, called for a determined struggle against those ‘moneylords depending on the British connection for support’ who still ruled Ireland half a century after the Rising: ‘The essence of Tone and Connolly’s teaching is that the freedom of the Irish people can only be achieved through a complete break with the British Empire (under any name) and that the only power capable of achieving and maintaining that freedom is a National Movement led by the Irish working class.’² Goulding and his associates began to criticize much of the republican tradition as it had developed since 1916, with the help of survivors from the previous generation. George Gilmore, who had taken part in the ill-fated Republican Congress experiment of the 1930s, contributed a series of articles to the United Irishman calling for a return to the politics of James Connolly.³

The IRA leadership used carefully chosen quotations from Wolfe Tone and Patrick Pearse to legitimize their freshly minted socialist ideology, stressing its continuity with the republican heritage. However, there could be no mistaking their political innovations. Operation Harvest had been exclusively northern in its scope, but much of the agitational work conducted by republicans now took place south of the Irish border. Goulding insisted that confrontation with the Dublin establishment, and with the ‘economic imperialism’ of foreign capitalists, was just as important as the struggle against British rule in the North: ‘While the IRA faced North, its sole aim being the ending of partition, the salesmen of imperialism aided by their native servants commenced a systematic takeover of Irish assets, a systematic speculation in Irish money, Irish manpower, Irish land. The Army guarded a frontier while the imperialists quietly entered by another and laid claim to Ireland.’4

Kieran Conway, a university student who joined the movement in the late 1960s, has described the charismatic aura of its most influential leaders: ‘Cathal Goulding, Seán Garland and Seamus Costello were living, visible, here-and-now revolutionaries, who had done prison time, or carried the scars of British bullets on their bodies, unlike the dead and distant heroes of the other left-wing groups.’⁵ Seán Garland, like Goulding, came from a working-class background in Dublin’s north inner city. He had been seriously wounded during the Border Campaign while leading an attack on an RUC barracks in Fermanagh. Two of Garland’s comrades were killed during the raid, each inspiring a celebrated folk song. His reputation for toughness, both physical and ideological, was to be greatly reinforced in the years to come. Seamus Costello was also a veteran of Operation Harvest: after leading an IRA unit on a cross-border raid as a teenager, he was nicknamed ‘the Boy General’, and the loss of a finger in a training accident added to his mystique. Youthful, good-looking and highly articulate, Costello became a poster boy for the movement’s political turn, winning a council seat in his native Wicklow after building up a local base through energetic community activism.

The president of Sinn Féin, Tomás Mac Giolla, did not have the same military profile as Garland or Costello, although he had also been interned during Operation Harvest and now served as chairman of the IRA’s central authority, the Army Council.⁶ After some initial hesitation, he became a strong supporter of Goulding’s left turn. As a university graduate, Mac Giolla was an exception to the rule in the IRA leadership, where self-taught men like Goulding and Garland held sway. When the Border Campaign lurched to a halt, Peter Berry, a senior official at Dublin’s Department of Justice, disdainfully referred to IRA Volunteers as ‘men of limited education and poor personality who have made no particular mark in their jobs and private lives’.7 Cathal Goulding would have despised Berry’s elitism, but he was keen to recruit some college-trained intellectuals who could give the movement’s new platform a more elaborate theoretical foundation. Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston stepped forward to play that role. Johnston, the son of an Ulster Presbyterian who had taken a lonely stand against Unionism during the Home Rule Crisis, became the IRA’s director of education.

Opposition to Goulding’s new departure soon began to emerge. Some veterans drifted away from the movement, while other leading figures continued to oppose Goulding from within. Two of the most important dissenters were the IRA’s director of intelligence, Seán Mac Stíofáin, and Goulding’s predecessor as chief of staff, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. Mac Stíofáin, born in England of part-Irish descent, had served in the Royal Air Force before joining the IRA. He was arrested in 1953 on the same arms procurement venture that had landed Cathal Goulding in jail, and got to know members of the Cypriot revolutionary group EOKA while serving time in Pentonville Prison. Ó Brádaigh had seen action during the Border Campaign and now worked as a schoolteacher in Roscommon, a poor, largely rural county in Ireland’s west. Both men held positions on the Army Council.

