August 69

The RUC were beaten. Next day, 14 August, they were pulled out and the British troops were on the streets of Derry. As far as the withdrawal of the hated police was concerned it was a tactical victory for the people of Derry which brought them much-needed relief.

The Unionist government at Stormont in Belfast took a bitter revenge.

Pressured by Paisley at a midnight meeting, Chichester-Clark, the Prime Minister, mobilised the paramilitary and exclusively Protestant B Specials and issued armoured cars to the RUC in Belfast. That night the armoured cars roared up and down the Catholic Falls Road machine-gunning Divis Its, while the B Specials and Loyalist mobs surged down the side streets from the Shankill Road, burning out Catholic families.

The people of the Falls were virtually defenceless but the following day — calling on folk memory and traditions of previous generations — barricades were built at every street corner and the roads were blocked the way they had been against the police cage-cars in the 1920s and 1932. Free Belfast was born.

BAYONETS The vows were made that there would not be another night like 14 August on the Falls. If the RUC and Specials tried to come in again they would have to fight every inch of the way. The result would have been civil war. Aiready there had been riots in Dublin with crowds demanding guns for the North.

On 15 August the RUC was withdrawn from the Falls and replaced by the British Army. A day later they were in the Catholic Ardoyne district of Belfast. Few noted at that time that as the British troops took up their positions on the Falls their bayonets were pointed at the Catholic ghettos, not at their attackers, Behind the barricades the traditional leaders — the Church, the politicians, and the businessmen — were discarded. The people turned to the Republicans and the militant wing of the Civil Rights movement. The Republicans set up a Defence Committee and on the afternoon of 15 August representatives of PD and the Defence Committee worked out a set of four demands to be met before the barricades came down. These were: disband the B Specials; disarm the RUC; abolish the Special Powers Act; suspend the Stormont government.

MEMBER OF THE DEFEATED RUC DEFENCE COMMITTEES T hat night PD members set up a pirate radio as the voice of the Defence Committee and the people behind the barricades. The next day more PD members were running off the first copies of a bulletin outlining the nds.

Despite the bloodshed — eight people killed (two of them Protestants, six <> Catholics); not to mention 1,500 Catholic families driven out over a couple of months - morale behind the barricades was high. The RUC and the military kept out and the people knew instinctively that they'd struck a major blow at the Orange state. The barricades were strengthened and rotas organised to guard them in every area.

There was a high level of mass involvement. The pirate radio, now Radio Free Belfast, moved to a permanent base in Leeson Street on the heart of the Falls and got a new transmitter which could be heard all over the city. It broadcast requests and political comments all day long. The duplicated bulletins had become Citizen Press , a daily newsheet with a circulation of 10,000 inside the barricades.

CITIZEN PRESS The Citizen Press and above all the radio played a vital role behind the barricades. In the first days they raised the morale of the beleaguered people. They answered the lying propaganda of the Unionist regime with none ot the qualifications and euphemisms of the liberal bourgeois press.

The anti-Unionist people realised that at last they had tools of their own which would tell their side of the story and that they could give their answers direct and plain to Chichester-Clark, Paisley and Callaghan. And the world’s press would hear it because they all listened to Radio Free Belfast. After the first few days the radio and the paper served another function. They raised the consciousness of the people. The mass audience in the ghettos heard about the connection between Unionism and big business, about the economic reasons for Britain’s intervention the North, and the real reason why Jack Lynch, Prime Minister of the South of Ireland, had stood idly by — the fact that the Southern economy was totally dominated by British economic imperialism.

However crudely explained (for we message of the cadio and the paper for the months that the barricades lasted did a lot to lay the ideological which was to come.

BARRICADES BULLETIN PD ran the radio and did most of the work on the Citizen Press until late September. We also produced a printed paper, Barricades Bulletin , which was circulated in the rest of the North, the South and even in Britain. We set up a poster ganda posters like ‘The Mad Major’ (Chichester-Clark) and ‘Malone (Malone Road being the home of Belfast’s upper class). And all the time we repeated the message, ‘the barricades stay till our demands are met’, announce disarming of B Specials It was an exciting time. The people of the ghettos were getting their first taste of political freedom since the yoke of the Northern state had been clamped on their necks in 1921.

; government.

