SAOIRSE32

Forty years ago today, a police baton charge signalled the start of the Troubles. One student on that march became an icon of rebellion. Where is she now? Cole Moreton meets… Bernadette McAliskey

Sunday Independent
Sunday, 5 October 2008

**There is a flash link to more stories about Bernadette onsite

Castro in a miniskirt, they called her. A “blazing star” and “an icon of the civil rights movement”. The female face of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Republican rebel immortalised in a huge mural on the side of a house in “Free Derry”. Tourists go to see it: wee, wild Bernadette Devlin shouting through a loudhailer as smoke billows over the barricade behind her. So who is this pensioner in a lilac cardie?

“There are people who think I’m dead,” she says cheerfully, sitting in an anonymous office on an industrial estate, in a small town west of Belfast. “I like that!”

But this really is the same woman who was elected to Parliament in 1969 aged 21, the youngest female MP ever. The one who was about to make a speech to marchers in Derry in January 1972 when the Parachute Regiment opened fire, killing 14 people on what became known as Bloody Sunday. The woman who was in the Commons the next day, to hear the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, say the Paras had acted in self-defence. She hurled herself across the floor of the House and slapped him hard on the face, yelling, “Murderous hypocrite!”

This diminutive 61-year-old is the same woman whose maiden speech was described – by opponents – as “brilliant” and “electrifying”. Listening to a broadcast of it, a young American scholar knew he wanted to be in politics. His name was Bill Clinton.

Even now, her legend is powerful: at the Cannes film festival this year a biopic of Devlin was announced, to be called The Roaring Girl. She will be played by Sally Hawkins, star of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, apparently. But not if Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (as she has been for years) gets her way. “The whole concept is abhorrent to me,” she says, revealing that her lawyers are challenging the film. “How dare anybody make a pretend life for me while I’m still living the real one?”

She hates dwelling on the past. “I am interested in now!” So she is unlikely to be among those marking the 40th anniversary today of the first major civil rights march ever to be held in Northern Ireland. “Why celebrate 40? You only do that if you’re so full of yourself you think something must be done before you die.”

McAliskey would rather talk about present-day issues, like the treatment of migrants who come to Northern Ireland looking for work. “Disgraceful,” she says, as the director of a charity that offers them advice and help. “People who know they’re not allowed to behave badly towards each other any more have found themselves a new target.” It is a question of human rights, she says. Most things are to Bernard, as she calls herself. Most other people are wrong too, it seems, as she rages among the case files and pot plants. The Good Friday Agreement led to “fleece and consternation, not peace and reconciliation”. The “smoke and mirrors peace” was bought with European money: “The decent unemployed couldn’t cross the road for being offered work!”

She says it all with the sly look of someone who loves a battle, just like the old days … but I asked to see her. Not the other way round. She cherishes her relative obscurity, and only agreed to talk about the work of the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme (Step), the network of groups and campaigners she directs from this office in Dungannon. “I’m not interested in all that ‘those were the days’ stuff.”

She can’t help herself, though. McAliskey loves to talk. The march in Derry on 5 October 1968 was, she says, “the beginning of it all. I can still see, in my mind, the absolute hatred on the faces of police officers. My understanding of the society I was in was irrevocably changed.”

It had been organised by the newly formed Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, to protest at discrimination against Catholics. Some participants have admitted they were trying to provoke the authorities. Not her. “Until then I thought of policemen as the ones who kept the rowdy drinkers in line at my grandmother’s pub.”

Newspaper reports described a baton charge by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. “This wasn’t a baton charge,” she says bitterly. “This was a pent-up hatred. This was naked violence. This was three or four men with long cudgels standing over someone on the ground and hitting and hitting them.”

This is the old Bernie Devlin, phrase-making through clenched teeth. “This was police following those who had dragged away the injured, and beating them up as well. This was a realisation that your worst enemy was in a uniform and had the power,” she almost spits it out, “to kill you.” She still feels deeply about it. “I hate them. Hate the police.” Surely she has to work with them now? “It’s not personal. But it is my deepest prejudice.”

In 1968 Devlin had just begun her last year studying psychology at Queen’s University. “I was a first-class honours profile student. Then it was all swept away. My degree and my career. It says something about the cataclysmic impact things had on me at the time that I just didn’t care.”

She started a radical student movement called People’s Democracy, and was taken up by the media. “I come from a long line of strong women,” she says. “My mother and grandmother were both widows. The level of poverty that I grew up in brings a degree of strength and creativity to women, because they have to manage.”

Remarkable things happened within a year. She was thrown out of university, but elected as a unity candidate for Mid Ulster. She wrote a book. She was carried on the shoulders of Irish Americans on a trip to New York. She was jailed for inciting a riot and served six months in prison. She also started to upset a lot of people who had voted for her. “I went away to London and knocked about with the socialists and the Gypsies and the feminists. Best education I could have. But people here said, ‘Confine yourself to our issues. And please cut your hair and lengthen your skirt. And don’t smoke.’ I said, ‘I think youse were looking for somebody else!’”

She horrified them further by having a daughter, Roisin, out of wedlock (although she married the father, Michael McAliskey. They are still together). She was defeated in the next general election, by which time Bloody Sunday had happened. “That was when the civil rights movement ended and the armed struggle began.”

How so? “That was the point of realisation for me that the penalty for demanding equal rights in your society was that your government would kill you. Then you say, ‘If it’s OK for the government to declare war on the people, the people have a right to declare war on the government.’” And on civilians? Children? She doesn’t flinch. “Right up until that point I would have openly argued all the time against armed defence, never mind armed warfare.” And then? “You couldn’t do that with any credibility after Bloody Sunday.” Many people would have taken her for an IRA apologist. “Yes they would. I never said, ‘Don’t do it.’ Because I had made that equation in my own head. That’s terrible … but that was real.”