In many cases, the resistance to Goulding stemmed from conservative political attitudes held by IRA members. Others simply believed that the IRA should concentrate on the struggle for national independence and steer clear of ‘divisive’ social questions. However, some traditional republicans also held the new platform responsible for a perceived slackening of commitment to armed struggle. After bubbling beneath the surface for several years, this current of opinion was forcefully articulated in July 1969 by a well-known Belfast republican, Jimmy Steele, at the reinterment of two IRA men who had been hanged in Britain during the Second World War. Steele pointedly heaped praise on those who ‘went forth to carry the fight to the enemy, into enemy territory; using the only methods that will ever succeed, not the method of the politicians, nor the constitutionalists, but the method of soldiers, the method of armed force’. In Goulding’s new-look IRA, he added contemptuously, ‘one is now expected to be more conversant with the teachings of Chairman Mao than those of our dead patriots.’8

Of course, there was a certain irony in Steele’s invective, as the movement led by Mao had not shown any reluctance to use force in pursuit of its objectives and was now a leading sponsor of armed struggle in the Third World. The IRA itself discreetly petitioned Mao’s government for support in the 1960s, although Chinese diplomats snubbed its emissary Seamus Costello.⁹ Cathal Goulding rejected claims that the movement had turned its back on guerrilla warfare. Speaking at an IRA commemoration in 1965, he gave the following assurance to supporters: ‘The only way to rid this country of an armed British force is to confront them with an armed force of Irishmen backed by a united Irish people. The British forces in the Six Counties will be confronted by such a force.’¹⁰ At Bodenstown two years later, Goulding stressed that there was no contradiction between armed struggle and political action: ‘The will to use military force does not exclude the use before or at the same time of other forces both political and social, to the realization of the same end.’¹¹

A similar message could be found in a confidential IRA document obtained by the Irish government when its police force arrested Seán Garland in 1966. Although Garland’s paper warned that ‘classic guerrilla-type operations cannot be successful’, it went on to recommend a different type of insurgency in the North, with operations ‘designed to inflict as many fatal casualties as possible’ on the British Army: ‘We must learn from the Cypriots and engage in terror tactics only.’¹²

The movement’s ideological baggage made it harder to discuss such matters without confusion. For many republicans, after the apostasy of Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera and Seán MacBride, ‘politics’ was a dirty word, and only those who bore arms for the Republic could be trusted to follow the right path. Garland’s blueprint may have been partly designed to appease men like Seán Mac Stíofáin, who worried that the movement was drifting away from its true vocation. Mac Stíofáin would still have been troubled by the document’s stress on the need to build a political movement ‘with an open organization and legal existence’ as the precursor to any ‘extra-legal’ action.13

Ruairí Ó Brádaigh was more sympathetic to the idea of political agitation as a complement to the IRA’s traditional role. He had stood for election to the Dáil during the Border Campaign and won a seat on an abstentionist platform. But Ó Brádaigh personified a type of republican for whom abstention from the assemblies in Dublin, Belfast and London was not merely a tactic but a sacrosanct principle. From his perspective, the IRA’s right to wage war derived from its claim to represent strict legal continuity with the Second Dáil of 1921. Whatever leeway might exist for tactical innovation in other fields, there could be no flexibility on this point.

As a result, when Goulding and his allies broached the question of taking seats in parliament, there was bound to be a strong backlash from traditionalists. Seamus Costello was one of the strongest voices calling for the policy of abstention to be discarded. Goulding and Garland later argued that he was needlessly abrasive, alienating people who might otherwise have been won over.¹⁴ But Costello combined this view with a firm belief in the necessity of armed struggle, as he made clear when speaking at Bodenstown in 1966: ‘To imagine that we can establish a republic solely by constitutional means is utter folly. The lesson of history shows that in the final analysis, the robber baron must be disestablished by the same methods that he used to enrich himself and retain his ill-gotten gains.’

