A People's Movement

The Fight for Reform in Northern Ireland

Ryan Conner

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781636763415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Many authors have sought to understand Northern Ireland's "Troubles, " the nearly thirty-year armed conflict during which more than 3, 500 people were killed.

A People's Movement: The Fight for Reform in Northern Ireland is not just another book about the "Troubles." In this new work, Ryan Conner shifts our gaze from the period of conflict toward the civil rights movement of the 1960s in order to better understand the relationship between political protest and militancy. Synthesizing published interviews, memoirs, government records, and the latest academic research, Conner argues that the movement's varieties of protest represented a new form of politics that was distinct from, though not completely independent of, the traditionally republican goal of uniting Ireland through armed force.

Conner demonstrates that we should study social movements and conflict in terms of not only winners and losers or perpetrators and victims, but also through the memories of the prominent and everyday people who witness and participate in these moments.

Part One

1916 AND DISPUTES OVER THE HISTORY OF BRITISH RULE IN IRELAND

Chapter 1

Dublin, April 1916: Irish Nationalism and the Easter Rising

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Nora Connolly had been close with her father James Connolly throughout her life. She had traveled with him as he campaigned in elections, gave lecture tours, and led meetings of the Irish Socialist Federation in the United States, her father’s organization dedicated to raising Irish-American support for a socialist movement. While her father toured the US, Connolly managed her father’s paper and spoke at meetings of dock workers in Belfast. Connolly later led the women’s branch, “Betsy Gray Sluagh,” Na Fianna Éireann (Warriors of Ireland) and formed the women’s republican paramilitary Cumann na mBan (League of Women) in Belfast. The agents of a rising tide of cultural nationalism at the start of the twentieth century, these organizations aimed to mobilize the Irish people to take up arms against Britain and secure Irish independence. Cumann na mBan, according to Connolly, trained its members in political propaganda, first aid, fundraising, and—perhaps most important—Irish history. Na Fianna Éireann taught Irish history and language to boys and girls between the ages of eight and eighteen; mobilized by such history, these young pupils learned, the Irish people must rise against the British and break the shackles of their oppression.27

The nationalist campaign for independence rested on the core idea that Ireland once had a glorious and prosperous past until the English invaded the island in the twelfth century. The invasion and centuries of occupation destroyed the Irish language, culture, and economy. This conception of Irish history hinges on several historical developments. At the end of the fifteenth century, the English Crown subordinated the Irish parliament to its authority. Throughout the seventeenth century, English and Scottish Protestant settlers and the Crown established the policy of plantation in the northeast of Ireland, dispossessing the native Catholics from their land. As early as 1650, Catholic clergy produced poems portraying the English Protestants as foreign to Ireland and their Reformation as heretical, poetry that became widely copied and circulated throughout Ireland. Throughout the eighteenth century, Parliament established penal laws that stripped Catholics of all political power and landownership. The United Irishmen, a group of middle-class Catholics and Protestants, rebelled against English rule in 1798 in pursuit of a republic with universal male suffrage. The English suppressed the rebellion and, out of fear that the French Revolution would spread to England through Ireland, passed the Act of Union in 1801, establishing the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Parliament incorporated Ireland to quell political dissent; however, the legislation left no provision for Catholic emancipation. To militant nationalists, the union was irredeemably corrupt, imperialist, and repressive. Such nationalists interpreted the potato famine of the 1840s as genocide by the British. Only in an independent state could the Irish have real political power, one that would recognize that Ireland’s language, history and culture were distinct from Britain.28

One of the first organizations motivated by this conception of Irish history, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) organized to launch insurrection against the British. It held meetings and demonstrations and distributed leaflets, pamphlets, and newspapers. After a failed revolt in 1867, the IRB was politically unpopular for the rest of the century, and British security forces often infiltrated it. Nonmilitant forms of cultural nationalism, however, did become more popular through organizations such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Gaelic League. Hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women participated in this revival of traditional Irish culture in the late nineteenth century; through this grassroots activity, the organizations claimed, the Irish would cleanse the moral and spiritual character of their nation. Through concerts, lectures, debates, dances, and festivals, the League promoted the idea that the Irish Catholics were fundamentally distinct from the English and the authentic members of the Irish nation. Despite the wide membership, only a few embraced the pursuit of Irish independence through physical force.29

Constitutional nationalism, which offered Home Rule as the solution to the so-called “Irish Question” in British politics, retained greater mainstream appeal. Represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party, constitutional nationalists within the British parliament advocated reform of the Union through parliamentary, nonviolent means. Their solution would have devolved some, though not all, power from Westminster to a newly created government in Dublin. Constitutional nationalists and Liberals introduced Home Rule legislation in Parliament in 1886 and 1893, but it twice failed due to the veto power of the House of Lords, the upper chamber controlled by Conservatives and Tories. In August 1911, Parliament removed the House of Lords’ veto to delay legislation. In April 1912, Parliament introduced the Third Home Rule Bill, but it faced powerful opposition from Conservatives and Unionists. Unionists in Ireland had already started mobilizing political and paramilitary power against Home Rule.30

Despite their relative lack of political capital, militant nationalists by the early twentieth century would pose a powerful challenge to the Home Rulers. The Irish Volunteers, a nationalist paramilitary organization formed in November 1913, represented this new challenge to the political establishment. Drawing from members of the IRB, the GAA, and the Gaelic League, the Volunteers, as their manifesto suggested, claimed to defend the political liberties of the Irish nation and its right to self-determination against those who resisted Home Rule. Some of the Volunteers’ leadership stated that the organization would act only in self-defense, but others supported offensive, armed insurrection. The Volunteers’ manifesto declared that the British Conservative leadership and press had been the force behind the resistance to Home Rule. Notably, the document did not mention the unionists in Ireland. This omission reflected one of Irish nationalism’s core assumptions that the scope of the Irish nation was congruent with the island. By definition, nationalist thought would not concede that a large number of people on the island would identify with Britain and want to stay within the United Kingdom. It would become popular among nationalists to claim that the unionists were deluded and manipulated by the British. As the argument went, if only the British left Ireland, the unionists would abandon their own cause and rally to support an independent Irish republic.31

The potential for insurrection became greater as Europe descended into war. The House of Commons, the lower of the two houses in Parliament, passed the Home Rule Bill, sending it to the House of Lords for a vote. The British Conservatives seized the opportunity to portray the Liberal government as dangerous as well as to offer their support to the unionists, who continued mobilizing against Home Rule. However, the nationalist John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, agreed to defer Home Rule as the European powers started mobilizing for war. On August ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• MAP
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART ONE - 1916 AND DISPUTES OVER THE HISTORY OF BRITISH RULE IN IRELAND
• Dublin, April 1916: Irish Nationalism and the Easter Rising
• Belfast and France, July 1916: Ulster Unionism and the Battle of the Somme
• PART TWO - THE COLLISION OF PAST AND PRESENT IN DERRY, NORTHERN IRELAND, 1920–1972
• Northern Nationalism, Unionism, and Commemoration after Partition
• Housing Protests and the Stirrings of Reform
• Republicans, Socialists, and Civil Rights: Strategies of Reform or Revolt?
• Student Activism, the New Left, and the Unionist Retreat
• “Free Derry” and the Forces of “Law and Order”
• Bloody Sunday: The Demise of Civil Rights?
• The Peace Process and the Meanings of Civil Rights
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography