Belfast and Derry in Revolt: A New History of the Start of the Troubles

BELFAST AND DERRY

IN REVOLT

Simon Prince is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University’s School of Humanities. His publications include Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles (IAP, 2007; New Edition, 2018).

Professor Geoffrey Warner is a Supernumerary Fellow in Modern History at Brasenose College Oxford. He is the author of many books and has published widely in the field of Northern Ireland’s history.

BELFAST AND DERRY

IN REVOLT

A New History of the Start

of the Troubles

NEW REVISED EDITION

Simon Prince

&

Geoffrey Warner

First published in 2012; new revised edition published in 2019 by

Irish Academic Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.iap.ie

© Simon Prince & Geoffrey Warner, 2019

9781788550932 (Paper)

9781788550949 (Kindle)

9781788550956 (Epub)

9781788550963 (PDF)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Typeset in Classical Garamond BT 11/15 pt

Cover: The Troubles: Derry riots, Derry, 1969.

(Gilles Caron copyright: Fondation Gilles Caron/Clermes)

Contents

Preface to the New Edition

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Maps

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Before October

CHAPTER TWO

The Divis Street Riots of 1964

CHAPTER THREE

Between the IRA and the UVF

CHAPTER FOUR

The Day the Troubles Began

CHAPTER FIVE

The Civil Rights Movement

CHAPTER SIX

To the Brink in Belfast

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Battle of the Bogside

CHAPTER EIGHT

From the Ashes of Bombay Street …

CHAPTER NINE

The Weekend of 27–28 June 1970

CHAPTER TEN

The Falls Road Curfew

ENDINGS

Endnotes

Index

Preface

‘O nce upon a time’ was how the Derry radical Eamonn McCann began an August 1969 pamphlet that told his story of the civil rights movement. ¹ Everyone was putting together their own narratives to make sense of the extraordinary events they were living through at the start of the Troubles. From the moment that the civil rights movement came into being on 5 October 1968, people felt a need to remember and commemorate it. Memorabilia was created, songs were composed, records were produced, special anniversary issues were published, and documentary films were made. ² Narratives of the start of the Troubles were personal, but they were also political. During the February 1969 Stormont election campaign, the three candidates in the Foyle constituency presented voters with different accounts of the origin, course, and future direction of the civil rights movement. ³ Northern Ireland’s ‘memory wars’ often began before the event had even ended. In Belfast, while the conflagration of August 1969 was still happening, the Bishop of Down and Connor telephoned police headquarters to ‘contradict official Press, TV & Radio reports’. ⁴ The struggle to shape how the event was described and interpreted – to control the narrative – was an integral part of the event itself. Definitions were imposed and rejected, blame was assigned and displaced, responsibility was claimed and contested, and past causes and future courses were suggested and debated. ⁵

Activists have worked hard to construct and sustain narratives about how a civil war began in a devolved region of the United Kingdom. Indeed, as the fiftieth anniversaries roll round, the tales are getting told again. Belfast and Derry in Revolt: A New History of the Start of the Troubles challenges those narratives. The book serves four closely related purposes. First, it rejects the story of a loyalist backlash to the civil rights movement and the republican campaign of violence, showing instead that they were the first to march and to shoot. Second, it questions the twin assumptions that the civil rights movement was a unitary actor and that non-violent direct action was a peaceful form of protest. Third, it refutes claims that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) acted defensively and that the Belfast brigade failed to protect ‘their’ neighbourhoods. And finally, it casts doubt on the idea that the start of the Troubles had a single cause, shifting attention over to how violence was produced by a set of developments that, in turn, triggered further developments. The outbreak of civil war in Belfast and Derry cannot be explained in terms of a unique underlying cause.