For Costello, it was essential to maintain ‘a disciplined armed force which will always be ready to strike at the opportune moment’.¹⁵ Seán Garland had a similar message at Wolfe Tone’s graveside two years later, where he urged the IRA to embrace a new role. The movement’s open, political wing was expected to function as ‘a bridge between the underground activities of the army and the people’, while the IRA itself provided the necessary muscle: ‘It must be ready to defend a revolution in the making, to defend the people who are agitating for their rights.’¹⁶

The Orange State

For all the bombast of its leaders, Goulding’s new model army was more of an irritant than an existential threat to the ruling class in Dublin. Its supporters took part in direct action of various kinds, from ‘fish-ins’ on the property of foreign landowners to the occupation of vacant buildings.17 There was a gradual increase in IRA membership in the South as it recovered from the low point of the early 60s, rising from 657 in 1962 to 1,039 four years later, according to police estimates.¹⁸ However, Goulding had no illusions about the movement’s overall strength: ‘A famous revolutionary once said: “A guerrilla must move through his people like a fish moves through water.” We, I think, moved through our people like fish through a desert.’¹⁹

The internal debate on abstention had not been resolved in time for the Irish general election of 1969. Even if it had, Sinn Féin would have struggled to make an impression. Popular opinion in the South did shift towards the left in the late 1960s, but only to a limited extent, and in any case the Irish Labour Party was harvesting the fruits of that turn, having shed some of its rhetorical timidity and promised to break the mould of Irish politics. Labour won its highest-ever vote share in the 1969 election, but Fianna Fáil still comfortably outpaced its rival after a red-baiting campaign.²⁰ At a time when political turbulence rocked much of Western Europe, the Republic of Ireland appeared to be an oasis of stability.

Its northern neighbour presented a very different prospect. The political system in Northern Ireland was much less flexible, and the potential for republican agitation to disrupt the status quo much greater. The Unionist Party had held power at Stormont, the regional assembly, without interruption for almost half a century: between 1920 and 1969, there were just four prime ministers, two of whom served for twenty years each. When Basil Brooke took the helm in 1943, he warned that a post in the Northern Irish cabinet ‘is not, and should not be, a life appointment’, but did little to dispel that impression over the years that followed.²¹ There was no clear line of demarcation between the Northern Irish government, the Unionist Party and the Orange Order. Between 1921 and 1969, all but three cabinet ministers and all but eleven of the ruling party’s MPs were Orangemen at the time of their election.22 The first Unionist prime minister, James Craig, abolished proportional representation for elections to Stormont in 1929, having already done so for local councils in 1923. His aim, openly stated, was to ensure that every regional poll would be a referendum on partition, with all other questions pushed to one side.²³

In local government, Unionists made extensive use of gerrymandering to maintain their control in areas like Fermanagh and Derry City where there was a nationalist majority.²⁴ The restriction of the local-government franchise to property owners served as another barrier to nationalist participation, as Catholics were more likely than Protestants to rent their homes. When the Nationalist Party put down a motion at Stormont calling for universal suffrage in 1958, the Unionist politician Brian Faulkner remarked in a private conclave that it was ‘quite obvious’ why such reforms were unacceptable, although the sectarian logic could not be stated openly: ‘The real reason behind it is Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh.’²⁵

If opposition developed outside the electoral field, the Special Powers Act of 1922 gave Northern Ireland’s government the authority to ban newspapers and demonstrations, and to intern suspects without trial. The Act even gave Stormont’s home affairs minister the power to criminalize any act ‘not specifically provided for in the regulations’ that he considered to be ‘prejudicial to the preservation of the peace’.²⁶ A part-time force known as the B Specials backed up the full-time Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). In the late 1960s, the RUC was nine-tenths Protestant, the Specials almost exclusively so. Both were armed.²⁷

Protestants had a much greater share of professional, managerial and skilled-manual jobs, while Catholics tended to occupy unskilled posts if they were employed at all. In 1971, Catholic men were two-and-a-half times more likely to be out of work than their Protestant counterparts.²⁸ Less than 5 per cent of the workforce in Belfast’s iconic shipyards was Catholic.²⁹ Unionist politicians regularly issued warnings that the minority should be kept out of sensitive posts. In 1933, the future prime minister Basil Brooke boasted to supporters that as a businessman, ‘he had not a Roman Catholic about his place’, urging his fellow employers to remain vigilant against those who ‘were endeavouring to get in everywhere and were out with all their force and might to destroy the power and constitution of Ulster’.30 Emigration levels reflected the economic disparity: between 1926 and 1981, the annual rate of departure for Catholics was more than twice that for Protestants.³¹ This had the happy effect, from the Unionist perspective, of counteracting a higher birth rate among Catholics, otherwise their share of the population would have been almost 5 per cent greater.³²

