The Second Coming of Paisley: Militant Fundamentalism and Ulster Politics

6. Civil Rights for the Green, the Black, and the Orange

161 6 Civil Rights for the Green, the Black, and the Orange As Paisley and O’Neill awoke to New Year’s Day in 1967, it likely seemed to both that they had strengthened their stature among their respective supporters. Paisley had become an important martyr within the international fellowship of militant Protestantism, and the Free Presbyterian Church was beginning to expand its membership and plan new congregations after a decade of limited growth. O’Neill, meanwhile , retained UUP support as well as the moderate leadership of the Protestant and Catholic communities. Most local Unionist associations upheld O’Neill when the party took a special vote on 24 September 1966, and Unionist MPs unanimously backed him three days later. However, O’Neill would soon see his career shortened. Dissidents within the UUP and the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland (Orange Order)—whose members solidly supported the UUP—and Catholic activists within the newly formed Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in January 1967 began a series of events that put intense pressure on the O’Neill administration that weakened its ability to introduce reforms or to alleviate Protestant concerns. Although the erosion of support for O’Neill within the UUP and the Protestant community as well as from his moderate Catholic supporters was not yet outwardly evident, from the day Paisley walked into the Crumlin Road Jail, the Northern Ireland prime minister could never simultaneously satisfy Paisleyites and the Catholic community. New factors now entered the arena.1 162 † The New Testament The Green and the Black During the closing years of the 1960s, the focus of Paisley’s crusade shifted from opposing Christian apostasy and the policies of the O’Neill administration to battling the emerging civil rights movement in Northern Ireland . To Paisley and militant fundamentalists, the movement was nothing more than a thinly disguised coalition of Irish Republicans, Communists, and the Roman Catholic Church. They were convinced that the movement threatened the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and the existence of Bible Protestantism in Ulster. Between August 1968 and the outbreak of sectarian violence one year later, Paisley turned the efforts of his crusade against civil rights activism.2 In January 1967, both the United States and Northern Ireland were contending with indigenous civil rights movements, which were moving in different directions. In America, the movement for racial equality ebbed as African Americans gained voting rights and access to integrated schooling and as civil rights activists radicalized. The civil rights movement of large street marches and local activism had largely run its course, and Americans were beginning to accept the reality of integrated schools and public facilities. Proponents of social change now focused on implementing the Great Society and confronting Black Power and the Vietnam War. Across the United States, civil rights activists were turning from direct-action protests to antiwar and antiestablishment activities.3 In Northern Ireland at the same time, Catholic activists were beginning to escalate their demands for political and economic equality. Civil rights activism had been the vocation of a small group of middle-class Catholics and a coalition of Labour and Liberal MPs in Westminster who had been willing to give Terence O’Neill time to affect meaningful reforms. In January 1967, however, the Northern Ireland civil rights movement gave notice that its patience had run out. Over the next thirty months, the events that transpired in Northern Ireland and the United States transformed the careers of both the Reverend Ian Paisley and Prime Minister Terence O’Neill.4 The civil rights campaign within Northern Ireland began in 1963 and in a manner much quieter than its American counterpart. The pressure Civil Rights for the Green, the Black, and the Orange † 163 for reform came from two organizations that were founded to publicize Catholic discrimination complaints and to lobby the British government to take a more active role in Northern Ireland’s internal affairs: a private group, the Campaign for Social Justice in Northern Ireland (CSJ) formed in Dungannon in 1963, and the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU), a group of Labour and Liberal MPs, was established at Westminster two years later. The CSJ consisted of middle-class professionals who disseminated discrimination statistics to the British and Irish press as well as the British government. It avoided a violent or religious theme within its pamphlets and press releases. It had grown out of housing protests that a group of...