The People’s Democracy and the NICRA resignations [March 1969]
Extended Editorial Note: Below is a news report by Desmond Greaves on the special NICRA meeting that was called in March 1969 to try to repair the divisions caused by the People’s Democracy proposal that NICRA should join with it in a provocative march through Protestant East Belfast to Stormont. The report was carried in the May 1969 issue of the “Irish Democrat” and sought to put a positive gloss on this NICRA meeting for readers in Britain by stating that “unity was restored” and that Belfast Trades Council secretary and CP member Betty Sinclair, who had resigned with three others over this proposed march, was replaced by another CP member, Edwina Stewart, and that Belfast Wolfe Tone Society member Ann Hope, Republican leader Billy McMillen and Armagh Republican Liam Cassin replaced the others who had resigned.
This note gives the background to this meeting and to the NICRA resignations that preceded it. It also draws attention to the destructive role played by the People’s Democracy in the evolution of the Northern Civil Rights Movement and the political/ideological outlook that governed the actions of the PD leaders – a topic which historical commentary on the period has generally ignored.
The so-called “People’s Democracy” movement initially arose as a reaction by Queen’s University students to the 5th October 1968 events in Derry. Following that event the students – young, idealistic and politically inexperienced – organised a number of marches and street sit-downs in Belfast which led to confrontations with the police and Paisley-led Loyalists. While ostensibly disdaining a formal structure and leadership, the People’s Democracy movement was in reality led from the beginning by far-Left members of the Young Socialist Alliance, some of whom had been members of the Trotskyite Irish Workers’ Group in London in the years immediately before. They coordinated their efforts in the PD behind the scenes, unbeknownst to the majority of student members.
A key indicator of Trotskyite ideological provenance was the criticism by PD spokesmen and supporters of the so-called “stages theory”, usually prefixed with the word “Stalinist”, which supposedly motivated the Republican and Communist members of the NICRA. This adjective harks back to Trotsky’s dispute with Stalin over political strategy in the 1930s. This is not really a theory at all, but rather a setting out of some basic facts of political life: namely, that democratic reforms such as the establishment and maintenance of an independent State, or campaigning for equal civil rights for all citizens of that State, are different things from whether that State should pursue a capitalist or socialist economic and political policy once it is established. In other words, political democracy and socialism are different things. Democracy refers to equality of citizens’ rights, whereas the ideologies of capitalism or socialism relate to differences of class interest regarding State policy. In contrast to these commonsense distinctions, Trotskyites uphold the theory of so-called “permanent revolution”, whereby democratic struggles should be subsumed into socialist ones, for success in the former will be enough to satisfy the capitalists/bourgeoisie, whereas genuine leftwingers should push for socialist revolution. For Trotskyites therefore, advancing socialist demands and using leftist rhetoric in campaigns for democratic rights are deliberately aimed at alienating non-socialists and supposedly exposing their inadequacies as bourgeois reformers before the forces of the proletariat. Confrontations with the “forces of law and order” may also be welcomed as exposing the reactionary character of the capitalist State – in the People’s Democracy case the Northern Ireland Government at Stormont. In 1969-70 the PD leaders openly encouraged such confrontations and the media publicity they attracted.
The NICRA publication “We Shall Overcome: The history of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland 1968-1978” describes the rise of the People’s Democracy as follows:
“Although PD grew out of a genuine desire for civil rights by a broad section of the student population, its leadership aimed it in the general direction of a socialist political philosophy and away from what they regarded as reformism. In the whale’s belly that was Queen’s, cut off from the outside world, the students were easily led from reform to revolution in a matter of weeks, and PD declined into a narrow politically sectarian organisation united only by the politics of impatience. Initiated into politics by the need for civil rights, they decided that only socialism could provide such rights and immediately demanded socialism. Like the Nationalist Party they confused the demand for civil rights in the existing State with a demand for a specific form of government which only the abolition of the State could provide.”
The principal PD leaders were Michael Farrell, then a 24-year-old teacher at Belfast Technical College, Kevin Boyle, a law lecturer at Queen’s University, and Bernadette Devlin, a young Queen’s psychology student. They liaised closely with the Trotskyite Eamonn McCann in Derry, who was a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party.