DEMOCRACY impossible. were not Marxists then), the political foundation for the decade of struggle workshop producing powerful propaRoad Fiddles while Falls Road Burns’

could appeal. people.

Brit Freeland and RUC head Peacock POLITICIANS AND CLERGY They had no confidence in the people and were afraid that they would elect the old politicians or the nominees of the clergy. But the Defence Committee had no democratic mandate, and under pressure they co-opted precisely the people they had wanted to keep out — the politicians, Father Padraig Murphy, and Tom Conaty, an ambitious and right-wing Catholic businessman. Eventually such people controlled the Central Defence Committee. And because there were no mass meetings to discuss the demands, the CDC began to water them down and to negotiate deals with the British Spontaneous outbursts of popular feeling, as when Bishop Philbin was chased out of Albert Street for trying to get the barricades down, delayed the sell-out. But they couldn’t prevent it. By the end of September most of the barricades were down, although only the head of the RUC had been changed — the Special Powers Act was still there and, most important, so was the Stormont parliament. It was to take another two and a half years and a lot of bloodshed before Stormont was overturned.

The PD members were unhappy about the lack of democracy but we didn’t fight it hard enough, partly because we were still a student-based group with few real roots in the area. Eventually our position in running the propaganda for the area became This happened in two ways. Party whips arrived from the Sinn Fein headquarters in Dublin (this was before Sinn Fein split into its provisional and Official wings) to enforce the party line. They explained to the local Republican leaders that they should never have agreed to the demand to suspend Stormont since — according to these people who were later to lead the Officials — it was a democratic Irish Assembly.

Then they complained about the politics of the radio and paper. Comparisons between the attack on the Falls and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia would have to stop; so would calls for democracy behind the barricades. Reluctantly the local Republicans toed the line. A censor was appointed to the radio and an entire issue of Citizen Press was recalled and burnt. There were no democratic structures to which we Secondly, while the radio and paper supposedly voiced the policies of the Defence Committee, these changed from day to day as the right wing strengthened their positions and continued their secret negotiations with the military and the British government. Again we didn’t fight as hard as we should — but by then there was no structure through which we could have carried the struggle to the UNFREE CITIZEN At the end of September, we withdrew from running the Citizen Press and the radio, although the latter had been rendered ineffective anyway by high powered jamming equipment brought in,by the British. On 3 October we produced the first issue of a new, uncensored paper of our own, Free Citizen (later to become Unfree Citizen after internment, and now Socialist Republic). By then the barricades INTERNMENT It was the rising of the mass of Catholic populationthat brought about the introduction of internment. When public and international opinion had castigated internment on the basis that no pretence of justice could be pleaded when there was no trial, the Diplock Commission was set up and it reported in early 1972. A form of trial was introduced through trial by one judge and not by the defendent’s peers. Rules of evidence were changed to allow conviction purely on the evidence of a statement and statements obtained under duress and involving brutality by interrogators now became not only acceptable but commonplace. The Castlereagh conveyor belt system provided as effective a form of repression as internment but without the controversial overtones implied in the internment system. The form has changed but not the content. Despite the special nature of the arrest and trial procedures for political offenders the British government has adopted as a central strategy of criminalising those in the vanguard of the political struggle. If these are defeated, they reckon, the rest will be only a mopping up operation to defeat the rebellious Fenians. But the reaction to the hunger strikers deaths has not been as quiet as the British government expected. 90,000 people attended the funeral of Bobby Sands and the campaign has seen a H-Block MP and two H Block TDs elected. THE BRITS MOVE IN WHERE RUC FEAR TO TREAD Once again the repressive solution to the struggle for civil and democratic rights and reforms has raised the whole question of the undemocratic foundations of the northern state itself, and has caused the beginnings of a breach in the criminal bipartisan support by the British Labour Party for Tory policies in Ireland. Similarly the election campaigns have caused traumas for all 3 bourgeois parties in the south who have paid electorally for their silence on the H Block issue. The lesson of 12 years of the British army, 10 years of internment followed by other repression is that the nationalist community cannot be defeated by oppressive measures. Only when partition is brought down by the force cf mass mobili sation can the foundations be laid for a just equitable and peaceful Ireland.

We will only succeed if we learn the most important lesson of Free Belfast: to put our faith in the masses. Imperialism will never be defeated by self-appointed leaderships answerable to no one or by secret negotiations, but only by the will of the people.