Part 2

Most accounts of the current trouble in Northern Ireland begin at 5 October 1968, which is as good a date to start from as any other. It was the day of the first civil rights march in Derry. Had all those who now claim to have marched that day actually done so, the carriageway would have collapsed. It was a small demonstration, perhaps four hundred strong—and a hundred of these were students from Belfast. Most of the rest were teenagers from the Bogside and Creggan. The march was trapped between two cordons of police in Duke Street and batoned into disarray.

The march had been organized by a loose group of radicals who had been trying for months, with some success, to create general political mayhem in the city. Those involved were drawn mainly from the local Labour Party and the James Connolly Republican Club. In March they and some others had organized themselves, if that is not too strong a word, into the Derry Housing Action Committee, which set out with the conscious intention of disrupting public life in the city to draw attention to the housing problem. The DHAC introduced itself to the public by breaking up the March meeting of Londonderry Corporation. We invaded the public gallery of the council chamber with banners and placards and demanded that we be allowed to participate in the meeting. The mayor naturally refused, and made it clear that he was not going to tolerate hooliganism in the chamber. From the Nationalist benches Alderman James Hegarty voiced the opinion that we were ‘under the control of card-carrying members of the Communist Party’. Eventually the meeting had to be adjourned. The police were called and we were ejected. There was wide publicity in the Irish papers. It was a very successful demonstration. We repeated it at the April and May meetings of the Corporation.

The Housing Action Committee had immediate internal problems. It started with about twenty members. It split twice during the first few months of its existence. One group broke away because it was ‘too political’, another because it was not political enough. Its first chairman, Matt O’Leary, resigned during the summer after a series of seemingly trivial rows. But through it all the Committee’s campaign continued to gather momentum. Its strength was that, unlike the opposition groups which hitherto had had a monopoly of anti-Unionist politics in the city, the HAC gave people something to do, even if it was only kicking the mayor’s car as he fled under police escort from another abandoned meeting of the Corporation, and thus it managed to siphon in behind it some of the gathering frustration of the Bogside and Creggan. And the decision to select the Corporation as the primary target and to set about the systematic disruption of its business was in itself a minor political masterstroke.

The gerrymandered Corporation was the living symbol in Derry of the anti-democratic exclusion of Catholics from power. The stated reason for our activities in the gallery was to highlight the housing situation, but they were generally regarded by Catholics as an attack on the whole political set-up; which, of course, they were. There were many in the Bogside who did not approve of our ‘extremism’ and were nervous of our ‘communistic ideas’—but there were none who would defend the Corporation. In that sense it was the safest of safe targets. After the mayor abandoned his chair and adjourned one Corporation meeting, Finbar Doherty vaulted from the public gallery into the chamber, installed himself in the mayoral chair, declared himself First Citizen and issued a number of decrees. Finbar was a passionate Republican, much given to violent rhetoric. He was five feet tall, with double-lens glasses. It can be doubted whether more than a tiny percentage of the people would, given the chance, have actually voted for him as mayor, but there were very few in our area who failed to smile when they heard of the incident.

By early summer the group around the Housing Action Committee was beginning to be seen as a real challenge to the Nationalist Party in the Catholic working-class areas of the city. There was much muttering about communists and on Easter Sunday the bishop had abjured young people not to allow themselves ‘to be led by the mob’. The campaign of disruption was also bringing to the surface differences within both the Labour and Republican movements in the city. The local Labour Party was a branch of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, an eminently respectable body based on a markedly timid trade-union bureaucracy. Its local leaders were sternly disapproving of members roughing up the mayor. One of the party’s stalwart moderates, Mr Harry Doherty, warned a branch meeting around this time that ‘I can detect left-wing ideas creeping into this party’. More than that, there was vigorous opposition to any liaison with Republicans. The Labour Party prided itself—publicly and often—on the fact that it bridged the sectarian barrier and had in its ranks both Protestant and Catholic workers. Protestants, it was said, would be frightened off by the mere mention of Republicanism. Mr Ivan Cooper—now a member of the SDLP but then the best-known Labour Party personality in the city—demanded the expulsion of any member who appeared on a platform with Republicans, ‘especially with that fool Finbar Doherty’.

The situation within the local Republican movement was almost the exact obverse. Older members of the movement, exponents of ‘pure’ Republicanism, objected to cooperation with members of the ‘partitionist’ Labour Party. They were, anyway, angry at concentration on what seemed to them to be short-term bread-and-butter issues to the neglect of the ‘national ideal’.

The issues were never fully resolved in either organization. The ad hoc alliance between the left of the Labour Party and the left of the Republican Club continued, and continued to be frowned on by both local party establishments. But the leftists involved carried out no clear political struggle within either organization. We could not, because what we shared was not a common programme but a general contempt for the type of politics which prevailed in the city.

The only attempt to codify our ideas was made in May, when a ‘perspectives document’ was prepared by Labour leftists:

The situation which confronts us is not promising. The great mass of the people continue, for historical reasons, to see religion, not class, as the basic divide in our society. This sectarian consciousness is reinforced, week in, week out, by local Tory newspapers. The machinations of Catholic and Protestant Tories such as McAteer, Glover, Anderson, and Hegarty are carefully calculated to maintain the status quo. The end result is a working class which is unresponsive to socialist ideas…

We must ask ourselves whether the Labour Party itself is adequate to the needs of this situation. We, like all branches of the Labour Party, have operated along conventional lines putting our personalities and our policies before the people at elections, issuing intermittent statements on current events, attempting to recruit more members and to perfect the party machine. Most parties operate so…

People in Derry are worried about housing and jobs and the denial of civil rights. The question before us is: how best can the discontent arising from each issue be gathered together and directed against the root cause—i.e. the political and economic set-up?

One of the basic difficulties arises out of the present division of the working class along religious lines. Many Protestant workers in Derry feel that they are members of a vaguely privileged section of the population (as, in one sense, they are). As a result, despite the economic situation of the area, they are resistant to change. Many of the Catholic workers interpret the bulk of Governmental activity as being to some extent directed against them as Catholics. Thus, they are ‘easy meat’ for the adroit demagogy of the McAteers and Hegartys.

To dispel this confusion we will have to engage in patient grass-root organization on the concrete issues affecting the working class in its day to day life. This means participating actively in the developing tenants’ movement in the city, attempting to reorganize the unemployed, participating as a party in such activities as protests against the banning of Republican Clubs, etc. The party, in a phrase, should go to the people rather than attempt to attract the people towards it.

Housing agitation provides a good example of what the party could be doing. While most people, as individuals, feel alienated from such remote institutions as the Housing Trust, they are actively worried about such questions as the awarding of rehabilitation grants, the operation of the Rent Rebate Scheme and the need for a faster rate of redevelopment. These are concrete and specific grievances all of which are capable of a relatively short-term solution. Around these it would be possible by door to door campaigning to build up an active housing movement in the city…

Similarly with the unemployment: we cannot hope immediately to make the Labour Party the focus of the desire for work. We can, however, assist the re-emergence of an unemployed action committee and thus heighten the general level of political militancy…

It can do this by declaring publicly its unequivocal support for the aims and activities of such organizations by co-ordinating and giving direction to its members who would be active in them; by attempting through the activity of its members gradually to politicize such struggles; by assuming a quasi-educational function in tracing the connection between the political system and bad housing, unemployment and the negation of democracy.

All this would require an act of political faith on the part of us all, from party leaders downward, faith in ourselves and in socialist ideals and ideology. It would mean that we have no enemies, only arguments, on the left, that we should have confidence in our politics and state them openly without regard to what Tory-influenced sections we might annoy: that we should wage at every level an uncompromising anti-Tory crusade. Such a party would have a real hope of becoming, eventually, the natural repository for the aspirations of the discontented.

Insofar as we had a perspective, that was it. There were frequent discussions around the points in the document in various pubs and houses during the summer. These were attended by Johnnie White, Liam Cummins and Finbar Doherty from the Republican Club; Charlie Morrison, Dermie McClenaghan and myself from the Labour Party; Matt O’Leary of the Housing Action Committee; Eamonn Melaugh, a free-wheeling radical who had ten children and a bizarre vocabulary; and a few others. Little came of these discussions. There was always too much to do, because one of the results of our having made an initial impact was that people came in a constant stream with problems to be solved: people who wanted houses or wanted repairs done to houses, people who believed—correctly, almost always—that they were getting less than their full entitlement from Social Security, people who were in trouble with rent arrears. It seemed to them that the much publicized and more aggressive tactics we had brought to bear on the Corporation might avail them better than the official channels.

Indeed, up to then people did not use even the official channels for complaint. They knew that they were being treated badly and believed that there was little anyone could do to stop it. We began squatting people in empty houses, of which there were a considerable number in the area, in each case issuing statements that we would ‘physically resist’ any attempt to evict the family involved. Private landlords charging exorbitant rents were picketed. The local office of the Northern Ireland Housing Trust was subjected to a daily barrage of phone calls and personal visits about the cases of individual families on the housing list. We confronted landlords and officials with more aggression than they had ever met before. Dermie McClenaghan, on being told that the Housing Manageress was too busy to see him, said quietly (he always spoke quietly) that if she did not see him at once he would return with ‘a gang of hooligans’ and smash the office up. Electricity Department officials, come to cut off the supply from a Creggan woman who could not pay the bill, were, after a long argument during which a crowd gathered, told that the first man to put his foot over the threshold would be shot. In almost all such cases our tactics were successful. This was very satisfying, but it took a lot of time which meant that often we resembled a rather violent community welfare body rather than a group of revolutionaries. Any perspective of building a clear-minded political organization in opposition to the dominant tendencies within the Labour or Republican movements was forgotten in the frenetic round of breaking into empty houses, organizing pickets and encouraging individuals to stand up to the landlords and local bureaucrats. And, anyway, such activities seemed to be bearing some fruit. There was a feeling gathering in the area that, however unacceptable our political ideas might be, we were at least getting things done. This in turn encouraged us to believe vaguely that we must be making some political progress.

At the beginning of June Dermie McClenaghan discovered John Wilson. Mr Wilson was living with his wife and two children in a tiny caravan parked up a mucky lane in the Brandywell district. The caravan was an oven in the summer, an icebox in the winter. One of the children had tuberculosis. Mr Wilson had been told by the Corporation Housing Department that he had ‘no chance’ of a house. Mr Wilson’s case was tailor-made. On 22 June, a Saturday, about ten of us manhandled the Wilsons’ caravan on to Lecky Road, the main artery through the Bogside, and parked it broadside in the middle of the road, stopping all traffic. We distributed leaflets in the surrounding streets explaining that we intended to keep the caravan there for twenty-four hours as a protest against the Wilsons’ living conditions and calling for support. We then phoned the police, the mayor and the newspapers, inviting each to come and see. The mayor did not come. We expected that the police would try to arrest us, or at least to move the caravan to the side of the road. But they merely looked and left.

We stood guard on the caravan all night, equipped with a loud-hailer with which we intended to try to rouse the district if the police made a move. But nothing happened. On the Sunday we hauled the caravan back to its original parking place. We had about two hundred supporters with us on the return journey. Reports of the incident were carried with some prominence in the Irish Sunday newspapers and on local radio and TV. We announced that next weekend we would repeat the performance, this time for forty-eight hours. During the next week we were visited by policemen who explained, almost apologetically, that if we went through with this they would ‘have to take action’, which greatly encouraged us. On the Wilson issue we now knew that if we were arrested we would have strong support in the area. The facts had been given wide publicity and no one could deny that a great injustice was being done. Few, therefore, could openly oppose vigorous protest against it. If we could force the police to act against us we could be certain of an upsurge of sympathy which would further weaken the Nationalist grip on the area.

We lugged the caravan on to the road again the following Saturday and waited up two nights for the police onslaught. But again nothing happened. We dragged it back to its laneway and resolved next week to take it into the city centre. Before the week was out the Wilsons had been guaranteed a house and ten of us had been summoned to appear in court for contravening the Road Traffic Act (N.I.), 1951. It was a perfect ending.

It had very publicly been made clear that outrageous tactics worked, that blocking roads worked better than an MP’s intervention—if the latter worked at all. The court proceedings provided us with a platform; fines and suspended sentences conferred on us an aura of minor martyrdom. At the first meeting of the Housing Action Committee after the court hearing we really began to believe ourselves when we said that we had the Nationalist Party on the run.

On 3 July the mayor, Councillor William Beattie, was scheduled to declare open a new lower-deck carriageway across the River Foyle. The opening was to take the curious form of Councillor Beattie’s ceremonially walking across the bridge. It was too good a chance to miss and, sure enough, as soon as he set off seven young men sat down in his path displaying placards, some of which bore the pardonably exaggerated legend ‘Hitler—Franco—Beattie’. Finbar Doherty intervened and, as he was seized by plain-clothes detectives, burst into ‘We shall overcome’. No one joined in. As yet they did not know the words. Two of the seven, Roddy Carlin and Neil O’Donnell, refused to sign bonds to keep the peace and instead went to jail for a month. The result was more press statements, more publicity and a further noticeable increase in what appeared to be our political support.

By this time our conscious, if unspoken, strategy was to provoke the police into over-reaction and thus spark off mass reaction against the authorities. We assumed that we would be in control of the reaction, that we were strong enough to channel it. The one certain way to ensure a head-on clash with the authorities was to organize a non-Unionist march through the city centre. We decided to march in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of James Connolly. A ‘James Connolly Commemoration Committee’ was called into being, with Finbar Doherty as chairman, and a route through the city centre was submitted to the RUC. The march, on 21 July, was to end with a rally in the Guildhall Square. Mr Gerry Fitt, Miss Betty Sinclair, leading communist and chairman of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, and Connolly’s son Roddy were invited to speak, along with three of our own number. When the order banning the march was served it found the Committee in complete disarray. A dispute as to whether the Irish Tricolour should be carried at the head of the procession had reached deadlock. Some of the Republicans said that they would not march without it. To do so would be an insult to the memory of Connolly. For the same reason others said that they would not march with it. The march was abandoned in a welter of recrimination. The rally went ahead and was a significant success. About a thousand people attended. The Nationalist Party was strongly attacked. Mr Fitt said that he regretted the decision not to defy the ban. It was immediately suggested to him from the crowd that he should now lead the people through the city walls and into the outlawed Diamond. Mr Fitt did not answer the call. The Derry Journal said that Connolly’s memory had been ‘poorly served’ by the event.

The Nationalist Party was now running very scared indeed. We made our regular appearance at the next meeting of the Corporation. In March we had come thirty strong. Now we overflowed the council chamber out into the foyer of the Guildhall building and into the street. Before the meeting was abandoned Alderman Hegarty declared in stirring fashion that he was renouncing the party pledge to cooperate with Unionist members. The public gallery reacted to this announcement with a mixture of applause and shouts of ‘hypocrite’, there being different levels of consciousness present. And others were coming round. In the foyer outside Ivan Cooper closed a speech by paying tribute to ‘the great work being done by Finbar Doherty’. The police formed a cordon to allow the mayor to make a getaway. On leaving the Guildhall Eamonn Melaugh phoned the Civil Rights Association and invited them to come and hold a march in Derry.

The CRA had organized a march—the first civil rights march in Northern Ireland—from Coalisland to Dungannon in August to protest against discriminatory housing allocations in that area. About four thousand had marched, and it passed off peacefully despite being prevented by the RUC from reaching its objective, Dungannon market square.

A delegation from the executive of the Civil Rights Association came to Derry to discuss the project with us. The CRA had no branch in Derry. At that point it had few branches anywhere. We met in a room above the Grandstand Bar in William Street. Melaugh, as the man who had thought of the idea, delivered a pep-talk before we went in to meet the delegation: ‘Remember, our main purpose here is to keep our grubby proletarian grip on this jamboree.’ It was good advice. It was immediately clear that the CRA knew nothing of Derry. We had resolved to press for a route which would take the march into the walled centre of the city and expected opposition to this from moderate members of the CRA. But there was none. No one in the CRA delegation understood that it was unheard of for a non-Unionist procession to enter that area. The route we proposed—from Duke Street in the Waterside, across Craigavon Bridge, through the city walls and into the Diamond—was accepted without question. The CRA proposed that all political organizations in the city—
including the Unionist Party—should be invited to attend. We argued down the proposed invitation to the Unionists, but accepted that the Nationalists should be asked. We knew that the invitation would put them in a very embarrassing position. If they accepted they would be seen as coming in behind us—a demeaning position for the elected representatives of the people. If they refused we could denounce them as deserters. It was agreed that in the absence of a CRA branch a committee—to be called the Ad-hoc CR Committee should be set up with one representative from each supporting organization to attend to local details. 5 October was selected as the date for the march because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that Derry City Football Club was playing away that Saturday.

In the end only five organizations committed themselves far enough to nominate a representative onto the Ad-hoc Committee. It consisted of Johnnie White (Republican Club), Eamonn Melaugh (Housing Action Committee), Finbar Doherty (James Connolly Society), Dermie McClenaghan (Labour Party Young Socialists), and Brendan Hinds (Labour Party). It was suspected that the James Connolly Society existed mainly in Finbar’s mind. The Young Socialists was the Labour Party under another name. Brendan Hinds was a local shop-steward of intermittent militancy who called everyone ‘kid’ and had a penchant for talking in aphorisms, a characteristic which was subsequently to unsettle many a television interviewer’s style. (‘Mr Hinds, can you explain the background to these riots?’ ‘Idle hands throw stones, kid.’)

