Human Rights as War by Other Means: Peace Politics in Northern Ireland

Chapter 2. The Usual Suspects

CHAPTER 2 The Usual Suspects Street politics were made fashionable by the Civil Rights Movement, and that was a good thing. . . . If people couldn’t articulate what they felt in words then they could forcibly demonstrate what they felt with bricks and bottles. Street politics changed the very consciousness of the people, and opened to them prospects which were before vague dreams, i.e., jobs, houses, justice. . . . Street politics were exhilarating, dangerous and to a degree effective; they were also bloody, brutal and murderous. —Joe Nicholas, letter to the editor, Sunday Press, November 1, 1970 At the bottom of the Falls Road, in the Divis area of west Belfast, one wall has become a dedicated site for murals. It is called the “international wall,” and the murals there draw connections between Northern Ireland and other countries. Periodically, the murals are changed; exemplary paintings have commemorated the Basque struggle, expressed sympathy with besieged Gazans, and celebrated historical figures like Che Guevara. A long-standing trope of the murals is comparison of nationalist experiences in Northern Ireland with African American experiences in the United States. So, for example , in 2010, nine years after the Holy Cross protests discussed in Chapter 1, a mural juxtaposed images of the Holy Cross children and Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine black students who attended the desegregating Little Rock High School in Arkansas, as she was harassed by white students in 1957. 38 Chapter 2 Comparisons of Irish experiences in the north with the U.S. civil rights struggle have persisted since the 1960s, when local civil rights campaigners appropriated the strategies of the U.S. activists. The civil rights movement began in protest of practices under the unionist-dominated Stormont parliament —including gerrymandering, limited enfranchisement, and anti-Catholic discrimination in public services, especially housing. Their demonstrations and marches were met with violent opposition from police and loyalists. Street politics spiraled into violent conflict. In this sense, rights discourse was implicated in the conflict’s emergence. Those living in the most impoverished and violent areas of the city quickly embraced the protest tactics of the civil rights movement, as working-class nationalists and unionists in west Belfast incorporated rights discourse into their political vernacular. This appropriation, as much as the civil rights movement itself, was an early determining influence on the contemporary function of rights talk as war by other means. The appropriations of rights talks in the 1970s swiftly translated grander assertions of civil rights into more quotidian claims for socioeconomic rights, such as the right to public housing in communally identified areas of the city. Territorial boundaries of political and communal blocs hardened, and swathes of people were put out of their homes, often violently. As riots, mass displacements, bombings, and shootings became everyday events, rights talk, especially about housing rights, became inseparable from profound social and political cleavages, as well as new forms of political action. Rights Enter the Lexicon “Patrick,” a former member of People’s Democracy (PD), one of the 1960s civil rights organizations, still recalls some of their work with a sense of accomplishment. But he is also rueful and contemplative. The subsequent loss of life, he says, makes his heady days of student activism seem naïve. In 2011, he still questions PD’s role in the conflict, and he is still shaken by memories as he makes his way through the city. Recently, he says, driving past the Divis area, he remembered Patrick Rooney, the first child to die, killed in his bed as police fired on Divis Flats during the riots of 1969.1 He began to cry and pulled to the side of the road to compose himself. Questions and doubts plague him, not about the injustices of the Northern Irish state they confronted but about the different paths they might have taken. “It’s not whether The Usual Suspects 39 those things didn’t happen; it’s whether the response to them could have been different,” he said sadly. In contrast to Patrick’s doubts about civil rights strategies and categorical rejection of violence, contemporary accounts of the peace process causally link past violence to the postpartition state’s rights deficits. The curative potential of human rights is celebrated for helping end the conflict. A pivotal moment in this account is the late 1960s campaign for civil rights, the violent reactions of police and loyalists, and the subsequent street-level, intercommunal violence that escalated...