Battle of the Bogside: A 50-year-old lesson in the fragility of Northern Ireland’s peace

It’s been 50 years since British troops marched into Derry, in Northern Ireland, and proceeded to beat the life out of the fledgling civil rights movement. Just like flare-ups in Kashmir this week over autonomy and citizens in Hong Kong resisting tighter controls from China, the messy legacy of Britain’s colonial past continues to play out around the world.

Northern Ireland was established in 1921, and the British government left Stormont to be run primarily by Protestant unionists. In the decades that followed, the nationalist minority, which was largely Catholic, suffered systemic discrimination: they were disproportionately blocked from the electoral process, housing and jobs. By 1968, inspired in part by the African-American quest for equality in the US, a civil rights movement was set up to protest peacefully against the establishment. It was born with genuine cross-community aspirations, as veteran socialist Eamonn McCann recalls.

“I remember trying and failing to get across to people that while Protestants had slightly better chances of getting houses than Catholics, the majority of the Protestant working class was not living in good housing either.”

It was soon evident that any potential for class solidarity would fail to hold. While these early stirrings were about gaining British civil rights, and not a battle for a united Ireland, unionists were still suspicious. “Unionist politicians presented the civil rights movement to their voters as a republican movement,” McCann adds, “but we had Protestant trade unionists, young socialists, all sorts in the make up. The Catholics were in the majority, but the politics weren’t nationalist or Catholic.”

In October 1968, civil rights marchers were batoned and beaten in Derry as they called for “one man, one vote”, with national television footage causing disbelief among viewers at home and around the world. In January 1969, a People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry was ambushed and brutally attacked by supporters of the future DUP founder, Reverend Ian Paisley, at Burntollet Bridge, while the RUC simply looked on.

These images still hung in the air in the summer of 1969, when the annual marching season began. This is the time of year when unionists celebrate historic Protestant victories, parading through villages and towns across Northern Ireland.

In the Bogside, a nationalist enclave which sits just outside Derry’s historic city walls, the citizens had already begun to distance themselves from a state which had no interest in treating them fairly, frustrated by the containment of the civil rights movement. Over months, they had begun barricading the entrances to the area, and on one gable wall were daubed the famous words which are still present today: “You are now entering Free Derry”.

When the Apprentice Boys, a historical protestant fraternity, marched through the city on 12 August, it was clear to all that it could not pass without incident. Another local civil rights campaigner Paddy Doherty even attempted to mediate with the group ahead of the march, but to no avail.

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As the Apprentice Boys rounded Waterloo Place, Bogside youths at the corner of William Street began to throw stones, with the RUC trying to hold the thin line between them. Some would say the marchers had earlier thrown pennies from the city walls to aggravate people in the area below. As things escalated, the skirmish quickly grew out of control, and erupted into a three-day riot in which the RUC would attempt to retake the Bogside.

The locals had the advantage of barricades, which the RUC had to dismantle while coming under a hail of stones, bricks and homemade petrol bombs. Some of the “missiles” came from the roof of the dominant Rossville Street flats, where a team of rioters had set up in a key position. With hindsight, it is remarkable that no one was killed.

Young men and women were at the fore of the action, often led by firebrand activists such as McCann and MP Bernadette Devlin, but there was a wider community effort, with even the older women of the Bogside helping to concoct petrol bombs with production-line skills learnt at the city’s factories. My own grandfather, living in Lisfannon Park, recalled buckets of water and cloth being left outside the houses for people to clean their eyes, after the RUC began using tear gas on the rioters.

For their part, the RUC was woefully underprepared for the kind of assault they faced in the Bogside. With just a few hundred of them on duty at any one time, the force was severely stretched, and their uniforms and modest shields left them wide open to injury, which only depleted their numbers further. Calls from the Bogside went out to other nationalist areas across Northern Ireland to spark more disturbance, and stretch the police further.

In his new book Fifty Years On, author Malachi O’Doherty warns against the mythology of the battle, and explores how the disaffection around the civil rights issue was exploited by more violent elements in the community. “Republicans decided there was a potential to escalate trouble to bring down Stormont. The riot was more or less set up by republicans. The police were baited into the Bogside. This was a very dangerous riot. It was a trauma. People came out of it stunned by a level of violence they hadn’t anticipated at all.”

On 13 August, an extraordinary intervention appeared to come from Dublin. In a televised speech that night, Taoiseach Jack Lynch said that Stormont was clearly “no longer in control of the situation”, and said the current crisis was a result of the policies pursued by the unionist government.

Crucially, he appeared to throw hope to the besieged nationalist community, saying: “The Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse.” This led to excited hopes from many in the Bogside that the Irish army was about to come to their aid and make a military incursion into Northern Ireland.

