1969: How the Troubles Started in Northern Ireland

The Troubles did not break out on a specific date, but it is generally agreed that they began in 1969. The seeds of the sectarian conflict that turned Northern Ireland into a war-torn region for almost three decades had been sown long before. The Burntollet Bridge ambush of January 1969, the Loyalist bombings that followed, and the August riots in Derry/Londonderry and Belfast, all have a common origin in the Partition of Ireland and “the orgy of anti-Catholic violence that accompanied the birth of Northern Ireland in 1921,” as Ed Moloney puts it. The bulk of the seeds that led to the Troubles had been sown long before that, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and even earlier, in the years following the Plantation of 1609, when Ulster, the most Gaelic province of Ireland, began to be colonized by settlers (“planters”) from northern England and southern Scotland.

One of the key events of the Troubles took place at Burntollet Bridge, a rural location in County Londonderry, some six miles south-east of Derry/Londonderry and almost 70 miles north-west of Belfast. About 40 peaceful and unarmed marchers left Belfast on New Year’s Day. For four days, they marched through the green fields of County Down, singing We Shall Overcome and shouting peaceful slogans. The march was organized by People’s Democracy—Daonlathas an Phobail, in Irish—a student organization and one of the most active political groups in the Irish civil rights movement alongside the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).

Founded in Belfast, on October 9, 1968, by a group of students from Queen’s University, including Bernadette Devlin, Eamon McCann, Michael Farrell, and Eilis McDermott, the PD modeled its 1969 march on the Selma-Montgomery marches led in 1965 by the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

On the morning of January 4, the marchers arrived at Burntollet. The night before, loyalists had left stones and stockpiles in the fields around Burntollet. Identified by white armbands and armed with cudgels, iron bars, bottles, stones, nail-studded sticks, and makeshift clubs, hundreds of Loyalists came down from a hill near Burntollet Bridge and attacked the unarmed marchers, men and women, young and old.

Some tried to escape through the nearby fields, but they were chased, beaten, and thrown into the nearby Faughan River. Among them were also Dolours (1950-2013) and Marian Price, two sisters from Belfast who would soon join the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Bernadette Devlin later recalled that, as she stood in the street with her fellow marchers, she could “see a great big lump of flatwood, like a plank out of an orange-box, getting nearer and nearer my face, and there were two great nails sticking out of it. By a quick reflex action, my hand reached my face before the wood did, and immediately two nails went into the back of my hand. Just after that I was struck on the back of the knees with this bit of wood which had failed to get me in the face, and fell to the ground.”

The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), Northern Ireland’s predominantly Protestant police force, was stationed nearby, but its men did little or nothing to prevent the violence or help the unarmed marchers.

In the eyes of its organizers, the PD march of January 1969 was designed to shape up the status quo. The aim of the PD, at least according to one of its founders, Michael Farrell, was to “develop concrete agitational work over housing and jobs to show the class interests of both Catholics and Protestants.” What the march highlighted, however, was a shift in Northern Ireland’s politics “from being primarily about civil rights to the more ancient disputes about religious and national identities,” as Hennessey writes in his A History of Northern Ireland. These disputes would lie at the heart of Northern Ireland’s social, political, and economic problems for the next 30 years.

In April, Loyalist groups responded to the increased activity of the civil rights movement with a bombing campaign, which they (and the media) blamed on the (still dormant) Irish Republican Army.

Loyalist bombs first damaged a water installation at Dunadry, County Antrim, followed by other bombs that damaged the Silent Valley waterworks, cutting off two-thirds of Belfast’s water. On April 28, Captain Terence O’Neill (1914-1990), who had been prime minister of Northern Ireland since 1963, announced his resignation. It was the end of an era. The end of a six-year term that some still regard as a tragic missed opportunity, the last chance, as McKittrick & McVea put it, “to tackle, by political means and in a time of relative peace, Northern Ireland’s structural problems.”

An Eton-educated man with an Anglo-Irish background who had served with the Irish Guards in World War II, O’Neill had always believed that the only way forward was to integrate Catholic communities into the Northern Ireland economy.

Ironically, although O’Neill was a staunch Unionist and his primary loyalty was to the British state, his views were in part in line with those of various nationalist civil rights organizations. To quote from Hennessey again, “O’Neill doubted whether the people of Ireland, North and South, really brooded over the events of 1690 and 1798, instead believing that they were more concerned with the value of their take-home pay, with job security, and their children’s education.” He believed in the power of “reasonable men” on both sides to look beyond old sectarian fears and prejudices. The events of the first five troubled months of 1969 seemed to prove him wrong.

The night after his resignation, his speech was broadcast throughout Northern Ireland: “A few short weeks ago, you, the people of Ulster went to the polls. I called that election to afford you the chance to break out of the mould of sectarian politics once and for all. In many places, old fears, old prejudices and old loyalties were too strong.”

On May 1, 1969, James Chichester-Clark (1923-2002) succeeded Terence O’Neill as prime minister of Northern Ireland. While the NICRA announced that it would tone down its campaign of agitation, as the summer approached, Protestants were more determined than ever to hold their traditional summer parades. On July 12, riots broke out in Derry/Londonderry, Belfast, and Dungiven.

A month later, on August 12, the Apprentice Boys of Derry marched through the city. As they passed near the Bogside, the Catholic enclave close to the city center, local youths began throwing stones at the marchers. It was the beginning of the Battle of the Bogside, which took the form, in the words of McKittrick & McVea, authors of Making Sense of the Troubles, of “pitched battles between police and local men and youths using petrol bombs, brick and any other missiles they could find to prevent the RUC from entering the district. Police replied with tear gas and by throwing stones back at the rioters.”

While the RUC had been able to contain the riots in July, this time they couldn’t. Unrest spread like wildfire from Derry to Belfast, Newry, Armagh, Dungannon, and Coalisland in County Tyrone. Barricades were erected across the streets of Belfast. RUC stations were attacked. Civilians, both Catholics and Protestants, were killed.

On August 14, 30-year-old Catholic John Gallagher became the first “official” victim of the Troubles when he was shot dead by the Ulster Special Constabulary in Armagh. He was married with three small children. On the same day, in Belfast, as rioting continued on Divis Street, the RUC opened fire with their heavy-caliber Browning machine guns to respond to the killing of a Protestant man. Patrick Rooney, a nine-year-old Catholic schoolboy, was lying on his bed when a bullet pierced the wall of his bedroom in Divis Tower, killing him instantly.

The next day was August 15, the Feast of the Assumption. In Bethel, New York, three days of “Peace & Music” were about to begin at Max Yasgur’s Dairy Farm, where dozens of musicians, from Joan Baez to Janis Joplin, from Jimi Hendrix to Santana, would perform in what would go down in history as the Woodstock Festival. In California, Hollywood was still trying to make sense of the brutal murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent at 10050 Cielo Drive on August 9, and the equally brutal murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following day. In west Belfast, a Protestant mob petrol-bombed a Catholic house in Bombay Street, west Belfast, displacing thousands of people. The RUC failed to stop them. When the violence finally subsided, six people were dead. Four were Catholics and two were Protestants.

Chichester-Clark claimed that the riots that had engulfed the major cities of Northern Ireland for three days were not the product of a complex political and economic situation of inequality between the Catholic and Protestant communities. They were, he believed, the “conspiracy of forces seeking to overthrow a Government democratically elected by a large majority.” Chichester-Clark reluctantly turned to the British government for help. At 5 pm, on August 14, British troops were deployed on the streets of Derry.

On August 20, after Chichester-Clark had met Harold Wilson (1916-1995), then prime minister of the United Kingdom, in London, the British government issued a statement declaring that British troops had been deployed temporarily and that they would be withdrawn once “law and order had been restored.” But Downing Street had misunderstood or underestimated the depth of the sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland.

At the end of September, a group of Loyalists threw petrol bombs and set fire to five Catholic houses in Coates Street, west Belfast. The next day, a Republican crowd responded by attacking an RUC station on Hasting Street. Unrest continued in October, a month marked by further rioting and bombings. As McKittrick & McVea write, “The damage caused by the violence of August 1969 was not confined to the strictly physical. It deepened community divisions and increased bitterness, and it wrecked whatever relationship existed between a large proportion of the Catholic community and the RUC.”

Following an inquiry into Northern Ireland’s police forces—the RUC and the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC)—led by Lord Hunt, the so-called Hunt Report was published in October.

It recommended the disarmament of the RUC and the abolition of the USC, commonly known as the “B Specials,” an armed quasi-military and exclusively Protestant force under the command of the RUC. In October, Sir Arthur Young (1907-1979) was appointed as the head and Inspector General of the RUC. An Englishman from Eastleigh, Hampshire, he had been sent to the then British Kenya Colony in 1954 on a colonial mission with a brief to reform and modernize the police force. Arriving in the midst of the Mau Mau Rebellion, he pushed for a major change in the way the British authorities dealt with “rebels,” calling for the minimum use of physical force.

