Excerpt of Derry City by Notre Dame Press

DERRY CITY Memory and Political Struggle in Northern Ireland

MARGO SHEA

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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CONTENTS

List of Figures Acknowledgments Maps

vii ix xiii

Introduc t i o n 1

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One

Situating the Past in Derry

Two

From under the Heel of the Minority: Challenging Protestant Memory and Power in Pre-Border Derry, 1896–1922

Three

Against the Wishes of the Inhabitants: Memory as Mooring in “Castaway” Derry, 1922–1945

Four

Tickling the Lion’s Tale, 1945–1962

143

Five

Sulphur in the Air, 1963–1968

195

Six

Old Derry’s Last Stand, 1969

231

Conc l u si o n

249

Notes Bibliography Index

255 305 321

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INTRODUCTION

Barry McMonagle was twenty-four years old and an aspiring amateur photographer when the civil rights movement got under way in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the late 1960s. Looking back on his experiences of documenting the movement and the outbreak of the Troubles, he said, “What a heady sense of change there was then in the trembling Derry air, what a tumult of ideas and bright-seeming glimpses of a different future beckoning. What was said then was, ‘Everything’s changed. Nothing will ever be the same again.’”1 To explain this sense of overwhelming rupture, McMonagle recounted Derry Catholics’ sense that something perceptible had shifted in the city’s political culture after decades of stalemate. A space opened; from it poured pent-up frustrations at city authorities whose policies had long marginalized the political voices of the city’s Catholic and nationalist majority. In August 1969, the Battle of the Bogside between the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), B Specials, and local Catholics saw the stalemate end in a torrent of unrest: “There’s a story, probably made up but possibly true, of a ten-year-old girl hurling a stone down Rossville Street at the RUC and shouting, ‘I’ve waited 50 years for this!’ Everybody will have known what she meant.”2 When I started this project, I found myself drawn to McMonagle’s story and to the image of a little girl with a big memory. It struck me that it didn’t much matter if the tale about her was true; its persistence as community lore made it compelling. The girl on Rossville Street beckoned me, suggesting that ordinary people’s engagements with the past were embedded everywhere in Catholic Derry. The community’s histories and memories were rooted in the streets inhabited by its residents, in their activities and their voices. Catholics performed memory—told stories, sung songs, gathered, played out the past—more than they wrote about it or imprinted it on the urban landscape. Documented histories, formal 1

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2 D E R R Y C I T Y

emorial narratives, written reminiscences and commemorations were m simply the visible tip of a hulking iceberg of cultural memory that was expressed persistently and ubiquitously through words and deeds, through “ephemeral social practices, gestures and ritual.”3 The story of the stone-thrower on Rossville Street also suggested that studying remembrance might reveal previously opaque or hidden histories. Northern Irish Catholics were underdogs and largely invisible in public life before adherents of the Home Rule movement in the late nineteenth century demanded that governance of Ireland be returned from Westminster to a domestic parliament in Ireland. Following Partition and the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921, Catholics faced legal restrictions that stunted cultural and political expression. This absence of overt expression has led historians to view quiet on the political front as apathy and disengagement with questions of cultural and national identity. The apocryphal tale of the stone-throwing girl, though, suggested that underneath the placid surface of public life, Catholics possessed more trenchant attitudes and stances concerning the politics of Irish identity. There is more to the story of the cataclysm of civil rights and the early Troubles than a seething Catholic acquiescence to the Northern state that erupted on the streets in the heady days of 1968. From the Home Rule campaign to the onset of the Troubles and beyond, Derry Catholics’ community identity—its sensibilities and aspirations—sought nourishment from acts and expressions of memory. Drawing on the past, a diverse set of Derry residents animated and articulated a distinct and explicit Irish Catholic identity in the city with striking continuity up to and through the early Troubles. Indeed, when Catholic bishop Neil Farren was asked to provide a statement for the Cameron investigation into the violence at Duke Street in October 1968, he didn’t begin in the 1960s, 1921, or even 1801. His response was tied to memory of an Irish and Catholic Derry standing alongside the city that was planted and planned in 1614 as part of the English colonial project in Ireland. For the bishop, the turmoil of the late 1960s was inextricably tied to his understanding of Plantation and the world that it replaced: Derry was founded in the year 548 by St. Columba and his monks and Londonderry was established almost 1000 years later by royal

