BOOKS Twenty Years On Michael Farrell (editor), Brandon Books, Co. Kerry, 1988. £4.95 T HE MEMORY of 1968 has provoked much mocking commentary in the major media of the developed capitalist world.
A lot of fun is poked at "students playing at revolution" and reassurance is offered through interviews with people who participated in the 1968 events, but who now conform to the established order.
Ireland had its share of such people, but they are not among the eight contributors to this book. All are still political activists, seven of them were members of People's Democracy in 1968 and its precursor, the Young Socialists. This current, in Michael Farrell's words "best expressed the spirit of worldwide youth revolt within the civil rights movement in the North of Ireland" The eighth contributor comes from the other major strand in the civil rights movement, the republican movement. He is Gerry Adams, currently MP for West Belfast and president of Sinn Fein.
The book captures the excitement of the times. The sudden rise of the civil rights movement after the October 5 march in Derry was beaten off the streets by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and TV film of the event was flashed across Ireland, Britain and the rest of the world.
A few days later the students of Queens's University Belfast held their own protest march, and later that evening founded People's Democracy (PD). Farrell's Young Socialists (YS) became its "hard core" . PD did things other more cautious organizations would not even contemplate, and as a result conflict with the moderate leadership of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was unavoidable.
A decisive turning point arrived in December 1968 when the Unionist Prime Minister Terence O'Neill granted a few
BOOK REVIEW measly reforms, sacked the ultra-rightist Home Affairs Minister William Craig, and called for a "truce". NICRA wanted to pull the movement off the streets. PD, or as Farrell puts it a little more precisely, "at least (we) in its YS hard core" were not fooled.
Farrell and his comrades decided on a march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969. The march, modeled on the 1965 Selma-Montgomery march in Alabama in the USA, was harassed and attacked by groups of loyalists and finally ambushed at the bridge which later gave the event its name: Burntollet. The RUC led the marchers into the attack and later stood around chatting with the assailants. It was a grim lesson in how deeply sectarianism was built into the Northern state and sharply radicalized the Catholic masses.
Barricades go up around
"Free Derry"
The marchers got a heroes' welcomes in Derry, and by August 1969 the RUC and their auxiliary paramilitary force, the B-Specials, had been physically driven out of the city. The barricades went up and "Free Derry" was born. As British troops appeared in Derry streets for the first time, events in Belfast took a more sinister turn. The RUC and the B-Specials attacked the Catholic ghettoes in West Belfast "spraying the Falls Road with machine-gun fire". Over 150 Catholics were burned out of their houses and five people were killed.
The RUC and the local Stormont government had reintroduced the gun into Northem politics, but the civil rights movement had neither anticipated nor prepared for this development. This touched off an extremely important split in the Republican movement a few months later and profoundly shaped the politics of subsequent years.
We have already mentioned the fact that PD clashed with the moderate leadership of NICRA over what direction to take in late 1968. It may come as a shock to some readers to know that the Communist Party (CP) and the leadership of the republican movement backed the moderate NICRA leadership on this and several other significant occasions.
The republican leadership of that time had emerged after the disastrous 1956-62 armed campaign. They concluded that military struggle alone was insufficient. They turned to political action, and were a component part of the civil rights movement. But this leadership had also adopted the idea that democracy was one "stage" in the struggle to be completed. Once it was achieved then there could be unity between Catholics and Protestants, then Irish unity, and later still some form of socialism.
The limitations of this scenario, not to say its right wing implications, were dramatically exposed in the revolutionary upheavals of October 1968 to August 1969. A traditionalist right wing had remained a sizeable minority inside the republican movement, and was hostile to the political turn. But they did understand the need for armed physical defence in the wake of the August 1969 events: they formed the "Provisional wing of the republican movement in 1970 and gradually won mass support in the Catholic ghettoes. The other wing, the Officials, gradually broke with its republican roots and is today a Stalinist-tinted, virulently anti-republican organization known as the Workers' Party.
The Provos were thus born with an extreme suspicion of politics and only after IENTY ABS ON the H-Block/Armagh mass movement of 1979-81 did they move away from a purely military strategy.
"RUC led the marchers into an ambush"
Gerry Adams offers an extremely interesting account of the late 60s and early 70s because he was one of the very few "political" Belfast republicans who sided with the Provisionals in the 1970 split. Significantly, when he led Sinn Fein to abandon the "principle" of abstaining from the Dail (the Southern parliament) in 1986, the old Provisional leadership of Ruairi O Bradaigh and Daithi O Conaill themselves split to form Republican Sinn Fein.
Adams candidly lists the republican leadership with the "gradualist" NICRA leadership and graphically states that they were wrong about the Burntollet march: "This 17 leadership position (opposition to the initia-
BOOK REVIEW • SENEGAL tive) was submerged by the boots, bricks and batons of the off-duty B-Specials and their associates as the RUC led the marchers into the ambush"
Adams concluded that the rise of the mass movement had put a challenge to the very existence of the Northern state on the agenda. This, and the emergence of armed struggle put him on the Provisional side of the split. But as he puts it so well, "the political ground was left untilled".
Inevitably this review has only concentrated on one or two areas. Other contributions include an account of the women's movement which shows how backward the components of the civil rights movement (including PD) were on this issue. Bernadette McAliskey writes about what she achieved as a Westminster MP (there is a lesson there for Sinn Fein who still boycott the British parliament), and Carol Coulter writes about the South of Ireland.
The book does, in my opinion, meet Michael Farrell's objective of outlining "some of the steps needed to resolve the crisis that began 20 years ago with a popular revolt against the injustices of the sectarian state in Northern Ireland."
British response to mass upsurges
Farrell points out that all the major initiatives taken by the British over the last 20 years — the latest being the Anglo-Irish Agreement — have been in response to all-Ireland mass upsurges with substantial sup-