Gerry Fitt and the SDLP: 'In a minority of one'

By Sarah Campbell

Gerry Fitt was a key political figure in Northern Ireland for over twenty years, yet there is no major historical evaluation of his contribution, nor of his legacy or place in the memory of the minority community there. Fitt played a central role in creating the identity of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as a socialist party. Yet, he noted that he was often in an ‘unhappy minority of one’ over many issues and at times the relationship between himself and his party colleagues was ‘very uneasy’. Drawing on unpublished party and private papers, recently released Irish and British government papers, and interviews, this book is the first academic study of the role of Gerry Fitt in the politics of the SDLP and will examine the first decade of the party through the lens of his leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780719098048

Sarah Campbell

Sarah Campbell is an internationally acclaimed textile designer who, together with her late sister Susan Collier, founded and ran a groundbreaking and renowned design partnership, creating iconic motifs for the industry's greatest names for more than 50 years. Love of pattern and colour and an inventive freshness are the hallmarks of her work. She now works on her own – making, teaching, writing, and continuing to paint designs on cloth and paper both for commercial production and to special commission.

Book preview

1

The plough and the tricolour: Gerry Fitt and the evolution of nationalist politics in Northern Ireland, 1959–69

Since the election I have read in sections of the British Press that I have been classified as an Irish Republican. I should take this opportunity to classify my political allegiance. To classify me as an Irish Republican is not strictly correct. The Irish Republican Party in Ireland does not recognise the authority of this House in any part of Ireland and its members would, indeed, refuse to take their seats in this House. I have not yet given up hope, and I have not yet determined to follow the line of the Irish Republican Party, because I believe that during my term as the representative of West Belfast in this House I will be able to appeal to every reasonable Member in this Chamber, and, through them, to every reasonable member of the British public. I feel certain that at the end of this Parliament dramatic changes will have taken place in the North of Ireland, of which I am a constituency Member.¹

Gerry Fitt was first elected to Belfast Corporation in 1958, to Stormont in 1962, and to Westminster in 1966. Fitt’s emergence in Northern Irish politics coincided with a sea-change in Catholic politics in Belfast, and throughout Northern Ireland. Fitt could not have known when he made his maiden speech in Westminster on 25 April 1966 that the dramatic changes that he spoke of would be as significant as they became. It was never inevitable that the civil rights movement of 1967–68 would develop into the civil conflict of 1969 and the limited civil war of the 1970s.² The fact that it did highlights the importance of many social changes occurring in the North in the 1950s and 1960s. The post-war improvement in living standards meant that the arrival of the ‘consumer society’, while not displacing traditional fixations with partition, drained them of some of their emotional centrality.³ The Cameron Report, commissioned to examine the disturbances in Northern Ireland in 1968 and 1969, argued that the determining factor in the unrest was the emergence in the 1960s of a ‘much larger Catholic middle class … which is less ready to acquiesce in the situation of assumed (or established) inferiority and discrimination than was the case in the past’.⁴

Old nationalism

In order to re-evaluate and re-examine the emergence and formation of the SDLP and to determine what role it, and Gerry Fitt, played in the revision of Irish nationalist ideology, it is important to place the party in its historical context and appreciate the changes in nationalist thinking, notably in Northern Ireland, that predated and helped to shape the SDLP’s inaugural statement of policies in August 1970. In spite of the fact that for almost fifty years the Nationalist Party was regarded as the main representative of the minority community in Northern Ireland little detailed research has ever been carried out on the party, with the notable exceptions of work by Brendan Lynn, Eamon Phoenix, and Enda Staunton.⁵ What one discovers from these studies is that the Nationalist Party was a political grouping, made up of various individuals, trying to provide constitutional opposition in circumstances where it had no prospect of securing power and no prospect of forcing any movement on the constitutional question, or of compelling the authorities at Stormont to introduce a reform package capable of satisfying the alleged grievances of northern Catholics. Marc Mulholland argues that political nationalism during this period was decrepit. The important Catholic constituencies in Belfast had long been captured by various and fragmented labour nationalists, pushing mainstream Nationalism to the rural hinterland.⁶ The Nationalist Party in Northern Ireland did not have a proper organisational structure. It was locally organised and had a strong clerical influence. It did not attend the Northern Ireland Parliament until 1927 and only participated subsequently because of pressure from the Catholic authorities, who sought improved funding conditions for their schools. The Nationalist Party parliamentarians were reduced to acting as ‘ombudsmen’ for their constituents and they paid little attention to the ‘legislative process’. Their only successful piece of legislation was the Wild Birds Act of 1931.⁷

