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What was the Peace People movement in Northern Ireland?
The Peace People began in 1976 as a grassroots movement to protest the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland…
On a bright and sunny summer day in Belfast in 1976, a large crowd of women and children are making their way through the suburb of Andersonstown. People have been basking in a heatwave for the last few months, but the women in this 10,000-strong gathering are not out to make the most of the sun, and, despite their number, they move in near silence. The mood is sombre, only occasionally punctuated by an outburst of singing from the group of nuns that join the throng. Most striking – in a religiously divided Northern Ireland – is the presence of both Protestants and Catholics; marching side-by-side and carrying banners calling for peace. The crowd moves down Finaghy Road North, a location that now holds a deep and tragic significance, on their way to Milltown Cemetery. There, they will mourn three newly buried children: the latest victims of sectarian violence. The 1970s were a dangerous time in Northern Ireland, when the tensions that had divided the people for decades spilled over into a bloody period of unrest called the Troubles. Protestants and Catholics lived side-by-side in disharmony. Politically and economically, Northern Ireland was dominated by Protestant loyalists who wished to remain part of the UK. The state police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was overwhelmingly Protestant too. But Catholic nationalists wanted to end British rule and see Ireland unified. Protests, rioting and attacks, including bombings, were common on both sides. Read about the battle of the Bogside In August 1969, after days of fighting across a number of towns and cities, the British government took the decision to send in troops to restore law and order. Instead, this emboldened the Irish Republican Army (IRA), especially a splinter faction called the Provisional IRA (or Provos), who were willing to use violence in their guerrilla campaign to get rid of the British. Over the years, innocent people were constantly caught in the crossfire, such as the victims on Finaghy Road North in 1976. The tragedy that sparked the Peace People movement On the afternoon of 10 August 1976, British troops engaged in a high-speed chase with a young member of the IRA, Danny Lennon. He had been seen driving through Andersonstown, with a passenger, and supposedly pointed a gun in the direction of the soldiers, who set off in pursuit in their Land Rover. At the same time, a young mother named Anne Maguire and her four children, aged between six weeks and eight years old, were walking down the same road. The British soldiers opened fire and shot Lennon dead, causing the car to swerve and mount the pavement – right into the path of the Maguire family. The infant Andrew in his pram and eight-year-old Joanne, who was riding her bicycle, were killed instantly, while two-year-old John died the following day. Only seven-year-old Mark was unhurt as he had been further along the pavement. Anne was severely injured and remained unconscious for several days, awakening to hear of the unbearable loss of three of her children. She would take her own life a few years later. The tragedy was a stark demonstration of how the conflict in Northern Ireland was needlessly killing innocent civilians, with no sign of stopping. While there was fury in the community with some blaming the soldiers and others the republicans, most were too heartbroken to be angry at any particular side. They were just tired of the bloodshed. The following day, dozens of women from local republican neighbourhoods marched in protest against IRA violence, symbolically pushing prams as they went. Churches were flooded with those offering prayers for the Maguire family, spontaneous marches took place across Northern Ireland, and the site of the crash on Finaghy Road North became a flower-adorned shrine. Who was behind the formation of Peace People? Anne Maguire’s sister, Máiread Corrigan, having had to formally identify the children, went on television and called for an end to the violence. Her appeal spoke to all in the grieving community. Among them was Betty Williams, who had been one of the first on the scene of the tragedy and who began going door-to-door with a petition for peace in Northern Ireland. Within two days, she had gathered 6,000 signatures. The Maguire children’s funeral took place on 13 August, and the next day Corrigan and Williams helped organise a march of 10,000 people – Catholics, Protestants, republicans and loyalists alike, putting differences aside – through Andersonstown to the site of the tragedy and the cemetery where the children were now buried. By then, the two women had also met Ciaran McKeown, a Belfast-based journalist and a nonviolent activist, and the trio emerged as leaders of a new grassroots peace movement. An even larger rally followed on 21 August, where around 20,000 supporters gathered at Ormeau Park and McKeown read out a declaration setting out the aims of the movement, which had been named Peace People. “We have a simple message to the world from this movement for peace. We want to live and love and build a just and peaceful society. We want for our children, as we want for ourselves, our lives at home, at work, and at play to be lives of joy and peace,” it began. “We reject the use of the bomb and the bullet and all the techniques of violence. We dedicate ourselves to