The civil rights movement in Northern Ireland formed in the late 1960s due to changing Catholic attitudes and discrimination. It was influenced by movements in the US and sought to secure basic rights for Catholics. The movement grew through non-violent protests modeled on MLK that drew international attention when faced with police brutality, radicalizing more Catholics. While emerging from nationalist goals, it occupied a political space left by disarrayed parties and focused on socioeconomic issues using new tactics to build broad support and become a powerful force.

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What factors led to the formation and growth of the civil rights movement?
When ‘the Troubles’ erupted in Northern Ireland in 1969, the descent into violence obscured
the vigorous civil activism of the preceding years, which had sought to win for Catholics
those fundamental rights the minority population had been systematically denied since the
1920s. This essay will seek to explain the formation, and trace the growth of, this dynamic
political force in Northern Irish history.
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was officially inaugurated on 1
February 1967, but the factors which precipitated its formation had not developed overnight;
groups dedicated to securing the extension of basic civic rights to all British citizens had been
set up as early as 1964, with, for example, the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ). The civil
rights movement in Northern Ireland was not an appendage of any one of the Stormont
parties; it was conquering new political space, pushing the parameters of popular activism
and thereby redefining the struggle for Catholic equality, which had foundered in the
parliamentary arena, beset by factionalism and quarrel. The Nationalist Party’s incapacity to
mobilise mass support was rivalled only by its intransigence in refusing to contemplate a
formal alliance with the other opposition parties, rendering it largely impotent in the face of
unbreakable Unionist hegemony at Stormont.1 The Northern Ireland Labour Party was
regarded as similarly ineffectual, even in areas blighted by punishingly high levels of
unemployment, such as Derry.2 This disillusionment with Stormont politics, however, had
not been effectively exploited by the IRA, which was languishing in something of a strategic
impasse.3 Having abandoned ‘Operation Harvest’ in February 1962, the IRA was hovering
ambiguously between militarism and constitutionalism, thus further enlarging the political
1 Dr Brendan Lynn, Holding the Ground: The Nationalist Party in Northern Ireland, 1945-1972 (Aldershot:
Ashgate Publishing, 1997), CAIN, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/lynn97.htm#ch5, (last visited 6
March 2014).
2 Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1992), 647.
3 Bob Purdie, Politicsin the Streets: The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990),
CAIN, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/crights/purdie.htm#nicra,(last visited 7 March 2014).

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vacuum in Northern Ireland. With none of the ‘old’ nationalist parties or paramilitary groups
articulating a sufficiently coherent or compelling agenda which reflected the changing
conditions of the 1960s, there was clearly a political void to be colonised, thus paving the
way for the formation of the civil rights movement.
Another important factor driving the formation of the civil rights movement was the
evolution of Catholic values stimulated by the advent of the welfare state after 1945.
Northern Ireland, which was heavily subsidised by Exchequer, enjoyed considerably better
public service provision than was the case south of the border, and the undeniable benefits
thus conferred by British citizenship, somewhat eroded the appeal of immediate Irish unity
for many Catholics. Having hitherto spurned participation in public life, and thus
legitimisation of the state, many Catholics- particularly a bourgeoning middle class, created
by the Education Act of 1947-therefore began to seek a more activist role in civic affairs-
and, crucially, within the existing constitutional framework- in order to challenge the
institutionalised discrimination encoded in the political DNA of Northern Ireland. 4
This changing mentality fundamentally informed the formation, and subsequent
development, of the civil rights movement. Nationalist politician John Hume penned an
article for The Irish Times in 1964 in which he expounded this point emphatically, imploring
his fellow Catholics to contribute constructively to the political process, and thereby
repudiate the bigoted unionist stereotype of the Northern Catholic as ‘... irresponsible ...
immature and ... unfit to rule.’5 Even if the ultimate aspiration of a united Ireland had not
been abandoned, a new generation of Northern Catholics increasingly recognised that it was
necessary to detach demands for ‘British rights for British citizens’- the slogan of the civil
4 Patrick Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981) 103-4.
5 John Hume, ‘The Northern Catholic: I’, The Irish Times, (18 May 1964).