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Introduction 3

charter of King James I. Although these events are now only history, the problems they created are what perplex the city today. The principal task entrusted with the Irish Society in 1612 was, I quote, “the Petition of Sir Thomas Phillips—the Avoiding (removing) of the NATIVES and planting wholly with BRITISH.”4 In Derry, Catholics simultaneously invoked, drew on, and constructed the past through memory work—the conscious and subconscious staging of memory through discussions, writings, displays, commemorations, festivals, protests, religious celebrations, memorials, oral histories, personal accounts, and community conversations.5 Paying attention to memory reveals how Catholics drew selectively and instrumentally from the past to construct cultural, social, and political identities from 1896 to 1969. These years are not arbitrary—1896 saw the city’s first political gerrymander, ward redistricting, to achieve unionist political objectives as the Home Rule movement and the Gaelic Revival took on steam; 1969 saw not only the start of the Troubles and arrival of British troops in Northern Ireland but also the dissolution of the Londonderry Corporation, which marked the end of the era of political gerrymander and the decline of unionist political power in the city. Mapping memory work and historical consciousness illuminates a deep reservoir of a community’s experience and makes visible battles that were waged quietly, out of the limelight over long periods of time.6 As such, this investigation of Catholic and nationalist memory in Derry contributes to broader histories of Ireland and Northern Ireland by inviting a reconsideration of the decades between Partition and the Troubles. At the same time, it offers insight more broadly into the gestures, discourses, and rituals communities draw on to weave threads of historical consciousness out of their experiences, aspirations, and fears. Scholars and politicians have long lamented an Ireland imprisoned by its history. Interpretation of the past has played a part in political conflict, presiding over ongoing disputes that center around claims to national identity and its socioeconomic, spatial, territorial, political, and cultural manifestations. Derry has been a poignant example of this process at work; its history is in many ways an unfolding story of “dissonant heritages” and their effects.7 When John Lees came to Derry in 1968 to

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4 D E R R Y C I T Y

write a story for the New York Times, he observed that Derry was the epitome of conflict in Northern Ireland. Of the divided city, he observed, “Its problems are in a real sense . . . deeper and more hurtful because the city’s special place in Northern Ireland’s history has made it a talisman of prejudice on either side.”8 Brian Keenan also observed this phenomenon: “Nowhere are people more aware of their heritage whether recent or distant; nowhere are they more conscious of their ancestors’ triumphs and sufferings. There, people experience ancient antagonism; there, they also are struggling to find ways to accommodate each other’s differences. To those who view ‘Londonderry’ as a microcosm of Northern Ireland, there is a sense that current ‘troubles’ began in Derry, and a sense that Derry also might point the way to resolution.”9 In the context of Northern Ireland, the presence of the past is not so much a divided narrative as much as it is (at least) two separate ones.10 “Protestants and Catholics,” Henry Glassie observed, “. . . begin at different points, follow different routes, embrace different personalities . . . history is not so much a weapon between groups but a means to consolidate one group.”11 In addition, Protestants and Catholics alike have felt historic sensibilities of marginalization and victimization. As a result, members and representatives of both communities have encouraged interpretations of the past that have not only explained patterns of division but have helped to perpetuate them. For Ulster’s Protestants, remembrance was woven into official histories and mapped onto the physical landscape. Often a very public process, memory work was accompanied by pageantry and ritual that claimed physical space and reaffirmed authority in the present through references to the past. Londonderry is the “Maiden City,” besieged but undefiled during the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89; the survival of the small community of supporters of the Protestant king William of Orange made possible his ultimate victory at Drogheda’s Battle of the Boyne in 1690, shaping Irish history (and that of the “three kingdoms”) for the next several centuries.12 As early as 1789, the siege became the subject of annual commemorative attention. The events of the Siege of Derry and its commemorative resonances were themselves motivated by remembrance of events associated with the Irish Rebellion in 1641, when thousands of Protestant settlers were