working with our neighbours, near and far, day in and day out, to building that peaceful society in which the tragedies we have known are a bad memory and a continuing warning.” In the following months, over 100,000 put their names to the declaration and mass Peace People rallies were held across Northern Ireland and Britain. Unlike other calls for peace, this was a large-scale movement where Protestants and Catholics came together. At one march on Belfast’s Shankill Road – a Protestant heartland – Catholics were welcomed over the ‘peace lines’, the walls separating neighbourhoods. But peace was never going to be an easy aim. Members of the movement were regularly subjected to stone-throwing at rallies, death threats and even petrol bombings. Despite a commitment to nonviolence and inclusivity, some opponents accused Peace People of being pro-British, while others disliked the idea of the two religious groups mixing at all. The IRA saw it as a threat to their aims of a united Ireland. Undeterred, Peace People continued to organise rallies, including in November 1976 when more than 10,000 people marched to London’s Trafalgar Square, where American folk singer Joan Baez sang We Shall Overcome. What was the impact of the Peace People movement? In the first six months after Peace People was established, Northern Ireland saw a 70 per cent drop in the rate of violence, calculated by the number of fatalities, and it would never return to the levels experienced at the height of the Troubles. For their tireless efforts, both Williams and Corrigan were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (the latter, at 32, became the youngest recipient of the laureate until Malala Yousafzai in 2014). Not long afterwards, McKeown became the first person from Northern Ireland to make a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations. It would be another two decades until peace was finally achieved in Northern Ireland with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Today, Peace People still works at maintaining peace in Northern Ireland, as well as across the globe. This article first appeared in the August 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
A brief history of the Good Friday Agreement
On 10 April 1998, a deal was reached to bring an end to Northern Ireland's Troubles, in what became known as the Good Friday Agreement. Here, historian Alan MacLeod investigates the long road of the peace process which sought to reconcile two different traditions in Ireland – and considers the legacy of the Agreement...
The Good Friday Agreement, reached on 10 April 1998, was a careful balancing act, reflecting the competing demands and aspirations of the different parties to the talks. Yet, despite the widespread euphoria that greeted the deal, this was only a beginning. Implementing the Agreement has been a difficult process, depending on the willingness of the political representatives of Northern Ireland’s two communities to work together. That willingness has frequently been missing... The Good Friday Agreement: the background The partition of Ireland in 1921 followed more than a century of unrest between Britain and Ireland. Under the Act of Union of 1800 Ireland lost its parliament in Dublin and became governed directly from Westminster. For much of the 19th and into the 20th century, varying states of tension and conflict developed as unionists campaigned for Ireland to remain part of the UK, while nationalists campaigned for either home rule or an independent Irish state. The issue of Irish home rule dominated domestic British politics from 1885 to the start of the First World War. In April 1916, the Easter Rising shook Dublin, as a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of an Irish Republic and clashed with British troops in the capital. The rising, which resulted in the loss of 450 lives and destroyed much of the centre of Dublin, was ended by the British within a week. However, the public mood shifted decisively when the 15 leaders of the rising were executed by the British authorities in May 1916. The executions and imposition of martial law fuelled public resentment of the British. The next five tumultuous years, including the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), resulted in the end of British rule across most of Ireland. Read more | The Easter Rising: when Ireland went to war Read more | Bullets and ballot boxes: a history of Anglo-Irish relations since the Easter Rising The Government of Ireland Act, which became law in May 1921, split Ireland. Northern Ireland was formed from the six predominantly unionist counties in the north-east of the island. The remaining 26 predominantly nationalist counties formed the 'south', becoming the independent Irish Free State in 1922. