The August 1969 Events in Belfast [August 1969]
[Editor’s Note: Desmond Greaves went to Belfast shortly after the 14-15 August 1969 events there, when many Catholic homes were burned down and large numbers of Catholics were expelled by Orange mobs interacting with B-Special police. This led to the British Government insisting to the Northern Ireland Government that the British Army should replace the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) in Catholic areas of Belfast and Derry. These events led four months later to the split in the Republican Movement, which up to then had supported the peaceful Civil Rights movement, and from that emanated the Provisional IRA and its military campaign over the next quarter-century. The article below from the September 1969 issue of the “Irish Democrat” gives Greaves’s impressions of West Belfast following the burnings and expulsions. This September issue also carries formal statements on the August events from Britain’s National Council for Civil Liberties, the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the Connolly Association, and the agreed joint statement by the CPGB and the two Irish communist parties which Greaves himself had been asked to draft at the relevant joint meeting (see Greaves Journal, Vol. 20,19 August 1969). This joint statement supported the call, originally made by the Connolly Association a year before in July 1968, for a Bill of Rights as the way of dealing with the crisis. The article below is followed by an excerpt from Greaves’s “Killeshandra” column in the same issue of the paper, referring to the attitude of the British press to the abuses in Northern Ireland over the years, because of its obvious relevance to the situation described.]
Historic Barricades: What I saw in Belfast
This is what I saw when I visited Belfast immediately after the ructions.
I will try to give a plain, unvarnished account, and only draw conclusions that would come to the mind of any sane, sober-minded man.
There are comments printed on page five of this issue of the “Irish Democrat”.
After disembarking from the Liverpool boat I telephoned the private address of William Blease of the Irish T.U.C., who I thought could locate for me a man whose number I could not find in the telephone book.
It was barely eight in the morning. But his wife told me he had gone to work. I thought this odd. He must have plenty to do.
After nine I found Andrew Barr in his office. He will not be offended with me if I say he looked “shook”. He told me of the terrible problems confronting the Labour movement, the vast problem of refugees, unemployment, health and welfare.
He told me that Miss Elizabeth Sinclair of the Belfast Trades Council had launched a font for immediate relief and had circulated every Trades Council in Britain and Ireland and had sent letters abroad.
The address of the Trades Council is Room 10, 4 Waring Street, Belfast. I make no apology for publishing it in the middle of an informative article. The need for relief is urgent.
He also told me that the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions had gone on record already for the introduction of full civil rights, and intended to press it.
Finally, he told me about the attitude of Protestant workers. Many of them who had never shown bigotry in their lives are in a strange mental state. They would not discuss the revolutionary events that had taken place. They were like autistic children, if I might invent the parallel myself. They had received a shock to their whole way of thinking.
Across the road I found Gerry Fitt. He wasn’t “shook”. He was bouncing with energy. I thought his windows had been staved in. But it seems they were boarded up only as a precaution.
A military waggon carrying a huge crane was parked outside his house all the time. The soldiers in it looked at us curiously when I and another journalist knocked at Gerry’s door.
Military vehicles were scurrying past, possibly under orders that the troops must show themselves as much as possible. I looked at the faces of the soldiers. There was nothing on them but sheer bewilderment. They would look the same if they were called out to “preserve order” in Birmingham.
Gerry told me of the endless succession of wires and phone calls that had to be sent to Mr Callaghan [British Home Secretary] to get him to act while Catholics were being burned out of their houses.
He was strongly critical of the callous disinterest of leading British politicians.
His first phone calls Mr Callaghan did not deign to answer in person. Later he got frightened and took the phone off his assistant to talk to Fitt. He solemnly promised Fitt that he would disarm the B-men, though he didn’t say when or how.
Fitt was then in a church hall into which several hundred people had gathered. The young men had thrown up hasty barricades to stem the tide of the Orange mobs. He told Callaghan: “There are two hundred people here listening to this phone call.”
The other side had guns, petrol, automatic weapons, machine guns even.
The people of the Falls Road were defenceless. They came to Gerry Fitt to “give us something to fight with”.
What could he give them? This was where the petrol bomb came into use. It was the only thing.
People were asking, “Where is the IRA?”
Gerry was of the opinion that the IRA was taken by surprise. This was a complete answer to the propagandist talk of an IRA plot. The hoodlums who had flung themselves on the people of the Falls Road had not sent them a postcard first.
I went up to the Divis Street flats. In the house of an old friend I saw the bullet holes.
One bullet had come in through the flimsy “wall” typical of this type of “housing”. It had come through just above where the pillow was on the bed. “My wife might have been sleeping there,” my friend told me, “but she didn’t stay here that night.”
