Belfast and Derry in Revolt. Simon Prince

      5. Derry, showing the walled city, the Waterside and the Bogside

Introduction

      ‘The beginning, in which was conceived the end, could not but continue to shape the middle part of the story’

      – Elizabeth Bowen

      We could have chosen any number of beginnings. In Derry, at the close of the 1950s, five children almost died in the fire that burned down the hut which was their family’s home.1 In Belfast, on the night of 14/15 August 1969, a 9-year-old boy was killed by machine-gun fire as nearby streets burned.2 In Derry, during the last week of June 1970, two young girls died in the fire that burned through their house after their father’s attempts to make a bomb in the kitchen caused an explosion.3 But, the choice of beginnings that has been offered here would lock in different narrative meanings. Brian Friel’s play Freedom of the City, which is set in Derry at the start of 1970, brilliantly illustrates how narrative brings together identity, causality, agency and trajectory across time. An American sociologist’s expert testimony, a children’s rhyme, a priest’s sermon and an army officer’s press statement give different explanations of what has caused the violence: poverty, the unfinished Irish revolution, the injustice inflicted upon the local Catholic community and terrorism.4 All narratives, including historical ones, are constructions and all narratives, even ones which insist they are simply stories, offer ways of viewing the world. So, we have chosen to begin by explaining how we constructed our historical narrative and why we are asking, not what caused the Troubles to start, but rather, how the violence of the start of the Troubles was produced.

      There are books that are perfect and then there are books that actually get published. This, obviously, is one of the latter. We will make no attempt to pass off our work as the definitive history or the full story of the start of the Troubles, especially as our focus is just on Belfast and Derry. This book is not the final word on the subject, and we expect our arguments to be assessed and tested by others. To lubricate this communication – which we hope will be with historians of different countries, with academics from related disciplines and with wider publics – some methodological niceties need to be observed. Our aim is to present the most convincing interpretation of the past which we can construct from available sources. As Peter Mandler has reasoned, ‘while our evidence is partial, some of it is better than the rest, and some better suited than the rest to addressing certain problems’.5 We are not asking, once again, what the origins of the Troubles were, but instead how the form of the conflict in Northern Ireland changed.6 The violence produced in Belfast and Derry at the end of the period examined in our book was such that the conflict had taken on the form of a civil war. (We are using here the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas’s broad definition of civil war as ‘armed conflict within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities’.)7 As we are addressing a new question, we have drawn on primary sources that have not been used before and we have also examined for ourselves ones that have because other scholars were pursuing other problems when they were in the archives. That said, this book could not have been written without the pathbreaking work done on Northern Ireland by historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers and literary critics; the choice we have made to try, wherever possible, to base our arguments upon primary sources is a methodological one. Most of our extensive debts are paid, as much as they can be, up front in the acknowledgements rather than in instalments spread throughout the text.

      ‘Historians,’ Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd claim, ‘in contrast [to social scientists], tend to work more empirically and intuitively’– and, ‘without explicit theoretical reflection’, ‘crucial issues can be elided’.8 (The use of ‘explicit’ matters here: all historians employ theories, it is just that some are more explicit and thoughtful about this than others.) This criticism is echoed by Mandler. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘are we so conservative in our use of theory?’ Mandler suggests not only that ‘we refresh ourselves with … draughts of theory’, but also that ‘we need to explore [the] theoretical work being done … not thirty or a hundred years ago, but recently’.9 This is advice worth following. So, when our archival research carried us to a point where our intuition told us we needed help from our neighbours in the academy, we chose to look for it. Contemporary theory, to use Mandler’s term, is indeed refreshing, but we have tried to drink responsibly by testing these theories with our own evidence and keeping hold of the historian’s sober recognition of how alien and complex the past is. Still, objections could be raised that we have merely been taking small sips of contemporary theory; we would counter, however, that we have again been simply staying within our limits, as we have been given a fixed number of words in which to answer our question. Similar complaints could be made about our use of comparison, and we would give a similar explanation for our approach. While, ideally, a comparative framework should be set out and primary research should be conducted, this is actually just one end of a continuum: every historical

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