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/GettyImages-521059042-1711e68.jpg" width="4961" height="3508" alt="H22 Ruins of the Coliseum Theatre, Henry Street 1916 This theatre was opened in April 1915 and destroyed in the 1916 Easter Rising. (Part of the Independent Newspapers Ireland/NLI collection.). (Photo by Independent News And Media/Getty Images)" title="Coliseum Theatre, Henry Street 1916" /> The Good Friday Agreement and the Troubles For 30 years in the late 20th century, Northern Ireland was wracked by a bloody ethno-nationalist conflict known as ‘the Troubles’, which has left over 3,700 people dead and thousands more injured. At the heart of the Troubles is the division in Northern Irish society. The majority population in Northern Ireland – the unionist community – identify as British and want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. The minority community – the nationalists – want Northern Ireland to be reunited with the rest of Ireland, in an independent Irish Republic. As the nationalist community is predominantly Roman Catholic and the unionist predominantly Protestant, the conflict has often been portrayed as a sectarian one. Certainly, sectarian attacks occurred throughout the Troubles. However, the conflict was a consequence of the competing national identities and aspirations of the two communities occupying Northern Ireland. Read more | The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments As a result, Northern Ireland’s politics did not develop on class lines, as in the rest of the UK. Instead, Northern Ireland’s politics centred on the constitutional question. Following the partition of Ireland, the unionist community generally voted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which remained in permanent control of Northern Ireland’s devolved government from 1921 until its abolition in 1972. Discrimination against the minority, particularly in housing and employment, led to the growth of a civil rights movement in the 1960s, demanding ‘British rights’ for the nationalist population. However, the civil rights movement was met by a loyalist backlash and violence flared. Finally, in August 1969, the British government was forced to step in and deploy troops in Northern Ireland. They were to remain there until 2007. Out of the violence, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) re-emerged, and the focus of the conflict shifted from civil rights to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. The IRA dated to back to the Easter Rising and had launched sporadic campaigns since partition directed at trying to achieve Irish unity. Its recent ‘Border Campaign’ (1956–62) had ended in failure and over the course of the 1960s the IRA came to focus more on extreme leftist united front politics rather than militant republicanism. This caused a split in the republican movement in December 1969, from which the Provisional IRA was born. While most nationalists supported the newly formed Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), who sought to achieve Irish unity by political means, there were those in the minority community who supported the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’, attempting to gain Irish unity by force. Unionists fiercely resisted any moves towards a united Ireland. Loyalist paramilitary groups also formed and contributed to the developing violence. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) emerged from 1966, and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and its proxy Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) from the early 1970s. Read more | The big question: Has terrorism ever achieved its aims? As the conflict deepened, the death toll rose rapidly. Events like Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972 – in which British troops killed 13 unarmed civilians and injured several more (one of whom later died from his injuries) while taking part in a protest march – acted as a catalyst to the increasingly bitter conflict. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/GettyImages-522516460-140f433.jpg" width="4746" height="3756" alt="The remains of the 13 people who were shot dead by the British Army in Derry on Bloody Sunday,30/01/1972 at the removal of their remains to the church in Derry on 02/02/1971. (Part of the Independent Newspapers Ireland/NLI Collection). (Photo by Independent News and Media/Getty Images)" title="Bloody Sunday" /> The prelude to the peace process Over the course of the Troubles, British governments attempted to develop political initiatives that sought to end the conflict. Edward Heath’s government (1970–74) developed an ambitious programme, resulting in the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973. This combined a devolved assembly for Northern Ireland, involving power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties, with the creation of a Council of Ireland to institutionalise links between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, this was brought down by a two-week general strike in May 1974, as the unionist population rejected the involvement of the Irish government under the cry that “Dublin is just a Sunningdale away”. Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979–90) was more modest in ambition, with Mrs Thatcher’s focus on securing cooperation from the Irish government in tackling the IRA. In exchange the Irish government was given the right to put forward its views on Northern Ireland’s affairs. This again infuriated the unionists, who sought to bring the Agreement down. However, as the 1980s progressed, some significant developments began to reshape the approaches of the participants in the conflict. Read more | How should history remember Margaret Thatcher? Republicans increasingly saw the benefits of combining a political strategy with the armed struggle. Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political counterpart, began contesting elections, and regularly polled between 10 and 15 per cent of the vote. This caused deep concern in both the British and Irish governments and influenced the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The ‘bullet and ballot box’ strategy caused tensions within the republican movement that had to be carefully managed by Gerry Adams, who became Sinn Féin president in 1983. Experience of the drift to far left politics in the 1960s and the ingrained abstentionism – the refusal to accept the legitimacy of, or to take seats in, political institutions in the Republic, Northern Ireland, or Westminster – in the republican movement made many suspicious of political engagement. The IRA had not been defeated and a flow of weapons was reaching Ireland from Libya. Significant IRA attacks continued, such as the attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet in the 1984 Brighton Bombing. However, Sinn Féin could achieve electoral legitimacy by contesting elections, for example through Adams’s election as a Westminster MP in 1983. In addition, in 1988 Adams began a series of talks with John Hume, leader of the constitutional nationalist SDLP. While the Hume-Adams talks had no immediate successes, they were influential in steering the British and Irish governments towards the Downing Street Declaration, which would come in 1993. There was also some movement from the British government. Influenced by Hume, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, delivered a speech in November 1990 in which he declared that the British government had “no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”. Instead it was for the people of Northern Ireland to decide its constitutional future. Coupled with this change in mood music, Brooke also approved the opening of a secret communication channel between MI5 and the republicans. Brooke also sought to get Northern Ireland’s constitutional parties talking to each other. He proposed that inter-party talks should cover three strands: the first dealing with relationships within Northern Ireland; the second dealing with relations between the two parts of Ireland; and the third dealing with links between the British and Irish governments. The talks began in April 1991, but quickly became bogged down in procedural disagreements. But the three-strand format was to be at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement. The Downing Street Declaration and IRA ceasefire The peace process picked up momentum in 1993. The British prime minister, John Major, worked closely with the Irish Taoiseach [prime minister], Albert Reynolds, on a joint declaration that was hoped would form the basis of a peace initiative. This resulted in the Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993. The declaration recognised the two different traditions in Ireland and stated that peace could only come through reconciling the differences between them. The two governments committed themselves to building that process of reconciliation and creating appropriate political structures to facilitate it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GettyImages-51426636-1-5c60888.jpg" width="1015" height="699" alt="British prime minister John Major (left) and Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds address a press conference in London prior to issuing a joint declaration to bring peace to Northern Ireland, 15 December 1994. (Photo by Gerry Penny/AFP/Getty Images)" title="British prime minister John Major (left) and Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds address a press conference in London prior to issuing a joint declaration to bring peace to Northern Ireland, 15 December 1994. (Photo by Gerry Penny/AFP/Getty Images)" /> In parallel to the Downing Street Declaration, Reynolds worked to persuade the IRA to declare a ceasefire. Both Reynolds and Hume were convinced that tying Sinn Féin into a cross-nationalist coalition would show them the benefits of using purely political means. This would involve nationalists in Northern Ireland, the Irish government, and Irish America, and would provide the republicans with access to the highest political levels in Washington. To show Sinn Féin the benefits of constitutional politics, Reynolds lobbied the US president Bill Clinton to grant Gerry Adams a visa to visit the United States. Clinton agreed, and Adams was granted a 48-hour visa to visit America in February 1994, despite most of Clinton’s senior advisors being against the move, and much to the fury of John Major. The visa was important as part of the wider choreography of peace making. But it did not lead to an immediate IRA ceasefire. Indeed, a month later the IRA demonstrated its continued reach by attacking Heathrow Airport. However, the visit was important as part of the process of debate within the republican movement, and finally, on 31 August 1994, the IRA announced its ceasefire. The ceasefire was followed in October 1994 by a ceasefire called by the loyalist paramilitaries. However, the ceasefires did not lead directly to all-party talks. Instead, the peace process quickly became bogged down over the question of arms decommissioning – the hand-over, or verified disposal, of weapons. The IRA would not consider anything that could be perceived to be surrender and Sinn Féin argued that decommissioning should be negotiated as part of a process of ‘demilitarisation’. But neither unionist politicians nor the British government would countenance talks with Sinn Féin until decommissioning had taken place. Unionists had been disconcerted by republican celebrations following the announcement of the IRA ceasefire; they were not willing to take Sinn Féin at their word. In an attempt to break the impasse, the British and Irish governments created an international decommissioning body, chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell. This was part of a ‘twin-track’ approach, with decommissioning