The Ad-hoc Committee never functioned. It was not clear who was to convene it, and less clear what authority it had, if any, to make decisions without reference to the CRA in Belfast. By mid-September Eamonn Melaugh and I had taken effective control. We issued press statements daily, successively under the name of each of the five supporting organizations, calling for ‘a massive turn-out’, ‘a gigantic demonstration’, and so on. We churned out leaflets on a duplicator owned by the Derry Canine Club, the chairman of which had a son in the Labour Party, went flyposting at night, and made placards. None of the placards demanded ‘civil rights’. We were anxious to assert socialist ideas, whether or not the CRA approved. We used slogans such as ‘Class war, not Creed war’, ‘Orange and Green Tories Out’, ‘Working Class Unite and Fight!’ The intention was to draw a clear line between ourselves and the Nationalist Party, to prevent pan-Catholic unity. We understood in general terms that the Nationalist Party, if we did not clearly differentiate ourselves from it, might be able to assume control of whatever movement arose out of 5 October, and no movement with the Nationalist Party at or near its head could hope ever to cross the sectarian divide.

During the previous months we had managed to make contact with some Protestants from the Fountain, a small working-class area which abutted the Bogside. They too had their housing problems, mostly concerned with hold-ups in a redevelopment scheme, and a few of them had approached us suggesting that we devote some of our agitations to their cases. This we had done, heartened that our non-sectarian intentions had been accepted. We knew that none of our Protestant contacts was going to march on 5 October—that would have been too much to expect—but we had real hope that the socialist movement we were going to build after, and partly as a result of, the march would engage Protestant support.

We had no doubt that 5 October was going to be a very significant day. (After the meeting at which the CRA had accepted our route Melaugh had remarked: ‘Well, that’s it. Stormont is finished.’) For six months we had been making steady and seemingly inexorable progress. We began as a small, disparate group and by simple direct action tactics we had month by month accumulated support. Despite all splits, confusions and inefficiencies everything that we did seemed to turn out right. Now we were in control of an event which was seriously perturbing the government and exciting concerned editorials in the Belfast papers.

There seemed no reason to suppose that 5 October would not be our most significant advance to date. There were one or two problems. The CRA was a liberal body with no pretensions to revolutionary politics. But then we were paying little attention to them. Their sponsorship of the march was nominal. We had no common political organization. But this had proved no real drawback in the last six months. Indeed the absence of organization, the fact that we rarely sought formal approval of our actions from the Labour Party, the Republican Club or anyone else, appeared to have been a positive advantage. The decision to block a road with John Wilson’s caravan, for example, had been taken in the name of the HAC at a street corner by Matt O’Leary, Dermie McClenaghan and me within a few hours of Mr Wilson’s contacting Dermie. And that had worked out very well.

Under the Public Order Act two people had to sign a document notifying the police of the route of the march, thus assuming legal responsibility for it. The CRA, in pursuit of respectability, approached Councillor James Doherty, businessman and chairman of the Nationalist Party, and John Hume, a factory manager who was prominent in the Credit Union Movement. Both refused pointblank. Two members of the CRA itself signed instead.

A week before 5 October the march had still not been banned. In an effort to force the issue Melaugh and I issued a statement saying that the march would go on ‘despite any undemocratic ban which might be imposed’. It was 3 October before the government rose to the bait and orders prohibiting the march, signed by Home Affairs Minister William Craig, were delivered in the late afternoon to Melaugh, Johnnie White, Finbar Doherty and me. The ostensible reason for the ban was that the Apprentice Boys had given notice of a march over the same route at the same time. We phoned the CRA and Mr McAteer. The CRA said that they would meet that night. Mr McAteer advised us to postpone the march for a week.

A CRA delegation came to Derry on the Friday night. At a meeting in the City Hotel they announced that the march was cancelled. In anticipation of this Hinds and McClenaghan were already touring the Bogside and Creggan with a loudspeaker car holding off-the-cuff street-corner meetings appealing to people to ‘come out tomorrow and show your contempt for the law’. For two hours the CRA representatives explained to us that it was their march, it was they who had formally notified the police, and that they, therefore, were the only people with authority to decide whether or not it should go ahead. We explained that we were marching anyway. It was some time before the Belfast delegation grasped the central point that they had no means of stopping us marching. Their opposition collapsed when one of their number, Frank Gogarty, broke ranks and announced that ‘if the Derry people are marching I’m marching with them’.

We expected about five thousand people to turn out. There had, after all, been four thousand at Dungannon. Our calculation all along had been that a ban would encourage thousands of outraged citizens who would not otherwise have marched to come and demonstrate their disgust. Gerry Fitt arrived from Blackpool, where the Labour Party conference was in session, bringing three Tribunite MPs with him as ‘observers’. Our loudspeaker van toured the streets from early morning with Hinds at the mike informing the populace that ‘when you gotta go, you gotta go and we gotta go today’. Police reinforcements poured into the city, and there were rumours that there were ‘dozens’ of Alsatian dogs in the Waterside police station.

Commentators afterwards were unanimous that the imposition of a ban had indeed doubled the number of marchers. If this is so, then without the ban the turn-out would have been pathetic indeed. About four hundred people formed up in ranks in Duke Street. About two hundred stood on the pavement and looked on. It was a very disappointing crowd. People may have been deterred not by the ban but by the expectation of violence. And our somewhat melodramatic advance publicity had probably done little to reassure them. The march would proceed, we had said, ‘come hell or high water’, and the overwhelming majority of people in the Bogside and Creggan were not yet ready for either. Moreover, the whole route of our march lay outside the Catholic ghetto. We were to learn in time that when organizing a march towards confrontation it is essential to begin in ‘home’ territory and march out, so that there is somewhere for people to stream back to if this proves necessary.

On the day, however, numbers soon became irrelevant. Our route was blocked by a cordon of police and tenders drawn up across the road about three hundred yards from the starting point. We marched into the police cordon but failed to force a way through. Gerry Fitt’s head was bloodied by the first baton blow of the day. We noticed that another police cordon had moved in from the rear and cut us off from behind. There were no exits from Duke Street in the stretch between the two cordons. So we were trapped. The crowd milled around for a few minutes, no one knowing quite what to do. Then a chair was produced and Miss Betty Sinclair got up and made a speech. She somewhat prematurely congratulated the crowd on its good behaviour and advised everyone to go home peacefully. Mr McAteer and Mr Cooper spoke along similar lines. Austin Currie, Nationalist MP for East Tyrone, was much less explicit about peace. I made a speech which was later to be characterized by the magistrates’ court as ‘incitement to riot’. It was an unruly meeting. Our loudspeaker had been seized by the police and it was difficult to make ourselves heard. Some of the crowd were demanding action. ‘There must be no violence’, shouted Miss Sinclair, to a barrage of disagreement. But the decision as to whether there would be violence was soon taken from our hands.

The two police cordons moved simultaneously on the crowd. Men, women and children were clubbed to the ground. People were fleeing down the street from the front cordon and up the street from the rear cordon, crashing into one another, stumbling over one another, huddling in doorways, some screaming. District Inspector Ross McGimpsie, chief of the local police (now promoted), moved in behind his men and laid about him with gusto. Most people ran the gauntlet of batons and reached Craigavon Bridge, at the head of Duke Street. A water cannon—the first we had ever seen—appeared and hosed them across the bridge. The rest of the crowd went back down Duke Street, crouched and heads covered for protection from the police, ran through side streets and made a roundabout way back home. About a hundred had to go to hospital for treatment.

In the evening the lounge of the City Hotel looked like a casualty clearing station, all bandaged heads and arms in slings. In a corner Miss Sinclair was loudly denouncing the ‘hooligans and anarchists’ who had provoked the police and ‘ruined our reputation’. Later there was sporadic fighting at the edges of the Bogside which lasted until early morning. Police cars were stoned, shop windows smashed and a flimsy, token barricade was erected in Rossville Street. A few petrol bombs were thrown. By the next morning, after the television newsreels and the newspaper pictures, a howl of elemental rage was unleashed across Northern Ireland, and it was clear that things were never going to be the same again. We had indeed set out to make the police over-react. But we hadn’t expected the animal brutality of the RUC.

The Bogside was deluged with journalists. Some spent their time trying to identify a local Danny the Red. (The May events in France were fresh in the memory.) Others wandered into the area and asked to be introduced to someone who had been discriminated against. A lady journalist from the Daily Mail came to my front door asking for the name and address of an articulate, Catholic, unemployed slum-dweller she could talk to. Derry was big news. The prime minister, Captain Terence O’Neill, delivered a liberal homily appealing for moderation and restraint. Mr Craig praised the police for their tactful handling of the affair. Eamonn Melaugh, Finbar Doherty and I were arrested on Sunday afternoon and charged with contravention of the Public Order Act.

We had a mass movement, but no organization. The Housing Action Committee was obviously inadequate in the new situation. We called a meeting of ‘the local organizers’ for Tuesday night in the City Hotel. The index of our political and organizational chaos was that, having called the meeting, we were not at all certain who would have the right to attend. At the time that did not seem very important. We would as always muddle through. All seemed to be going according to plan—insofar as there was a plan. At a stroke we had shaken the government, fatally undermined the Nationalist Party in the city and made Derry world news. Who needed organization? Who needed theory? About fifteen people attended, the ‘regulars’ plus Ivan Cooper and a few members of the Labour Party and the Republican Club who had not until then played a very prominent part. It was agreed that we should march again the next Saturday over roughly the same route. We forecast a turn-out of ten thousand people. Ivan Cooper and Johnnie White agreed to sign the document notifying the police of our intention.

Another meeting was called in the City Hotel for Wednesday night. It was not, and still is not, clear who had organized it. But word got around during the afternoon that ‘all interested parties’ were meeting to ‘consider the situation’. In the nature of things there was no mechanism whereby our loose group could convene itself and arrive at a joint attitude to this. Some of us met in the foyer of the City Hotel in the evening and decided to attend the gathering, see who was there and perhaps participate in the meeting. We agreed, too, that nothing the gathering decided could be binding on us. In the room upstairs there were about a hundred and twenty people. The Catholic business community, the clergy, the professions, trade-union officialdom and the Nationalist Party were well represented. In the event I took the chair, flanked by McClenaghan and Johnnie White, and told the meeting that we, the organizers of the march, would be interested in what they had to say. Various speakers congratulated us on the marvellous work we had done over the past few months. A few expressed their regrets, apologies etc. that they had not ‘been as active in the past as I would have liked’. All urged that we now all work together. Finally it was proposed that the meeting elect a number of people who, together with the original organizers, would constitute a new committee. I explained that the meeting could elect anything it wished as long as it understood that the ‘original organizers’, as they had come to be called, would make up their own minds what status, if any, to accord those elected. Eleven people were elected from the floor and the meeting closed.

There followed immediately a short, bitter row between myself and the four other ‘original organizers’ who were present. I argued that we should immediately walk out, leaving the eleven persons just ‘elected’ to their own devices. ‘Without us they have no credibility. Why should we give it to them?’

White, McClenaghan, Hinds and Melaugh countered that we should join with these eleven, reasoning that since we held the initiative we would be able to force the pace, drag some of them along in our wake and force the others quickly to resign. (Finbar Doherty, who had not heard that the meeting was taking place, was absent.) In a fit of either pique or principle I then stomped out and denounced the persons elected at the meeting as ‘middle-aged, middle-class and middle of the road’. The other four stayed behind and joined in a meeting of the new, expanded body.

The organization called itself the Citizens Action Committee. It immediately elected five officers. They were: chairman, Ivan Cooper; vice-chairman, John Hume; secretary, Michael Canavan, owner of a chain of bookmaker’s shops, a pub and a salmon-processing factory; treasurer, Councillor James Doherty; press officer, Campbell Austin, Liberal-Unionist and owner of the biggest department store in the city. It was a far cry from the ad hoc committee of five days previously. The Committee’s first action was to call off the march scheduled for the following Saturday.

The Committee arranged a sit-down in Guildhall Square for 19 October. Campbell Austin resigned in protest. About five thousand people came on a wet day and sat down in the square to hear speeches. The emotional and political keynote was set by Paddy Doherty, a tough-minded and rigorously honest right-winger, when he asked the crowd, rather in the manner of a retreat priest inviting the congregation to renounce the devil:

‘Are you, the people of this city, irresponsible?’
‘No’ thundered the fervent reply.
‘Are you, the people of this city, communists?’
‘No!’
‘Are you, the people of this city, under the influence of any political organization?’
‘No!’
‘Will there be bloodshed in this city tonight?’
‘No!’
‘Thank God!’

A local solicitor, Oaude Wilton, the usually unpaid advocate of every Bogsider in trouble, appealed to us to ‘Forget the past and live together for the future. I ask you to treat every person fairly and give employment fairly, provided always that you have your fundamental rights’. John Hume conducted the singing of ‘We shall overcome’. All joined in the chorus.

It was that kind of meeting. The Citizens Action Committee declared at the outset that it was a ‘non-political’ body. It renounced violence. Its watchword was ‘Anti-Unionist unity’. No speech from its platforms was complete without a declaration of pacifist intent and an appeal for ‘the unity of all our people’. Unity was impressively demonstrated when fifteen thousand people assembled in Duke Street on 16 November to try again to march to the city centre. Craig had now banned all demonstrations within the city walls. The march faced a police cordon on Craigavon Bridge, and hundreds of stewards held back the younger and more aggressive elements who wanted to fight their way through. After a thirty-minute stand-off which threatened at any moment to erupt into the biggest riot seen in Derry in living memory, the crowd surged around the police cordon, which, perhaps with some foresight, was so positioned as to leave open an alternative route into the city centre, and made its way to the Diamond. The meeting was held in the outlawed area. This was considered a famous victory and it established the CAC as the unchallengeable leaders of anti-Unionism in Derry.

The CAC’s sudden strength did not lie in its having committed the Catholic masses to a new political programme. Its strength was that in a sense it had no programme. Certainly it made specific demands—universal franchise in local government elections, an end to gerrymandering, laws against discrimination and so on. But there was nothing in this that the Nationalist Party had not, in its own way, been campaigning for for decades, nothing with which the Republican movement, the Labour Party, the Liberal Party and even a section of the Unionists did not agree. The CAC’s strength was that it struck an attitude which perfectly matched the mood of the Catholic masses in the aftermath of 5 October. John Hume was its personification: reasonable, respectable, righteous, solid, non-violent and determined. The average Bogsider wanted to do something about 5 October; he could go out and march behind Hume, confident that he would not be led into violence, in no way nervous about the political ideas of the men at the front of the procession and certain that he was, by his presence, making a contribution to the struggle. The CAC did not challenge the consciousness of the Catholic masses. It up-dated the expression of it, injected new life into it and made it relevant to a changed situation. And the tiny miracle which sealed their success in doing this was that they had contrived to contain within their ambit most of those who had, until 5 October, been leading a struggle designed specifically to destroy that consciousness.

Revolutionaries and reformers can unite only when the revolutionary agrees, temporarily at least, to suspend those items in his programme with which the reformer disagrees. There is no reciprocation. The revolutionary will agree with the reformer’s demands; his basic objection will be that they do not go far enough.

So for the time being a fractious alliance held together. And it seemed to be getting some results. The civil rights demonstrations which took place throughout Northern Ireland, but most frequently and dramatically in Derry, in the weeks after 5 October forced concessions from the Unionists. On 8 November a specially requisitioned meeting of the Corporation accepted a Nationalist motion setting up a three-man committee to allocate houses. Alderman Hegarty and two Unionists were elected to the committee. Shortly afterwards O’Neill announced a five-point package of reforms. These involved a plan to abolish Derry Corporation, universal franchise, and a promise that sections of the Special Powers Act would be ‘put into cold storage’ (but not so cold as to prevent rapid re-heating when the occasion arose).

Had such measures been announced in Stormont three months previously they would have been hailed as a dramatic advance. Now they were far too little far too late. What they did was to confirm to the Catholic masses that the power which they were beginning to feel was real. When on 16 November fifteen thousand people stood in a mass on Craigavon Bridge confronting the police they felt, being there in those numbers, real power in their grasp. That was a heady thing to happen to people from the Bogside, something which no cabinet minister could ever understand.

There was a civil rights march in Armagh on 30 November. The Rev. Ian Paisley called a counter-demonstration. With hundreds of followers, most of them armed with sticks and clubs, he occupied the centre of the city, the march’s objective, from early morning. The march had not been banned, but the RUC blocked its path and prevented the two sides coming into contact. There was no clash, but the gruesome possibilities were not missed by many people. Dr Paisley protested loud and long about the weakness of O’Neill in the face of the rebel threat. Mr Craig repeatedly asserted his conviction that IRA men and Trotsky-ites were masterminding the Catholics. The CRA, the CAC and the Nationalist Party demanded that the government charge Paisley and sack Craig. Tension grew. Then on 9 December Captain O’Neill apparently had the biggest success of his career. He made a dramatic prime-ministerial broadcast immediately after the news on local television. It was ten minutes of emotional cliches delivered in the whining nasal drawl which is, apparently, his natural voice. He ended by asking ‘What kind of Ulster do you want?’ and appealing to ‘men of goodwill to come together’.

Immediately afterwards he sacked Craig from the government. This was generally regarded as a very courageous thing for Captain O’Neill to do. In his own terms it may well have been. The civil rights movement welcomed it triumphantly, and glowing tribute was paid to the principled liberalism of the prime minister. Both the CRA and the CAC called ‘a truce’—that is they promised not to organize any marches in the immediate future. O’Neill’s broadcast was printed and reprinted in the press and generally touted as the keynote address of a new era. The majority of people in the Bogside, and in the Catholic community in Northern Ireland generally, believed at this point that the trouble was over. For a brief period we had gone marching mad. Reforms were on the way and, with the Unionist hard-liners ‘routed’ (Derry Journal), there was no reason why there should not be ‘steady progress’ (Irish News) towards a ‘society where all men live in dignity’ (John Hume).

