Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the opening days of the Troubles. Here Susan McKay starts a week-long series of articles where she looks backs at the Northern Ireland of 1969, but also the Northern Ireland of today and tomorrow.
On August 1st, 1969, the then Irish minister for external affairs, Dr Patrick Hillery, met with the British secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, Michael Stewart, at the Foreign Office in London.
Hillery expressed his concern that a huge Apprentice Boys parade was about to take place in Derry, a city which was, he said, according to a contemporary note of the meeting, “a veritable powder keg”.
Nationalists in Derry had “no confidence” in the police, and it would be “sheer madness” to allow the parade to go ahead as planned. “Something could be started there which might be very difficult to contain.”
Stewart was blasé: "He adverted to the fact that a similar problem had arisen in Bermuda recently" and had passed off without undue trouble. Besides, there were "hopeful signs" that the Northern Ireland government was "taking steps towards reform" and "the more London interfered...the less effective the results might be".
Hillery, who was not reassured, pressed on, but Stewart was having none of it. This was an “internal matter” and it could not be discussed with “outsiders”.
He went on to make a "disparaging remark" about the poor attendance at Westminster of "Miss Devlin", the newly elected MP for Mid Ulster.
Protestants like <a class="search" href='javascript:window.parent.actionEventData({$contentId:"7.1213540", $action:"view", $target:"work"})' polopoly:contentid="7.1213540" polopoly:searchtag="tag_person">Ivan Cooper</a> who got involved in the civil rights campaign in 1968 were denounced as 'Lundys', meaning traitors
Twelve days later Devlin was smashing up kerbstones on the streets of Derry in the aftermath of the Apprentice Boys demonstration of dominance during the two days and nights of what became known as the Battle of the Bogside.
In a film about the battle, made by Vinny Cunningham and John Peto in 2004, Devlin, now Devlin-McAliskey, said that people feared the police were going to invade the area.
The fears were well founded. Earlier in 1969 the RUC had enabled the notoriously-sectarian auxiliary force known as the B Specials, backed up by local unionists and loyalists, to ambush a People’s Democracy march at Burntollet bridge a few miles from Derry.
Police had burst into the home of Samuel Devenny in Derry and beaten him so badly in front of his family that he died weeks later.
In the film Nell McCafferty describes her mother and other women, who had worked on assembly lines in shirt factories as well as cooking for their families, making petrol bombs with womanly efficiency. “When I watched them I knew the revolution had come.”
Andrew Boyd's 1969 book Holy War in Belfast details the grim history of sectarian clashes in the North. The concept of equal rights for Catholics was, he said, "repugnant to most unionists", and Northern Ireland was in effect a "semi totalitarian statelet".
Devlin had described Derry as “the capital of injustice”. When the Border was drawn up in 1921, Derry had a nationalist majority. In order to maintain unionist control nationalists were gerrymandered into overcrowded slums. The system extended to the whole of Northern Ireland. Those who owned houses had votes, those who did not had none.
Lord Brookeborough’s warning that Catholics were inherently disloyal and “out to destroy Ulster”, and his advice that employers should favour “Protestant lads and lassies”, still held sway.
‘Lundys’
Catholic men were almost three times more likely to be unemployed than Protestant men, while Catholic women were almost twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestant women.
Protestants like Ivan Cooper who got involved in the civil rights campaign in 1968 were denounced as "Lundys", meaning traitors, after the governor who wanted the original Apprentice Boys in 1689 to reach a compromise with the forces of King James and end the siege of Derry.
From the 1960s onwards a fiercely anti-Catholic young preacher called Ian Paisley would end his speeches with a roar of "no surrender!"
The Apprentice Boys and their police allies were defeated in Derry in August 1969, when the British government sent in the army, not to take on the city’s nationalists but to defend them and prop up the failing regime.
However, as Michael Farrell - one of the leaders of civil rights group People's Democracy - commented in 1988, "Belfast suffered for Derry's temporary victory" when the RUC, B Specials and loyalists attacked the Falls Road and burned out entire Catholic streets.
The DUP's position on homosexuality has not changed since Paisley campaigned to 'save Ulster from sodomy' in the 1970s
A “handful” of IRA men fought back. Five people were killed, including 9-year-old Patrick Rooney. It was a taste – a bitter and sorrowful taste – of the mayhem and terror that were to consume the North for the following quarter of a century and more.
Ballymurphy, Bloody Sunday in Derry, Bloody Friday in Belfast, the Miami massacre, the La Mon firebomb, the Kingsmill massacre, the Enniskillen bomb, the Omagh bomb, the Disappeared. Some atrocities are infamous.