to accompany political talks rather than precede them. Mitchell delivered his report in January 1996, setting out six principles that should be endorsed by all parties to the talks. This included a commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Mitchell recommended that all parties should sign up to these principles and that some decommissioning could take place during the talks. However, this was not enough to prevent the slide back to violence. On 9 February 1996, the IRA released a statement announcing the end of its ceasefire. An hour later a massive explosion rocked Canary Wharf, killing two people. What was the Good Friday Agreement? The election of Tony Blair’s Labour government, on 1 May 1997, was transformational. Blair was as committed to the peace process as Major had been, but had the advantage of being able to approach Northern Ireland without the baggage that Major had accumulated over seven years of talks. The IRA renewed its ceasefire on 20 July 1997, opening the way for Sinn Féin to be included in the inter-party talks that had begun under Mitchell’s chairmanship. The question of decommissioning remained though, and the British and Irish governments sought to fudge the issue rather than allow it to derail the process again. This led to Ian Paisley’s hard-line Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) walking out of the talks, never to return. The DUP rejected the notion of making any concessions on the constitutional position of Northern Ireland or negotiating with Sinn Féin, whom they considered terrorists. While deeply unhappy, the more moderate UUP remained in the talks. Given the DUP’s declared desire to break the talks, Mitchell wrote later in his memoirs that their decision to walk out actually helped the process of reaching an agreement. However, it was to have a lasting impact on the politics of Northern Ireland, as the DUP’s opposition to the Good Friday Agreement severely hindered its implementation. Sinn Féin entered the all-party talks on 15 September 1997, having signed-up to the Mitchell Principles. After marathon negotiations, agreement was finally reached on 10 April 1998. The Good Friday Agreement was a complex balancing act, reflecting the three strands approach. Within Northern Ireland, it created a new devolved assembly for Northern Ireland, with a requirement that executive power had to be shared by parties representing the two communities. In addition, a new North-South Ministerial Council was to be established, institutionalising the link between the two parts of Ireland. The Irish government also committed to amending Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic’s Constitution, which laid claim to Northern Ireland, to instead reflect an aspiration to Irish unity, through purely democratic means, while recognising the diversity of identities and traditions in Ireland. Finally, a Council of the Isles was to be created, recognising the ‘totality of relationships’ within the British Isles, including representatives of the two governments, and the devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Referendums were held in both Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland on 22 May 1998. In Northern Ireland 71 per cent of voters backed the Agreement, with 29 per cent voting against. While this was a significant endorsement, an exit poll for the Sunday Times found that 96 per cent of nationalists in Northern Ireland backed the Agreement, compared to just 55 per cent of unionists. What is the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement? The Good Friday Agreement was hard won. But it has faced considerable challenges over the 20 years since its signing. On 15 August 1998, 29 people were killed when dissident republicans exploded a car bomb in Omagh. This represented the largest loss of life in any incident in Northern Ireland since the start of the Troubles. While the Omagh bombing was committed by republicans opposed to the Agreement, it returned the spotlight to the question of decommissioning paramilitary weapons, which the Good Friday Agreement had stated should happen within two years. Unionist anger at the refusal of the IRA to give up its weapons was combined with frustration at the refusal of Sinn Féin to accept the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/GettyImages-942610284-5ccaf93.jpg" width="1537" height="2040" alt="David Trimble, Chief Minister for the Northern Ireland Assembly, surveys the damage at the bomb site, 17 August in the northern Irish town of Omagh after a car bomb explosion killed 28 and injured hundreds 15 August. / AFP PHOTO / PAUL VICENTE (Photo credit should read PAUL VICENTE/AFP/Getty Images)" title="NIRELAND-BOMB-TRIMBLE" /> Under these circumstances, power-sharing proved impossible to sustain. Meanwhile, voters in each community started to turn away from the moderate parties, and instead support for Sinn Féin and the DUP increased, displacing the SDLP and UUP in the process. For a significant part of the decade following the Good Friday Agreement, devolution was suspended because of the inability of the largest parties from each community to reach agreement on power-sharing. Progress was made on decommissioning, which was confirmed to have been carried out in September 2005, but political agreement remained elusive. Eventually, the British and Irish governments hosted crunch talks at St Andrews in October 2006. There, Sinn Féin finally agreed to accept the PSNI, while the DUP agreed to share power with Sinn Féin. In May 2007, an Executive