In The Spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Someone I used to know, who I emailed partly because I thought she'd like the blog, teaches a course on Non-Violence in Social Movements, and told me that her co-teacher is about to do a presentation on N. Ireland. It made me realize that I have said almost nothing about the non-violent side of the N. Ireland conflict- the civil rights movement, the second peak of relatively/completely non-violent mass struggle around 1980, the most significant effort at opposing violence (the Peace People), and other issues about the North that involve non-violent struggle.

Although I am an IRA supporter, I generally am VERY supportive of non-violent efforts. This post will give some history about non-violence in N. Ireland.

I'm going to start this history with the civil rights movement around 1970, since earlier non-violent efforts by the minority didn't have much of a mass character to them (at most, form 1945-1951 there was activity that might have been about 1/2 comparable to the civil rights movement), and I'm not going to give a 90 year history of the subject- once again, I recommend Michael Farrell's "Northern Ireland: The Orange State." I also might not go into tons of detail, so I recommend the web-site Conflict Archive on the InTernet (very academic and neutral) and also this (not quite as neutral and academic as CAIN, but based on roughly four of the top 5-10 best books on the subject).

The Civil Rights Movement started in the mid- and late 1960s, depending on who you ask. The first civil rights march was on Aug. 24 of 1968 from Coalisland to Dungannon. Loyalists planned a counter demonstration which convinced the government to ban the civil rights rally, but it went ahead anyway, with a minor confrontation with the security forces and loyalists. At this time, and for a small number of years before, there had been a lot of work on the issue of discrimination in public housing. Not only was it causing great homelessness (usually not as we usually think of it, but a bunch of often large families living in one small house), voting in local elections was based on property, and although a significant minority of Protestants were also affected, it overwhelmingly affected Catholics because of discrimination in employment which affected their ability to buy a home and discrimination in the allocation of public sector housing. Activists in Derry, including Eamonn McCann, who had been working on that decided to organize a civil rights march for Oct. 5th. A loyalist organization announced that they would march the same route at the same time and the government banned the civil rights march. The civil rights march was attacked by the police with brutality that shocked the world when television footage exposed it. In response, at Queens University in Belfast, a lot of students, overwhelmingly left-wing to one degree or another, considered it their Vietnam (they were, to one degree or another already anti-Vietnam War, but this was closer to home). They formed People's Democracy, which was a mostly (but not exclusively) Marxist, militant and student group (although it lasted about 15 years and quickly developed beyond a student group). The main figures were Bernadette Devlin, Michael Farrell, and Eamonn McCann. PD organized marches and sit-downs in Belfast. When the government announced a series of reforms in Nov. which only addressed roughly 1/4 of the reformist demands of the broad Civil Rights Movement (there were three other things included which were not really addressing their demands). In response, the mainstream leadership of the CRM called a truce, but PD said they would march from Belfast to Derry starting Jan. 1st 1969.

The march was based, at least in one way, on the Selma-Montgomery March (in general, the CRM were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in America). The idea was that the reforms didn't go far enough (they certainly did not, the main problem being that only two out of four major problems with the franchise was fixed; the other two were dealt with a year later after London got involved), that they were a "sham" and that a compromise would be done between the moderate unionists and the moderate nationalists. The PDs also were concerned about the deal ignoring issues of economic justice and the PDs were also more interested in raising the border as an issue than the rest of CRM was. In her book ("The Price of My Soul," about 1/2 of which describes the first year of the PD), Bernadette Devlin criticized the moderate parts of the civil rights movement for calling for anti-discrimination measures without also calling for measures that create more jobs (and also more housing) so that a more equal distribution of jobs and houses wouldn't mean less for Protestants. I'm sure she didn't mean that she opposed those anti-discrimination measures, but she felt it was very important to at least talk about universal economic justice as well. The PDs felt it was important to keep the momentum going, keep the pressure up, and test how much the unionist population and the police had changed. The unionists and the police didn't pass. The march took four days and was often attacked by loyalists. In one case, the police told the marchers that ahead on the road there was an ambush and recommended an alternative route- the ambush was on the alternative route. The next time, the PDs ignored that advice and there was no ambush on their route. The last day of the march, there was a major ambush at Burntollet bridge not far outside of Derry. The police stood by while loyalists, including many off-duty members of the B-Specials who were kind of like a regional national guard launched a vicious attack, many students were injured and/or driven into the river (in January). (in 1999, I attended an event commemorating this in Derry, and barely missed getting to take part in a march commemorating it). The marchers, their numbers swelled by people from Derry, were welcomed as heroes when they entered the Nationalist part of Derry.