The bullet went through the next wall. I traced it into the bathroom. It chipped a piece out of the bath and went on through the next wall. In the next room I saw it again. It had embedded itself in a plastic chair.
I took photographs of these things, but they will not be ready for this issue of the “Irish Democrat”.
There were barricades around the flats – huge tall skyscrapers – empty bottles were piled up on the higher landings. There was a 100-gallon drum of petrol, still part full. Bricks and stones were in piles. There was a smell of burning, though no smoke was visible. The mills where James Connolly had organised the girls were in the distance, gutted.
Even in parts of the city where there had been no fighting the house windows and shop windows were boarded up, but here it was clear that some of the public houses would never reopen.
Another friend met me with a car. We went up to Turf Lodge, a fine new modern housing estate at the top of the Glen Road. It was a bright showery day. The mountains were gleaming in green and yellow. Across the Lagan Valley the jagged peaks of the Mourne Mountains broke the skyline. No wonder the tourists come here.
At the foot of the hill the road bends to enter the estate and here every car or wagon had to stop and tell its business. We had the magic name. It was that of a well-known Communist Republican who was on board the prison ship in the days of the Second World War.
He would not object to my mentioning his name. But I would not advise any of the “security” forces to try using it.
We went on till we found the main barricade, all other access to the estate having been sealed off.
There was a huge board and we watched the pickets paint upon it “No B-men, Military, RUC allowed past this point”. They were repainting it because of reports, which I was not able to confirm, that British troops were operating with B-men in Co. Derry, searching houses. The report, which at that time I doubted, was carried on the “Irish News”.
They had not barred troops till then. Now they did.
A trench was dug on both sides of the road across the fields. Only fully trained troops could have forced their way in.
We went to the house of the aforementioned Republican. His son took us round. There was a constant stream of questions to be solved.
There were very few shops on the estate. Women had to go outside the barricades to get food. They had difficulties of transport. A means of getting them down and back was improvised.
Patrols kept an eye on the outskirts. There had been one attack on the estate made by B-men. It had been repulsed, but there was uneasiness over the large amount of open country surrounding the houses. It would be hard to seal up all the ways in, especially the mountains.
I was taken to the refugee centre. A school building had been taken over as a hospital.
Further up the hill another had been taken over to house the homeless.
An organiser with several women assistants was working there.
The huge haul was filled with bidding. Cooking and eating facilities had been taken over.
There I heard a story of the magnificent solidarity of the Turf Lodge workers.
When the attack was made on the Catholic areas of the city, refugees swarmed up. Families had been separated. Men, women and children – leaving aside of course the young men who stayed and fought – were pouring in, with what they stood up in. They had lost everything.
There was nothing ready for them.
Yet within hours mattresses, blankets, simple cooking utensils appeared. None of these came from the “Government”. The people split their homes. The men went round the estate, took any bedding people could spare, and often could not spare, and they hunked it on their backs up to the centre. Though not every refugee had a mattress, they all had blankets.
But because of the health problems, it was considered unwise to keep masses of people sleeping on the floor.
An appeal went round the estate that the refugees should be accommodated in houses.
There are a thousand houses on the estate.
There were one thousand five hundred refugees.
The citizens split their houses now, as they had split their possessions before. They moved their families into one or two rooms and gave the other rooms over to the refugees.
The organiser told me how a wee girl, not more than 15, had been in Dublin on a holiday.
She reached Belfast on the Friday night, to find screaming mobs round the district where she lived. She went to a priest who drove round Belfast to one refugee area after another. In the end he brought her to Turf Lodge.
There were missing children too.
So it was decided to take a census of all on the estate. The name of the girl’s parents came on the second sheet returned. They were frantic about her, but could do nothing, except the father hung around somewhere near where their house had been in hopes he might see her. And the children were restored to their families.
I left Turf Lodge full of admiration for the courage, inspiration, and above all the capacity to improvise of these working people, whose experience of revolution was nil, but who knew how to manage their own affairs if they were allowed.
The next port of call was the Falls Road.
All the way down, past James Connolly’s house, on the south side of the road every street was blocked by a barricade.
Some of the barricades were of wrecked, sometimes burnt-out motor vehicles. Others were of paving stones, occasionally brushwood, old drums, old tyres, rubbish of all sorts piled in inextricable confusion.
But there were also more sophisticated barricades. I saw steel scaffolding expertly let into the wall, leaving only the size of a door for anybody to enter.
This was on the Catholic side.
On the other side of the road, that open to the Protestant areas, the British Army were with barbed wire, but at some points there were also Irish barricades.
The soldiers carried rifles but no bayonets.
