of Human Rights Day, PD was allowed to hold a three-hour sit-in at Stormont (see Arthur 1974).
Student radicals introduced several fissures in the civil rights movement. Purdie (1990) writes that the PD coalition with civil rights campaigns was a temporary, instrumental move, because members were “almost as hostile” to middle-class nationalist elements within the movement as they were to Stormont (198). Arthur (1974), a PD leader from October 1968 to Easter 1969, argues that PD members were not seeking revolution and in the beginning innocently believed that, once civil rights reforms were achieved, they could retreat from broader politics. What is certain is that, during 1968 and 1969, PD members disagreed repeatedly with NICRA members, pushing for more street marches. NICRA’s (1978) account reflects the suspicions that PD members were attempting to undermine the group and push a more leftist agenda.
The PD quickly began organizing protests the other groups found controversial. In January 1969, a small number of PD activists staged what they called the Long March, walking from Belfast to Derry. However, they never reached their destination. An organized loyalist contingent brutally attacked the marchers at Burntollet Bridge outside Derry. PD participants said the police did nothing to defend them. Conflict intensified after this event. As summer approached, both nationalists and loyalists lived in fear of their neighbors. Nationalists told me they had feared a sectarian onslaught from loyalists; loyalists said they were anxious the IRA was going to mount a full military campaign for a united Ireland.
On August 12, 1969, violence escalated in Derry and Belfast. Nationalists in the Bogside and Creggan areas of Derry directly engaged police and loyalists after a loyalist parade. By the next day, rioting had spread across the region. After two days, with police staff strained to the breaking point, the British Army stepped in at Derry. In Belfast, the rioting intensified, and intense sectarian battles led to six deaths. The most intense riots took place in mixed neighborhoods located between the lower Falls and lower Shankill areas of west Belfast. In Bombay Street, forty-four houses owned by Catholics were burned to the ground by loyalists. A barricade was set up between the Falls and Shankill Roads, the IRA surged, and conflict escalated from this point throughout the 1970s. The cityscape became a patchwork of embattled “communities,” separated by makeshift walls, later institutionalized as “peace lines.”
The political reforms proposed in the 1960s were ultimately implemented, but only after conflict had erupted. Individual franchise in local elections came earlier, in April 1969, but sporadic street violence had already become widespread civil disorder. Other reforms followed in the next decade, also too late to forestall the violence and conflict. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), established in 1970, gradually took over administration of public housing from elected representatives (see Brett 1986). The Fair Employment Act banned discrimination in 1976.
In 1972, the most violent year of the conflict, 496 people were killed, and some of the most horrifying violence occurred (McKittrick et al. 1999: 138). Potentially lethal violence became a daily occurrence: police records show 1,853 bombs and 10,631 shooting incidents in 1972 alone (PSNI 2012b: 2). At the beginning of the year, on January 30, civil rights marchers in Derry protested the practice of internment. Shockingly, British paratroopers monitoring the march shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians; seventeen others were injured, one fatally. The incident became known as “Bloody Sunday.” These killings were seen by nationalists as conclusive evidence of the local state’s failure. In March, devolution was suspended, and Britain instituted direct rule, dissolving the Stormont parliament. Local authorities were restricted to governing matters such as refuse collection, recreation, and community services. Yet the abuses of the Stormont era remained a potent rhetorical weapon in political battles for decades.
After Bloody Sunday, civil rights campaigners organized fewer marches, understandably reluctant to expose themselves to further state violence. As the conflict escalated, NICRA turned to more conventional advocacy, lobbying the UN regarding internment, policing and justice, and treatment of prisoners.8 The PD became overtly associated with republicans as it attempted to become a working-class movement. After conflict became endemic in 1969, some PD members aligned themselves figuratively and literally with the beleaguered residents of the Falls. Arthur (1974) recalls that attempts at activism in working-class communities fell on deaf ears among the Protestant working class, who associated civil rights with nationalism. Certainly, PD efforts in west Belfast never became as influential as citizen’s defense committees and paramilitaries. But PD did introduce New Left concepts, such as people’s cooperatives and people’s councils.
Many individuals within PD became influential figures in political and academic spheres in the years that followed. Kevin Boyle became a widely respected human rights lawyer. Michael Farrell, also a human rights lawyer, served on the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. Eamonn McCann, a young leftist from Derry, became a respected journalist and an active member of the Socialist Workers Party. Bernadette Devlin, famously elected an MP at age twenty-one in 1969, was influential in the formation of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). Jeff Dudgeon pursued a successful challenge to sodomy law before the European Court of Human Rights and remains an internationally recognized gay rights activist. Paul Bew became a respected academic historian and eventually advised the Ulster Unionist Party during the peace process.
Although consensus about the nature of the Stormont regime eventually emerged, the role of the civil rights movement in the conflict is more contentious. Unlike Bell (2006), who treats the movement as part of a trajectory toward human rights values, others implicate activists in the genesis of conflict. For example, Prince (2006, 2007) suggests that the civil rights movement, shaped by the “global revolt” of 1968, was partially responsible for the violence that followed its rise. Because civil rights brought street politics to sectarian Northern Ireland, with the ensuing state brutality and intercommunal violence, Prince argues that “its legacy was more one of civil strife than of civil liberties” (2006: 875). Politicians also claim that civil rights demands inevitably led to conflict. Conor Cruise O’Brien, who careened between unionism and republicanism in his long political career, argued in 1981 that the movement’s outcome “in Northern Ireland conditions could only be, as usual, Catholics versus Protestants” (cited in Ranelagh 1999: 268).
Other scholars and participants view the movement as a catalyst rather than a cause of conflict, treating violence as a symptom of an irredeemable system, unmasked by the movement. White (1989, 1993) explores how membership in or support of the civil rights movement influenced some to join the IRA. It is overly simplistic, however, to treat the movement as a straightforward route to armed struggle or as a direct cause of the conflict. Furthermore, a number of factors determined west Belfast community activists’ subsequent appropriation of civil rights tactics, especially direct protest and rhetorical appeals.
Although large numbers of civil rights activists did not embrace violence, the fact that some high-profile activists eschewed the nonviolence of Martin Luther King was a crucial factor in perceptions of the civil rights movement as a cause of the conflict. The role of the republican Wolfe Tone Societies in NICRA’s formation and the presence of paramilitary stewards at some marches led many to believe the movement was aligned with republicanism. Certainly, some of my research participants embraced both the civil rights movement and a philosophy of armed struggle. Furthermore, after conflict erupted, some more radical tendencies in the broader movement advocated armed struggle, and individual activists such as McCann appeared sympathetic to PIRA at times (1980: 129).9 Nevertheless, the mobilization for civil rights, through the assertion of basic rights to assembly, did not inevitably cause the conflict. It was, however, a catalyst for some of what followed. One consequence was that the language of rights became an integral part of institutional and everyday politics.
The contemporary function of rights discourse as war by other means is determined by how rights talk is received by different social groups as much as by the intentions of advocates. Current reception of rights talk is partly shaped by historical perceptions that, despite legitimate grievances, the civil rights movement was implicated in the conflict. Prominent campaigners’ contradictory positions about political violence
