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30 October 1997 Edition

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New in print: Derry's rare oul times

From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the birth of the Irish Troubles
By Niall O'Dochairtigh
Published by Cork University Press.

As a very specific, step by step, map through the events of the late 60s and early 70s this book can hardly be faulted. The wealth of information provided makes it a very useful resource for students of the war in the Six Counties.

The book also outlines the early political pedigree of political figures of that time. Although in doing this O'Dochairtigh is content to define them in terms of moderate and extremist with republicans tending to be slotted into the latter category.

And of course extremists are the ones who use violence, except that O'Dochartaigh's description defies reality. After all, it was the state that introduced violence into the equation from day one when the Civil Rights marchers were beaten off Duke Street.

I also felt uneasy that the author seemed to want to present a work that was an objective analysis of a conflict whose cause and effect boiled down to how events impacted differently on either the Catholic/Nationalist people and the Protestant/Unionist people.

So when Sammy Devenny was beaten by the RUC in his William Street home in 1969 (he would eventually die from his injuries) O'Dochairtigh describes the dramatic effect this had on nationalist thinking and behaviour. Devenny's death was also another factor that led nationalists into conflict with the state. Therefore when, later in the book, O'Dochairtigh talks about William King - a Protestant man who died of a heart attack after Catholics assaulted him in Derry city centre - the author maintains this had the same effect on Protestants as did the death of Devenny on the Catholic community. I'm sure, emotionally, it had, but the politics of both deaths are completely at odds - Devenny's killing was carried out by state forces who invaded the Bogside and then covered up the whole affair, something that couldn't have happened without the political support of the then Stormont government and the British government whose Scarman Tribunal was limited at the outset.

This all comes from the author's analysis of the conflict as an ethnic conflict. This is not an ethnic conflict; it is a struggle born out of 800 years of British colonial rule in Ireland. When Ireland was partitioned in 1922 it was not partitioned along ethnic lines where a separate people were given a state based on their national, religious or cultural differences. Firstly Ireland was partitioned because it gave the British the best deal they could get and secondly it was partitioned where it was because it gave the unionists the best deal they could get. It was pragmatism not ethnicity that dictated the deal.

It is mostly on this wrong analysis that the book fails as the author looks for a balance based on the two tribes theory, a balance that can't exist if the colonial question remains unresolved.

By Dominic Doherty.


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