I saw a rifle loaded only once. What it was loaded with I don’t know.
Outside a public house, a Catholic who had been burned out said he recognised the man who had set his house alight. He told a soldier, who refused to arrest him. He had no powers of arrest, he said. He advised the Irishman to report the man’s name. He replied that he did not know his name. He was then advised to “Go home” – not very helpful advice to a man who has been burned out.
The troops were completely unaccustomed to police duties. They talked freely to passers-by. I think they desperately wanted to be accepted by the people, and that it was not only that they had instructions to behave themselves. Actually it is a mistake for police to get chatting.
In this instance there was a gradual rise of tempers, and I saw the soldiers doing the little military jig day they affect when fixing their magazines. I wonder they did not radio for instructions at the start – but perhaps they did and got none.
There was no difficulty in getting past the barricades into the Falls district. People who walked in – I had lost the car – were not questioned. Only those in cars were asked to explain themselves. A very healthy attitude to motorcars, I thought.
There I found one of the Republicans who had lost his work, looking after the house while his family did some shopping. The television was switched off. We listened to Belfast Free Radio on a transistor set.
The Falls was impressive even beyond Turf Lodge.
I asked how many people were there behind the barricades. I was told the total number was 75,000.
The size of a fair-sized city.
No wonder some of the troops had to look across the road and read the slogans on the barricades: “This is free Belfast” and “An Phoblachy Abú”.
The Free Radio was warning of desultory attacks by the B-men now operating in plain clothes, and telling the public to strengthen the barricades when we went round to look at the devastated area.
Any man of my time of life has seen plenty of devastation. I can say that the scene around me reminded me of the blitz.
To describe what took place as “riots”, as the Press and radio have done, is an absurd understatement. It was war.
On the north side of the Falls Road, at this particular point, there is a largely Catholic area only a few hundred yards wide, and then beyond, without much no-man’s-land, is the Protestant Shankill area.
A row of exceptionally strong barricades seals off the two areas.
On the side of the barricade where I stood every house was in ruins. Street after street; row after row. One of the worst had been inhabited by a Protestant cobbler, a harmless wee man as everybody said, whose crime was getting on well with his Catholic neighbours.
Across on the far side of the barricades, anybody could see that there was no damage done. And, adding insult to injury, overlooking the scene of wanton destruction there was a Union Jack flying.
Even an English jingo would be ashamed to see his flag flaunting the misery of thousands of dispossessed people, after such an orgy of violence.
There was one little house, burned beyond repair, where what paint was left was bright and new. The paint pots and paint brushes were still there in the bedroom. The people had been surprised doing a little bit of decorating, had left everything and ran.
The scale of destruction was unbelievable.
It would not be possible, I was assured, and it is certainly my belief that I was assured correctly, for such an attack to be carried out without considerable preparation.
My friends were full of praises for the courage of the young men who ripped up the streets under fire, constructed hasty barricades to hold back the attackers, while stronger ones were built behind and retreated from one to the other, defending their homes without elementary arms, with sticks, stones, iron railings, and later petrol bombs when these could be organised. At long last a handful of old rifles was pressed into service.
But for this heroism the whole Falls area would have been gutted during the four hours Mr Wilson and Mr Callaghan were dithering, scared to override the Six-County authorities’ objections to British troops coming in to halt what was becoming a massacre. A nine-year-old boy was shot dead when machine-guns opened up on a block of flats.
As the battle grew fiercer, B-man men were seen distributing rifles to Paisleyites. Snipers positioned themselves on the roofs of mills. That is why the Republicans burned the mills down. If they had had rifles themselves they would have picked off the snipers.
They had no desire to create unemployment. It would have been worse than unemployment if all the Catholics had been driven out of Belfast, so that by the time civil rights were introduced nobody had need of them.
Back into Free Belfast. My companion’s young son came in from work, a boy in his late teens. He had been carrying the wounded to safety.
We went for another walk round. Tricolour flags flew at street corners and over many of the barricades.
“I think,” I remarked, “that there might be a chance that those need never come down.”
“What d’you mean?”
“I don’t mean the end of the border has come. But I’ve a feeling that Flags and Emblems Acts, Control of Employment Acts, and quite a few other things have become completely out of date.”
I could not get on the ship, so I decided to come back to London through Dublin.
Walking from Connolly Station to O’Connell Street wondering which of my friends to ring up, at the GPO I saw a platform. Soon I descried Cathal MacLiam’s enormous beard, and Micheál O Loingsigh’s not quite so big one [Both member of the Wolfe Tone Society]. And Derry Kelleher [leading Sinn Fein member], and the stocky resolute figure of Con Lehane [Dublin solicitor], and Michael O’Riordan [Irish Workers’ Party secretary] exuding cheerful leadership.