The law that established the machinery of government in Northern Ireland made it clear that ultimate jurisdiction lay with Westminster. However, British politicians preferred to overlook this clause and leave the Unionists free to govern as they saw fit. For many years it was the convention at Westminster to ban all discussion of Northern Irish affairs. Britain’s political class had the best of both worlds, with full control over Northern Ireland’s territory – which proved to be of vital strategic importance during the Second World War – but no responsibility for its day-to-day affairs. When the Irish state left the Commonwealth in 1949, Clement Attlee’s government quickly passed a bill guaranteeing there would be no change in Northern Ireland’s constitutional status against the will of Stormont. It made no attempt to push through local government reform as a quid pro quo from the Unionist administration, claiming, wrongly, that such matters lay beyond its remit. A group of backbench Labour MPs, the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, set out to disrupt this consensus in the 1960s, but Harold Wilson ignored their calls for intervention after his accession to Downing Street.³³

The most significant challenge to the Unionist Party at the ballot box came from the Northern Irish labour movement. Communal divisions had not squeezed class conflict out of the picture altogether. In the 1930s, a communist-led movement of jobless workers briefly forged a pan-sectarian alliance to demand action against unemployment. During the Second World War, Northern Ireland accounted for 10 per cent of all working days lost to strikes, despite having just 2 per cent of the UK’s total workforce.34 That surge left its mark on the first post-war election, when the vote for Labour candidates jumped from 7.5 per cent in 1938 to almost 32 per cent seven years later.³⁵ Working-class discontent drove Basil Brooke to accept the social reforms introduced by Attlee’s government after 1945, at a time when some Unionist politicians wanted to loosen ties with Westminster so they could maintain the pre-war status quo.³⁶ The challenge to Unionist hegemony faded during the 1950s, but started to recover again in the last years of Brooke’s premiership. In 1962, the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) won four seats in Belfast with over 40 per cent of the vote.³⁷

Unlike Nationalist politicians, whose support came exclusively from the Catholic minority, the pro-union NILP could eat into the Unionist Party’s support among working-class Protestants if it played its cards right. With regional unemployment well above the UK average, Basil Brooke’s languid approach to government was becoming a liability. In 1963 the Unionist hierarchy eased Brooke out of his position, to be replaced by Terence O’Neill.

If the NILP’s electoral growth had enabled it to supplant the Unionist Party, its willingness to tackle discrimination against Catholics was open to question. Paddy Devlin, who was elected to Stormont as an NILP candidate in 1969, later described the party’s record on civil rights issues as ‘scandalous’.³⁸ But by the time Devlin won his seat, the question of what a government led by the NILP might do was purely academic. After Brooke’s departure, the Unionist leadership worked hard to project a more dynamic image to Protestant voters, promising ‘a social and economic revolution’ that would ‘make Ulster a place where every man’s head is held high’.³⁹ That proved to be enough to banish the spectre of defeat.

One facet of Terence O’Neill’s modernizing image was an apparent willingness to venture out of the Orange bunker. He welcomed the Irish Taoiseach Seán Lemass on a visit to Stormont in 1965, and arranged some photo ops with Catholic nuns to show his ecumenical spirit. But that was about as far as such gestures went. O’Neill dismissed charges of systematic discrimination against Catholics as ‘baseless and scurrilous’, and certainly showed no appetite for sweeping reform.40 With the electoral road blocked and Harold Wilson’s government reluctant to intervene, opponents of Unionist rule now began to explore another path. O’Neill’s administration soon faced the challenge of a civil rights campaign in which Goulding’s IRA played a central part.

‘Where would unionism be then?’

In January 1967, a meeting in Belfast set up the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). NICRA wanted a clean-up of local government, with fair electoral boundaries and no restrictions on the franchise, and an end to discrimination in housing and employment. In principle, none of these demands posed a direct challenge to the Union: indeed, their effect would be to bring Northern Ireland into line with British practice. However, many Unionist politicians insisted that a subversive conspiracy lurked behind NICRA’s respectable facade. Terence O’Neill’s home affairs minister, William Craig, dismissed the civil rights campaign as ‘bogus and made up of people who see in unrest a chance to renew a campaign of violence’.⁴¹ This view informed Craig’s handling of civil rights demonstrations when the movement took to the streets.

