Irish Labour Party politician, Conor Cruise O’Brien: ‘Would the removal of the disabilities of Catholics in the Northern Ireland electorate be worth taking at the risk of precipitating riots, explosions, pograms, murders?’8 The argument propounded by Conor Cruise O’Brien was that a Civil Rights Movement could easily beget a violent movement and that such a movement could be hijacked. How can such risks be weighed against the injustices that the Civil Rights Movement sought to remedy? Austin Currie, John Hume’s close political colleague and co-founder of the SDLP, recalls: ‘It was John Hume who said that when you throw a rock into a lake it will cause ripples but you [weren’t] quite sure where the ripples would continue. You do something that you see as being an objective which will be successful and useful and there can be other consequences. It’s always the danger to any agitation.’
As David Trimble has indicated, there were a variety of Unionist perspectives about this new rights-demanding movement. The more hardline people were in denial that the rights demanded were ever withheld. There was also a perception that the Civil Rights Movement was merely a vehicle for the IRA to generate enough chaos to gather itself into an armed struggle for a United Ireland. It was never going to be ecumenical, even though it might have started with that ideal. As Irish political and constitutional expert, Brendan O’Leary, says: ‘The truth is that the Civil Rights Movement was a coalition. It contained communists, it contained socialists, it contained Republicans disillusioned with previous IRA and Sinn Féin activity. It included Northern Nationalists unhappy with the Nationalist Party.’
It also contained Protestants, particularly those who had been to Queen’s University Belfast in the 1960s and who were willing to discuss options for building a new society together. There was a pervasive view that when people from a Unionist background made any form of coalition with those from a Nationalist background it was tantamount to ceding political ground. When Ivan Cooper, for example, a liberal from a Church of Ireland background, became a civil rights activist and formed a political alliance with John Hume, friends and neighbours from his village, Killaloo in County Derry, were openly contemptuous of his ‘betrayal’. Even among younger and educated Unionists, there came to be a clash between conscience and tribal instincts; typically, the latter won out. Brendan O’Leary relates: ‘We know from the archives that the O’Neill cabinet, right up to 1968, knows that it’s wrong not to have universal suffrage in local government but it’s obsessed by the fact that if they apply universal local government suffrage, Nationalists are going to gain twice as many votes as Unionists and they’re going to lose all of the west.’ As previously noted, the legacy of the O’Neill cabinet was not only a failure to reform the rigged franchise, making mass protest and civil disobedience to force them to do so practically inevitable, for good measure it also disinvested the west.
Parallels between the Irish and American Civil Rights Movements
A future US leader from the American South, Bill Clinton, who in 1968 was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, observed:
I first became aware of John Hume when he became widely written about in the news and the SDLP was attempting to do the most difficult of all things, which is to be an inclusive political party in a polarising time. We know what works in the world is inclusive politics, inclusive economics, [and] inclusive social policies, but the more people are polarised and distrusting – and particularly if they’re shooting guns – the more difficult it is to say, ‘I’m for inclusive cooperation, I’m for peace’, and John just held the line. He wanted an inclusive peace and he thought that non-violence was the best way to pursue it. He was the Irish conflict’s Martin Luther King or Gandhi and I thought as a tactical matter he was right.
Informed by the American Civil Rights Movement, the leaders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement saw that rights could be very rapidly obtained through non-violent mass protest. In the United States, the events from Bloody Sunday in Selma on 7 March 1965, to the successful march in Selma under federal protection on 21 March 1965, to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act on 6 August 1965, showed that enormous strides towards full participation in society could be achieved, and quickly. In the view of Brendan O’Leary, ‘by adopting the methods of the American Civil Rights Movement, what Hume and a range of others did, particularly Austin Currie inside the Nationalist Party, was to reorient the strategy, both as a strategy of protest against the Belfast government and to be heard by the London government in insisting on British rights for British citizens’.
This strategy put the British government in an untenable moral position. As Gandhi had done in the 1940s, the Civil Rights Movement used the principles that the British government purported to uphold against them by demonstrating that they were being honoured in the breach. Similarly, in the United States, the appeal to sacred ideals of the founding documents by the Civil Rights Movement also eventually turned the tide in American public opinion. At all times Hume, despite the escalation of violence, nevertheless continually looked to the model of Martin Luther King, and his insistence, especially when circumstances became very intense in the US, that the movement must remain non-violent. Other parallels with the American Civil Rights Movement abound, as Brendan O’Leary elucidates:
In both the American and Northern Irish contexts, communities were subject to local control, and in both cases a local majority discriminated against a local minority. The local majorities organised themselves, sought exclusive patronage over public appointments, they monopolised the local policing, the local security forces, the local judiciary, and in some jurisdictions they disenfranchised the minority. In both cases, the local majority also discriminated against the local minority. The discrimination extended to both public employment and private employment – members of the minority community were not hired or, if hired, were not promoted. As African-Americans mobilised behind the banner of their constitutional rights as American citizens, Northern Nationalists in the Civil Rights Movement mobilised behind the demand for equal rights as British citizens.
The February 1969 Election
In a State which had raised parliamentary elections to a high level of irrelevancy, the February 1969 election was a dramatic break with tradition, a crucible in which radically differing goals and aspirations and methods for achieving them were, for the first time in the history of the Northern Irish State, exposed to the reality of the ballot sheet. Eamonn McCann, a candidate in that election in the Derry (Foyle) constituency, describes the principles defining that election, in its Derry context, as follows:
People like John were looking for what was called British rights for British citizens. It seemed a rather modest ambition. I had a more radical agenda, a socialist agenda. The election in February 1969 was called with the prime minister of the day, Terence O’Neill, and a famous broadcast said: ‘What kind of Ulster do you want, Ulster is at the crossroads’. It was a crossroads election. John won the election beating the old Nationalist Party leader Eddie McAteer and myself. That signalled and demonstrated that John’s style of looking for … not a United Ireland, but looking for equal rights within Northern Ireland and advocating a strong but moderate way of pursuing that, matched the mood of the people to a greater extent … than Eddie McAteer or myself.
McCann’s socialist approach failed to command broad appeal and the Nationalist Party, with its age-old strains of indignation and abstentionism, was effectively wiped away. Throughout its decades of existence, it had achieved nothing other than managing to speak to the Nationalists’ sense of being a minority, of being deprived. The party that effectively swept it away, though still in formation in 1969, was the SDLP.
Hume’s approach spoke to the electorate and it was to continue to do so for the next three decades, as Hume topped the poll again and again. In 1969, he had stood for the principles of inclusion and justice. Neither socialism nor nationalism had appealed to the Derry electorate as much. The words ‘justice’ and ‘inclusion’ may well resemble the pat words of many politicians at the hustings, yet the degree of injustice and exclusion that the Catholic electorate in Derry faced meant that the mandate Hume sought went to the core of their dilemmas. It also had resonance beyond Northern Ireland, first