There was a solidarity meeting about to begin. It was strange to see normal political life in action after so short a journey.
A group of young students were parading outside a cinema with placards saying, “Down with Fascist culture. Up Mao Tse Tung” [These would have been the “Internationalists”, mainly Trinity College students]. They argued a little with members of the queue as the gardai look on.
The gardai did I say? They were there, of course, standing about in groups, silently eyeing the demonstrators, others directing the traffic.
So what?
It struck me with a sudden impact that though I had sent spent all day in Belfast, and had walked and driven miles round the city, I had not seen a single policeman in uniform. Not even in the centre of the city. And I had not seen any troops “on the beat” either.
I must find out, I said to myself, was there any crime?
And I did.
There was no crime.
When the people are in power there is no crime. It is only when the force of the imperialist State repress the people that the people become indifferent to crime, and leave its suppression to the “Guardians of law and order”, who are paid for the job.
I was told of the excitement which said swept Dublin when the pogroms began, of the refugee camp set up on the border, not as an international gimmick, but because of the desperate plight of those who fled the terror.
But for the resistance of the young men of the Falls Road, who had, at last, found that half-dozen rifles and were down to their last round when the mobs hesitated and gave time for the British troops to come in, the Twenty-Six Counties might have been accommodating 50,000 people.
There were some wild reactions. In the first frenzy some people tried to burn a Protestant church – it must be the first time in the history of Dublin.
Every speaker on the platform, which included a Protestant clergyman, members of the Republican, Labour and Communist movements, students, intellectuals and workers, emphasised the need to fight sectarianism. The fight had been successful.
The two religions were co-operating again. The Irish people should be neither Catholic nor Protestant, but both, said Michael O’Riordan, quoting Thomas Davis.
Young Sean Edwards [Worker’s Party activist] made a fine speech and there was a general atmosphere of sober determination. There was bitter condemnation of the hypocrisy of British imperialism, and the realisation that there was still a struggle ahead, and a political struggle too, before the battle for a united Irish Republic had been won.
One thing I missed in the meeting. It was any expression that there are classes in Britain, that over the past few years there have been anti-imperialist developments among the English youth.
This is of course because there has not been enough of it to make any impact in Ireland. I was told by one of the speakers afterwards to whom I mentioned this deficiency that “Only a few exceptionally intelligent and enlightened people in England would ever support Irish freedom.”
I will end on that note. If that is the opinion of an enlightened and intelligent Irishman in Dublin, is it not time the British working-class people caught themselves on?
Is it not time that the voice of the intelligent and the enlightened was to be heard a little louder? Through the Labour movement?
For after seeing what I saw in Belfast I will say with one of the old prophets: “If ye are silent, then the very stones of the earth will cry out against this iniquity.”
– – –
[Excerpt from Desmond Greaves’s “Killeshandra” column in the same, September 1969, issue of the “Irish Democrat”]
Staff at the Connolly Association office have been going in at seven in the morning during the Six County crisis.
Why?
To get some work done before the telephone starts ringing.
And apart from the phone there is a continuous stream of visitors.
The Association is very pleased to see them when they come. But if anybody has difficulty in getting through on the phone, well, try again. But not at seven in the morning.
The only daily newspaper to have wholeheartedly backed up the struggle for Civil Rights in the Six Counties during the crisis has been the “Morning Star”.
This is edited by Mr Matthews and lies somewhat away from the other papers in Farrington Road, halfway between Fleet Street and the Thompson Empire in Gray’s Inn Road.
“Tribune” among the weeklies has been the best, but for once the “New Statesman” has shown a bit of the futility of the Stormont regime in no uncertain terms.
Paul Johnson wrote on August 15th: “The present situation in Ulster, for which Britain ultimately carries full responsibility, is a scandal and a disgrace.”
Which brings me back to Betty Harrison.
Seven years ago she was organiser of the Tobacco Workers Union. Together with Marcus Lipton [Labour MP for Brixton], John Eber of the MCF and Desmond Greaves of the Connolly Association, she went on a fact-finding tour of the Six Counties.
She came into the Connolly Association office one day recently.
“Well,” she said, “We went there seven years ago and when we got back and told them the facts, nobody took any bloody notice of us. And now they’ve got to send troops in.”
She can say that again.
It is a terrible commentary on the irresponsibility of the greater part of the British communications system that they utterly suppress information that is given to them, in what they conceive to be the political interests of England.
The British people were simply not allowed to know. These crimes that Unionism has now been caught for have been committed continuously for fifty years – shielded by the greater part of Fleet Street.