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Introduction 5

killed, exacerbating fear and kindling animosities between Protestants and Catholics. Derry, with its walls and loyal citizenry, became a figurehead for the province’s Protestants from the eighteenth century onward, the events there gradually enshrouded in a sanctified memory and made an official part of the province’s historical narrative after 1922.13 Londonderry’s Protestants have taken strength from unionism and motivation from the memory of their forefathers’ righteous vulnerability to establish traditions that reaffirmed their identity in order to overcome anxieties accompanying minority status on the island of Ireland and, later, anxieties that the United Kingdom would not support their status as members of the Union. The city’s official history dovetailed for centuries with many aspects of Anglo-Protestant experience; indeed, many considered Derry the “chief city of ascendancy in Ulster.”14 From the city walls themselves to the parades around their perimeters, rites and expressions of memory served that history and affirmed it. When the Troubles began in 1969, one journalist put it this way, “Sanctified as it is by the mythology of the past, Derry is seen by many nervous Protestants as the key to the survival of their state and their society.”15 To Irish Catholics, Derry is associated with the ancient oak grove for which the city was originally named and with Columba, also known as Colmcille, the city’s patron saint who founded a monastery there in the sixth century. As the Derry annals would have it, the stones of the ruins of a once great church, the Tempul Mor, were carted away to build the city walls and ramparts in the early seventeenth century, colonialism bringing creative destruction in material form.16 In the 1960s, Derry was home to a broad-based civil rights movement that turned violent and brought soldiers onto Northern Ireland’s streets at the same time that governmental “business as usual” was suspended and life in the city and the province changed dramatically. Site of 1972’s Bloody Sunday, the city saw thirteen unarmed and peaceful civil rights protestors shot and killed by British paratroopers. Official British government apologies in 2010 notwithstanding, Bloody Sunday continues to loom traumatic in collective memory. In fact, Bloody Sunday itself carried within it echoes of fierce street conflicts in the city in 1920 that saw more than twenty local Catholics shot and the community ripped apart in the wake of looting and arson.

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6 D E R R Y C I T Y

In public consciousness and also within scholarly histories, a long gap stretches between the days of the sainted grove and the turbulent period of civil rights and the early Troubles. For much of this time, Derry’s Catholics represented a world apart; their culture reflected complicated identities. Long before the establishment of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, they were seen as “other” by Protestant settlers who developed and laid claim to Londonderry from the Plantation period onward. Independence and the establishment of the Free State only three miles from Derry’s city center ruptured ties with nearby County Donegal, the place where many Derry Catholics had roots and had created and nurtured an urban Irish Catholic culture from these experiences of difference. Although they held a demographic majority since 1850, Catholics’ political representation was steadily reduced through periodic and strategic use of gerrymander until the dissolution of the Londonderry Corporation in 1969, constraining opportunities for political voice, geographic mobility, higher education, and public employment. Largely divorced from traditional politics for much of this time, many Catholic nationalists in Derry shaped and framed identity through relationships to home, church, and neighborhood; they only episodically participated in explicitly public and political realms; thus, the city’s twentieth-century cultural history of nationalism and resistance has been largely overlooked. Yet, this history is crucial for understanding “the interwoven politics of community, struggle and power” that shaped nationalists’ perceptions of and commitments to civil rights and ultimately ushered in the era of conflict the world came to know as the Troubles.17 More broadly, it also invites a rethinking of the long-standing trope of an Ulster Catholic “culture of grievance” that has been used by historians for decades to describe, and indeed define, Catholic attitudes towards public life in Northern I reland.18 This book examines how and under what circumstances Catholic Derry emerged and evolved from the turn of the twentieth century, when it was first incorporated as a city and experienced its first political gerrymander, to the end of the 1960s—which saw a suspension of local government, the rise of paramilitary activity, and the introduction of British military presence in the North. A focus on this period resituates the civil rights movement and the Troubles by highlighting the ways urban development and community life intersected with larger social and political

