6

To the Brink in Belfast

Nineteen sixty-seven was a quiet year in Belfast after the turmoil of 1966. RUC intelligence reports in July 1967 and January 1968 both stated that there was ‘no immediate indication’ of the IRA resuming militant action against Northern Ireland.1 This was a reflection of the state of the organization. At a meeting on 29–30 August 1967, a gloomy picture was painted of the current situation: although there were 614 volunteers on the rolls, only 274 were effective; the army was broke, owing its staff members £274 and another £334 to individuals; and it appeared that it only had ‘enough ammo. for one good job [and] a very limited amount of arms and explosives’.2

What was the reason for this disarray? The ongoing dispute between what may be called the traditionalists and modernizers in the Republican movement had something to do with it. Seán Mac Stíofáin was temporarily suspended from membership in the second half of 1966 because he had refused to distribute copies of the Sinn Féin newspaper, The United Irishman, in his command area. The offending issue contained a letter from Roy Johnston which criticized the saying of the rosary at Republican commemorations on the grounds that it was sectarian. Mac Stíofáin, like many IRA members a devout Catholic, believed that the Marxist Johnston’s ‘real target … was not sectarianism, but religion as such’.3

These events inevitably had their repercussions in Northern Ireland, including Belfast. Billy McMillen stated that ‘strenuous efforts were being made to radicalize our membership who were still very reluctant to adapt to the unfamiliar role of political activists’ and ‘[t]he Belfast Battalion Staff impressed on Headquarters the necessity for a happy blend of political agitation and military activity’.4 McMillen’s task was probably not made any easier by the fact that, as the IRA’s Intelligence Officer, Mac Stíofáin decided to ‘concentrate personally on the North’, where he found Belfast ‘on its toes’ and seeing ‘eye-to-eye on policy matters’ with him.5

Paisleyism, on the other hand, was faring relatively well. While only thirteen congregations of the Free Presbyterian Church had been founded between 1951 and 1966, twelve more were added in the eighteen months that followed July 1966, a rate of one every six weeks. On the political front, Ian Paisley’s wife, Eileen, topped the poll in a municipal election for the St George’s Ward in Belfast in May 1967, although the two other candidates on her Protestant Unionist ticket were beaten by supporters of Terence O’Neill. A Belfast Telegraph poll published in December 1967 showed that 34 per cent of all Unionists ‘usually’ agreed with what Paisley said, while 44 per cent did not believe that he had deliberately tried to stir up bad feeling between Catholics and Protestants.6

A new ingredient was added to Northern Ireland’s politics in 1967, however, which was to have an enormous influence on both Republicanism and Paisleyism and other loyalist groups. This was NICRA, which was set up in January 1967. Its aim was to campaign against what were seen as the worst abuses in Northern Ireland’s political system: the gerrymandering of local authority boundaries, the restriction of the local government franchise to property owners and their spouses, discrimination in the allocation of council housing and public sector jobs and the Special Powers Act.7 These were mainly, but not exclusively, Catholic grievances. Many Protestants, for example, were affected by the restriction of the local government franchise. Thus, while 31 per cent of Catholics in Belfast did not have a vote, neither did 22 per cent of Presbyterians, 18 per cent of Church of Ireland members and 13 per cent of members of other Protestant denominations.8 Those in the NICRA coalition who wished to build bridges between the Catholic and Protestant working classes could take comfort from this and those who did not could use the fact to counter the charge that it was a purely Catholic/Nationalist/Republican pressure group.

I

Over twenty years later, William Craig, who had been Minister for Home Affairs in 1967, was still convinced that NICRA was a Republican front. ‘To me’, he told Peter Taylor, ‘it was the beginning of a republican campaign organized entirely by the IRA and it was much more significant than any previous campaign. It was a deliberate effort by the IRA to play a bigger part in the politics of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Of course, it would exploit and use local figureheads where it could, but I would have said quite categorically that it was the guiding hand.’9

Although there is some evidence to support the claim that the Republican movement in general and the IRA in particular were instrumental in forming NICRA,10 this does not mean that it was, in Craig’s words, ‘organized entirely by the IRA’ which was its ‘guiding hand’. From its beginnings in 1967, NICRA was a coalition and its executive consisted of Communists, Nationalists and people of no particular political persuasion as well as Republicans.11 With the passage of time, moreover, other political groupings made their influence felt, notably the People’s Democracy. The Republicans certainly exploited NICRA, but they did not control it even if, as McMillen claimed, they could have done so.12

