The clearest precedent for the recent Garvaghy Road events is not of sectarian battles in the distant past but of the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s.
Thousands of Protestant working-class people then supported and participated in the civil rights movement, most via their membership of the trade union movement. Union flags were more common on the early civil rights marches than party or national flags of any sort.
Many will have remembered that by the early seventies the most significant progress had been achieved not by the crack-crack of guns or by quiet shuffling towards a ballot box but by marches, blockades, sit-downs and occupations and the sound of marching feet.
But that’s not the way the situation was presented by unionist leaders, who loudly proclaimed that there wasn’t a bit of difference between the civil rights association and the IRA. “CRA=IRA” was plastered across a thousand walls in Belfast, Derry and around the North generally.
It was on the basis of this contention that Ian Paisley and his rag-bag army of sectarian thugs and religious blatherskites proclaimed that the civil rights movement was a front for armed Republicanism and must be put down. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when unionist leaders returned to the same theme in relation to Garvaghy Road. Nothing but the same old story.
Within 24 hours of their arrival in Derry, the British top brass asked for a meeting with a delegation from the Bogside. We went to Victoria Barracks on the Strand Road, and met Brigadier Lang and Colonel Millman. It had been decided beforehand that we would tell them that we intended to hold the area until the RUC was disarmed, its auxiliary B-Specials and the Special Powers Act abolished and anti-discrimination measures put in place.
We had not discussed what to do if the British decided to come on in regardless. But the issue did not arise. The Brigadier assured us that they had no intention of entering the area without our agreement.
He was a tall man of plausible appearance and Sandhurst accent. He said that his army had come to see that justice was done; that he knew of the injustices of the past, but that that was over and done with and he hoped for a friendly relationship with us in the future.
He quite understood that we might have certain things in the area which we wished now to move out and, to facilitate this, there would be no check on vehicles on one of the roads to the Republic for the next twenty-four hours.
We thought at first that he was talking about our makeshift radio transmitter, but quickly realised that it was guns and bombs which he had in mind. The British government obviously had no understanding of what was going on but assumed that we were threatening a resumption of armed conflict. They had been well-used to making war against rebels and reprobates across their shrinking empire.
And thus the stage was set for decades of violence and the litany of heartbreak and death which was to be imprinted on working-class life.
