698. The Troubles: The Brink of Civil War (Part 2)

The Rest Is History - Goalhanger

This episode of 'The Rest Is History' explores the escalating tensions in Northern Ireland leading up to the outbreak of the Troubles, focus

Key takeaways

• The 1968 house occupation by nationalist MP Austin Currie in Caledon became a symbolic flashpoint, highlighting systemic Catholic disenfranchisement in housing and politics.
• The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) emerged from grassroots activism inspired by global movements like the American Civil Rights Movement, advocating for 'one man, one vote' and an end to gerrymandering.

Main topics

• The housing crisis and sectarian discrimination in Northern Ireland
• The rise of the civil rights movement in 1968

Notable quotes

"What kind of Ulster do you want? A happy and respected province, in good standing with the rest of the United Kingdom? Or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations..."

Conclusion

The episode underscores how deeply entrenched sectarian divisions and institutional discrimination created

Transcript preview

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Dominic and I will be telling a thrilling Victorian adventure on the Friday night to kick things off. And Speaker 5 (1:08) it's not just us. Mary Beard is coming. Stanley Tucci's coming. You really couldn't ask for a better guest list unless you were on it. If Speaker 3 (1:14) you want to join us, head to southbankcentre.co.uk for the full line-up. Buy your tickets now. See you there. See Speaker 1 (1:22) you there. Speaker 3 (1:38) Ulster stands at the crossroads. I believe you know me well enough to appreciate that I am not a man given to extravagant language. But I must say to you this evening that our conduct over the coming days and weeks will decide our future. What kind of Ulster do you want? A happy and respected province, in good standing with the rest of the United Kingdom? Or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations, regarded by the rest of Britain as a political outcast? As always in a democracy, the choice is yours. I will accept whatever your verdict may be. If it is your decision to live up to the words, Ulster is British, which is part of our creed, then my services will be at your disposal to do what I can. But if you want a separate, inward-looking, selfish, and divided Ulster, then you must seek for others to lead you along that road, for I cannot, and will not, do it. So that was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and Old Etonian, Terence O'Neill, addressing the nation on television on the night of the 9th of December 1968. And I probably didn't adequately convey in that reading the sheer sense of weariness and desperation that led him to make that speech. You Speaker 5 (3:06) were chipper. Speaker 3 (3:07) You were positively chipper. No, he's a military man. And so he knows the importance of preserving a sense of optimism. But that has a very ironic, a kind of bitterly ironic ring today, doesn't it? Because we know where Ulster is heading. And it is going to lead to a separate, inward-looking, selfish and divided Ulster, I guess, because it's going to lead to breakdown of law and order, sectarian hatred, sectarian killings, triumph of extremism, riots, shootings, bombings, hunger strikes, troops on the streets. all kinds of, well, troubles doesn't really do justice to what's going to happen. Speaker 5 (3:45) No, exactly. And actually probably not even Terence O'Neill in his darkest moments could have imagined exactly how grim elements of Northern Ireland's future would be. So that speech is the end of 1968. Last time we were talking about really 1965, 66. We were talking about the roots of the troubles, the legacy of partition, the border campaign of the IRA, the rhetoric of Ian Paisley. And then we ended with the first UVF killings in the summer, spring and summer of 1966. And today we're really going to turn to 1968 and 1969. So this is when the sectarian tension becomes real street fighting. And when Harold Wilson's government in London takes the fateful decision to send the British army onto the streets of Northern Ireland. And that's something that even a few years earlier would have been unthinkable, but for Tom, for most of our... the first 20-odd years of our lives, was a fact of life. The British Army were in Northern Ireland, and it seemed at one point that they always would be. So, where to start this story? Well, we'll start it in what might seem a very unlikely place. We'll start it in a pebbledash terraced council house in the village of Caledon in County Tyrone in June 1968. So, Caledon is just inside the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was a majority Protestant, and it's controlled in 1968 by the Unionist Party. And as we described last time, if you're controlled by the Unionist Party, if you're in a village there or town, then most of the houses, almost all of them, are given to Unionist voters, i.e. Protestants. There are more than 250 Catholic families in the area that are on the waiting list for housing. And some of those families have been waiting for as long as a decade. But this particular council house, which is 9 Kinnard Park, has just been allocated to a 19-year-old woman called Emily Beattie, who is a secretary