by Ed Moloney
In the context of Derry’s violent past, the IRA’s decision even to discuss its participation in such an enterprise was extraordinarily significant. Unlike the Provisionals in Belfast, the IRA in Derry was not driven by sectarian considerations or by the need to defend its community. The Derry IRA was instead created and sustained by conflict between the city’s nationalist population and the security forces, first the RUC and then the British army. By agreeing to take part in a process that endeavored to reduce the opportunities for conflict or that softened hostility between its constituency and the British forces, the IRA was in effect offering to cut off the supply of its own lifeblood. It would be difficult to find a more convincing way of signaling a willingness to end the war.
TO GRASP the significance of the events at and after Coshquin, it is first necessary to understand the sanguinary history of Derry itself. Although it is inaccurate to do so, most Northern nationalists place and date the beginning of the Troubles to events in the city on October 5, 1968, when a small civil rights march was batoned and hosed off the streets by a force of RUC men. Their orders from the unionist home affairs minister, Bill Craig, were to stop the crowd marching from Duke Street, on the eastern banks of the Foyle, across Craigavon bridge into the historic, walled center of the city.
The reaction of the police was out of all proportion to the threat posed by the crowd of four hundred or so, but their behavior betrayed the enormous importance unionists attached to retaining their grip on this most nationalist of Northern Ireland’s cities. Built and developed as a commercial venture by the City of London companies in the northwest of Ireland in the early 1600s, the walled city was constructed as a Protestant bastion, a garrison of the Scots-English plantation of Ulster. Its fortified walls made the city a place of Protestant refuge during successive Irish native rebellions. A lengthy siege in 1689 mounted by the Catholic King James II won Londonderry, as Protestants always call the city, a special place in loyalist mythology. The fact that it resisted the siege earned it the title “the Maiden City,” and hard-line Protestants determined that Catholics would never breach its sanctity.
Catholics had lived outside the walls of Derry from the late eighteenth century in a rat-infested collection of hovels called the Bogside. The population nevertheless grew; by the mid-nineteenth century Catholics were in a numerical majority and by 1920 made up a majority of voters, although gerrymandering meant that unionists held on to control of the corporation. The introduction of proportional representation in the same year changed all that, and for the first time in Derry’s history a coalition of nationalists and republicans took control and a Catholic was made mayor. But after partition Derry became part of the Northern Ireland state, and unionists set about reasserting their control. Proportional representation was abolished, electoral boundaries were redrawn so that Catholic votes were devalued, and a property qualification was introduced for elections to local government. According to one estimate, a third of the adult population of the Bogside in 1964 was not allowed to vote in council polls.5
Characterized by discrimination and deprivation and with huge male unemployment rates, Derry symbolized nationalist complaints about life in unionist-dominated Northern Ireland. Things did not begin to improve for the city’s nationalist community until after the Second World War, when the benevolent effects of the British welfare state, especially the availability of college-level-education, filtered through the Catholic population. A more assertive and impatient generation emerged and demanded change.
Anger at the poor quality of public housing and the unionist-dominated corporation’s refusal to build new developments, part of a calculated policy to confine Catholic voters to overcrowded electoral wards, provoked the first mild street protests, led mostly by left-wing activists. The same factors were working on the Catholic psyche elsewhere in Northern Ireland, and in August 1968 the first civil rights march, from Coalisland to Dungannon in County Tyrone, was held but was barred by the RUC from reaching the center of Dungannon. A few weeks later the Derry housing agitators invited the organizers, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, to lead a similar protest in October.
Not everyone in Derry was in favor of such street demonstrations. The Catholic Church exercised the single most powerful influence on the minds of Derry nationalists. The city’s bishop at the time, Dr. Neil Farren, one of the most conservative Catholic clerics in Ireland, consistently aligned himself with the forces of law and order, while moderate Catholics expressed alarm both at the radical politics of those behind the civil rights agitation and at its potential for unrest. John Hume, for instance, was ready to lead a motor cavalcade of Derry people to Stormont to protest the unionist government’s decision to locate Northern Ireland’s second university in the Protestant town of Coleraine but declined to put his name to a document notifying the RUC of the route of the first civil rights march in Derry, something that would have meant accepting legal responsibility for the event.6 Tensions between these conservative elements and Derry’s radicals—and later militant republicans—was to be a defining feature of nationalist politics in the following years, but security force excesses repeatedly drove the moderates into the hard-line camp or neutralized them.
