Paul Bew Professor of Irish Politics Queen’s University, Belfast
May 2007
Preface to the New Edition
Young men throwing petrol bombs at police officers. This image has defined the summer of 2018 in Derry – just as it became visual shorthand for revolt during the early years of the Troubles.1 For modern historians, the temptation is always there to see the past in the present and to view things through a national lens.2 But Northern Ireland’s ’68 set out instead to look sideways, finding the global interconnectedness in the local story of the start of the Troubles. Eamonn McCann, who organised the first Civil Rights march in Derry, recalled coming home convinced that he ‘could sweep up the local, parochial politics … by introducing an international dimension’.3 He succeeded, transforming forever the contexts in which everyone in Northern Ireland thought and acted. Since the book’s publication over a decade ago, I have become even more convinced of the need for historians to write the long ’68 into the history of Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland into the history of the long ’68.4 Where the account offered here has activists on the Celtic fringe adopting and adapting ideas from the north American and western European core, I would now argue that Northern Ireland was central as well as peripheral. Myriad networks of people, objects, and ideas linked together disparate points around the western world in these years – and for some of these networks the central nodes lay in Northern Ireland. During 1970, for example, militants from the United States and France took direct inspiration from their Northern Irish comrades, who they believed had successfully bridged the gulf between western youth and Third World guerrilla fighters.5 The confrontations of the long ’68 – in places like Chicago, Paris, and Derry – were characterised by individuals drawing on the ideological positions of the time in an effort to mobilise support. At the start of the Troubles, the assorted forms of street politics and the variety of reactions they brought from the authorities produced dynamic processes which carried Northern Ireland in unanticipated directions and away from what was originally in dispute. The conflict should be viewed as a series of interrelated phases rather than as a seamless whole. So, while the images of petrol bombers from half a century apart may look similar, they represent very different struggles.
The Derry violence weakly echoes the early Troubles; another news story from the summer of 2018 is explicitly about this history and about how to deal with it. Starting in May, the United Kingdom government has been consulting on the best way to address Northern Ireland’s past. The proposals have elicited emotional responses from Cabinet minsters and other public figures as much as from victims and their families.6 Past events are still very much present politics. I did not fully appreciate this was the case until after I had finished writing Northern Ireland’s ’68, however. During the fortieth-anniversary commemorations, I witnessed political groups furiously battling to take control over the narrative. The Derry-born Republican Martin McGuinness claimed ‘we marched along Duke Street and along many other roads and country lanes across the northern state, as we demanded change’. Irishmen and women were subsequently forced to take up arms and fight to make the British treat with them as equals. But, throughout the long war, the ‘march for civil rights and national rights’ always remained the same.7 The Social Democratic and Labour Party pushed back against this reading of events, insisting that ‘Civil Rights are part of our DNA’. Republican violence was not only unnecessary, it had also held up ‘a journey that took a community from grievance to governance’.8 McCann founded ‘Reclaim the Spirit of ’68’ to challenge both these narratives. According to this group’s press release, the Civil Rights movement was about ‘the struggle of working class people for economic and social rights’.9
What all the interventions in the ‘memory wars’ have in common are neat frames which do not fit with the messy pictures I found in the archives and presented in this book. The narratives, though, are much more robust than I had originally thought them to be. They resist evidence that contradict them and play more of a role than precise, qualitative information does in how individuals make sense of things.10 Significantly, these things help the men and women whose actions – whether directly or indirectly – produced violence live more easily with the choices they made. Outsiders are not in a position to understand, let alone to judge. ‘He sees it from his side,’ explained one bomb victim of the view taken by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer who planted it.11
The main reason for the primacy of narrative in public debates on the past in Northern Ireland is because they have endings as well as beginnings and middles: real evidence cannot refute imagined futures. While the Republican narrative promises a future free from Britain, the Unionist one envisages an endless siege, with enemies outside the walls and traitors inside them. One more push could bring victory; one more compromise could bring defeat. The two principal narratives, then, are simply impossible to bridge, spiraling around each other without ever touching. This problem is not just about historical events being read in radically different ways. Even supposing that a consensus could be reached on a factual account of, say, the long march undertaken by the People’s Democracy from Belfast to Derry in January 1969, the narratives would arrive at this shared site from different starting points in the past and would head off in different directions towards the present and on to their respective imagined futures.12
Unsurprisingly, then, previous attempts to deal with the past in a systematic manner have failed to gain enough public support to go ahead. The main stumbling block has typically been the differences which exist in Northern Ireland over the legitimacy of the paramilitary campaigns. Historians cannot resolve those disagreements – and no document discovery or fresh analysis will change that state of affairs. Attitudes to Republican and Loyalist violence are, in turn, shaped by differences over to what extent Northern Ireland in 1968 was the ‘Orange State’. Yet again, it is difficult to see how these narratives of democracy subverted or of tyranny overthrown can be either proved or disproved by historical research. The people of Northern Ireland are divided not so much over questions of fact and interpretation as over moral issues: the ultimate responsibility for the violence, the underlying motives of the principal actors to the conflict, and the fundamental meaning of victimhood.
When I was writing Northern Ireland’s ’68, I did not properly understand just how passionately my dispassionate account could be read. Historians have to work with concepts that have a political dimension and I also made the choice to use, wherever possible, the language of the time. An unintended consequence of writing this way was to give certain readers the false impression I was making firm moral judgements. Looking back, I regret not explaining those decisions more carefully. For example, the word ‘provoked’ – which appears in the very first line of the book – has implications for the issue of responsibility for the violence of the start of the Troubles. I used the term because contemporary activists throughout the western world often employed it. The leader of an American anti-war group said in September 1967 that its aim was to ‘provoke confrontation’, West German leftists said the ‘protest violence’ of the Easter 1968 marches was a way of ‘provoking the state’, and an article in the New Left Review that summer urged student radicals to behave ‘provocatively’.13 What I should have made clear in Northern Ireland’s ’68 was exactly how these activists were employing this term. The protest repertoire of the late 1960s was a radicalised version of the one showcased a few years earlier in Birmingham, Alabama, during Project ‘C’ for Confrontation. As Martin Luther King explained in the midst of the campaign to ‘the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice’, ‘we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.’14 So, McCann’s ‘provocation’ on 5 October 1968 was about seeking to reveal the violence – broadly defined – that he believed lay behind the Northern Irish Prime Minister’s liberal mask. ‘[Terrence] O’Neill talked about progress but,’ McCann predicted, ‘he would go back to the old Unionist background of open suppression.’15
Suspending ‘one’s own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into … alien and possibly repugnant perspectives,’ writes Thomas Haskell, is