Their hopes were dashed when the Irish army did indeed push north – but only to the border at Donegal, where they set up field hospitals, and assisted Derry families fleeing south, some of whom had effectively become refugees. On 14 August, on the third day, breaking point was reached. Responding to a request for help from the Northern Ireland government, prime minister Harold Wilson gave authority for the British army to be sent into Derry.

Their official job was to restore law and order, breaking up the Bogside citizens from the RUC. Unionists saw them as reinforcement, giving temporary relief to the police, but nationalists saw this as a victory. They had fought the unionist establishment, and forced the hated RUC into retreat. O’Doherty says this played into the hands of republicans who had encouraged the violence. “They saw, within Derry, the chance to break the RUC completely. If they could get Stormont out of the way, then it was Irish facing British, a return to the War of Independence, which was unfinished.”

Operation Banner, as it was officially named, began as a targeted and temporary military campaign. The army was greeted by some in Derry as a neutral force, there to protect them from the RUC. But as more troops were deployed across Northern Ireland, with the specific intent of reinstating the rule of the unionist government, things quickly turned sour.

The IRA had reemerged to take on this most visible symbol of British rule, and as their guerrilla campaign intensified, the army became increasingly hostile to the nationalist population. In turn, support for the IRA campaign grew, while loyalist paramilitaries also emerged to protect the unionist community. What began as a Derry riot soon saw Northern Ireland slide into the brutal landscape of chaos and hatred which came to be known as The Troubles.

A symbol of British rule from whichever side you stood, the army would end up staying in Northern Ireland for 37 years, leaving only when the peace process, devolution and decommissioning were well underway in 2007. It became the longest military campaign in UK history.

Today, on the streets of the Bogside, the British army is nowhere to be seen. There is not a stray pebble on the ground, nor the remnants of any barricades. There is little evidence that anything untoward ever happened here – unless you look at the walls. There, in murals the length of houses, are artistic depictions of the scenes that played out on those streets – not just during the Battle of the Bogside, but Bloody Sunday in 1972, and protests around the IRA Hunger Strikes of 1981. Looming large over residents and tourists alike, these scenes are now relegated to history – but politics is still very much alive.

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Nowadays, you’re just as likely to see posters advocating for same-sex marriage, a woman’s right to choose, and for an Irish Language Act. In an echo of 1969, these civil rights issues – which do not and should not belong to one community alone – have been denied to the people of Northern Ireland by unionists at Stormont, this time in the guise of the DUP.

Other signs across Derry, which scream Stop Brexit and No Hard Border, tell of an even greater disquiet. A no-deal Brexit on 31 October could find Northern Ireland locked out of an EU in which it voted to remain, with a border reinstated across an island which is becoming increasingly integrated, against the wishes of all communities, north and south.

While the injustices in Derry were once broadcast from megaphones on top of barricades, today the population speaks confidently on the world stage in its own defence. The cause of the grievances, however, remain starkly unchanged. “In the Battle of the Bogside nationalists and republicans made it clear they were no longer prepared to accept the status quo or tolerate being treated as second-class citizens and stood up for their rights,” says local Sinn Fein MP Elisha McCallion.

“Today once again we have a British government ignoring the will of the people of the north, denying rights, treating us with contempt and, with the support of unionists, intent on dragging us back to the days of second-class citizenship through its reckless Brexit agenda.”

On Brexit, Sinn Fein speaks for the majority of nationalists and mainstream republicans. But there is a more sinister threat looming from dissident republicans, who reject the truce of the Good Friday Agreement, and are committed to using violence to end British rule in Northern Ireland. For them, Brexit provides an opportunity to capitalise on disaffection, and take on some familiar targets.

Their threat may appear small, but it is not insignificant. While firing indiscriminate shots at police on a residential street in April, they killed journalist Lyra McKee, sending shockwaves around the country. In a warning to the local community in the Creggan area where the incident occurred, a sign erected on a lamppost last month reads: “Informers will be shot”. Her killer has never been apprehended.

Northern Ireland’s ex-police chief Sir Hugh Order has warned that if there is any hardening of the border, these groups will attack it, and any personnel that involves. “History tells us that, by definition, they are targets, as soon as you have a fixed point,” he said.

Drew Harris, head of the Garda police force in the Republic, said dissident republicans would “use any difference in the border arrangements as a rallying call to their campaigns”. George Hamilton, chief constable of the Police Service Northern Ireland, which replaced the RUC, said that anyone who claims these warnings are being overplayed is “simply wrong”.

To speak of this very real threat is not scaremongering, nor is it allowing violence to hold back democracy, nor indeed is it willing on such disturbances. Rather, it is an earnest warning from the island of Ireland, from people who know all too well how quickly legitimate political problems can be exploited and escalated, if more violent minds are given half an excuse.

When the people of Ireland protest against a hard border and advocate for the backstop, we are not thinking of issues of customs and trade, nor of parliamentary arithmetic and political intrigue. We are thinking of war and peace. And after all our battles, peace is what we want to keep.