‘Winds of change’

[There is] … a wind of change … blowing across the Irish scene. Old feuds are dying out, old politicians are retiring, old resentments and loyalties are fading away. Younger leaders are taking over, and new issues taking shape … Poverty, not partition, is now the problem to be solved, prosperity, not separation from Britain, the goal to be won … age and changing circumstances have now at last caught up with the politicians and they must now face retirement or reality. ⁸

While this issue of Round Table was referring to the ‘winds of change’ sweeping across the southern Irish State in 1966, the same could easily have been said about Northern Ireland. Mulholland argues that sectarian discord seemed to be dissipating in the early 1960s. In Northern Ireland, as in the Republic, there was a broad ‘reaction against the political in favour of the socio-economic’.⁹ The replacement of Lord Brookeborough as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by Terence O’Neill in 1963, the succession of Seán Lemass in 1959 in Dublin, and the Labour Government returning to power in Britain in 1964 contributed to the belief that attitudinal changes on the North were taking place.

In 1963, Lord Brookeborough resigned after twenty years as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and was succeeded by Captain Terence O’Neill. Under the new leadership of O’Neill, it was widely believed that decisive changes were taking place and that Northern Ireland was being ‘modernised’. That is to say, that Northern Ireland was ceasing to be obsessed by sectarian symbols and was beginning to share the preoccupations of the rest of the western world with economic growth and consumer satisfaction.¹⁰ There is a tendency, Marianne Elliot argues, to think of the premiership of Terence O’Neill as one of the great ‘might-have-beens’ of recent Irish history, a regime apparently moving to heal its religious divisions, being derailed by the extremes on both sides.¹¹ Not only did he embark on an apparent whirlwind of regional development, but also, for the first time, a Unionist Prime Minister made religious reconciliation part of Government policy. O’Neill believed the UUP could attract Catholic voters, arguing ‘We must get away from this facile assumption that the Roman Catholic population is identical with … the nationally minded people.’¹² In 1963, less than a year after the Irish Republican Army (IRA) cross-border campaign ended, O’Neill was making concerted efforts to include Catholics in his vision of a ‘New Ulster’. For example, in June 1963, O’Neill offered a public condolence and a message of sympathy on behalf of the Northern Ireland Government on the death of Pope John XXIII. In April 1964, he visited the Lady of Lourdes Intermediate School, a Catholic school. After Brookeborough’s anti-Catholic statements, many Catholics came to view O’Neill as some kind of saving hero. This was his problem. It was hardly traditional Unionism and left too many Unionists uneasy and ultimately hostile. Not only that, but in trying to appeal to both sides, O’Neill appealed to neither.

Michael Kennedy argues that Seán Lemass’s election as Taoiseach on 23 June 1959 marks a watershed in the history of twentieth-century Ireland.¹³ Between 1959 and 1963 a new vigour was injected into the North–South co-operation agenda as economic co-operation became a reality through the limited moves towards freeing up cross-border trade.¹⁴ A permanent committee of senior officials had recently been set up to discuss problems in Anglo-Irish trade; Lemass hinted that perhaps something similar could be set up to deal with North–South trade.¹⁵ Whereas de Valera saw North–South co-operation as a means to ending partition, Lemass saw it as a step on the road to entry into the EEC and as a means towards ending partition in the long run.¹⁶ The Dublin Government was quickly coming to the opinion that for northerners, Catholic and Protestant alike, the reasons for maintaining partition were essentially ‘pragmatic’ and were largely based on economic and financial considerations. In 1959, at the Oxford Union, and in July 1963, in Tralee, County Kerry, Lemass made key speeches to signal this change in attitude. In the speeches, he recognised Northern Ireland in a manner that no other Taoiseach had done and acknowledged the principle of consent written into the 1949 Ireland Act at Westminster. By placing virtual recognition – the use of the term ‘Northern Ireland’ as opposed to the ‘Six Counties’ – and consent side by side, the speeches were a major move forwards in Dublin’s Northern Ireland policy and signalled a willingness further to improve relations with Belfast.¹⁷ This initial good will was extended and strengthened in 1965, when Lemass and O’Neill met in Belfast, the first meeting between the two heads of State since 1920. While the discussions centred on economic co-operation between North and South, the move signalled Dublin’s revised ‘Nordpolitik’ and the North’s willingness likewise to co-operate.