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rights movement- from the vexed question of the border.6 Indeed, such was the emphasis on
socio-economic issues, that some republicans even conceived of the civil rights movement as
a vehicle for transcending the sectarian chasm, and thus reconciling Protestant workers,
farmers and small businessmen disaffected with the Northern Irish state, to their vision of a
united Ireland which would deliver economic prosperity and social justice for all.7 This
notion that Protestants could be assimilated relatively easily into a united Ireland was
delusional, but it is reflective nonetheless of the shift in Catholic attitudes which had taken
place since the Second World War, and had engendered the socio-political context for the
birth of a movement which sought to engage and canalise mass support as had never before
been achieved by the fragmented opposition in Northern Ireland. The civil rights movement
was undoubtedly ‘broadly based’- a key factor in its rapid growth after 1967- embracing ‘...
nationalists, liberal unionists, trade-union activists and other sympathetic parties.’8
Furthermore, although the cadres of the movement were dominated by middle-class activists,
working-class Catholics were increasingly active in the campaign for civil rights as well.9
This socially and politically broad bedrock of support was a crucial launch pad for success,
indeed, according to Alvin Jackson, ‘ ... for a brief period (in 1968-9), NICRA swept all
before it.’10 Such success was envisaged by many, as we have noted, as a stepping stone to
the ultimate goal of a united Irish republic; the civil rights movement disavowed revolution
and was firmly committed to reformism, but the wider constitutional question had been
shelved, not buried. Thus, the formation and growth of the civil rights movement was a
somewhat paradoxical process; the implementation of new tactics, to be discussed further
later, was a key plank of its success, but it could never have become a mass force if it had
6 Marc Mulholland, The Longest War: Northern Ireland’s Troubled History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 61.
7 Purdie, Politicsin the Streets, CAIN.
8 Paul Arthur and Keith Jeffrey, Northern Ireland since 1968 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 5.
9 Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland, 104.
10 Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798-1998:War, Peace and Beyond (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 364.

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completely jettisoned the heritage of Northern nationalism, which was still a significant
component of Catholic identity. 11
As we have discussed above, the civil rights movement emerged from a broad spectrum of
Catholic political ideology, and occupied a vacuum produced by the disarray of the
established opposition parties and paramilitary groups in the 1960s. But the campaign for
civil rights was fundamentally rooted in Catholic grievances which had festered for decades,
since the creation of the Northern Irish state in the 1920s. The Cameron Report, published in
1969, exhaustively documented, and underpinned the validity of, the extensive catalogue of
bitter injustices alleged by Northern Catholics, who were indubitably subject to acute
discrimination in public life.12 Discrimination was rife in employment, built into the electoral
system, and permeated educational provision, but perhaps the most charged issue was public
housing, a highly evocative lightning rod for Catholic discontent, as illustrated by its
significance as a catalyst for the formation of organisations which would furnish a template
for, and constitute the nucleus of, the fledgling civil rights movement. The Homeless Citizens
League, founded in Dungannon in May 1963, was a forerunner of the CSJ, which in turn
gave rise to NICRA. Protest over the issue of housing also supplied the civil rights movement
with its first major publicity coup, when, in June 1968, MP Austin Currie, along with two
local men, illegally squatted in a house in Caledon which had been allocated to an unmarried
19 year old Protestant woman, Emily Beattie, the secretary of a local Unionist politician,
ahead of dozens of Catholic families then living in sub-standard accommodation in the area.
When the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) arrived to evict the three men, the intense media
11 Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, ‘Irish Nationalism and the Irish Conflict’, in Rethinking Northern Ireland,
ed. David Miller (London: Longman, 1998), 62.
12 The Honourable Lord Cameron, D.S.C., ‘Disturbances in Northern Ireland: Report of the Commission
appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland’, (Belfast: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1969), CAIN,
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/hmso/cameron2.htm#chap12, (last visited 7 March 2014).