Hard-line Unionists could certainly point to a substantial republican element in the civil rights campaign. Gerry Adams, then a young militant in Belfast, described the first NICRA meeting as having been ‘packed by republicans, who wielded the biggest bloc vote’. The commander of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, Billy McMillen, confirmed that the meeting was ‘attended in strength’ by republican activists, to the point that its decisions ‘could have been completely dictated by their votes’. However, both men went on to complicate this picture of NICRA as an IRA proxy by explaining that their comrades were instructed to vote for a broad-based committee.⁴² In any case, the fact that republicans had the strongest presence at NICRA’s launch does not prove that they remained in control over the next two years as the campaign developed into a mass movement.

The civil rights association brought together a wide range of political forces around its call for reform, from Con and Patricia McCluskey, founders of a Dungannon-based lobbying group called the Campaign for Social Justice, to Nationalist politicians like Gerry Fitt and Austin Currie. None of these individuals had any interest in using NICRA as the platform for an uprising against the state, as their subsequent political trajectories clearly showed. But we still need to ask why republicans had chosen to involve themselves in a project of this kind at all. Was it simply, as Craig insisted, the prelude to a new IRA campaign? Or did it represent a break with tradition?

However much the IRA might have transformed itself since the Border Campaign, it was still unclear what Goulding’s strategy meant for republicans in the North. According to Billy McMillen, the Belfast IRA was slow to embrace the new thinking: ‘We used to spend hours at meetings trying to conjure up ideas and excuses as to why we shouldn’t become involved in this type of political activity, and to tell Dublin GHQ why they were wrong.’43 McMillen eventually signed up to Goulding’s agenda and became a staunch ally for the leadership in Dublin, but other veterans like Joe Cahill, Seamus Twomey and Billy McKee dropped out of the IRA altogether.

The movement’s first notable venture after the failure of Operation Harvest came in 1964, when McMillen ran as a candidate for West Belfast in the UK general election. Republicans displayed an Irish tricolour in the campaign office on Divis Street, flouting legislation that prohibited such emblems. The fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley demanded that the RUC remove the flag or he would do so himself. When police officers broke into McMillen’s office and took down the offending item, it provoked several days of rioting on the nationalist Falls Road.⁴⁴ For McMillen, the Divis Street confrontation had proved that there were still ‘embers of patriotism’ among the city’s nationalists, needing only ‘a good strong Republican wind’ to spark a conflagration. But he also admitted that, in practical terms, the IRA only gained a couple of dozen new recruits on the back of the disturbances.⁴⁵

It was some time before the IRA leadership devised a plan of action for northern republicans that was informed by their new ideology. Tomás Mac Giolla made an early contribution with his speech at Belfast’s Easter parade in 1965, where he announced that republicans would soon begin a campaign for universal suffrage in local government elections. Mac Giolla was keen to stress that the movement could raise such demands without compromising on its ultimate goal: ‘The conduct of this campaign will not in any way distract Republicans from their primary objective which is to enforce the evacuation of British troops and British administration from Irish territory, to unite the whole people of the nation and to develop the resources of the nation in such a manner as to benefit the mass of the Irish people and not a limited capitalist class.’46 This was a foretaste of the ideological tensions that would become apparent when republicans lined up with the civil rights movement.

By the time NICRA was founded, the United Irishman had published a detailed blueprint for republican involvement in civil rights agitation. It called for a campaign of protest that would put the Unionist leadership under intense pressure, confronting O’Neill’s administration with ‘popular demands from the disenfranchised, the gerrymandered, the discriminated against, the oppressed Catholic and nationalist minority within the North’. If the campaign was successful, it would lead to ‘the destruction of the machinery of discrimination to the maximum, the unfreezing of bigotry to the greatest extent, the achievement of the utmost degree of civil liberties possible, freedom of political action, an end to the bitterness in social life and the divisions among the people fostered by the Unionists’.

