War and an Irish Town

By Eamonn McCann

“Few could quarrel with the publisher’s description of this as a classic.” —Books Ireland

“So honest, so human and so readable.” —Irish Times

McCann’s account of what it is like to grow up a Catholic in a Northern Irish ghetto—first published in 1974—quickly became a classic account of the feelings generated by British rule. The author was at the center of events in Derry which first brought Northern Ireland to world attention. He witnessed the gradual transformation of the civil rights movement from a mild campaign for “British Democracy” to an all-out military assault on the British state.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Oct 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781608469758

Eamonn McCann

Eamonn McCann has been campaigning for social justice in Derry  for more than 40 years. A lifelong socialist and trades unionist, he is  a member of the National Executive of the NUJ and of the Northern  Ireland Committee of the ICTU.  He has campaigned against militarism and war since the days of CND  and the Vietnam protests, and was among those who successfully  took non-violent direct action against the bomb-makers Raytheon.  He is chairman of the Bloody Sunday Trust and a member of Amnesty  International and of the Rail lobby, Into the West. 

Book preview

War and an Irish Town

War

and an Irish Town

Eamonn McCann

Third Edition

With a new introduction by the author

Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

Copyright © Eamonn McCann, 1974

Introduction to Haymarket edition © Eamonn McCann, 2018

First published 1974 by Penguin Books

This edition published in 2018 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-975-8

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,

[e-mail]

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Printed in Canada by union labor.

Library of Congress CIP Data is available.

Introduction

to the Haymarket edition

One of the loudest cheers I ever heard in the Bogside came in response to the cry: ‘The whole black nation has to be put together as a black army. and we’re gonna walk on this nation, we’re gonna walk on this racist power structure and we’re gonna say to the whole damn government—STICK ’EM UP MOTHERFUCKER, this is a hold up, we’ve come for what’s ours . . .’

The declaration was the last item in the ten-point programme of the Black Panther Party, enunciated in rich, booming R&B tones on the soundtrack of a film projected against the gable which was later to become Free Derry Wall, in the small hours of a riotous night in 1969.

The cheer had as much to do with the daring of the language as with the sentiment of the slogan. But it also signalled the extent to which civil rights campaigners at that time felt an association with the Panthers, then under murderous assault by the feds and local police forces across the US.

The international dimension has virtually been written out of history. The North is scarcely mentioned in accounts of sixties revolutionism, even by some who came among us to be pictured at barricades, clenched fists on militant show.

To insist now on the relevance of internationalism is to venture onto ground which has been little disturbed by the stride of standard-issue chroniclers who assume that Northern Ireland can be understood entirely and in no other terms than Protestant versus Catholic, Orange against Green. This applies particularly to players and commentators who marched lock-stepped and bulging with self-satisfaction towards the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, perhaps hymning Harry Chapin’s Flowers Are Red: ‘Flowers are red, young man / Green leaves are green / There’s no need to see flowers any other way / Than the way they always have been seen.’

The main Unionist and Nationalist parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, are, naturally, insistent that the construction of mainstream politics around the idea of communal identity is natural, inevitable, unchangeable, and that any alternative perspective—based, say, on class—is fanciful and futile.

Given the dominant politics of the architects of the Agreement, it’s scarcely surprising that it was shaped so as to allocate every citizen of the North to either the Orange or the Green camp and then to build a system of checks and balances, blandishments and vetoes, to ensure that neither side could take advantage of the other in the future. It required and formalised sectarianism, now to be characterised by peaceful competition rather than hostile confrontation.

To argue that the settlement was pre-programmed to deadlock, and that abrasion of the interfaces would always have a potential to spark off new conflagration, was to invite denunciation that you were an opponent of peace. The war was over. We now had the tools to create a contented peace. Stop stirring.

