Regiment decision or whether the politicians and military people in Lisburn knew what the Parachute Regiment would do. But John was right. He spotted right at the start something had changed. I mean, when you looked at the soldiers of the Parachute Regiment – they were trained to fight and kill and beat.
The Parachute Regminent solider who Hume was remonstrating with in the iconic footage maintains that the British government had legitimised their presence, and that they could open fire with plastic bullets if people insisted on marching beyond the barbed wire boundary. Hume disputed his authority entirely and demanded to know the law that permitted his Regiment to act as it did. So wherein did authority lie for what happened at Magilligan? In Robert Fisk’s opinion:
For a long period in Northern Ireland, there was clearly among most Brits, however well educated [and] whatever their roles, politicians (not Whitelaw but beneath him) and certainly army officers, there was a very colonial mentality. Remember most of the senior officers in the British Army at that time had taken part in the retreat from Empire. They had been in Aden or they had been in Cyprus or they had been in some cases in Kenya. So they had seen the withdrawal of the Brits, the weakening power of Britain. As the years moved on, the army officers became slightly less colonial in their minds but the politicians became more so (Roy Mason is a classic example).
Hume’s view was that if the Parachute Regiment was willing to open fire with plastic bullets on the beach, they would do that and worse on the streets of Derry. Three days later, he spoke at a meeting at the Ardowen Hotel in Derry and made it clear that he would not participate in the march scheduled in Derry on 30 January. Not unlike Martin Luther King’s decision on ‘Turn Back Tuesday’, Hume urged people to regroup in the new political context engendered by the Magilligan attacks. Was Hume vindicated in urging people not to proceed with a march on the streets of Derry the following Sunday? Eamonn McCann, who was not present at the Magilligan Beach march on 23 January 1972, but did participate in the Bloody Sunday march the following Sunday in Derry, remembers:
There was a number of possible reactions to what had happened at Magilligan. One was John’s reaction to say well if that’s the way it is going to be, we want to draw back from it, that these people are going to kill us. The other reaction was we are not going to be intimidated, we are not going to be driven off the streets by these people. I thought myself at the time that the bigger the crowd we had, the less likely it was that there was going to be violence from the State. Nobody could foresee the future. Nobody knew how things were going to unfold. After half a century of stasis, events were moving very quickly in the North. We were hurtling into the future, and I think that people did not have time to stand back and try to work out what exactly was happening. John did not seem to grasp that what had happened at Magilligan made a big march in Derry the following week absolutely inevitable.
Like the march at Magilligan beach the weekend before, the march scheduled for 30 January 1972 in Derry City was an anti-internment march. However, the brutality exhibited by the Parachute Regiment at Magilligan had to a considerable degree reconfigured the march as a contest; it was the people’s defiance of the Parachute Regiment, which had been called in to ‘police’ the Derry demonstration. The presence of a multitude of television cameras and journalists was also certain to make the Derry march an even higher-profile event.
Of all the acts of terror and aggression that were to follow over the course of over twenty years of war, the Parachute Regiment’s firing of live rounds against innocent demonstrators in Derry on 30 January 1972 remains the most transformative act of the Troubles because it was perpetuated by a ‘professional’ army which instantly lost any integrity it had left in the eyes of the Catholic minority. In the aftermath of 30 January 1972, as Eamonn McCann put it: ‘to suggest to people after that that they should seek redress for their problems through constitutional means was just laughable … Bloody Sunday was the definitive moment when the real trouble started’.23 Hume’s position of holding the constitutional line became exceptionally difficult after Bloody Sunday. Eamonn McCann further elaborates:
One of the big mistakes made by the State in relation to the early civil rights marches was to attack them. Had they not attacked them, had they just allowed these marches to proceed peacefully and a few people make their speeches and everybody go home ... It was no longer possible after Bloody Sunday for John or anybody else to say what we are looking for are British rights for British citizens. That slogan was gone. That perspective was shot off the streets on Bloody Sunday.
Embarrassed by international outrage and protest, within two months of Bloody Sunday, British Prime Minister Ted Heath summoned Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner to London and peremptorily informed him that he was proroguing the Parliament of Northern Ireland. Without any further discussion, Northern Ireland would be ruled directly from London. The first phase of Northern Irish history (1920–72) was over. The parliament which had symbolised a half century of injustice towards the minority was finished. Its demise represented the failure of any form of self-government in Northern Ireland without substantial oversight from London and Dublin. While the removal of its powers gave the minority occasion for relief, the fall of Stormont also left a political vacuum – 1972 was one of the bloodiest years of the Troubles – with an attendant sense of hopelessness. For Hume, while a solution within Northern Ireland had been unworkable, there was still one more option to work towards and it involved winning support for his strategy from Dublin and London.
2
The American Dimension Unleashed
John Hume had first travelled to the US to represent the Irish League of Credit Unions in the 1960s. Hume brought to the US a fascination for the republican model of government and an admiration for those who challenged the government to live up to the ideal of equality expressed at the founding of the United States. Mayor Ray Flynn of Boston walked John Hume through the city’s streets and recalls that Hume was:
Fascinated with Martin Luther King [who] was a strong presence in Boston since the days when he went to Boston University. I would tell John stories about how I saw Martin Luther King out in the Roxbury neighbourhood marching into downtown Boston. John would want to know the whole background. I would take him to different locations where Martin Luther King lived. I realised that John really looked up to Martin Luther King, probably more so than any political leader or personality in the world.
By the late 60s and the eruption of the Troubles, Hume, by then a prominent politician, was sought out for his views on the unfolding situation by concerned Irish-America. That began a series of false starts before an effective coterie of supporters could form.
As early as the autumn of 1969, when Hume was invited to address the Donegal Men’s Association in Boston, he had a realisation about where his political activities in the US would centre – it was to be at the treetop level rather than at the grassroots. As Seán Donlon, who was Irish Consul General in Boston from 1969–71, remembers:
In those days Ted Kennedy, as far as I recall, had no presence in Boston. He didn’t live there. John began to form the view that organised as it was, Irish-America was not the route to power. Organized Irish-America was extraordinary in the sense that there were maybe 500 different groupings – whether it was the Donegal men, Cork men, the Éire Society of Boston, the Irish Cultural Centre – you had lots and lots of organisations dealing with specific issues, for example, immigration or dealing with social matters. But John quickly came to the view, and he was absolutely right, that these are not the route to power; these people are not into the American political scene. If I want to influence American policy somehow or other, I’m going to have to break into the Washington scene … I think very quickly John began to focus on: Where is the power? Who has the power? How can I enter that zone of power?
Hume found that America was receptive to the Irish Question, but only on preconceived grounds and through the filter of their own experience, and that a good deal of education would be required to elucidate the complexity of the Northern Irish conflict for American audiences.