The attack at Burntollet was followed up by police attacking a nationalist part of Derry, which saw the first use of violence by the people involved in the civil rights movement- although willing to be non-violent on marches and at rallies and such, when their neighborhoods were attacked, that was seen as something else. The civil rights marches continued until early 1972, but the general situation got more violent. After the events of Aug. 1969 when there was massive violence against the Nationalist community (which defended itself with violence), the British army came onto the streets. Within months the IRAs (there was a split at the end of 1969), and especially the Provisional IRA, began to assert themselves. The republican paramilitaries came into conflict with the police, and until about June of 1970, to a lesser degree the British Army (after June 1970 it was to a large degree). The civil rights marches continued. As a result of British involvement, more of the demands of the civil rights movement were granted- one-person, one-vote was established for all elections; the B-Specials, who were exclusively Protestant and notoriously sectarian, were replaced by the Ulster Defense Regiment, who developed a similar reputation after a brief period. No effective effort was made to combat discrimination in employment, which actually got worse. Not only was emergency legislation left on the books, it was extensively used through internment without trial, which became the main issue of the civil rights movement after it was introduced in Aug. of 1971. Internment lasted until the end of 1975, and while about 100 loyalists were interned, about 1,900 republicans were interned, but since during the first 1.5 years not a single loyalist was interned, the republicans interned would have been interned for longer periods on average. During this time, republicans were probably about 20 times more active than loyalists, but were overwhelmingly attacking the security forces and destroying commercial/non-military property without killing civilians while the loyalists were almost exclusively intentionally killing Catholic civilians. But despite that, republicans were about 19 times more likely to be interned. Also, two members of People's Democracy were interned despite the fact that even though they offered (non-material) support to the PIRA, they were mostly non-violent and did not consider themselves republicans. Also, the Chair of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was also interned.

In late Jan. 1972, an anti-Internment/civil rights march was brutally attacked by the security forces- there are reports that some British officers started beating their own men to get them to stop beating the marchers. At the end of January Bloody Sunday happened, and 13 civil rights marchers were shot dead by the British Army in Derry. The march was already banned from the center of the city (the city was majority Nationalist and the center was in the part that was overwhelmingly majority Nationalist. You might want to take a look at this link for details, but the tiny amount of violence aimed at the British Army didn't justify their aggression, and for years now almost everyone agrees that the people killed were innocent.

Although there was a flury of united Civil Rights marches immediately after Bloody Sunday, it's widely agreed that Bloody Sunday killed off the CRM, and launched the armed struggle of the IRA (the one which was at the time known as the Provisionals). And I’m sure some people, to one degree or another, did not want to march if the British were going to simply kill them. As far as I can tell, during the next 5-6 years after Bloody Sunday, mass struggle was something like 1/4 of what it had been between 1968 and 1972. At some point in 1978 and increasing until the 1980 and 1981 Hunger-Strikes there was a return to mass struggle which by 1980 was on roughly the same level as was seen around 1970.

(The MASSIVE anti-internment march fired on on Bloody Sunday was primarily organized by a senior politician of the moderate SDLP, not Sinn Fein)

For about 5 years in the 1970s convicted and interned prisoners, loyalist and republican, were treated as political prisoners, or as prisoners of war (although I'm not sure how appropriate it is to use the term POW in relation to the loyalists). In the mid-1970s this was phased out with internment and was completely ended in 1980. Although it's worth pointing that internment was quickly replaced with other emergency legislation including detention for seven days and non-jury courts, the important thing is that all the republican and loyalist prisoners were the result of a political conflict, and the republicans, with some negligible individual exceptions, could easily be called prisoners of war (the exceptions could still be called POWs, but with a little less justification). Besides the level of support shown for the hunger-strikers which I'll describe shortly, there's reasons to believe that the vast majority of the nationalist population supported the hunger-strikers, including most of the roughly 60% who did not usually express support for the IRA- that is those who were calling on the IRA to go on cease-fire. The thing is, at that point the events of Aug. 1969 were still fresh in people's minds, and those who were too young and not nearby heard about what happened. the thing is, the IRA had been demilitarized in the years before that, and offered almost no defense- the overwhelming amount of defense came from people, usually young, throwing rocks and petrol bombs and building barricades. Afterwards, grafiti claimed that IRA stood for "I Ran Away." After that, almost no one in the Nationalist community wanted the IRA to disarm (that only became popular around 2000) or disband (I suppose in the last few years that might be slightly popular, although there's probably a majority who are happy with the IRA remaining in a very stood-down manner, and as a veterans organization, or something like that). Also, because there was almost zero support for the police in the Nationalist community (the SDLP were fairly consistently hostile to the police until 2002, and as recently as 2001 there was solid evidence of how Nationalists felt about the NI police when 5/6 of N. Ireland units of the Gaelic Athletics Association voted no on allowing the police to be members of the GAA) people would turn to the IRA. So, even among those who were not normally considered IRA supporters, almost no one was unconcerned about the prisoners starving themselves to death to be treated as prisoners of war.