True, the level of violence plummeted after the Agreement and this is widely advertised as having resulted from the pact. On the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Agreement in April 2018, the notables involved in its negotiation were hailed as heroes of peace as they paraded across the front pages. These included the greed-fuelled warmonger Tony Blair and notorious sex abuser Bill Clinton. The fact that prominent feminists were among the delighted crowd as Clinton was made a Freeman of Belfast testified to the depth of the awe in which the Agreement was held.

‘Say what you like, he helped bring us peace.’

Peace is precious. But it’s fair to say that virtually all who questioned the Agreement on account of its consolidation of sectarianism, including many who were not neutral between supporters and opponents of the Northern State and the British interests which sustained it, had never been in favour of armed conflict in the first place.

The main reason the Agreement came about is that the section of society which had borne the brunt of the conflict, the working class, Catholic and Protestant, had no stomach for continuation of the slaughter. The peace process was a bottom-up phenomenon rather than handed down by a beneficent elite.

The hope of the Derry activists who had triggered the civil rights campaign in the late 1960s that we could obliterate the colour-coding of Northern politics had apparently come to nothing. The glimpse we thought we had had of possibilities beyond the old limits of political thinking seemed to have been an illusion induced for our own comfort. My great friend Johnnie White, a socialist fighter all his life, including within Republican organisations, managed a tight smile through terrible pain in the last conversation we ever had: ‘Back then, McCann, 1969, that was the best.’

Back then the American connection had been important to us. I recall bringing back to New York the golden key to the city which Bernadette McAliskey (née Devlin) had received from Mayor John Lindsay and, on my first night in town, presenting it to Panther leader Robert Bay at a ceremony in Harlem which attracted a little media coverage. My friend the novelist Jimmy Breslin told me immediately that that had been ‘stupid. . . . You shoulda done that on your last night, not the first!’ By next morning, all thirteen of the speaking engagements arranged for me had been cancelled by their Irish American sponsors. One crusader for equality and civil rights in the North explained from Boston that I had associated the cause of Irish civil rights with ‘niggers’ and that this would prove disastrous. What US campaigners who had risked their lives and saw lives lost in voter-registration drives in the badlands of Alabama and thus inspired the movement in the North would have made of this isn’t hard to imagine: Up against the wall, motherfuckers.

The argument of the Left was that our natural allies in the United States ought surely to be those who, like us, were fighting against oppression. The counter-argument, not just from Irish Americans but from many civil rights ‘moderates’ at home, too, was that it made no sense to alienate powerful US interests, that to gratuitously introduce issues of injustice in the US would, as one prominent Bogside Republican put it to me, ‘split our support’. The effect was to strengthen significantly the argument that demands which went wider than a rebalancing of community advantage were wrong-headed and to be discouraged.

The same consideration has more recently led supporters of gay rights in Ireland to travel to the US to march shoulder to shoulder with homophobe bigots on Paddy’s Day parades. Some who had railed against the occupation of Iraq sang dumb and stood grinning at shamrocked photo opportunities alongside George W. Bush. We need the White House to press the British to put pressure on the Unionists to make concessions to Nationalists, ran the same decrepit logic as we’d encountered in the sixties.

(The most sensible line on St. Patrick’s Day in the US that I’m aware of came from the splendid Sarah Silverman: ‘I go into my apartment, lock the door and spend the day laughing at Angela’s Ashes.)

On the morning after Donald Trump’s election as US president in November 2016, John Hume’s successor as leader of the impeccably moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Colum Eastwood, announced that he would not be attending the annual March 17th shindig at the White House while Trump remained resident. Within hours, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams announced that he’d certainly be at the party. (In the event, he wasn’t invited.) Sinn Fein members proclaimed that Eastwood had exposed his own naïvety. ‘We have to be strategic.’ Strategic—the favourite word of flannel merchants everywhere.