Before the IRA fired a gun and before civil rights marchers took a step, a small number of loyalists were on the streets fighting phantoms. They believed that ‘rebels’ were on the brink of attacking Northern Ireland; they believed ‘the people’ needed to take the actions that their representative government was failing to take. But republicans were not ready for another armed campaign and Stormont had taken thorough precautions ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. When a Protestant widow from the Shankill was murdered in the spring of 1966, the perpetrators were from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), not the IRA.⁶ Belfast experienced a loyalist ‘frontlash’. Northern Ireland’s top police officer warned the Ministry of Home Affairs that ‘Protestant extremists’ now posed ‘an equal or even greater threat’ than the IRA. He also had intelligence on the ‘Paisleyite Movement’ that suggested the UVF was the ‘militant wing of the organisation’.⁷ Contrary to what the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had concluded, the incendiary preacher Ian Paisley never directly assisted loyalist paramilitaries. He did, however, inspire many of them to get involved in militant politics. The combination of agitation and assassination weakened Stormont and strengthened those republicans and leftists who were seeking revolutionary change. In other words, it achieved the opposite of what Paisley and the UVF claimed they had set out to do.

The second purpose of the book is to better understand how the civil rights movement could be so successful, so quickly, and yet fall apart so soon afterwards. The people who met in Derry on 5 October 1968 to march for civil rights represented, according to the commission of inquiry, ‘most of the elements in opposition to the Northern Ireland Government’.⁸ They had opposed each other, too, in the past – and they would do so again. When three of the marchers contested the same seat in the Stormont election, the civil rights movement had its obituary notice printed in the Derry Journal.⁹ The movement was made up of shifting, short-lived alliances of individuals and organisations. By April 1969, the chairman of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, Frank Gogarty, was complaining that ‘the movement was in a disgracefully fragmented state’. Organizations, he continued, ‘acted independently of each other and ... held each other in mutual suspicion’.¹⁰

The fragmentation and competition within the civil rights movement gave it dynamism. A tiny band of leftists, who had embraced direct action, pushed more moderate figures into taking up non-violent strategies. As McCann recalled in February 1969, he had been in the street when it was ‘a fairly lonely place to be [and when] respectable gentlemen ... were noticeable by their absence’.¹¹ The ban on the 5 October 1968 march brought moderates out to line up alongside radicals that day; the brutal way that the police enforced the ban brought many more people on to the streets and the shocking television footage brought international media attention. The former mattered more than the latter. It was pressure from below, not above that ultimately forced the Stormont government into making concessions. The movement in Derry kept the city in a constant state of disorder. Finally, in late November 1968, police chiefs and leading businessmen told ministers they had to take the ‘heat ... out of events by political means’ and make ‘the decisions which would restore normal conditions’.¹² Fragmentation and competition, however, meant that the civil rights movement was divided over how to respond to the government’s reform package. While the moderates chose to pause their protests, the radicals decided to maintain the pressure. The disorder therefore did not end. For those individuals and organizations willing to use violence in pursuit of their goals, opportunities now began to open.

The third aim of Belfast and Derry in Revolt is to challenge the narrative that presents IRA violence as defensive in nature. Republican militants were not backed into taking a stand against a police force that had united with loyalist mobs. Our case is driven home by an analysis of the August 1969 violence in north and west Belfast, during which eight people died and many more were injured. The IRA was, in fact, behind the first incidents on 13 August 1969. Following the Belfast commander’s order to ‘get the people on to the streets’, IRA volunteers led a march from Divis Flats to the local police stations, one of which had petrol bombs thrown at it.¹³ When a RUC platoon blocked the march from going into a mixed area, the IRA men responded with gunfire and a grenade.¹⁴ In Ardoyne, although firearms were not used and loyalists were also involved, republicans were again pushing the violence.¹⁵ The next day, the brigade prepared for loyalist reprisals by taking up defensive positions,¹⁶ but the leadership had not prepared for the ferocity of those attacks nor for the firepower of the security forces. On 15 August 1969, in just under two hours, gunshots wounded twelve Catholics and killed a teenage member of the Fianna in the Clonard area. The IRA did not run away, however. From 6 pm until the early hours of the morning, only Protestants were shot: thirteen in total suffered injuries.¹⁷ The republicans turned the tide.

It is a ‘remarkable fact’, to use the tribunal of inquiry’s phrase, that other parts of Belfast remained quiet during those hot summer nights.¹⁸ Disturbances were sparked on the Falls Road and in Ardoyne, where the IRA was active; similarly, they were instigated around the Shankill Road, where the Shankill Defence Association (SDA) was on the streets and the UVF was lurking in the shadows. In each case, political action by militant entrepreneurs set the pattern of events. Organizations mobilized individuals, provided them with the chance to participate, and co-ordinated their actions. Indeed, organizations – paramilitaries but also political parties, state agencies, Churches, trade unions, and interest groups – were the principal actors in the drama.