For the first eighteen months of its existence, NICRA was little more than a pressure group and it only achieved salience in Northern Ireland’s politics when it moved into the streets.13 Its iconic moment came with the Derry march of 5 October 1968, and, as has been explained elsewhere in this book, NICRA was nevertheless a minor player in someone else’s political theatre. The ensuing violence, in McMillen’s opinion, ‘did more in a few hours to rock the tribal Orange/Unionist Establishment, and did more for the minority in the Six Counties than the IRA physical force campaigns had been able to do in fifty years’.14 In so doing, however, it confirmed the view among many Protestants that the demand for ‘civil rights’ was little more than a pretext for Catholics, and especially Republicans, to try and overthrow ‘their’ government by force. ‘The situation is explosive’, a brief for British ministers warned, ‘civil war is not impossible.’15

In Belfast, the most immediate consequence of the 5 October 1968 march was the emergence at Queen’s University of what became the People’s Democracy. After the violence in Derry, the poet Seamus Heaney detected ‘embarrassed, indignant young Ulstermen and women whose deep-grained conservatism of behaviour was outweighed by a reluctant recognition of injustice’.16 On 7 October 1968, the Joint Action Committee, which had been created the year before to protest against the ban on the university’s Republican Club, was brought back to organize a march from Queen’s to Belfast City Hall to take place two days later.17 Paisley and his wife called upon the RUC Commissioner for Belfast on 8 October to draw his attention to the resentment which they claimed was felt by a number of citizens, and particularly those of Mrs Paisley’s municipal constituents who lived in loyalist Sandy Row, near which the students’ march was scheduled to pass. The Commissioner impressed upon the Paisleys that ‘it was their duty as responsible citizens to do everything in their power to preserve the peace’ and they promised to do so. Instead, Paisley promptly set about organizing a counter-demonstration. The police, fearing a violent clash between the two groups of protesters, chose to re-route the students’ march.18

Having reluctantly accepted the police re-routing of their own march, the students discovered as they were approaching Donegall Square that the Paisleyites had switched the venue for their counterdemonstration to this space. Once again concerned about a possible violent clash between the two groups, the RUC refused to allow the students into the square. The angry students sat down in Linenhall Street and did not start leaving until the early evening, whereupon the Paisleyites also dispersed.19 Not all the students went home. A group of fifty or so met in MacMordie Hall and set up a permanent protest group to campaign for social and political change. As Paul Arthur, a participant-observer, has written, ‘What began as a small gathering of disenchanted students intent on voicing their criticisms of the organizers [of the march], the police and the counter-demonstrators grew into an emotional and intense mass meeting concerned with solving the fundamental problems of the divided community’.20 ‘Student Power’, the university newspaper declared, ‘had come to Belfast’.21

The meeting produced a six-point policy programme which closely mirrored that of NICRA. It also elected what Arthur describes as a ‘faceless committee’ of ten people with no known political affiliations. The title of the movement was deliberately chosen so as not to exclude those without connection to the university.22 Kevin Boyle, a young lecturer popular with the students, subsequently admitted to an American interviewer in 1972 that its ‘faceless committee’ was in fact manipulated by political activists, something which is confirmed by notes in his private papers.23 Leftists, such as Eamonn McCann’s close comrade Michael Farrell, had been looking for an issue that would serve as a ‘bridge to involvement’ for university students: civil rights had now given them it.24 Farrell, who was teaching at a local college, was present at the first meeting and came to play an increasing role in People’s Democracy.25 Indeed, although he was not on the ‘faceless committee’, he was to become the face of People’s Democracy.

Following the original clash between the student demonstrators and the Paisleyites, repeat performances regularly occurred over the next few weeks and months, with the police often in the unenviable position of trying to keep the two apart. On 16 October 1968, the People’s Democracy belatedly made it to Donegall Square. ‘Let me tell you’, declared Boyle at the meeting which followed, ‘there are many people in this city who feel that [now that] the students have got to the City Hall our marching is finished for Civil Rights. I would like to say from the platform today that they are very, very wrong’. Bernadette Devlin, a psychology undergraduate who had been elected on to the ‘faceless committee’, reached out to the Paisleyite counter-demonstrators in her speech. She called on ‘the people across the street’ ‘to support us in demanding, not a political issue, not a sectarian issue, but a human issue’.26 They did not. On 4 November 1968, after the police enforced a ban on another march to City Hall and People’s Democracy responded with a sit-down protest, some Paisleyites assaulted several students. A group of Paisleyites then headed over to Queen’s University and occupied Hamilton Hall – ‘claiming’ it ‘as part of the Empire’ – for several hours, before leaving under police escort. This, together with the aggressive behaviour of many police officers earlier in the day, had such an impact upon students that even an undergraduate who was a ‘staunch believer in the principles of Unionism’ had his ‘faith in the RUC’ brought to a ‘rather low ebb’.27

