public housing to Protestants, and the system for voting in local elections meant housing discrimination had electoral consequences. That is, under Northern Irish voting laws, only “ratepayers”—either property owners or public housing tenants, both of whom paid a local property tax called “rates”—or their nominated representatives could vote in local elections. Private tenants did not pay rates—their landlords did—so these tenants were not automatically entitled to a local council vote. These rules applied only to local council elections; all adults were enfranchised for Northern Irish and UK parliamentary elections. Yet this system, combined with discrimination against Catholics in public housing, amplified the political representation of unionism. Ratepayers’ provisions also entitled owners of commercial property to nominate special voters (non-ratepayers) for each £10 ($28) value of the property, for up to six voters.2 Given disproportionate Protestant ownership of commercial property, this, too, increased unionists’ political representation (see Darby 1976). Furthermore, the practice nurtured a culture of patronage within unionism, as nonratepaying Protestants were dependent on property owners for nominations to vote in local council elections. There was also a pattern of gerrymandering, whereby electoral boundaries were drawn to ensure unionist dominance, most strikingly in Derry. Policing and justice also operated in a biased fashion, with the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act 1922 allowing internment without trial.3
Brice Dickson (2010), a respected human rights scholar and advocate (he was a founding member of the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the former head of the Human Rights Commission), makes clear the underlying difficulty of approaching Stormont’s repressions as human rights violations. Although these practices disenfranchised the minority, he explains, international frameworks that define human rights do not prescribe particular political or voting arrangements. In this sense, these frameworks offer limited tools. For Dickson (2010), stretching human rights principles to denounce the Stormont regime’s practices obscures the essentially political nature of its abuses (15). Extending this observation helps clarify a central insight: rights conflicts were political from the moment of their emergence in Northern Ireland. Broader narratives took longer to emerge, such as identifying human rights violations as causes of conflict or, later, human rights culture as a cause of peace.
In the 1960s, however, political and economic shifts occurring throughout western Europe dramatically changed the region’s politics. A growing Catholic middle class and radicalized university students (from both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds) challenged the region’s governance. The civil rights movement they created, and opposition to it, became a catalyst, rather than a simple cause, for the conflict. The local movement combined tactics from both the U.S. civil rights movement and European student uprisings. These tactics were introduced at a moment of increasing local tensions, as nationalists and unionists, respectively, celebrated the fiftieth anniversaries of the Easter Rising and the World War I Battle of the Somme.4
In the 1960s, pressures for state reform were acknowledged by some of the unionist elite. Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, who took office in 1963, attempted to reform the state by proposing the elimination of the commercial owners’ vote and a boundary commission in 1966. Two years later he added review of the Special Powers Act and fair public housing allocation to his reform proposals. Civil rights campaigners felt the reforms were too modest, and unionists felt that any concessions were dangerous. O’Neill’s efforts appear motivated more by a concern to preserve and modernize the unionist state than by a commitment to civil rights (Dixon 2001).
An early civil rights group was the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ), formed by middle-class Catholic residents of Dungannon, County Tyrone, in 1964. Their main concern was discrimination in the Dungannon Urban District, where the council gave Protestants preferential treatment in public housing allocations (McCluskey 1989). With leadership from Dr. Conn McCluskey, a general medical practitioner, and his wife Patricia, the CSJ began organizing protest marches. The group’s first publication, “Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth,” compiled figures on housing allocation, council employment, and political representation according to political identification in Londonderry, Enniskillen, and Dungannon districts (CSJ 1964).
The CSJ also initiated legal challenges, including applications to the European Court of Human Rights, but they were unsuccessful (Dickson 2010; McEvoy 2011). Although Dickson (2010) contends that the group’s U.S. lawyers provided inadequate counsel, the CSJ members believed state denial of their legal aid application also hurt the cases (CSJ 1966). Alongside CSJ, other civil rights groups began to emerge in the 1960s, such as the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC). The movement quickly realized legal challenges were not an effective tactic (McEvoy 2011). Direct actions, such as marches and protests, became their preferred approach, along with rhetorical appeals to audiences in Britain, North America, and Australia (Maney 2000).
In 1966 and 1967, a new group emerged to coordinate the various civil rights groups: the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). The Wolfe Tone Societies, republican groups established in 1964 to commemorate the leader of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion against Britain, were a primary force behind the creation of NICRA (Purdie 1990: 122). The Wolfe Tone Societies’ engagement with civil rights activism was a break from the republican ideology of armed struggle. In the 1960s, many republican groups, including the IRA, increasingly embraced leftist and Marxist ideology and became receptive to other political tactics (see Moloney 2007). Nevertheless, this early alliance of civil rights activism with republicanism added to unionist suspicions of the movement, even among the Protestant working class who could benefit from civil rights reforms. In 1967, NICRA publicized five objectives shared by civil rights groups: “To defend the basic freedoms of all citizens; To protect the rights of the individual; To highlight all possible abuses of power; To demand guarantees for freedom of speech, assembly and association; To inform the public of their lawful rights” (NICRA 1978: 20). In 1970, the group created a more specific list of demands: the individual franchise in local government elections, an independent boundary commission for local constituencies, a points system for housing, fair employment legislation, and a bill of rights. (Inclusion of the first demand, individual franchise, was mostly a propaganda device, since it had been established more than a year earlier in April 1969.)
The civil rights movement’s rhetorical appeals for international sympathy established a tactic that subsequent activists used for a variety of causes. Yet appropriating rights discourse is not a simple task, especially when movements in other places and times are treated as comparable to different situations. So, for example, civil rights activists in Northern Ireland faced a significant rhetorical challenge when they compared arcane local council voting practices or discrimination in public housing allocation to U.S. laws disenfranchising African Americans (e.g., poll taxes and literacy tests), to systematic, state-mandated racial segregation (Jim Crow laws), and to the historical legacies of the mass kidnap, transport, and enslavement of African peoples.5 At the same time, the Irish Americans who supported the Northern Irish campaign, but not the U.S. civil rights movement, were discomfited by these comparisons (Maney 2000; Dooley 1998). James C. Heaney of the American Congress for Irish Freedom warned in a letter to Dr. Frank Gogarty, a civil rights campaigner, “There is not a single Irish American group in the United States which has worked with the Colored Civil Rights movement…. So don’t expect this of any of us.”6
The other primary tactic, street protests, catalyzed broader political conflict throughout 1968 and 1969. On October 5, 1968, the DHAC, with support from NICRA, organized the first civil rights march in Derry. Police and loyalists attacked the protestors, and intercommunal rioting raged across the city and the region for two days. These events inspired the formation of a new, more strident civil rights group, People’s Democracy (PD).7 On October 9, to protest these events, about 3,000 students and staff from Queens University attempted a march to Belfast City Hall and were blocked by loyalist counterdemonstrators. PD was formed following this incident, and Northern Ireland’s 1968 arrived. PD initially outlined a list of conventional civil rights demands regarding voting, housing, employment, and civil rights (Arthur 1974), yet from the beginning it was more explicitly oriented to a class-based analysis than was NICRA. On October
