equality. The hard-core protestants whose real objective was lost with partition, and who have fought a defensive battle ever since, view any concession as the thin end of "Rome rule'. Their Orange Order governs the Unionist party which has controlled Ulster since its inception. This power structure is the core of this abortion of a country. The latent sectarianism of the found in the consciousness of the population but in the rigid organised sectarianism of the unholy triumvirate; the Orange Order, the Unionist Party, the Ulster state. The determining factor which fissures northern Ireland is the use of the entire apparatus of the state by the protestants to enforce their religious-political position. Every demand by catholics for houses, jobs, and votes, which threatens the Orange monopoly of power, that is, the slightest concession, brings out the cabinet thugs and the vigilante Ulster Volunteers; fuses farmers, lumpen proletariat, ministers, and police in a common cause which splits the country from top to bottom.
With the economy close to recession, and the business classes in revolt, the Unionists for the first time show real signs of splitting. Civil rights, whether it remains a series of bourgeois demands for reform or is transformed, (which is conceivable) into a socialist programme, will ultimately sink the Unionists.
It has brought Ulster into a modern world where Orange protestantism cannot survive. By demanding civil rights has posed the Diamond, the focus of the tiny, walled centre of Derry, and after some sectarian shouting the Paisleyites were chased from the Diamond through Ferryquay Gate and down Fountain Street, which is the protestant part of the town. The police moved in and dispersed the crowd, who then, as the police put it, took up opposing positions on the wall at Butcher's Gate. The police lined up between the two groups, turned and laced the civil rights demonstrators, whilst the Paisleyites provided them with an artillery barrage of stones from behind. The fighting from this point on was confused, but what seems to have happened is as follows: the RUC attempted to block the civil righters into the Bogside. By doing so, they infuriated the catholic population who came out in large numbers from the Bogside and beat WILLIA A injuries, false teeth and glasses broken, hospitalised;
Harry, 20, son, kicked and struck with baton, head cut and minor injuries;
Ann, 18, struck with fist, and her feet beaten;
Cathie, 16, (just out of hospital where she has had stitches for a stomach operation) struck stomach, back and legs, and was rehospitalised;
Danny, 12, head wounds;
Colette, 10, struck with baton on head;
Jim, 5, struck on head;
Fred Budd, neighbour, lay over the children to protect them, batonned on forehead and crown, thrown off the children, who were then struck, and received treatment in hospital.
N • G.P.O.
WATERSIDE STATION BRIDGE MILE tom 5. ST. COLUMB'S CATHEDRAL GATE 6. APPRENTICE BOYS' HALL SHIPQUAY GATE The police have claimed that they were the victims of the brutality. 209 of their number were injured, 86 treated in hospital, detained; but 79 civilians also received hospital treatment, unlike the police the civilians did not use firearms, and some of the photographs.
on this page shows the real balance of forces and one heroic unarmed demonstrator is said to have knocked down three policemen. If that is brutality, then the RUC thoroughly deserves it, despite tear-jerking articles in the Belfast Telegraph headed "The anguish of the riot-squad wives'. The Derry police were given a beating which they will not forget. They had to call in between a third and a half of the entire the official police force in Ulster. On Sunday groups of thirty with shields and batons ready morning they could only patrol Bogside in the That Sunday, the RUC were forced to face up to the logistic impossibility of suppressing the catholic population. The civil rights leaders called for solidarity demonstrations to take the the Samuel, father, 42, severe head and stomach | catholic housing estate about half a mile up the hill away from the city. Thousands of the local Creggan. population joined a mass meeting and at 5pm they marched back down the hill with at least 1500 armed men, the weapons mainly the traditional and very effective hurley sticks Bogside at 4.45pm.
Meanwhile, that morning, at 1.20pm, a massive gelignite charge had been detonated at the Silent Valley reservoir in the Mourne Mountains: it destroyed the main supply valve controlling most of Belfast's water supply. In the same morning, in the heart of protestant country, at Annaboe, Kilmore, eight miles from Armagh, kilowatt pylon was badly damaged. While the civil rights and PD leaders were working to resolve the situation in Derry; a well-organised force was putting final touches 11.40 that Sunday night, eleven petrol bomb attacks took place, ten of them at post oilices nine of the bombs igniting, two of the post offices, both sub-stations, one at Grosvenor Road, the other at Durham Street, were gutted. One of them, it is rumoured, through lack of water. There can be no question that these swift and efficient acts of arson were coordinated with the explosion in Silent valley.
Sunday evening and Monday evening also saw the familiar pattern Paisleyite provocation, police reprisals against civil rights demonstrators, baton charges, and sectarian arrests. Lurgan on Sunday night is one example, Belfast at the Falls Road, which is the catholic ghetto, on Monday night, is another. At the Falls Road, the RUC attracted the attention o the dispersing crowd by thumping their batons against their shields and taunting them while other members of the force cut off the side streets. Petrol bombs were thrown, the police charged, bystanders, later found innocent by the courts, were batonned and arrested.
Tonight angry catholics will be gathering in the streets around Falls Road and Divis Street, while protestants will answer Mrs Paisley's call to mobilise. Both groups are inflamed by the blast which has deprived much of Belfast with water and incited by the demonstrations and the baton charge in Falls Road. Belfast is used to open sectarian rioting. In the 1930s, Falls Street was regularly terriorized with protestant petrol bombs. In 1964 the RUC openly smashed the local republican headquarters with the then up and coming Rev. Paisley and his mob cheering them on. Three nights of riot. followed, and the unionists had mobilised thei election support. But the political life of Ulste is changing, the civil rights demonstrators have shown up the moderate O'Neill for what he is a reactionary. Their struggle now, if one accepts their strategy, must be to prevent their own catholic based movement from becoming purely sectarian and ending up as yet another chapter in the long history of failure that is the Irish revolution.
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population is not the cause of the present crisis in northern Ireland, its manifestation is the result of an underlying division which is not
and long iron bars; the police faced with an ultimatum posed by the radical bourgeois civil rights leader John Hume MP, had evacuated
to the plan. for actions calculated to anger the civilian population of Belfast. Between 11 and