Why, for fifty years, did nationalist people in our twisted corner of Ireland sit on their hands and do nothing? There were those who enlisted in the IRA and were part of its border campaign. Others, like Brendan Behan, crossed the Irish Sea to bomb Britain. But the great majority of Catholics looked at and /or experienced discrimination and gerrymander, and shrugged their shoulders. What was the point? You might as well shake your fist at a wet Sunday: nothing would change. And so for five decades Catholics sighed and clicked their tongues. Better to make jokes about the abuse of power than to get yourself in a lather when you were powerless.
So what happened between, say, 1964 and 1974, What stung the minority population here so that apathy became major protest and passivity became armed conflict?
Most historians date the radical change here from 1967, when the Civil Rights movement formed and took to the streets. Others point to October 5, 1968, when television cameras showed the rest of Ireland and the world what police brutality looked like up close. And of course it was RTÉ and not the BBC who had their cameras there to record the repression. The BBC was too busy planning its schedule to make sure there was adequate live coverage of the Twelfth marches.
But there was an earlier period – 1964 and early 1965- which showed the first signs that the wind was changing. That’s when the Lockwood Committee sat, pondering where a new university should be sited. The obvious choice was Derry, the second-largest city in the state. It even had an embryonic university already in Magee College, so the new university there would have had a ready-made foundation .
However, the decision involved several factors. Wherever it was located, the new university would have an economic as well as an educational impact. Businesses would develop around this focal point, new life would be injected into the area. Linked to these and the deciding factor for the Lockwood Committee was the population make-up of the university area. Derry had a two-thirds Catholic majority, and siting it there would not only encourage third-level education, it’d regenerate that Catholic city generally. Coleraine on the other hand had a 6:1 proportion of Protestants to Catholics. And so it was decided: Coleraine got the university.
Even the unionist mayor of Derry was appalled and said so. The deeply conservative Catholic Bishop of Derry, Dr Farren, voiced his disapproval. A dark-haired young man called John Hume became the chairman of a campaign to bring the university to Derry. Middle-class Catholics who had never protested at anything got into their cars and joined a cavalcade of vehicles to Stormont, making their feelings known. But none of that mattered – Coleraine still got the university. The protestors were taught a lesson some at least would not forget: peaceful protest doesn’t always work.
But what looked like outright defeat planted seeds. A couple of years later John Hume, Austin Currie, Seamus Mallon – Catholic men who, ironically, had benefited from third-level education in the sectarian state, organized the anger of the Catholic population and the Civil Rights movement was born.
What encouraged many Catholics then to press forward with protest was that the Catholic middle-class had openly challenged a decision by the state. Remember, that was a cavalcade of cars to protest at Stormont, and most working-class people back then didn’t have cars. Maybe middle-class Catholics had a vested interest in challenging the authorities on this educational decision. The children who successfully passed the Eleven Plus examination and went on to grammar school and university were mainly – and still are – middle class. And it was mainly middle-class Catholics who led the Civil Rights movement and eventually formed the SDLP.
When a state starts to lose the support of its middle-class, it’s in trouble. The organized protest over the university siting left unionism troubled. A few short years later, it would be faced with something more radical: the Troubles.
Today, there is a similar stirring in the Catholic middle class. The hopes of a new beginning that came with 1998 and the Good Friday Agreement have, it seems, been battered and shattered. Suspicions about corruption and incompetence, indignation about contempt for things Irish are widely held. Except speedy and decisive action is taken (what ever became of that RHI Inquiry report?), middle-class nationalism/republicanism will turn its gaze from Stormont and look toward Dublin for a new, borderless, equitable Ireland.
Comments are closed.