Stormont did not at this stage regard the People’s Democracy as being as much of a threat as the Derry movement. On 24 October 1968, when People’s Democracy activists had occupied the Northern Irish House of Commons, the Speaker did not call in the police, the Minister of Education spoke to the students and a Unionist MP added his name to a declaration of civil rights.28 This changed during December. Although a sizeable number of students wanted to give O’Neill the breathing space that he asked for in his televised address to Northern Ireland, Farrell was able to exploit participatory democracy and the Christmas vacation to secure a vote in favour of marching from Belfast to Derry in the New Year.29 The march was consciously modelled on the Selma-Montgomery marches which had in the basic narrative presented in the mass media restarted the stalled American civil rights movement.30

After the Burntollet ambush, the marchers complained bitterly that, when attacked, the police failed adequately to protect them, an opinion shared by a junior minister at the British Home Office.31 The obvious answer to these charges – which, of course, the police strenuously denied – was that the marchers should have followed the proposed alternative route in the first place. Indeed, the independent inquiry which looked into this and other disturbances during the period concluded that the leaders of the march, the most prominent of whom was Farrell, saw it ‘as a calculated martyrdom’.32

Distinguishing ‘turning points’ in history is a perilous task. However, Burntollet is a better candidate than many where the start of the Troubles is concerned. People’s Democracy justly claimed to be non-sectarian, but Boyle, who was on the march, said later that he could still remember the depression he felt at one point on ‘seeing the Catholic school children out all waving to us and the Protestant school not waving and how that, in effect, was the end of my innocence in the Northern Ireland conflict, and the real worries about sectarianism that I had kept down becoming clear’.33 An anonymous welder from the shipyards of east Belfast, someone to whom People’s Democracy wanted to reach out, wrote a letter to the Belfast Telegraph in which he explained that, although he had voted Labour for the past twenty years, ‘the Kevins, the Michaels, the Eamonns, the Bernadettes, etc.’ had converted him ‘from a very moderate, tolerant “live and let live” Protestant into a near Paisleyite’. This was a view which, he claimed, was shared by all his moderate, Protestant friends in the shipyards.34

This created something of a dilemma for the IRA. Seán Garland, one of the heroes of the border campaign, told his Belfast audience at the annual Easter Rising commemoration on 6 April 1969,

Unless and until the NICRA is able to re-create that unity of purpose and discipline of action as the Protestant working-classes of this city … showed in the early part of this century and as they again showed in 1932 when Orangemen and Republicans fought shoulder to shoulder against their common enemy [i.e. the Outdoor Relief riots] there can be no hope of success.

Yet soon after Burntollet, on 19 January 1969, the Coiste Seasta, a powerful sub-committee of Sinn Féin dominated by the IRA, had agreed that ‘it was vital that 15 radical marchers be elected to the Executive of NICRA at its AGM’, thereby encouraging the very phenomenon which working class Protestants like the anonymous welder found so objectionable.35 The dilemma was never resolved.

II

Throughout January 1969, O’Neill’s position was becoming increasingly insecure. He opted to respond to the renewed violence in Derry with concessions and a crackdown: a commission of inquiry and a ‘firmer use of police power’. Most of his Cabinet colleagues saw the commission as a ‘breathing-space’ that should be used to press on with the existing policy on local government restructuring and franchise reform. But Brian Faulkner, the Minister of Commerce, argued that it would be ‘regarded as an abdication by the Government’ and that ‘a more direct approach would be to agree as a Cabinet to universal adult suffrage’.36 Away from the Cabinet table, Craig also took the line that setting up the inquiry showed a ‘lack of confidence’, and he put down a motion asking the government to resist outside interference. With his main rival making ground, Faulkner decided the moment had come to move against O’Neill, and so he too left the Cabinet and made his criticisms public. Another Cabinet minister also resigned and O’Neill stumbled into another backbench revolt.37 The Prime Minister claimed that the rebels had gone to the country by issuing a manifesto in Portadown, so he chose to follow them by calling an election.38 O’Neill once more sought to mobilize popular support in order to strengthen his political position.39

The election, which took place on 24 February 1969, was therefore in large part a plebiscite for or against O’Neill. Thanks to the decentralized nature of the Unionist Party, pro- and anti-O’Neill Unionists stood against one another in some constituencies. There were six such contests in the sixteen Belfast seats and the pro- and anti-O’Neill candidates won three each. The three won by the Prime Minister’s opponents (St Anne’s, Shankill and Woodvale) were all in west Belfast and, significantly perhaps, they all abutted on to overwhelmingly Catholic areas and were predominantly working class.40