The failure of the IRA’s cross-border campaign and an end of the anti-partition campaign suggested the end of an era for northern Catholics. Lemass’s speeches and Sinn Féin’s electoral defeat in the 1959 Westminster general election, which was interpreted as a rejection of force as a political means, proved important challenges to nationalist certainties and stimulants to explore new solutions. Nationalists had put themselves in a difficult position. They had made no secret of their dislike of the State and their ultimate ambition to see its demise. This allowed Unionists to dismiss charges that they were penalising the Catholic religion as such and to assert that their quarrel was with nationalism in its ‘political sense’.¹⁸ Marc Mulholland argues that the 1960s were a period of blurring boundaries in Northern Irish society. They did create, however, an opportunity to remake the political landscape. The Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), the Liberal Party, and elements of the civil rights movement all attempted to establish new political alignments on the basis of the apparent exhaustion of the old sectarian dichotomy.¹⁹ From the late 1950s onwards, pressure increased on the Nationalists to refashion their policies and strategies with the shifting priorities of the time.

Reforming nationalism

The reappraisal of nationalist policies began in 1959, with the founding of a small nationalist group, National Unity.²⁰ The main essence of National Unity was the need to make reunification conditional on consent, and the need for a united opposition. Its objectives also included the removal of the misunderstandings that divided the people of Northern Ireland; establishment of closer relations with the South, encouraging the exchange of ideas among the younger generation; and the promotion of Irish culture, including the study of the Irish language.²¹ National Unity was merely a pressure group, not a competitive political party, and it made little impact on the Nationalist Party, which was proving slow to change its ways. National Unity’s emergence proved, however, that the minority in Northern Ireland were no longer willing to accept their lot, and were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the unorganised shape of the Nationalist Party. Significantly, when a member of National Unity, Dr James Scott, wrote to George Colley (later Minister for Finance) on 16 July 1964 asking for financial assistance for the National Unity journal, New Nation, the matter was referred to Lemass. Lemass sought the advice of Minister of External Affairs Frank Aiken, who stated that he was ‘convinced following a study of the issues of this Journal to date that it would be inadvisable to give it financial assistance’.²² Dublin thus missed the opportunity to direct northern politics away from the constitutional issue and towards participation within the State, which, together with the progress in North–South relations, may have addressed some of the nationalist grievances.

The aims of National Unity were practised at Maghery in 1964, when members of National Unity confronted members of the Nationalist Party. They condemned the party in very strong terms. The Nationalist Party urged the need for unity, however, and as a compromise a new umbrella organisation to explore ways of co-operation between all nationally minded groups – the National Political Front – was formed.²³ In November 1964, Nationalist Party leader, Eddie McAteer, issued a thirty-nine-point statement of policy that the party would adopt. The thrust of the document’s emphasis was on better relations between North and South, and within the North itself.²⁴

The meeting between Lemass and O’Neill in 1965 would change the course of northern nationalism. The meeting presented McAteer with a dilemma. In this apparent détente between Dublin and Belfast, the Nationalist Party needed to be seen to respond. They could not afford to do otherwise. After ignoring the State for fifty years, the Nationalist Party accepted the title of Official Opposition in Stormont for the first time on 2 February 1965, less than three weeks after the O’Neill–Lemass meeting.²⁵ However, after a year of Official Opposition, the Nationalist Party were in a peculiar position. They were committed to remaining in Stormont, but realised they could never become even part of a coalition Government, and they had little influence on the legislation passed there. In fact, all they were doing was giving credibility to the Stormont system. By 1967 there seemed to be growing disillusionment among Catholics with the politics of old-fashioned nationalism. It was no longer reflecting their interests. When Fitt stood for the Westminster election in 1966, he commented, ‘I regard the fight in West Belfast as a battle between the rich and the poor – a struggle between the working class and the affluent society and this is the platform I will stand on.’²⁶ Hume likewise summed up the attitude of the new generation:

