PEOPLE'S DEMOCRACY -- Stormont Watch

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, [7], 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: Mon, Apr 21 2008, 17:01:55 PDT
Author: www.civilrights1968.com
Subject: PEOPLE'S DEMOCRACY
In reply to: OBITUARY 's message, "Re: "Mother of the Civil Rights" 1908-2008" on Mon, Apr 21 2008, 14:46:10 PDT

Download the original attachment
The Peoples Democracy

1968 was the year of student protests around the world. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations were in full swing on campuses across the United States. In February the installation of a new reformist government in Communist Czechoslovakia unleashed the Prague Spring, a torrent of debates, mass meetings and protests by students and workers. In May students occupied the Sorbonne University in Paris and started an uprising that nearly toppled the government of General De Gaulle until it was crushed by the batons and CS gas of the French riot police.

In August students and youth activists protesting at the Vietnam War besieged the Democratic Party�s National Convention in Chicago and were beaten off the streets by the police. And in the same month Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring experiment. Crowds of students confronted the tanks and one of their number, Jan Palac, burned himself to death in the centre of the city in protest at the invasion.

Students and young people around the world were caught up in a spirit of revolt and students at Queens University in Belfast were affected by the global trend as well. A number of Queens students had been on the October 5th march in Derry and when they got back to Queens and told their story, a mass march of students to Belfast City Hall was organised for a couple of days later.

The RUC prevented the marchers from reaching the City Hall and the angry students returned to Queens and set up an organisation called Peoples Democracy to campaign for the Civil Rights demands. Following the example of the students in the Sorbonne, the Peoples Democracy held structureless mass meetings with no executive committee or formal leadership and there was often intense political debate between �radicals� and �moderates� over strategy and tactics.

The Peoples Democracy students threw themselves into the Civil Rights campaign with great energy and enthusiasm. Borrowing from their continental counterparts they set up poster workshops and churned out hundreds of posters, leaflets and stickers. After a week or two they got to march to the City Hall and they took part in all the Civil Rights marches outside Belfast. They also fanned out across Northern Ireland holding meetings in towns and villages and setting up local Civil Rights Committees. And on 24th October, they staged a sit-in in the Great Hall of the Stormont Parliament, plastering it with Civil Rights stickers.

PD was very determinedly non-sectarian and, initially at least, contained many students from Protestant and Unionist as well as Catholic and nationalist backgrounds.

When Prime Minister O�Neill announced his reform package, Peoples Democracy condemned it as inadequate, particularly because it did not concede the key demand of �One Man, One Vote�. And while NICRA and the Derry Citizens Action Committee called a halt to demonstrations until 9th January 1969 in response to O�Neill�s Crossroads appeal, PD decided to go ahead with a four-day march from Belfast to Derry starting on 1st January.

The march was modelled on a key march by the US Civil Rights movement from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama three years earlier. The Selma march had helped to push the US administration into introducing the Voting Rights Act, which gave black people equal voting rights in the Southern US states.

The decision was controversial both in Queens and the wider Civil Rights movement. It was only confirmed after a series of contradictory votes in Queens and NICRA and the Derry CAC criticised the decision though once the march got under way, they reluctantly supported it.

The march was legal. It had not been banned by the authorities but it was harassed and blocked by hardline unionist counter-demonstrators from entering most of the towns along the route. On the final day it was ambushed by a cudgel-wielding crowd of opponents at Burntollet Bridge as it neared Derry City. Many of the marchers, who now included a lot of local young people, were beaten and some of them were driven into a nearby river.

A number of the attackers were members of the B Specials, the RUC auxiliary force, and the RUC who were escorting the march completely failed to prevent the attack even though the attackers had been gathering at the ambush site for several hours before the marchers arrived. On the night the march arrived in Derry, a group of RUC men invaded the Bogside area of the city breaking windows in the houses and shouting sectarian abuse.

The assault on the marchers outraged many Civil Rights supporters and dramatic TV footage of the attack had a major impact in Britain and further afield, reminding viewers that the Northern Ireland problem had not been resolved.

Reactions to the Burntollet march were divided. The Prime Minister criticised the marchers almost as trenchantly as their attackers. A Government appointed Commission of Inquiry, which acknowledged that most of the Civil Rights grievances were justified, condemned strongly condemned the march, saying it had polarised the community in Northern Ireland. Some people in the Civil Rights movement felt that Prime Minister O�Neill should have been given more time to sell the need for reform to his hostile backbenchers. Others felt that the march had helped to focus attention on the demand for One Man One Vote, which the Prime Minister conceded a couple of weeks later.

Bernadette Devlin (now McAliskey), who had become the best known member of Peoples Democracy and who was prominent on the Burntollet march, was elected to the Westminster Parliament three months later, becoming the youngest MP since William Pitt the Younger was elected in 1781.

The Aftermath

After Burntollet, Civil Rights marches began again with, for the first time, violence by angry marchers in Newry a week later when they were blocked from entering the centre of the town. Captain O�Neill apparently wanted to step down around this time but was persuaded to stay on by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Opposition leader Ted Heath. They feared he might be replaced by a more rightwing Unionist leader whose actions might force London to intervene directly in Northern Ireland.

After persuading his parliamentary party to back One Man One Vote in January, O�Neill called a snap general election on 24th February to strengthen his position. The result was confused. A number of the Civil Rights leaders were elected to the Northern Ireland Parliament providing a stronger and more effective opposition but on the Unionist side, O�Neill failed to get the endorsement he was seeking. He resigned shortly afterwards, to be replaced by Major Chichester-Clark who was more acceptable to hardline backbenchers but who pledged to carry out the same policies as O�Neill.

Chichester�Clark�s government introduced a stringent Public Order Bill to curtail protest marches and demonstrations. Civil Rights marches continued but with less effect while the new Civil Rights MPs sought to use the parliamentary process to press their demands. But tensions were increasing on the streets, especially during the summer Orange Order marching season. Eventually there was a major outbreak of rioting and violence in Derry and Belfast over the annual Apprentice Boys parade in Derry in August 1969.

The British government sent in the army to control the situation but after a couple of months of relative calm, the conflict resumed in a new, but different and much more violent, form.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]