O’Neill hoped to win some Catholic votes and thus we find him campaigning in Oldpark, a seat which was 40 per cent Catholic and where the sitting member for the previous eleven years had been Vivian Simpson of the NILP. On 20 February 1969, the Belfast Newsletter carried a story under the headline: ‘He made her house seem like a castle’, which referred to a statement by Mrs Mary McNulty of Jamaica Street, whose home O’Neill and the local Unionist candidate, Alderman Joseph Cairns, had visited on the previous day. ‘As long as there are men like Captain Terence O’Neill and Alderman Cairns in the Unionist Party’, Mrs McNulty told the newspaper, ‘… then I’ll vote Unionist.’41

Jamaica Street was in Ardoyne, a predominantly Catholic district bordering on the Crumlin Road, and its population included a number of Republican supporters and activists who were put out by Mrs McNulty’s remarks. According to Joe Graham, who was an IRA volunteer with connections in the area, ‘some irate neighbours who didn’t seem to share Mary’s fondness for Unionist ass kissing, redecorated her “palace” with tar and feathers and increased the ventilation by breaking all the windows’. A petition condemning the visit, which seems to have been the idea of Graham and another IRA volunteer who lived in the area, Martin Meehan, was circulated and attracted 106 signatures out of the 131 residents of the street. In view of what had happened to Mrs McNulty’s house, it is noteworthy that as many as twenty-five people refused to sign precisely because they disapproved of it.42 Such independence would become rare in the years that followed.

Paisley’s newly created Protestant Unionist Party only contested two seats in Belfast, both in the mainly Protestant east of the city. Its candidate came second in Bloomfield, beating the NILP into third place, but the positions were reversed in Victoria, where Major Bunting ended up bottom of the poll. Bunting and Paisley had been sentenced to three months in jail on 27 January 1969 for their conduct in Armagh the previous November, but the latter chose to sign a bail bond pending his appeal and was quickly released (although not before a riot similar to that which had occurred when he was previously incarcerated in 1966). Bunting, who was fasting in protest against his sentence, chose to remain in jail until he too was released to fight the election. On 25 March 1969, however, both men returned to prison after dropping their appeals.43

Five days later, at 3:53 am on 30 March 1969, an explosion occurred at the Lisnabreny sub-power station at Castlereagh in the eastern suburbs of Belfast causing £500,000 worth of damage.44 This was followed, during the course of the next month, by four other major attacks on public utilities, including the Belfast water-supply pipes from the Silent Valley reservoir in the Mourne Mountains to the south-east and Lough Neagh to the north-west. Paisley’s newspaper, the Protestant Telegraph, had no doubts as to the identity of those responsible. ‘This is the first act of sabotage perpetrated by the IRA since the murderous campaign of 1956’, it declared.45 Although 1,000 B-Specials were mobilized to guard key installations, the Northern Ireland Government felt this was not enough and asked for British troops, too. This request was granted and Home Secretary James Callaghan told the Labour Cabinet on 24 April 1969 that although it was not yet possible to say who was behind the explosions, it was known that ‘the Irish Republican Army was now dominated by a Communist element and that the civil rights organization contained a mischievous fringe of extremists’.46

From the outset, however, it was suggested that suspects other than the usual ones were responsible. On 31 March 1969, for example, the Belfast Newsletter received an anonymous telephone call blaming the UVF. The RUC received a similar call two days later.47 Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about the size and state of the UVF in 1969 other than that it was commanded by a man named Samuel ‘Bo’ McClelland, who took over from ‘Gusty’ Spence when the latter was jailed in 1966.48 Spence himself told Taylor that UVF men were involved in the explosions. One of them, Thomas McDowell, figures on the UVF Roll of Honour as a result of his subsequent death in October 1969 when he was accidentally electrocuted while attempting to blow up another electricity sub-station in the Republic of Ireland. But McDowell was not only a member of the UVF; he was also a member of Paisley’s UPV and a Free Presbyterian. Indeed, according to the key witness in the subsequent trials, Samuel Stevenson who turned Queen’s evidence, others involved in the explosions were also members of the UPV, including Robert Murdock, one of those charged with Noel Doherty in 1966 for attempting to obtain explosives. Referring to the attacks on public utilities in March and April 1969, Stevenson told the police: ‘These jobs were done to cause confusion and get rid of O’Neill’.49 As in 1966, there was no firm evidence linking Paisley himself with these events, but once more some of those who followed him were clearly prepared to use violent methods in order to obtain their objectives.

