Derry, Saturday the 5th of October 1968

A transforming moment in Irish history, 40 years on

10.10.2008

Sunday, 5 October, 2008

• Civil rights movement 1968-69 - 05 October 1968 (4) (direct link)

• The day the RUC broke heads in the world’s living-rooms (1)

Saturday, 4 October, 2008

• The spark that lit the Troubles is still smouldering in the embers (2)
• Marching through Derry to the sound of 'We Shall Overcome' (3)

Thursday, 2 October, 2008

• A transforming moment in Irish history, 40 years on (3)

(1) Sunday Business Post,  (2) Irish Examiner, (3) Irish Times, (4) RTÉ

Sunday, 5 October, 2008

The day the RUC broke heads in the world’s living-rooms

By Tom McGurk, Sunday Business Post

The filming of RUC violence towards civil rights marchers 40 years ago today could have had a radically different outcome.

Does history turn more than we imagine on who was in the right place at the right time or in the wrong place at the wrong time? No doubt there are deep underground streams of historical cause and effect, but where and when these waters ebb or break can often be determined by the most mundane of circumstances.

Forty years ago to the day, on October 5, 1968, a small civil rights protest march of about 400 people in Derry was first ambushed and then bashed up by an RUC riot squad. It was a totally unexpected event which, for most people across Ireland, seemed to have dropped out of the blue of history. Few knew about the planned march, media coverage was tiny and even the vast majority of Derry’s citizens had chosen to ignore it.

I suspect, too, that, as the RUC climbed into their tenders afterwards, they must have felt secure in the knowledge that what had occurred was not much more than another day of imposing the North’s unique style of law and order. In retrospect, their response was the beginning of Unionism’s great mistake: to doggedly misinterpret the political crisis at the heart of Northern society as merely a crisis of law and order.

As insignificant an event as the march seemed then, 40 years on it is incredible to think that nothing was ever to be the same again in modern Irish history.

Events in Derry’s Duke Street that afternoon - for all their storm-in-a-teacup dimensions - were to be magnified out of all proportion by the arrival of a new witness to Irish history: the television news camera.

There were some right men in the right place at the right time that day. One of them was RTE’s newly-appointed head of news, the late Jim McGuinness - who, as it happened, was born and bred in Derry and who had instructed that the event be covered.

The other right man in the right place was the RTE cameraman, the late Gay O’Brien, and sound man Eamon Hayes, whose film sequence of the police beatings has become a classic in television news archives.

Shooting with an Auricon 16mm film camera, O’Brien and Hayes were not only brave enough to remain filming throughout the police baton-charge, but the old news hounds - anticipating what might happen afterwards - were shrewd enough to conceal the magazine containing their 12-minute film with the car’s spare wheel before setting out immediately for Dublin.

Luck would have it, too, that RTE news was also in the right place, having just joined the new European Broadcasting Union news-film pooling system. Within 24 hours, RTE’s black and white battle of Duke Street was playing to astonished audiences across the globe, from London to Los Angeles.

It took all sides some time to realise the implications of that global eye observing everything. The historic Irish question suddenly had a new context and setting on television.

It was 1968, a violent and tumultuous year, and, to everyone’s amazement, an incident in Derry had followed the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the May Paris uprising and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia onto the world’s television screens.

Was Terence O’Neill the right or the wrong man in the right or the wrong place? If civil rights had been quickly established, would we have avoided what followed? The tragedy was that, as a political entity, unionism was probably incapable of delivering civil rights.

In the first instance, it was hardly an organised political party at all, more a collection of ferocious local fiefdoms dominated by the Orange Order. Its instinctive reaction was to regard any minority demand as potentially subversive. Given Unionism’s determining sectarian subtext and the rise of Ian Paisley - then in his early Frankenstein years - how many Worshipful Grand Masters could be got through the eye of the proverbial needle?

The political battle for civil rights became a political battle within unionism itself, as O’Neill’s enemies closed in on him. The long march to the right that was to end in the triumph of the DUP a generation later was beginning.

The other problem was that unionism for 50 years had traditionally regarded its discriminatory treatment of the nationalist minority as an essential device for maintaining the one-party state; it was even seen as patriotic.

Job discrimination made nationalists emigrate and therefore maintained the sectarian numbers game, while housing discrimination maintained local electoral hegemony.

Over and beyond all that, there was the seminal lesson of the state itself, the ultimate calculated act of electoral discrimination that drew a state around the largest number of Protestants it could find.