This point can be illustrated further by examining the Shankill riots of 11/12 October 1969. In Belfast and Derry in Revolt, we rather overlooked the significance of this event. New archival material, however, shows that the clashes were not an improvised response to the release of the Hunt Report into policing that day. Over a week before the riots, reports came in to the intelligence services that the SDA and UVF were planning multiple demonstrations to overstretch the RUC and drag in the army. Finally, on 10 October, Special Branch sources confirmed that the loyalist plan to ‘confront’ the security forces was about to be put into action. Beginning with a lunchtime sit-down protest, the sequence of demonstrations stuck to the timetable acquired by Special Branch. As day turned to night, the RUC struggled to shield Unity Flats – seen by loyalists as an IRA citadel – from a crowd of around two thousand men. With the pubs letting out Saturday-night drinkers, the police chose to call in the army. According to the Irish News, the soldiers were greeted with shouts of ‘Englishmen go home’.¹⁹ Bottles and bricks followed and were met with CS gas; the smoke drew gunfire and petrol bombs; and automatic weapons were countered with armoured vehicles. The battle between British soldiers and the suspected ex-servicemen in the UVF went on until dawn. Following up their advantage, the security forces carried out a search operation in the Shankill, capturing two petrol-bomb factories, a small supply of arms and ammunition, and equipment and literature belonging to a pirate radio station.²⁰ ‘Events,’ the weekly intelligence summary judged, ‘had been pre-planned.’²¹

Taken together, these three main arguments lead to a conclusion that justifies the claim in the book’s subtitle to be offering ‘a new history’. It is a mistake, we argue, to collapse the complex web of action and reaction that marked the start of the Troubles into a long-running confrontation between self-mobilizing ‘communities’. Popular protests and militant collisions cannot plausibly be represented as the inevitable product of underlying ethnic differences. Instead, the confrontations of the time were characterized by individuals and organizations seizing initiatives, appealing to ideological positions, and mobilizing support. When people burned someone out of their home, marched for civil rights, demonstrated against a protest, attacked a police station, or provoked a riot, they were engaging in an organized political action.

In the period between 1964 and 1970, several ideological positions attracted varying degrees of support. For unionism, the most popular position at this time, the United Kingdom was the state and the Crown-in-Parliament exercised sovereignty. But that sovereign had devolved power to an elected government at Stormont to manage the region’s own affairs. Nationalism, the other mainstream ideology, claimed that the Irish nation, understood as a cultural group, was the people and had the right to a state that took in the whole nation. Republicanism, which appealed to only a minority, aspired to establishing a state that was both wholly united and completely independent. The IRA styled themselves the provisional representatives of the people’s will, holding its sovereignty in trust until an all-Ireland vote elected a constitutional assembly. Loyalism, another fringe ideology, stretched democratic principles even further: its leading figures insisted that they know the will of the majority of the people. Revolutionary socialism, which had the least support, held that the workers of the world needed to be free of both representative government and the state.

Around this central conflict over competing democratic visions were arrayed multiple dynamic and intersecting conflicts. When this conflict turned violent, violence started to be used much more in other conflicts, too. Belfast and Derry in Revolt focuses largely on political conflicts, but intimate ones also became more prone to erupting into violence. The politicization of private life and the privatization of politics helped shape the start of the Troubles. As the new chapter on the Falls Road Curfew highlights, the biggest battle between Irish republicans and the British army since 1916 began with a woman falling out with her husband for storing arms in the family home. The violence of the Troubles was creative as well as destructive: individuals and organizations responded to it by constructing new identities, institutions, and ideas. These processes had logics of their own, giving rise as time progressed to conflicts that were scarcely connected to those charted in this book. The original issue in contention, however, was not marginalized. Indeed, Brexit has shown just how much the conflict over who the people are remains at the centre of public life.