comprised of the DUP, Sinn Féin, UUP and SDLP was finally able to take office. This time, the institutions created under the Good Friday Agreement were to remain in being until the current political crisis led to the collapse of the Executive in January 2017. Despite the fragility of the institutions created and the continuing bitterness between politicians representing the two communities, the Good Friday Agreement remains an important landmark in Northern Ireland’s history. The Good Friday Agreement was able to bring to an end 30 years of violence, and allows Northern Ireland’s two communities to pursue their contrasting aspirations by purely political means. Dr Alan MacLeod is a historian of modern Britain and Ireland and Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of International Politics and the Northern Ireland Conflict: The USA, Diplomacy and the Troubles (IB Tauris, 2016). This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2018
Why we should remember the battle of the Bogside
Historian Niall Ó Dochartaigh considers the importance of the riots in Derry that marked the start of 30 years of violent conflict
More than 50 years ago, in August 1969, the Northern Irish Troubles began in earnest with the battle of the Bogside. For three days, from 12–14 August, large crowds armed with stones and petrol bombs, loosely coordinated by the Derry Citizens’ Defence Association, battled successfully to keep the Royal Ulster Constabulary out of the Bogside area of the city after violence broke out during the annual loyalist Apprentice Boys march. The civil rights campaign had begun with a great sense of optimism a year earlier, but from October 1968, when police baton-charged a march in Derry’s Duke Street, civil rights protests had been surrounded by increasing tension. Derry – or Londonderry, as it is officially known – was the North’s second largest city. It was a chiefly nationalist city, but gerrymandering and discrimination had long ensured that the unionist party maintained control of local government in the city with only a third of the vote. The battle of the Bogside only ended when British troops marched into Waterloo Place in the city centre and stretched out concertina barbed wire and barricades across the roads and replaced the exhausted RUC at the front lines. Army commanders agreed not to try to enter the Bogside, and ‘Free Derry’, as it was dubbed, was administered for the following two months by a broad-based local defence association. The British government now forced the unionist government at Stormont to implement reforms aimed at conciliating the Catholic and nationalist minority that made up one-third of the North’s population, including disarming the police force. For many on the left, Free Derry represented a great victory of popular mobilisation over the forces of repression, and it received large-scale and sympathetic media coverage across Europe and North America. But the rioting in the Bogside had also triggered a dangerous escalation. No one had died in Derry, but in Belfast there was widespread sectarian rioting and battles with the police. Shooting broke out and seven people were shot dead on 14 and 15 August. A day after the soldiers were deployed to Derry, they were sent on to the streets of Belfast. They would remain there for more than three decades. Read more Why we should remember…? Why we should remember the translation of Anne Frank’s diary Why we should remember Target Zero Day Why we should remember the Amnesty Act of 1872 <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/05/GettyImages-515185532cmyk-63dcf68-e1690361399495.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="A group of formerly enslaved African-Americans around the time of the US Civil War" title="A group of formerly enslaved African-Americans around the time of the US Civil War. The Amnesty Act removed prohibitions on political roles for many Southern rebels after the war. (Image by Getty Images)" /> The battle of the Bogside was an important catalyst for change, triggering a determined British government intervention that ended the unionist monopoly on power. But it also marked the beginning of 30 years of violent conflict that would claim the lives of more than 3,600 people and bring untold suffering. It was only finally brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a delicate compromise between unionists and nationalists and the British and Irish governments. It is a measure of the potential for renewed political tensions in Northern Ireland that this agreement is now at the centre of debate on the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union. Niall Ó Dochartaigh is a professor of political science and sociology at the National University of Ireland Galway This article was first published in the August 2019 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed in 1921, brought to an end the Irish War of Independence and set a provision for the establishment of the Irish Free State. But rather than quelling violence, the treaty ushered in a period of fresh uncertainty. A chaotic civil war followed between those who accepted the treaty and those who opposed it. As we mark a century since the Irish Civil War began, Charles Townshend explains the key tensions and milestones of the conflict…
