The IRA was wrong from 1970 - Village Magazine

October-November 2024 59

The IRA was wrong from 1970

Those behind the provocative

Burntollet civil rights march of

1969 have miswritten the history

of IRA violence

By Anthony Coughlan

e recently celebrated the

thirtieth anniversary of the

August 1994 IRA ceaseﬁre. As

I was involved myself in the

1960s Northern Ireland civil

rights movement before the Provisional

“armed struggle” commenced, I have a

particular interest in the causes of the Troubles.

Sinn Féin people seem to belive that the IRA’s

military campaign was in some way necessary

or inevitable in order to advance the political

position of the Nationalist community of the

North to where it is today.

A recent piece in the Irish Times by Mark

Hennessy and Gerry Moriarty, ‘Thirty years

after the ceasefire, former IRA members

believe the battle of history is being won’, for

example, cites this belief and then states: “The

contrary argument is that the civil rights

campaign, the SDLP’s peaceful politics,

together with demographic change, would

have left Northern nationalists roughly where

they are now, minus 30 years of conﬂict and

3,700 deaths”. A reply by former Ireland rugby

player, Trevor Ringland, a unionist, reﬂects its

Burntollet:1

OPINION

headline, ‘IRA campaign was not about civil

rights. It was about driving people such as me

“into the sea”’.

Reﬂecting on these perspective, it is my

opinion that Northern Nationalists – and

indeed many quondam Unionists – would be

not just where they are today but they would be

in a far more politically advanced position than

they are now if the peaceful civil rights

approach alone had been followed from 1969

onwards.

The issue of whether the Provisional IRA

campaign was inevitable or necessary to

advance Northern Nationalism politically is

likely to be much debated as a United Ireland

becomes possible due to changing

demography. The debate may well be relevant

in the upcoming General Election here because

government parties are hostile to Sinn Féin’s

nationalism.

Contemporary Sinn Féin’s agenda has

attempted to invent a respectable ‘myth of

origin’ for itself: namely, that the Provisional

IR A campaign was in some way the continuation

of the 1960s Northern Civil Rights Movement,

that the civil rights campaigners of that time

were ‘beaten oﬀ the streets’ by the Paisleyites,

the ultra-Loyalists and the British, and that the

Provisional Movement from which Sinn Féin

derives, came into being to ‘defend the people’

and to advance further the reforms which the

Civil Rights Movement had been seeking but

which the British Government denied.

The most cursory examination of the

historical facts will show that this contention

has no basis whatever. Unfortunately, most

people either do not know or have forgotten

the facts of those years, and it would be useful

if the media, particularly old hands, would

strive to enlighten them.

One reason for this ignorance is that,

unfortunately, there is no decent book on the

Northern Civil Rights Movement — which

preceded the Provisional IRA campaign – to do

justice to its diverse elements, including the

important solidarity movement in Britain at the

time. Bob Purdie, Dr Conn McCluskey,

Eamon McCann, Bernadette Devlin, Simon

Prince and others have all written books on

aspects of the 1960s Northern Civil Rights

VillageOctNov24.indb 59 03/10/2024 14:27

60 October-November 2024

very independent-minded one. He and his

associates, it seems, must be denied credit for

any worthwhile political achievements.

I quote just three instances of the

Association’s work. When I lived in London in

the late 1950s and during the time I was full-

time organiser for the Connolly Association in

1960-61, it succeeded in getting over half the

British Parliamentary Labour Party to send

telegrams to Northern Prime Minister Lord

Brookeborough calling for the release of

Republican internees in Belfast – some 200 of

whom had been imprisoned there without

charge or trial for years.

In 1961-62 the Connolly Association

organised three marches across England

calling for civil-liberties reforms in Northern

Ireland. These were historically the first

marches for Northern civil rights, although

they took place in Britain rather than the North.

This solidarity campaign went on all during the

1960s. In 1966 Stormont Prime Minister

Terence O’Neill had an exchange of letters with

the Association, which showed how aware of,

and how concerned about this campaign he

and the Northern Unionist Government were.

Material relating to all of this is now available

on the Desmond Greaves Archive website at

www.desmondgreavesarchive.com and in

particular in Greaves’s two-million-word

‘Journal’ and his ‘Table Talk’, which I have

edited as his literary executor. Some fourteen

relevant items may be found under the

“Articles/ Northern Ireland Civil Rights” sub-

section of this site. Historian Dr Michael Quinn

is currently writing Greaves’s biography.