for a local solicitor who's very big in the Unionist Party. Emily Beattie is engaged to a member of the Reservist B Specials, and she is, of course, a Protestant. And to local Catholics, the fact that she's getting this house seems absolutely outrageous. And one of the people who objects is the nationalist MP for East Tyrone, who is a young man called Austin Currie. And on the 20th of June, Currie decides he's going to occupy this house in protest. He wants the world to notice. And with two friends, he breaks into the house using a poker to get in, but they're not there for very long. The local police, the RUC, throw them out a few hours later, and one of the RUC men who throws them out is Emily Beatty's brother, who's come armed with a sledgehammer. Nobody is hurt, nobody is killed, it's not a massive story in the grand scheme of things, so why does it matter? Well, we talked last time about just how divisive, how toxic the issue of housing is in Northern Ireland in the 60s, both in itself, but also as a symbol of something bigger. The sense among the Catholic minority that they are second-class citizens, shut out of the top jobs, denied votes in local elections, even denied homes of their own. Now, it has to be said, a lot of working-class Protestants would take a different view of this, and we'll come back to them a bit later. And this has been going on for 40 years or so, but Austin Curry, the guy who occupied the house, is typical of a new generation. These are people who don't remember the original Troubles, because the Troubles... the name was used to refer to the earlier conflict. They don't remember the troubles of the 1910s and 1920s. Somebody like Austin Curry, they've got TVs, they've seen the American Civil Rights Movement, they've seen Martin Luther King marching in Selma and Montgomery, all these places, and they're impatient to see change, and they're keen to learn from the American civil rights activists. Speaker 3 (7:42) Example. This is June 1968, so a month after the events in Paris. Would that be an inspiration as well? The sense that the world can be turned upside down? Yeah, Speaker 5 (7:52) not as much, Speaker 3 (7:53) I would say. It's a civil rights movement. Speaker 5 (7:55) Yeah, it is. I mean, there was a 68 mood, which I do think matters. And there are other people who are perhaps more influenced by Paris 68, but not so much Austin Curry, I would say. Anyway, so he's an example of this. He's a history graduate from Queens, and he's become the youngest MP at Stormont. But there are others. There's a guy called Jerry Fitt. Jerry Fitt had been a stoker on a merchant navy ship. He became an Irish Labour politician. And then in 1966, he won a Westminster seat for West Belfast as a Republican Labour candidate. So Speaker 3 (8:26) Republicans are starting to win seats now. At the start of the 60s, you were saying that they didn't have any. They had zero, yes, exactly. But they're starting to get one or two. I Speaker 5 (8:35) think there were two at this point. And then there's a guy called John Hume, later very well known. John Hume came from a working class family in Derry. He got a degree in history and French, like me. He ran the campaign to have Northern Ireland's second university in the second city, Derry. And he was absolutely outraged when the authorities said, no, we're going to put it in a place called Coleraine, which is a small Protestant town, not in a Catholic city. So all three of these men, Austin Curry, Jerry Fitt and John Hume, become associated with this new movement. for Catholic civil rights. They want fair electoral boundaries and end to gerrymandering. They want the fair allocation of housing. They want the end of the B specials, these kind of armed reservists, auxiliaries helping the police. And above all, I mean, the thing they say that really resonates, particularly because of what's been going on in America, they say in local elections, we should have one man, one vote. Enough of this business of only getting a vote if you're a tenant or a homeowner. It should just be one man, one vote, universal suffrage. So when most people in Britain or America hear about this, it seems completely unobjectionable. Why would you disagree with the principle of one man, one vote? But actually, we've already met through your amazing powers of impersonation. We have met one person who would find this very objectionable indeed, the Reverend Ian Paisley. He and his supporters would say, This civil rights movement is a Trojan horse. It is an IRA front to bring down the state that we have built here in Northern Ireland and to force us, the Protestants of Ulster, into a united Ireland. Now, most people listening to this will say, well, obviously he would say that, but that's bigoted and mad and totally wrong. But actually, this is a really, really interesting question and a surprising story. So the main civil rights organisation was called the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, NICRA, and it was founded at the beginning of 1967. And most of its members were middle class Catholic activists, and they were genuinely outraged at what they saw as the legacy of sectarian discrimination. But you know, when Ian Paisley and people like him said this is just an IRA front, there was actually a grain of truth in it. Do you remember