The explosions were not the only contribution to the deterioration of the situation in April 1969. Serious violence broke out once more in Derry on 19 April 1969, and for the first time since the civil rights movement had emerged, it spread to Belfast. The IRA fire-bombed ten post offices in the city on the night of 20/21 April 1969 in an attempt to draw the RUC away from Derry50 and on the following two nights there was rioting on the Falls Road. On 21 April there was a march from the recently built Divis Tower block to the Springfield Road RUC barracks, where a petition against police brutality in Derry was delivered. After the marchers had returned to the Divis Tower for an open-air meeting, a section of the crowd broke away and attacked the nearby Hastings Street police station with stones and bottles. During the course of the rioting the local police commander, District Inspector Frank Lagan, one of the few Catholics who had attained a high rank in the RUC, was beaten up by a group of youths and had to seek refuge in a private house.51

Both the march and the meeting were organized by NICRA and People’s Democracy. But there was also another participant in the shape of the Belfast Housing Action Committee (BHAC). This organization was, in fact, a Republican front, although this was hotly denied at the time.52 Its main purpose was to agitate for improvement in the undeniably poor housing conditions in west Belfast and it had recently installed a family, whose own house had been seriously damaged by fire, as squatters in an empty flat in the Divis Tower while campaigning for them to be properly re-housed. Such action was in accordance with what headquarters in Dublin was then advocating, but, in the words of one member of the BHAC, events in Derry enabled it to extend its efforts as ‘part of a larger strategy to help alleviate the struggle against [the] RUC in Derry who were attacking and oppressing the nationalist people on a daily basis’.53 Hence the BHAC’s involvement in the protest march on 21 April 1969. This tactic of relieving the situation in Derry by creating a diversion in Belfast was tried again by Republicans, among others, in August 1969 with fatal consequences.

Republicans also took advantage of an outbreak of violence in Ardoyne the following month. This revolved around the Edenderry Inn, a public house with a somewhat unsavoury reputation on the corner of Hooker Street and the Crumlin Road. Trouble erupted between the police and patrons of the establishment on the night of 16 May 1969 and continued over the following two nights. These clashes, which drew in other residents of the area, involved baton charges and the throwing of stones, bottles, pieces of iron grating and the occasional petrol bomb. The RUC originally played down these incidents as being ‘in the nature of “pub brawls”’, but they soon developed into something more than that.54 Following a further violent confrontation between the police and rioters on the night of 23 May 1969, considerable anger was expressed by some residents over what they regarded as the heavy-handed conduct of the police. One even thought the area could become another Bogside, in the sense that the police would be excluded and replaced by local vigilantes.55 Feelings were such that two meetings were held in nearby Butler Street on 24 and 25 May 1969 and a Citizens Action Committee was formed. Republicans spoke at the meetings and two IRA volunteers, Joe Graham and Tony Cosgrove, were elected to the committee. A number of men, mainly youths, began to patrol the area, and it seemed that the police were adopting a lower profile.56

On 29 May 1969, members of the committee went to see the RUC City Commissioner and his deputy. According to one of them, Father Marcellus Gillespie, a priest from the neighbouring Holy Cross Church, Cosgrove and Graham tried to get the police ‘to admit that they were guilty to some extent in the trouble’. Graham admits that he wanted to provoke a dispute which ‘would result in the representatives of the committee walking out in feigned disgust’, but goes on to say that ‘the RUC beat us to the punch’ by inviting Father Marcellus to a private tête-à-tête after which he left the meeting in a hurry, telling Graham and his companion later, ‘look lads, you are all IRA men and I am not going to be used. I am resigning my membership of the committee as of this moment’. Father Marcellus’s own account does not mention this incident, but it is clear that he did not approve of Graham and Cosgrove who, he claimed, were later told by the locals ‘to get out of the district and stay out’.57

Graham eventually admitted that ‘[t]here was an element of political agitation involved’ in setting up the Action Committee, but some Ardoyne residents had worked this out for themselves at the time. A ‘Peaceful Citizen’ complained in the Irish News of 26 May 1969 that it was unrepresentative and concluded, ‘[i]t is time that the people banded together to tell this new committee of people who seem to be running things in the vicinity, to mind their own business and let us get back to normal lives’. This prompted a reply from Rebecca McGlade, a Republican on the NICRA executive, criticizing ‘Peaceful Citizen’ for concealing his or her identity. To which the latter retorted that Mrs McGlade ‘knows very well that in an area such as Ardoyne that anyone who speaks out against an element such as that which caused all the damage to property in the area is classed as a “traitor” and “RUC tout” and is a marked person’.58

There were signs of increasing loyalist militancy in these days, too. Between 21 April and the end of May 1969 the RUC recorded some dozen incidents of intimidation against Catholics either living or working in mainly Protestant areas. Two families actually left their homes on the night of 21/22 April after threats that they would be burned out and letters were sent to three residents of two neighbouring streets, each containing a live 9 mm round and containing an order to leave their homes or face the prospect of being shot dead.59 Many of these threats purported to come from the UVF, although whether that organization was responsible or whether its name was appropriated for greater effect is not known.