This new edition of Belfast and Derry in Revolt has added a chapter on the Falls Road Curfew and taken out one on how narratives mapped out the contours of the conflicts. Both these choices came in response to feedback from readers. Extending our narrative by another week has allowed us to develop further our argument about how political competition produced violence. Removing a chapter that explored at length how human memory operates keeps up the momentum of our narrative. This preface has presented the relevant conclusions of that cut chapter; it has also set out our purposes for the book more directly and addressed an event whose significance is overlooked. As the last line of Belfast and Derry in Revolt acknowledges, there will always be something new to be said about the start of the Troubles.

Acknowledgements

Baoth of us would like to begin by acknowledging the incalculable debt that we owe to Paul Bew and Lisa Hyde. Among many, many other things, we would like to thank Paul and Lisa for introducing us to each other and encouraging us to work together. We would also like to thank the staffs of the National Archives in London, the National Archives of Ireland in Dublin and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast – and particularly David Huddleston whose advice and help on the location and declassification of documents was indispensable; the McClay Library at Queen’s University Belfast and especially Diarmuid Kennedy, in charge of Special Collections; the Linen Hall Library in Belfast; the newspaper libraries in Belfast and Colindale; the Bodleian Library at Oxford University; the Imperial War Museum; Derry City Council’s Archive Service; and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London. Thanks to Will Liddle for the maps and to the team at Irish Academic Press for their sterling work in getting the book ready for publication. We owe a debt to fellow scholars of Northern Ireland’s troubled past, too: Paul Arthur, Guy Beiner, Aaron Edwards, Richard English, James Greer, Brian Hanley, Tom Hennessey, Liam Kelly, Brendan Lynn, Marc Mulholland, Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Henry Patterson, Bob Purdie and Graham Walker.

GEOFFREY WARNER: I would like to express my thanks to the following people, without whose help my contribution to this book would never have been written: Jane Liddle, whose efforts halved the time required in the archives and libraries of London and Belfast and who provided constant encouragement during the research process and the writing- up; to Fathers Keenan, McMunro and Mac Manuis for access to the valuable chronicles of St Matthew’s Church and the Clonard Monastery in Belfast; to Briege Rice, for much appreciated help in the latter stages of research; to Bob Purdie for reading through early drafts and providing invaluable comments; to Martin Parker, whose computing skills ensured that an ageing desktop survived long enough to see the completion of the text; and to two men, one a former member of the IRA and the other of the UVF, who were participants in some of the events described in the book and who gave generously of their time in answering my questions and explaining their own positions. Given the circumstances, it is even more important than usual to emphasize the customary caveat that the conclusions reached and the views expressed in the book are those of the author alone.

SIMON PRINCE: I have accumulated many scholarly debts in working on this book. My greatest debt is to Roy Foster who signalled that I was heading down a dead end, guided me in a different direction and encouraged me to wander all over the road and indeed off it, too. I have also benefitted enormously from the support that I have received from Richard English, Ian McBride and Richard Bourke; my contribution to this book would not have been written without them. Bob Purdie, Patrick Maume, Briege Rice, Erika Hanna, Robert Lynch, Margaret O’Callaghan, Graham Walker, Dominic Bryan, Kieran McEvoy, Catherine Merridale, Michael Drolet, Elizabeth Elbourne, Frances Flanagan, Sarah Stoller, Lorenzo Bosi, Jeremy Varon, Ruud van Dijk and Chris Reynolds all took the trouble to read early forms of some of the chapters, and I am deeply grateful for their incisive comments. During the course of researching and writing my contribution to this book, many other people have helped me in different ways and I am glad to have this chance to thank them: Giogros Antoniou, Lauren Arrington, Pamela Ballinger, John Bew, Eugenio Biagini, Jessie Blackbourn, Dani Blaylock, the late Kevin Boyle, Mike Broers, Tony Coughlan, Tony Craig, Gianluca De Fazio, Anne Devlin, Michael Fanning, Diarmaid Ferriter, Martyn Frampton, Ultán Gillen, Clive Holmes, Eamonn Hughes, Roy Johnston, the late Tony Judt, Tara Keenan Thomson, Michael Kerr, Frances Lannon, Jane Liddle, Maria Luddy, Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, Leo McGann, Marisa McGlinchey, Cillian McGrattan, Peter McLoughlin, Caroline Magennis, Jonathan Moore, Ellie Nairne, Caoimhe Ni Dháibhéid, Eunan O’Halpin, Senia Paseta, Tamson Pietsch, Paul Readman, Colin Reid, the Rice family, Daniel Sherman, Robert Tombs, Jon Tonge, Brian Walker and Rakefet Zalashik. (As ever, not all of those I thank agree with all the arguments I have made nor do they bear any responsibility for any errors.) I owe debts to institutions as well as individuals because Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, and the History Department, King’s College London, have each provided me with an academic home over the last four years. ‘Writing a book,’ George Orwell argued, ‘is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.’ So, I want to end by thanking my best friends and my family for nursing me through this second bout: Tom Parkin, Nick Dale and Corin Spencer-Allen; my sister Sarah, my father Keith and my mother Margaret. I have dedicated this book to my mother, who deserves much better.

