IRA nostalgia must be challenged as we remember 50 years of the Troubles
This week is the fiftieth anniversary of riots in Londonderry that led to the deployment of troops in Northern Ireland. To mark the occasion, the BBC broadcast reports and discussions that betrayed just a hint of nostalgia for violence that some people say sparked the Troubles.
The “Battle of the Bogside” began when nationalist protesters threw stones at police and marchers, as the Apprentice Boys of Derry held its annual parade to celebrate the relief of the city in 1689 from a siege by Jacobite forces. Rioting continued for several days and spread to Belfast, where seven people died in fierce fighting, before the army was sent in to restore order on the 14th August 1969.
This “temporary” deployment in support of the RUC eventually lasted until 2007, as troops became targets of a murderous IRA campaign to destroy British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. Ironically, they were welcomed initially in nationalist communities, where Ulster’s police service was perceived as a partial force that favoured loyalists whenever sectarian trouble broke out.
The August riots were the culmination of a tense period In Northern Ireland. A civil rights campaign, set up to address Catholic claims of discrimination, had descended into inter-communal violence, thanks to counter-protests led by Ian Paisley’s followers and the increasing involvement of paramilitaries.
The unionist government at Stormont deserved its share of blame. The authorities allowed legitimate grievances to fester that were then used by republicans to cultivate wider disenchantment with the state.
In Irish nationalist mythology, some of these complaints became grossly exaggerated over the years. Catholics were never denied the vote in Northern Ireland, despite a widespread perception to the contrary. In local government elections, the franchise in the province was based on property ownership, while that system had been reformed in the rest of the UK after the Second World War. Some unionist councils distributed social housing unfairly but, equally, there’s evidence that discrimination was rife in nationalist controlled areas too.
Yet, as David Trimble acknowledged many years later in his Nobel Prize winner’s speech, Northern Ireland had become a “cold house” for Catholics.
The violence in the Bogside was fuelled by anger that a previous civil rights march had been banned, because it clashed with an Apprentice Boys parade. In the end, neither event took place, on the basis that together they posed a risk to public order, but nationalists believed the loyalist organisation invented its demonstration as a pretext to stop their protest. Unionist attitudes to the civil rights movement had hardened after the IRA declared support for its aims.
As these controversial events are remembered in Northern Ireland, they raise particular sensitivities because they coincide with a relentless campaign by Sinn Féin to justify republicans’ role in the Troubles and portray the British state as the main cause of violence.
BBC Radio Ulster’s Talkback programme featured one contributor this week who spoke about feeling “liberated” by throwing her first stone at the Battle of the Bogside. She regarded it as a missile targeted at “my boss who paid me £3 a week”, among other members of the unionist establishment.
On Twitter, the author and journalist Malachi O’Doherty, who this week published a book about the Troubles called Fifty Years On, asked whether the interviewer “could not think of one hard question for a self-confessed rioter, like: how would you feel if you had killed someone?” He detected “smug nostalgia” for the violence that “needs serious challenge”.
The republican take on history forgets that civil rights leaders warned ahead of the march that the movement’s message would be undermined by violence. John Hume appealed for the loyalist parade to be allowed to pass the Bogside peacefully.
Indeed, most of the civil rights campaign’s demands were conceded within a relatively short period of time. As early as November 1968, Ulster’s reformist prime minister, Terence O’Neill, introduced a five point programme addressing complaints about housing allocation and the Special Powers Act, among other measures. In 1970, the Macrory Report recommended sweeping changes to local government, including universal suffrage and the formation of twenty-six new district councils.
The IRA’s campaign lasted for almost another thirty years and its aims were, not as its apologists now try to claim, human rights and equality, but driving the British forces out of Northern Ireland and coercing the unionist majority into an all-Ireland state. Alongside Paisley and loyalist extremists in the UVF, it created an atmosphere of sectarian paranoia that pushed the province into ever greater convulsions of violence.
Operation Banner, as the army’s deployment was known, aimed initially to stop rioting in Ulster sparked by the disorder in Derry and perpetuated at flashpoints in Belfast. It remained in place to protect the lives and property of everyone in Northern Ireland, as republican terrorists and their loyalist counterparts tore at the fabric of society and attempted to drag the place into outright civil war.
For the most part, it was successful, though the use of troops in a civilian environment and the misbehaviour of a small number of individuals encouraged fresh grievances that fed more terrorism.
Last week, the Tipperary-born academic, Professor Liam Kennedy, told the West Cork History Festival, “the provisional IRA proved the dynamic for three decades of paramilitary violence and as such was primarily responsible for the Troubles – the PIRA was not about civil rights or protecting Catholic communities, it was about achieving a 32 county republic by force of arms.”
Subsequently, the republican movement has tried to recast the conflict as a struggle for “equality” and “parity of esteem” against British and unionist oppression. Professor Kennedy is disdainful of this narrative, noting that the IRA was responsible for 60% of 2,636 deaths during the Troubles. “In some instances,” he argues, “there is such a thing as an oppressive minority and, in that sense, the republican community…. can be categorised as an oppressive community.”
By giving former rioters, agitators and paramilitaries the opportunity to present their version of events unchallenged and in a glow of sepia-tinged nostalgia, the BBC and other broadcasters give weight to the IRA’s gross distortions of history.