On 1 May 1969, it was announced that a Shankill Defence Association (SDA) had been set up ‘to secure better conditions for Protestants scheduled for rehousing … and to defend loyalist lives and property after the threats last week of Falls Road rioters’.60 Its chair was to be a 39-year-old ‘manager’s agent’, John McKeague, a member of the UPV who had been arrested in a fracas when the police came to take Paisley to jail on 28 January 1969. The following month, McKeague had stood, unsuccessfully, as the Protestant Unionist Party candidate for the Victoria Ward in a council by-election. By the time he was elected chairman of the SDA, however, his relationship with Paisley seems to have been under some strain.61

While these developments were taking place, there had been a change of government in Northern Ireland. The February election had not produced the decisive outcome which O’Neill had hoped for and his party was still riven with dissension, notably over the early introduction of one-man-one-vote in local elections. His cousin, James Chichester-Clark, resigned over the issue on 23 April 1969 and five days later O’Neill, unable to guarantee the passage of the reform, followed suit. Bonfires were lit on the Shankill Road and the Union Jack was flown over Paisley’s church in the Ravenhill Road.62

Joe Cahill, a veteran Republican who had narrowly escaped the fate of his young commanding officer, Tom Williams, who was hanged for the killing of a policeman in 1942, later made a revealing comment to his biographer. ‘The one person who realised that the nationalist people could be won over with a few reforms’, he said, ‘was Terence O’Neill … I suppose we should be thankful to people like Paisley and the others who did not want to see any reforms implemented. They were responsible for O’Neill being ousted’.63 Even if one disagrees with Cahill’s assessment, his view was typical of those Republicans who feared that reform would mean the end of their preferred revolution.

O’Neill was succeeded by Chichester-Clark, who appointed Faulkner, but not Craig or any of the more outspoken opponents of the former Prime Minister, to his Cabinet.64 On 6 May 1969, an amnesty was announced for all those charged or convicted as a result of political protests. Paisley and Bunting were released from jail, and pending prosecutions of leading figures in the civil rights movement such as Gerry Fitt, Bernadette Devlin and Austin Currie, the young Nationalist MP for East Tyrone, were dropped.65 There was a temporary easing of the situation, but it did not last for long.

III

On 18 May 1969, NICRA issued an ‘ultimatum’ to the Unionist Government stating that unless the latter announced an acceptable timetable of reform within six weeks it would continue with its civil disobedience campaign. Since the timetable was expected to include the abandonment of the Public Order (Amendment) Bill, which was designed to deal with the disruptive tactics previously used by civil rights activists and which was then slowly and painfully proceeding through Stormont, together with the abolition of the B-Specials, the outlook was not particularly hopeful.66 It therefore came as no surprise when, as from 28 June 1969 onwards, marches were again staged in many parts of the province.

Just over a week later the head of the RUC’s Special Branch, County Inspector Douglas Johnston, sent a special assessment of the civil rights movement to the Inspector-General. His was a rather more sophisticated analysis than that of those who, like Craig and Paisley, equated NICRA with the IRA. Johnston felt that recent attendance figures at marches suggested that they had ‘lost their steam’, and if it was not to wane or founder it must necessarily become more militant, with ‘a new crop of impossible demands’. (He could have added that the harsh treatment meted out to some demonstrators by the police and the courts were also giving activists plenty of additional grievances.) Although there had been ‘a Protestant sprinkling of idealists and do-gooders’ in the movement at the beginning, it had now ‘crystallized into the familiar “green” composed of Republicans and Nationalists but still … containing a vociferous minority grouping of Trotskyites or Revolutionary Socialists’ and it was against this background that the present struggle for power could be seen.67

As far as the Republican movement was concerned, Johnston did not think that it approved of People’s Democracy, despite the latter’s support for a thirty-two county socialist republic. Basing himself on an internal strategy document, he said that the Republican movement emphasized the importance of short-term agitation in favour of democracy, civil rights, job discrimination and security, the aim being to obtain maximum concessions while Harold Wilson was still in 10 Downing Street. Demonstrations should have no party-political content and be non-violent. In the medium term, it was hoped to build a six-county movement based on workers, farmers, the self-employed and professionals, irrespective of religion, in order to undermine the popular basis of Unionist rule. No long-term objective was cited, but Johnston did say that, under the influence of his namesake, Roy Johnston, the Republican movement had become a Connollyite socialist movement using infiltration, manipulation and any alliance which served its purpose for the time being in order to undermine and destroy the existing system of government.68