This was certainly a very ambitious vision for political change when set against the realities of Northern Ireland at the time. But it still fell short of the republican demand for an end to British rule, and there was no mention of any role for the IRA as the spearhead of resistance. Indeed, the blueprint implied that partition would remain in place for some time to come, even if the civil rights movement was an unqualified success: ‘If things change too much the Orange worker may see that he can get by alright without dominating his Catholic neighbour. The two of them may in time join forces in the labour movement, and where would Unionism be then?’47

For some of Cathal Goulding’s supporters, NICRA’s reform programme was a realistic platform that could be put into effect if it brought enough pressure to bear on the governments in Belfast and London. By compelling the authorities to grant such reforms, republicans would create a more hospitable environment in which to work for their long-term objectives. Goulding’s young protégés Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston were the main advocates of this perspective in republican circles. The thinking of Desmond Greaves, a Marxist historian who had recruited them to the Connolly Association when they were living in Britain, strongly influenced the two men.⁴⁸ Arguing that a civil rights campaign could undermine Unionist hegemony in Northern Ireland, Greaves worked tirelessly in the British labour movement to highlight discrimination against nationalists under Stormont rule. From his standpoint, there was no question of ending partition in a single bound: Northern Ireland had first to be reformed and democratized before it could unite with the South.⁴⁹

Greaves was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and saw the Irish communist movement as the main vehicle for progressive politics on the island. Irish communism, which had never been a substantial force, was divided into two organizations: the Communist Party of Northern Ireland (CPNI) and the southern Irish Workers’ Party. Although its membership was small, the CPNI did have some influence in Northern Ireland’s trade unions, with figures such as Betty Sinclair and Andy Barr occupying senior positions. Speaking at a party conference back in 1952, Barr had urged the labour movement to unite behind demands for franchise reform, repeal of the Special Powers Act, and ‘the removal of all forms of discrimination directed against the nationalist minority’.⁵⁰ This was the NICRA programme in embryonic form, almost two decades before the civil rights movement got off the ground.

Republicans were keen to get the CPNI on board, seeing its trade union base as a potential route into the Protestant working class, and Betty Sinclair became NICRA’s first chairwoman, with the help of republican votes. Sinclair proved to be one of the most cautious figures in the civil rights movement. She wanted NICRA to emulate Britain’s National Council for Civil Liberties by taking up individual cases of discrimination and lobbying politicians at Westminster, and opposed a decision to begin organizing street demonstrations in the summer of 1968.51

Sinclair was old enough to remember both the tentative cross-sectarian unity forged in the struggle against unemployment during the Great Depression, and the vicious communal rioting that followed a few years later.⁵² Anything that brought sectarian passions to the fore threatened to split Northern Ireland’s trade unions down the middle. But with other avenues seemingly blocked, Sinclair’s NICRA allies decided to go ahead with a campaign of protest, beginning with a march from Coalisland to Dungannon in August 1968.

Class and Creed

It was hardly surprising if Unionist politicians like William Craig fell back on traditional stereotypes as they got to grips with the civil rights movement. A campaign that had the IRA demanding equal rights under British rule, while their communist allies pleaded for caution and restraint, was bound to confuse its adversaries. Craig’s bewilderment would have been shared by many IRA activists as they tried to absorb the new line on civil rights. For republicans, the tactics now being urged upon them were as unconventional as NICRA’s plea for reform.

The United Irishman told civil rights activists to study the experience of their US counterparts and challenge the Unionist government by defying its laws: ‘The secret of effectiveness in acts of civil disobedience is careful planning, well-prepared publicity and the avoidance of undisciplined, provocative actions which would alienate rather than increase public sympathy and support.’⁵³ Of course, republicans had no problem with the idea of breaking the law, but they had not been trained to turn the other cheek when they encountered violence from the state and its agents.

