international festival of liberation and therefore not part of ’68.46
The intensity of the Northern Irish conflict suggested that the Troubles must have been an inevitable product of the sectarian divide. The creation of a Protestant-dominated state with a sizeable Catholic minority in the years following the First World War did not solve the Irish question so much as rephrase the problem. For decades, Northern Ireland apparently remained the ‘static society’.47 Unionists presided over an unjust system and both Nationalism and Republicanism failed to challenge it. According to the official story, this only changed when the first generation of Catholics to benefit from the education reforms of the mid-1940s came of age in the late 1960s. The minority population then began to protest in the streets against the crimes of the Protestant supremacist state – and was met with police batons.48 This time, however, the traditional hardline response split the Unionist Party rather than binding it together, led to condemnation not support from Britain and, instead of crushing the movement, brought more Catholics into the streets.49
By the thirtieth anniversary of ’68 and the start of the Troubles, historians had begun to challenge these dominant narratives. The media’s favourite ’68ers had retrospectively claimed that the movement’s leftist rhetoric should be ignored. Activists had supposedly resorted to outdated Marxist terminology to describe the fledgling struggle for individual autonomy as nothing else was available to them at that time. Historians have preferred, however, to research the political language of ’68 for themselves rather than rely upon the self-appointed translators.50 As the fortieth anniversary nears, this approach has resulted in what is becoming the new consensus on ’68. Examining the flood of words spouted out in the late 1960s, it becomes obvious that political change mattered more than experimenting with new lifestyles. Sixty-eighters were not turning away from politics in the pursuit of pleasure; isolated individuals were finding fulfilment in collective action. They believed that they were part of a global struggle to free humanity from imperialism, capitalism and bureaucracy, not the individual from old-fashioned ways of living. Instead of a fleeting festival of liberation, ’68 emerges as the climax of post-war radicalism. There was a ‘long ’68’ dating back to at least the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s.
This political interpretation allows events in Northern Ireland to be written back into the story of ’68; it also allows the events of ’68 to be written back into the story of Northern Ireland. The region’s leftists had believed that by initiating an escalating cycle of provocation and repression the dictatorial face of the Unionist government would be unmasked. The divided working class would then unite in opposition to the ‘Orange Tories’ and in pursuit of a socialist vision that transcended those offered by the Labour and Communist parties. Like the nineteenth-century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui, Northern Ireland’s ’68ers had thought, ‘Why discuss what it is like on the other side of the river? Let us cross over and see.’51 When they marched over the River Foyle into the centre of Derry, they hoped to discover a society polarising along class lines. Instead, they soon found that sectarianism was gaining in strength. Sixty-eight was a global revolt, but across the world it took place in national and local contexts. The Troubles is perhaps the most tragic outcome of this coming together of international trends and historic divisions.
Northern Ireland lends itself well to a case study of the global revolt. Thousands and thousands of pages would be required to do proper justice to the ‘long ’68’ in France or the Federal Republic of Germany – to look at the shape of the state; the way mainstream political parties struggled to adapt to a changing world; the attempts made by the extremes of Right and Left to escape the political margins; the rise and fall of social movements; activism at a local level; the impact of international politics and intellectual fashions; and the bewildering array of marches, riots, occupations, meetings, speeches, negotiations, sit-downs, and strikes that made up the revolt itself.
Examining these developments in Northern Ireland is an altogether more manageable task. It is also just as worthwhile. Northern Ireland might have been seen as a provincial backwater, but it was home to no fewer than three of the world’s greatest contemporary poets: Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley.52 Similarly, Northern Ireland’s leading activists should be counted among the star ’68ers. Telling the story of the ‘long ’68’ in Northern Ireland and tying it in with recent research on other Western countries is therefore one way of trying to pin down this ‘elusive revolution’.53 As the nineteenth-century French traveler Gustave de Beaumont observed, ‘Ireland is a small country where the greatest questions of politics, morality and humanity are fought out.’54
CHAPTER ONE
Unionism and its State
BUILDING A PROTESTANT STATE
Sir Basil Brooke sat underneath an oak tree on his family’s estate of Colebrooke, Fermanagh, one night a week for much of 1920 and 1921.1 Brooke began his vigil after accompanying his pregnant wife to Dublin, which he found had been transformed in the four years since the Easter Rising. Sinn Féin, which had won a majority of Irish seats in the 1918 Westminster election, was striving to bring into being the republic that had been proclaimed during the insurrection. The struggle to end British rule was spearheaded by the movement’s military wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During Lady Brooke’s confinement, from March to May 1920, the IRA scored a significant victory: Dublin Castle capitulated to Republican hunger strikers and released hundreds of prisoners. Brooke returned from the capital determined to stop the lawlessness that he had seen there from spreading to his part of Ireland. With a dozen other local men, Brooke formed an illegal vigilante force. He had spent the previous decade in the British army – defending the Empire in India and South Africa, at Ypres, Suvla, Vimy, Cambrai and Arras.2 In 1920, the same ‘loyalty and devotion to empire’ required Brooke to ‘fight the agents of murder, anarchy, and terrorism’ in the place of his birth.3
Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned to their homes after the First World War to fight similar battles against revolutionary change. Frenchmen formed the Union Civique, Italians the Organizzazione Civile and Germans the Freikorps and the Einwohnerwehr. In rural, conservative and Catholic Bavaria, war weariness allowed a left-wing Jewish journalist from Berlin to transform a massive peace demonstration into a revolution. Between November 1918 and April 1919, this unlikely revolution regressed into an absurd attempt to erect a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Munich’s rag-tag ‘Red Army’ was easily defeated by regular German troops and Bavarian Freikorps units. The brutal suppression of the Räterepublik and the vengeance visited upon its leaders failed to exorcise the fear of revolution. Bavaria’s small farmers and middle classes believed that when the next insurrection came the police and the army would be no match for the Bolsheviks. Concerned citizens reacted by organising themselves into ‘civil guards’, the Einwohnerwehr. By the start of 1920, around 357,000 men had volunteered to serve in the Einwohnerwehr. The Allied governments saw these paramilitary forces as a way for Germany to get round the commitment it had made to reduce its army to 100,000 men. At the Spa disarmament conference in July 1920, Germany agreed to disband the Einwohnerwehr after the Allies had threatened to occupy the Ruhr. David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, had admitted to the conference that if millions of guns were in the hands of English civilians he would not be able to sleep at night.4
During that same month, Lloyd George agreed to consider enrolling vigilante forces in the North of Ireland into the service of the state. Brooke was one of the men lobbying for official recognition: he told the top British general in Ireland that ‘If the government will help [the people] they will do all they can to help the government.’5 With the war in the South against the IRA escalating, the overstretched British state welcomed the idea of letting loyalists defend the North. In return, Westminster consented to bear the huge costs of arming, equipping and maintaining a Special Constabulary. For leading Ulster Unionists and the British government, this arrangement also had the benefit of calming Protestant fears that they had been left unprotected. Brooke was not alone in worrying that the more extreme loyalists might otherwise have taken matters into their own hands,