One of the more revealing comments in Johnston’s assessment concerned Paisley and the symbiotic relationship that he had with the civil rights movement. ‘If the Reverend gentleman could only be persuaded to leave it to the Government and police …’, Johnston complained, ‘the Civil Rights attendances would probably continue to fall away’ as the movement fed and thrived on such opposition. So, of course, did Paisleyism, which meant that ‘the Reverend gentleman’ was unlikely to oblige. What is clearly missing from this assessment is any recognition that the police themselves were part of the production of violence and not merely caught between the extremists.69

Sectarian tension was heightened as a result of the ‘Twelfth’. This was not an automatic outcome, but rather the product of conscious efforts on the part of certain individuals and groups. The almost entirely Catholic Unity Flats complex at the bottom of the Shankill Road was surrounded by police after the residents had showered the passing Orangemen with bottles and stones. In Ardoyne, an Irish Tricolour was displayed in a window of the Edenderry Inn as Orange marchers were returning from their rally in south Belfast up the Crumlin Road. According to a policeman present, the loyalist crowd on the southern side of the road ‘became incensed and began to shout and point in the direction of [the Edenderry Inn]’. Members of the marching lodge tried to break ranks, but the stewards kept them moving and the police prevented the loyalists from crossing over the Crumlin Road to the Catholic side. The police, who had earlier requested the manager to lock the doors to prevent any trouble, had to break into the premises in order to arrest the alleged miscreants.70

Both District Inspector Shaw Montgomery, the policeman in charge of Belfast District C (which included Ardoyne), and Father Marcellus thought they detected a change in the atmosphere after 12 July 1969. Beforehand, they felt, the trouble in the area had been mainly between some of the Catholics in the Hooker Street area and the police, but afterwards it became much more between people from the two communities.71

Just how acute tensions had become in Belfast was shown by the events of the weekend of 2–3 August 1969. As the name suggests, the marching season in Northern Ireland is not confined to 12 July, and on 2 August 1969 the Junior Orange Lodge of No. 1 District marched down the Shankill Road towards the railway station, on their way to an outing in nearby Carrickfergus. This took them past the Unity Flats. The SDA had provided an ‘escort’ for the young marchers in case there was an attack by the residents. There was no disorder while the procession was passing, but shortly afterwards some 200 Protestants tried to enter the flats and there was stone-throwing and some fighting in the courtyard.72

Real trouble broke out during the late afternoon and early evening, when the marchers were returning from their outing. A large crowd came down from the Shankill inflamed by inaccurate rumours that the children had been attacked on their way to the station in the morning. Prevailing notions of manliness meant that men were required to protect children. The police sought to cordon off the flats and some entered the courtyards. This move backfired, however, and fighting broke out between the residents and the police. During the course of the fracas a 61-year-old man, Patrick Corry, was batoned by the police; he subsequently died some four months later of his injuries.73

The Junior Orange Lodge returned at about 7 pm. Once again there was no violence against them, but after the parents had collected their children, a hard core of would-be vigilantes – described by one policeman as ‘hooligans, agitators and criminals’ – remained behind. They launched a full-scale attack on the Unity Flats, which was repulsed by the police, who then drove them back up the Shankill Road. The fighting went on in this area until midnight. Little thanks was shown to the RUC by the residents of the Unity Flats, who continued to throw stones at the police and the fighting there went on until 3 or 3:30 am.74

Deprived of their prey in the Unity Flats, the crowd on the Shankill Road resorted to widespread looting and vandalism. The Irish Times described the scene on the morning of 3 August 1969: the Shankill ‘looked … as though it had been blitzed. Hundreds of windows in shops and private houses were smashed and the contents of shop windows looted. The roadway was covered with broken glass, stones, bricks, fragments of paving stones and pieces of iron which had been thrown during the riots’.75

There was also rioting on the Crumlin Road on the night of 2 August 1969. Following a report that a crowd was moving up Hooker Street to the Crumlin Road, a small group of police was sent to the area. After dark a rival crowd appeared, led by two men carrying Union Jacks and shouting ‘let’s wreck the fucking pope heads’. Although there were only six policemen and despite a shower of stones, bottles and sticks, they managed to force the Protestants up the Crumlin Road and into the side streets on the south side. After reinforcements had arrived, the police were able to persuade a larger Protestant crowd to disperse. By then, however, a Catholic crowd had gathered and a barricade was erected across Hooker Street. At about 11:30 pm people emerged from behind this barricade and began hurling petrol bombs and other missiles at the police. The latter, led by an armoured car and followed by Land Rovers, made baton charges into Hooker Street to break up the crowd.76

Following further rioting on both the Shankill and the Crumlin Road on the night of 3 August 1969, the SDA issued a statement in which it said that, while it deplored looting, the police had shown partiality towards the Catholics and, as a result: ‘[w]e make it clear that the police are no longer friends of Ulster Loyalists and can never expect our help again’. Indeed, McKeague asked the authorities to send B-Specials to keep order on the Shankill Road, which they did.77