It was the People’s Democracy that initiated the Burntollet march in early January 1969, which significantly raised sectarian feelings across the province. The PD went ahead with this event even though the NICRA Executive and the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee had called at the time for a moratorium on civil rights marches in order to give an opportunity to see what Prime Minister Terence O’Neill’s modest reform programme amounted to. The majority of the university students were initially against the march proposal, but it was pushed by the internally organised Young Socialist element and formally agreed after a succession of meetings that were attended by ever fewer numbers. The assault on the marchers by Loyalists at Burntollet Bridge got massive coverage in the contemporary media. It made heroes of the participants in the eyes of many Northern Nationalists. One week later, in Newry on 11 January, the People’s Democracy held a march during which demonstrators burned police tenders and attacked a local post office. This further associated civil rights with Catholic rights, and Catholic rights with violence.
On 15 February 1969, at NICRA’s second AGM following its foundation in 1967, the pre-split Goulding-led Republicans helped elect PD leaders Michael Farrell and Kevin Boyle to the NICRA Executive and made Frank Gogarty chairman of NICRA instead of Betty Sinclair.1 Gogarty was an independent Republican who had been beaten unconscious at Burntollet. He was a highly emotional person, close to and much influenced by the PD leaders. The People’s Democracy had by now largely discarded its student base and become an embryonic leftwing political party, with groups or branches in several Northern towns. It put up eight candidates in the Stormont general election on 24 February, which Prime Minister Terence O’Neill called in the hope of boosting his support. No PD candidate was elected. The confrontations at Burntollet and Newry, coupled with PD leaders standing in the Stormont election, tended to alienate such liberal Protestants as had supported the Civil Rights demands up to then2.
On 7 March 1969 the “Irish News” carried a report that Bernadette Devlin, speaking at a meeting in Gulladuff, had announced details of a march to be organised by NICRA in association with the People’s Democracy from the centre of Belfast to Stormont through the heart of Protestant East Belfast for the end of that month. The NICRA Executive had no previous knowledge of this, but it was clearly a concerted attempt by the PD members to make things impossible for the Executive’s more “moderate” members. According to the NICRA document referred to, Messrs Farrell and Boyle supported NICRA’S participation in this march with the People’s Democracy: “At an Executive meeting to discuss the proposed march three separate pro-PD proposals were put forward by either Farrell or Boyle and on each occasion the vote was divided exactly seven each. On each occasion also the Chairman, Frank Gogarty, used his casting vote in favour of the march. The outcome was that four members of the Executive, Betty Sinclair, Fred Heatley, John McInerney and Raymond Shearer, resigned.” As full-time secretary of the Belfast Trades Council, it was clear that Betty Sinclair could not go along with any such event, which would in any case have completely discredited NICRA.
The NICRA document continues: “But four valuable members of the Executive had gone at a crucial period in the civil rights struggle and eight of the Omagh Civil Rights Association followed soon afterwards. The first open split in the NICRA ranks had appeared and although an emergency general meeting on March 23rd ended in some confusion, the majority attending were in favour of abandoning the proposed march to Stormont. That march never did take place but its proposed implementation within the organisation had caused severe damage.”
This 23 March meeting was the one at which Desmond Greaves says in his “Irish Democrat” report below that “unity was restored”. The reality was that this resignation crisis caused the Cathal Goulding leadership of the Republicans in Dublin and the Belfast CP leadership to agree to replace Betty Sinclair on the NICRA Executive with Edwina Stewart, who became secretary of the NICRA in the period following. Edwina Stewart was married to Jimmy Stewart, leading Belfast CP member and later general secretary of the post-1970 Communist Party of Ireland. The Stewarts, like most Belfast CP members, were of Protestant background. They remained politically close to the Goulding-led Republicans in the period that followed.