South of the border, the events of 40 years ago in Derry were also to send out tremors that would eventually consume the dominant ruling party, Fianna Fáil, in a crisis of redefinition.

Two years previously, Eamon de Valera had gathered the old comrades around him to celebrate the 50th anniversary of 1916 with great self-congratulation and more than an air of revolutionary finality. All political eyes were turned inward, rather than northwards.

For Northern nationalists, the signals were unmistakable - partition was continuing into another generation and it was as essential to the maintenance of the southern political establishment as it was to the Northern one.

The stratagem of demanding full British citizenship rights under the civil rights banner within the North was all that was left, and there were few left who had hopes of either constitutional or armed struggle changing the political status quo.

But even 40 years on, the sense of what might have been still lingers. Who knows who were the right or the wrong people in place, but it is hard not to believe that a unique political window had opened briefly.

Since partition, the minority had smouldered in the North and a different response to the civil rights moment could well have doused that fire. Instead, the spontaneous combustion that followed was to kill and injure thousands.

Copyright © Sunday Business Post 2008

Saturday, 4 October, 2008

The spark that lit the Troubles is still smouldering in the embers

By Irish Examiner

By Ryle Dwyer AN Irish Press reporter was watching a police water cannon vehicle moving into position. He had never seen one in action before.

A heavy woman was looking into a shop window. Suddenly her legs were taken from under her by a blast of the water cannon. She was left sitting on the pavement with her hands up in the air asking, “what happened?”

Forty years on we might all ask the same question: what happened? Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the civil rights march in Derry on October 5, 1968. It turned into a police riot and, in the words of John Hume, this was “the spark that lit the bonfire”.

There had been trouble simmering in Northern Ireland for the previous couple of years. Some blamed it on the 1966 celebrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising.

The first victim of the Northern Troubles was Martha Gould, a Protestant woman who died in a fire after a petrol bomb — thrown by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) at the Catholic-owned pub next door — hit her home by mistake on May 7, 1966.

The following month the UVF set out to murder a local republican but they could not find him so, instead, they murdered Peter Ward, a Catholic barman on his way home after work. Three people were convicted of Ward’s murder.

“I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man (Ian) Paisley or decided to follow him,” Hugh McClean told police when charged. “I am definitely ashamed of myself.” (McClean died in jail, but his colleague Gusty Spence emerged, after serving 20 years, to take a leading part in organising the loyalist ceasefire.)

“There is no time for delay in facing up to the problem which exists in Northern Ireland,” Gerry Fitt told a London conference on February 25, 1967. Catholics were being treated like second-class citizens, so he warned reform was needed urgently.

“The day for talking has gone,” Fitt told a gathering in Derry in July 1968. “The day for action has arrived. If every individual here today goes home and rededicates himself to change the system as it operates in Derry, then we will change the system as it operates in the Six Counties and in the whole island of Ireland. If constitutional methods do not bring social justice, if they do not bring democracy to Northern Ireland, then I am quite prepared to go outside constitutional methods.”

In August 1968, Austin Currie, a young nationalist member of the Stormont parliament, protested against the allocation of houses in a new council development in Caledon, Co Tyrone. All 14 houses were allocated to Protestants.

One of those was given to Emily Beattie, a 19-year-old unmarried sister of an RUC constable. The message was clear there was no room for Catholics.

Currie and others occupied the house allocated to Beattie, but they were removed. This gave rise to the formation of the Civil Rights Association (CRA). A protest march was organised from Coalisland to Dungannon and some 2,500 people turned up. But the march could not be completed because Ian Paisley organised a counter-demonstration in Dungannon and the rival groups had to be kept apart.

Paisley contended that the CRA was just a front for the IRA, but at that point the IRA was no more relevant that the Animal Rights Association. Organising counter demonstrations became a loyalist tactic to stifle the CRA. When a civil rights march was called for Derry on October 5, a rival demonstration was similarly organised so that both would be banned.

The CRA insisted on going ahead with the march. About 400 people showed up, many simply because the march was banned. Marchers included Eddie McAteer, John Hume, Ivan Cooper, Gerry Fitt, Bernadette Devin, Eamonn McCann, Paddy Devlin, Austin Currie and Michael Farrell. On Duke Street they were blocked by a police line.

Comparatively few would have seen what happened next but for RTÉ cameraman Gay O’Brien who filmed the scene as Paddy Douglas pleaded with police to allow the march to proceed. At that point a policeman struck him in the groin with his baton. The resulting cry of anguish was heard around the world.

