25 YEARS ago this month, on January 30th, 1972, Bloody Sunday, British soldiers stormed up the street where I was born and shot 13 people dead. I watched some of it happen.
Recently, I ve been reading the newspapers of the period, preparing a talk to mark the anniversary. What has intrigued me most is the reaction recorded in the South. It was on a much bigger, broader scale than I d remembered. But at some levels it was shorter-lived, too, and perhaps not as deeply-felt as I d thought at the time.
For the three days after Bloody Sunday, the South was hit by a succession of work-stoppages. On the third day, the day the victims were being buried together in Derry, towns and villages across the country were paralysed by a general strike as effective as any in Europe since World War II.
This is commonly characterised in histories as a day of mourning , which in a way is fair enough. But the mourning mainly took the form of massive walk-outs from work, called in Dublin, Cork, Dundalk, Waterford, Galway, Sligo and Letterkenny and quite likely in other places, too, not mentioned in press reports by the local trades councils.
Reports from Dublin on the Tuesday after the killings, for example, tell of a succession of marches arriving at the British embassy in Merrion Square from mid-morning to late afternoon, to hand in petitions or parade outside with placards or shout protests or whatever.
500 workers from the Hammond Lane Group on the Bluebell Estate delivered a letter which each of them had signed. The entire workforce, it was said, from Beamish and Crawford in James Street arrived next. Then hundreds behind an Electrical and Engineering Union banner from Murphy s Structural Engineers in Santry. After them, 120 marchers from the Agricultural Institute. Then several hundred from the Aspro Nicholas factory in Walkinstown, then a contingent from Booth Poole and Co. at Islandbridge, then 500 agricultural students from UCD . . . and so on and so on and so on.
Reports from every other major centre of population were along the same lines.
Of the following day, the day of the funerals, the Irish Times account, by Dick Walsh and John Armstrong, began: The British Embassy in Merrion Square, Dublin, was burned down yesterday, after the biggest demonstrtation the Republic has seen in a generation.
The report estimated that it took an hour for the parade, much of it workplace contingents, to cross O Connell Bridge in an afternoon of driving rain and bitter winds. Along the route, thousands joined the march and many thousands more waited in Merrion Square while, with muffled drum and black flags flying, the main body of protesters arrived.
The protesters eventually overwhelmed Gardai around the building, and burned it down.
Around the rest of the South, the close-down of shops, offices, schools and factories was absolute. Few buses or trains ran and Aer Lingus aircraft were grounded. No British planes landed or took off at Dublin, Shannon or Cork airports. Estimates of the size of a rally in Cork city centre varied from 20,000 to 50,000.
This grief and anger was reflected also in an unprecedented contingent travelling to Derry for the funerals. Ten State cars in convoy crossed the border at Bridgend three miles outside the city. 14 members of the government, led by Tanaiste Brian Lenihan, a personal representative of President de Valera, 32 backbench TDs including Garret FitzGerald, Conor Cruise O Brien, Ray McSharry and Charlie Haughey, 17 senators, the mayors of Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Galway, Kilkenny, Drogheda, Sligo, Clonmel and Wexford, all in ceremonial robes, the general secretary of the ICTU, the president of the GAA, bishops, archbishops, and an estimated 200 priests, and many, many more, arrived from the South at St. Mary s in the Creggan for the requiem mass.
This was, in its way, the highpoint of 32-county nationalism in the history of the Southern State. Never since partition had there been such a deluge of emotion engulfing all of society, never before or since such a sense of oneness in shared raging sorrow with nationalists corralled in the North.
But what s most remarkable, looking back on it now, is how rapidly and ruthlessly thereafter the Southern establishment moved to contain it, and to ensure that the aftershocks didn t unsettle political arrangements on their own patch.
Two days after the killings, on the day before the burning of the British embassy, alongside a series of lengthy reports from Derry, the Irish Times carried a single-column story which began: The Army Chief-of-Staff, Major General TL O Carroll, said yesterday that the force was well-equipped to deal with internal security and likened the morale in the country to that of the 1940 period when 40,000 men were recruited very quickly.