If the reformist civil rights strategy prevailed in the long run, it was difficult to see what place it would hold for the ‘Army of the Republic’. But NICRA’s programme could also be seen in a very different light, as a way for republicans to expose the true character of the Northern Irish state and prepare the ground for its destruction. According to this line of thought, the nationalist population would not support a direct military challenge to that state, but could be mobilized to take part in demonstrations calling for its reform. If the authorities responded with hostility and repression, nationalists would then be open to more radical ideas, and the IRA might once again come to the fore, this time with the popular support that had been lacking in the 1950s. Gerry Adams later spoke about the civil rights movement in precisely these terms, describing it as ‘a means of confronting an apartheid state, exposing its contradictions and building popular opposition to them and to the state itself’.54

In a 1970 interview, Cathal Goulding implied that he had been thinking along similar lines. For Goulding, physical force could not be the starting point of a successful movement, as the US experience showed: ‘We first had to try to inject some militancy into ordinary people who wouldn’t join a violent struggle but would support a peaceful one, people whom you could organize to march, to demonstrate, sit-in, and things like that. It was this peaceful activity that really brought the situation to a head in the Six Counties.’⁵⁵

This does not mean that Craig’s suspicions about the movement were correct. At the time, such distinctions were not as clear-cut as they might appear in hindsight, and it was quite possible for individuals to waver between the two perspectives on civil rights agitation. According to Adams, a junior figure at the time, his own view took shape gradually as the struggle gathered momentum. He believed that the IRA leadership had embarked on ‘a serious attempt to democratize the state’, during which ‘the national question would be subordinated in order to allay Unionist fears’.⁵⁶

To complicate things further, the proposal to begin a campaign of street marches came not from the republicans in NICRA but from the Nationalist MP, Austin Currie.57 Currie had already organized a protest against housing discrimination in Dungannon in June 1968. Another Nationalist politician, Gerry Fitt, delivered a fiery speech from the platform on that occasion, calling for civil disobedience to undermine the Unionist government. Fitt even hinted that he would be willing to go further if the need arose: ‘If a day came when we had to fight in the street for the protection of our future, for the protection of our wives and children, then that day can’t come soon enough.’⁵⁸ However, both Currie and Fitt proved to be staunch opponents of republican violence in the years to come.

One thing soon became obvious. Neither republicans nor the wider civil rights movement would be able to discuss these questions at their leisure without taking account of the response they encountered from the Unionist state and its Protestant supporters. Terence O’Neill was already under pressure from Unionist hardliners for alleged backsliding before NICRA had started its campaign, and Ian Paisley continued to nip at the heels of the Unionist establishment after his role in the Divis Street riots of 1964.⁵⁹

Paisley was a larger-than-life character in more than one sense: with a booming voice and a mountainous physique, he could deploy his rhetorical skills and encyclopaedic knowledge of scripture in defence of traditional Unionist values. If NICRA took its cue from Martin Luther King, Paisley looked to King’s opponents for inspiration, brandishing an honorary doctorate in theology from Bob Jones University, a bastion of the segregationist cause. He kept up a steady stream of religious publications throughout his career – including the imperishable Sermons with Startling Titles – but did not hesitate to use more robust methods when the situation required, greeting the Irish premier Seán Lemass with a hail of snowballs on his ground-breaking trip to Stormont.

In 1966, the Orange Order’s Grand Master, George Clark, warned that Paisley and his supporters might ‘succeed in doing what the IRA failed to do in Northern Ireland at Easter’, by ‘attracting television cameras and newsmen from all over the world to Ulster’.⁶⁰ To many observers of the Northern Irish scene, Paisley seemed like a farcical throwback, with his doom-laden rhetoric evoking a conspiracy between Moscow and Rome against the Protestant way of life. But the journalist Jack Bennett warned readers of the United Irishman that he should be taken very seriously indeed: ‘The Paisleyites are not the wild men on the outskirts; they are the hard core of Unionism per se. Nothing Paisley preaches is offensive to the spirit of Unionism; rather it is the pure essence of Unionist Party ideology as nourished in local Unionist associations throughout the Six Counties.’61

Paisley’s rhetoric helped inspire a British Army veteran called Gusty Spence to organize a new paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which took its name from Edward Carson’s militia.⁶² Spence had fought in Cyprus against the EOKA guerrillas whose campaign inspired the IRA commander Seán Mac Stíofáin. The UVF leader and his associates wanted to assassinate a republican activist in Belfast, but only managed to kill three civilians in the space of two months in 1966. O’Neill’s government banned the UVF after the murders, and Spence received a life sentence. Paisley’s Protestant Telegraph disclaimed any responsibility for the killings, blaming the ‘hell-soaked liquor traffic’ instead.⁶³