The police then rioted. Viewers were appalled at the sight of the Insp Ross McGimpsey hitting an unsuspecting man on the back of the head with his baton and frantically flaying just about anyone he could hit.

Gerry Fit was filmed with blood streaming down the side of his face. “I knew that they were going to beat me up,” he later told a reporter. “I wasn’t going to retaliate. I wasn’t going to throw stones. I got pins-and-needles and I felt the blood running down. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to let that blood run because the cameras are there’.”

The report of the Cameron Commission, set up to investigate was happened, was critical of the police and Fitt’s behaviour, but he was unapologetic. “I make no apology for my action on that day,” he stated on September 12, 1969, following the publication of the report. “I am glad I have lived to see the day when the oppressed people of Northern Ireland finally got off their knees to throw off the yoke of unionist oppression.”

Next day Fitt met with Capt James Kelly, an Irish intelligence officer who was in Belfast to assess the situation for Irish military intelligence. John Kelly, a Belfast republican, and his brother, Billy, also attended the meeting, which took place in Fitt’s home. Fitt told Capt Kelly the nationalist community needed arms to defend themselves.

“Fitt made clear the urgency of the situation and that it was of paramount importance to get in arms immediately,” Capt Kelly reported next day. “I suggested there might now be a short period of calm in which to organise.”

Fitt replied: “No, you have it all wrong. It could happen anytime. It could happen this minute.” Then Fitt’s wife, Anne, shouted as she burst into the room: “It’s on, Gerry. It’s on.”

IN THE following weeks and months Capt Kelly undertook to purchase arms on the continent and transport them back to Ireland, with the help of Finance Minister Charles Haughey. While those plans were being hatched, Fitt went to Derry on January 5, 1970.

“At the corner of Victoria Street, he was saying ‘it’s time to get the guns out’,” Eamonn McCann noted in his book, War and an Irish Town. Fortunately on that occasion, McCann added, “calmer counsels prevailed.”

Terence O’Neill, the Stormont prime minister, tried to stop the drift towards the Troubles by calling a general election in February 1969. Paisley ran against him.

O’Neill won 47% of the vote, while Paisley got 38.6% and Michael Farrell of People’s Democracy, 14%. Yet the media somehow depicted O’Neill as the loser. Paisley, behaving as a bigoted demagogue, was credited with a moral victory.

This judgment was crazy. The pundits had underestimated Paisley’s appeal, and then they explained their poor judgment by exaggerating his performance.

With the current impasse in the North, the events of October 1968 should be a grim reminder of the dangers of political posturing in a volatile situation.

Copyright © Examiner Publications (Cork) 2008

Saturday, 4 October, 2008

Marching through Derry to the sound of 'We Shall Overcome'

By Martin Cowley, The Irish Times

It's 40 years since police broke up the Civil Rights protest in Derry. Martin Cowley recalls his part in an event that flashed around the world

BLACK AND white news film of Derry in the 1960s coats the city in a sickly pallor.

But it was exhilarating time for a teenager gripped by twin bugs of politics and news.

Political tension on the doorstep, turmoil in international capitals, East-West confrontation, impending epochal change worldwide. That was 1968.

Anybody worth their salt was radical then. Derry Labour Party chanted "Tories Out North and South" and demanded nationalisation of banks.

The Establishment gave them the brush-off with a sniffy smile. No one's laughing now, comrade.

October 5th, 1968 heralded the bloody baptism of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, which took its inspiration from the struggles of black America. The movement's guiding principle was non-violence and its leaders stuck to it.

Many other forces and influences quickly bore down on the sorry state of Northern Ireland, however, and that peaceful and dignified demand for equality was overtaken by a nightmare of strife that lasted 35 years.

When I heard last week that Claude Wilton had died, I rummaged among the detritus of a reporter's past - such as dog-eared notebooks, Stormont press gallery tickets, a rubber bullet and Christmas cards from 10 Downing Street.

I unearthed a 1966 diary that confirmed a vivid recollection of Claude in those early days of street politics. Claude was a good soul.

Highly principled and respected by all, he was a solicitor of Protestant stock.

He instinctively practised civil rights long before the term was coined, and long before legal aid. He loved Derry well and helped all who sought his aid, especially the men and women of no property.