Actually, what the Catholics had been given was a sense of achievement. It was a new experience, and for the moment it sufficed. Meanwhile, an ‘I’m backing O’Neill’ campaign was launched. The Belfast Telegraph printed forms bearing this legend with spaces for people to sign their names. The forms were taken round factories and distributed outside churches. At least one member of the CAC signed. Car stickers, even, were printed. The Parliamentary Unionist Party supported the sacking of Craig by twenty-eight votes to none with four abstentions. ‘His departure from the meeting, crestfallen and alone, was symbolic in itself,’ crowed the Derry Journal. Clergymen, trade-union leaders and prominent academics publicly pledged their support for the ‘O’Neill policy’. A casual visitor to Northern Ireland might have wondered who it was, apart from William Craig and Ian Paisley, who had ever been against reform. ‘His appeal met with an instant and voluminous response that soon amounted to a tide of support from the Protestant community,’ continued the Journal. ‘From the churches, the academics and the professional and commercial classes to a multitude of ordinary Unionists came striking testimony that Captain O’Neill could count on their backing for a policy of conciliation and reform.’ In a poll conducted by the Dublin-based Sunday Independent, which has an almost exclusively Catholic readership, Captain O’Neill was elected ‘Man of the Year’ by an overwhelming majority.

The ‘truce’ was broken when the People’s Democracy announced that it was marching from Belfast to Derry, starting on 1 January. The PD had been formed by the students at Queen’s University, Belfast, who had been in Derry on 5 October. It was a loose organization without formal membership and with an incoherent ideology comprising middle-class liberalism, Aldermaston pacifism and a Sorbonne-inspired belief in spontaneity. At its core was a small group of determined left-wingers who had been in close liaison with the Labour left in Derry before and after 5 October, most of whom retained simultaneous membership of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. The march was condemned by the Nationalist Party. Mr McAteer said that the ‘public are browned off with marches’ and that it was ‘bad weather’ for such activity. The attitude of the Catholic establishment was summed up by Frank McCarroll, owner of the Journal. ‘Let the truce stand. The difference between what they [the civil rights movement] demanded and what the government offered was certainly not sufficient to justify any risk of chaos in the streets.’ Neither the CRA nor the CAC would support the march, but neither felt sure enough of its ground to condemn it outright.

About eighty people, Queen’s students and half a dozen supporters from Derry, set off from Belfast City Hall at nine in the morning of 1 January. Dr Paisley’s right-hand man, Major Ronald Bunting, came with a Union Jack and a group of supporters to give it a barracking send-off. The march was a horrific seventy-three-mile trek which dredged to the surface all the accumulated political filth of fifty Unionist years. Every few miles groups of Unionist extremists blocked the route. Invariably the police diverted the march rather than open the road, so that much of the time it wound a circuitous way through country lanes from stopping place to stopping place. It was frequently stoned from the fields and attacked by groups of men with clubs. There was no police protection. Senior RUC officers consorted openly with leaders of the opposing groups. On the final day of the march, at Burntollet Bridge a few miles outside Derry, a force of some hundreds, marshalled by members of the B Specials and watched passively by our ‘escort’ of more than a hundred police, attacked with nailed clubs, stones and bicycle chains. Of the eighty who had set out fewer than thirty arrived in Derry uninjured. But they had gathered hundreds of supporters behind them on the way and were met in Guildhall Square by angry thousands who were in no mood for talk of truce. Emotion swelled as bloodstained marchers mounted a platform and described their experiences. Rioting broke out and continued for some hours.

The scene of the battle shifted from the city centre to Fahan Street, Rossville Street and William Street as the police tried to drive us into the Bogside. It died out in late evening when, having succeeded in moving us back into our own area, the police made no real attempt actually to come in after us. The area was peaceful and deserted at 2 a.m. when a mob of policemen came from the city centre through Butcher Gate and surged down Fahan Street into St Columb’s Wells and Lecky Road, shouting and singing:

Hey, hey we’re the monkees.
And we’re going to monkey around
Till we see your blood flowing
All along the ground.

They broke in windows with their batons, kicked doors and shouted to the people to ‘come out and fight, you Fenian bastards’. Anyone who did come to his or her door was grabbed and beaten up. The only phone in St Columb’s Wells is in No. 37, McMenamins’. Roused from his bed and seeing the mob rampaging around the street Johnny McMenamin lifted the receiver and dialled 999. He had been put through to Victoria RUC Barracks before realization dawned on him that this was ridiculous. The police stayed for about an hour, roaming up and down the Wells and Lecky Road, shouting, singing, throwing stones through any upstairs windows at which a face appeared. When they had gone, people crept out to clear up the damage, tend to those who had been beaten up and comfort hysterical neighbours. Lord Cameron in his restrained report on these events recorded ‘with regret that our investigations have led us to the unhesitating conclusion that on the night of 4th/5th January a number of policemen were guilty of misconduct which involved assault and battery, malicious damage to property in streets in the predominantly Catholic Bogside area, giving reasonable cause for apprehension of personal injury among other innocent inhabitants, and the use of provocative sectarian and political slogans’.

By mid-morning the streets were filled with people discussing and arguing about what we should do. Hundreds of teenagers had armed themselves with sticks and iron bars and were of the opinion that we should march on Victoria Barracks and take revenge. At the corner of Wellington Street Gerry Fitt was saying that ‘it’s time to get the guns out’. Calmer counsels prevailed, and in the early afternoon the women of the area went in a body and told District Inspector McGimpsie that the RUC would not be allowed back into the area until those responsible for the attack on Bogside were named and disciplined. Vigilante squads organized themselves immediately afterwards. The Foyle Harps Hall in Brandywell and the Rossville Hall in Bogside were opened as recruitment and organizing centres. Vinny Coyle, an enormous man well known in the area, the violence of whose language and demeanour belied a genuinely peaceful nature, emerged as the energetic commandant of vigilantes. Barricades were erected across the three or four main entrances to the Bogside. By nightfall vigilante patrols complete with official armbands and carrying clubs were patrolling the streets. It was half-expected that the police would come. The atmosphere was exciting.

John ‘Caker’ Casey, who by dint of his dab hand with a paint brush was recognized as an expert wall-sloganeer, fetched out the tools of his trade and in a moment of inspiration wrote ‘You are now entering Free Derry’ on a gable-end in St Columb’s Street. In the middle of the night someone arrived with a radio transmitter. It was installed in an eighth-storey flat in Rossville Street with the aerial on the roof. We began broadcasting, describing ourselves as ‘Radio Free Derry, the Voice of Liberation’.

The only people more appalled than the government by the situation were the leaders of the CAC. They had never intended barricades. But blood was up and there was nothing they could do about it. By chance the radio transmitter had been presented to Dermie McClenaghan and me. We used it to make propaganda encouraging the people to keep the barricades up and the police out and to ‘join your vigilante patrols’. We were perhaps erratic. On one occasion Tommy McDermott, who believed in the revolutionary potential of underground music, was left alone with the transmitter, an opportunity which he used to treat the populace to two hours of the Incredible String Band interspersed with whispered injunctions to ‘love one another and keep cool’. But for the most part we played rebel songs, and White, McClenaghan, Melaugh and I and some others delivered regular harangues. Reception was good, the listening audience vast.

The police made no real attempt to enter the area. The barricades remained for five days, by which time the enormous implications of what was happening had seeped through. Keeping the barricades up indefinitely meant, in effect, to opt out of the state, and seemed to require some permanent institution separate from and opposed to the police to control the area. This had not been thought of. And rioting was one thing, but the police sooner or later were going to try to re-enter, and to keep them out would require fighting some sort of set-piece battle. That was another thing altogether. For a start, the police had guns and, Mr Fitt notwithstanding, we had not. Radio Free Derry nightly bombarded the area with pleas to ‘keep up the resistance’. We failed to swing the population round completely to this point of view, which possibly was not a bad thing because at the time we had neither the organization nor the means to put such resistance into effect. By the end of the week nervousness and uncertainty had replaced the excitement of Sunday night. The CAC had kept on the sidelines. Late on Friday night Hume, Cooper, Canavan and a few others descended on the area and with a series of perfectly pitched and brilliantly timed speeches convinced the vigilantes that the barricades ought to be dismantled. They were gone by the morning. Any attempt to re-erect them would have been a frontal challenge to the CAC, and the revolutionary disc-jockeys of Radio Free Derry were in no position to do that, most of them, after all, being members of that body.

There was rioting in Newry on 11 January and sporadic trouble in other areas. In Derry unemployed teenagers, of whom there were and are no small number, took to the casual stoning of any police car which came into view. Dr Paisley continued to stomp the country telling Protestants that ‘O’Neill must go’. Mr Craig was appealing to the rank and file of the Unionist Party. Captain O’Neill was being given almost weekly votes of confidence by various executive organs of the party, each of which was immediately interpreted by commentators as further evidence of the good sense and moderation of the Protestant people and the isolation of Craig and Paisley. In February Captain O’Neill put the matter to the test when he dissolved Parliament and called an election. He put up ‘O’Neill Unionists’ in constituencies where the local organization had selected a pro-Craig candidate. It was said that Captain O’Neill’s team was ‘very impressive’. It included the Duke of Westminster, the son of Lord Carson and the husband of Lady Moira Hamilton. They were slaughtered. For some reason it took months for press commentators, the British government and some other interested observers to realize this.

The announcement of the election threw civil rights organizations into some disarray. The PD, after some soul-searching about the corrupting influence of parliamentary politics, put up nine candidates, all of whom, in the end, polled well. The most common sight in the lounge of the City Hotel in Derry was that of leaders of the CAC who had hitherto been dogmatic about the ‘non-political’ nature of their activities circling one another, dagger in hand, wondering into which back it might most profitably be plunged. Ivan Cooper sought and accepted the Labour nomination for the rural area of mid-Derry, discovered quickly that the Labour tag was not popular in the constituency, resigned from the party and won easily as an Independent. Hume stood for the Foyle constituency, which includes the Bogside, against Eddie McAteer. I stood against the two of them as an official Labour candidate, with some tacit Republican support. We rejected the party manifesto and wrote one of our own. The election agent ran away with the deposit (one hundred and fifty borrowed pounds) the night before nomination day. He had taken a taxi to Norfolk to see his girl-friend. We lost another deposit when the result was announced. Mr Hume won handsomely.

After the election things went from bad to worse for moderates of all hues. It had been hoped that the decision of the people expressed through the ballot box would be accepted by everyone in the proper democratic spirit and that politics would, as a result, return to the chamber at Stormont. The problem was that it was by no means clear what the people had, in fact, decided, and in such a situation all tendencies retain their hopes. O’Neill was still prime minister but most of his critics in the Parliamentary Unionist Party had won their way back to Stormont. Dr Paisley had run him close in Bannside and could justifiably feel that his star was still rising. The unexpected performance of the PD against both ‘liberal’ Unionist and Nationalist candidates showed that Catholic working-class resistance to the blandishments of O’Neill was stronger and deeper than had generally been supposed.

Rioting started again in Derry within a few weeks. It was on a small scale at first, teenagers stoning police cars at the edge of the Bogside. It built up and, on 19 April, erupted into the bloodiest violence the city had seen to date, with youths from the Bogside using stones and petrol bombs to hold the police off. The police burst into a house in William Street and, probably out of frustration, beat up everyone present. The man of the house, Sammy Devenney, was subsequently to die from his injuries. A policeman cornered in Hamilton Street drew his gun and fired two shots. No one was hit but the point was well taken. Afterwards the talk was of the next time and there were some who said that we ought to be prepared. No one doubted that there would be a next time. There was rioting on and after 12 July when the Protestants celebrated the result of the Battle of the Boyne.

The Derry riots were a minor affair, but around Unity Flats in Belfast and in Dungannon there were fierce clashes between Catholics and Orange marchers, with the RUC intervening on the Protestant side.

O’Neill had resigned in April and taken himself off, ennobled, to the boardroom of a merchant bank in the City of London, where he is believed still to be. He was replaced by Major James Chichester-Clark, a bumbling squire from the Maghera district. Chichester-Clark—or ‘Chi-Chi’, as he came to be called after an exotic animal in the London Zoo—announced that he believed in being ‘fair’. Mr Hume, Mr Cooper, the CRA and other leaders of moderate Catholic opinion counselled their supporters to give him a chance. But in the Bogside and elsewhere the rioting classes were not impressed. The unemployed youth of areas like the Bogside had, at the outset of the civil rights campaign, been regarded as marching fodder. Energetic and instinctively aggressive, they could be counted on to turn out for sitdowns, marches, pickets or any other protest activity which was organized. It was they who had turned out on 5 October. It was their impatience which had then impelled the CAC into more activity, and more militant activity, than its leading members would have wished. It was their energy and aggression which had powered the civil rights campaign through its first frenetic months. In the end it was they, not the RUC, who frightened organizations like the CAC off the streets. The CAC died in Derry after the riots of 19 April. It was difficult after that to organize a demonstration which did not end in riot, and the CAC was not about to assume such responsibility. But by ending demonstrations the moderates took away from the youth any channel for expression other than riot. The rage and frustration which lay just beneath the surface of life in the Bogside could no longer be contained within the thin shell of the CAC’s timid respectability. The ‘hooligans’ had taken over, and the stage was set for a decisive clash between them and the forces of the state. Everyone knew it would come on 12 August, when the Apprentice Boys were scheduled to march past the Bogside in their annual celebration of the Relief of Derry in 1689.

At the end of July the Republican Club announced that they had formed a ‘Derry Citizens Defence Association’, to protect the area against attack on the Twelfth. They invited all other organizations in the area to nominate two representatives to sit with them on this body. There was some annoyance that the Republicans, before inviting the cooperation of any other group, had parcelled out the leading positions among themselves. Sean Keenan was chairman, Johnnie White secretary, Johnnie McAllister treasurer. But most political groups in the area accepted the Republican initiative, reasoning that something decisive was going to happen on the Twelfth and it was as well to lay title to some of the action in advance.

The matter was clinched by what appeared to be a joint assault by the RUC and Orange demonstrators on Unity Flats in Belfast on 2 August. One man was beaten to death and many others were injured. Reports of this sent a frisson through the area. Obviously something similar might happen in Derry on the Twelfth. We had better be prepared. The CAC met, nominated two people to sit on the DCDA and quietly went out of existence. At the time no one noticed.

The stated purpose of the DCDA was to try to preserve the peace and, as soon as this failed, to organize the defence of the area. Maps were procured and we counted out the forty-one entrances to the area. Materials for making barricades were stored adjacent to each. Enthusiasm was high. The 12 August procession was regarded as a calculated annual insult to the Derry Catholics. There was a surge of resentment and much bitter muttering every year. But this time, after all we had come through in the last nine months, the attitude was very different. This year at last they were going to be shown that things had changed drastically. And if they dared to attack…The first barricades went up on the night of the 11th in anticipation.

On the Twelfth stewards made a token effort to prevent the march from being stoned as it passed the end of William Street. Mr Hume, Mr Cooper and some others were at the front appealing for calm. Some of the stones tended to fall short and Mr Cooper was felled. As the volume of stonethrowing increased a mixed force of RUC and supporters of the Apprentice Boys made a charge into the area, which was the signal for the real hostilities to begin. The battle lasted for about forty-eight hours. Barricades went up all around the area, open-air petrol-bomb factories were established, dumpers hijacked from a building site were used to carry stones to the front. Teenagers went on to the roof of the block of High Flats which dominates Rossville Street, the main entrance to the Bogside, and began lobbing petrol bombs at the police below. This was a brilliant tactical move and afterwards there was no shortage of people claiming to have thought of it first. As long as the lads stayed up there and as long as we managed to keep them supplied with petrol bombs there was no way—short of shooting them off the roof—that the police could get past the High Flats. Every time they tried it rained petrol bombs.

The DCDA set up headquarters in Paddy Doherty’s house in Westland Street. Throughout the battle all doors in the area were open. Tea and sandwiches were constantly available on the pavement. The police started using tear gas after a few hours, which nonplussed us momentarily. A call to the offices of the Red Mole in London—they seemed the most appropriate people
—produced an antidote involving vinegar and a series of instructions for lessening the effects. Soon there were buckets of water and vinegar stationed all over the battle zone. As an alternative, Molly Barr was dispensing free Vaseline from her shop under the High Flats.

Four walkie-talkie radio sets were taken from a television crew. One was installed in Doherty’s house and the other three used to report back on the state of play in the battle. Our possession of those instruments was later to be adduced as evidence of the massive, subversive conspiracy behind the fighting. When the batteries ran out after a few hours the sets were given back to their owners. On the evening of the 13th Mr Jack Lynch appeared on television and said that he could ‘not stand idly by’. Irish troops were to be moved to the border. This put new heart into the fight. News that ‘the Free State soldiers are coming’ spread rapidly. Three first-aid stations, manned by local doctors, nurses and the Knights of Malta, were treating those overcome by the gas or injured by missiles thrown by the police. The radio transmitter, now operating from Eamonn Melaugh’s house in Creggan, was pumping out Republican music and exhortations to ‘keep the murderers out. Don’t weaken now. Make every stone and petrol bomb count.’ The police were making charge after charge up Rossville Street.

Phone-calls were made to contacts in other areas begging them to get people on to the streets and draw off some of the police from Derry. We appealed through Telefis Eireann for ‘every able-bodied man in Ireland who believes in freedom’ to come to Derry and help us. ‘We need you, we’ll feed you.’ In the main battle area, Rossville Street, the fighting was being led by Bernadette Devlin, who had seemingly developed an immunity to tear gas and kept telling people, implausibly, that ‘it’s O.K. once you get a taste of it’.