Doubtless these and related matters will be

mulled over by various parties in the time

ahead, especially in the context of Sinn Fein’s

policy evolution vis-a-vis the North with the

upcoming General Election coming to

dominate.

as one of containing IRA ‘terrorism’.

What brought about such a change in such

a relatively short time?

Clearly one factor was the Republican split

in January 1970, the formation of the

Provisional IRA and its embarking on a

militarist course. The other factor was the

change of British Government in June 1970,

just six months following the Republican split,

when Harold Wilson’s Labour administration

was replaced by Edward Heath’s Tories. From

the start Heath’s Government adopted a hard-

line pro-Unionist policy which gave rise to the

Falls Road curfew of July 1970, the Ballymurphy

massacre of August 1971, Brian Faulkner’s

introduction of internment without trial that

same month and Bloody Sunday in Derry in

January 1972 – four crucial incidents which

gave mass momentum to the newly formed

Provisionals.

Provisional IRA policy and British

Government policy thus mirrored one another

from 1970 onward.

On another relevant point, any decent study

of the Northern Civil Rights Movement needs

to do justice to the solidarity work in Britain

which led to Labour Premier Harold Wilson

being put under signiﬁcant pressure from his

backbenchers to introduce civil rights reforms

in the North during the 1960s. In 1949, at the

time of the Ireland Act, British Labour was

overwhelmingly behind Ulster Unionism. In

1969, twenty years later, it was signiﬁcantly

otherwise. This was primarily due to the work

of the Connolly Association and of Desmond

Greaves, editor of its monthly paper, the Irish

Democrat.

The Connolly Association’s work is usually

either ignored or downplayed by

commentators. I believe that this is mainly

because Greaves was a communist, even if a

Wilson’s Labour Government insisted on

one-man-one-vote and various other civil-

rights reforms following the civil-rights

marches of 1968 and it put pressure on the

Northern Ireland Government to introduce

these. The Provisional Movement was not

formed until over a year later

Burntollet:2

movement, but none gives an adequate overall

picture.

A look at the facts will show that Prime

Minister Harold Wilson’s Labour Government

insisted on one-man-one-vote and various

other civil rights reforms following the civil

rights marches of August, October and

November 1968 and that it put pressure on the

Northern Ireland Government of Unionist Prime

Minister Captain Terence O’Neill to introduce

these.

The Provisional Movement was not formed

until over one year later – in December 1969 in

the case of the IRA, and in January 1970 in the

case of Provisional Sinn Féin.

Moreover, the Provisional movement when

founded was under the leadership of Seán Mac

Stíofáin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and their ilk, who

were committed to a militaristic course from

the start, and British Government policy played

right into their hands. In 1968 Gerry Adams

was a mere 20-year-old bartender in the York

Bar, Belfast, and it took nearly 20 years before

he and his colleagues came to lead the

Provisionals and embarked on the ‘peace

process’.

One reason why journalistic treatment of the

Northern Civil Rights Movement is generally so

inadequate is that it relies excessively on the

analysis of Eamon McCann, Bernadette Devlin

and Co. The fact that the former is himself a

well-known journalist is probably relevant

here. Both of them were of course signiﬁcantly

involved at that time, but in the People’s

Democracy movement which organised the

Burntollet march of January 1969. This is

generally agreed to have raised the sectarian

temperature in the North significantly,

contributing in turn to the anti-Catholic

explosion of August 1969 – so that its

participants have an interest in justifying that

event.

The Burntollet march was held in deﬁance of

the call by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights

Association in late 1968 to have a moratorium

on provocative marches in order to give Terence

O’Neill’s reform programme a chance, or to

enable the Northern Ireland public to assess

what it amounted to.

May I suggest that one way of answering the

important question whether the Provisional

‘armed struggle’ was inevitable and who was

primarily responsible for what happened as a

result of it, is to look at the period like this: In

1969 British public opinion, and indeed

opinion around the world, was overwhelmingly

on the side of the Northern Nationalists and the

Civil Rights Movement. It was universally

recognised in that year that Northern Catholic

Nationalists had been getting a raw deal, and

Ian Paisley and the Unionist ultras were in the

dog-house.

Just two years later, however, in 1971, that

situation was virtually completely reversed.

The Northern problem was now seen primarily

Burntollet:3

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