tactic of civil disobedience took various forms aside from sit-ins. The rate and rents strikes in Fermanagh (1970) and Derry (1971) constituted a peak of the civil disobedience tactic in Northern Ireland, and Hume was deeply involved with both strikes. Speaking in parliament of the case of Fermanagh, he defended his course of action thus:
In the course of his speech the right hon. Member for Enniskillen (Mr. West) referred to a speech made by me at the Diamond in Enniskillen on Saturday, 10th October [1970]. He wondered whether the police had given the Attorney-General a full report of my speech. Lest the police did not give a full report to the Attorney-General I shall tell him exactly what I said. I make no apology for opposing tooth and nail by every peaceful means at my disposal Fermanagh County Council in the same way as I opposed Derry Corporation. I shall continue to oppose it until we have done to Fermanagh County Council what we did to Derry Corporation. On that day I advised the people of Fermanagh to withhold their rents and rates. I advised them to elect local committees and to pay their rents and rates to those committees until such time as there was a democratic council. I advised them that if the county council retaliated by withdrawing its services they should organise lorries, collect the refuse and then go and empty it into the garden of the chairman of Fermanagh County Council. Dr. Paisley [Bann Side]: Shame. Mr. Hume: Or the garden of the nearest Unionist councillor.20
By 1971, however, Hume was beginning to believe that prioritising the political process over civil disobedience would ultimately be necessary to counter the IRA; that he needed to create a system of authority that could be acceptable to all communities in Northern Ireland. The idea of electing a local committee to usurp the authority of Fermanagh County Council was an intelligent tactic to force the State into exhibiting some modicum of accountability. However, it was also potentially dangerous because leading a programme of civil disobedience was riddled with risks: how to measure the exact length to which civil disobedience could go? How to ensure that the inevitable retaliation would not lead to lethal consequences for its practitioners? How to ensure that extremists did not exploit it to their own ends?
Moreover, civil disobedience also begged an important strategic question. The more civil rights privations were highlighted, the more the state was undermined; the effect of this process, which to an extent was redemptive, also reinforced a perception that the State was irredeemable through politics alone. When the balance tipped towards such a conclusion, a peculiar genie emerged from the bottle. The tactic of civil disobedience presupposes a way back to the normality of civil obedience once certain concessions are won. If the belief in society erodes sufficiently through the acts (and brutal reactions to) civil disobedience, how can civil society prevail? As David Trimble conceded, ‘we Unionists built effectively Northern Ireland, and we built it a good house there, but it was a cold house for Catholics’. In the hope of replacing the cold house with another more inclusive one, civil disobedience nevertheless ran the risk of eroding the foundation upon which such a house could stand.
Background to Bloody Sunday
Since 1968, for three and half years the people in Northern Ireland had demonstrated by turns in organised and in ad hoc ways to establish their rights. There had been immediate gains in 1968, but significant losses as well, through repressive legislation and in particular with the introduction of internment without trial. Codenamed Operation Demetrius, internment without trial was introduced in Northern Ireland on 9 August 1971, and oversaw the ‘lifting’ of Catholics by the security forces and their imprisonment in internment camps (such as Magilligan) where they were unaccountably held and, in many cases, tortured. Catholic victims of these practices were interned on the slightest pretence – membership of an Irish language club or of the Gaelic Athletic Association, for instance.
Internment without trial discredited Stormont’s already diminished reputation in the eyes of the Catholic population still further: while the British army was directly responsible for interning, it was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner, who had introduced the measure. The fact that he and his cabinet could preside over such outrages made Stormont’s claims to be a government of law and order risible. For all the evidence of brutality within the walls of the internment camps, the nadir of the army’s misconduct was still to come in its reaction to the protest marches first at Magilligan on 23 January 1972 and then in Derry on 30 January 1972.
On 23 January 1972 (one Sunday before Bloody Sunday), Hume led a protest on Magilligan beach to demonstrate the anger in the Catholic community about internment. In response to the peaceful demonstration, the British Army’s Parachute Regiment fired plastic bullets at point-blank range at men, women and children, all of which was recorded by film cameras. The following exchange between Hume and the British army official responsible for the firing, likened by James Sharkey to the ‘encounter between Hugh O’Neill and the Earl of Essex four centuries earlier’,21 does indeed suggest a face-off not only between protesters and security forces, but a collision of civilisations:
Hume:Could you tell me on what authority that you’re holding us back from walking in there?
Soldier:This is a prohibited area. You are not allowed into a prohibited area.
Hume:Under what law – would you ask those men to stop firing rubber bullets at men and women please?
Soldier:They will not. They will stop it provided you keep away from the wire and don’t try to enter this prohibited area.
Hume:Under what law is it prohibited, or under what authority is it prohibited? Can you tell me?
Soldier:It has been prohibited by the police and by the government.
Hume:The police tell me that it is you who is in charge here, not them … Are you proud of the way your men have treated this crowd today?
Soldier:This crowd has tried to come into a prohibited area. You as a Member of Parliament could try to stop them.
Hume:You shot them with rubber bullets and gas. The crowd was marching over there. The leaders were going to speak to you. Before we even got here you opened fire … I wouldn’t be very proud of the conduct of your men today. They opened fire on a crowd of people and they were totally unarmed people …
Soldier:You are not allowed to march in there.
Hume:Why not? It does not belong to you.
Soldier:It is prohibited.
Hume:It does not belong to you. You cannot prohibit it ...
Soldier:It has been prohibited by your government.
Hume:[shouts] Who’s government?
Soldier:The government of Northern Ireland.
Hume:Not our government. And that’s why you’re here – because it is not our government.22
In his final response, John Hume MP had come to the point of repudiating the Northern Irish government. After years of commercial initiatives, of civil rights demonstrations or raising awareness through teaching, campaigns and journalistic articles and three years as an elected representative, Hume’s conclusion was simply that a government which would sanction such actions was not his. Now, Hume intimated, there was a palpable risk that people could be shot dead for simply expressing themselves through marches, and Magilligan was the moment when Hume ultimately rejected the tactic of civil disobedience. Hume later explained that he realised something new was happening, that the power of decision-making now lay with the military and there was no negotiating with the Parachute Regiment. Hume realised at Magilligan beach that something terrible could happen. Robert Fisk, who at that time covered Northern Ireland for the Times in London, remembers:
I realised there was something wrong