The armed struggle hit her hard in 1981, when Ulster Freedom Fighters broke down the door of the remote family home and fired shotguns. Michael was shot twice. She was hit in the chest, arm and thigh as she went to wake up one of the three children. Roisin was nine, Deirdre five and Fintan just two. Paras happened to be watching the building, but did not prevent the loyalists going in. Three men were arrested.

“We could not go back to the house after that.” Instead they were moved to a troubled estate. “My kids would have survived the loss of their mother better than the loss of their physical security, which was home.” The damage allegedly done to Roisin was detailed in court last year, when the German government made a second attempt to extradite her for alleged involvement in an IRA attack on a British Army base in June 1996. It failed. “There was never any credible evidence against her,” insists McAliskey. “And yet a young woman gets destroyed in the middle of it.”

Destroyed? “Yeah. She battles valiantly against deep post-traumatic stress that has its origins in when we were shot, but also in the interrogation and incarceration they subjected her to [during the investigation]. They used the fear and trauma of what she went through as a child in an attempt to extricate information from her that she just did not have.”

Perhaps that was the most powerful reason for her mother’s retreat from the national stage: to recover and keep the family safe for a while. But it is also true that she never found the right party platform. Too headstrong, maybe. Too far out. So McAliskey chose to campaign locally, working with women on the estate. “We took over derelict houses, provided places to meet. Sixties stuff, really.”

It led in 1997 to the formation of Step. “We don’t confine ourselves to one area, such as housing, or legal rights, or water charges – we research and campaign across them all.” It is currently trying to help migrant workers who “just turned up here overnight in 2001″. Local farms and factories could not get enough workers. “So, one morning, 500 came from Portugal. People thought they were a peace delegation. Now, probably 20 per cent of the adults in this area were born somewhere else.”

Speaking up for them has led her into conflict again, with former allies. “People have said, ‘You were with us; now you’re with the foreigners.’ I say, ‘No. I am doing the same thing I have always done. It’s still about people having a right to fulfil their potential and not be excluded from that because of other people’s prejudice.’”

Her name still has influence, she insists. “I could call up the Deputy First Minister and tell him, ‘Straighten yourself up!’” Why doesn’t she, then? She laughs. Quarrels between Martin McGuinness and the First Minister, Peter Robinson, have left the executive unable to meet. “Nobody is making any decisions just now.”

Then why not try again to get elected and bang a few heads together? “What is the point of going into politics?” she says with a sigh. “Look at Gordon Brown. He doesn’t believe anything he used to believe in.”

Better to revolutionise lives one by one, perhaps, in the town she left to go on the march that changed her life, 40 years ago today. In the battered lobby of her office, a couple from Poland are waiting. They know little of the history of this place, or who she is. “Good,” she says briskly. “The icon was never me. People say the image has been tarnished. Do I care? I never made the image; I don’t care what happens to it. I’ve got my life to live.”

A life on the front line

1947 Born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland

1965 Goes to Queen’s University in Belfast to read psychology

5 October 1968 Attends the first major civil rights demonstration, in Derry. Sees Royal Ulster Constabulary attack marchers with batons

1969 Starts radical student movement; attracts media attention. Thrown out of college. Jailed for incitement to riot. Writes book. Becomes youngest women ever elected to Parliament

1971 Has first of three children

1972 Attacks Home Secretary in the Commons, day after Bloody Sunday

1974 Loses seat to nationalists

1981 Shot, with husband, when loyalists break into their remote home

1998 and 2007 Successfully fights extradition of daughter Roisin to Germany, for alleged involvement in IRA attack

Earth Times
DPA
04 Oct 2008

Belfast - The 40th anniversary of a civil rights demonstration that changed the course of Irish history is being remembered at a conference in the Northern Irish city of Londonderry on Saturday, attended by Irish President Mary McAleese and Nobel Peace Laureate John Hume. The demonstration, since referred to as the Duke Street March, took place in the city (known to Irish Catholic Nationalists as Derry) on October 4, 1968, and marked the beginning of a civil rights movement aimed at ending discrimination against Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic population by the majority Protestant government.

The march was violently broken up by police forces overwhelmingly composed of Protestants loyal to the British crown and inimical to Catholic civil rights. The violence marked the beginning of 30 years of sectarian violence known as the Northern Ireland Troubles.

McAleese in her keynote address drew parallels between the then emerging Northern Ireland civil rights movement and similar youth movements that swept across the world in 1968, from Paris to Washington and South Africa.

McAleese evoked the memory of “all those … who set out 40 years ago … to create a Northern Ireland where every man, woman and child, Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Nationalist … would share full equality of citizenship.”

A peace agreement was signed in Belfast in 1998 which ended the Troubles, and eventually led to a power-sharing government between pro-British and pro-Irish parties.

“When we consider the extent of change already achieved, of sacrifices and compromises made on all sides, we take courage and hope. We look back, but there is no turning back,” McAleese added.

McAleese is the first president of the Republic of Ireland to have been born within Northern Ireland, a territory of 1.7 million people which is part of the United Kingdom.

The power-sharing arrangement is not currently proceeding smoothly, however, with the two main parties of the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein deadlocked over political appointments.

Hume, a nationalist leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Unionist leader David Trimble, in 1998 for their efforts in ending the violence, also addressed the conference.

