Fifty years ago today in Derry the Orange State answered the very reasonable demands of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) with vicious brutality.
Here is the RTE archive footage of those events.
Many historians believe that what happened on Duke Street that day was the start of the Troubles.
To look at a political map of the Derry in 1968 was to observe the psephological outworking of an Apartheid statelet within the United Kingdom.
The imported term of “Gerrymandering” was used to describe local government in Derry and it was very apt.
However, even Governor Elbridge Thomas Gerry of Massachusetts might have blushed at the deformed salamander that had been created on the Foyle.
After generations of discrimination, the people of the Bogside finally rose up.
They had tried the peaceful route and the RUC had used violence to suppress them.
The world looked on as it all unfolded over several highly charged days.
For the decision-makers in Whitehall, this was a little local difficulty in a far-off country of which they knew little.
I was a ten year old watching the TV as the RUC battered peaceful marchers in Derry.
My maternal grandfather opined that the IRA would get involved in this business if it wasn’t settled quickly.
He was correct.
In the televisual age, the world watched and quickly noted the similarities between the Good Ol Boys of the RUC and their Scotch Irish kith and kin in the Deep South.
Rosa Parks and Bernadette Devlin were opposing the same oppression.
When the Paras gunned down peaceful marchers in the same town four years later on Bloody Sunday the message was sent loud and clear to any doubters within the nationalist community in the North.
Peaceful demonstrating could get you seriously hurt in Norn Iron if you’re a Taig.
Inevitably many in the nationalist communities of the Six Counties realised that the Orange State was irreformable and had to go.
The Good Friday Agreement signed THAT Northern Ireland into history.
Over the last two decades, the Border has blurred away almost to nothing here in Donegal.
Now the Partition line could come back.
That’s a wet dream for unionists like the DUP who opposed the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).
The “one man one vote” for the current generation of nationalists in the Six Counties is Ach na Gaeilge.
Half a century ago the demographic design of the confected six county statelet was still holding firm.
Today that has gone and the nationalist community has grown to the extent that a tipping point is only a few years away.
The demands of NICRA were essentially for Catholics in Northern Ireland to be treated like any other citizen of the United Kingdom.
It was the brutal response of the local state that created the spark for the thirty-year insurgency.
There was no need for any of it and it was tragically unnecessary.
What would follow in Derry and across the Six Counties in the decades from then until the GFA was signed was triggered by the violence of the RUC that day.
For the avoidance of doubt, 50 years ago in Derry, the IRA as an armed organisation effectively didn’t exist.
However, that would change.
The teenage stone throwers of the Bogside would become very, very good at guerrilla war.
Unlike many in the 26 counties, I saw no difference between an ambush in Crossmaglen 1981 and the one at Carrowkennedy in 1921.
For the avoidance of doubt, when ordinary people take up arms against the state it almost always is the fault of the latter.
What happened in Derry half a century ago today told the nationalists of the Six Counties that the polity they had been born into didn’t consider them to be equals.
Moreover, if they said anything about it then the functionaries of the state would batter them into silence.
You know the rest.
Lest we forget…
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On the footie front I see that Stevie G is keen to sign up 4 of the 5 loanees in his squad as soon as possible.
Kent, Ejaria, Worral and Coulibaly are all wanted to be signed on a permanent basis in the January window with the Roma loanee returning to his parent club.
With ST monies exhausted and Close Bros due £4m in February who or what is going to fund the spending spree?
No doubt Kent looks like a good prospect but how much will Liverpool value him if they decide to get rid, £4/5m?
Ejaria and the other two, lets say another £5m. Thats £9/10m in total.
It’s just not feasible given the financial situation and losses for the current year likely to exceed last year’s £7m.
It’s a classic Catch 22 situation. Tavernier might attract a fee of £4m or so but that won’t solve the problem.
Morelos is the only asset who might attract the sort of offer to fund the spending that Gerrard wants but he has attitude issues that will put lots of clubs off.
Will be interesting if Gerrard gets his way but buying the 4 loanees with the money generated by the sale of the top goalscorer may not sit well with the manager.
With Hearts and Hibs still in the mix this year’s title race is shaping up to be the closest in years.
As confirmed by Nimmo Smith having access to substantial funds brings no sporting advantage with it so being able to splash out in the January window will have no effect on the title chase.
That will be music to the ears of Hibs, Hearts and Rangers.
With the shambles that is Brexit now entering it’s final stage no one knows what the consequences will be for the citizens of the UK.
Will May and her party lead the UK into the promised land of milk and honey or will leaving the EU be an unprecedented disaster?