That process began on October 5, 1968. Dozens of marchers were hospitalized by the initial RUC charge, while scores more were forced to run a gauntlet of batons or were drenched by a water cannon operated by policemen whose commander, District Inspector Ross McGimpsie, a local version of Bull Connor, enthusiastically joined the fray. A prominent West Belfast MP, Gerry Fitt, the founder of the Republican Labour Party, was the first to get his skull cracked, while the presence there of a number of British Labour MPs ensured that the events would be impossible to ignore. As it was, a cameraman from the Irish broadcasting service, RTE, captured the police violence on film, and the scenes shocked public opinion in the Republic and in Britain. In the Bogside the events in Duke Street triggered three days of stone throwing, and poorly constructed barricades were erected to keep out the RUC. The October 5 melee was a public relations and political disaster for unionism, but it set Derry’s nationalists on a course of increasingly violent confrontation with the state and its uniformed guardians.
The situation only worsened thereafter. In January 1969 some four score radical students from the Belfast-based People’s Democracy group staged a march from Belfast to Derry in deliberate imitation of the American black civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. The seventy-three-mile route took the students through staunch loyalist areas of Counties Antrim and Derry, and they were constantly blocked and harassed by mobs, some led by associates of the fundamentalist unionist Ian Paisley amid allegations of police collusion. At Burntollet bridge, on the eastern outskirts of Derry, the march was ambushed by an organized gang of stone throwers, many of them off-duty members of the Protestant militia, the B Specials. The RUC fled, leaving the students to the mercy of the loyalist mob. The remnants of the march were again stoned by loyalists as they made their way to Guildhall Square, on the edge of the Bogside, where the arrival of bloodstained survivors sparked five days of fierce rioting. In the early hours of the first night, drunken RUC men went on the rampage in part of the Bogside, smashing windows, shouting sectarian insults, and beating up any Catholic resident unfortunate enough to cross their path. After that, the barricades, this time more effective structures, sprouted throughout the area. Someone painted a slogan on a gable end in the Bogside that read, “You are now entering Free Derry.” A myth had been born.
Derry’s moderate nationalists had condemned the Burntollet march, as it became known, and eventually talked the barricades down, but events were slipping out of their control. In April there was another outburst of violence, and this time the mostly teenage rioters used gasoline bombs as well as stones to fend off the RUC. Again the police went on a late-night rampage and badly beat a Bogside man, Samuel Devenney. He died three months later, and the conviction grew that RUC batons had hastened his death.
In Derry, skirmishes between the Apprentice Boys and Bogside Catholics on August 12 soon developed into a full-scale battle, when the RUC took the side of the loyalists as they made efforts to invade the Catholic area. This time the Bogsiders repulsed the police charges with volleys of stones thrown from behind barricades and gasoline bombs tossed from the top of a tall block of flats, while the police replied by soaking the area in clouds of acrid CS gas, disabling rioter and innocent resident alike. Roused by a communal fear of what defeat might bring, the resistance offered by the Bogsiders was determined and fierce.
After two days the Battle of the Bogside had been won by Derry’s nationalists, and an exhausted RUC was obliged to withdraw. The victorious Bogsiders celebrated as, on the afternoon of August 14, a company of the Prince of Wales Own Regiment took up positions in William Street at the mouth of the Bogside. Elsewhere in Northern Ireland the Derry riots had transformed the political situation. The Irish taoiseach, Jack Lynch, had gone on Irish television the night before to warn that the Republic could not stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse. Lynch’s speech raised unionist fears and nationalist hopes that the Irish army would invade, but arguably the real effect was to oblige the Wilson government in Britain to send in the troops. Meanwhile pleas from the besieged Bogsiders that nationalists in Belfast and other towns stage protests aimed at drawing off police resources had been answered with tragic and fatal results. A Catholic man was shot dead by B Specials in County Armagh, and five people were shot dead in Belfast as rioting engulfed interface areas of North and West Belfast.
The arrival of the British army in Derry was greeted by most Catholics as a huge political victory over the unionist government in Belfast, and although some voices warned against giving the troops a welcome, these were in the minority. What everyone did agree on, however, was that in less than twelve months the nationalists of Derry had been transformed from quiescence to militancy, thanks mostly to the actions of the RUC.
IF DERRY PROVIDED proof that nothing radicalizes people quicker than the thump of a police or army club, then it would be hard to find a better example of this than the experience of Martin McGuinness. A nineteen-year-old apprentice butcher at the time of these turbulent events, McGuinness was later to occupy virtually all the top positions in the Provisional republican movement: Derry IRA commander, Northern commander, chief of staff, chairman of the Army Council, Sinn Fein vice-president, Mid-Ulster MP, and Sinn Fein minister of education. Back in August 1969, though, he was just one of the hundreds of so-called Young Hooligans who would throw stones and gasoline bombs at the police. McGuinness’s journey to militancy was typical of so many of his contemporaries, and his story is the story of the rise and growth of the IRA in Derry.