The crux of the matter for the younger generation is the continued existence, particularly among the Catholic community of great social problems of housing, unemployment and emigration. It is a struggle for priority in their minds between such problems and the ideal for a United Ireland … It may be that the present generation of younger Catholics in the North are more materialistic than their fathers but there is little doubt that their thinking is principally geared towards the solution of social and economic problems.²⁷

The social and economic situation of the 1960s – that is, higher levels of welfare provision and opportunities for employment – led to ‘a deep questioning of traditional Nationalist attitudes’.²⁸ The Nationalist Party could not have predicted that after 1965 Northern Ireland was about to enter a period of chaos and instability that was to produce a new style of politics. Reforming the Nationalist Party was more difficult than first thought. In 1965, the National Political Front developed into the National Democratic Party (NDP). The two aims of the NDP were to unite and to renew nationalism. While the Nationalist Party remained preoccupied with the single issue of partition, the emergence of the NDP allowed socio-economic issues to come to the fore. Initially merely a pressure group within nationalism, the NDP went on to become a political party in its own right. It fought the 1967 local government elections, and had twenty-eight candidates elected. The NDP organised and fought elections in areas that were not already dominated by the Nationalist Party – that is, areas east of the Bann – and the party had a significant support base in Belfast. The NDP also espoused the philosophy of ‘unity by consent’. It became a real alternative to Unionism and a genuine political threat to the Nationalist Party.²⁹ The contribution of the NDP to the intellectual evolution of nationalism is best demonstrated in its political organisation, its policies, and the electoral strategy of the party. Ian McAllister has argued that the NDP became the forerunner to the SDLP: as the NDP had developed a democratic political structure, based on parties south of the border, it contested elections in areas that had previously been uncontested by the Nationalist Party and it developed left-of-centre policies in relation to the economy and social issues.³⁰

Some within the Nationalist Party began to question the direction the party was going in and called for its complete overhaul. Among those were the Gormley brothers and Austin Currie.³¹ Patrick Gormley (Mid-Derry) was of the opinion that the atmosphere in the North had changed a lot. For the first time, there was room for positive politics and sectarian voting could become obsolete.³² Gormley argued in 1965:

At present there are 18 Opposition MPs in the Northern Ireland House of Commons but they represent a variety of political parties – Nationalists, Northern Ireland Labour, Republican Labour, Independent Labour, Liberal and Independent. These parties disagree mainly on the subject of partition. In my view, however, the partition argument is inessential at the moment. So long as it is kept up the Unionists will be happy. ³³

That same year, he commented:

The so-called Nationalist Movement has been more ideological than political in content. Instead of getting votes through emotional reaction to Unionism by presenting an ideology that is the direct opposite to Unionism we must seek positive electoral support for a realistic programme of political action. We must be prepared to face up to hard facts and accept them but not in defect … We have a positive contribution to make and we must fight to make it. While we still cherish our ultimate desire we must concentrate on advancement social, political and economic step by step. ³⁴

He had a likely supporter for these views in Austin Currie, who was elected as a Nationalist MP in East Tyrone in 1964. Currie had benefited from the 1947 Education Act, which provided opportunities for Catholics to attend university, and was a graduate from Queen’s University. He was articulate and unwilling to settle for a position of second-class citizenship, and perhaps affected to some degree by liberalising influences within Catholicism. According to Currie, nationalism needed to become less defensive and insular if it was to have any future in Northern Ireland: ‘A Catholic feels himself to be a second-class citizen … The result is that most Catholics have a ghetto mentality, a mentality which runs completely counter to the general outlook in the greatest international association there is. Catholics in the North are too ghetto-minded, too insular.’³⁵ Throughout his 1964 campaign Currie had stressed the necessity for a new approach to be taken by the nationalist community in Northern Ireland. He was one of the first to call for unity among the ‘nationally minded of the Six Counties’ and he advocated the creation of a political party capable of tackling the ‘bread and butter issues’ of unemployment and poor housing.