Similarly, there are those who style themselves anti-

imperialists but who couldn’t bring themselves to say boo to an arms company urging imperialist war for profit. When the Raytheon 9, members of the Derry Anti-War Coalition, myself among them, occupied and ‘decommissioned’ the arms company’s Derry plant in August 2006 in a successful effort to disrupt production of military equipment being used in Israel’s assault on Lebanon at the time, both the SDLP and Sinn Fein, self-proclaimed opponents of the arms trade and Israeli aggression, rejected all pleas to show support—because of the risk of alienating US business interests.

As with solidarity with the victims of racist inequality in the 1960s, opposition to imperialism and war profiteering is subjected to the needs of ‘our community’ vis-à-vis ‘the other side’. Not that ‘our community’ has benefited much—although, naturally, there have been political and personal benefits for some reformed radicals who managed successfully to flip-flop into the arms of the US ruling class.

To this extent, the flip-floppers can be said to have prospered. In contrast, the socialist adventurism of the late sixties is commonly presented as a brief flurry of sanguine naïvety. But that’s not the only possible analysis.

The ideas of internationalism and revolt from below which animated young people fifty years ago are, I dare say, more relevant in the globalised present than they were in the gone days of gas and barricades. It’s the current relevance of the global context which makes it important to see Northern Ireland in the late sixties not just in the perspective of Irish history but also against the background of war, tumult, and repression across the world.

As Johnnie had recalled in reverie in his last days of life, rampaging down Rossville Street shouting the same slogans as were rising from demonstrations in Chicago, London, Paris, Sydney—‘Two, four, six, eight / Organise and smash the state!’—had been a heady experience which all involved had hoped could be sustained. There had, no doubt, been an element of willed optimism in our high expectations. Maybe we’d been dizzied by the vastness of what seemed possible. But there was, too, reason to believe.

January 1968 saw uprisings in every city in Vietnam and the seizure by the National Liberation Front—‘Viet Cong’—of part of the US embassy in Saigon. The fact that an army of poor peasants could push back the forces of the greatest power on earth boosted the morale of anti-imperialists everywhere.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April. Thousands of young people stormed out from African American neighbourhoods to tear down symbols of the system and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the police. A few weeks later, at a sit-down protest on the lower deck of Craigavon Bridge across the Foyle, Finbar Doherty struck up a chorus of the song most associated with the US civil rights movement, ‘We Shall Overcome’. By the end of Roddy’s rendition, the crowd of a couple of hundred (it’s a very easy song to learn) was singly lustily along.

A week after King’s murder, there was a spasm of street demonstrations in West Germany following an attempted assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke. In May, Paris erupted. Students built barricades in the streets around the Sorbonne. Factories and offices emptied as workers struck in solidarity. The ten-million-strong stoppage was the biggest strike ever in Europe.

The following month, demonstrators in Yugoslavia laid siege to parliament in Belgrade—‘Down with the Red bourgeoisie’.

In August, thousands of Chicago cops attacked Vietnam War demonstrators outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Norman Mailer’s blood-and-guts account of the clash remains one of the great vivid pieces in the canon of American journalism. But the anti-war voice of the grassroots was drowned out by a roar of pro-war patriotism. Convention delegates with an anti-war mandate took the view—the same as that taken by Barack Obama in opposing the invasion of Iraq and then voting repeatedly for appropriations to fund the slaughter—that once the die was cast, no attitude was patriotically permissible other than to ‘support our boys’.

On October 2, students were massacred in droves by paramilitary police when they marched for democracy in Mexico City. A square near the university was left carpeted with corpses. Three days later, as I hesitated before speaking at a moment of incipient riot on our first civil rights march, a heckle came from a teenager: ‘What about the Mexican students, McCann?’ which psyched me into sudden realisation of how high the stakes were.

Each upsurge of struggle sent out a flurry of sparks which helped ignite struggle elsewhere. Everywhere, some who had become involved in protest politics on account of grievances particular to their own community or group saw that they were not alone.