The diary also confirmed - though unrecognised then - what could even have been a minor scoop for a budding reporter; a report of what must have been one the North's first public airings of the Civil Rights anthem, We Shall Overcome .

The year 1968 was marked by international turmoil. Student riots in Paris, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Soviet Union's humiliation of Dubcek and its crushing of the Prague Spring, and much more.

On October 5th the world saw the ugly face of Northern Ireland, and Britain had to open its eyes to excesses on its western reaches. The course of this island's history, and British-Irish relations, was changed forever.

"Gentlemen, please," pleaded a protester facing a phalanx of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers as they blocked civil rights marchers who were calling for wholesale reform of voting and housing allocation procedures, and an end job discrimination.

Batons flailed as the police broke up the demonstration after some early scuffling. The police had the marchers hemmed in on both sides. Protesters tried to dodge blows to the body and head deliberately aimed or doled out gratuitously to anyone within reach.

News cameraman Gay O'Brien of RTÉ shot the famous footage that flashed around the world.

I happened to be in his line of sight, and was filmed being sent sprawling by a burly policeman wielding a blackthorn stick after I had taken other baton blows to the head.

I had deliberately walked on the pavement and was among the crowd on the footpath as the police charged.

I was a young reporter with the Derry Journal and had not been assigned to cover the march, but I certainly wasn't going to miss it.

The marchers' grievances were shared by Catholic nationalists and liberal Protestants: demands for an end to a system that gave business-owners extra votes in council elections and demands for houses for hundreds of families crowded into crumbling, unsanitary flats.

Some time before October 5th, my editor sent me to speak to an old woman who lived alone in a tiny run-down house that had an outside lavatory with cracked bowl.

A Protestant, she lived in a unionist enclave. Her plight was sad. Working-class Protestants also endured rotten housing, too silently, perhaps, for the greater cause of unionist unity.

Unionist Party apparatchiks had ward boundaries sewn up so that they controlled the corporation, despite the nationalist voting majority.

The ruling forces turned their backs on the homeless and helped to perpetuate job discrimination.

Derry was out on a limb. Vital shipping and rail links had been axed.

A second city was earmarked - "Craigavon".

The galvanising factor that uniquely united Derry's citizens was a decision to locate the North's second university in Coleraine.

This host of issues drove Claude Wilton into politics, in two unsuccessful attempts to win seats from incumbent unionists.

My friends and I joined the campaigning for him and in 1966 I took note of the craic in the small green diary.

It was then that I heard the civil rights anthem sung on the streets of Derry for the first time.

May 14th, 1966: Went down with Seamus Coyle to Claude Wilton's HQ. Delivered election addresses for two hours. I delivered to Sir Basil and Lady McFarland (local unionist grandees).

May 18th: Went to Claude's final rally with (my cousin) John Healy. Johnny Hume and Ivan Cooper spoke. While John Hume was speaking . . . (unionist) supporters and bands passed by. Claude, etc, sang We Shall Overcome.

May 19th: Was out knocking up people all day. McLaughlin's (more cousins) was . . . area HQ.

The next page reads: "Claude was beaten by 443 votes. After result, all supporters sang We Shall Overcome walking down the Strand Road." Stirring times.

• Martin Cowley was a reporter on The Irish Times from 1971 until 1989. He was the newspaper's London editor in 1978-81. Later he joined Reuters as Ireland correspondent

Copyright © The Irish Times 2008

Thursday, 2 October, 2008

A transforming moment in Irish history, 40 years on

Analysis: Events in the North will mark the anniversary of the iconic civil rights march in Derry in 1968

By Gerry Moriarty, The Irish Times

STALWARTS OF the Northern Ireland civil rights movement - older, greyer, perhaps even wiser - are currently reminiscing about October 5th, 1968, a Saturday 40 years ago that turned out to be a transforming moment in modern Irish history. Some believe it was the day the Troubles officially began.

It was a heady, exciting time for sure in many corners of the world, what with the Vietnam War protests, the US presidential election, Martin Luther King and the American civil rights marches, the rioting in Paris, and let us mention too the music: Dylan, Hendrix, the Beatles, Cream.

Even the dreary steeples couldn't escape the hope and exhilaration of the period. As Barack Obama might say, it was a time for change. In Northern Ireland in 1968 the change was real and dynamic.

The memories this weekend will be of Duke Street in Derry when the RUC turned on the marchers, a place that is rather like the GPO on Easter Week 1916: if all the people who said or thought they were there were there you would cram Croke Park, or the Brandywell in Derry, several times over.