List of Abbreviations

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation

BHAC Belfast Housing Action Committee

CCDC Central Citizens Defence Committee

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CND Campaign for nuclear Disarmament

CS O-Chlorobenzylidene Malonontrite

DCAC Derry Citizens Action Committee

DCDA Derry Citizens Defence Association

DHAC Derry Housing Action Committee

DUAC Derry Unemployed Action Committee

ECHR European Convention on Human Rights

EOKA National Organization of Cypriot Fighters

GOC General Officer Commanding

GPO General Post Office

IRA Irish Republican Army

ITN Independent Television News

MP Member of Parliament

NICRA Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association

NIHT Northern Ireland Housing Trust

NILP Northern Ireland Labour Party

PD People’s Democracy

RIC Royal Irish Constabulary

RTÉ Raidió Teilifís Éireann

RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary

SDA Shankill Defence Association

SNCC Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee

UCDC Ulster Constitution Defence Committee

UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence

UDR Ulster Defence Regiment

UPV Ulster Protestant Volunteers

USC Ulster Special Constabulary

UTV Ulster Television

UVF Ulster Volunteer Force

VSC Vietnam Solidarity Campaign

YUHAC Young Unionist Housing Action Committee

Maps

1. Main Catholic Areas in Belfast

2. The Crumlin Road Interface

3. East Belfast

4. The Falls-Shankill Interface

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 narrative is comparative, even when the comparisons are implicit.¹⁰ We have chosen to draw explicit, albeit brief, comparisons in our book because, first and foremost, contemporaries often located themselves within international contexts. Answering our question has required us to take account of how people’s mental worlds stretched beyond the streets of Belfast and Derry.

As will soon become clear, one of us has made more use of theory and comparison than the other. We are advancing broadly the same arguments in this book, yet we nonetheless have chosen to allow each other plenty of room for personal styles, emphases and interpretations by writing separate narratives on Belfast (Geoffrey Warner) and on Derry (Simon Prince). Our different voices reinforce and open up reflection on the fact that our new history is a narrative and therefore is contingent upon the choices we have made as historians. Such a structure has other advantages, too, as it keeps calling the reader’s attention to the differences between the start of the Troubles in the two cities that were, usually, at the heart of developments. We, it is perhaps worth stressing again, are not claiming to be presenting an Olympian view of the whole of Northern Ireland. Despite these narrative demands, we are confident that readers will take in their stride the book’s shifts of perspective, place and period; after all, to quote Roy Foster, modern Irish writers have had ‘neither the time nor the inclination for novels that were formal in conception and linear in structure’.¹¹ This book is meant to be read from cover to cover because from conception to completion, this has been our intention. Indeed, we would have chosen to construct our respective narratives quite differently if they were going to be separated out into two books instead of being put inside the same covers. That said, while the whole is greater than its parts, we have accepted that, in these hard-pressed times, this is a lot to ask of readers and so we have tried, in various ways, to make it easier to consume the book in bits. For those reviewers who are in a hurry, we will treat you to sweeping statements about our underlying assumptions in the introduction’s remaining paragraphs.