last time we said the IRA had done their border campaign and they'd kind of given up on the armed struggle and they'd focused on left-wing politics? Yeah, they'd gone off and become woke. They'd become Speaker 4 (11:05) woke, exactly. And as part of this wokery, Speaker 5 (11:07) they had set up a series of what they called wolf-tone societies. So these were basically radical Republican talking shops. Men in polo necks and very earnest-looking women would... Join a wolf tone society. It's named after a revolutionary from the 1790s. And they would talk about how to bring about Irish unity, how to smash sectarianism, ideally how to bring down imperialism and Speaker 3 (11:32) capitalism as well. And it would be presumably joined up with other freedom struggles across the world. Of course. The wretched of the earth. Speaker 5 (11:41) Yeah. How can we take inspiration? All of that kind of thing. Somebody would bring along a dogged copy of Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus. No question whatsoever. But there would be a hard-faced man in the corner who's no stranger to blowing up a post office. That kind of thing. And it was actually from the wolf-toned societies that the idea of a big civil rights campaign really took off. And when you look at the first meeting of this NICRA, Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, when you look at who was there at the first meeting, yeah, there are a load of people who like civil liberties and are members of like a Labour Party this and a Labour Party that or whatever. But there are communists. And there are IRA men, including the commander of the IRA's Belfast Brigade. I mean, this isn't just me making this up. There's a brilliant book on all this by Richard English. It's probably the definitive history of the IRA called Armed Struggle. Right, Richard English. Speaker 4 (12:31) Yeah, I know. He would say that, Speaker 5 (12:34) wouldn't he? I know, mental. He's a Northern Irish historian called Richard English who writes about the IRA. Richard Prod. So here's the thing. In some ways, it does kind of start as an IRA front, but it becomes something much bigger. I mean, you mentioned Paris. Because it does catch the mood of the mid-60s, it attracts loads of people, especially students, who are not really interested in the IRA. They're not interested in overthrowing the state. They're not Marxists. They actually are genuinely interested in housing and in fair voting and all of this kind of stuff. So in that sense... Ian Paisley and people who are talking about the Trojan horse, they're right in one way but wrong in another. Isn't that history all the time? Yeah, history is a land of contrasts. The civil rights movement might have in some ways started as an IRA front, but it has become something Speaker 4 (13:24) much bigger and much broader. Speaker 5 (13:28) And actually, the real tragedy of the civil rights movement really is its timing. Because as we said, it's modelled on the American civil rights movement. But the thing about the American civil rights movement that's easily forgotten is that it comes to fruition, it peaks at a point when people in America are extremely well off, including people in the South, which is booming. You Speaker 4 (13:48) know, it's the affluent society, Speaker 5 (13:49) massive economic growth, rising wages, people feel very optimistic about the future. It's easier to make changes against that background. than it is when things are bleak. And of course, in Northern Ireland, the civil rights movement is coming to prominence, 1967, 68, precisely the point when the traditional industries on which Northern Ireland depends are in real trouble. The jobs are drying up. The working class Protestants that probably you do need to persuade are frightened about. economic and cultural change. So it's much more difficult. If you've come back from the shipyard, you're worried your job's going to go. And you open the newspaper and you see a load of people are complaining about something. Effectively, you have to make the concession. It's much harder to do, I would say. And this is one reason why I said we'd come back to this issue about second-class citizens. It's why it's very hard for a lot of unionists to accept the second-class citizen criticism. So there's a great book. called Loyalists by Peter Taylor. Peter Taylor, BBC journalist, did three books called Provost Brits Loyalists. Basically oral histories, lots of interviews, looking at the conflict through three different lenses. And there's one on Loyalists. It's full of interviews with poor working class Protestants who are very defensive, indeed outraged when they hear about Catholics saying they are second class citizens. Our housing was the same as our Catholic next door neighbor, two up, two down with an outside toilet. It really irks me when I hear about the disadvantages that the Catholics had. Protestantism and unionism in Northern Ireland is not a monolith. There are a lot of very poor people who are part of that community. And they feel, you know, when they're told, oh, you are the first class citizens, you have the whip hand over your neighbors. They're offended by this because they don't feel that way at all. And so, of course, the tragedy in some ways, the tragic irony of the civil rights movement is that it actually