The civil rights campaign began in the mid-1960s as an attempt to draw attention to grievances felt by Catholics in Northern Ireland. The initial grouping, the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ), adopted the techniques of a pressure group, and wrote letters to MPs in the House of Commons in London and published a series of pamphlets. The letters and pamphlets set out their case that Catholics in the region were experiencing disadvantages in relation to public sector housing and jobs, and also because of certain electoral practices. The campaign became a mass movement in 1967 when the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was founded in Belfast. The main objectives of NICRA were: universal adult suffrage in local government elections, the end to ‘gerrymandered’ electoral boundaries, the allocation of public housing to be on the basis of need, repeal of the Special Powers Act, the disbanding of the ‘B-Specials’, the end to discrimination in employment, and a system to deal with complaints of discrimination.³⁶ It began to lobby for support for its aims but quickly resorted to protest action on the streets of Northern Ireland.³⁷

Millions of words have been written on the civil rights movement, from instant journalistic accounts to analyses by political scientists and sociologists, and more recently, by historians who are now challenging the dominant narratives of the movement, such as Simon Prince, who maintains that while Northern Ireland was different, it was not exceptional. Thirty years of virtual war while the rest of the Continent experienced a period of uneasy peace has encouraged some people, he argues, to forget that Northern Ireland has always been part of Europe. According to Prince, Northern Ireland should be compared to France and West Germany, not to apartheid-era South Africa and Israel-Palestine.³⁸ Prince also argues that the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was part of the rising tide of radicalism that swept the Continent during the 1960s. This, however, has often been obscured in accounts of both the global revolt of 1968 and the origins of the ‘Troubles’.³⁹ Brian Hanley and Scott Millar argue that the Official IRA was key to the founding of NICRA. Although there were various bodies – the CSJ, the Wolfe Tone Society, various ad hoc housing committees – and individuals, the fact is, the authors contend, that the commander of the IRA in Belfast, Billy McMillen, was on the executive of NICRA, the first executive, and the Official IRA was present right throughout its existence. Republicans were on the NICRA executive and republicans were important, particularly at a local level and across a lot of rural Ulster. In the 1980s, the ‘official’ history of the movement would have stressed that the movement had sought to unite Protestants and Catholics. But if you look at what republicans said at the time, Millar and Hanley suggest, they saw it as a way of ending partition – to demoralise, split, and divide unionism.⁴⁰

The civil rights movement provided an opportunity for the Nationalist Party to shake off the ‘Green Tories’ image it had in the public eye. Brendan Lynn has argued that although McAteer wanted to modernise the Nationalist Party, his tenure as leader was marked by caution over party reorganisation and a sceptical attitude to the civil rights movement.⁴¹ Indecision on this issue cast away the Nationalists’ last chance to reassert their dominant role in deciding in what direction the energies of the North’s Catholics should be directed. While the civil rights movement had nominally helped the Nationalist Party in that it tried to create a tolerant, conciliatory atmosphere, in practice it was a threat, firstly because it articulated politically what the Nationalist Party said party-politically and hence made constitutional, electoral channels irrelevant. Secondly, the movement attracted moderate Catholics and undermined their loyalty to the Nationalist Party by fostering disillusionment towards established political parties.

At the same time, Pat Walsh argues that in the decade between 1964 and 1974, Catholic politics in the North might have become something other than nationalist for the first time in sixty years.⁴² There was a good chance, with all the rhetoric and political language of civil rights and social and economic concerns, that politics might develop along the lines of Left and Right. Rumpf and Hepburn argue that one of the clearest characteristics of anti-partitionist politics between 1945 and 1969 was the total rift between Belfast and the rest of Northern Ireland. Relations between the city anti-partitionists and their rural associates had never been very good, except when Nationalist MP Joe Devlin’s Ancient Order of Hibernians had been able to paper over the cracks.⁴³ The Northern Ireland Labour Party seemed poised to benefit from these changes in the minority political mind-set. The party had its roots in the Belfast Labour Party. It found its support among the Belfast working class, and attracted both a Catholic and a Protestant following. Initially the NILP did not take a position on the constitutional question, but in 1949, at a special conference, it resolved ‘to maintain unbroken the connection between Great Britain and Northern Ireland as part of the Commonwealth’.⁴⁴ Following this decision, many anti-partitionists left the party to form various independent and republican labour groups, such as the Republican Labour Party (RLP).

