legacy of the O’Neill cabinet was not only a failure to reform the rigged franchise, making mass protest and civil disobedience to force them to do so practically inevitable, for good measure it also disinvested the west.
Parallels between the Irish and American Civil Rights Movements
A future US leader from the American South, Bill Clinton, who in 1968 was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, observed:
I first became aware of John Hume when he became widely written about in the news and the SDLP was attempting to do the most difficult of all things, which is to be an inclusive political party in a polarising time. We know what works in the world is inclusive politics, inclusive economics, [and] inclusive social policies, but the more people are polarised and distrusting – and particularly if they’re shooting guns – the more difficult it is to say, ‘I’m for inclusive cooperation, I’m for peace’, and John just held the line. He wanted an inclusive peace and he thought that non-violence was the best way to pursue it. He was the Irish conflict’s Martin Luther King or Gandhi and I thought as a tactical matter he was right.
Informed by the American Civil Rights Movement, the leaders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement saw that rights could be very rapidly obtained through non-violent mass protest. In the United States, the events from Bloody Sunday in Selma on 7 March 1965, to the successful march in Selma under federal protection on 21 March 1965, to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act on 6 August 1965, showed that enormous strides towards full participation in society could be achieved, and quickly. In the view of Brendan O’Leary, ‘by adopting the methods of the American Civil Rights Movement, what Hume and a range of others did, particularly Austin Currie inside the Nationalist Party, was to reorient the strategy, both as a strategy of protest against the Belfast government and to be heard by the London government in insisting on British rights for British citizens’.
This strategy put the British government in an untenable moral position. As Gandhi had done in the 1940s, the Civil Rights Movement used the principles that the British government purported to uphold against them by demonstrating that they were being honoured in the breach. Similarly, in the United States, the appeal to sacred ideals of the founding documents by the Civil Rights Movement also eventually turned the tide in American public opinion. At all times Hume, despite the escalation of violence, nevertheless continually looked to the model of Martin Luther King, and his insistence, especially when circumstances became very intense in the US, that the movement must remain non-violent. Other parallels with the American Civil Rights Movement abound, as Brendan O’Leary elucidates:
In both the American and Northern Irish contexts, communities were subject to local control, and in both cases a local majority discriminated against a local minority. The local majorities organised themselves, sought exclusive patronage over public appointments, they monopolised the local policing, the local security forces, the local judiciary, and in some jurisdictions they disenfranchised the minority. In both cases, the local majority also discriminated against the local minority. The discrimination extended to both public employment and private employment – members of the minority community were not hired or, if hired, were not promoted. As African-Americans mobilised behind the banner of their constitutional rights as American citizens, Northern Nationalists in the Civil Rights Movement mobilised behind the demand for equal rights as British citizens.
The February 1969 Election
In a State which had raised parliamentary elections to a high level of irrelevancy, the February 1969 election was a dramatic break with tradition, a crucible in which radically differing goals and aspirations and methods for achieving them were, for the first time in the history of the Northern Irish State, exposed to the reality of the ballot sheet. Eamonn McCann, a candidate in that election in the Derry (Foyle) constituency, describes the principles defining that election, in its Derry context, as follows:
People like John were looking for what was called British rights for British citizens. It seemed a rather modest ambition. I had a more radical agenda, a socialist agenda. The election in February 1969 was called with the prime minister of the day, Terence O’Neill, and a famous broadcast said: ‘What kind of Ulster do you want, Ulster is at the crossroads’. It was a crossroads election. John won the election beating the old Nationalist Party leader Eddie McAteer and myself. That signalled and demonstrated that John’s style of looking for … not a United Ireland, but looking for equal rights within Northern Ireland and advocating a strong but moderate way of pursuing that, matched the mood of the people to a greater extent … than Eddie McAteer or myself.
McCann’s socialist approach failed to command broad appeal and the Nationalist Party, with its age-old strains of indignation and abstentionism, was effectively wiped away. Throughout its decades of existence, it had achieved nothing other than managing to speak to the Nationalists’ sense of being a minority, of being deprived. The party that effectively swept it away, though still in formation in 1969, was the SDLP.
Hume’s approach spoke to the electorate and it was to continue to do so for the next three decades, as Hume topped the poll again and again. In 1969, he had stood for the principles of inclusion and justice. Neither socialism nor nationalism had appealed to the Derry electorate as much. The words ‘justice’ and ‘inclusion’ may well resemble the pat words of many politicians at the hustings, yet the degree of injustice and exclusion that the Catholic electorate in Derry faced meant that the mandate Hume sought went to the core of their dilemmas. It also had resonance beyond Northern Ireland, first in Britain where the media attempted to convey the causes of the Northern problem, which helps to explain why, that same year, Hume’s profile was noticed by Senator Ted Kennedy.
Terence O’Neill was later to say that he called what he termed the ‘crossroads’ election to give the people of Northern Ireland the chance to break the mould of sectarian politics.9 In electing a candidate such as Hume, the electorate had availed of that chance, since one of the four basic principles Hume articulated in seeking a mandate to form a social democratic movement was that it ‘must be completely non-sectarian and must root out a fundamental evil in our society, sectarian division’.10 But the tragedy was that the Unionists did not perceive it so.
Hume the Parliamentarian
The newly minted MP, elected to represent the Foyle constituency at the Parliament of Northern Ireland, had never before held political office. Nevertheless, he gave the impression of one who had considerably more experience than his thirty-two years and novice status might indicate. He had already represented Ireland in the United States during his presidency of the Irish Credit Union, and he was alert to the wider movements of the world, which were gathering pace: from Prague to Memphis equality movements were challenging traditions and demanding new approaches to politics. Such changes were the nub of what the Parliament of Northern Ireland in Stormont had stood against. Even so, Hume had considerable confidence in himself and in his approach to politics. The least parliamentary of parliaments, the atmosphere in Stormont towards the new, articulate generation hungry to establish themselves in Northern Ireland could hardly have been less welcoming. Yet, in spite of such intolerance, the sclerotic and self-perpetuating cycle of the rigged parliament was about to be unsettled by a parliamentarian of uncommon ability.
As Parnell and his party had done in Westminster in the 1880s, Hume and others managed to use the parliamentary process to shame Stormont into facing up to the injustices of the State. Those injustices included gerrymander, sectarian housing allocation and hiring policies. Increasingly, those injustices – when challenged by public protests – had in turn spawned further injustices: in the judiciary, in policing and in legislation to give validation to them. On 3 April 1969, for instance, on the floor of parliament Hume spoke of the nexus between housing allocation and political patronage: ‘Each petty potentate in each little rural electoral division allocates all the houses in that division and perpetuates himself in power. That is part of the housing policy … the political jobbery which has been a root cause of the social injustices.’11 In so doing, Hume challenged politicians for lacking the communal instincts which would have tended to the needs of all of the people they represented: ‘If the Government were to take a referendum they would find that the people would be in favour of reform. The people who would resist it would be the local Caesars who would lose their power and would not be able to shove