When he landed in Northern Ireland, he disbanded the B-Specials and replaced them with the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). While the move was welcomed by Irish Nationalists, angry Loyalists poured onto the Shankill Road to protest against the reforms and the Hunt Report.

Ironically, on October 11, a Saturday, they killed a RUC officer, the first member of the RUC to die in the Troubles, the very force they were trying to defend. His name was Victor Arbuckle, he was 29, married, and had a two-and-a-half-year-old son, Clive. His wife, who never remarried, remembers her five years of marriage with Arbuckle this way: “We were both very, very happy. He was so proud of his son. I will never forget him. I think about him every day – how things would have been so different if he had been alive today.”

After his funeral, 250 uniformed colleagues walked behind Arbuckle’s coffin, reportedly the largest procession ever seen in east Belfast. On the same night, two Protestant civilians, 25-year-old George Dickie and 32-year-old Herbert Hawe, were also killed by the British Army.

As most of those forced to move after the riots of August 1969 were Catholics, many felt that the IRA had failed in its primary objective and responsibility: to protect unarmed Catholic families and their homes and businesses from Loyalist violence and security forces. It was around this time that the first phrase “IRA – I ran away” first appeared on the walls of the Falls Road area in west Belfast.

In its defense, in 1969 the IRA had very few weapons and especially few young men and was virtually unprepared to face various loyalist groups, such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) which had already been arming themselves for more than two years. Various northern Nationalists turned to the “South,” to the Republic of Ireland and its Taoiseach, Jack Lynch (1917-1999), commonly known to his fellow citizens as “Honest Jack,” for help.

In the aftermath of the Battle of the Bogside, Lynch, then the leader of the Fianna Fáil, announced that field hospitals would be set up close to the border, in County Donegal and “at other points along the Border” to treat the very large number of people who did “not wish to be treated in Six County hospitals.”

He also added: “It is clear now that the present situation cannot be allowed to continue. (…) It is clear also that the Irish Government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse. It is obvious that the RUC is no longer accepted as an impartial police force. Neither would the employment of British troops be acceptable nor would they be likely to restore peaceful conditions, certainly not in the long term.” Lynch also allocated some £100,000 for “emergency relief” and Irish soldiers stationed in Donegal reportedly began training men from Londonderry.

As Loyalist and Unionist men began to form vigilante groups to protect their own communities, violence escalated, and a new IRA, known as the Provisional IRA, eventually emerged. To quote Ed Moloney, author of Voices from the Grave, “The Provisional IRA was conceived in the angry, charred back streets of Catholic Belfast and that bestowed on the new group a puissance that had been denied its predecessor during the Border Campaign.”

Some of those who had left the IRA over the direction of Cathal Goulding (1923-1998), such as Billy McKee (1921-2019), a former commander of the Belfast Brigade’s D Company in the 1940s, and Séamus Twomey (1919-1989) and Jimmy Steele (1907-1970), republican legends of the 1940s and 1950s republican movement, rejoined the IRA in the autumn of 1969. Although the Provisional IRA could have easily been swallowed up in its first few months by the “old guard,” by what has been since known as the Official IRA, it didn’t.

Born out of escalating tensions between Catholics and Protestants and the increasing danger posed by Loyalist forces to Catholic civilians, at a major turning point in history, the Provisional IRA expanded as the conflict continued. Moloney identifies two main characteristics that distinguished it from the Official IRA. First and foremost, it was conceived as a defensive force, at least according to its founders, with the stated aim of protecting working-class Catholics from Unionist and Loyalist violence.

The second important feature was “a distinct readiness on the part of its early members to meet Loyalist violence on equal terms.” The new IRA was determined to meet violence with violence and began to re-arm itself. The rest is history. Almost three decades and more than 3,000 casualties later, on August 31, 1994, the IRA declared a cessation of military operations.

On the afternoon of August 15, 1969, a mob of angry Protestants and Loyalists from the Shankill area of west Belfast “crossed the border” into the Catholic Nationalist Falls Road and attacked Catholic houses and shops. It was the culmination of days of rioting in Derry and Belfast, followed by the deployment of British troops on the streets of Northern Ireland. Some believe this was the official start of the Troubles. Eight months earlier, in January, a Loyalist mob had attacked a peaceful march, and the police had done virtually nothing to protect the (unarmed) marchers.

In the months following the so-called Burntollet Bridge ambush, Loyalist groups began bombing various power stations and water supplies across Northern Ireland. The (still dormant) IRA was always (falsely) blamed. Then, in August, riots broke out in Derry and soon spread to Belfast. It was only the beginning. Everything in Northern Ireland was about to change.