As Rumpf and Hepburn suggest, labour politics in Catholic Belfast since 1945 were a complicated mixture of parliamentary and city council matters, in which paper labels can be more confusing than helpful.⁴⁵ The RLP was formed in 1953 by Harry Diamond, but its biggest personality was Gerry Fitt, who was elected to Westminster in 1966. Fitt’s first political encounter came when he acted as an election agent for Jack Beattie, a republican socialist politician in Belfast. The party emerged from the NILP, as an anti-partitionist alternative to it, and espoused the left-wing republicanism of the executed 1916 leader, James Connolly. However, to suggest that the RLP was a properly organised political party is to over-emphasise its support. The party was mainly based around the personality of Fitt, and he determined the its policies. Rumpf and Hepburn argue that the RLP was able to bring the socialist republican arguments of Connolly into play when necessary, but it relied far more for support on its own efforts and individual popularity than on any formal trade union backing, while its socialism, unlike Connolly’s, would scarcely have alarmed the most moderate member of the British Labour Party.⁴⁶ The RLP only had support in the Belfast area and did not contest elections west of the Bann. Between 1953 and 1969, it only ever had two members in Parliament.⁴⁷ The highest number of candidates they stood in an election was five, in the 1969 election. The party received 3.8 per cent of the total vote in 1969, which was the highest it ever received. Gerry Fitt was the only RLP MP elected for Westminster; he was elected in 1966. With his non-sectarian rhetoric and his emphasis on social issues, very much in the style adopted by Joe Devlin in his later years, he was able to appeal effectively to the new Labour Government at Westminster.⁴⁸

Fitt’s republicanism, however, was entirely internal and personal, freeing him from bondage to any flag. He manned a polling station for Sinn Féin in the 1958 Belfast Corporation elections, in the middle of their 1956–62 campaign. He later explained away this liaison with Sinn Féin: ‘I would have worked with anybody that got up and after the Unionist … Sinn Féin then wasn’t like it is now.’⁴⁹

The NILP enjoyed a renewed surge in support in the late 1950s and early 1960s. All Labour victories in Northern Ireland elections between 1921 and 1969 had been in Belfast, and all but one since 1945.⁵⁰ In the 1958 Westminster election, it won four seats in Belfast constituencies, its highest number ever.⁵¹ The NILP even became the Official Opposition when Nationalist MPs decided not to occupy the position. The four MPs retained their seats in 1962, with increased majorities. The crisis in Belfast shipbuilding and marine engineering employment, which shrank by 11,500, or 40 per cent, between 1961 and 1964, inflicted much pain on politically important Protestant working-class communities.⁵² During this time, the NILP saw its vote rise to almost 77,000.⁵³ This working-class breakthrough at Stormont led to the resignation of Brookeborough as Prime Minister in 1963. When Terence O’Neill took over, it seemed he could not curb the growth of Labour politics in the North. Although the party did not secure any seats in the 1964 Westminster election, ten NILP candidates secured a total of 103,000 votes, or 16.1 per cent of the total vote.⁵⁴ With the Labour Party in Britain also returning to power, the possibility of politics in Northern Ireland developing along the British party lines of Left and Right, as opposed to the religious allegiances of Orange and Green, was a double worry for O’Neill. On one hand, he was afraid that the NILP would drain Protestant support away from the Unionist Party, and on the other, they had very influential and powerful friends in Westminster. However, there was no real cause to worry, as politics in Northern Ireland remained an anomaly within the context of Britain. The NILP’s inability to compete with the Unionist Party on the constitutional issue meant that its electoral support was transient and vulnerable to rapid erosion in periods of communal tension.⁵⁵ In addition, O’Neill began a campaign of economic modernisation in order to steal some of the NILP’s clothes, and so a snap Stormont election in 1965 saw the NILP seats reduced to two and a reassertion of Protestant populism – identified with Ian Paisley.

