There are some days that not only leave a deep and dark imprint in the memories of a community or a nation or millions of people across the globe.
The oft-quoted and now clichéd example is how people a wee bit older than myself remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
In my lifetime, the events that seem to turn the world upside down seemed to happen within a few short months between November 1989 and March 1990. In that short space of time, the monolithic symbol of Stalinist tyranny in the east, the Berlin Wall was pulled apart brick by brick by a mass movement and Nelson Mandela began his long walk to freedom and signalled the end of the seemingly impregnable apartheid system in South Africa. Closer to home, the last day of March in 1990, as the so-called community charge bills hit our doormats, Thatcher and her poll-tax were effectively finished off by riots in Trafalgar Square.
Such momentous days are not always so glorious and full of hope and joy. Some momentous days not only leave scars but seem to set history on a path that is dominated by bitterness and bloodshed.
For the 1.5 million inhabitants of Northern Ireland, Sunday 30 January 1972, forever after Bloody Sunday, was one such day.
Of course there were many other days. There is a whole history of struggles that marked turning points in the making of and sustenance of that sectarian state.
Michael Collins, the leading Irish revolutionary, who prophetically stated that he had signed his own death-warrant when he signed the treaty with Britain that gained independence for twenty-six counties of Ireland, but left the Catholics of the remaining six counties at the mercy of an in-built Protestant majority and no doubts to their fate when the Prime Minister of the new Northern state, Lord Craigavon, promised a “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people”.
For more than four decades, it seemed for Catholics that everyday would be the same. The one-party state condemned them to second-class citizenship. Being born a Catholic meant that you couldn’t get a home, you get a job; even in Derry, which had a majority of Catholics (called Londonderry by the Loyalists that engineered electoral boundaries (gerrymandering) to ensure they controlled the council), no Catholic worked for their local council, would not even be able to get a job cleaning the toilets.
Eamonn McCann, the socialist and writer who was at the heart of the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, described the attitude of the Nationalist politicians and leading figures that represented Catholics at the time:
“People in my area said ‘There is nothing to be done about this. As things are, so they ever shall be’ The Nationalist establishment said that things would only become different when we had a united Ireland”
The young generation of Catholics growing up in the 1960s were not having any of it. Rather look to the history of Irish struggle, their horizons were further, to Czechoslovakia, to Vietnam, to France but nore significantly the Civil Rights movement of black people in the United States.
The powers of the state in the six counties were the envy of dictatorships around the world, in 1963 when South African Justice Minister Vorster was introducing new apartheid laws he remarked that he “ would be willing to exchange all the legislation of this sort for one clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act”.
Powers to; intern without trial for an unlimited period, to order that no inquest be held into deaths at the hands of the state, and later the notorious Diplock courts, where juries were made redundant and defendants were tried by a single judge.
As Civil Rights campaigners took to the streets and marched these powers were used by the Northern state against them. Not just the Northern state, but Protestants that felt their interests were under threat and better served by being loyal to the union with Britain, took up cudgels against them. They weren’t of course, as someone had characterised the relationship between Protestants and Catholics, it was “tuppence-ha’penny looking down on tuppence”. Being born a Protestant meant that you were privileged compared to Catholics. Compared to workers on mainland Britain, less eager to show their allegiance to the Crown, they were worse off.
It was as the great anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Douglass once said about the fact that poor Southern whites happened to be the most resistant to emancipation of black slaves, “They divide both to conquer each”
The campaign for jobs and homes and equality with Protestants was met with ferocity by the Loyalists. Those defending the status quo were well organised and armed. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was not open to many Catholics, and the notorious reserve force, the Ulster Special Constabulary (better known as the B-Specials) were brutal in their assaults on protestors.
In West Belfast, Catholics were burned out of their homes as Loyalist gangs went on the rampage. The IRA had long given up the fight and local graffiti told the tale, “IRA = I Ran Away”.
In Derry, the local Nationalist community in the Bogside held the line under siege from local Loyalists, the B-Specials and the RUC for 3 nights and 2 days. In 1969, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson sent the troops in to “restore order”. The intervention meant the end of the siege and was initially welcomed by the Bogsiders, famously Derry women were pictured making tea for the soldiers.
But this was not to be just a temporary restoration of order. The last British troops left Northern Ireland in 2007, the longest continuous deployment in British military history.
The British Army were there to maintain the Northern state. In July 1970, the Army imposed an illegal curfew on the Catholic Falls Road in West Belfast.
The British forces were acting like any other occupying army and in response more young Catholics turned to the IRA.
It was not until 1971 that a British soldier was killed by the IRA.
Further fuelling the hatred of British occupation was the internment of 346 men, raided in a dawn swoop on Catholic areas in August 1971. Very few were IRA members, none were Loyalists and in the subsequent rioting, nine civilians were shot.
Twelve internees were guinea pigs for the army’s “sensory deprivation techniques”.
The British and Loyalist establishment wanted to crush the “no-go” areas of the Bogside and the Creggan and were prepared to do so by whatever means.
On 7 January 1972 General Robert Ford declared in a memo to the commander of the British Army in Northern Ireland, General Harry Tuzo, “I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued.”
A few weeks later, Ford had his opportunity as thousands joined the Civil Rights march through Derry against internment.
Lord Saville’s report published on Tuesday, 38 years after the event, vindicates the accounts of many of the demonstrators that day and contradicts Lord Widgery’s report that was published 11 weeks after the shootings.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/15/bloody-sunday-inquiry-key-findings
That the 14 people that were killed as a result of the actions of British Paras on that day, were innocent, did not have nail bombs on them, nor did the Paras come under fire before they started shooting.
That judgement brought great joy to the masses gathered outside Guildhall in Derry on Tuesday.
As well it might. For the state murder that happened that day, and Widgery’s whitewash less than three months later, set Northern Ireland on a cycle of violence that lasted the best part of three decades and claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people. There were never so many new recruits and there were never so many people from the Nationalist areas that joined the IRA in that period. Bloody Sunday and Widgery’s Whitewash proved that the British state would murder civilians and lie to protect the sectarian state. Taking up the armed struggle seemed to be a rational strategy, there seemed to be no other alternative.
The problem was that it produced a long and bloody stalemate. The British and local states with all their might could not defeat a force that defended and was supported in most part by the Catholic population. Equally, a few hundred volunteers could not inflict a military defeat against the resources at the hands of the British state.
Peace was achieved after a recognition of these realities, mainly from those working-class communities, both Protestant and Catholic that suffered the most at the hands of this war.
But the process has the acceptance of a sectarian divide at its heart. This is at the behest of the political establishment, British, Loyalist and Nationalist. But as has been the pattern since the state was formed in 1921, neither Catholic workers nor Protestant workers will benefit.
Trouble At T' Satanic Mill 