Many writers have accused Cathal Goulding and his comrades of woeful naivety about the potential for class politics in Northern Ireland. Conor Cruise O’Brien was willing to grant that the IRA leadership was ‘sincerely committed to an anti-sectarian policy’, albeit one grounded in sheer fantasy: ‘It thought that, if class issues were emphasized, and a revolutionary situation created, the “false consciousness” of the Protestant proletariat would be eliminated, and all the workers would join together in the attack on the political and industrial establishment and on British imperialism.’⁶⁴ In his own critique of the Goulding line, Gerry Adams recalled a modest attempt by republicans in Belfast to organize a pan-sectarian campaign that was scuppered by the intervention of Unionist tub-thumpers: ‘If the state would not allow Catholics and Protestants to get a pedestrian crossing built together, it would hardly sit back and watch them organize the revolution together.’⁶⁵

Some comments made by republican leaders during this period do lend substance to the charge of reckless myopia. Tomás Mac Giolla let his imagination run free when he addressed Sinn Féin’s annual conference at the end of 1967: ‘There is welcome evidence of change among the Protestant community of the North. They are beginning to think for themselves. Once they open their mind to new ideas, no one will be more receptive than they to Republican principles.’66

But the reformist strategy put forward by Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan did not count on any sudden and dramatic shift in the political consciousness of Northern Ireland’s unionist majority. According to their arguments, the change sought by left-wing republicans would have to come about in stages.

First, the civil rights demands were to be won through a peaceful but militant campaign of protest. Northern Ireland’s political system would be democratized, its unorthodox features swept away. That would open the way for the second stage, during which the republican movement and others would struggle to bring class politics to the fore. Only when this had been achieved and left-wing forces had come to power on both sides of the Irish border would it be possible to dissolve the border between the two states and establish an all-Ireland workers’ republic.⁶⁷ The real flaw with this blueprint was not that it anticipated support from Protestants for the civil rights platform. Rather, it was the tacit assumption that the unionist population would remain largely passive as NICRA set about winning those demands.

The realism of this political vision can be measured on two different timescales, long and short term. If the civil rights programme had been carried out in full, the political class at Stormont would have been constrained in a number of ways. From below, universal suffrage and fair electoral boundaries would have resulted in areas such as Fermanagh and Derry City passing out of Unionist control altogether. From above, a Bill of Rights guaranteed by Westminster would have blocked discrimination by the Unionist Party against its political opponents. Any regional government would have found itself partly ‘defanged’, having lost its most important legislative tool of repression, the Special Powers Act, and its access to a paramilitary police force. The assembly itself would have been opened up to some extent by the adoption of a new voting system – or to be precise, the restoration of an old one, the PR system abolished by James Craig in 1929. Under such conditions, a transformation of Northern Ireland’s political life would surely have been the result, whether or not the final outcome was in line with republican hopes.

But that scenario required time and patience, two commodities that were in short supply as the civil rights movement began to pick up steam. The NICRA leadership was satisfied with its first public outing, from Coalisland to Dungannon in August 1968, which brought 2,000 people onto the streets. However, the police redirected the march from its original route after Ian Paisley and his associate Ronald Bunting threatened to obstruct the marchers with a demonstration of their own. Gerry Fitt denounced the RUC as ‘bastards’ from the platform, and claimed that he would have led the marchers into police lines ‘but for the presence of women and children’.68 Fitt’s rhetoric contrasted sharply with the nature of the protest, as the stewards worked hard to prevent any clashes with the police.⁶⁹

The tactics deployed by Paisley and Bunting could be expected to come into play at any subsequent demonstration. Sooner or later there would have to be a clash, whether with loyalist ultras or the police. In that case, another assumption underpinning the civil rights strategy would be put to the test. If the Unionist Party proved unwilling to reform the sectarian state, Westminster could, it was argued, be forced to act over their heads. In effect, once the civil rights campaign got going in earnest, there would be a race against time: the British government would have to intervene and take the heat out of the situation before the sectarian pot came to the boil. When NICRA announced its plan to march through Derry’s city centre in October 1968, the countdown to crisis had begun.