Derry 1968

BY ART Mac EOIN


For several months in 1968, the civil rights campaign, particularly in the city of Derry, brought thousands of people onto the streets. It put huge pressure on the Unionist government and generated massive media interest around the issue of the denial of democracy and basic civil rights in the Six-County state.

For decades there had been a failure to effectively mobilise the nationalist people of the Six Counties, despite the injustice of partition and the blatant oppresion, cultural, social, political and economic under which nationalists were forced to live, but the civil rights campaign began to change this.

The first march by the Civil Rights Association took place in Tyrone in August 1968. When political activists in Derry announced a civil rights march in the city early the following month it was soon banned by the Stormont regime. The Nationalist Party, which dominated nationalist politics in the North at the time, refused to support the march. It was backed however by local republicans, students, socialists and local members of the Northern Ireland Labour Party and was sponsored by the Civil Rights Association in Belfast.

The Derry civil rights marchers came into physical confrontation with the RUC in Duke Street, when the latter launched a particularly vicious baton-charge on the unprotected crowd. Dozens of marchers were hospitalised and hundreds of others horrified by the intensity and brutality of the RUC assault.

When the march reached the Diamond in Derry city centre, the RUC launched another baton charge against demonstrators, forcing them outside the city walls and into the nationalist Bogside district. The crowd responded to this unrelenting violence by throwing stones back at the RUC. It marked the beginning of three days of rioting in Derry as barricades were hastily erected and crowds, using stones and petrol bombs, fought running street battles with the RUC.

The Derry march and the riots which followed exposed not only the brutality of the Orange state but also its inherent instability and insecurity. It was obvious that a Unionist one-party state was incapable of reform, that its survival was based on sectarianism and discrimination and importantly that, left on its own, it would be toppled by a popular uprising of the nationalist victims of discrimination.

These events brought Derry massive media coverage not least in the centres of influence in London and Dublin and began to put the issue of the Six Counties on the Irish and British political agenda. Also, Ireland was once again becoming an issue on the international stage.

The march, which brought civil rights demonstrators into direct conflict with the forces of the state in the Six Counties, took place in Derry on 5 August 1968, 33 years ago this week.