The re-assertion of Republican-Communist cooperation on the NICRA Executive following the March 1969 resignation crisis led the People’s Democracy to withdraw from its Executive at the third NICRA AGM in February 1970. The PD leaders had long been calling for the abolition of Stormont and direct rule from Westminster, as they regarded the Unionist Government in Belfast rather than its principals in London as the main enemy. There was an analogy here with the situation in 1800, when those running the College Green Parliament made themselves so unpopular by their mistreatment of the people during the 1798 rebellion that the oppressed Catholics widely welcomed its abolition and direct rule from London through the Act of Union. NICRA on the other hand advanced the Bill of Rights demand that Westminster should legislate for democratic reforms in the North, while empowering a reformed Stormont to develop closer relations with Dublin – so providing a political arena in which in which Northern Catholics and Protestants could establish and pursue their common interests over time. When the Republican split occurred in January 1970 the newly formed Provisionals took up the PD demand and cited NICRA’s supposedly “reformist” policy in wanting to keep the Stormont Parliament in existence as one of the reasons for their break with the “Officials”. In due time the Conservative Edward Heath introduced “direct rule”, giving the PDs and others what they called for – another instance of the common pattern of ultra-Left policies playing into the hands of the political Right.
- The Editor of these notes was present at this March 1969 NICRA meeting as an observer from the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society and as Dublin correspondent for the “Irish Democrat”.
- Examples of sympathetic Protestants being alienated by People’s Democracy activity are given in Dermot Maguire’s “The Fermanagh Civil Rights Campaign in its Wider Context, 1969-74” and in John McCaul’s article on Newry mentioned above.
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NICRA Plans Civil Disobedience [“Irish Democrat”, May 1969]
By C. Desmond Greaves
While dramatic news was coming through from Derry, unity was restored at the special meeting of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), called to replace the members of the Association’s committee who had resigned last month over the issue of the advisability of the NICRA cooperating in a civil rights march to Stormont.
Miss Betty Sinclair, last year’s chairman of the Association, decided not to go forward again, although numbers of people wanted her to do so. In her stead two other women took her place on the committee, with overwhelming votes from the delegates present.
They are Miss Ann Hope, a member of the Belfast Trades Council and active in the Belfast Vietnam Committee and the Wolfe Tone Society, who was elected treasurer; Mrs Edwina Stewart, also well known in Belfast Labour circles; Mr Liam McMillen, a prominent member of the Republican Movement; and Mr Liam Cassin of the Armagh Civil Rights Committee.
The four new members of the NICRA should go far to strengthening its representative character and should restore its unity after the recent differences of opinion on policy matters.
The meeting was a crowded one in the Wellington Park Hotel. Mr Frank Gogarty, the chairman, had just returned from witnessing the police attacks in the Derry Bogside the night before.
He had a tape recording with him of interviews with families who had been assaulted in the area by the RUC. As these were heard by the meeting there was an emotional surge of sympathy with the Derry people.
Many suggestions were made as to what to do in support. Among the speakers were Mr Andy Barr, Fr McGeoghegan of Belfast, Mr Jerry Doherty of Derry, and others. The meeting closed when the augmented Executive went into private session to discuss their plans.
Earlier in the meeting it was announced that sub-committees had been set up to prepare policy on various aspects of the civil rights campaign. The NICRA was submitting evidence to the Cameron Commission and would welcome statements from people who were present at the recent disturbances.
A sub-committee was also working on a plan of civil disobedience to implement the civil rights demands. It was proposed to draw up a Civil Rights Charter for which the signatures of the public in the North would be sought. The Executive also wished to give civil rights groups from other parts of the Six Counties a greater say in the Executive, but the present Constitution of the NICRA did not allow for this. Pending the adoption of appropriate constitutional amendments therefore, at the next AGM, the Executive intended holding fortnightly meetings with local civil rights committees throughout the North.
All bodies would be invited to these and they would enable people outside Belfast to play a full part in the formation of general policy for the Civil Rights Movement.
If the new NICRA Executive acts in a responsible and intelligent way, there can be no doubt that its position as the “guiding brains” of the Civil Rights Movement as a whole will be securely established during the coming period. The present situation in the Six Counties will call for all the ability and discipline its members can muster.