Contrary to the views of the many who ditched their radicalism so as to reach respectability, internationalism is more relevant now than then—not because anti-capitalists wish it so but because capitalism itself, the never-ending source of our political ills, is more integrated on a global scale than ever. For socialists, the basis of internationalism has never depended on fellow feeling with struggles which coincide with or parallel our own—although that sentiment would be a good start—but in understanding that because those who run the world in the interests of the rich are organised across countries and continents, so must opponents of capitalism be if we are to confront them in appropriate array. We must see and understand those who struggle elsewhere along the same lines as ourselves not only as campaigners we sympathise with but as elements of the same entity, pitched against the same force, seeking the same end.

In this perspective, the idea of hobnobbing with the main architects of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan while avoiding contact with the US anti-war movement represents not a subtle strategy—‘They are not using us, we are using them’—but outright betrayal of the anti-war cause.

The same point emerges from consideration of the widening inequalities between the rich and the rest of us. The crisis of capitalism which shuddered the world in 2008 and brought the lines of class division into sharp relief is not amenable to solution in one country. The same banks, the same bail-outs, the same interlinked issues.

Likewise with the fight against racism and homophobia, for abortion rights, for the defeat of imperialist incursions by the United States, in solidarity with Chechens and others yearning for freedom from Russia, in defence of civil rights, jobs, wages, working conditions, and so on, in every struggle for liberty and justice, we are weakened when we shape our strategy to keep powerful interests onside.

This is particularly true in Northern Ireland, where neither the US nor any major power has a compelling strategic interest and so can feel free to give or withhold backing from this or that faction according to how they have behaved themselves.

You put your own struggle above all else, seek support from any interest willing to back your particular cause, irrespective of their record and role in other arenas, and you find yourself soon on the wrong side of the barricade.

It was a point made with sharpness and humour at a packed meeting commemorating the civil rights movement in Sandino’s pub on 4 November 2008—the night of Barack Obama’s election—by Emory Douglas, minister of culture in the Black Panther Party back in 1968 and one of the producers of the film projected onto Free Derry Wall. He and Billy X, the party’s archivist, were in Ireland for a series of meeting marking the fortieth anniversary of the parallel events in the North and across the Atlantic.

‘It’s a wonderful night, full of hope, and we have to hold on to the hope, so we can push for the things he (Obama) promised would come when he fails to deliver, as he will. Real change, if it comes, will come from below, just like here, just like anywhere.’

Billy X added: ‘Wall Street will still be there. The Israeli lobby will still be there. The chiefs of staff and the CIA, the industrialists, oil barons, the owners of the media, all of them still there. . . . All Obama has won is the presidency.’

We went back into the warm, where a couple of last-ditch drinkers of a certain age had moved on to a straggly verse of Phil Ochs’s great song about another US invasion we’d once marched against: ‘The fishermen sweat, they’re pausing at their nets, the day’s a-burning / As the warships sway and thunder in the bay, loud the morning / But the boy on the shore is throwing pebbles no more, he runs a-warning / That the marines have landed on the shores of Santo Domingo.’

If we hold on to the memory, draw out the lessons, the best is still to come.

The massacre in Derry of civil rights marchers by members of the Parachute Regiment on 30 January, 1972—fourteen dead, fourteen wounded—had a more powerful effect on politics in the North, especially in Derry, than any other incident since the foundation of the State in 1921.

A determined campaign by the families of the victims, the surviving wounded, and their supporters kept the issue alive until, in the late 1990s, the Dublin government took it on as its own. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, under relentless pressure from the families and other campaigners, eventually accepted that formal talks on new political arrangements could not begin in earnest without Bloody Sunday being first gotten out of the way.

The result came in January 1998 when Tony Blair announced a new Bloody Sunday Inquiry. This time, given the total lack of trust in British law following the 1972 ‘Widgery Whitewash’, the inquiry was to have an international dimension. The British law lord, Lord Saville of Newdigate, was to chair, alongside former New Brunswick (Canada) chief justice William Holt and former Australian High Court judge John Toohey. The holding of a second inquiry into events which had already been disposed of under the same legislation—the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act, 1921—was unprecedented: indeed, according to many legal experts, it was constitutionally impermissible. But then, when needs must, politics always trumps constitutional law.