However, many of the almost 4,000 people killed by loyalists, the IRA, the British army and the local security forces, as well as others who died by suicide or heart attacks after conflict murders, are remembered only by their families. There are multiple campaigns for truth and justice.
When Northern Ireland prime minister Terence O'Neill invited taoiseach Jack Lynch to Stormont in 1967, Paisley turned up and threw snowballs at the Irish visitor, shouting "no pope here".
Some 40 years later, Paisley, who had ruined O’Neill’s efforts to reform the North, as well as the careers of every unionist leader thereafter, became first minister alongside deputy first minister Martin McGuinness, who had rioted in Derry during the Battle of the Bogside and later became an IRA leader.
In 1969, Lynch said Ireland would not "stand by" and watch nationalists suffer state violence. In 2017 Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said that "no Irish government will ever again leave Northern nationalists or Northern Ireland behind".
Parade
Last week the Taoiseach made several trips to Belfast. Last Saturday tens of thousands of people marched in Pride through Belfast, among them, side by side, Varadkar and British peer Lord Hayward. The PSNI took part in the parade. People from all parts of the community were celebrating.
In a few months it will be legal for same-sex couples to get married in the North thanks to a decision last month in the Houses of Parliament that human rights already enjoyed elsewhere in the UK should be introduced there.
The DUP opposed the move. Its position on homosexuality has not changed since Paisley campaigned to "save Ulster from sodomy" in the 1970s. The party argued that these were devolved matters, but, as Labour MP Stella Creasy put it, "devolution does not mean segregation".
Creasy successfully steered through an amendment to introduce abortion rights. Lord Hayward promoted the changes in the House of Lords.
On Tuesday the Taoiseach was welcomed by local DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson for a tour of Queen Elizabeth's Northern Ireland residence, Hillsborough Castle, newly opened to the public. (Donaldson, along with the now DUP leader Arlene Foster defected from the Ulster Unionist Party to the DUP in protest because they opposed the Good Friday Agreement). Varadkar had a meeting with business and community leaders. And in the evening he took part in a boisterous but largely good-natured debate with Northern political leaders as part of Feile an Phobail.
Inevitably it was dominated by talk of Brexit – supported enthusiastically by the DUP, opposed by a majority of Northern Ireland voters in 2016, and today if all opinion polls are to be believed.
There was also discussion of the potential thereafter for a poll on the future of the Border. Varadkar opposed such a poll in the short term, arguing that in the event of a chaotic Brexit and the absence of functioning government in the North, it would be destabilising. It would also require significant preparation.
He warned against repeating the mistakes of partition which created a Catholic state and a Protestant state.
“The Good Friday agreement is a most eloquent document,” he said. “It recognises the right of people in Northern Ireland to be British, Irish or both. Bunreacht na hÉireann does not. It is an Irish document. We will have to have a new constitution, a new state.”
Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald was seated beside Varadkar. Her party wants a poll. “Brexit has demonstrated that partition is a disaster. Irish unity is the best outcome, Brexit or no....the constitutional question is on the table.”
When Ulster Unionist Doug Beattie declared himself to be "proud to be Irish, British and a European", McDonald said "we are well capable of having a conversation in a fair, decent and inclusive way".
Civil rights
The DUP's hardline East Londonderry MP Gregory Campbell denied that his party was responsible for the collapse of Stormont 2½ years ago, or for the failure of talks to reinstate it.
“We didn’t bring it down,” he said. When the audience laughed, and shouted about various DUP corruption scandals, he repeated it more loudly “we didn’t bring it down”. A third time he shouted it: “We didn’t bring it down.”
Alliance party leader Naomi Long, recently elected as an MEP, told him he was once again showing the lack of respect which had caused the assembly to die. Respect, she said, was at the core of the agreement, and enabled people to work together. Long got prolonged applause for her contributions.
This is an extraordinary moment – civil society has bypassed Stormont
Her party, founded after the civil rights movement dwindled, was remembered by Farrell in 1988 as “an amalgam of upper class do-gooders and lower-class social climbers”. It has found a new kind of radicalism under Long’s leadership.
Respect, decency and inclusiveness had not been on display last Sunday when Sinn Féin MEP and former IRA prisoner Martina Anderson addressed a rally to commemorate the IRA hunger strikes of 1981.
She said the British government needed to know its “days in Ireland are numbered”, and concluded with the old cry associated with the IRA’s “armed struggle” – “tiocfaidh ár lá!”
