enough people to fill the frame of a television camera’ to be a success.18 Indeed, the publicity for the march was aimed as much at inducing the BBC, Ulster Television and Telefís Éireann to send camera crews as at bringing out the citizens of Derry.19 All the leftists had to do to have their protest covered by the network news programmes at home and abroad was to provide the drama demanded by television.
Several clashes involving policemen and protesters occurred soon after the march got under way. These violent incidents were partly the result of the confusion over tactics that both sides were experiencing. The original route had been spontaneously abandoned and an unguarded road taken instead – forcing the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to move a reserve unit hurriedly into place.20 The first rank of marchers, which at the insistence of the organisers mainly consisted of MPs, had been pushed into the hastily assembled police line. Although no explicit order was given to draw batons, certain officers appear to have reacted by striking McAteer and Fitt.21 The latter was then arrested for disorderly behaviour and taken to the hospital via the police station.22 The RUC later claimed that a placard wielded by one of the marchers rather than a police baton had cut Fitt’s head. The explanation given for McAteer’s injuries was even weaker. The police report devoted an entire paragraph to an analysis of the ‘bruised area below the right groin’ before concluding that there was ‘nothing which would give any indication as to the exact nature of the blow causing the contusion’.23
Following the initial scuffles, however, both sides backed away from each other.24 In the absence of anything else to do, Sinclair began to improvise a meeting. Her hope was that the same tactics that had kept the peace in Dungannon would work again in Derry. The police also adopted a conciliatory stance, providing Sinclair with a chair and making no attempt to disperse what was an illegal assembly. The NICRA Chair’s plea for the right of non-violent procession to be properly respected was echoed by McAteer.25 McCann’s speech was more ambivalent regarding the use of force.26 As McCann later testified in court, he had told his audience that he was ‘not advising anyone to rush the police cordon’ nor – being a ‘private individual’ – was he going to ‘stop anyone’.27 Indeed, given that the leftists were responsible for the marshals, anyone who wanted to attack the RUC was probably not going to be stopped. The stewarding was not completely reckless: they had succeeded in moving the marchers back from the police line before the meeting and the chief marshal had called for the crowd to depart at its conclusion. But the stewards lacked the numbers, the training and the inclination needed to contain any trouble in a crowd that had swollen to almost 1,000 people.28 Consequently, when the Belfast leftists started to insult the police and hurl placards at the cordon, their bid to provoke the RUC was not checked by the marshals as it had been in Dungannon.29 The police officer in charge later gave sworn testimony that he had ordered his men not to react. After about five minutes of being subjected to ‘Sieg Heil’ taunts and a fusillade of missiles, they were told to draw batons and ‘clear the mob’.30 The commission of inquiry found that ‘nothing resembling a baton charge took place but that the police broke ranks and used their batons indiscriminately on people’.31 The strategy of provoking the police into an overreaction had succeeded.
The ensuing violence was made worse by an earlier decision to move a party of police from the original route to the opposite end of the street. The RUC later claimed that the officers had been sent to guard a ‘demolished building, containing more than ample ammunition for violent demonstration’. However, the unintended consequence of stationing men here was that the marchers were effectively trapped. This ‘tactical error on the field’, to employ the term used by headquarters, was compounded by another: the party was not informed that the crowd was being dispersed nor given orders to allow people through.32 As the commission of inquiry observed, ‘when a number of marchers hurried towards them some violence was almost inevitable’.33 With the demonstrators seemingly reluctant to leave, the RUC called in water cannons to clear the area. The water wagon, which was making its first appearance in Derry, sprayed people indiscriminately.34 As well as sweeping both sides of the street, the water cannons also sprayed Saturday afternoon shoppers on the bridge leading to the city centre.35
The water wagon directed a jet through an open window on the first floor of the house where the Ulster Television camera crew was stationed.36 The BBC team’s filming was also impaired.37 The Telefís Éireann cameraman, however, managed to record several hundred feet of film. A former BBC employee living in Derry contacted the current affairs department about this footage. Since the Irish Television Service’s launch in 1961, the two national broadcasters had co-operated extensively. The BBC was therefore allowed to screen the dramatic Telefís Éireann film of the march on its regional and network news bulletins.38 The television coverage transformed the political situation. When one of the Unionist MPs at Westminster described the RUC as ‘probably the finest police force in the world’ during Prime Minister’s Questions, Wilson referred him to the BBC’s reporting. ‘Up to now we have perhaps had to rely on the statement of himself and others on these matters,’ he explained. ‘Since then we have had British television.’39 Events in Northern Ireland were to remain on British television screens into the next century.
John Hume, the community activist, had been a writer and performer on BBC Northern Ireland’s answer to ‘That Was The Week That Was’. The British show’s satirical assault on the establishment had made it a hit with critics and viewers alike. But Northern Ireland’s attempt to build up a domestic satire industry proved a failure.40 It was difficult to deliver topical comedy in a political culture where the topics never seemed to change. Four decades later, this is still a problem for people seeking to satirise Northern Irish politics. Newton Emerson, editor of the spoof Portadown News website, mined the hypocrisy of the peace process for material. However, he eventually decided to ‘decommission’ the website as he feared that he was on the verge of repeating himself. Emerson had been able to get away with attacking men who were normally intolerant of criticism for the simple reason that he was funny. Northerners on both sides of the communal divide pride themselves on their sense of humour. In 2006, the Cambridge University Ireland Society held a forum on ‘Humour in Northern Irish Politics’. Most of the panel and the audience members had come to praise Northerners for learning to laugh in the face of adversity. Emerson, by contrast, rubbished this cliché. He recalled how when he had lived in England he had not found that the natives lacked a sense of humour – and suggested to the students that they had probably made the same discovery. Northerners had not forged a unique brand of comedy that set them apart from the rest of humanity.41
The central theme of this book is that Northern Ireland was different, but not exceptional. Thirty years of virtual war while the rest of the continent experienced a period of uneasy peace has encouraged some people to forget that Northern Ireland has always been part of Europe. Fleets of tugs did not spew forth from Harland and Woolf’s great shipyards to tow the six counties to a new mooring off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Northern Ireland should be compared to France and West Germany, not to apartheid-era South Africa and Israel-Palestine. This does not lead to the injustices of the Unionist regime being ignored. Western Europe in these years was a place where former Nazis held high office, the police invoked laws from the fascist era, and a counter-insurgency war was fought in one of its greatest cities.42 Northern Ireland under the Unionists was not outside the mainstream in this Europe.
The civil rights movement was part of the rising tide of radicalism that swept the continent during the 1960s. This, however, has often been obscured in accounts of both the global revolt of 1968 and the origins of the Troubles. In 1988, the street protests of twenty years earlier were commemorated in Western Europe as the post-war generation’s coming of age.43 When they reached maturity, the baby boomers had supposedly found themselves in conflict with an adult world where conservative values and institutions had not kept pace with economic modernisation.44 ’68 was presented as the beginning of a cultural revolution that had delivered personal freedom. This view was championed by the handful of former activists who had established themselves as spokesmen for the ’68 generation.45 By contrast, Northern Ireland was regarded as having a civil rights generation. Roy Foster’s history of modern Ireland warns against making ‘analogies with student movements’ of the late 1960s. The ‘absence of a distinct youth