inadvertently, through no fault of their own in many ways, drives people like this into the arms of Ian Paisley and away from the centre ground and away from Terence O'Neill. Speaker 3 (15:55) Because there was never any opportunity that they could have signed up with housing activists in Protestant community, do you think? Well, they didn't have housing activists in Protestant communities because they were getting housing. But they were kind of... houses with no toilets. Couldn't we get together and improve housing across Northern Ireland? There were organisations Speaker 5 (16:14) like that for you. You could join the Northern Ireland Labour Party. And the Northern Ireland Labour Party would say, we are open to all people irrespective of religion, and we're fighting for better conditions and rights and whatnot for working class people. That's what we're all about. But it's a less sexy story, isn't it? Than one that is about suffering and adventure. and fighting and dying to quote, what is it, Gusty Spence, all of that kind of thing. That's a story that seems richer and has much more traction and is more emotionally meaningful than one that's just a bit bland and sort of old working class people getting together and fighting for better toilets or something, I would say. Better washing machines. Better washing machines. Well, this is the Samba Review of History. Speaker 4 (16:57) Anyway, let's get back to Austin Curry and that house in Caledon. You Speaker 5 (17:00) know, I asked about Paris. 1968, of course, it's also the Prague Spring, the student protests in America, all of this kind of thing. And when people read about Austin Curry occupying the house, they're like, yes, this is exciting. You know, the revolution is coming to Northern Ireland. Brilliant. And a few weeks after his Caledon protest, Curry goes to a meeting of the civil rights groups and he says, let's do something bigger. Let's have a march like they have in America. Martin Luther King would do these marches through Alabama or something. Loads of publicity. Let's have a march of our own. We'll have a march to draw attention to housing discrimination in County Tyrone. And so it is that on the 24th of August, 4,000 people join him in Northern Ireland's first big civil rights. They march from the village of Coal Island to Dungannon. And it all goes well. You know, 4,000 people, they're trudging along. They're all happy, singing songs, whatever. But the people who are on the more radical side of the movement are very disappointed. They say, well, come on. The thing about Martin Luther King's marches is they got the publicity because they were attacked, because they ended in violence. If you want to grab people's attention... You actually do need a bit of violence. You need confrontation. You need to expose the sordid reality of the state. So then people will see you as martyrs and they'll see the state for what it really is, which is repressive and cruel and violent and so on. And so they say the next march should be somewhere much more high profile. namely the city of Derry, or officially London Derry. So this, as we said last time, Northern Ireland's second city, 60-40 Catholic Protestant. Economically, Derry is really struggling. One in five men are out of work. The mood is very bleak, it is very fractious. It is the worst possible Speaker 3 (18:49) place to hold a demonstration. And not just because it's poor, but because it has such a symbolic resonance for the... Protestants. Speaker 5 (18:58) Symbolic for both sides. Symbolic for the Catholics because it's a Catholic majority city run by Protestants. Symbolic for the Protestants because there was this siege in 1689 and they hold the Apprentice Boys of Derry march every year to remember it. But if their goal Speaker 3 (19:15) is to get a kind of violent reaction, then they need to annoy Protestants, don't they? Yeah, and this is the place. You know, they want the kind of equivalent of the bull-necked sheriff going in. Bull Connor. Yeah, all that kind of thing and smacking up civil rights protesters in America. If they want the same thing, then they have to kind of press Protestant neuralgia areas. Speaker 5 (19:39) Yeah, totally. Totally, and this is what they're doing. Their plan is they will start on the east side of the city across the River Foyle. They will cross the Craighaven Bridge. They'll go into the city centre. They will go through Protestant areas. They will end inside the city walls, which are, of course, sacred, really, to Protestants, where the Apprentice Boys of Derry have their parade. And they will end near the War Memorial in the centre of Derry. Again, a sacred spot for Protestants. Now, as the Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan, not everybody's cup of tea, quite nationalist history, but as he rightly says in his book, The Troubles, he says, it was as though Hamas were to parade through Jerusalem's holy places and conclude with a rally at the Wailing Wall. Well, when you put it like that, it's not quite as bad as that, but it's kind of, it's very provocative. And at Stormont, the hardline Home Affairs Minister, William Craig. who's always keen to bolster his popularity with the sort of more extreme unionists. He does the obvious thing. He bans the march, as he's empowered to do. But on the 5th of October, 1968,