The Troubles claimed over 3,000 lives and stemmed from centuries of sectarian division and political strife between the native Irish Catholic population and Protestant settlers loyal to Britain.

An Phoblacht
02 October 2008

SPEAKING at the Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement during which the Victims Commission made a presentation, Sinn Féin Dáil leader and Peace Process spokesperson Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin TD called for the establishment of an Independent International Truth Commission.
The meeting was attended by Sinn Féin Executive ministers Michelle Gildernew and Conor Murphy, MPs for Fermanagh/South Tyrone and Newry/Armagh, as well as Sinn Féin Vice-President Pat Doherty, MP for West Tyrone.
Deputy Ó Caoláin welcomed the work of the Victims Commission for the thousands of people who have been deeply affected by the conflict. “That work is a key part of the process of healing, reconciliation and building a renewed society.”
He told the meeting:
“When it was announced earlier this year that a four-person Victims Commission was to be established, Sinn Féin said that it represented an important step forward in ensuring that ALL victims can be represented equally.
“The different needs, backgrounds and experiences of the many people who have lost loved ones and suffered during the conflict need to be dealt with on an equitable basis. It is positive that we now have in place a commission that puts the needs of victims centre-stage and that, through a collective approach, can ensure parity of esteem for all victims.”

NO HIERARCHY OF VICTIMS

The Sinn Féin Dáil leader said there should never be a hierarchy of victims.
“That is crucially important. People on all sides suffered, as did many who were totally uninvolved in the political or military conflict.
“Following a process of consultation and discussion, particularly with victims and victims’ groups, Sinn Féin has concluded that the best way forward on the issue of truth recovery is through the establishment of an Independent International Truth Commission.
“Republicans have acknowledged the hurt they have caused during the conflict. Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams has expressed his personal and sincere regret and apologised for that hurt. The IRA has also apologised to all those non-combatants it killed or injured and their families.
“In the past, the British state has refused to acknowledge its role in the conflict, the killings by its army and police and especially with regard to collusion. This refusal continues, as we have seen with the failure to co-operate with the Barron investigation established by this Oireachtas. That approach must change.”

An Phoblacht
02 October 2008

Adams meets parents of Damien Walsh

SINN FÉIN President Gerry Adams MP and Jennifer McCann MLA have met the parents and uncle of 17-year-Damien Walsh, who was shot dead by the UDA/UFF in west Belfast in March 1993.
The meeting, at Stormont on Tuesday, was to discuss ongoing efforts by the family to ascertain the truth around Damien’s murder and to review the two current investigations taking place by the Historical Enquiries Team and the Police Ombudsman’s office.

Photo of Damien Walsh from Victims and Survivors Trust

Marian and Peter Walsh were accompanied by Damien’s uncle, Breandan O Lochlainn, who is also chair of VAST (Victims and Survivors Trust), which they and others established following Damien’s murder.
Damien Walsh was killed by the UFF while working at the Dairy Farm Complex at Twinbrook on 25 March 1993. He was on a state-funded Youth Training Programme.
There is no doubt that collusion between British state forces (principally the RUC) and the UDA was responsible for Damien’s death. His was one of several hundred murders carried out by unionist death squads using weapons imported into the North via South Africa with the help of British Intelligence.
It is also known that the British Army was watching the Dairy Farm at the time of Damien’s murder, that informers played a role, and that the Historical Enquiries team has had DNA evidence of one of the killers for over two years and has done nothing about it.

REPORT

The Police Ombudsman’s office is now carrying out an investigation and a report is expected to be published, perhaps within the next few months. The HET is also carrying out an investigation.
Speaking after the meeting, Adams said:
“Damien Walsh is one of many hundreds of people killed by unionist death squads. His family, like many others, is seeking the truth about his murder and the role of the RUC, British Army and others in that. Sinn Féin supports them in their efforts and will do all we can to help.”

BY MÍCHEÁL MAC DONNCHA
An Phoblacht
02 October 2008

IN the aftermath of the first Civil Rights march from Coalisland to Dungannon, in August 1968, it was announced that the next demonstration would be in the city of Derry. Civil Rights campaigners in Derry had been pressing for a march in their city which had long been a byword for unionist sectarianism and discrimination.
Using gerrymandered electoral boundaries and a corrupt voting system which allowed wealthier citizens to have multiple votes in local elections, the unionists maintained a majority of members on the council in a city with a nationalist majority. Nationalists lived in very poor housing conditions and were affected disproportionately by the 20 per cent rate of unemployment in the city.
Unionists had long regarded the old walled town as a citadel that could never be surrendered and their dominance was symbolised by the walls towering over the crumbling 19th century terraced streets of the nationalist Bogside. The last time nationalists had attempted to hold a parade inside the walls was on St Patrick’s Day 1951 when they were batoned by the RUC.
Housing was a massive issue in Derry and the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) provided the focus for leadership as the Civil Rights campaign took off. The DHAC had organised a James Connolly commemoration in the city in July 1968 which was banned by the unionist government.
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) agreed to hold a march in Derry on 5 October. The loyalist Apprentice Boys organisation immediately announced a counter-demonstration with the purpose of forcing the unionist government’s hand to ban the Civil Rights march. But the regime at Stormont did not require forcing because the Home Affairs Minister was ultra-unionist William Craig who promptly imposed the ban.