The agitators are 40 years older now. Some are dead.

You'll be familiar with the names who were there or thereabouts on October 5th, 1968, or on other key dates around that frenetic time: John Hume, Austin Currie, Ivan Cooper, Bernadette Devlin, Eamonn McCann, Nell McCafferty, Michael Farrell, Paul Arthur, Paul Bew.

Some are taking part in events marking the anniversary this weekend, the biggest of which is a three-day commemoration in the Guild Hall in Derry, which President Mary McAleese will address.

A conference, Civil Rights - Then and Now , is taking place in Queen's University, Belfast, tomorrow. The Workers' Party will also reflect on October 5th, 1968, at their Northern regional conference in Belfast on Saturday. Other events are also taking place recalling the day.

Glasses will be lifted to former Irish Times journalist Mary Holland, who reported from Derry on the day for the Observer , and to the RTÉ cameraman Gay O'Brien, whose footage of the RUC batoning marchers was flashed across the world, and to former West Belfast MP Gerry Fitt, the image of him with blood streaming down his face after he was truncheoned being part of the iconic impressions of October 5th. All dead now.

The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was formed in early 1967 to protest against discrimination of Catholics and to campaign for five key demands: "one man, one vote"; an end to gerrymandering of council boundaries; an end to housing discrimination; an end to discrimination by public authorities; and the abolition of the B Specials police reserve.

The following year nationalist MP Austin Currie, later an SDLP minister and later still a Fine Gael minister, staged a sit-in in Caledon, protesting that Catholics were being discriminated against in the allocation of housing.

That August he was the central figure behind a march from Coalisland to Dungannon. Some 4,000 participated but it did not gain significant coverage. The world was more concerned with the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia a few days earlier.

October 5th in Derry attracted some 300-400 marchers. Currie remembered the day as being like "The Charge of the Light Brigade: policemen to the front of us, policemen to the back of us, no way out".

Historian Paul Arthur, then a 23-year-old just back from an Israeli kibbutz, had a similar memory of being hemmed in on both sides by the police. "There was a huge innocence about the day," he said, recalling the prevailing youthful fervour of 1968. "Beforehand no one had any sense that the police would attack us," he added.

Arthur said similar incidents had happened previously "on a much more minor scale" with the RUC wading in with batons when, say, Irish Tricolours were displayed at St Patrick's Day parades. "But the huge difference was that Gay O'Brien captured what happened. His presence was what made the 5th of October."

The reports by Mary Holland also had a significant impact. Previously the British government, to its great relief, left what happened in Northern Ireland to the unionist Stormont administration, as was the Pontius Pilate political protocol of the day, but not any more.

At the debates this weekend in Derry and Belfast the likes of Farrell, Currie, Arthur and fellow historian Lord (Paul) Bew will discuss that past. One can expect that the predominant opinion will be celebrating the civil rights movement but there will be other views. Gregory Campbell will be there.

Paul Bew had just begun college in Cambridge in October 1968, having been involved in the socialist movement in Northern Ireland with the likes of Farrell and McCann. At the Belfast event he may also offer a cautious divergent take on the period.

He missed the Derry march but was marching at Burntollet when it was attacked by loyalists in January 1969, precipitating a period of rioting and disturbances across Northern Ireland that culminated in the Battle of the Bogside in August 1969 and the arrival of British troops on the streets of Derry to try to restore civil order.

Subsequently, there was the IRA split and the formation of the Provisional IRA, and all the toxic history and 3,700 deaths that came afterwards.

Bew wonders was an opportunity lost between October 5th and Burntollet. If Burntollet could have been avoided, could unionist prime minister Terence O'Neill have succeeded with his moderate and modest programme of reform when he appeared willing to take on his hardliners?

Bew, with a raft of caveats, may enter his "what if" into the debating mix this weekend and no doubt will be politely but robustly challenged by the likes of Currie and Arthur, who argue that O'Neill was just too weak to implement reform.

Currie said O'Neill was regularly warned of the inevitability of the floodgates opening if Catholics were not accorded civil rights, but that he just didn't have the political strength to prevent the damburst.

He feels too that more precipitate action by the British government could have prevented a hopeful enterprise being overtaken by a violent sectarian conflict, which was the antithesis of what civil rights was about. There will be plenty to talk about.

• Gerry Moriarty is Northern Editor of The Irish Times

Copyright © The Irish Times 2008