Born just at the dawn of the welfare state, McGuinness had a background mirroring that of most families in the Bogside. His mother and father were both devout Catholics and daily communicants. Politics, he remembered in a 1989 interview, were “never discussed” in his family, although, like most Bogsiders, his parents voted for the Derry-based nationalist leader Eddie McAteer with as much devotion as they practiced their religion. Militant republicanism was just not an issue. Back in the late 1960s the number of republicans in Derry could be counted on the fingers of one hand. While Belfast had a large network of republican families, Derry republicanism was dominated by just two veteran figures, Sean Keenan and Neil Gillespie, who could trace their involvement back to the 1940s. In the McGuinness household the IRA was a distant and strange thing. “It was never a subject for discussion,” he later recalled.
We had been through what you term the Border campaign, from ’56 to ’62. I do remember vaguely discussions with my friends about what is the IRA and people were saying the IRA is this and the IRA is that. I had no real interest in it and it meant nothing to me. Our lives revolved around attending Derry City football matches, playing football ourselves, playing Gaelic football and hurling and, when we got old enough, having a good time at the weekend.7
Nor were McGuinness and his contemporaries always hostile to the RUC:
The cops were people who came to street corners to chase you away if somebody sent for them because you were playing football on the street… they were never seen as a political thing at all. There was actually a cop, I forget his name, who was fairly involved with the local football club here. The cops were strolling around the Bogside and nobody took a second look at them. The older people had a resentment towards them but it was never really discussed or talked about to us young people. I can never recall my father or my mother or any older people saying “these guys are bad news” or “they’ve done this” or “they’ve done that.”8
At the early stage of the civil rights agitation McGuinness shared the moderate views of Catholic leaders like John Hume. Reform, not revolution, was uppermost in his mind:
[I was] very pacifist, absolutely and I agreed with them at the time. I thought it was dead sound because at that time I wouldn’t have been saying let’s fight back, let’s use violence against these people because they’re using violence against us. I never felt that the situation had deteriorated so badly that that could be justified. There was always the hope that somewhere along the lines of government would catch themselves on and grant the Catholic people the demands they were asking for.9
The beating and subsequent death of Samuel Devenney began a change in McGuinness’s attitudes. “The innocuous policeman who was involved in our football club had suddenly overnight become a monster because Catholics were demanding civil rights,” he recalled. “So at that stage we regarded our community as being under attack by the RUC, that these people had turned into monsters.”10 After this he began throwing bricks and stones with the best of them.
McGuinness was neutral about the British army when the Prince of Wales Own Regiment replaced the RUC on August 14, and was ready to be influenced by the way subsequent events unfolded. “[T]here were people saying that the troops eventually would be used against the people [but] I never took sides in that debate at all. I never said this side’s right, we should welcome them. After they arrived I just went home… and took up no position at all on whether the coming of the troops was a good thing or a bad thing.”11
THE BRITISH TROOPS and the nationalists of Derry enjoyed a honeymoon period after the Battle of the Bogside, but like all honeymoons it was fated to be a short-lived affair. At the end of September, the Derry Citizens Defence Association, set up in anticipation of the August riots by the presplit Republican Club, dismantled the last remaining barricades around the Bogside, but almost immediately there were sectarian clashes that developed into running battles between Protestant youths from the Fountain area and Bogside Catholics. In the riots that followed, a middle-aged Protestant man, William King, was beaten, suffered a heart attack, and died.12 Local unionists, already deeply unsettled by the events of August, demanded that the British troops react vigorously to this incident and to the continued defiance represented by Free Derry.
The British army’s response to the death of King was governed in no small way by the background of the senior military commanders now charged wit
h policing the city. Many had recently served in colonial trouble spots, and this shaped their attitude to the Bogsiders, as the most detailed study of the city at this time noted: “Brigadier Peter Leng, for example, the commander of the British troops in Derry, had been a battalion CO in Aden from 1964 to 1966, when the British withdrew. It is hardly surprising that such officers should draw on their colonial experiences, in Aden, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus or Oman, when dealing with the situation in Derry.”13 Within days of King’s death British troops erected a “peace-ring”, which comprised checkpoints and military barriers, that cut off the Bogside and the Creggan above it from the city center, treating it like an Arab souk that had to be insulated from the rest of civilized humanity. Under pressure from unionists, the British army was beginning to isolate and identify Derry’s nationalists as the problem. That they did so without taking into consideration the objections of the city’s moderate Catholics served only to further isolate this important sector of nationalist opinion and foster the psychological climate for further confrontation.
