Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [184]
Beyond what was legal, and all this was, darker forces began to stir when in 1966 a small group calling itself the Ulster Volunteer Force or UVF, based in the backstreet bars of the mainly Protestant Shankill Road, decided to attack a quiescent IRA. However, unlike policemen or soldiers, the IRA were not so easy to identify, so the UVF made do with Catholics in general—a policy of brazen casualness. They murdered a seventy-seven-year-old Protestant widow in a firebomb attack on a neighbouring Catholic drink store; a drunken Catholic man wandering up the Falls Road shouting ‘Up the Republic, up the rebels!’; and a young Catholic hotel barman who went to a late-night drinking den with his friends and was shot dead when UVF members marked them as supporters of the IRA after mishearing snippets of their conversation.16
Inspired by the example of civil rights activists elsewhere, a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed in January 1967. A highly articulate new generation of Catholic leaders came to the fore. Protestants secretly envied their articulacy, while resenting them as ‘uppity’ Fenians and Taigs. The movement also included a number of IRA figures, who in search of a pie for their fingers saw it as another route to realising their republican agenda. In no sense were they the decisive or directing hand behind a movement that was too inchoate to control and which was part of a global generational revolt in the 1960s. The extreme-left students who were prominent in the movement consciously sought to provoke what they could characterise as a Fascist reaction from the ‘Orange Tories’, the necessary prelude to a full-scale revolution. Instead they were engulfed by a sectarian civil war as old monsters surfaced from the sea deeps.17
Along with its calls for an end to discrimination by the police or in public housing, the movement crystallised around the slogan ‘one man, one vote’ in protest against the disqualification of mainly Catholic lodgers, subtenants and young people living at home from voting in local government elections. As the wise Conor Cruise O’Brien once wrote, there was something of Antigone provoking Creon about such civil rights starlets as Bernadette Devlin, known to critics as a three parts innocent abroad. The civil rights movement borrowed the US tactic of marches to the sound of ‘We Shall Overcome’, in a sectarian context with a very developed sense of ‘our’ territory. Orange marches were an assertion of dominance; therefore, whatever the civil rights rhetoric, predominantly Catholic marches must be assertions of Roman dominance too. Left-wing activists deliberately selected routes to maximise the likelihood of trouble.
A march that took place despite being prohibited in Londonderry in October 1968 resulted in a police riot which put more than seventy people in hospital. As the young Max Hastings reported at the time, with their revolvers, Sten-guns, armoured water wagons and tear gas, the RUC was not in the mould of Dixon of Dock Green, the avuncular star of a 1960s TV London police drama. There were also the part-time Special Constables or B Specials, that is another eight thousand Protestants armed with guns. Close-up television footage showed a senior RUC officer bludgeoning demonstrators, among them three Labour MPs, one of whom, Gerry Fitt, was soon covered in blood from a head wound.18 How that situation was engineered for the cameras probably warrants notice. In January 1969 a radical wing of the civil rights movement, called People’s Democracy, principally associated with Bernadette Devlin and Eamonn McCann, ignored mainstream advice and marched from Belfast to Londonderry, a route that took them through some heavily Protestant villages. At Burntollet Bridge in rural County Londonderry