On the morning of the 14th we heard reports of fighting in Belfast, Coalisland, Dungannon, Armagh and other places; we took this as encouragement. Other people were coming to our aid. The Tricolour and the Starry Plough were hoisted over the High Flats. Two people were shot and wounded by the police in Great James Street. A duplicated leaflet entitled ‘Barricade Bulletin’ appeared: ‘The enemy is weakening. They have been on their feet two nights. One more push.’ The tear gas came in even greater quantities until it filled the air like smog. People were running through it, crouching, eyes closed, to hurl a petrol bomb at the police lines and then stagger back. In William Street, a group breaking into Harrison’s garage to steal petrol was stopped by a priest who told them it was wrong. ‘But Father, we need the petrol.’ ‘Well,’ said the priest dubiously, ‘as long as you don’t take any more than you really need.’ And thus absolved in advance, they went at it with a will.

By three in the afternoon the police had been dislodged from their footholds at the bottom of Rossville Street and the battle lines, after two days, were being pushed back inexorably out of the Bogside and towards the commercial area of the city. Then, looking through the haze of gas, past the police lines, we saw the Specials moving into Waterloo Place. They were about to be thrown into the battle. Undoubtedly they would use guns. The possibility that there was going to be a massacre struck hundreds of people simultaneously. ‘Have we guns?’ people shouted to one another, hoping that someone would know, inching forward, more slowly now, as the police retreated, suddenly fearful of what was about to happen. We were about half way down William Street when the word came that British soldiers were marching across the bridge.

The Specials disappeared, the police pulled out quite suddenly and the troops, armed with sub-machine-guns, stood in a line across the mouth of William Street. Their appearance was clear proof that we had won the battle, that the RUC was beaten. That was welcomed. But there was confusion as to what the proper attitude to the soldiers might be. It was not in our history to make British soldiers welcome. A meeting started outside the High Flats in Rossville Street. (In every riot in Northern Ireland there is a man with a megaphone waiting for the meeting to start.) Bernadette Devlin, her voice croaking, urged ‘Don’t make them welcome. They have not come here to help us’, and went on a bit about British imperialism, Cyprus and Aden. It did not go down very well. The fight had been against the RUC, to ‘defend the area’…The RUC was beaten; the soldiers had prevented the Specials coming in and had not attempted to encroach on the area: They had deployed themselves around the edges. And, anyway, everyone was exhausted, clothes torn and faces begrimed, their eyes burning from the tear gas. It was victory enough for the time being.

Paddy Doherty struck the right note: ‘We have done well. We can rest on our laurels for a bit. Let us see how all this works out before we rush into anything we might regret.’ With Ray Burnett, a Scottish member of the International Socialists who had been hitch-hiking around Ireland and been given a lift into the middle of a riot, I drafted a leaflet which by seven o’clock was being distributed as ‘Barricade Bulletin No. 2’. ‘This is a great defeat for the Unionist government. But it is not yet a victory for us.’ People were not in the mood for political analysis and it didn’t have much effect.

Later we were able to listen to the news from other areas. The Specials had killed a man called Gallagher in Armagh. Belfast was desperate. Police, Specials and Protestant extremists had wreaked what appeared to be a minipogrom on Catholic areas. Tracer bullets had been used on blocks of flats. Whole streets of houses had been burned out and there were refugees living in school halls. There were some dead. And it went on the next day, burning and shooting. It sounded very different from Derry, inconceivably horrific. But by the afternoon of the fifteenth soldiers were deployed in all the troubled areas and it seemed that the situation had stabilized.

The Defence Association had had no effective existence during the actual fighting. When the radio sets had been in operation and reports from various fronts coming into the headquarters, some, particularly those in the headquarters listening to the reports, had been encouraged to believe that this amounted to organization. But really there was no organization involved, and none needed. Those bearing the brunt of the fighting were the stone-throwers and petrol-bombers of weekends past and they did not need instruction on what to do and would not have been amenable to it had it been offered. When the fighting ended, however, and the army made no move to come into the area there was an immediate need for a body which could claim to speak for the people. The Defence Committee fitted the bill. It began to get bigger. On the Twelfth it had had perhaps eighteen or twenty members. No one was quite sure, since the qualifications for membership had never been set out clearly and the meetings, up to then, had been fairly informal. When the fighting ceased representatives of various groups—tenants’ associations, street committees and so on—were accepted as members.

Individuals became members simply by taking jobs which had to be done. For example, one man was independently arranging accommodation for the fifty or so volunteers who had answered our call to ‘every able-bodied man in Ireland who believes in freedom’, and on that account he became billeting officer. He did a very efficient and unrewarding job for the next three months. Later the ‘Outsiders’ demanded a say for themselves on the Committee, and Sean Matgamna, now editor of the British weekly Workers’ Fight, became a member. In the end we were forty-four strong. Most of these were not members of any political organization and it was some weeks before the relative strength of the different factions on the committee became clear.

Within twenty-four hours of their appearance the army asked for a meeting. A delegation went to Victoria Barracks on the Strand Road, and met Brigadier Lang and Colonel Millman. It had been decided beforehand that we would tell the army that we intended to hold the area until the police were disarmed and the Specials, the Special Powers Act and Stormont abolished, and that no soldier would be permitted to come through our barricades. We had not discussed what we would do if the army decided to come on in regardless. But the issue did not arise. The Brigadier assured us that they had no intention of coming in without our agreement. He was a tall man of plausible appearance and Sandhurst accent. He said that the army had come to see that justice was done, that he knew of the injustices of the past, that things would be different now and that he hoped for a friendly relationship with us. He quite understood that we might have certain things in the area which we wished now to move out and, to facilitate this, there would be no check on vehicles on one of the roads to the Republic for the next twenty-four hours. We thought he was talking of our radio transmitter, which shows that at that point we were almost as naïve as the army.

In the immediate aftermath of the fighting relations between the army and most of the people of the area were very good. At Butcher Gate, William Street and other army positions at the edge of the Bogside women squabbled about whose turn it was to take the soldiers their tea. Army relations with the youth of the area, however, were to deteriorate very quickly. From the outset there were two opposing interpretations to be put on the fact that the army had encircled us. One was that they were protecting us from attack, the other that they were containing us, both to prevent us attacking anyone else (for example the police barracks) and to control who and what came and went: it suited ‘moderates’ to argue the former, ‘extremists’ to argue the latter. The youth, both by instinct and by experience, tended towards extremity. Within a week of the army’s appearance the first minor conflicts occurred. The police were still patrolling in the centre of the city and our young people would go out looking for them. On the first Saturday night of the army’s presence a group of about fifty stoned a police patrol in Foyle Street. A company of soldiers intervened and stood between the two sides. The stoning continued, the stones being lobbed over the army lines. Brigadier Lang came to take personal control of the situation. Standing about three yards from him a young man threw a half-brick which struck a constable and knocked him to the ground. The Brigadier grabbed the culprit by the neck, shouting apologetically, ‘I have to arrest him, he’s hit that policeman.’ The young man’s comrades surged around the Brigadier screaming for his release. ‘If you don’t release him.’ I told the Brigadier, ‘there’s going to be terrible trouble.’ ‘See that he does not do it again, then,’ said the Brigadier, after a pause to look around to survey the situation, and released his hold on his prisoner. Thus victorious, the crowd went home, cheering. Some time later a Protestant man, William King, died from a heart attack after being kicked near the city centre by a gang from the Bogside while soldiers stood a few yards away, making no move to intervene. The soldiers had no instructions to cover such situations.

On the Defence Committee the political lines were emerging, hazily at first, then, as the Committee was forced to make decisions, more and more clearly. Almost all important decisions concerned the barricades: when and in what circumstances we would take them down. Attitudes to this were naturally determined by the degree to which one was willing to accept the army. Mindful of our experience of the Citizens Action Committee, the left decided to act as an organized faction on the committee and also to maintain a separate existence. We had, we discovered, fifteen out of the forty-four committee members with us. We held a meeting of the faction before each meeting of the committee, to discuss the business which was to come up and decide on a joint attitude. Most members of the faction were in the Labour Party or the Republican Club, although there were other Republicans and Labourites on the committee who were not members of the faction. Outside the Defence Committee we had a fairly informal and nameless group operating out of Dermie McClenaghan’s house in Wellington Street. Dermie had sent his mother out of the town ‘for your own safety’, which meant that we had the house to ourselves. An assortment of people congregated here each day, our Labour-Republican group, two members of the People’s Democracy from Belfast, some of the ‘Outsiders’ and Tom Picton, a six-foot-six-inch Life photographer of radical sympathies who introduced us to the concept of the permanent stew. He had a huge cauldron of potatoes, chunks of meat and vegetables simmering over a low gas on Mrs McClenaghan’s cooker. Every morning he would throw in some more ingredients, so that it never ran out. Food was thus available at all hours of the day and night. Some people slept in McClenaghan’s in sleeping bags and on the sitting-room couch, others would drift in during the day. We had a duplicator installed in one of the bedrooms and produced a ‘Barricade Bulletin’ every second day. This consisted of news snippets, anti-army propaganda (Cyprus, Aden, Ireland in the twenties and so on), attacks on the Wilson government and some rudimentary analysis of the situation. Sarah Wilson, a member of the London Poster Workshop Group, appeared complete with silkscreen. We found her a hall to work in, and, helped by a team of children, she produced a series of striking and effective posters which soon festooned the area.

We held public meetings every few days. At these we constantly reiterated the four demands originally put forward by the Defence Committee and exhorted the people to stand fast until they were conceded. All this was designed to prevent a repetition of our experience with the CAC. We anticipated that the Defence Association would compromise and wanted to ensure that when this happened there was some left-wing focus available which could be presented as a possible alternative.

For weeks we were fairly happy about the way things were going. Our public meetings were well attended and enthusiastic. Our bulletins were accepted and read eagerly. It appeared that our faction represented a considerable body of opinion, that we were a force to be reckoned with—and no longer trapped within a ‘moderate’ alliance. When our references to the necessity to ‘smash the rotten capitalist system’ were applauded we took it as evidence that ‘revolutionary consciousness’ was on the increase.

But what the people were applauding was not so much what we said but the way we said it. We were great ones for violence of the tongue. We were forever ‘giving notice that…’; giving notice to the government, the police, even ‘the world at large’, that we would or, more frequently, would not accept such and such a proposition. The police were always ‘the uniformed thugs of the RUC’. British imperialism took a lot of stick. We never got down to defining with any precision what British imperialism was. We implied that it was the thing the Bogside had been fighting against for the past year and that we, the left-wingers, were more against it than anybody else. References to ‘Adolf Craig’ were always good for a cheer. Most of our meetings were held in the afternoons from the top of a barricade at the bottom of Westland Street. People from nearby streets, hearing the amplified voices, would gather around.

The Defence Association met almost daily, either in Paddy Doherty’s house or in a disused bookmaker’s shop which adjoined it. Not all discussion centred on matters of great moment. There were a host of day-to-day problems which had to be dealt with. People living on the fringe of or just outside the area and who felt threatened would want to move in. They would either be squatted in a vacant house or arrangements would be made to have men available to protect them if the necessity arose. Petty crime had to be investigated. A ‘police force’ was set up, and it dealt competently with what little crime there was. ‘Punishment’, more often than not, consisted of a stern lecture from Sean Keenan about the need for solidarity within the area, which seemed to work quite well. A vigilante corps to patrol the area at night was enrolled. It was divided into three sections, operating from halls in the Creggan, Bogside and Brandywell areas. Each hall had its own catering officer whose job it was to ensure that tea, soup and sandwiches were available as each patrol finished its two-hour duty and that the cigarettes were fairly distributed. (The cigarettes caused a lot of trouble and more than one meeting of the committee was dominated by minute investigation of alleged irregularities. Outraged by a report that Creggan was on twenty cigarettes a night while his men made do with ten, Bobby Toland, an aggressive young man with long hair who had somehow emerged as chief of the Bogside vigilantes, declared UDI one evening and barred members of the Defence Committee from his headquarters in the West End Hall. He was bought off with an extra allocation.) Dignitaries came to ‘see for themselves’. Lord Hailsham came to assure us that his party was sensitive to the need for reform and that ‘we never knew about the things which were going on here’. From the Republic came a procession of politicians, from cabinet ministers to aspirant county councillors, each to be photographed in front of a barricade, preferably shaking hands with someone who could positively be identified as ‘one of the Bogside defenders’. Tribunite MPs gave daring clenched fist salutes before leaving. The most notable visitor was James Callaghan, who, as Home Secretary, had responsibility for Northern Ireland at Westminster.

Mr Callaghan came at the end of August. In honour of the visit the Defence Committee had Caker Casey’s ‘Free Derry’ slogan professionally re-done. The gable was painted white and a sign writer employed to do the lettering. There were many of us who preferred Caker’s version.

Mr Callaghan’s welcome in the Bogside was afterwards described by pressmen in terms ranging from ‘enthusiastic’ to ‘ecstatic’. It was very noisy, very emotional, and a little confused. The left faction had argued successfully in the committee that, consistent with our policy of not permitting the forces of ‘law and order’ to enter the area, Mr Callaghan should not be allowed to bring any escort with him. The left had also decided that we would mount some sort of demonstration to make it clear that there were those in the area who did not place complete trust in him or in the Labour administration. Fairly typically, by the time Mr Callaghan arrived we had not decided what form this demonstration should take and it never happened. The vigilantes were mobilized to escort Mr Callaghan but when he appeared they, and he, were swept along by a surging crowd of thousands up Rossville Street and into Lecky Road. Mr Callaghan took refuge in a local house, where four members of the Defence Committee—Sean Keenan, Paddy Doherty, Michael Canavan and I—went to talk to him. We formally reiterated our demands: disband the Specials; disarm the police; repeal the Special Powers Act; abolish Stormont. We told him that the barricades would stay up until they were granted. Mr Callaghan said that, quite frankly, the demands were unreasonable. A committee under Lord Hunt had already been set up to look at the whole question of policing Northern Ireland. ‘New structures’ would now have to be created to give all sections of the community a ‘sense of belonging’. We told him about the unemployment problem and he said that, yes, it was very serious, unemployment was always serious and that, indeed, he and his colleagues would have to see what could be done about it. Sean Keenan said that Mr Callaghan could see we were all reasonable people. Mr Callaghan agreed that indeed we were. He went upstairs and addressed the crowd outside from an open window.

It had been said, he began, that the London government was impartial. This was not true. The government was firmly on the side of justice. There was loud cheering. Mr Callaghan left and went to the Protestant Fountain area, where, it was reported, he had a distinctly more subdued welcome.

At the first meeting of the Defence Committee after Callaghan’s visit it was proposed that the barricades be taken down. The left faction resisted this fiercely, arguing that none of the demands just put to Callaghan had been met. No vote was taken, but it was obvious that Callaghan had greatly impressed some of the leading moderates and that they were prepared to trust him and the Labour government to produce an acceptable solution. The ‘demands’ were, anyway, no longer being taken very seriously. They had been drawn up in the chaotic emotional atmosphere of 14 August. No one now really believed that Stormont was going to be abolished forthwith, and the majority on the Defence Committee was dealing in the realm of immediate possibilities.

Callaghan had not just impressed members of the Defence Committee; he had been very popular with the people as a whole, not because of any personal qualities but because, if the arrival of the British Army symbolized our physical victory over the RUC, Callaghan’s appearance symbolized the political defeat of the Unionist Party. They were no longer calling the shots. The boss himself had arrived to put them in their place, and their discomfiture, of which his surly reception in the Fountain was seen as an example, was pleasant to behold. Things were going our way. (Callaghan’s account of his visit to Derry, in his book A House Divided, suggests that he was completely unaware of this feeling.) But if things were going our way, if the British government was here in person to shackle the Unionist Party, there was no need any longer to maintain the militancy of recent weeks. While the elation of the battle had lingered on, revolutionary rhetoric at the bottom of Westland Street had been quite congenial. Now, increasingly, it seemed merely strident.

The left faction went to work churning out ‘Barricade Bulletins’ and posters and holding more street-corner meetings. But we were trying to turn back the tide. To the majority of people the barricades had had a simple function—to prevent hostile forces coming in to attack the area. The hostile forces had been defeated. So why not take the barricades down? It was a logical argument. We countered with the slightly dubious ploy of linking our barricades to those in Belfast, arguing that it would be a ‘betrayal of Belfast’ for us unilaterally to dismantle our defences. This had a powerful emotional appeal. The Catholic ghettoes in Belfast had suffered immeasurably more than we. The suggestion that we should keep our barricades up as a symbol of solidarity with them was well-nigh unanswerable. The argument did, however, have one enormous weakness. It would disappear as soon as the Belfast barricades came down, and we had no knowledge of, much less control over, what was happening in Belfast. Indeed contrary to Unionist paranoia about a well-coordinated plot to subvert the state it emerged at one point that no one on the Derry Defence Committee knew who the officers on the Belfast Defence Committee were. With the decisive support of the Catholic hierarchy the army talked the Belfast barricades down by mid-September, when an army Land Rover went through the Falls with Dr Philbin, the local bishop, perched incongruously in his robes in the passenger seat. Shortly afterwards a mass meeting at the Free Derry Corner—as the area around Casey’s gable had come to be called—voted to breach the main barricade in Rossville Street.

After the manic days of August depression was slowly setting in. Vigilante patrols fell off. What was the point of tramping round the area all night? Nothing ever happened. If no one was going to attack, where was the need for defence? The issue was sealed on 9 October, when Lord Hunt’s committee reported and Callaghan arrived back in Northern Ireland with Sir Arthur Young, the new Chief of Police. Hunt had recommended the disarming of the RUC and the abolition of the B Specials. It was, by any estimation, a victory for the Catholics. Any lingering doubt was removed on the night of 10‒11 October, when the army in Belfast smashed a riot on the Protestant Shankill Road. The Hunt Report had driven the Protestants raging mad. It had castigated and disarmed their police force and abolished their B Specials and, by extension, humiliated their whole community. They came out now in their thousands and flung themselves down the Shankill to vent their wrath and frustration on Unity Flats. A policeman who stood in their way was shot dead. The army moved in and battered its way up the Shankill with bloodthirsty enthusiasm. In the shooting two Protestants were killed and a dozen wounded. Many others were beaten or kicked unconscious. Who in the Bogside could doubt now that at long last law and order were being administered impartially?