EMERGENCY MEETING

FASCIST TACTICS: Water cannons fired against peaceful demonstrators, with one man showing what he thought of the RUC’s fascist tactics

NICRA held an emergency meeting with the DHAC. Many on the NICRA Executive and some Derry nationalist figures, including John Hume, wanted to cancel the march but the majority of Derry activists were determined to defy the ban. They won out and the march was to proceed as planned.
It was a relatively small march, beginning on Craigavon Bridge with several hundred people. The objective was the Diamond in the city centre. The march was stopped in Duke Street by the RUC. A meeting was held with speakers including Gerry Fitt, Betty Sinclair, Eddie McAteer, Ivan Cooper, Austin Currie and Eamonn McCann. Three Westminster Labour MPs were also present.
After the meeting the marchers found themselves hemmed in on all sides by the RUC. They could not disperse and after a tense stand-off the RUC, oblivious to the presence of TV cameras and photographers, unleashed an unprovoked attack on the crowd with batons, boots and fists. Water cannons were then used.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, then a young People’s Democracy activist, recalled:
“Quite deliberately, they hosed in the upstairs windows and shopfronts, and they went right across Craigavon Bridge, hosing all the onlookers. The police just went mad.”

MICKEY DEVINE

The RUC attack in Duke Street brought the Civil Rights struggle in Ireland to a world audience for the first time. It was a complete eye-opener to many people in the 26 Counties and in Britain. But most profound was its effect on young nationalists. Derry man Mickey Devine, the last of the ten Hunger Strikers to die in 1981, recalled:
“Like every young person in Derry, my whole way of thinking was tossed upside down by the events of 5 October 1968. I didn’t even know there was a Civil Rights march; I saw it on television.
“But that night I was down the town smashing shop windows and stoning the RUC. I developed an intense hatred of the RUC. As a child I had always known not to talk to them or to have anything to do with them, but this was different.
“Within a month everyone was a political activist. I had never had a political thought in my life but now we talked of nothing else. I was by no means politically aware but the speed of events gave me a quick education.” (Quoted in Duke Street – The Point of No Return, by Kevin McCool, An Phoblacht, 6 October 1988).
The RUC attacked the Civil Rights march in Duke Street, Derry on 5 October 1968, 40 years ago this week.

DAN KEENAN, Northern News Editor
Irish Times
**Via Newshound
Saturday, October 4, 2008

THE MARKING of the 40th anniversary of the Derry civil rights march of October 5th, 1968, should help provide lessons for the modern era, a Belfast conference has heard.

Michael Farrell, a lawyer, author, rights campaigner and student activist in 1968 told a special seminar at Queen’s University the anniversary should not be marked by triumphalism or a reopening of old wounds.

He told the conference, 1968: Civil Rights, Then and Now, that the NI Civil Rights Association was born out of anger at unionist corporations mainly in small towns across the North over issues such as housing, jobs, gerrymandering and local democracy. He denied it was sectarian or had anything to do with a united Ireland.

Placing it in an international context, he linked the anniversary with the 60th anniversary of the UN declaration on human rights. Civil rights activists in Northern Ireland in 1968 identified with blacks in the southern US and with “a Baptist minister named after Martin Luther”, he said.

He contended that the Northern state was “too brittle” to accommodate the demands of the Civil Rights Movement, while the British government ignored it as best it could. The vast array of national and international tools and instruments which are now available for the purposes of seeking redress were simply unavailable in the late 1960s.

Simon Price, author of Northern Ireland’s 1968, warned against reliance on memory of those involved to assess the impact of the Civil Rights Movement.

“The past cannot be remembered as it was,” he argued. “All memories are of equal value; all historical sources, however, are not.” He continued: “Collective memory reconstructs the past as myth rather than fact - to serve the interests of a particular group. It provides consolation, confirms and reinforces values and conjures up a wider political vision.”

Queen’s University academic Lord Paul Bew argued that an opportunity was lost sometime between the October 5th civil rights march in Derry and the attack on the People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry at Burntollet the following January.

He felt the then unionist prime minister, Terence O’Neill, had taken on his hardliners and was preparing to reform the Northern state. “Burntollet changed it all,” he argued, adding that the response to the challenge posed by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was amateurish.

University of Ulster academic Paul Arthur discussed the diversity of the original Civil Rights Movement, suggesting it was a broad organisation which suffered from having “too many chiefs”.

Questions on Terence O’Neill’s sincerity were not as relevant as his ability to deal with the challenge of change, he said.

Bob Purdie, author of Politics in the Street, doubted that Capt O’Neill “could have pulled it off”, arguing that the former leader’s determination was not enough. Like Dr Purdie, Edwina Stewart, a NICRA member, admitted that she and many of the 1968 generation had made “many mistakes”. She told the conference of a sense of naivety which marked the early days of the movement and the first marches in Northern Ireland.

Kevin Boyle, of the University of Essex, said the Civil Rights Movement preceded “the human rights era” and argued that ideas were now transferred globally and rapidly thanks to the extraordinary development in information and communications technology.

Tom Hadden, of Queen’s University, said those agitating for civil rights had to ask how best to do this without stoking terrorism.

Margaret Ward of the Women’s Resource and Development Agency said the issue of civil rights now had to be “gendered”. She argued that much of the intervening period was marked by a realisation of the need to recognise the division between Catholics and Protestants. Such determination had to be given to the separate needs of men and women.

The weekend’s commemorations continue this weekend with a major international conference in Derry on the civil rights legacy.

Andersonstown News Thursday
Belfast Media

A West Belfast man who admits being involved in the brawl that led to the killing of Gerard Devlin has been accepted on to the republican wing at Maghaberry Prison.

Anthony Notarantonio was taken to the jail’s Roe House after being remanded in custody at Belfast Crown Court last week.

