1968 by Richard Vinen

Author:Richard Vinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Ten years ago the IRA was the stronger campaigning explosively to ‘free the Six Counties’ from English over-lordship and planned to work for socialism when the link with Britain had been cut. Today the political side has the upper hand, and tries to preach a peaceful, political path to reunification through socialism.54

The ‘political side’ did not keep the upper hand for long. The Provisional IRA, a break away group from the old Official IRA, was formed in December 1969 with the initial intention of protecting Catholic areas from attack by Protestants and the police. ‘Protection’ went with the exercise of power. Devlin was to say: ‘Armed defence took away from the people themselves the responsibility for their own defence and put it in the hands of somebody . . . who was supposed to be looking after them.’55 The increasing importance of armed struggle drew attention to the fact that revolutionary traditions could also in a curious way be conservative traditions. In 1968, supporters of the IRA, Provisional or Official, looked to their own past more than they looked to an international movement. In July 1969, Harold Wilson’s government allowed the bodies of two IRA men executed in England in 1940 to be brought back to the Republic of Ireland for burial. At the funeral, Jimmy Steele, an IRA veteran who had first been arrested in 1923, made a speech in which he complained: ‘one is now expected to be more conversant with the teachings of Chairman Mao than those of our dead patriots’. His words were greeted with applause.56

More generally, the international, especially European, associations of the Northern Irish 68 can be overstated. For one thing the institutional links between the Northern Irish civil rights movement and left-wing organizations in continental Europe were relatively weak. The movement’s most important interlocutors were to be found in other English-speaking countries – mainland Britain, Australia, the United States and the Irish Republic. It is true that twelve organizations in the main countries of continental Western Europe had some relations with the Northern Irish civil rights campaign, but the number of such organizations in the United States was thirty-five, the number in the Republic of Ireland was fifty-three and the number in mainland Britain eighty-two. As for practical support, continental Europe counted for almost nothing. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association got 42.1 per cent of its funding from the United States and no measurable amount from continental Europe.57 The relation between the civil rights campaign and the Republic of Ireland was particularly important because the Republic was an island of cultural conservatism and this put civil rights campaigners in an awkward position when, for example, they campaigned against the censorship of books. More generally, the whole island of Ireland was influenced by Catholicism, and often a pre-Vatican II variety of Catholicism at that. Identification with working-class Catholicism could sometimes push civil rights campaigners into an unwilling association with conservative morality. Protestant women taunted female civil rights marchers with the chant ‘ask the Pope to let you have the pill’.

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