Callaghan brought Young into the area and introduced him to a cheering crowd. ‘This is Sir Arthur Young. He’s going to look after you.’ ‘Oh no,’ said Sir Arthur, all London bobby and affability, ‘they are going to look after me.’ There were more cheers.

That ended the second phase of Free Derry. Military policemen came in, unarmed, to patrol the area, preparatory to a reformed RUC taking over. For a few weeks previously, after the dismantling of the Belfast barricades, the left faction had more or less given up any attempt to hold back the inevitable. We were occupied with other things.

From the beginning of September, Republicans and some members of the Labour Party had been learning to use guns. A Republican training officer had come up from Cork, and in a tiny house in the Brandywell district people who had perhaps joined the Labour Party a year or two ago out of admiration for the political principles of Harold Wilson (this is possible) learned how to dismantle and reassemble the Thompson and the Sten and how to make a Mills bomb. We went across the border into the Donegal hills for practice shoot-outs. It was exciting at the time and enabled one to feel that, despite the depressing trend of events in the area, one was involved in a real revolution. But after the Hunt report and the reaction to it this activity too lost its urgency. Only the hooligans—and the heroes of the High Flats were rapidly being relegated again to that status—retained the fire for conflict. The Republicans were having their own problems, as the conflicting opinions which were shortly to split the movement hardened on both sides.

The next six months were, by Northern Ireland standards, quiet. Military police patrolled the area. They were very friendly and fairly popular. People accepted them, chatted to them, invited them in for a cup of tea. And as the barricades tumbled the politicians re-emerged, blinking in the sunlight. Attention was shifted away from Rossville Street and the Falls Road to the more salubrious arena at Stormont. The attention of the British press seemed to shift altogether, with the exception of some dewy-eyed photo-features in the tabloids depicting the warm human relationship which had built up between the troops and the Catholics. The Ulster Troubles, it appeared, were over, and Cabinet ministers turned with relief to the more pressing and electorally more important problems of the state of the pound, industrial relations and what to do about Ian Smith. But in Rossville Street and the Falls Road and a hundred other dusty streets in Derry and Belfast, things were different. Reforms had filtered through on to the statute book. An Ombudsman had been appointed. Derry Corporation had been abolished and replaced by a Development Commission. A points system for the allocation of houses was in operation. Moderate Unionists could, and often did, point proudly to this record of progress. None of it, however, made any difference to the clumps of unemployed teenagers who stood, fists dug deep into their pockets, around William Street in the evenings. Briefly elevated into folk-hero status in the heady days of August, praised and patronized by local leaders for their expertise with the stone and the petrol bomb, they had now been dragged back down into the anonymous depression which had hitherto been their constant condition. For them at least, nothing had changed and they were bitterly cynical about the talk of a reformed future. ‘We’ll get nothing out of it. The Orangemen are still in power.’ Occasionally they would stone the soldiers. It was small-scale stuff.

On the last Sunday in March 1970, Easter Sunday, there were two Republican parades, one Official, one Provisional, in commemoration of the 1916 Rising. The movement had finally split in January. In Derry, initially at least, most of the younger Republicans had opted for the Official wing. Rioting broke out near the city centre as the Officials’ commemoration ceremony broke up. It was by later standards a fairly minor affray but it was significant enough to draw forth a chorus of condemnation from Mr Hume, local priests and other leaders of moderate opinion. Much was made of the fact that such behaviour tended to make more difficult the full implementation of the reforms. Scorn was the hooligans’ mildest response to this reasoning. It could not be gainsaid, however, that the overwhelming majority of the people of the area continued to be sternly disapproving of conflict with the army. The soldiers were still seen as protectors, as ‘Disgusted’, ‘Derryman’, ‘Pro Bono Publico’ and other prolific writers made clear in the letter columns of the Derry Journal.

On Easter Tuesday the Orange marching season began. It sparked off rioting in the Ballymurphy estate in Belfast. On television the Bogside saw the army deluge the estate with CS gas. The rioting went on sporadically for three days. Once again hooliganism was roundly condemned on all sides. There were further riots in Belfast at the beginning of June. The army, learning quickly, announced that it had acquired new transparent shields, the better to see the rioters. They were reputedly manufactured from the material used in the windows of American space craft. They were unbreakable. And rubber-bullet guns were demonstrated for the first time on the television news.

On Friday 26 June Bernadette Devlin finally lost her appeal against a six-month jail sentence for riotous behaviour in Derry the previous August. The police agreed that she should surrender at Victoria Barracks in Derry that evening. A ‘farewell’ meeting was arranged for Free Derry corner. On her way to the meeting from Belfast her car was stopped about five miles outside Derry. She was arrested and taken to Armagh Prison. When word of this reached the waiting crowd it erupted in rage. The ‘defence of the area’ in August 1969 had already passed into local folklore. It was a noble episode in which we had all participated when, after decades of second-class citizenship, we had finally risen and asserted in a manner which made the world take notice that we were not going to stand for it any more. The jailing of Miss Devlin was a challenge to the area to stand by that estimation of its own action.

Not everyone answered the challenge. Miss Devlin may have been a heroine to the hooligans, but ardour tended slightly to dim as one ascended the age-scale. She had, it was well recognized, got ‘communistic ideas’ and her talent for instant rhetoric about the joys of revolution unnerved the cautious. Local upholders of the ‘traditional values’ may have thought that six months in Armagh would do her, and them, no harm at all. But it would have been a private thought. For a day or two it was not possible publicly to execrate rebellion.

The hooligans, for the first time since August, had some sort of mandate for riot, and they were joined by some who had not flung a stone in anger for almost eleven months. It lasted over the weekend. The first perspex shield appeared, edging around the corner of William Street and Abbey Street. A brick hit it and it broke. The first rubber bullets, fired according to regulations to bounce off the ground before hitting their target, were fielded and fought over and kept as souvenirs. Gas containers crashed and petrol bombs flared through the swirling CS haze. All day Saturday and through Sunday afternoon the 1969 scenario, with the army in the RUC role, was acted out, the fighting surging back and forth around the mouth of Rossville Street. On mid-afternoon on Sunday, supporters of Mr Hume called a meeting of ‘prominent people’ in one of Michael Canavan’s bookmaker shops to try and find a peace formula. It was suggested that a deputation should go to the military authorities and ask them to withdraw their soldiers from around the area. Sean Keenan, the best-known figure in the embryo Provisional organization, refused to be part of the delegation. Sean said that what we had to do was to prepare to defend ourselves. ‘Against whom?’ he was asked. Against the British army. Most of those present were incredulous. ‘But the army is here to defend us.’ Outside, the fighting went on. A delegation did go to Victoria Barracks and spoke to the army commander and Frank Lagan, the local police chief. A curious agreement was reached—that if attacks on the troops stopped immediately the RUC would not attempt to patrol the area for a fortnight. Lagan was visibly depressed by the terms. ‘We had been doing so well. People were beginning to accept us.’

The fighting died away on Sunday night, not as a result of the agreement, which meant little to those in the forefront of the battle, but out of general exhaustion. And once again, the news from Belfast was very bad. Orange parades had triggered further fighting in Ardoyne, Ballymurphy and East Belfast. In East Belfast a Protestant crowd had tried to storm the small Catholic enclave around St Matthew’s church. Armed men had defended it. Four Protestants and one Catholic had been killed. Three Protestants were killed in shooting in Ardoyne. Reports were, as always, confused, with the Catholics, the Protestants and the army giving different versions of, and drawing different conclusions from, each incident. But the central point was clear enough—that in Belfast it was shaping up like a shooting war, the Catholics were vastly outnumbered and the marching season was not nearly over. The controversies which occupied hours of parliamentary time and acres of newsprint about which side threw the first stone or whether the soldiers, when the fighting started, had acted impartially—were of little interest to the rioters and potential rioters of the Bogside and Creggan. What was of importance was that the Orange parades, these noisy, never-ending celebrations of institutionalized Catholic inferiority, were, apparently, being shepherded around Belfast past hemmed-in Catholic ghettoes by British soldiers. It was enough to make anger rise in even the most moderate Catholic observer. And the Falls curfew followed immediately. On 3 July, a Friday, when nerves were still frayed from the bloodletting of the previous weekend, an army search party found guns in a house in Balkan Street in the Lower Falls. The search party was stoned as it withdrew and the inevitable riot developed. Hundreds of rounds of CS were fired until the whole area choked on it. Then, at ten in the evening, the army imposed a curfew and did not lift it until Sunday. The soldiers moved in to enforce it, firing over a thousand rounds from their SLRs and killing three men. The people were penned in their houses. The soldiers went on a house-to-house search for arms, smashing in doors, ripping up floorboards. No one was allowed out on the Saturday. Then pressmen and Unionist leaders, including Captain John Brooke, were taken on a tour of the subjugated area in Land Rovers. Having gassed and battered the people into submission and made them cower in their kitchens, they came then with this effete squire from the back end of Fermanagh—he who, on an ordinary day, wouldn’t dare set foot in the Falls—gave him an escort as he lorded it over the people and brought British press photographers with them to record the scene for their readers. I watched it and listened to accounts of it on television in a house in Beechwood Street in the Bogside. The woman of the house is mild-mannered to an extreme. Clenching her fists and crying with impotent rage, she stuttered: ‘The bastards, the rotten, lousy, English bastards.’

The Falls curfew did not totally alienate the Catholics from the army. There were many who believed that, despite all, the presence of the army was still some sort of defence against extremist Protestant attack. It was said that the army had been misled by Unionist politicians, that this did not really represent army policy, that only a Scottish regiment had been involved, English regiments were different. People believed what they wanted. But the hooligans knew. The only difference between the army and the RUC was that the army was better at it.

A fortnight before the curfew the Tories had won the British General Election, and it was argued by some that this accounted for the more stringent army tactics. In the Londonderry constituency Mr McAteer and I had stood against Robin Chichester-
Clark, brother of the then Northern Ireland prime minister, now a Tory front-bench spokesman. Mr McAteer stood as a ‘Unity’ candidate, with Mr Hume, rather bizarrely, as his election agent. (Mr Hume’s decision to act as Mr McAteer’s election agent had been described by Mr McAteer as ‘Mr Hume’s finest hour’.) I stood as an Independent Socialist, the Northern Ireland Labour Party having come to the conclusion that I had ‘too violent an image’ to qualify for their endorsement. Our election workers in Derry City were drawn mainly from the ‘hooligan element’. They worked their proverbial hearts out, though none of them in truth was entirely convinced that any election was worth worrying about. In the countryside, local Republicans, press-ganged by Johnnie White, manned the booths. Mr Chichester-
Clark got 39,000 votes. Mr McAteer and Mr Hume got 27,000. We got 7,500. The result made little difference to what was happening.

The area was raising a sudden generation of kamikaze children whose sport it was to hurtle down Rossville Street, stones in hand, to take on the British army. The Saturday riot became a regular thing. It was known as ‘the matinee’. People did their shopping in the morning so as to get home before the riot started. ‘Come on,’ women shopping in the city centre would say to one another around lunch-time, ‘let’s get back into the area. The trouble will be starting soon.’ The hooligans would gather at the bottom of William Street in the early afternoon and throw stones down the Strand Road towards Victoria Barracks. Eventually armoured personnel carriers would trundle out. The rioters would withdraw up William Street to the Rossville Street corner. The APCs would follow, being stoned all the way. The army would first use rubber bullets, then gas. Then they would send in the snatch squad. The rioters would scatter and, being nimble on their feet, very few were ever caught. The snatch squad would withdraw, the rioters would regroup and battle would continue. There were few variations from Saturday to Saturday.

Whatever they now thought about the army, many local residents were still vehemently opposed to this type of activity week after week. Few issues of the Journal went to press without another statement from Mr Hume reiterating his belief in the efficacy of ‘peaceful methods’. The same message boomed from the pulpits on Sunday. Commentators reported—and they may have been right—that only a minority of Catholics actively supported violence. Occasionally someone—usually a woman who lived around William Street or Rossville Street—would come out into the middle of a riot, box the hooligans’ ears and tell them to get the hell out of it and let people live in peace. But for all that the hooligans were the sons and daughters of the area, and however much their activities may have been regretted or condemned there could be no question of any section of the people backing the army against them. ‘Hooligans you can call them, Father,’ asserted a woman to the priest in the grounds of the Cathedral after mass one Sunday, ‘and hooligans some of them certainly are; but they are our hooligans.’ Moreover, stoning the soldiers may not have been producing desired results, but then neither were the ‘peaceful methods’ of the politicians. Gradually the ground was slipping from beneath the feet of the moderates.

If the riots in Derry in 1970 were only semi-serious, the situation in Belfast was grim. On 31 July Danny O’Hagan had been shot dead by the army in the New Lodge Road. The army said he was a petrol bomber. Local people flatly denied it. The Times, appeasing all sides, described him as ‘an assistant petrol bomber’. REMEMBER O’HAGAN was painted in foot-high letters on gable ends in Bogside. There was shooting in Belfast almost every week after that, and one fact emerged starkly from it all—that when the army was involved it was always against the Catholics.

Since 1969 there had been a feeling in Derry, based not entirely on demagogic appeals, that it was somehow up to us to stand by the Catholic ghettoes in Belfast. We were much more advantageously positioned than they. We had had things much easier, and not just in the past two years. The fear in Belfast was that the isolated Catholic communities might be swamped and devastated by the surrounding Unionist population. It was a very real fear. It had, after all, happened before. That could not happen in Derry where, in any sectarian conflict, we could win. We were aware that the holocaust in Belfast in August 1969 had been precipitated by people coming on the streets in solidarity with us in Derry and that they had suffered mightily as a result. We had done nothing during the Falls curfew. At the time ideas floated around, that we should march and sit down outside Victoria Barracks, that we should somehow create an incident which would stretch the army and perhaps draw them away from the Falls. No one imagined such a demonstration would have changed the course of curfew significantly, but there was a feeling that we ought surely to have done something. By rioting at the edge of the Bogside, the thinking went, we were now showing the people in the Catholic ghettoes of Belfast that we were still with them, that their admirable intransigence in a much more dangerous situation was finding an echo here in Derry. ‘Up the Falls’ was a favourite slogan as the hooligans charged down Rossville Street. The name plate at Moore Street in the Brandywell district had been removed and ‘Hooker Street’ painted in its place. Hooker Street is in Ardoyne in Belfast. It was a tribute.

Even had there been no other factor involved what was happening in Derry magistrates’ court in this period would eventually have swung a solid section of public opinion behind the hooligans. The Criminal Justice (Temporary Provisions) Act was passed in July 1970. It laid down mandatory sentences of six months for disorderly behaviour. It was not opposed by any Catholic member of the Stormont Parliament, after Mr Fitt, Mr Hume and the others had negotiated a deal with the Unionist Party, whereby an act outlawing incitement to religious hatred was passed at the same time. Only Ian Paisley fought against the package.

The act meant in effect that anyone found guilty of being ‘in a riot situation’ had to be sentenced to jail. Very few rioters were caught red-handed: they were too quick and too experienced for that. The army resorted to picking up suspects days afterwards around the centre of the city or at the Unemployment Exchange in the Strand Road. The irony of that was not missed. ‘The only place you can be certain of finding a Derry rioter is at the dole.’ In a typical case three or four soldiers would appear in court and positively identify a youth picked up in these circumstances as having thrown stones at them a week or two weeks ago. It was inherently improbable that they could be so certain, and some ‘identifications’ were ludicrous—soldiers asserting that they ‘had no doubt at all’ about the identity of a youth glimpsed in the darkness throwing a stone from fifty yards a fortnight previously. The defendant would produce three or four witnesses to say that he had been nowhere near the scene of the riot; and in almost all cases the defence witnesses were telling the truth. For what the army was doing was picking up likely-looking individuals more or less at random, and by no means all long-haired, unemployed Bogside teenagers were involved in every single riot. The fact that a particular defendant had almost certainly been involved in other riots on other dates did nothing to lessen the sense of injustice. Magistrates almost invariably accepted the army evidence, frequently remarking that ‘there seems no reason why these soldiers should come into court and perjure themselves’. Defendants, once found guilty, were automatically jailed. This combination of telescopic-eyed soldiers and myopic magistrates injected a weekly booster shot of bitterness into the Bogside and Creggan. After some months of this there were a number of acquittals. One of the most common ‘weaknesses’ of defence cases was that, in the nature of things, defence witnesses were drawn from the defendants’ peer group. They would tend to be other teenagers who would say that they were with the lad in question in a different place when the offence was committed. The bench paid scant attention to such people and the counsel for the prosecution—usually Mr E. H. Babington, a man with a passion for law and order, whose voice when he questioned working-class people had a built-in sneer—would manage easily to confuse them. In a few cases, eventually this was countered by finding ‘respectable’ and more articulate people—teachers, for example—to supply the alibi. We out-perjured them. But one ought not to have been brought to such a pass. Every case was logged in the minds of the people.

All the while Mr Hume, Mr Cooper and other local ‘moderate’ leaders were striving desperately to redirect attention and activity towards the ‘proper’ parliamentary channels. Occasionally they would appear in the middle of a riot, counselling peace, offering to make representations, appealing to the army to withdraw to barracks, promising to ask Parliamentary questions. But by the beginning of 1971 they were being told by fifteen-year-olds to ‘fuck off’.