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coverage which attended the event vastly magnified this relatively small act of civil
disobedience, marking a key turning point in the development of the civil rights movement.
The anti-Catholic discrimination in electoral practises, employment, education and housing
briefly outlined above, had been endemic in Northern Ireland since the 1920s, so why did the
civil rights movement only materialise in the late 1960s? This question of timing impinges
directly on our assessment of the formation and growth of the civil rights movement in
Northern Ireland, because it introduces into the equation a highly significant transnational
dimension, which we will now explore. Jonathan Tonge argues that the accession to power of
left-wing governments in Britain and the United States in the early 1960s emboldened
hitherto fatalistically apathetic Catholics to launch a renewed campaign for ‘British rights for
British citizens’, in a more sympathetic international context. 13 An even more significant
impetus for the growth of the movement, however, was its conscious imitation of the struggle
for equality and social justice being played out in the American South. Alvin Jackson
unequivocally asserts that NICRA was floundering unavailingly before it adopted the tactics
of Martin Luther King, who had become, by the mid 1960s, a global icon.14 Thus borrowing
tactics so successfully employed on the streets of Albany and Birmingham, the first official
civil rights march in Northern Ireland, from Coalisland to Dungannon, was held on 24 August
1968, followed by the Derry march of 5 October, which was heavy-handedly dispersed by the
RUC. Images of the RUC savagely batoning demonstrators were transmitted around the
world, inviting deeply embarrassing comparison with repressive authoritarian regimes in, for
example, Czechoslovakia, Spain, and South Africa, and thereby advancing what was perhaps
the primary goal of the leadership of the movement, to delegitimise Stormont on the
international stage.15 At this juncture, we should reflect on the role of the media in what was
13 Jonathan Tonge, Northern Ireland: Conflict and Change (London: Pearson-Longman, 2002), 63-4.
14 Jackson, Ireland, 1798-1998,365.
15 Simon Prince, ‘The Global Revolt of 1968 and Northern Ireland’, The Historical Journal,49, 3 (2006), 853.

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then the opening phase of the ‘television age’. The mass media was instrumental in
integrating the civil rights movement in a small corner of the United Kingdom, into the
broader politico-cultural phenomenon of ‘68’’; television both relayed images from the
streets of Derry and Belfast to an international audience of millions, and fed back into the
cycle of protest by providing activists in Northern Ireland with contemporaneous examples of
civil struggle in other countries, to draw upon. The globalisation of protest thus fostered by
the mass media in the 1960s, was a significant asset for the civil rights movement in Northern
Ireland, which was able to tap into the moral legitimacy- and thus derive political capital
from- what was presented as a wider battle against ‘... imperialism, capitalism and
bureaucracy.’16
On the home scene, the Northern Irish state, in deploying such naked and partisan violence
against Catholic protestors, whilst indulging the rampant thuggery of loyalist militias- most
notably in the case of the civil rights march waylaid and attacked at Burntollet Bridge on 4
January 1969- was shorn of the last vestiges of legitimacy in the eyes of many of its citizens.
The conduct of the police was a boon for the civil rights movement, for even moderate
Catholics who had hitherto remained wary of participating in protests which might bring
them into confrontation with the authorities, were now increasingly receptive to NICRA’s
message.17 That a relatively uncommitted individual such as Raymond McClean, a doctor in
his mid thirties who had served in the RAF, could be converted to civil rights activism
virtually on the spot, by witnessing traumatic physical evidence of the brutality which had
been meted out to the injured protestors he treated in Derry in October 1968, is testament to
the radicalisation inculcated within the Catholic community by indiscriminate police
violence.18 This was undoubtedly a boost for the civil rights movement in the short-term, but,
16 Ibid., 851.
17 Jackson, Ireland 1798-1998,365-66.
18 Dr Raymond McClean, The Road to Bloody Sunday (Derry: Guildhall Press, 1997), 44-5.

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we should note, NICRA would ultimately be overtaken, after 1969, by this rising tide of
radicalisation, which it would find itself increasingly powerless to harness and control.
In conclusion, the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was of course a product of the
unique political, social and religious circumstances which had prevailed in the province since
partition, but it is particularly useful to consider the recent historiographical trend towards
emphasising the context of the 1960s. At home, changing conditions modified the orientation
of protest on a socio-economic axis, whilst transnational factors such as the rise of the mass
media, and the dissemination around the world of a message also being espoused by brother-
activists in the United States, Europe and Asia, created the context for the civil rights
movement to develop, if only relatively briefly, into an irresistible political force.
Word Count (including footnotes): 2, 169.

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