The civil rights movement was an opportunity for Labour politics to reassert itself in the North. The NICRA espoused a just and equal society for all and contained within it much labourist rhetoric, as well as references to ‘British rights for British citizens’. Yet, when it came to the 1969 election, or to the civil rights movement, the NILP was too slow to shake off the sectarianism that prevailed among the Belfast working class. Although individual members of the NILP, such as Paddy Devlin, supported the civil rights movement, the party did not give its official backing until May 1969. Even at that point there was much debate within the party on such a resolution. For the NILP, civil rights was as dangerous an issue as the constitutional question had been in 1949. As an editorial in the Irish News commented, ‘As workers for a socialist system designed to sweep away inequalities and injustices inherent in the capitalist system it was surely incongruous for it to stand officially aside from a movement seeking to do away with some very definite inequalities in our society.’⁵⁶ On this aspect, the civil rights movement had taken over most of the policies of the party, and one NILP member commented that the NILP had become ‘so moderate and so middle-of-the-road that events had left it behind so that in the general election there had been very little difference between pro-O’Neill and Labour party policies’.⁵⁷

Aaron Edwards argues that the NILP could well have avoided being brushed to the side by the civil rights movement had three ingredients remained consistent in the six months after August 1968. Firstly, had the NILP emerged to expose the political calculation of Nationalist politicians attaching themselves to the civil rights agenda for narrow political purposes it might well have copper-bottomed the loss of those Catholic supporters who were now flocking to the beat of a tribal drum. Secondly, had the party actually come out in support of those individual members (that is, Austin Currie, Gerry Fitt, and Betty Sinclair) who led the marches and addressed the rallies on the firm basis of officially endorsed NILP policy, then it might have been in a much better position when jockeying for votes in those inner-city areas where the newly formed nationalist parties had emerged. Lastly, if the British Labour Party had actually ‘responded to the promptings of the NILP in the 1960s it might have applied the necessary pressure on O’Neill to carry out reforms speedily’.⁵⁸

Ulster at the crossroads

Although Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, by convention issues relating to Northern Ireland were not debated at Westminster; they were to be dealt with by the local Stormont Government.⁵⁹ Despite the fact that under Section 75 of the Government of Ireland Act (1920), Westminster could intervene in Northern Irish affairs at any time, the British Government was usually content to leave well enough alone. During the 1964 general election campaign, Wilson had promised to tackle discrimination in Northern Ireland.⁶⁰ However, it was not until the election of Fitt that the spotlight was shone on the discriminatory practices there. One of Fitt’s greatest achievements was breaking this convention in Stormont and he can be credited with advancing the aims of the civil rights movement in Britain. Consequently, he became the main spokesperson for Catholics in Northern Ireland. The North did receive more attention from Westminster between 1964 and 1968, including London putting pressure on O’Neill to deal with discrimination, but it was not a sustained policy. Although the increased interest by the Labour Party led to the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU) – a loose alliance of Labour MPs spearheaded by Fenner Brockway and Paul Rose, and cultivated by Gerry Fitt in Belfast – a Westminster intervention would have seriously drained the Wilson premiership’s limited reserves of time, energy, and authority, and it was well known that embroilment in Irish affairs had derailed other reforming ministers.⁶¹ While O’Neill continued to make noises of reform, including his rapprochement with the Dublin Government and language of ecumenism, he came under hardline pressure from within his own Cabinet and general unionist population for these largely symbolic gestures.

The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association did not begin at a certain time and place. Rather, it evolved from a diverse set of political aims and ideals that slowly came together to forge a unity based on a common frustration with Unionism, a broad rejection of crude Nationalism and a growing awareness of the need for an effective vehicle for political and legislative reform.⁶² With the rise of the race relations question in Britain, British politics had become sensitised to the problem of discrimination.⁶³ John Whyte’s judgement on how much discrimination there was in Northern Ireland is probably fairest: ‘the picture is neither black nor white but a shade of grey … [But in the west of the province] the greyness of the picture … changes to an ominous darkness’.⁶⁴ It was precisely because the issue of discrimination was thus localised that the civil rights movement had its origins in Tyrone and Derry, and not in Belfast where one would expect. This geographical division would reoccur in nationalism in the future. The civil rights marches in Tyrone in August 1968 and Derry on 5 October 1968 changed the parameters of the political situation. The Derry march ended in violence, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) batoning civil rights protesters off the streets: most prominently, Gerry Fitt.

By October 1968 the Unionist Government was in retreat. O’Neill was in trouble on several fronts. Inside the Cabinet there was opposition to the Minister for Home Affairs William Craig’s heavy-handed tactics in dealing with the Derry march, an opposition not based on humanitarian grounds, but founded rather on the adverse publicity that the incidents received. Television and the media had an enormous influence on the course events took after 5 October. O’Neill was aware that Derry had