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Introduction 7

issues and events for Catholics who understood themselves to be Irish both before and after Partition, up to the start of the Troubles. Here, we trace the past remembrance itself, honing in on Catholic Derry’s history through the lens of the memories its inhabitants cultivated and nurtured and also through the versions of the past Catholics and nationalists contested. In their engagements with one another, with Protestant unionists and with those across the Irish border, the concerns and hopes of Catholics and nationalists in Derry were often expressed through memory work. As they sought recognition locally, worked to influence broader debates over political, social, and economic issues, and sought to maintain an Irish cultural identity, Derry Catholics drew on the past to sustain their communities, to reflect their experiences, and to change their fortunes. My focus on memory and historical consciousness draws this book into a lengthy and lively conversation about the influences of memory on Irish history. History and memory have been understood in opposition to one another, and many historians of Ireland have argued that history— with its tests for veracity, its impartiality, its complexity—engages in pitched battle with the “feel-good happy-clappy therapeutic refuge” of popular memory. The dangers of memory could be seen in overly simplistic, essentialist, and essentializing rhetorics that, by invoking the past instrumentally, served to exaggerate difference, reify sectarian divides, and exacerbate conflict over much of Ireland’s modern history. It has been argued that Irish nationalism itself fed on inventions in the form of memory, and ultimately led political leaders to codify those memories as popular history.19 This focus on the dangers of popular history and memory may, of course, elide the processes through which those particular interpretations became useful and, indeed, popular. George Bernard Shaw famously wrote that critiques of nationalism are luxuries for those whose national identity is not in jeopardy: “Nationalism stands between Ireland and the light of the world. Nobody of any intelligence likes Nationalism any more than a man with a broken arm likes having it set. A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man is of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality, it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”20

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8 D E R R Y C I T Y

Aspects of British colonial involvement in Ireland, particularly erasures of the Irish language, shrunk the scale and scope of understanding of the island’s history. Depopulation in the nineteenth century through famine and emigration meant the further loss of cultural inheritances. Meanwhile, official histories celebrated the union of Ireland and Britain, masked the subordinate role of Ireland and de-emphasized perspectives on the past that did not highlight the benefits of both Anglicization and modernization. In response, countermemories emerged. Often locally specific, fragments embedded in songs, stories, folklore, the Irish language, and quotidian performances and rituals, countermemories kept alternative narratives alive throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.21 As Joep Leerssen points out, “The balladeers and historians of Gaelic Ireland, the Gaelic-speaking priests writing anti-English history on the Continent, the known or anonymous authors of Jacobite-Messianist aisling poetry, the seanchaí-based village scholars” took snippets from the past and formed the bedrock of a Gaelic-identified Irish cultural identity that was then adopted and adapted in the nineteenth century as a way of creating a “shared sense of us-ness” that shaped nationalism from the Young Ireland period onward.22 By the Gaelic Revival era at the turn of the twentieth century, remnants from the Gaelic, Catholic Irish past had achieved a sense of continuity and comprehensibility that nationalists harnessed quite intentionally for the purposes of state-making. Claims of invention overlook the project of repair so central to the nationalist histories of this period. Fashioning a usable past from available remnants and traces became part of the national project. As revolutionary and romantic nationalism coalesced in the early years of the twentieth century, a patchwork of rescued stories, collected memories, and refashioned “found” narratives fused to form Ireland’s new official history that could be utilized to marshal support for the emergent state and to present cohesion in the past as a salve for a fractured and partitioned Ireland. This history portrayed the Irish past from the Norman period onward as a long, undifferentiated, and uninterrupted story of struggle that excluded characters and events that deviated from the script that simplified Irish “freedom” and framed it as a goal at once “timeless and perennial.”23

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Introduction 9

It was during this time of revolutionary foment, simultaneously and paradoxically both formative and destructive, that the familiar tropes of Irish nationalist popular history were codified. The story went something like this: An unspoiled, uncorrupted past characterized by a unified, Celticized Irish island-wide culture dating to pre-Christian times met rupture in the form of 700 years of English misrule, until Ireland achieved independence and democracy, both of which were universally desired, achieved, and celebrated. At the same time, Ulster’s politicians and writers were narrating an alternative history in which Anglo-Norman settlement and the British presence were responsible for civilizing and organizing the chaotic, illegible backwaters of unruly Ireland. In these unionist narratives, Ulster had been the exception to the historical rule since the pre-Christian era.24 It had emerged thus as a homogeneous, industrious Protestant region. Analysis of current events and arguments for independence on the one hand and for Partition on the other relied increasingly on an understanding of Irish history punctuated and thus shaped by these interpretative divides. The early years of Irish independence saw the cementing of narratives on either side of the new border, but over the following decades, the scholarly study of Irish history underwent revision and embraced the many “varieties of Irishness,” exploding the myth that Irish identity could be understood in terms of a monolithic political affiliation, or any political affiliation at all, for that matter.25 The tidiness of previous interpretations was revisited and complicated. Multiplicity was the watchword of the moment. Binaries were deposed and Irish nationalism and British colonialism both were castigated for toying with history. The political climate in Northern Ireland also shaped the way historians viewed memory and thus how they chronicled the past. After 1969, historians became ever warier of attributing nationalist intentions to their Northern Catholic historical subjects. The belief that nationalist mythology had contributed to radical militant republicanism in Northern Ireland motivated historians to reassess their participation in public discourse about the past. Echoing Yeats after the Easter Rising, Nancy Curtin suggests that historians felt culpable for sending out a new generation of men whom “the English shot.”26 Feeling queasy about their possible collusion

