The Day it all Began

Tonight I went to my first Belfast Film Festival event, a documentary about the beginning of the civil rights movement in Derry. A march on 5 October 1968 was the kick-off for a civil rights campaign that quickly morphed into The Troubles as the Unionists refused to give in to basic demands for decent housing and jobs. Catholics were tired of being under the boot of the Protestant majority but their pleas for equal rights fell on deaf ears, leading to the IRA’s violent campaign and the Protestant paramilitaries’ violent response. Here’s a BBC summary of the film.

The saddest part of the film was the observation that the movement in Derry for civil rights was originally non-sectarian. It was led by Labour politicians and Young Socialists who were watching demonstrations in Paris, London, and America. But the police response was highly sectarian. They saw the marchers as a bunch of Fenian trouble makers and were ready for sport. They banned the October march and responded with tank-mounted water cannons and billy clubs. All caught on tape. There was some disagreement as to whether some in the civil rights movement provoked the police, to get the violent response onto TVs in living rooms around the world. During a talk back after the film, its director and one of the activists, Eamonn McCann, said that was not the case. Whether some of the protesters egged on the police or not, the police happened to have water cannons on hand--never used before in the UK. So they were ready for a fight and had boxed the marchers in from either end of Duke Street before bashing heads in.

Two other things I remember from the film. There were 8,000 Protestant voters in Derry and 14,000 Catholic voters. But, uniquely in the UK, it was not a one-man, one-vote system. Business owners and property owners were given extra votes. So the city council was made up of 12 Protestants and 8 Catholics. As a result, funding, jobs, housing--all steered to Protestant neighbourhoods. In one scene, a large Catholic family was turned out of a council flat they had occupied. Their furniture in the street was a painful reminder of all the tenant farmers turned out by landlords during the famine. Once evicted, the house was given to a 19 year old Protestant girl who lived there alone.
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