The politics of Bloody Sunday arise from the way the atrocity differed from all the others commemorated on the gravestones which stand as milestones along the Via Dolorosa of our Troubles. The massacre was perpetrated not by any Orange or Green faction but by men of an elite regiment uniformed to represent the British State. It happened not by hidden bomb on a lonely road or furtive ambush in the dead of night or eruption of death into a crowded pub, but on open ground in broad daylight on a clear crisp day, closely observed by hundreds of witnesses, local residents and marchers who had converged on the area and now watched in distraught horror from windows and balconies or crouched around corners.

In the immediate aftermath it was widely believed, including by me, that the atrocity had been perpetrated at the prompting of the Unionist government at Stormont, where Prime Minister Brian Faulkner was under intense pressure both inside the party and outside it, in the person of Ian Paisley. They were demanding daily that something drastic be done to deal with the ‘no-go area’, aka Free Derry.

In fact, no evidence was to be found in the thousands of documents released by Saville to back this belief up. In contrast, there was no shortage of evidence that the operational plan had been drawn up by senior army officers, with no thought, good or bad, about Faulkner’s predicament. Bloody Sunday was a very British atrocity.

Memos between senior officers spelt it out that their rage against the Bogside had to with the damnable presumption of ‘hooligans’ in taking over an urban area and excluding the forces of law over a period of months. This was a profound insult to everything senior British officers held dear.

The Inquiry was a mammoth affair. Hearings began in March 2000, first in the Guildhall in Derry, then in London to facilitate soldiers and others who claimed that their lives would be at risk if they ventured to Derry. Statements were taken from 2,500 people, 924 of whom gave oral testimony. One hundred and sixty volumes of evidence running to 25 million words were considered, as well as thirteen volumes of photographs, 121 audiotapes, and 110 videotapes. The final cost was close on £200 million. Most of this went to lawyers. The message pounded out was that no stone was being left unturned in the assiduous search for truth.

Saville’s five-thousand-page report was published on 15 June 2010. It left a slight shadow of doubt over one victim but found positively that all the casualties had been innocent: none had been carrying a weapon or offering any threat when struck down. Without exception, the shooters who gave evidence were found to have perjured themselves.

The sea of shining faces that were gathered in Guildhall Square to watch the announcement from the Commons on a giant screen could have lit up a continent. Here, at last, was acknowledgement that the Bloody Sunday killings had been unlawful. This was the vindication that the families and their supporters had trekked towards for decades, and it was sufficient unto the day.

The fact that the phoney findings of the Widgery Inquiry had been overturned induced a sense of achievement as well as delight. But in time, calmer consideration and a colder eye put the report into different perspective. Saville, while giving the families almost all that they’d asked for, manipulated evidence to let senior politicians and military chiefs off the hook. The report was thus along more traditional lines than was allowed at the time. It didn’t deny British culpability but loaded the blame onto those at the bottom and protected those at the top. Thus, Prime Minister David Cameron, to wild applause in Guildhall Square, felt able to welcome the report while insisting that the reputation of the British army itself remained unsullied.

Cameron couldn’t have described the killings as ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’ had a finger of blame been pointed at, for example, Major General Robert Ford, Commander of Land Forces, Northern Ireland, at the time, or at Michael Jackson, adjutant on the day to Lt. Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, the unit which had carried out the killings.

Saville’s case against the shooters was that they’d breached orders in targeting citizens who posed no threat. He indicted Wilford for sending two companies too deep into the Bogside and allowing them to fight ‘a running battle’. According to Saville, these acts of indiscipline provided as full an account of the reasons for Bloody Sunday as it was possible to assemble from the evidence.