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10 D E R R Y C I T Y

with militant republicanism, historians wondered if “an uncritical nationalist republican history affirm[ed] the men of violence and polarize[d] the two communities in the north beyond reconciliation?”27 Under these circumstances, identifying and highlighting the importance of widespread nationalist sentiments in the North prior to the Troubles looked dangerously like aiding and abetting terrorists. John Regan argues that this had its own dramatic effect on the production of historian knowledge about Ireland. When historians assumed “a causal relationship between art and politics on the one hand, and historiography and violence on the other,” a moral crisis within the Irish academy ensued. Hardly dismissive of their power, critics attacked popular interpretations of the past precisely because of their explosive effects. Underlying many of these critiques lay an assumption that memorial discourses fueled the conflict as much, if not more than, the conflict itself encouraged particular kinds of memory work. Historians, Regan argues, responded by producing “counterinsurgency narratives” that aimed, consciously or not, to defuse republicanism.28 Debates over revisionism and the limits of historical objectivity have been covered masterfully elsewhere.29 Here, it is sufficient to acknowledge historians who have insisted that a reckoning with “the burden of the past” in Irish history is a requisite for any meaningful communication about it. Contending with the complexities of memory is possible, they illustrate, without reducing it to lie, manipulation, or delusion. Brendan Bradshaw made a salient observation when he pointed out that efforts to remedy the anachronistic projections of nationalist ideology that had been foisted on the past had only succeeding, in fact, “in extruding the play of national consciousness.”30 Leaving Ireland a place with a fragmented and disfigured past characterized only by discontinuity, he argued, destroyed the community’s resource—a past that might enable them to understand themselves better. If “the Irish had clung tenaciously to their nationalist heritage,” what right had historians to take it away?31 Certainly, Derry is illuminative in this respect. This study of memory work in a corner of Ireland far from the state-making crafters of nationalist history in Dublin, as Beiner’s work on 1798 and William Kelleher’s study of the eponymous Ballybogoin or Henry Glassie’s exploration of County Fermanagh have also done, illustrates that Irish memory practices

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Introduction 11

have operated from the bottom up as much from the top down.32 As John Bodnar explained so persuasively in the context of the United States, strands of vernacular and official memories are difficult to tease apart.33 In Ireland, threads of folklore, performances of traditions passed down through generations, and elaborate festivals around Catholic saints and holy days all complicate the arguments that Celticized, Catholicized historical memory was artificially imposed by the state-makers. Although not specifically about memory, William Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, documenting the early civil rights struggle in Mississippi, and William Hinton’s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village illustrate the power of the local study to illuminate patterns and connections that a more traditional research model might overlook.34 Indeed, as other scholars have noted, there are parallels to be drawn between the long arc of African American struggles for freedom and equality in the United States and the Northern Irish civil rights movement, and this book provides a deeper context for this kind of analysis.35 Revisionist perspectives still infuse academic thinking in Irish scholarly discourse about the presence of the past and bolster the notion that revisionism made it possible for Irish historical studies to eschew the vagaries of memory in order “to reach a new level of impartiality and professionalism.”36 The idea that memory is invariably and crudely instrumental is deeply embedded in these assertions, as is a dismissal of memory in favor of more reliable history. Christopher Norton recently asserted that “in Ireland . . . memories are frequently called upon to defend entrenched political positions and nearly always to present a fatalistic vision of the past.” In holding up his own work of historical scholarship as distinct from the vagaries of memory, he quoted Pascal Bruckner’s assertion that “memory intimidates, condemns, blasts; history desacralizes, explains, details. One divides, the other reconciles.”37 This continued polarization at once valorizes history and chastises memory without considering the limitations of the former and the affordances of the latter. Of course, historical production itself is complicated by issues of power, inequalities in both the production of and access to the archive, notions of what constitutes historical knowledge in the first place, and which social actors ultimately have the resources to become reputable chroniclers of the past.38 The continued insistence on memory as an unreliable narrator

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