It was explained in press and parliament—and no doubt accepted by the overwhelming majority of people in Britain—that the riots were fomented by the IRA. Unionist members of parliament explained at Westminster that areas like the Bogside, Ardonyne, the Falls and the New Lodge Road were in the grip of a ‘reign of terror’, that half the people were being manipulated and the other half intimidated. British papers, from the Mirror to The Times, carried lurid reports of men in black berets skulking in the background, organizing the deployment of child-rioters. Church leaders and moderate Catholic poiliticians also referred darkly to ‘sinister elements’ who were ‘leading the youth astray’. ‘Onlooker’ in the Journal was very strong on this subject. In fact neither wing of the Republican movement was, on balance, in favour of rioting. What each wanted to do in its own way was to get organized. There was a split in the Catholic ghettoes between those for and those against violence. But at this time it had little to do with the IRA or other ‘sinister elements’. By and large it was a question of age.

However, nothwithstanding the absence of organized Republican involvement in the rioting, Republican sentiment was growing, and most strongly among the rioting elements. In 1969 it had been perfectly possible to see the struggle as one ‘to defend the area’ and, more generally, to end oppression by the Unionists at Stormont. But now it was the British army whom one had to fight, it was they who acted as the instruments of oppression, who wielded the Special Powers Act against us. The struggle ‘against injustice’ became, in practice, a struggle against British forces—a pattern of play which matched perfectly the old Republican idea of the way things really were—and people were almost relieved gradually to discover that the guiltily discarded tradition on which the community was founded was, after all, meaningful and immediately relevant. ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘We shall not be moved’ gave way to ‘The Soldier’s Song’ and ‘Kevin Barry’.

The local left’s main activity was designed to recruit the hooligans into a socialist organization. This was made no easier by the fact that we had no common organization of our own. In 1970 we made three attempts to set up a Socialist Republican Youth movement independent of all other organizations. Each had a similar pattern. By distributing leaflets or merely by passing the word around we would call a meeting of young people in the Labour party hall in Magazine Street. The meetings were fairly chaotic, the audiences having little respect for standing orders. We would explain that the purpose of the organization was to play a part in the struggle against British imperialism. We had become a degree more specific about imperialism. We explained that there was much more to it than the soldiers in the street; it meant the big businesses which dominated the economy of Ireland, North and South; that to defeat it involved building a movement which could take on and defeat the agents of imperialism, Green as well as Orange; that this could not be done by pelting soldiers in Rossville Street with stones, admirable though the sprit behind that activity might be. Johnnie White would outline the course and failure of the IRA’s 1956‒62
campaign: how they had failed because they had not understood the need for politics as well as military activity; how we must now learn the lessons of that failure and create a movement of the working class. The older people in the area were incapable of doing this; they were hidebound by the past; it was up to the youth to take the initiative. It was, in retrospect, all sound stuff. But what the hooligans wanted now more than anything else was action. Building a thirty-two-county movement based on the working class sounded a very long-term project. The imperialists were down at the street corner. At every meeting someone would ask sooner or later when the guns were going to be handed out. Johnnie would explain again about guns and politics. ‘A man with a gun and no politics is a gangster.’ But it cut little ice. With one of our organizations—stupidly named ‘Young Hooligans Association’—we progressed far enough to elect a committee, have badges printed and organize a trip to Belfast so that our group could meet its counterparts from
Ballymurphy. It was a good day out. Regiments were compared. But that too, collapsed, after about six weeks, which for us was a record. (The rise and fall of three revolutionary youth organizations set up by the same people in one city in twelve months may be another record.)

As we entered 1971 events in Belfast were spiralling out of control by any available force towards all-out urban warfare. Guns were being used regularly. A few bombs went off. Clashes between the troops and the Catholics were progressively bloodier, and each left another increment of bitterness in its wake. The British press had stopped carrying the news. Most reports from Northern Ireland were, by now, straightforward propaganda exercises based mainly on army press handouts.

In the Bogside people saw the soldiers, during and after a riot, come rampaging into the area beating up rioters, bystanders or anyone else they could lay their hands on, firing rubber bullets, now sometimes stiffened by the insertion of torch batteries, at point-blank range, making random arrests and perjuring the victims to jail. They experienced the offensive arrogance of soldiers on patrol, the constant barrage of insult and sneer and invitations to come on and ‘have a go’. And in the papers the next morning they read of Tommy’s endless patience in the face of provocation, his gentlemanly demeanour in most difficult circumstances, his superhuman restraint and matchless discipline (‘No other army in the world would, for so long…’ etc.). ‘The rioters’ were reported in a different vein—cowardly, vicious, depraved, lusting for blood. The hand of the IRA was discerned in every incident, the reasoning seeming to be that, since the army at all times behaved impeccably and since a reform programme designed to institute ‘social justice’ had been enacted, the trouble could not be based on any legitimate grievance, and that therefore there must be some subversive body ordering or fooling or intimidating people into violence. Once that was established there was no necessity to investigate the background to any particular incident. Many a dispatch from Derry was written in the bar of the City Hotel after a quick call to the army PRO and phoned through from the foyer. There were those who got danger money for this exercise. And press lies made their own contribution to the gathering crisis. As the inhabitants of areas like the Bogside read the popular dailies and realized that the news bore no relation to the facts as they had seen and experienced them, that there was in progress a sustained and apparently coordinated campaign to distort the truth about what was happening in and to the community, the sense of isolation grew, the tendency to look inwards, to rely on ourselves alone because there was no one else who could be trusted, was daily reinforced. If the army’s increasingly indiscriminate violence was the major reason for the turn towards the gun, Fleet Street played a minor, but not insignificant, part in the same process.

The continuing inability of the left throughout 1970 and early 1971 to channel the aggression of the youth left the field open for the Provisionals, who, unlike us, had a perfectly coherent and stunningly simple answer to the crisis—smash Stormont and unite Ireland. But at the time, notwithstanding press accounts of a massively-financed, well-organized army, the Provisionals had neither the organizational nor the military capacity really to take hold of the situation in the ghettoes. They were making progress in the more intense situation in Belfast. But in Derry up to the middle of 1971 the best-known figures publicly associated with them were not young activists, but Sean Keenan and Neil Gillespie, veteran Republicans who were identified with the political rather than the military side of things. They were remembered for action in times past and were widely respected even by those who disagreed fundamentally with them. Neither fitted the image of the archetypal IRA man. In the spring of 1971 the Provisional IRA in Derry for practical purposes did not yet exist.

It had begun to exist in Belfast. On 6 February the first Provisional was killed in action. James Saunders, a staff captain, was shot dead in the Crumlin Road. The same night Gunner Robert Curtis of the Royal Artillery was shot dead in the New Lodge Road. It was one apiece, and the war was on. Saunders and Barney Watt, another Catholic who had been killed by the army on the same night, were given Republican funerals. It was the Provos’ first public show of strength and it was very impressive. Hundreds of young men marched in ranks, feet stamping, behind the tricolour-draped coffins. A volley was fired over Saunders’ grave. Thereafter, in Belfast the gun, rather than the stone or the petrol bomb, became the favourite weapon of those resisting the army presence. The turn to the gun was encouraged by the fact that the army was increasingly using lead in preference to rubber bullets against ‘ordinary’ rioters. It was not alleged, for example, that Watt had been armed. He had been in the vicinity of a riot and that had been enough. Every arms search—and army tactics on these occasions were of the type sometimes described by the press as ‘no-nonsense’—was adding to the bitterness and hostility. The supply of recruits into the IRA—especially into the more military-minded Provisional IRA—was increasing, and the supply of guns was beginning to keep pace.

In Derry, as always, the atmosphere was more relaxed, and the set-pieces at ‘Aggro Corner’—the junction of Rossville Street and William Street—were still the order of the day. But events in Belfast were having their effect. It seemed clear that what was happening there was that the British army, acting for the Unionist government, was taking on the Catholic community and attempting to beat it into submission, just as the RUC and the B Specials used to do; and that the difference this time was that sections of the Catholics, most noticeably the Provisional IRA, were fighting back. Labour Party, and to a lesser extent Official Republican, propaganda increasingly seemed quite academic. Labour Party membership in Derry was dwindling fast—the local party had cut its links with the parent organization in Belfast, which was marching steadily rightwards in step with the army, whose activities it persisted in describing as ‘peace-keeping’.

Brendan Hinds, Charlie Morrison and other trade unionists of the party, demoralized by the burgeoning sectarianism all around them and our inability to do anything to stop it, dropped out of activity. Dermie McClenaghan, too, seemed to weary of it, of the fact that somehow it had all become completely detached from the day-to-day bread-and-butter issues on which we had based ourselves two years ago.

I was spending about half the time in London, and the burden of party activity fell on Willie Breslin, a local teacher with a passion for issuing press statements, and Kathy Harkin, a housewife whose ability to type at fifty words a minute had for years made her the willing dogsbody of every radical organization in the city. Willie plugged away doggedly attacking the Catholic middle class and appealing for working-class unity against ‘the common enemy’. But to no avail. Every day produced new evidence that the Catholics were being attacked as Catholics and that the Protestant working class was enthusiastically in favour of this—indeed, thought that the army was not nearly aggressive enough. We no longer had any contact with the Fountain. ‘Workers’ unity’ as a slogan seemed not just academic but positively perverse. The most prominent of the younger members of the party—Seamus O’Kane, Tommy McCourt, Micky Doherty and others—were moving towards the Officials, who, having abandoned the attempt to create an independent youth movement and alarmed that the Provos were beginning to pick up members, had embarked on a recruitment campaign. O’Kane and the others resisted all invitations to join, doubting the Officials’ commitment to class politics, but they could see that quite soon in Derry too there might be a shooting war and that one could not remain uninvolved. Joint training sessions over the border in the Donegal hills were resumed. Willie disapproved of this activity, and the Labour members involved, while retaining formal membership of the organization, effectively dropped out. The Labour premises in Magazine Street were given up. The party could no longer afford them, and anyway they were too big for the numbers now coming to meetings.

Almost every day now something happened to stiffen the intransigence of Catholic attitudes. Disparities in the sentences handed down by the court became grotesque. A Protestant dealer in illegal guns got a suspended sentence. Catholic pickets went to jail. Catholic areas were subjected to daily army searches; Protestant areas went untouched. People were being beaten up quite casually by army patrols in Catholic areas at night. And Faulkner became Prime Minister. Chichester-Clark had been toppled by right-wing pressure after three off-duty Scottish soldiers were killed in unexplained circumstances on 10 March. Faulkner was probably the man in the Unionist hierarchy most heartily detested by Catholics (and still is). He had a well-earned reputation for being completely untrustworthy—‘political astuteness’, it was called—and hopes were expressed at Westminster that he might be the man to resolve the situation. There was never any possibility of this happening. ‘He’s got more faces than the Guildhall clock,’ said Seamus O’Kane, which just about summed up Catholic reaction to his election.

With Faulkner at the helm and the 1971 marching season under way, relations between the army and the Bogside went into a tailspin. The final rupture came on 8 July, when Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie were shot dead. The army said that Cusack had been carrying a rifle and that Beattie had been about to throw a nail-bomb. These were lies. They were the first people killed by the army in Derry, and their deaths had a big effect.

The Provos and the army had been shooting at one another in Derry for some weeks, the local Provisional organization having by now acquired the capacity to emulate its comrades in Belfast. It can be doubted whether initially there was mass support for this escalation. People are frightened by gunfire. But after the killing of Cusack and Beattie, support rocketed. The next Sunday, the Provisionals held their first mass rally in the area. Speakers made a straightforward appeal to ‘Join the IRA’. Afterwards, applicants for membership formed a queue. If the army was going to shoot us down unarmed, if they were going to lie about it afterwards, if the press was going to print the lies as fact, and if cabinet ministers in London were going to lie in their teeth in the Commons to cover up, there was only one answer.

Hume, Cooper and their colleagues, now formed into the Social Democratic and Labour Party, held a meeting in Hume’s house in West End Park while the Provo rally was in progress, came out and threatened to withdraw from Stormont if the Westminster government did not set up an official inquiry into the shootings. This was a half-despairing attempt to prevent leadership of the Catholic masses passing into the hands of those who advocated taking on the army. All along the SDLP had been fighting to convince their constituents of the efficacy of ‘parliamentary methods’. They realized that if they could not do that they would be swamped by the rising tide of Catholic anger. On 22 June they had seized on an offer by Faulkner to set up three ‘Parliamentary Committees’, two of which were to be chaired by Opposition members, to examine new legislation, and they tried manfully to represent this as a major breakthrough. It was Faulkner’s ‘best hour’, said Paddy Devlin. ‘It should be made clear to all people today who say that no change has taken place that this is simply not true,’ said Hume, with more than a touch of desperation. ‘There have been changes in this community.’ When he walked through the Bogside a few days later John found out what his constituents, who had had more than a little experience of reform in the last three years, thought of the ‘changes’. ‘You’ll never get anywhere, Johnnie, by doing the Stormont crawl.’ It was in an effort to recover this lost ground that the SDLP now made their threat to leave Stormont. And despite any misgivings or second thoughts which they might have had, they were forced to go through with it. There was to be no public inquiry.

They reaped no immediate benefit from this display of militancy. Political battles were now to be fought on the street, and the weapons were the Thompson and the Sten rather than the private notice question or the point of order. July was a very violent month. The Provos began to blow Belfast to bits and there was shooting in both Belfast and Derry almost every night. The Officials, who up to now had been unconvinced that the time was right for a full-scale campaign, weighed in. If they had not, they would have been totally eclipsed by the Provos. The Unionists called for ‘sterner action’, ‘more vigorous measures’, more soldiers and other such recipes for peace. From their right wing and their grass roots with increasing insistence came the demand for the all-purpose panacea of Orangeism—internment.
And on Monday 9 August they got it.

Internment was a calculated humiliation which Unionist governments had, since the inception of the state, regularly visited upon our community. In the twenties, the thirties, the forties, and the fifties, the RUC had come storming into our areas at night, dragged our people from their beds and taken them off to camps and prison-ships, where they were often held for years; no charge, no trial, nothing. There was not a family in the area which had not had a relative or a neighbour interned. Now it was happening again.

Sean Keenan was interned, of course. When the Special Branch draw up an internment list in Derry they write down Sean’s name and then ask: ‘Who else?’ He had been interned in the prison-ship Argenta in Belfast Lough in the forties. He had been interned in Crumlin Road jail in the fifties. On 9 August they came for him again. He would have gone quietly, being used to it, knowing the drill. About twenty others were picked up with him.

The ‘justification’ for the introduction of internment was based on the supposition that a ‘tiny minority’ of bloodthirsty gangsters was ‘holding the community to ransom’; if these were plucked out of the situation everything would fall back into its normal, peaceful pattern. There must have been many, in British government circles especially, who believed that indeed this is what would happen. Faulkner had assured them that this was the case, and, after all, there was independent confirmation from the press, which for many months had been describing in detail how IRA men were bribing children to riot, intimidating the ‘decent’ Catholics (who were in a great majority), terrorizing prospective jurors and witnesses, and so on. Remove ‘the men of violence’ and everything else would follow. They soon found out how wrong they were.

The days when the Bogside allowed itself to be kicked around like this were long gone. As the noise of the internment operation wakened the area at four in the morning, people poured into the streets. The resistance prevented the army completing its swoop. As a result Derry lost fewer people, proportionately, than any comparable area in the North. Not that that lessened the reaction. By dawn the area was hysterical with hatred. In Brandywell, Bogside and Creggan there were street-corner meetings in progress. Local people told of their experiences: how the soldiers had dragged Peter Collins down the stairs by the hair of his head; how they didn’t even give Micky Montgomery time to dress, just kicked him into the Land Rover in his underclothes; how they had come for John Carlin of Anne Street and, not finding him there, had taken instead his father, who was over sixty, and fired a rubber bullet into his stomach from point-blank range and then threw him into a truck. And Johnnie White, and Liam Cummins, and Micky McNaught and Liam McDaid and the others.

For the next few days there were so many people wishing to play an active role in resisting the army that it was almost impossible for the IRA to use guns. The streets were overflowing. At Iniscarn Road in Creggan women and girls linked arms singing ‘The Men who died at Upton for Sinn Fein’ and blocked the path of an army platoon, while, about two hundred yards away in Central Drive, in full view of both sides of this confrontation, hundreds of youths fought a pitched stones-versus-CS battle, with another platoon. The girls cheered wildly whenever a stone felled a soldier. The soldiers, more disciplined, refrained from similarly acknowledging a success for their side. There was a sit-down in Marlborough Road, a Catholic middle-class street at the edge of Creggan, most of whose inhabitants would not hitherto have been seen dead at a demo. Obstructive behaviour, ranging from standing in a crowd refusing to allow soldiers to pass to petrol-bomb attacks on army vehicles, was to be observed all round the area. The passive resistance came to an end when the army hosed a crowd sitting down in Lone Moor Road with purple dye and arrested a number of people, including John Hume and Ivan Cooper.

Belfast, meanwhile, seemed to have gone berserk. On the news we heard that there were gunfights raging in the Falls, the Markets, Ardoyne, Andersonstown and New Lodge Road. There were many dead. Protestant crowds had joined in the fighting, backing the army up. Whole streets were burning and thousands of refugees began to flee to the South. The twenty-four hours after internment were the bloodiest Northern Ireland had known for decades. There was in the area a profound lack of interest in the spectacle of British liberalism wrestling with its conscience, and winning, in the editorial columns of the Guardian.