As ever, Kipling’s ‘poor bloody infantry’ was to take the rap.

Back in 2010, few Bloody Sunday campaigners had energy left to fight on, or even readiness to admit that there was anything left to fight on for. We’d had a result. We had been on the road for thirty-eight years. This was as good as it was going to get. In the moment, by and large, I shared this view. Anyway, it felt wrong to rain on the families’ parade. And yet . . .

I had missed fewer than a dozen of the 484 days of evidence and was uneasily aware that there was something missing. I spent a day and most of a night rereading the relevant transcripts, checking my memory against the record.

In a document included in the bundles of evidence released by the Inquiry, written on 7 January 1972 after a recce to Derry, Ford had declared himself ‘disturbed’ by what he regarded as the soft attitude of local army and police chiefs to the Bogside, and added: ‘I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders amongst the DYH (Derry Young Hooligans).’

Ford asked Belfast commander Frank Kitson—the British army’s top expert on counter-insurgency, author of the standard manual Low Intensity Operations—to release 1 Para to go to Derry to police the planned civil rights march and rally. Kitson readily agreed.

A fortnight later, six days before Bloody Sunday, Ford overruled objections to the use of paratroopers by Derry commander Brigadier Pat MacLellan and local police chief Frank Lagan. He remained obdurate as other senior Derry-based officers expressed alarm, to the startling extent in one case of phoning the aide de camp to the chief of the General Staff, Sir Michael Templar, in London to plead for Ford to be overruled.

On the day, although with no operational role, Ford travelled to Derry and took up position at the edge of the Bogside, shouting ‘Go on the paras!’ as they charged through a barbed-wire barricade towards Rossville Street.

Saville ruled that Ford ‘neither knew nor had reason to know at any stage that his decision would or was likely to result in soldiers firing unjustifiably. . . . It was also submitted that . . . the authorities . . . (the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland Governments and the Army) tolerated if not encouraged the use of unjustified lethal force; and that this was the cause or a contributory cause of what happened on Bloody Sunday. We found no evidence of such toleration or encouragement.’

This was perverse. Local newspapers were carrying regular complaints and editorial condemnations of unjustified violence by paratroopers. Numerous incidents suggested toleration if not encouragement of unjustified lethal force, specifically by 1 Para. The most egregious had occurred six months earlier when the same unit had been involved in killing eleven unarmed civilians in the Nationalist Ballymurphy area of West Belfast. There was no inquiry, apology, admission of guilt for that massacre.

What were the paras to believe but that what they’d done in Ballymurphy and elsewhere was acceptable to their commanders? Saville’s explanation that ‘we found no evidence’ of a ‘culture of tolerance’ of unlawful violence would be unremarkable if by ‘evidence’ he meant evidence to the Inquiry. But he had declined to examine prior events, flatly rejecting submissions from the families’ lawyers that he should take account of Ballymurphy.

The reason he had found no evidence was that he had decided not to look for such evidence.

When he read Saville’s report, General Sir Michael Jackson, too, must have heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief. Jackson was the man who had organised the cover-up. He had first testified to Saville in April 2003. Neither in his statement to the tribunal nor in oral evidence did he mention having compiled a list of the shots fired or of having written any account of the day.

The following month saw Major Ted Loden on the witness stand. He had been the commander of Support Company of 1 Para, which had fired all of the shots which killed or wounded. He described how, shortly after the killing spree ended, he had, one by one, taken down in his own hand statements from the soldiers

Reviews for War and an Irish Town

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I probably wouldn't have found this book without the aid of the excellent Left Book Club. I am so pleased that I did.We all know that politics in the west is played by the rules of divide and conquer. This was/is clearly the game in Ireland where the threat of those horrible Catholics/Protestants is enough to get the masses to accept whatever scraps the elite choose to permit them. This is a very well written history of the Irish 'troubles' from as near to a neutral source as one is likely to get.WELL WORTH THE READ!