‘It is quite possible,’ muses John Whyte, ‘that, in proportion to size, Northern Ireland is the most heavily-researched area on earth’.¹² For our particular period, this famous quotation should be reworked: It is quite possible that, in relation to its importance, Northern Ireland is one of the least researched areas of the ‘global Sixties’. The ‘Surrealist Map of the World’ depicts an island of Ireland which, due to its contribution to art, dwarfs Britain and many other European countries; a map of the ‘global Sixties’ that reflected political impact would almost certainly feature a huge Ireland as well.¹³ But, even on this expanded area, are we not still covering well-trodden ground? Well, modern Irish historians are right to be proud of how our discipline punches above its weight – however, we would be wrong to let our skill at the sweet science blind us as to what division we belong in. For example, two recent, impressive publications on the Troubles from our academic neighbours cite as the standard works for this period political science books from the last century.¹⁴ Bob Purdie’s Politics in the Streets and Niall Ó Dochartaigh’s From Civil Rights to Armalites owe their continuing relevance to the quality of the writing and the research; they also owe it to having had the field largely to themselves. History students starting post-graduate research today that touches on the start of the Troubles will start off reading political science books based on doctoral dissertations which were started before they were born. Of course, as we have made clear above and will below, too, the existing literature consists of much more than these two books. Nonetheless, the frequency with which both Politics in the Streets and From Civil Rights to Armalites appear in footnotes and reading lists deals a body blow to the received wisdom that the start of the Troubles has been overburdened with research.

What, then, is ‘new’ about our ‘New History’? Firstly, this book has drawn upon new sources. ‘Much of what has been written about this period,’ as Henry Patterson pointed out in 2008, ‘has as yet made little use of the wealth of governmental archive material now available.’¹⁵ There are, of course, exceptions, notably the pioneering work of Thomas Hennessey on the origins and evolution of the Troubles.¹⁶ Following in the footsteps of Hennessey and others, following different research questions and following different methodologies, we have used primary sources that were overlooked by and/or unavailable to previous scholars. We therefore have also been able to relate the streets to the authorities much more closely than even Hennessey could do – which matters because the actions and identities of the people on the streets cannot be understood without examining the actions and identities of the people in authority, and vice versa.¹⁷ Secondly, this book has drawn upon new scholarship. In the last decade or so, historians of the American civil rights movement have pushed back its chronological and geographical boundaries; this has transformed the comparisons that can be made between developments on either side of the Atlantic. Research on the complicated linkages between non-violence, self-defence and armed struggle has been especially useful here. As has recent work on gender, material culture, riots, social movements, individual memory, collective memory, narrative and the dynamics of violence in civil wars.

So, we have tested ideas, hypotheses and arguments against a wealth of systematically gathered and interrogated primary sources – and we have changed our views as the evidence has compelled (indeed, we have broken away from our earliest work on Northern Ireland). After all of this, what basic conclusion have we reached about the Troubles? That it was, essentially, a political conflict.¹⁸ The concept of ethnic conflict, in contrast, depends upon people, either as perpetrators, participants or victims, being completely interchangeable; cultures, in this interpretation, are given agency, while individual actors are reduced to following a script handed down to them.¹⁹ Arguments that ‘natural’ ties can inspire communal action are falling out of favour in the academy, but the view nonetheless lingers that there is something special about ethnic identities compared to other identities in the turn to violence. Despite this seeming to be simple common sense, however, making direct causal links between ethnicity and conflict is much more problematic than it first appears. Inter-communal relations across the world and across history are usually peaceful and co-operative, even where and when inequality and discrimination exists.²⁰ Ethnic identity, moreover, is a subset of a broader identity category in which membership is determined by attributes associated with, or thought to be associated with, descent and in which the intrinsic characteristics are constrained change and visibility; most arguments about how ethnic divisions lead to violence, though, require ethnic identities to be fixed and assume that they can be distinguished from other group identities, including descent-based ones.²¹ The example of India since independence is helpful here. The political scientist Paul Brass has found ‘an overarching discourse of Hindu-Muslim relations’ that explains ‘all incidents involving members of these … communities in terms of the eternal differences between them’. This discourse, among other things, displaces blame from democratic politics, which is the context that gives meaning to the idea of a Hindu ‘majority’ and a Muslim ‘minority’ and which fixes these identities. Hindu-Muslim riots are not a spontaneous upsurge in ethnic animosities, but rather a particularly brutal form of electioneering that only happen in certain Indian states.²² Similarly, the start of the Troubles was not the beginning of the latest round in a centuries-old quarrel between Protestants and Catholics; it was part of the unfinished Irish revolution, the struggle over what democracy meant in theory and how it should