UPDATE 3/8/16 Somewhere in this part of the post I should say that, based on what might be called a fairly scientific look, only about .2% of the IRA's operations intentionally resulted in civilian death.

The effort in support of the prisoners started small, it was about 2-3 years before there was mass struggle, but there were a lot of important actions like the mothers of the prisoners wearing blankets (since the prisoners wouldn't wear prison uniform, they wore blankets as part of the first phase of their protest) at protests. Everything I've read indicates that during this period (starting in 1978 and increasing until the brief and unsuccessful hunger-strike of late 1980, and then continuing during the second one from the Spring until the Fall in 1981, during which 10 men died) there was a huge amount of activity. According to Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey (who was the most senior leader of the campaign in support), who has often said that republicans should spend more time organizing people and less time organizing armies, there was a return to mass struggle (she probably meant since the sharp decline of the Civil Rights Movement). There's reason to believe, based on election figures and reasonable assumptions, that a large majority of people who normally voted for the moderate rival of Sinn Fein, the Social Democratic and Labour Party voted for Bobby Sands (one of the hunger-strikers) when he was elected to parliament (the SDLP didn't put up a candidate). Also, John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, made statements criticizing the British government and suggesting that a lot of nationalists who weren't IRA supporters were supporting the hunger-strikers. There were 100,000 people at Bobby Sands' funeral, and even adjusting for the likelihood that some small minority (maybe 10,000) were from outside N. Ireland, it's worth pointing out that (including children, the disabled, the sick, and the elderly, many of whom probably stayed home) the nationalist population was about 500,000 at that time (UPDATE 5/22/09 it was a work day; unemployment among nationalists was probably no more than about 20%; Belfast, where the funeral was, at that time had a nationalist population that was probably something like 70,000 and the area within roughly an hour's drive of Belfast Local Government District might have contained something like 300,000 more nationalists at the most; so about 90,000 nationalists is a pretty high figure, assuming that there were also a lot of people who kind of supported the hunger-strikers but couldn't stomach attending a republican funeral) (about half the nationalists more than an hour away from Belfast were in the constituency that elected Sands).

For more information, see this.

(UPDATE 3/1/17 In recent years there has been a controversy over  a children's play park in what used to be called the Newry and Mourne local government district. The park was named after one of the dead hunger-strikers. Most of the time, most of the SDLP councilors voted in favor of naming it that way)

(UPDATE 7/9/17 From another post: "There is also evidence that almost no one in the Nationalist community went to the police about crime and instead almost everyone went to the IRA (this is supported by a statement by Eamonn McCann on pages 22-23 of the 1993 version of his book “War and an Irish Town” and by an article around 2003 in the Irish Times). Most Nationalists who didn’t support the IRA’s campaign nonetheless agreed more or less with the IRA’s goals and wanted Volunteers available for defense during times of sectarian tension and and when crime HAD to be dealt with by force.")

Since the hunger-strike ended, the mass struggle seems to have gone down to something probably just above what it was the 7 years after Bloody Sunday. Ogra Shinn fein (SF Youth) do a lot of demonstrations and some stuff that could be called direct action (there was also activity by Republican youth that often involved petrol bombs), but they seem to have not been very broadly based among nationalist youth. In 1988, in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement, marches were held that seem to have been well-attended, and every year there's a very successful republican march to mark the introduction of internment. There are other marches and rallies, but everything I've read indicates they are not at the same level as they were in the periods around 1970 and 1980, (I also saw a few nationalist protests which have influenced what I'm saying here).