Faulkner was on radio the next day explaining that the operation had been a great success, that its purpose had been, not, after all, to pick the gunmen up, rather to ‘flush the gunmen out’. And, indeed, he was able to point to quite a few flushed-out gunmen. They had been flushed out on to every Catholic street in Belfast, where they were shooting at the British army.

The internment operation had caught the left in the area in a state of no more than usual disorganization. By the afternoon we had at least made contact with one another. This efficiency was due in part to the fact that the Official leadership had sent Malachy McGurran, an affable and undogmatic veteran of the 1956‒62 campaign, to take over as full-time political organizer in the Derry area. We took over a vacant shop in Meenan Square near Free Derry Corner, established it as our headquarters and worked out a common approach to the situation. As well as the Officials and their Labour collaborators, there were a few members of the People’s Democracy, who had got out of Belfast just ahead of the army. We decided to go for a one-day industrial strike, a rent-and-rates strike, to put pressure on all anti-Unionists to resign from official positions and to announce that until every man was released neither the police nor the army would be allowed into the area.

Strikes—industrial or rent-and-rates—had been near and dear to local left-wing hearts for a long time. We had called for strikes against RUC brutality in January and April 1969 and against the army on a number of occasions since, but they had never got off the ground. Now the mood was right, and the rent strike was on as soon as it was called. We printed thousands of window stickers saying RENT STRIKE HERE and distributed them around the area. These worked marvellously to persuade the few recalcitrant individuals. No one wanted their house to be the only one in the street with no sticker up. There was some over-enthusiasm on the part of the youngsters whom we used to distribute them. ‘It’s up to you, Missus, which you have in your window, this sticker or a brick.’ This gave rise to allegations that the strike’s effectiveness was based on intimidation. But in truth ninety-five per cent of people in areas like the Bogside were on rent strike from the moment it was mooted. The one-day industrial strike took place the Monday after the internment operation and, again with no need for much persuasion, it was solid among Catholic workers.

The fact the people did what we, the left, demanded encouraged us to believe that they did it because we demanded it. It was the August 1969 delusion in a new setting. If the Plymouth Brethren had parked a soap-box at the bottom of Wellington Street and called for a rent strike they would have got it. The people were avid for action and it just so happened that we were first in the field suggesting what action they should take. The demand that the army and the police be kept out of the area was ridiculous. It was like making a demand that the sun rise tomorrow morning with a view to claiming responsibility for its eventual appearance.

In the next few months the area became used to the sight and the sound of guns, until a teenager walking along Lecky Road with a machine-gun would cause no frisson of excitement, rather speculation as to what target he might be preparing to hit.

Sympathy for his targets tended to diminish, even on the part of the many people who still did not really approve of gunplay. I arrived home one morning at two a.m. and told my father, the mildest man I ever met, that the lads had just got a soldier at Bligh’s Lane. ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it won’t do him a damn bit of harm,’ and went on reading.

The army made few attempts to come in. Occasionally, for reasons best known to their tactical experts but quite unclear to anyone else, they would thrust a couple of hundred yards into the area, and stand there long enough to draw fire, before pulling out. Perhaps they were testing the water. On one such occasion they took up position at the top of a laneway near Westland Street. It was mid-morning and in the laneway a woman was buying bread from a bread van at her back door. Round the corner bounced a teenage Provisional with an M1 carbine. He loosed off half a dozen shots up the lane at the soldiers. This obviously put the woman and the breadman in some danger. ‘Get out of it, you wee bugger,’ she shouted, enraged. ‘Can you not wait till the breadman’s finished serving the bread?’

Within a month of internment almost all the Labour Party members who had been working with the Officials joined the latter. The Officials at the same time lost some people to the Provisionals. Shedding members on the right and recruiting on the left, the effect of the upsurge of militancy on the Officials was thus to move their centre of gravity sharply to the left, significantly to the left of the leadership in Dublin who were even now advocating the ‘democratization of Stormont’ as the next ‘stage’ in the revolution. This had little effect on the course of local politics in the next few months, since political debate was drowned out by the rattle of gunfire and the sound of Provo bombs. The overwhelming majority of the people in the area were impatient of the war of words now being waged in the columns of the local press between the Provos and the Officials. The point was to keep the army out of the area and bring the Unionist government, the never-ending source of all our grievances, to an end. The only difference to be discerned between the two organizations was that the Provos believed in bombing ‘economic’ targets whereas the Officials wanted to concentrate on the military. The Official leadership also insisted that their campaign was ‘defensive’ and not ‘offensive’, a distinction too nice for anyone involved in the situation to understand. As one member of the Officials’ local staff put it: ‘Shooting soldiers is shooting soldiers.’ To most people there did not seem a big enough difference to justify the bi-weekly bursts of mutual denunciation in the Journal. Most households contributed indiscriminately to the weekly collection of both organizations. (Each offered the same wage to full-time volunteers
—five pounds a week and no deductions.) Both had closed their books to new recruits, being unable to handle the numbers waiting to join. More than one ex-hooligan went from one wing to the other and back again asking to be let in and being told to ‘come back in a few weeks and we will see what we can do’.

The antagonism of the area towards British authority received a further boost when word filtered out of the torture techniques being used to make internees talk. Apart from run-of-the-mill beatings-up, which everyone assumed would happen, the Special Branch had kept men hooded and spread-eagled against walls for hours on end, given them no food but bread and water, and played ‘white noise’ into their ears. The combination, it was said, would reduce strong men to gibbering idiots who would babble all they knew. The thought of that happening to people from our streets contributed greatly to the rising fury. (Lord Parker was to report the following March that all this had in fact happened but that it did not constitute cruelty since the perpetrators did not ‘take pleasure’ in their work…)

Meanwhile British commentators were searching for new words of execration to describe the IRA. They reached for Roget’s Thesaurus after 9 November when a group of women seized Marta Doherty, a local girl who was about to marry a British soldier, and tarred and feathered her. This was a case in point. Within hours Miss Doherty was the best-known bride in Britain. Local photographer Larry Doherty captured a striking picture of her, head sheared, tied to a lamp-post and covered in tar. It appeared on the front page of every British paper and was scanned by the news cameras of BBC and ITV. At Westminster, Lord Balniel’s elegant upper lip trembled with emotion as he expressed his shock/horror/detestation. It was related in tones of disgust that not one person in the large crowd watching had intervened to help her and that few people in the area seemed properly outraged by the incident. ‘What kind of people are they,’ it was asked, ‘who can allow such a thing to happen in their midst?’

They were, of course, and are, ordinary, decent working-
class people who happened to have to see and judge the incident in a context which newspaper editors and Tory politicians could not appreciate, even in the unlikely event of their wishing to. Less than a week before Miss Doherty’s experience Mrs Elizabeth Groves was standing in her kitchen in a house in the Andersonstown estate. She had a Republican song playing on her gramophone. A soldier standing in her garden aimed his riot gun through the open window and blasted a rubber bullet at her face. It tore both her eyes out. There were no pictures of the blind Mrs Groves in the British papers or television, no cheep of protest from the liberal papers, no murmur of concern in Parliament. Mrs Kathleen Thompson, a mother of six, of Kildrum Gardens in the Creggan estate, was standing in her back garden around the same time. Kildrum Gardens stands on the brow of a steep hill in Creggan overlooking an army post in the Foyle Road. A soldier, bored perhaps by the lack of action, aimed up and shot her dead. There was no official reaction. Her death was largely unreported. It was with things like that that the people of our area compared and contrasted what was done to Marta Doherty. It was in that context that they judged the hullabaloo which followed. There was, as it happened, a great number of people in the area who did not approve of what was done to Miss Doherty. But in the circumstances they could not reasonably be expected to take a very strong line on the matter. Just as no one—even those who continued to disapprove of them—could be expected to take a strong line against IRA activities.

The shootings war continued unabated. Many of the battles took place around ‘Fort Essex’ army post, which lay between Bligh’s Lane and Eastway, on the hill between Bogside and the Creggan estate. There were two hundred soldiers in it guarding a policeman. The policeman was there because in late 1970 Dr Paisley and Mr Craig were making political capital out of the fact that the area was almost completely unpoliced and insisting that the government do something about it. In a fit of something less than genius Major Chichester-Clark decided to open a police station in the heart of the area. A prefabricated hut was erected in the middle of some factory buildings. The perimeter was surrounded by barbed wire, sandbag emplacements were built, and two companies deployed. No one ever tried to go in to inquire about dog licences or stolen bicycles or to complain about the noise of the neighbours. The policeman never came out. After a time there were those who suspected that there was no policeman in there; just a hut with ‘Police’ written on it being guarded by two hundred soldiers. Mythical or not, three of the soldiers died to defend his presence.

Both Officials and Provisionals were patrolling the area in hijacked cars. For the most part they were fairly punctilious about not taking vehicles from private individuals. ‘Company’ and hired cars, though, were fair game. Taking them did not injure any individual and, as an added advantage, they were as a rule almost new. After a few months the local branch of the biggest car-hire firm in the world agreed to supply each wing with a free car—changed each week—in return for safe passage for the rest of its fleet. It was an equitable arrangement. Each battalion was responsible for hijacking its own cars and there was, at rank and file level, occasional over-enthusiasm, such as a unit deciding to hijack a new vehicle on the grounds that its current model had a puncture.

The Provisionals established headquarters in a house in Stanleys Walk, with separate district headquarters in Creggan and Brandywell. The Officials operated from an HQ in Creggan, using the Meenan Square shop for coordinating activities in the Bogside itself. Not all callers were on military business. People would come seeking advice, or with minor complaints—on the type of business which in Britain would naturally be taken to the welfare office or to a department of the local council. Provisional supporters would go to the Provisionals, Official supporters to the Officials. Neutralists had a choice.

Petty crime was handled by the Free Derry Police, which was independent of both IRAs. Tony O’Doherty, who had temporarily given up a career as an international footballer because, as far as one could judge, he preferred being at home in Creggan doing something constructive, emerged as police chief. His personal popularity had a lot to do with the fact that after a few weeks there was no petty crime. Shop owners in Creggan reported that for the first time since they had set up in business they could lock up at night with an easy mind. The police were obsessional about speed limits and many motorized visitors left the area outraged by an on-the-spot fine.

The barricades cut across the bus-routes through the area. One of the services was abandoned completely; the other, the Creggan service, had to thread a circuitous route through the few barricades which had been breached to permit access. The local authority was noticeably unwilling to send men into the area to carry out normal maintenance. Alternative arrangements were made. Street lights, for example, would be looked after by someone who had emerged as a particular street’s handyman. Playgrounds—not that there were many of them—were maintained by the people living near by. Upkeep of the Creggan football field had somehow become a police matter and was supervised by Tony O’Doherty. It all worked quite well.

At the beginning of December the Northern Resistance Movement—a recently formed united front supported by the Provisionals and the People’s Democracy—announced that if the internees were not released by Christmas they would organize a series of protest marches in defiance of a ban which had been in operation for some months. The first march took place up the M1 motorway on Christmas Day. The NRM’s intiative forced the Civil Rights Association, which was supported by the Official leadership, to take to the streets also. In the first four weeks of January the NRM and the CRA held a total of nine ‘illegal’ marches in different parts of Northern Ireland, some of them ending in medium-sized riots when the army moved in. The CRA march in Derry on 30 January 1972 was one of this series.

When the shooting started that day the first reaction, after fear, was bewilderment. Why were they shooting? At Free Derry Corner where most people had gathered for the meeting the crowd flung themselves to the ground as the crack-crack of the self-loading rifles came from the bottom of Rossville Street. Looking up one could see the last few stragglers coming running panic-stricken, bounding over the barricade outside the High Flats, three of them stiffening suddenly and crumpling to the ground. One ought to have realized at the time that what was happening was that they were being killed. An hour and a half later no one knew for certain how many were dead. Some said three, some five. From McCafferty’s house in Beechwood Street Bernadette Devlin phoned Altnagelvin Hospital and asked for the names of the casualties. About twenty people crowded around her into the hallway as she prepared to write them down. The pushing and shoving stopped as she just kept on writing.

Later in a shop in Creggan Martin McGuinness, the Provisionals’ OC, proposed and an Official seconded a call for national strike until after the funerals. The Official Command Staff voted to drop the fiction that they were on a ‘defensive’ campaign. The next morning there were groups of people standing around in Rossville Street, staring at the spots where it had happened. Everyone knew them now, the names of the dead. They could recite them as readily as a football fanatic rhymes off the names of his favourite team. And they knew how each one died, from the telling and the retelling of it: how Jack Duddy had been just behind Father Daly in the car park of the High Flats laughing to see a priest running when the bullet got him; how Pat Doherty had been lying out in the open moaning ‘I don’t want to die on my own’, and Barney McGuigan, a big quiet man, had gone out to him waving a white handkerchief and was shot in the base of the skull; how John Young had been dragging himself, wounded, in the shelter of the barricade across Rossville Street towards the door of the flats, people screaming down at him from the windows, pleading ‘Come on, lad, come on, come on, you’re nearly there,’ but he didn’t make it. And all the others. Bloody Sunday upset us considerably. A few weeks later the Officials planted a bomb outside the officers’ mess of the Para headquarters in Aldershot. Unfortunately it killed six innocent people. Had it killed a dozen British soldiers there would have been dancing in the streets in Derry.

After Bloody Sunday the most powerful feeling in the area was the desire for revenge. Since the deaths of Cusack and Beattie and the introduction of internment there had been mass support for the IRA, but it had been tempered with a vague uneasiness about the morality of killing people. ‘Moderate’ elements such as Hume and his supporters and the local priests could do nothing to alter the course of events, but at least they were accorded a hearing. Now few listened to anything that they said. People made a holiday in their hearts at the news of a dead soldier. The feeling was made all the more fierce by the reaction of the British establishment. There was more outrage expressed in the British House of Commons when Bernadette Devlin didn’t hit Reginald Maudling half hard enough than there was at our people being killed to keep Brian Faulkner in office. The strata that had traditionally wielded decisive influence in the area were now more powerless than ever. Members of Parliament sucked down to armed teenagers at the street corner and tried to buy friendship with offers of gelignite.

But for all the solidity of the area’s opposition to the forces of outside law and order there was no plausible representative organization within it. There were attempts to create one. The Officials, inspired by their national leadership’s attachment to some abstract idea of ‘mass democracy’, tried to set up a network of street committees. The plan was that the residents of each street would elect a committee and that these committees would in turn elect a ‘coordinating committee’ which would govern the area. Considerable time and energy were spent organizing street meetings and encouraging people to elect committees. They never really got off the ground and no coordinating body was ever formed. The Officials did not make it clear whether the street committees were to operate as mini tenants’ associations, with responsibility for ensuring that lighting was adequate and the streets kept clear of rubbish, the things at present being handled on an ad-hoc basis; or whether they were to be part of a quasi-revolutionary structure; or both. They did not make it clear because they themselves were confused on the point. The Provisionals rejected the idea of street committees on the ground that they were an Official plot to initiate ‘Moscow-style communism’. No one, not even the Provisionals themselves, took this allegation very seriously. What they meant was that they were not going to support any project thought up by the Officials. For much the same reason the Officials rejected the Provos’ plan for a ‘Free Derry Council’ to be elected by proportional representation with political groups offering slates of candidates. The SDLP was against any new elected body on the questionable grounds that Mr Hume was still the ‘elected representative’ of the area, and that there was no need for any other. After a time the Provos, with some tacit Nationalist Party support (it seemed to have resurrected itself for the purpose), did manage to call a ‘Free Derry Council’ into existence but too late for it to establish its bona fides as the sole authentic voice of the people or to play any meaningful role.

The inability of the area to produce a single representative body was a reflection of the fact that there was no general political agreement. Everyone was in favour of keeping the barricades up and the army out. No one wanted Stormont’s writ to run again. But beyond that there was no clear consensus. Beyond that indeed there seems in retrospect to have been amazingly little discussion. The results of this became clear on 24 March, when the British government, realizing that Bloody Sunday, far from terrorizing the Catholics off the streets, had made them yet more determinedly intransigent, suspended Stormont and instituted direct rule from Westminster. The instinctive reaction of the people of the area was unrestrained joy. Stormont had for decades been the focus of all our resentments. Now it was gone. Only the Official leadership tried to argue that this was not a victory; that it was in fact a defeat. But most people dismissed this attitude as a curious aberration and suspected that in their heart of hearts the Officials, too, were delighted. Everyone realized that with the suspension of Stormont Northern Ireland was up for grabs. But to the crucial question which this raised—with what did we want the Stormont system replaced?—there was no easy or generally accepted answer. This resulted in a degree of confusion about what we ought to do now, a confusion which William Whitelaw, the new Tory Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was not slow to recognize and use.

After direct rule the parliamentary politicians reemerged, just as they had done in 1969, with dusted-off statements about ‘peaceful progress to a just society’. For the previous seven months they had fought hard to make themselves relevant. Gerry Fitt had twisted and turned and tied himself in knots in an effort to reach some compromise on internment which might be acceptable to his constituents in West Belfast. In December he had planned to use his appearance on a three-hour BBC investigation of the ‘Northern Ireland Problem’ to suggest that if internees were charged with specific offences in the courts he and his party might return to ‘normal’ politics. However, his script was leaked and the reaction to it convinced him that this would not be a politic thing to say. Other of his parliamentary colleagues, reasoned that if you can’t beat them and won’t join them you might still skirt around the fringes making friendly noises at them. Some of these noises extended to offering overt support to anything that the Officials might propose, though exactly what this might mean was at no point made clear to the general public. The SDLP leaders, with the possible exception of Paddy Devlin of Falls, who often seemed big and aggressive enough to make up for any five lightweights, had wanted to sell out, but found themselves in a fairly unusual position for a social-democratic group in that they could not find a way to arrange the sale. Market conditions got better after direct rule.