The 50-year-old had earlier admitted charges of having unlawfully fought and making an affray.

The Andersonstown News understands that after being transported from court to Maghaberry, Anthony Notarantonio asked to be moved on to the republican wing.

The dissident republican inmates who control Roe 3 and Roe 4 wings accepted his request.

However, the decision to allow him to be held with republican prisoners has caused unrest.

“Some republicans aren’t happy that he’s in Roe House,” a prison source told the Andersonstown News.

“The Gerard Devlin killing had nothing to with the conflict – so why has he been allowed in?”

Anthony Notarantonio is a relative of senior Real IRA man Joseph O’Connor, who was shot dead outside his Ballymurphy home in October 2000.

By Seamus McKinney
Irish News
**Via Newshound
03/10/08

A border checkpoint is operating again more than a decade after the last permanent security post from the Troubles was closed.

Limavady Borough Council has introduced routine checks on cars and passengers at the Magilligan terminal of the Foyle Ferry which links counties Derry and Donegal.

The security checks by a private firm have infuriated passengers and are to be raised with the British and Irish governments by a Fianna Fail senator.

A council spokeswoman said Magilligan was considered “an international port of entry to Northern Ireland and the wider UK” and it had increased security there due to “staff training”.

Since starting six years ago, the Foyle Ferry has run up to 50 services daily along the mile-long crossing between Greencastle and Magilligan Point.

The car ferry, which has been used by almost two million passengers, has cut journey times between north Inishowen and Limavady from a 40-mile road trip to just 12 minutes.

But the increased security has sparked a furious reaction from politicians on both sides of the border.

Fianna Fail senator Cecilia Keaveney said it is doing nothing to “foster good relations” or for the economy.

She said she intended raising the matter with the Republic’s minister for foreign affairs, Micheal Martin, and with Secretary of State Shaun Woodward.

East Derry assembly member John Dallat said the checkpoint was “like something Montgomery Burns and his sidekick Smithers from the Simpsons would dream up”.

“This pathetic nonsense should be consigned to the rubbish bin,” he said.

Irish Times
04 October 2008

Elements of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) hark back to the days of unionist rule and hope to undermine Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, Sinn Féin claimed today.

Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness used a speech at a major event commemorating the 1960s Civil Rights Movement to launch an attack on the DUP.

He called on DUP leader Peter Robinson to agree a deal to secure the government and warned that failure to share power would see unionists robbed of any political control.

The Civil Rights movement protested against anti-Catholic discrimination by the then unionist government, but it was attacked by loyalists and police in scenes that preceded the outbreak of the Troubles.

Mr McGuinness told an international conference in Londonderry marking the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights campaign that some unionists still believed the period of unionist rule was a “golden age”.

“That mindset - of no surrender and not an inch - still exists in some elements of political unionism today, and especially within the DUP,” said Mr McGuinness.

“The fact is that there are still those within the DUP who do not agree with power sharing as a concept or as a matter of political practice.

“They do not accept that the days of unionist majority rule are gone and gone forever.

“They believe that by stalling and delaying they can hollow out the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements. And that is what is at the heart of the current crisis.”

The DUP and Sinn Fein are divided over a range of issues including the devolution of policing and justice powers to the Assembly. The dispute has seen republicans block meetings of the Executive since June.

But Mr McGuinness said: “If one party does not believe in partnership government and power sharing on the basis of equality then it is they who are placing the political institutions at risk.

“The Unionist political system needs to understand and come to terms with the reality that life has changed for everybody.

“The only way any unionist politician will ever hold any semblance of real political power now or in the future is in partnership with nationalists and republicans.”

Mr McGuinness said he had attended the British-Irish Council meeting in Edinburgh last week despite the deadlock, but was disappointed the DUP blocked yesterday’s North-South Ministerial Council after an Executive meeting was cancelled.

He said that since Mr Robinson emerged as leader of the DUP in June his party had yet to engage in meaningful negotiation and had cherry-picked from the St Andrews agreement.

Mr McGuinness claimed this analysis was supported by recent comments from former taoiseach Bertie Ahern and British prime minister Gordon Brown

“If partnership government is beyond the DUP then it will fall to the two governments to take the necessary decisions and implement the necessary policy changes to ensure political progress in the all-Ireland context envisaged in the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements,” he said.

Mr McGuinness added: “The resolution is DUP agreement to work the partnership arrangements and to agree a timeframe for the transfer of power on policing and justice.”

The DUP has said there is a lack of confidence in the unionist community for a move on policing, but Mr McGuinness said this was a bogus argument.

“I believe that an agreement forged between myself and Peter Robinson would send out a powerful and hopeful message for the future,” he said.

“But if we are to move forward it will take political courage and political leadership. It will need real and meaningful partnership government and power sharing.”

His comments came as Secretary of State Shaun Woodward said both governments remained ready to help, but believed the parties could yet find a way out of the deadlock.

By Freya McClements
BBC
03 Oct 2008

On 5 October, 1968, a civil rights march in Derry in protest at the allocation of houses, jobs, and restrictions on the right to vote ended in violence when the RUC turned a water cannon on, and then batoned the marchers.

A poster advertising the march in 1968. Pic courtesy Museum of Free Derry

Often regarded as marking the start of the ‘Troubles’, the Duke Street march was a crucial turning point in the campaign for civil rights in Northern Ireland.

Planned by the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) with the support of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), its 40th anniversary this weekend will be commemorated with an international civil rights conference at Derry’s Guildhall.

Derry Labour Party member Dermie McClenaghan was one of the committee who organised the march.