One aspect of this I'd like to discuss is the record of the SDLP, who claim to be inheritors of the civil rights movement. I'm sure there's some truth to that, but not as much as they would have you believe. As far as I can tell, in the 70s a large majority of SF members could say they had been involved in the CRM and in the 80s, some large minority could say the same thing. In 1988 a meeting was held at which participants in the Civil rights movement were invited to create a committee which would do work in commemoration of the CRM. Although it appears that the SDLP didn't participate for some reason (same thing for most of the non-Provisional part of the republican family, although at that point the Provisionals would have represented some very large majority of that family), it probably represented between about half and some large najority of the CRM and I have heard nothing to indicate there was a rival effort of similar success by the SDLP (I'm almost certain that in a video of one of the commemoration marches, you can see the leader of the SDLP, which indicates that they did not organize a rival effort). The committee did attract three of the 4-5 top people in the civil rights movement, including the person who was probably at the very top, Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey, plus Eamonn McCann who was probably either #2 or #3, and Michael Farrell, who was probably either #4 or #5. The video leaned towards supporting the Provisionals and took two subtle digs at the SDLP.

Also, the SDLP did not have a perfect record on the civil rights movement. John Hume, who was a senior figure from the beginning and became Leader of the SDLP in 1979 and remained Leader until 2001, opposed three of the most important marches in the civil rights era. He opposed the second march, the one in Derry that really got the CRM going (he refused to co-sign the paper-work for the permit), he opposed the Belfast-Derry march by PD, and he opposed the march that was fired on on Bloody Sunday. Also, when interment without trial was introduced, part of the response was a rent and rates strike, basically refusing to pay the local councils taxes and rent on public housing (it was originally an effort associated with the SDLP, but became very popular with the entire civil rights movement). Towards the very beginning it was estimated that 16,000 households were on the strike, which would have been something like 1/3 of that Nationalist population, probably something like 2/3 of those with public housing, and it probably grew as it became clearer that (for the first 1 1/2 years) not a single loyalist was going to be interned; those figures probably went up to about 2/3 and 4/5, although they might have fallen a bit not long after the government started interning a small number of loyalists. In 1974 there was a power-sharing government for N. Ireland as part of an effort to resolve the conflict. While internment continued, an SDLP minister announced that there would be no amnesty for people on the rent and rates strike, increased the amount of money that could deducted from the social security payments of those on the strike and introduced a punitive fine for people on the strike.

Going back to the 1970s, there was a movement that I should discuss. The Community of Peace People was a short-lived movement in 1976 which made a call that was sort of universally aimed at stopping all the violence, and they were more successful than similar efforts before and since- the two women at the center of it won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976. It started when the three children of one of the two women, Anne Maguire, died after being struck by a car driven by an IRA member who lost control after he was shot by the British Army. The Peace People issued a statement calling for an end to violence but were frequently criticized for often specifying the paramilitaries and not the security forces. For a brief period of time they were very successful, but as it became clear that they were not going to criticize the security forces their support in the Nationalist community declined. At one point there was going to be a peace march from a nationalist area into a loyalist area. The trade-unions announced that they intended to march as a bloc with their banners. Some loyalists threatened that there would be trouble if that happened. The Peace People said they also opposed the unions taking part as a group, and the unions told their members to instead march with their families. It's not clear if the PP opposed union participation before or after the loyalist threat. If it was before, that indicates some large degree of hostility towards the unions, if it was after, that indicates that they were willing to erode the effectiveness of their campaign in the face of threats of violence, which isn't really in-line with their movement of standing up against the paramilitaries. The thing is, since the conflict was fueled partly by poverty (even though with a poverty-free N. Ireland it would still make sense to unite Ireland, the sectarianism of the loyalists is fueled by poverty, as is the tiny amount of sectarianism of the nationalists and to some degree support for republicanism- although as you might guess I don't have a problem with that republicanism). The unions can address this, can generate support for progressive responses to poverty, and can glue together working-class nationalist/unionist solidarity, and if the unions had been integrated into the marches, that would have been much better. As you might guess, I still wouldn't be crazy about the Peace People as I would have largely supported the armed struggle, and the Peace People were saying nothing about the border (aside from some vague references, they also seemed to have said very little if anything about justice (i.e. discrimination); they were something like 75% PEACE and 25% anti-sectarian). Around the beginning of 1977, they even said that the violence of the security forces "is not as bad" as that of the paramilitaries. Within several months, the large Peace People marches were over with.

That's about it. Aside from the period around 1970 and in 1980/81, the mass struggle has been relatively low. Besides those two peaks it was probably only sort of comparable to what happened in Apartheid S. Africa, or during the Civil Rights Era in the American South.