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On October 5, 1968, police officers broke ranks to beat a small civil rights march off the streets of Derry. The young poet Seamus Heaney recognized this moment as a “watershed in the political life of Northern Ireland”: it was no longer possible to believe in “shades of grey.”1 On October 4, 2008, the commemorations marking the fortieth anniversary of the march opened in Derry’s Guildhall with an easy-listening version of Nina Simone’s “Free.” This was appropriate for an event that smoothed out the story of the past to suit the needs of the politics of the present. A Nobel Peace Prize winner, John Hume, and a former high-ranking member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Martin McGuinness, each laid claim to the movement’s legacy; the different Irish nationalist traditions—constitutionalism and physical force—each laid exclusive claim to continue the struggle of the Catholic minority.2 But the speech given by the journalist Nell McCafferty was played in a new key. She took out her medicine and encouraged people in the audience to talk about the drugs that they had been prescribed, for she felt that popping pills was the only proper response to the sight of elderly men parading onto the platform in acts of self-promotion. The late 1960s that McCafferty recalled were not about peaceful politics or the politics of the gun; they were about homeless families squatting in empty properties, the occupation of public buildings, and protesters challenging bans on marches. She talked about nonviolence, a democratic idea that is little heard of in the public discourse of Northern Ireland.3 It is an idea that questions the act of peacefully working within the system as much as violently trying to overthrow it. It is an idea that since the 1960s has helped end empires, topple dictators, and pull down barriers to equality. It is an CHAPTER SIX Pushing Luck Too Far ’68, Northern Ireland, and Nonviolence SIMON PRINCE 140 SIMON PRINCE idea that subversively suggests that even democratic states often have to be forced to concede change. The uneasy listening continued for the politicians when McCafferty asked and eventually bullied those who had also broken the law to raise their hands. A spontaneous round of applause sounded around the hall.4 In a reprise of what had happened four decades earlier, nonviolent confrontation had briefly offered the Catholic community something different from constitutional nationalism and militant republicanism. The orchestrators of the October 5, 1968, march in Derry that launched the civil rights movement chose not to attend the Guildhall commemoration; on this occasion, they were practicing nonviolent withdrawal rather than confrontation . The ’68ers did not want to lend their legitimacy to the event or to compromise their separate identity. They marked the moment in a bar dedicated to the guerrilla fighters Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and César Augusto Sandino.5 Northern Ireland’s star ’68er, Eamonn McCann, criticized the assumption that the past could be understood entirely and could not be understood other than in terms of Orange and Green, Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist. He complained in the press that the “fact that there was an international dimension to the North’s civil rights movement has virtually been written out of history.” Northern Ireland was being portrayed as a place apart, but “we weren’t all that different.”6 The sound of bullets and bombs may have dropped to a background hum, but the arguments over history remained as loud as ever. Writing about a past that has not yet passed has made it difficult to escape from the politics and parochialism of Northern Ireland. Most accounts tell the story from inside the civil rights movement and take for granted that there was homogeneity among groups, organizations, and agendas.7 The civil rights movement of 1968–69 was a troubled and temporary coalition that brought together Irish nationalists , Catholic interest groups, liberals, trade unionists, traditionalist and Marxist republicans, communists, and leftists. Their long-term objectives ranged from a reformed Northern Ireland through unification with the independent southern state to the creation of various versions of a united socialist republic of Ireland. The forms that protest took reflected this diversity: parliamentary politics, lobbying, marches, civil disobedience, confrontational direct action, and defensive violence. Some of these tactics were consciously taken from abroad, with the American civil rights movement and the global revolt of ’68 proving the main inspirations. As McCann complains, however, the existing literature fails to...

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