“The situation in the 1960s in Derry was that there was high unemployment, no housing programme at all, electoral boundaries which hadn’t been expanded, and there was no such thing as one man one vote - there were all sorts of things wrong.

“I was standing outside the Guildhall at a housing demonstration with Eamonn McCann and Eamon Melaugh, and we decided that Eamon Melagh was going to phone up NICRA and ask them to come and hold a march in Derry,” he said.

“The civil rights march was organised for 5 October.

Passed out placards

“I remember that particular morning, I had all these placards in the house, and I brought them along with me and passed them out as I walked to the start of the march at Duke Street.

“The marchers were stopped just at the end of the [Craigavon] bridge, with the police all lined up in front of them.

“Ivan Cooper and some others were making speeches, and I think the police must have thought there was no way out, and attacked them.

“They beat people to the ground viciously,” he said.

‘One man one vote’ was one of the aims of the civil rights campaign

“I thought, there’s more to it than just keeping order, this is about teaching them a lesson.

“It was about civil rights - well they were showing us they thought we had no right to exist.

“They were doing it with an arrogance that could only have come from the state,” he said.

Dermie said he escaped serious injury because he was standing so near the RUC lines.

“The blood was awful, and the violence was awful.

“John Hume, Eamon Melaugh and myself lifted the injured people and brought them into a restaurant and laid them on the tables.

“I eventually made my way back to the Bogside and I met Eamonn McCann.

“We looked up and saw the first riot of the Troubles beginning, at the top of Fahan Street.

“We couldn’t quite believe the extent of it

“Imagine that was the start of the Troubles,” he said.

Another of the organisers was Ivan Cooper.

Ivan Cooper became a founder member of the SDLP and an MP

“It wasn’t a big march, there were only about 500 people there.

“I was arrested that morning, along with Charlie Morrison and Eamonn McCann.

“We were taken to the police station, and they told us that they were going to enforce the ban at all costs.

“But they released us 20 minutes before the march.

“To this day, I don’t know why they did that.”

He made his way to the head of the march at Duke Street.

“The policeman was addressing the crowd with a loudhailer.

“I asked him if I could have a loan of his loudhailer - I don’t know why he agreed - but he let me have it and I read out the civil rights demands.”

Water cannon

The RUC turned a water cannon on the marchers before beating them with their batons.

“This was a completely non-violent march. All the violence was used against the marchers,” said Ivan.

“I was in the middle of it, and in the front row of the police was a neighbour of mine from home.

“He asked me what I was doing there with a bunch of Fenians.”

Ivan said that the marchers achieved a victory of sorts.

“All of the civil rights demands were conceded within three months, but it marked the beginning of a cycle of violence which eventually led up to Bloody Sunday, which then kick-started the IRA campaign.

“By 1972 people were going round saying to hell with civil rights, violence was the only way, which was the complete antithesis of the civil rights movement.”

Forty years after the march, Ivan said his great disappointment is that sectarianism still exists in Northern Ireland.

“There is still sectarianism and strife between the two communities.

“It doesn’t matter about power-sharing if there is still sectarianism at grass-roots level,” he said.

The International Conference on Civil Rights takes place in the Guildhall, Derry, on 4 and 5 October 2008.

Speakers will include Nobel Laureate John Hume, the Irish President, Mary McAleese, and MPs Martin McGuinness, Mark Durkan and Gregory Campbell, as well as civil rights leaders, activists and others who attended the march on 5 October, 1968.

Irish Times
**Via Newshound
Saturday, 04 October 2008

It’s 40 years since police broke up the Civil Rights protest in Derry. Martin Cowley recalls his part in an event that flashed around the world

BLACK AND white news film of Derry in the 1960s coats the city in a sickly pallor.

Martin Cowley is beaten by police and helped by protesters in Derry in October 1968. Photographs: courtesy of RTÉ library

But it was exhilarating time for a teenager gripped by twin bugs of politics and news.

Political tension on the doorstep, turmoil in international capitals, East-West confrontation, impending epochal change worldwide. That was 1968.

Anybody worth their salt was radical then. Derry Labour Party chanted “Tories Out North and South” and demanded nationalisation of banks.

The Establishment gave them the brush-off with a sniffy smile. No one’s laughing now, comrade.

October 5th, 1968 heralded the bloody baptism of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, which took its inspiration from the struggles of black America. The movement’s guiding principle was non-violence and its leaders stuck to it.

Many other forces and influences quickly bore down on the sorry state of Northern Ireland, however, and that peaceful and dignified demand for equality was overtaken by a nightmare of strife that lasted 35 years.

When I heard last week that Claude Wilton had died, I rummaged among the detritus of a reporter’s past - such as dog-eared notebooks, Stormont press gallery tickets, a rubber bullet and Christmas cards from 10 Downing Street.

I unearthed a 1966 diary that confirmed a vivid recollection of Claude in those early days of street politics. Claude was a good soul.

Highly principled and respected by all, he was a solicitor of Protestant stock.

He instinctively practised civil rights long before the term was coined, and long before legal aid. He loved Derry well and helped all who sought his aid, especially the men and women of no property.

The diary also confirmed - though unrecognised then - what could even have been a minor scoop for a budding reporter; a report of what must have been one the North’s first public airings of the Civil Rights anthem, We Shall Overcome .

The year 1968 was marked by international turmoil. Student riots in Paris, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Soviet Union’s humiliation of Dubcek and its crushing of the Prague Spring, and much more.