It’s doubtful if the UK government has a contingency plan if there is a democratic vote in Northern Ireland for reunification of the island which, given the continuing growth in the nationalist population, is only a matter of time.
Will those wishing to remain as UK citizens be shipped to the mainland or will the loyalist para militaries rise up against their former government?
The history of the Troubles peddled by the British media is, like their World War ll “we stood alone mythology”, simplistic and erroneous. The Provisional IRA were a result of the Troubles, not a cause.
The Troubles in my view really could be said to have started with the shooting dead of two young Catholic men, John Scullion and Peter Ward, by UVF leader Gusty Spence in different actions in 1966. The first bombs of a whole series of them were set off by the UVF all through the late 60s in an effort to incriminate the IRA; the first RUC man shot dead, Constable Victor Arbuckle, was shot by a loyalist sniper in October 1969. The first civilian to be beaten and to subsequently die was Samuel Devanny, beaten to death in his own home by the RUC. The first major civilian bombing carried out was by the UVF in December 1971 on McGurk’s Bar in Belfast. Fifteen people died.
All through this period, the so-called IRA, a bunch of rather pathetic Marxist ideologues spouting Pollyannaesque nonsense about changing the mindset of loyalists who despised everything about them, did little to help the beleaguered Catholic community face up to a murderous coalition of the RUC, the B Specials and the UVF. In many cases, these groups were indistinguishable from each other.
The first action of the Provisional IRA, which had split from the Marxist rump, was in defence of St Matthew’s church in the Short Strand in August 1971, almost three years after the event you describe in your column and only after it became apparent that the British state was not prepared to offer justice to people it had the cheek to claim were British citizens, a claim which sounds as hollow today coming from the mouths of Tory Brexiteers.
Having said that, nothing but nothing excuses the PIRA’s bombing of civilian targets, the La Mon hotel, Birmingham and Warrington bombings in particular.
Wonderful piece Phil.
I don’t think the fools like Boris and Jacob have learned the lessons of “the troubles”.
To go on record as saying that the legal border between U.K. the province known as N.Ire and the 26 counties which form the sovereign nation of Rep of Ire, to suggest that this is its like a border between London boroughs is appalling.
In essence, it should be just that. But the fact is, it is not. Countless lives, have been lost over the issue. The mere flossing over it gives an insight into the thinking of the old British mindset, that painfully has not gone away.
I think many of the people on this island that I live on, that is comprising of eng/sco/wal, Britain, may well need to learn the hard way of the consequences of a cock up with the border issue post Brexit.
If any of the inhabiatants of the fictional asylum that presently forms the House of Commons wishes to care a jot then we all know that many on the Tory benches and indeed some on the opposition benches don’t give a damn about Irish Catholic’s killed in the violence, how can they when collectively, they have failed to notice the high profile casualty in Warrington. Parents of Tim parry. I am sure will not want a hard border, to do so is to tarnish their work in raising profiles of all victims.
The actions of the British state, through its parliamentary democracy, a state rightly or wrongly that I wish to be a part of, here in Scotland, those actions clearly show it has no right to rule in the 6counties.
I do not believe either that it’s simply a matter of reunification of Ireland. As much as that’s the most practical solution, there are many things to resolve, not about the unionists in the north. But the whole taking on the apparatus of the north. The loss making province that it undoubtedly is, incorporating this into Ireland.
The debt, the apathy of Voters in the south to the north. (Watch an apalling video online of a young Irish voter from somewhere in the 26 counties, tell Martin McGuinness that he isn’t Irish. Dear oh dear). Many issues to resolve. But a United ireland, I am sure will offer fair term to the scum that we know by its noise. In the north. Fair play to those who wish to take them, it shows how much people who want a United ireland like Sinn Fein care, when they say that Orangeism tradition must be respected pricudngtits carried out in a respectful manner.
Fair play there as to me Orangeism is a stain on society.
50 years of resistance that’s a fact some great facts there Phil The Men and women that gave there life to the republican movement one has to wonder is the shinners taking the people in the right direction I am in Ireland on a regular basis people in west Belfast are still on the breadline and others live like kings (equality) ? Ps black47 is a must
Never forget Dungannon laid down the template three weeks before.
Tír Eoghain Abú
Am I the only nationalist looking foward to the British Brexit party in 2022? The same year the British National Census results will confirm what some of us already know. Unionists are actually in the minority in Northern Ireland…… the emperers clothes are indeed tri-coloured, but unfortunately them those colours are not red, white and blue!!!
Am Scottish and voting for it the empire will crumble while Britannia rules the waves no brainer🏴🇮🇪🇵🇸