The church, too, began flexing its political muscles. Most priests had all along held to the idea that killing people, including soldiers, was an offence against the law of God, and this was expressed in some sermons after specific IRA successes. But often it was tempered by a balancing condemnation of the British army and an expression of understanding that, of course, the violence had its roots in real injustice. The church had not yet launched the type of fierce, coordinated, openly-political campaign of which it was shortly to show it was capable.

The Provo bombing campaign was having some distinctly counter-productive effects. It was in the nature of the campaign that civilians were put at risk, and in Belfast there were a number of bloody tragedies, each of which was grist to the mill of the British propaganda machine. In the Catholic areas there was a widespread feeling of simple human horror. It was this horror, allied to the belief that with the suspension of Stormont we had already won a significant victory, which triggered a movement for ‘peace’. This made its first newsworthy appearance when a group of women in Andersonstown tried to hold a meeting to appeal for a bi-lateral truce. They were supported by the local clergy. They were unfortunate, however, in some of their other supporters. The wife of Tory MP Nigel Fisher flew in from England and announced that she was ‘here to do all that she could to help the women of Andersonstown in their search for peace’, which had an impact on the women’s movement something like a punch in the solar plexus. Other millstones such as the middle-class ‘Women Together’ organization insisted on tying themselves around the neck of the Andersonstown peace-
seekers and succeeded very quickly in pulling them under. However, the fact that they had made an appearance at all was not without significance. There was public opposition to the IRA from within.

Reaction to the bombing campaign in Derry was more muted; not least because the Derry Provos, under Martin McGuinness, had managed to bomb the city centre until it looked as if it had been hit from the air without causing any civilian casualties. Local attitudes to the bombing had always been fairly equivocal. Few could deny the force of the Officials’ constantly reiterated point that the people who suffered most by the destruction of business premises were the workers who lost their jobs. The owners, after all, would in due course get full compensation. It could not be gainsaid, either, that the bombing was pushing the Protestant masses even further to the right, and that was to be regretted. As against that, every bomb planted was a minor victory in the endless battle of wits against the security forces. Every blast, whether one approved of it or not, was a dramatic demonstration of the fact that we, who had been scorned for so long, could now strike out in an unmistakable fashion and make the establishment scream. A few hours after the Provos had blown the inside out of the Guildhall a supporter of Mr Hume remarked, ‘Of course I don’t agree with this bombing at all, but I must admit the Guildhall’s looking well.’

In Derry it was not the Provo bombing campaign but the Officials’ shooting of a Creggan teenager, home on leave from the British army, which gave Catholic Tories the opopportunity to come storming out to oppose the IRA. Nineteen-year-old Ranger Best, stationed in Germany, had foolhardily decided to spend his leave at home. As he wandered about the area renewing contacts with old friends he was twice warned by Official units to get out ‘for your own good’. But he did not. So he was picked up by an Official Patrol and taken ‘for questioning’ to the shop in Meenan Park. Once there, he was doomed. The man who presided over the ‘trial’ explained afterwards: ‘Once we had him there was nothing we could do but execute him. Our military orders after Bloody Sunday were to kill every British soldier we could. They didn’t say anything about local soldiers. He was a British soldier and that is all there was to it.’ Best was driven with a hood over his head to a piece of waste ground near William Street, told to get out and to walk straight ahead. After he had taken a few steps he was shot in the back of the skull. His body was found early next morning.

Had Best been an ‘ordinary’ soldier there would have followed a ritual, and largely disregarded, condemnation from the clergy and perhaps a statement from Mr Hume to the effect that this was not the proper way to proceed; but the majority of the people of the area would have considered it an act of war, maybe something which they were less passionately in favour of pursuing than they had been a few months previously, but an act of war nonetheless. But Best was not, of course, an ordinary soldier. He was a local lad, the son of solid and inoffensive parents who lived in a council house in Creggan, and his killing outraged that very feeling of communal solidarity which the last three years had created and which was absolutely essential to the maintenance of Free Derry. ‘If he had stayed in Germany he would have been safe enough,’ complained a local housewife the day after his death. ‘He was killed because he came home to see his mother.’ It was a line of argument which struck deep chords, not least in the hearts of local mothers.

The day after his death four hundred women marched to the Official headquarters in Meenan Square. Two members of the organization, neither of whom had been present at the ‘trial’ or execution of Best, were unfortunate enough to be manning the premises at the time. Their encounter with the protesters was bruising. The British media seized on the issue with unconcealed glee. ‘Women call on IRA to get out’ was smeared across the front pages. The five women who had led the march were accorded the handy reference-title: ‘the Derry Peace Women’ and quickly became the darlings of the Tory press. The church, too, quickly showed its talent for seizing the time and called a ‘peace meeting’ in the school hall in Creggan. Sharing the platform with local priests were a member of the local police committee, Mr John Maultsaid, Mr Frank McCauley (‘Onlooker’), Tom Doherty, a former Nationalist councillor, and some others of like ilk. Their message was clear: ‘Things have gone too far. It is time to call a halt.’ Most of the audience of two thousand agreed. Johnnie White mounted the platform and asked for the mike to explain the Officials’ position. The chairman, the parish priest of Creggan, Father Martin Rooney, refused, telling him that ‘You are not wanted. You are an alien influence’, after which the meeting broke up in some confusion. What was quite clear was that for the first time in many months the people of the area were, sometimes literally, fighting among themselves, a luxury no embattled community can afford.

The bishop turned out for Ranger Best’s funeral, flanked by twenty-five priests. (Two days previously fifteen-year-old Manus Deery had been buried. He had been shot for no particular reason by an army sniper from the city walls as he was on his way home from a fish and chip shop with the family supper. He got the standard two priests.) For the next week it seemed that no edition of the BBC’s ‘World at One’ and no front page of any newspaper was complete without quotes from a local priest or a ‘peace woman’ explaining that the IRA was no more than a tiny minority within the area and that the majority of peace-loving people were in the process of evicting them. Father Hugh O’Neill, administrator of St Eugene’s Cathedral, was particularly prominent. Father O’Neill had once accused me of being the Devil; that is, not of being an agent of the Devil but of being the Devil, Satan himself in human form. He was on surer theological ground now, asserting that the IRA had no respect for the law of man or God. ‘They are finished—it’s the end of the road for the IRA. Those Officials are not the IRA at all. They are communists pretending to be the IRA. The people have rejected them.’ Father O’Neill also alleged that there were North Koreans in the area up to no good, a revelation which resulted in a confrontation between a Daily Express reporter and a waiter from the Rice Bowl restaurant from which the waiter, quite possibly, has not yet recovered. At mass the following Sunday the church pursued the attack. The pulpits became for the day political platforms from which a coordinated series of anti-IRA—anti-Official IRA in particular—speeches were delivered.

The killing of Best and the reaction to it detonated a number of minor political explosions both locally and nationally. The fact that the clergy had openly entered the political lists against them forced the local Officials to define more clearly than they had ever dared before their attitude to the church and to its role in politics. Hitherto their attitude had been not so much ill defined as undefined. They were members of an organization which, at national level, claimed to be Marxist or ‘moving towards Marxism’. The local group, since its absorption of the Labour Party left after internment, had moved sharply to the left of the leadership’s position and was probably the least ‘Catholic’ Republican group in the country. Since August 1971, however, there had been neither the occasion nor, it appeared, the necessity to express this in action. The ‘defence of the area’ was the task at hand; the enemy was the British army. The Officials fought alongside the Provos to keep the army out and the occasional questioning of the means of doing this by the church and the SDLP was not urgent enough to demand answer. For its part the church was unable in the same period to denounce the Officials as forthrightly as it would have liked. But now, as the church and the middle classes roused Catholic wrath against them, and as Father O’Neill argued that the killing of a local Catholic was a direct product of their ‘alien ideology’, the Officials had either to cut and run or to fight back. To their credit, they did the latter, producing perhaps the fiercest class-oriented, anti-church polemic ever to issue from within our community. ‘We are not a Catholic organization. We never said that we were. If there is anyone in this community who has been giving us support in the belief that we are some sort of militant, Catholic, Nationalist organization, let them withdraw their support now. We are nothing of the sort. We are out to build a revolutionary socialist party of the Irish working class.’

It was, in Derry, fairly daring stuff and its authors expected that it would receive a fairly hostile reception when it was distributed in the Starry Plough (‘Derry’s own Republican paper’) around the Creggan and the Bogside; but the reaction was more complex. The church’s open entry into politics had deprived it of the total inviolability normally conferred on it by its ‘spiritual’ role. Those who wished to ‘stand by the IRA’ had to oppose the clergy on this issue. If the role of the IRA was being openly questioned for the first time in ten months, the role of the church was under similar scrutiny for the first time in fifty years. That too, in its own contradictory way, helped to loosen the bonds holding the area together. The Provisionals, after some hesitation, realized that the flak aimed at the Officials was certain to damage them as well and asserted their own refusal to accept the church’s dictate. Initially they had tried to use the reaction to the Best killing to divert support away from the Officials and towards themselves. But that was much too delicate a manoeuvre to come off and was quickly abandoned.

The Officials’ leadership in Dublin called a ceasefire three weeks after the Best affair on 23 May. They insisted at the time that this had nothing to do with the ‘peace women’s’ still buoyant campaign; few accepted this. What happened was that the elements in the Official leadership which had wanted, anyway, to call a ceasefire found the time ripe in the post-Best atmosphere. They had continued to insist that their organization was not engaged in any offensive, military operations—this despite the fact that since Bloody Sunday active service units had been doing little other than seeking out ways and means to shoot and blow up soldiers. This, insisted the leadership, was ‘defence and retaliation’, not to be confused with the offensive and sectarian behaviour of the Provisionals. The common people had continued to have great difficulty discerning the difference between the Officials defensively blowing up two soldiers in Brooke Park on 5 April and the Provisionals offensively shooting one a week later. The stated reason for the ceasefire was that military operations were aggravating the sectarian situation, forcing the Protestants into an even more intransigent position and leading on towards open civil war; the way forward was to concentrate on politics.

The Provisionals, meanwhile, were getting on with it. They had no hang-ups about Catholicism. ‘All our volunteers go to mass on Sunday.’ Nor did they espouse any un-Irish theories of revolutionary socialism. They had in their ranks most of the ‘Old Republicans’ whose presence helped confer on them a historical legitimacy denied the Officials. Theirs was a philosophy which presented the people of the area with no problems. One might disagree with it, and many did, but it was not in our tradition to disrespect it. ‘Fitt and the rest are wasting their time,’ said Martin McGuinness at a meeting in Brandywell. ‘We are not stopping until we have a united Ireland.’ That was clear enough. They recruited a few of the Official volunteers who had not agreed with the ceasefire.

They had become, by any standards, a brilliantly efficient guerrilla army. Now that the Officials had ‘given up’ they claimed recognition as the sole inheritors of the Republican tradition, a status which, once assumed, cannot of its nature be subjected to democratic contestation. A resultant disregard for all proffered advice or criticism was sometimes upsetting, even to their own supporters. They were the front-line hooligans of 1969 in arms, young and urgent and now absolutely sure of themselves. with all the arrogance of their age and their race. They escalated the bombing campaign. Systematically, street by street, business house by business house, they continued to take the commercial area of the city to pieces. ‘We are filling in the gaps,’ they would say. They became very good at it. They were rarely caught. And, still, they did not injure civilians, nor did they blow themselves up, both of which things still seemed to happen with tragic regularity in Belfast. And still, commentators would denounce them as mindless thugs and eminent churchmen would damn them to hell. Politicians continued to urge the people to ‘get rid of the terrorists’ and experts on guerrilla warfare talked learnedly about ‘a strategy to detach the gunmen from the civilian population’. It is not easy to envisage the strategy which would ‘detach’ the sons and husbands of the area from the ‘civilian population’ of it, a consideration which seemed never to strike experienced experts on the situation, such as Mr Whitelaw who continued to repeat the phrase as if repetition might magically endow it with meaning. (About a week after Ranger Best was shot I argued on a street corner with a lady who had been vigorously supporting the ‘peace campaign’, in the course of which I alleged against her that, ‘I suppose if you knew who did it you would give the names to the police.’ At this she stalked away saying that she had been trying to conduct a sensible discussion and if I was not going to take the matter seriously…)

One of the Provisionals’ reasons for rejecting all entreaties to call a ceasefire was that they had not yet been recognized as a ‘legitimate’ political tendency. British ministers of both major parties had pledged repeatedly that they would not ‘sit down with terrorists’, ‘shake the bloodstained hands of’, ‘have any discussion with the vile perpetrators of’, and so on. The more unequivocal the pledges given the more clearly the Provos recalled Cyprus, Aden, Kenya and Ireland in the twenties. At the end of June Whitelaw agreed to talk terms with them and a truce was called. After nine days, on 9 July, it collapsed when Provisional leaders in Andersonstown in Belfast were unable to restrain Catholics’ anger at what appeared as open army support for militant Protestants in a sectarian housing dispute. The war continued. The first bomb of the renewed campaign exploded in Derry within a few hours.

The disparate movement for peace and for Mr Whitelaw to be ‘given a chance’ persisted. The SDLP was its political expression. There was a degree of liaison between the two tendencies. The ‘peace women’ met Provisional chief Sean MacStiofain and Mr Hume was seen acting as chauffeur for the man sometimes described as the Provisionals’ ‘top Northern strategist’. During the truce Hume and the local Provisionals had jointly negotiated the dismantling of three barricades with one of Whitelaw’s aides. This nervous alliance fell apart when the truce collapsed and the barricades went up again. A soldier was shot dead on 11 July. The Provos celebrated the twelfth with the biggest bomb offensive to date, detonating a total of five hundred pounds of explosives around Waterloo Place alone in the afternoon. As usual hundreds gathered to watch the bombs go off. Businessmen, as they watched their premises crumble, said that it was the last straw and berated army officers standing around—‘call yourselves security forces?’—and demanded to know ‘why you don’t go into the Creggan and shoot every one of the bastards’. Our teenagers cheered: ‘Fucking right. We’re never going to own it. We might as well destroy it.’ But once again it was teenagers who were doing all the cheering. There was no one in the area willing to sell the Provos out. They were our people. But there were some—not peace women necessarily—who thought that for what we were going to get out of it it was maybe not worth going on.

Pressure from Unionist politicians, and more effectively from the UDA, who were setting up their own Protestant no-go areas in protest against the Catholic enclaves, mounted on Whitelaw to move in on Free Derry. The re-erection of the barricades dismantled during the truce was taken as proof that they could not be talked down, that Hume and the peace women could not deliver the area up. Whitelaw’s office began signalling unmistakably that the army was going to move in. The Provos understood this more quickly than most. They understood that Whitelaw had agreed to the truce in order to talk the barricades down, and they had been willing to go along with this, bargaining, barricade by barricade, for political position. That was no longer on the agenda.

Had the army moved in before direct rule it is certain that thousands of people could have come out to face them, guns or no guns. Now, however, the detested Stormont was gone. The peace women had emerged, bringing the SDLP along in the slipstream of their petticoats, back towards the centre of the political stage. What the area lacked now, which it had had prior to direct rule, the Best killing and the Official ceasefire, was single-mindedness. Without that single-mindedness it was not possible for the Provos, or anyone else, to contemplate a protracted set-piece battle to repel a determined British advance. There was little discussion of the question in the area. Everyone knew it was just not on; that the army, after a year, was going to get in.

They came, naturally, in the morning (at 4 a.m. on 31 July), unceasing lines of them in convoy, Ferrets, Whippets and APCs, Land Rovers, Saladins and Centurions coming up Rossville Street past the High Flats and into Lecky Road, searchlights playing down from the city walls, bulldozers and earth movers beginning to grapple with the barricades, men shouting, machinery screaming, noise everywhere. ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Tommy Mccourt, watching from Westland Street and getting his military parallels slightly crossed in his awe, ‘it’s like bloody Dunkirk.’ All over the area volunteers were melting into the darkness and short back-and-sides. In McCafferty’s in Beechwood Street Tommy, the American writer Jack McKinney and I made tea and discussed the theoretical implications of the changed situation. ‘Are you three going to sit there,’ asked Mrs McCafferty, ‘and let those tanks come right into our street?’ Ten minutes later an unmolested Centurion rolled round the corner from Elmwood Road and roared up the hill towards the barricade at the top. ‘Annie, Annie,’ shouted Mrs Mccafferty across the street to a neighbour, ‘would you come out and see what they are doing? They’re taking down our barricade.’

Before the day was out meetings had been held protesting about the army having killed two unarmed youths in Creggan, Seamus Bradley and Daniel Hegarty, who had apparently got in their way. The requisite instant broadsheet was on the streets:

Now, more than ever before, it is necessary that every hour of every day every British soldier is made to understand that in the eyes of the people of the area, he is a leper…Our area was an insult to Tories everywhere. Here we had a community which organized and ran itself without any ‘help’ from all those institutions which are supposed to be necessary, and we managed well enough…The only thing we demand of them or want from them is that they get the hell out of our area and out of our lives so that we can build our own future in a free, socialist, Ireland.

We had it printed by the Derry Journal and distributed seven thousand copies of it around the area. It was very well received. But Free Derry was finished, for the time being anyway.

The local Provo leadership had retreated over the border and into itself. Mr Hume said that the people were ‘resentful but resigned’. The Provos were not really resigned, of course. They were shortly to re-emerge with blithe disregard for the seemingly inevitable, the old cause still begetting the old indomitable persistency. The Officials faced the future wondering how one conducted ‘the political struggle’ now. Mr Hume knew how he wanted it conducted. Next Friday’s Journal carried the front-page headline: ‘Hume Calls for Continued Restraint’. ‘Now there,’ said McGurran, ‘there’s a turn-up for the books.’