A Secret History of the IRA by Moloney Ed

Author:Moloney, Ed [Moloney, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

The situation only worsened thereafter. In January 1969 some four score radical students from the Belfast-based People’s Democracy group staged a march from Belfast to Derry in deliberate imitation of the American black civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. The seventy-three-mile route took the students through staunch loyalist areas of Counties Antrim and Derry, and they were constantly blocked and harassed by mobs, some led by associates of the fundamentalist unionist Ian Paisley amid allegations of police collusion. At Burntollet bridge, on the eastern outskirts of Derry, the march was ambushed by an organized gang of stone throwers, many of them off-duty members of the Protestant militia, the B Specials. The RUC fled, leaving the students to the mercy of the loyalist mob. The remnants of the march were again stoned by loyalists as they made their way to Guildhall Square, on the edge of the Bogside, where the arrival of bloodstained survivors sparked five days of fierce rioting. In the early hours of the first night, drunken RUC men went on the rampage in part of the Bogside, smashing windows, shouting sectarian insults, and beating up any Catholic resident unfortunate enough to cross their path. After that, the barricades, this time more effective structures, sprouted throughout the area. Someone painted a slogan on a gable end in the Bogside that read, “You are now entering Free Derry.” A myth had been born.

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