Northern Ireland's '68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles

by Simon Prince, Paul Bew (Foreword)

The violence was sparked by a small band of leftists who wanted Derry in October 1968 to be a repeat of Paris in May 1968. Like their French comrades, Northern Ireland’s ‘sixty-eighters’ had assumed that street fighting would lead to political struggle. The struggle that followed, however, was between communities rather than classes. In the divided society of Northern Ireland, the interaction of the global and the local that was the hallmark of 1968 had tragic consequences. Drawing on a wealth of new sources and scholarship, Simon Prince’s timely new edition offers a fresh and compelling interpretation of the civil rights movement of 1968 and the origins of the Troubles.

Genres: History

296 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2007

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a massive, thoroughly researched work of historical scholarship that explains how a campaign for the fair allocation of public housing in Derry evolved into a campaign for civil rights across the whole of Northern Ireland but then degenerated into violent sectarianism and eventually, the Troubles. The previous history and intellectual development of the political thinkers and activists who orchestrated and organised this movement is excellently described and analysed. The local events in Ireland are constantly contextualised against the background of wider events elsewhere in the US and mainland Europe; Northern Ireland's '68 was part of a much bigger picture.

The politics of Unionism, notably under the central figures like Basil Brookeborough, James Chichester-Clark, and Terence O'Neill, are well explained, as are the pressures that came to bear on Unionism from across the water in London, where there seems to have been genuine concern about the lack of civil rights; this is no Ireland-centric anti-British diatribe; Prince's analysis remains dispassionate throughout. He shows that it was only due to pressure from the British in London ( and certainly not the pressure from their own fellow-countrymen) that the Unionists even tried to do anything about civil rights. There are good descriptions of O'Neill's cautious meetings with Toiseach Sean Lemass from Dublin, and of O'Neill's absurd Churchillian speeches, penned for him by his spin doctor, as he rather desperately tried to arrive at a settlement, amid vicious opposition from Brian Faulkner and others, even as the marches and violence were increasing in intensity. The names of these essentially mediocre men, incapable of political insight and without any vision other than that of maintaining the status quo, may be all but forgotten now, but were crucially important in the evolution of Irish politics.

This was a brief moment in Irish politics when radical ideas of international inspiration, with roots that went right back to Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen in the eighteenth century, sought and found connections to civil rights movements and liberation struggles elsewhere, from France to the United States to Mozambique and Cuba. These connections were not merely ideological; there were actual contacts and exchanges; I myself attended one meeting in Belfast that was addressed by African representatives of Frelimo (the Movement for the Liberation of Mozambique).

It was thought that violence might be inevitable, because it was endemic in the situation (and Prince explains this carefully) but there was an expectation that the violence, were it inevitably to come, would be revolutionary and not regressive; that, perhaps, was where the big mistake was made. People were playing with fire, but there was great idealism all over the world, notably in Paris and in the American civil rights movement but also elsewhere; there was a sense that great political progress could now be made in Ireland as in those other places. Che Guevara was alive and active in his South American campaigns, and a major influence on some of the smaller left-wing student groups who were part of the civil rights movement; our idea was for a socialism in Ireland that would be part of a global movement, superseding all the local sectarianisms that had kept Ireland divided and for one brief moment, enabling at least some Protestants and Catholics to stand together in a common cause, as they once had two hundred years previously. Unfortunately this took no account of the real situation in the Irish Republic, where there was no discernible student protest or worker movement and a great indifference to nearly everything that was happening in the North - as there still is today. That was another blind spot.

And in the end, the Irishness of Irish politics caught up with this idealism, as the old nationalistic struggle to just "drive the Brits out of Ireland" ( as though that were of itself the solution) once again took control. Now it all seems like a long time ago; the Irish Republic looks very different now. and in the North, despite the apparent progress, the old catholic-protestant Unionist-Republican bigotries remain exactly as they were all those years ago.

With these stony old sectarianisms, the Irish themselves (at least in the North) are obstructing their own political progress and impeding their own economic and social development. On either side they are not much given to self-criticism, but until they are ready to admit that their analyses of the situation, both Republican and Unionist, are erroneous, the risk of a new wave of violence, and a new generation of disaffected young people on both sides, must surely be great.

Simon Prince's book is a long, thorough, dispassionate historical account that is not only an essential element in modern Irish historiography but is also active history; by the time he gets to the end of his analysis, Prince has convincingly given us reasons to worry about the political unpreparedness of most of those, on both sides, who came out of those earlier events and who now have the main responsibility for determining what happens; how their forebears failed in 1968-69 to move Irish politics forward and allowed matters to slip back into the old ways. Prince's book is not only the best account of of how and why the Troubles began, but also brings with it an implicit political warning for the future; the old bigotries on both sides that came to the fore in '69- '70, at the point where Prince's book leaves off in despair, remain as strong today as they ever were - despite the superficial appearance of progress.

This book confirms that there is every reason to continue to be be deeply uneasy about the dark currents that still animate politics in the north of Ireland.

[Elleke · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was engaging and well researched/ written. I thought that the compare and contrast between protests (esp. US ones) were done well, but some of the Germany/France material could have been flushed out a bit more.