She repeated it louder: “Tiocfaidh ár lá!” and again shouting it: “Tiocfaidh ár lá!”
A local group representing IRA victims pointed out afterwards that she was standing on a square on which five-month-old baby Alan Jack, who was being pushed in his pram by his mother, had been killed by an IRA bomb in 1972.
Civil rights movement
In 1969 the civil rights movement wanted reforms which look modest in retrospect, although unionists saw them as a threat to the very existence of the state.
Chief among the demands were “one man, one vote” – a slogan no feminist would tolerate today – an end to religious discrimination, repeal of the draconian Special Powers Act, and disbanding of the B Specials. In fact the British had to abandon the old policy of non-interference, and the Stormont parliament was prorogued in 1972. Fair employment measures were introduced, as was the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. The franchise was extended.
Looking back at 1969, Farrell remembered the “explosion of energy, enthusiasm and vitality” of the time. He felt the same about last week’s Pride parade in Belfast.
“This is an extraordinary moment – civil society has bypassed Stormont. Membership of the EU brought in mandatory equality law and the Good Friday agreement brought effective equality. Fifty years on what we have is not perfect, but we have the means to address and undo grievances.”
Creasy, one of the architects of the changes to the North’s abortion law, said she was “blown away by the energy, skill and commitment” of the mainly young campaigners who had changed public attitudes.
The DUP wanted to retain the 1861 ban on abortion.
Journalist Lyra McKee dubbed her generation “the ceasefire babies”. She reflected in 2014 that the North had changed beyond recognition since 1998. Her friends came from every kind of social and religious background.
She had “absolutely no interest” in the constitutional question. “Slowly a common consensus is emerging, the belief that [it] should be left to die. It’s holding us back....I don’t want a united Ireland or a stronger union. I just want a better life.”
Recent research by Katy Hayward at Queen's University shows that 50 per cent of Northerners define their identity as neither nationalist nor unionist.
Suicide had preoccupied McKee, who drew on research by Prof Mike Tomlinson of Queen's University, which showed that more people had died by it since the end of the Troubles than had been killed during it.
She investigated the shadow the Troubles cast over the present, and noted that the “spoils” of the peace process never seemed to reach her generation of young working class millennials.
In April this year McKee was shot dead during a riot by young people from one of the most socially deprived areas of the North, the Creggan estate in Derry, where two out of three children are born into poverty. The riot was orchestrated by older men from the “New IRA”, who radicalise a marginalised element of the young with old rhetoric about the freedom struggle.
The same forces were at play in the New Lodge, a similarly impoverished part of Belfast, this week when a bonfire supposedly commemorating internment in 1972 became the focus of an ugly confrontation between the police and a thuggish crowd. One 18-year-old was stabbed and critically injured.
An attempt to defuse the situation by local Sinn Féin politicians saw them roundly abused by men whose message was simple “we don’t give a f**k”.
Cross-community activist
Every week the Shankill Women's Centre brings together 25 women from all over working class Belfast to talk about their ideas, their needs and their lives, facilitated by Eileen Weir, a renowned cross-community activist.
Weir joined the UDA in the early years of the Troubles, but later got involved in trade unionism which, she says, enabled her to think in terms of rights and justice rather than sectarian identity.
“Equality is still a big issue today. Women are still being left out when decisions are being made, even though by the time McGuinness and Paisley shook hands in 2007 we were already friends with each other. Without the women’s movement we wouldn’t have had the Good Friday Agreement.”
She speaks of the courage of the Women's Coalition and of Mo Mowlam, "the last decent secretary of state".
Betty Carlisle, director of the centre, says she is weary of having to struggle with funding cuts while the needs of local women increase as a result of the impact of austerity measures imposed by the government.
“I grew up in poverty, and I have no nostalgia for that. I spent my younger life trying to avoid getting shot or blown up. That’s gone – but the young today face other risks, like the drugs culture and the influence of violent pornography. We should have integrated education and housing by now, but we don’t.”
One of the North’s most astute political commentators, the Newsletter’s Sam McBride, says the collapse of Stormont has reversed progress towards any kind of normality.
“Last week Harland and Wolff shipyards, once one of the North’s biggest employers, went to the wall, and it was hardly remarked upon. Education reform has been abandoned.”
He notes that new British prime minister Boris Johnson only avoided controversy during his recent visit to Belfast because he declined to speak to the media. “Of course Northern Ireland has changed immensely since 1969. But people are still voting to stop ‘the other side’, now as then. The main determinant is still fear.”