General O Carroll was speaking at a press conference which almost certainly had been arranged before the massacre. But the tone and emphasis of his remarks are striking nonetheless. What was uppermost in his mind in the aftermath of the killings was the possibility of an internal threat emerging to stability in the South.
This same apprehension was repeatedly expressed in the Dail debate on Bloody Sunday, held on the day after the funeral deputation s return from Derry. Opening the debate, the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, referred to men who, under the cloak of patriotism, sought to overthrow the institutions of this State . . .
Groups proclaiming themselves to be members of illegal organisations have gone about intimidating people, he said, seeking to give the impression that these organisations are now to have a free hand . . . The institutions of this State will be upheld without fear or favour. The laws will continue to be enforced. Those who seek to usurp the functions of government will meet with no toleration.
Picking up the theme, the Opposition spokesman on Foreign Affairs, Richie Ryan of Fine Gael, declared that the lesson to be learned from the burning of the embassy was that now the anarchists, those who hoped to destroy the institutions of the State, know that if they could get sufficient numbers of people behind them, they could do untold damage.
Mr Ryan suggested that the government had not, until now, been awakened to the ominous possibilities. But the events of recent days had made the danger plain.
There were many expressions, too, of anti-British feeling, and of determination that the perpetrators of Bloody Sunday would somehow be brought to book. But Mr Lynch and Mr Ryan spoke respectively for the government and the main opposition party, and encountered no objection to their central thesis that the reaction to Bloody Sunday would and must not be allowed to unsettle the institutions of their own State.
The same note was dominant in a debate the following week on a Bill authorising an increase of 600 in Garda numbers. Fine Gael front bencher Tom Fitzpatrick agreed with the Minister for Justice, Dessie O Malley, that congratulations were due to the gardai who had tried to protect the British embassy. But, he went on, 600 new gardai wasn t nearly enough to rectify the deficiency the burning had revealed. At least 2,000 were needed. And something would have to be done about training and equipping (them) to cope with crowd control and riot conditions.
Additionally, any outstanding pay claims by gardai should be conceded without further ado. Sean Moore of Fianna Fail intervened to say that any legitimate grievance under which the force laboured should also be removed.
At the Fianna Fail Ard-Fheis held at the RDS on February 18th-20th, the same theme resonated through the hall. Justice Minister O Malley announced to prolonged applause that a number of Northerners recently acquitted on arms charges in a district court would be re-arrested and charged with the same offences before a judge and jury. Mr O Malley went on to say that the government would not rule out Special Courts . . . if the new measures were not sufficient.
Mr Lynch s presidential speech, wrote Irish Times political correspondent Michael McInerney, was remarkable for its absence of attacks on Britain or the Unionists (and) for its appeal for an end to emotional reaction.
In his Ard-Fheis sketch John Healy wrote: By far the most significant thing, however and one with far-reaching consequences to strike me was the absolute absence of any feeling that the men of the North and the soil of the North belong in the moral community of Fianna Fail. The North to most of them, as a community, is half a world away . . .
Sitting there listening to the speeches, you get the feeling that the North is nothing more than a functional historic claim: a thing so long reduced to standard clichis like our fourth green field that it isn t real any more.
There were many in the North, not all of them Unionists, people like myself, who, then as now, had no wish to be enveloped in the embrace of Fianna Fail or included in any moral community of nationalism and who will have found Healy s blood-and-soil rhetoric repulsive. The point is that, just three weeks after the North had seemed as never before to have become a visceral reality in the South, the main party of nationalism had disengaged from it, emotionally and intellectually, and resolved to crack down hard on anybody who showed disrespect for the Southern State by disregarding its border.
The hundreds of thousands on the streets of the South were overwhelmingly wage-labourers. Whatever feeling they evoked in Britain or among Unionists in the North, they struck fear into Fianna Fail and all other Dail parties of the day.
Bloody Sunday had brought the North closer to home in the South than ever before. Once they d had time to consider, the reaction of the South s ruling class was to ward it off, push it away, and to begin to devise solutions which would involve only such changes in the North as would mean no change in the South.
The main effect of Bloody Sunday on nationalism was to reconcile it to partition. Which means in a sense that the Paras won. So far. n