ecumenism and calling for a return to the fundamental principles of the Protestant faith. By pandering to Paisley’s views, the Orange leadership was hoping to isolate Paisley the man. Indeed, the Grand Master urged the Order to bar Paisley from speaking at its events.123
The Unionist government also followed the risky strategy of co-option and condemnation. When Paisley threatened to march into the heart of Catholic Belfast in September 1964 to remove the Irish tricolour from Sinn Féin’s election headquarters, the police were sent in before he could act. Home Affairs Minister Faulkner vainly tried to balance out this decision by banning Paisley from entering the Catholic Falls Road district. Paisley instead held a meeting in the city centre, but a hostile crowd gathered in the Falls in case he defied the ban. These protesters clashed with the police, thus provoking the worst rioting that Belfast had witnessed in decades.
The Irish flag was again placed in the window of the Sinn Féin office and was again removed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Barricades were built, petrol bombs were thrown, police Land Rovers were sent in, and water cannons were used.124 O’Neill blamed Paisley for the disturbances and warned against a return to the sectarian violence of the past.125 However, the heightened tensions helped to deliver to the Unionists the marginal Westminster seat for West Belfast. As one Nationalist politician observed, the party leaders believed that they had exploited Paisley for their own ends and, in turn, he was certain that he had used them to score a notable victory.126
The political calculations upon which O’Neill’s triangulation strategy rested were upset by the events of 1966. The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising presented the Unionist government once again with a choice between keeping public order and maintaining party unity. On this occasion, fears that the IRA intended to renew the armed struggle led O’Neill and his ministers to prioritise security over sectarianism. Stormont warned Westminster that the Republicans were planning to provoke sectarian violence and bring the army onto the streets. Harold Wilson was told that the ‘IRA campaign would then be publicised as a people’s uprising against the excesses of the Crown forces’.127 The Northern Ireland government therefore decided – with a few exceptions to appease loyalists – to allow the parades to go ahead and the Irish tricolour to be flown. The Derry Journal praised Stormont’s restraint, which had ‘paid off handsomely in the unruffled peace and calm throughout the community that has prevailed at this commemoration’.128 Although Northern Ireland escaped serious disturbance, the government would have been prepared for it. In the week running up to the anniversary, the press were briefed that ‘police and other security forces have been placed on a footing of instant readiness to meet any unlawful activity which may be mounted by the IRA’.129 The Nationalist Party accused Stormont of indulging in ‘scaremanship of the worst type’. Indeed, O’Neill appears to have hoped that the massive display of state power would placate Protestant extremists. It did not. At a huge Ulster Hall rally, O’Neill was denounced as an ‘arch traitor’.130
The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising was celebrated in stanzas as well as in the streets. Seamus Heaney’s Requiem for the Croppies linked the risings of 1916 and 1798. The poem’s theme is resurrection. The eighteenth-century rebels, the ‘Croppies’, marched with ‘pockets … full of barley’. The Croppies were defeated by the British army, vainly ‘shaking scythes at cannon’, and their dead were buried – ‘without shroud or coffin’ – in mass graves. ‘And in August the barley grew out of the grave.’131 For Heaney, 1916 was the political harvest of the seeds sown in 1798. In 1966, the Republican crop competed for light with Unionist flowers. During and after the First World War, poppies grew on the battlefields where Irishmen died in their tens of thousands. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and the sacrifice of the Ulster Division, O’Neill travelled to France. Many of the men who served with the division had previously belonged to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a paramilitary organisation that had been founded in 1913 to resist Home Rule. Half a century later, a small group of militant loyalists decided to resurrect the UVF name. The new UVF saw itself as part of a long tradition of defending Protestant Ulster from its enemies; everyone else saw it as a murder gang that killed Catholics in cold blood. In the early hours of 26 June 1966, three Catholic barmen leaving a pub in a Protestant area of west Belfast were shot by UVF gunmen.132 One of the men, eighteen-year-old Peter Ward, was killed and his companions were wounded.133 O’Neill, who had flown back from France to deal with the crisis, highlighted to the Stormont Parliament the contrast between men who had willingly laid down their lives fighting on the Somme and men who had senselessly taken life in the back streets of Belfast.134
One of the UVF killers supposedly said in police custody, ‘I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him.’ He later denied in court having made this statement.135 O’Neill – encouraged by reports from the RUC – also believed that the UVF was part of the wider ‘Paisleyite Movement’.136 Paisley himself had immediately condemned the murder and called upon the government to use the full rigour of the law against the guilty men.137 He apparently felt no need to ask himself, ‘Did that sermon of mine send out certain men that shot Peter Ward?’ While there was categorically no direct connection, Paisley’s words and indeed his actions undoubtedly fuelled the fears of militant loyalists. At the beginning of June 1966, Paisley and his Church had marched on the Irish Presbyterian General Assembly along a route that passed close to a Catholic area of Belfast. The Protestant marchers were met by stone-throwing Catholic youths. The Free Presbyterians had provoked the violence, but they were protected by the police. As the RUC battled with the rioters, the marchers continued on to the city centre. Trouble flared up again when they reached the assembly: the Paisleyites shouted anti-ecumenical slogans at the Irish Presbyterian leadership and abused Northern Ireland’s Governor. With moderate opinion outraged at Paisley’s conduct, O’Neill felt confident enough to draw analogies with the 1930s: ‘The contempt for established authority; the crude and unthinking intolerance; the emphasis upon monster processions and rallies; the appeal to a perverted form of patriotism: each and every one of these things has its parallel in the rise of the Nazis’.138 The counter-attack continued with Paisley being charged with public order offences. Having been found guilty, the Protestant preacher decided not to pay his fine but instead embrace the martyrdom of a prison sentence.139 The blood on Belfast’s streets had not made Paisley less sanguine. During late July 1966, the loyalist vigils held outside the city’s Crumlin Road gaol degenerated into riots. The Cabinet accepted the Home Affairs Minister’s proposal to use his powers to impose a three-month-long ban on all marches and meetings within a fifteen-mile radius of city hall.140 The ministerial order transferred the crisis from the streets into the Unionist Party.
Six years later, O’Neill claimed that the ‘seeds of 1966, germinating in 1968, unfortunately have now bloomed into violence’.141 Throughout the Western world, the radical Right played an important supporting role in the political street theatre of ’68. Comparisons can be made between Northern Ireland and the American South: protests against the half-heartedness of efforts to dismantle the old order and prevent murders motivated by hate.142 But drawing parallels with Continental developments is perhaps more revealing. In 1964, the same year as the riots in the Falls district of Belfast, the extreme right-wing Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands was founded in West Germany. The party’s successes in the 1966 Land elections prompted considerable concern.143 Theodor Adorno, one of the country’s most important philosophers and social critics, warned that many West Germans had not yet let go of the reactionary beliefs of the last century. He feared that ‘so-called national renewal movements in an age in which nationalism is outdated are especially susceptible to forming sadistic practices’.144 Across the border in France, the rabidly nationalist group Occident had already been seduced by violence. From 1964 onwards, drilled commando units armed with iron bars launched a series of attacks in Paris on left-wing students as well as on Jews, Africans, and Arabs.145 When leftists in Western Europe took to the streets to provoke confrontations, they found that the radical Right was only too willing to oblige.
O’NEILLISM
In his autobiography, O’Neill ‘face[d] up to the difficulty of saying a word about my predecessor, Lord Brookeborough’:
A