On October 5th the world saw the ugly face of Northern Ireland, and Britain had to open its eyes to excesses on its western reaches. The course of this island’s history, and British-Irish relations, was changed forever.

“Gentlemen, please,” pleaded a protester facing a phalanx of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers as they blocked civil rights marchers who were calling for wholesale reform of voting and housing allocation procedures, and an end job discrimination.

Batons flailed as the police broke up the demonstration after some early scuffling. The police had the marchers hemmed in on both sides. Protesters tried to dodge blows to the body and head deliberately aimed or doled out gratuitously to anyone within reach.

News cameraman Gay O’Brien of RTÉ shot the famous footage that flashed around the world.

I happened to be in his line of sight, and was filmed being sent sprawling by a burly policeman wielding a blackthorn stick after I had taken other baton blows to the head.

I had deliberately walked on the pavement and was among the crowd on the footpath as the police charged.

I was a young reporter with the Derry Journal and had not been assigned to cover the march, but I certainly wasn’t going to miss it.

The marchers’ grievances were shared by Catholic nationalists and liberal Protestants: demands for an end to a system that gave business-owners extra votes in council elections and demands for houses for hundreds of families crowded into crumbling, unsanitary flats.

Some time before October 5th, my editor sent me to speak to an old woman who lived alone in a tiny run-down house that had an outside lavatory with cracked bowl.

A Protestant, she lived in a unionist enclave. Her plight was sad. Working-class Protestants also endured rotten housing, too silently, perhaps, for the greater cause of unionist unity.

Unionist Party apparatchiks had ward boundaries sewn up so that they controlled the corporation, despite the nationalist voting majority.

The ruling forces turned their backs on the homeless and helped to perpetuate job discrimination.

Derry was out on a limb. Vital shipping and rail links had been axed.

A second city was earmarked - “Craigavon”.

The galvanising factor that uniquely united Derry’s citizens was a decision to locate the North’s second university in Coleraine.

This host of issues drove Claude Wilton into politics, in two unsuccessful attempts to win seats from incumbent unionists.

My friends and I joined the campaigning for him and in 1966 I took note of the craic in the small green diary.

It was then that I heard the civil rights anthem sung on the streets of Derry for the first time.

May 14th, 1966: Went down with Seamus Coyle to Claude Wilton’s HQ. Delivered election addresses for two hours. I delivered to Sir Basil and Lady McFarland (local unionist grandees).

May 18th: Went to Claude’s final rally with (my cousin) John Healy. Johnny Hume and Ivan Cooper spoke. While John Hume was speaking . . . (unionist) supporters and bands passed by. Claude, etc, sang We Shall Overcome.

May 19th: Was out knocking up people all day. McLaughlin’s (more cousins) was . . . area HQ.

The next page reads: “Claude was beaten by 443 votes. After result, all supporters sang We Shall Overcome walking down the Strand Road.” Stirring times.

• Martin Cowley was a reporter on The Irish Times from 1971 until 1989. He was the newspaper’s London editor in 1978-81. Later he joined Reuters as Ireland correspondent

By Ryle Dwyer
Irish Examiner
Saturday, October 04, 2008

AN Irish Press reporter was watching a police water cannon vehicle moving into position. He had never seen one in action before.

A heavy woman was looking into a shop window. Suddenly her legs were taken from under her by a blast of the water cannon. She was left sitting on the pavement with her hands up in the air asking, “what happened?”

Forty years on we might all ask the same question: what happened? Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the civil rights march in Derry on October 5, 1968. It turned into a police riot and, in the words of John Hume, this was “the spark that lit the bonfire”.

There had been trouble simmering in Northern Ireland for the previous couple of years. Some blamed it on the 1966 celebrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising.

The first victim of the Northern Troubles was Martha Gould, a Protestant woman who died in a fire after a petrol bomb — thrown by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) at the Catholic-owned pub next door — hit her home by mistake on May 7, 1966.

The following month the UVF set out to murder a local republican but they could not find him so, instead, they murdered Peter Ward, a Catholic barman on his way home after work. Three people were convicted of Ward’s murder.

“I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man (Ian) Paisley or decided to follow him,” Hugh McClean told police when charged. “I am definitely ashamed of myself.” (McClean died in jail, but his colleague Gusty Spence emerged, after serving 20 years, to take a leading part in organising the loyalist ceasefire.)

“There is no time for delay in facing up to the problem which exists in Northern Ireland,” Gerry Fitt told a London conference on February 25, 1967. Catholics were being treated like second-class citizens, so he warned reform was needed urgently.

“The day for talking has gone,” Fitt told a gathering in Derry in July 1968. “The day for action has arrived. If every individual here today goes home and rededicates himself to change the system as it operates in Derry, then we will change the system as it operates in the Six Counties and in the whole island of Ireland. If constitutional methods do not bring social justice, if they do not bring democracy to Northern Ireland, then I am quite prepared to go outside constitutional methods.”

In August 1968, Austin Currie, a young nationalist member of the Stormont parliament, protested against the allocation of houses in a new council development in Caledon, Co Tyrone. All 14 houses were allocated to Protestants.

One of those was given to Emily Beattie, a 19-year-old unmarried sister of an RUC constable. The message was clear there was no room for Catholics.

Currie and others occupied the house allocated to Beattie, but they were removed. This gave rise to the formation of the Civil Rights Association (CRA). A protest march was organised from Coalisland to Dungannon and some 2,500 people turned up. But the march could not be completed because Ian Paisley organised a counter-demonstration in Dungannon and the rival groups had to be kept apart.