The Irish News described the disturbances in Belfast over the weekend of 2–3 August 1969 as the ‘first major clashes between Protestants and Catholics since … 1935’.78 This was no exaggeration and, in addition, the police were becoming more aggressive. During the course of rioting in Ardoyne on the night of 4 August 1969, for example, a young man, Neil Somers, was knocked down and badly injured by a police Land Rover. Former Constable Spenser Cusack told the Scarman Tribunal that it was the vehicle in which he was riding which struck Somers. Moreover, it had been done deliberately and one of his colleagues had screamed ‘Run the bastards down’ as they turned into the street where the incident occurred. This was denied by other police witnesses and the accident was attributed to another Land Rover altogether,79 but it is significant that when Martin Meehan was arrested on the same night, he was so badly beaten up that he had to remain in hospital for a week and came out still walking with the aid of a stick, although the police claimed that he had fallen and that his injuries were ‘a result of hitting his head on the kerb’.80

An increase in intimidation came with the rioting, and many families living in the ‘wrong’ neighbourhoods were forced to leave their homes. The Belfast Telegraph reported on 5 August 1969 that over two dozen Catholic families had been forced out of Protestant areas and that seven out of seventeen Protestant families in Hooker Street alone had signed up for new houses. There even appears to have been some semi-formal arrangement between bodies on either side of the communal divide to ‘swap’ houses, although this can only have provided limited consolation to those driven out of homes in which some of them had lived in peace alongside their neighbours for years.81

IV

To what extent was there any organization behind this rioting? It is interesting that the Irish News routinely referred to the Protestants who attacked Unity Flats on 2 August 1969 as ‘Paisleyites’.82 Although those involved may well have been influenced by his anti-Catholic, anti-Republican and anti-Communist rhetoric, there is no evidence that Paisley had anything to do with organizing the rioting. Indeed, he held an open-air service close to the Lower Shankill during the afternoon of Sunday, 3 August 1969, in which he asked people to go home. His appeal had little effect, however. Moreover, the same Irish News reported that Major Bunting was on the Crumlin Road that night, appealing to the Protestant crowd to go home. He was booed and stoned for his pains.83

On the other hand, it is clear that McKeague and the SDA were active on the Shankill Road. His attentions then switched to the Crumlin Road. When asked why at the Scarman Tribunal, he replied that he had SDA members living in the area ‘and they requested us to come up because over a long period of time they had been subject to abuse verbally and otherwise coming from the Hooker Street/Herbert Street area’. He admitted that there was ‘some hostility against us’ at the beginning, ‘but as time wore on and people realised what was materializing, what was building up, they later came and apologized to me and thanked us for being there’. McKeague added that the membership of the SDA rose to 2,000 during this period.84 As for UVF involvement, we know nothing.

When it comes to what was happening in the Catholic areas, we return to the IRA. It seems that IRA volunteers were placed on defensive duty in Ardoyne and the Unity Flats in July 1969.85 Jim Sullivan, the Belfast IRA’s second-in-command, was spotted by the police in the flats on 2 August 1969 and he evidently arranged for the delivery of a vanload of pick handles later in the day, rather to the disappointment of the future Provisional, Gerry Bradley, then only 15 years old, who had hoped for guns.86 In Ardoyne, Meehan and Graham were active and Gerry Adams has recorded that ‘[w]hen a defence committee was set up in Ardoyne, I and other activists from outside the area went there regularly in solidarity with local activists’.87

McMillen later admitted that ‘heavy pressure was being exerted on the Belfast Battalion Staff to introduce weapons into the situation’. They were reluctant to do so, however, because ‘we realized that the meagre armaments at our disposal were hopelessly inadequate to meet the requirements of the situation and that the use of firearms by us would only serve to justify the use of greater force against the people by the forces of the Establishment and increase the danger of sectarian pogroms’.88

One of the principal complaints against the then IRA leadership by those who set up the Provisional IRA was precisely that it did nothing to remedy this situation. According to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, one of the founders of the Provisionals, there had been a meeting in Dublin in May 1969 at which he had suggested setting up vigilante groups to keep ‘pro-British elements out of the Catholic areas’, on the grounds that it was the ‘height of irresponsibility and madness to have the pressure continue from the civil rights movement knowing where it was going to lead and being unable to meet the logical consequences’. Cathal Goulding allegedly replied that ‘it was up to the official forces of the British Army and the RUC to defend the people’.89 It is hard to believe that Goulding would have made such a remark. As another account of what is probably the same meeting implies, it is more likely that he had not given the matter much thought.90 Perhaps he should have done so, as it was the Belfast IRA which took the fateful decision which produced the Belfast riots of August 1969 and not some loyalist conspiracy.