Paisley contended that the CRA was just a front for the IRA, but at that point the IRA was no more relevant that the Animal Rights Association. Organising counter demonstrations became a loyalist tactic to stifle the CRA. When a civil rights march was called for Derry on October 5, a rival demonstration was similarly organised so that both would be banned.

The CRA insisted on going ahead with the march. About 400 people showed up, many simply because the march was banned. Marchers included Eddie McAteer, John Hume, Ivan Cooper, Gerry Fitt, Bernadette Devin, Eamonn McCann, Paddy Devlin, Austin Currie and Michael Farrell. On Duke Street they were blocked by a police line.

Comparatively few would have seen what happened next but for RTÉ cameraman Gay O’Brien who filmed the scene as Paddy Douglas pleaded with police to allow the march to proceed. At that point a policeman struck him in the groin with his baton. The resulting cry of anguish was heard around the world.

The police then rioted. Viewers were appalled at the sight of the Insp Ross McGimpsey hitting an unsuspecting man on the back of the head with his baton and frantically flaying just about anyone he could hit.

Gerry Fit was filmed with blood streaming down the side of his face. “I knew that they were going to beat me up,” he later told a reporter. “I wasn’t going to retaliate. I wasn’t going to throw stones. I got pins-and-needles and I felt the blood running down. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to let that blood run because the cameras are there’.”

The report of the Cameron Commission, set up to investigate was happened, was critical of the police and Fitt’s behaviour, but he was unapologetic. “I make no apology for my action on that day,” he stated on September 12, 1969, following the publication of the report. “I am glad I have lived to see the day when the oppressed people of Northern Ireland finally got off their knees to throw off the yoke of unionist oppression.”

Next day Fitt met with Capt James Kelly, an Irish intelligence officer who was in Belfast to assess the situation for Irish military intelligence. John Kelly, a Belfast republican, and his brother, Billy, also attended the meeting, which took place in Fitt’s home. Fitt told Capt Kelly the nationalist community needed arms to defend themselves.

“Fitt made clear the urgency of the situation and that it was of paramount importance to get in arms immediately,” Capt Kelly reported next day. “I suggested there might now be a short period of calm in which to organise.”

Fitt replied: “No, you have it all wrong. It could happen anytime. It could happen this minute.” Then Fitt’s wife, Anne, shouted as she burst into the room: “It’s on, Gerry. It’s on.”

IN THE following weeks and months Capt Kelly undertook to purchase arms on the continent and transport them back to Ireland, with the help of Finance Minister Charles Haughey. While those plans were being hatched, Fitt went to Derry on January 5, 1970.

“At the corner of Victoria Street, he was saying ‘it’s time to get the guns out’,” Eamonn McCann noted in his book, War and an Irish Town. Fortunately on that occasion, McCann added, “calmer counsels prevailed.”

Terence O’Neill, the Stormont prime minister, tried to stop the drift towards the Troubles by calling a general election in February 1969. Paisley ran against him.

O’Neill won 47% of the vote, while Paisley got 38.6% and Michael Farrell of People’s Democracy, 14%. Yet the media somehow depicted O’Neill as the loser. Paisley, behaving as a bigoted demagogue, was credited with a moral victory.

This judgment was crazy. The pundits had underestimated Paisley’s appeal, and then they explained their poor judgment by exaggerating his performance.

With the current impasse in the North, the events of October 1968 should be a grim reminder of the dangers of political posturing in a volatile situation.

Ciarán Barnes
Belfast Media
Andersonstown News Thursday

The PSNI is offering Irish language GCSE courses to all its officers and civilian staff.

The move comes as pressure mounts on police chiefs to do more to promote the language.

At last week’s West Belfast District Policing Partnership (DPP) meeting it was revealed that two officers based in the West of the city now speak Irish to A-Level standard.

It also emerged that the PSNI has written to all schools in the area to make them aware that Citizenship And Safety Education (CASE) booklets are available in Irish.

“In addition, police and support staff have the opportunity to enroll on two-year GCSE Irish language programmes. There are currently 15 personnel in the second year of this programme,” said a PSNI spokesman.

DPP member and Irish language activist Rosaleen McClorey welcomed the PSNI’s foray into the Irish language.

However, she insisted police have to do more to engage with members of the public who plump for Irish as their first language.

Not everyone on the DPP was impressed with the PSNI’s efforts.

DUP councillor William Humphrey said at a time when police are juggling resources its energies should be focused on lowering crime rates and not promoting languages.

“With reduced resources and limited police numbers all resources need to be focused on tackling crime,” he said.

By Brian Rowan
Belfast Telegraph
Friday, 3 October 2008

In a sign of the changing times former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and veteran loyalist Gusty Spence have met — at Spence’s Groomsport home, the Belfast Telegraph can reveal.

Gusty Spence held talks with Bertie Reynolds

The meeting has been confirmed by a reliable source, but former UVF leader Mr Spence has refused to comment on what has been described as “a private discussion”.

It is understood the meeting was arranged through a third party and is linked to the planned publication of a book.

Spence played a crucial background role helping draft documents outlining policy positions in the build-up to the 1994 Combined Loyalist Military Command ceasefire — in a period when Mr Reynolds was Taoiseach.

The two have met previously.

According to a source, yesterday’s meeting was to discuss and confirm some details.

Spence has been in the news recently with his challenge to loyalists to decommission their arms.

He criticised part of the UVF endgame statement of last year, which said weapons had been put “beyond reach” and General de Chastelain informed.

Spence said that meant “nothing” — and challenged the loyalist leadership: “Why not take the ultimate step?”

Yesterday’s meeting is not linked to that intervention.