For “four glorious years” (as the republican publicity chief Frank Gallagher called his memoir of the period) of resistance to Britain between 1918–21, the Sinn Féin movement held together in pursuit of Irish independence. But immediately after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on 6 December 1921, sharp divisions appeared. The Irish representatives had been divided from the start of the treaty negotiations on issues of sovereignty and unity. The sides were broadly marked by those who were determined to uphold the sovereign republic declared in January 1919, and those who accepted that Britain’s refusal to give ground on the central issues of crown and empire meant that any agreement must involve modifying that independence. Arthur Griffith, who founded Sinn Féin in 1905 and was the leader of the Irish delegation to London to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty, was one of the latter. More surprisingly, Michael Collins – who as president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (a role regarded by some as virtual president of the republic) was widely presumed to be a diehard republican – also became one as the negotiations went on. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/07/GettyImages-3349413-d18fa3c.png" width="620" height="413" alt="A photo of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith arriving at 10 Downing Street" title="Michael Collins (right) and Arthur Griffith (left) arriving at 10 Downing Street, London for the treaty negotiations between representatives of Sinn Fein and the British government in December 1921. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> The treaty set aside the title ‘republic’ in favour of a ‘free state’ (a literal translation of the term ‘Saorstát’, officially used by the Irish parliament Dáil Eireann since 1919), with powers equivalent to the self-governing Dominions of the Empire. Before the Irish Civil War | 5 key moments on the path to partition January 1922: Sinn Féin splits In reaction to the signing of the treaty, Eamon de Valera, president of the Dáil, moved to sack the signatories from his cabinet. One of his ministers, William T Cosgrave, instead persuaded him to hold a cabinet meeting and take a vote on the treaty. The cabinet approved it by a single vote, and a long and bitter debate began in the Dáil. Accusations that the signatories, led by Arthur Griffith, had failed to refer the treaty back to Dublin before signing it, helped to poison the political atmosphere. But the issues at stake were more serious. Many Irish republicans believed that the republic, which had been declared at the first meeting of the Dáil in January 1919, was not a negotiating ploy but a real state, which could not be signed away without national dishonour. The concepts of honour and betrayal (of those who had died in the name of the republic) stalked the treaty debate. The final vote was won by those who accepted that the treaty – as Michael Collins put it – did not deliver “freedom” in the sense of outright independence, but the freedom to achieve it. Crucially, the treaty was all that could be wrung out of Britain at that point; idealism must be tempered with pragmatism, it was felt. But the margin of victory was narrow – 64 to 57 – and that was further reduced when de Valera stood for re-election as president, losing to Griffith by just two votes. In response, de Valera and his supporters walked out of the Dáil. February 1922: anti- and pro-treaty tensions build Two governments were now in existence: the Dáil cabinet now headed by Griffith, and the Provisional Government set up under the treaty and headed by Collins. Both pushed for an early general election. De Valera and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) opposed such an election, fearing that it would be influenced by the same British pressure which they believed had forced the delegates to sign the treaty. Sinn Féin tried to preserve a semblance of unity at its special Ard-fheis (party conference) in February 1922, resolving to delay the election until the new constitution had been drawn up. Hopes now rested on the ‘army of the republic’, the IRA, to hold together and find a way forward. Collins thought that his position as president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) would make this happen, but though the IRB Supreme Council supported the treaty, it proved unable to persuade a large part of the army to follow suit. Powerful impulses against open division persisted, and the ‘Neutral IRA’, which aimed to keep the army together [and were against taking a pro- or anti-treaty stance], became the largest grouping in the army. But its efforts failed. When a proposed Army Convention in February was banned by Richard Mulcahy, the Free State government’s minister for defence, the convention went ahead anyway. Mulcahy described this as the IRA mutinying against the Dáil, and the situation began to look irretrievable. As the British army abandoned its garrison points across the country in line with the Anglo-Irish Treaty provisions, the barracks were occupied by whichever IRA group was locally strongest. April 1922: the IRA seizes garrisons In the strategically key city of Limerick, a direct clash between the pro- and anti-treaty forces in February was headed off with great difficulty. In mid-April the anti-treaty IRA raised the stakes by occupying buildings in Dublin, most notably the Four Courts – a formidable building with a substantial garrison commanded by Irish republican Rory O’Connor. Britain became increasingly anxious that by tolerating this occupation, the Provisional Government risked sliding gradually into accepting the republican position. It subsequently pressured the Provisional Government to resolve the situation by force if necessary. An ‘electoral pact’ agreed by Collins and de Valera on 20 May, ensuring that the general election would reproduce the balance of pro- and anti-treaty members as in the treaty vote, further alarmed Britain. But the eventual election in mid-June saw pro-treaty candidates win a substantial majority; no anti-treaty candidates headed the poll in any constituency. June 1922: a political assassination sparks open conflict On 22 June 1922, two IRA gunmen assassinated British Army Field-marshal Sir Henry Wilson in London because they believed that as security adviser to the Northern Ireland government, he was responsible for anti-Catholic violence in Belfast. Though the gunmen – Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, who were both Londoners – seem to have acted independently, the British government believed that the attack was ordered by Rory O’Connor and delivered an ultimatum to Collins to eject O’Connor from the Four Courts. Within a few days a military assault was launched, using artillery borrowed from the British army. The fighting in Dublin in early July 1922 foreshadowed the war that followed. The anti-treaty IRA had no coherent strategy. Its attempt to bring in forces from the south-west to the capital stalled just outside Dublin; the republican force dispersed and reverted to guerrilla tactics. This was a heavy blow to the anti-treaty IRA’s hopes of disputing control of the country with the new National Army. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/07/GettyImages-3165898-753cbae.png" width="621" height="413" alt="Irish Republican Army officers, including General Rory O'Connor, lined up in front of the Tricolour Flag" title="Irish Republican Army officers, including General Rory O'Connor, lined up in front of the Tricolour Flag. (Photo by Walshe/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)" /> Elsewhere, the IRA – however experienced in guerrilla methods – proved unable to defend fixed positions against National Army forces armed with artillery (usually just a single field gun). Only eight National Army soldiers were killed when the republicans were driven out of Limerick later that month. August 1922: decisive action from pro-treaty groups In August 1922, the Free State government approach changed significantly. Griffith and Collins both died – the former of a reported heart attack and the latter killed in an ambush by anti-treaty forces. The so-called ‘civilian’ ministers – primarily William Cosgrave and Kevin O’Higgins, who had long called for more decisive action against the anti-treaty IRA – took control of strategy. The National Army was expanded, and offensives were launched across the country. Liam Lynch, the republican chief of staff, together with Liam Deasy, commander of the IRA’s 1st Southern Division, hoped to set up a defensive line running from Limerick to Waterford. Though Deasy fought a long and skilful battle around Kilmallock, most republican defenders failed to stand against the Free State forces. These were often no more competently led than their opponents, but they had a few commanders – like John T Prout in the southwest and Emmet Dalton in Dublin – who, with their experience of commanding regular units in the First World War, successfully organised a series of seaborne landings to seize southwestern ports. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/07/GettyImages-2628189-03dec78.png" width="619" height="414" alt="Free State soldiers camped outside the Four Courts Hotel in Dublin" title="Pro-treaty Free State soldiers use British artillery to attack the anti-Treaty Republican army who established their headquarters in the Four Courts in Dublin during the Irish Civil War. (Photo by Walshe/Getty Images)" /> Meanwhile, no credible republican government was set up; de Valera remained a marginal figure with no influence over the IRA, despite his huge prestige. The Free State government exploited the June election to insist that it represented the legitimate national will against what it labelled an anti-democratic militarist, or merely criminal, insurrection. The press was instructed never to call republican forces ‘IRA troops’, but ‘irregulars’, ‘bands’ or ‘bodies of men’. December 1922–March 1923: key republicans executed – without trial In early December 1922, Seán Hales, a leading pro-treaty TD [Teachta Dála, member of the Dáil], was assassinated by two anti-treaty gunmen in early December 1922. The killing was used as pretext for the execution of Rory O’Connor and three other Four Courts leaders by firing squad on 8 December – without trial. This effectively terrorist policy extended to local level, where Free State troops outdid the ‘Black and Tans’ (British reinforcements for the Royal Irish Constabulary recruited in 1920) in vicious violence. The massacre of 23 republican prisoners at Ballyseedy by Free State forces in Kerry in March 1923 (five others were also judicially executed) was perhaps the worst, but it was hardly an isolated instance. April–May 1923: a final blow leads to the conclusion of fighting Meanwhile, Free State leaders Cosgrave and O’Higgins wanted a decisive victory rather than a negotiated settlement, and their demand that the IRA should surrender and decommission its weapons ensured that there was no negotiation. The war went on partly because republican leaders remained optimistic, despite the steady deterioration of their position, that the nation would recognise the rightness of their cause. But when Liam Lynch, IRA chief of staff, was killed in action on 10 April 1923, those pressing for abandonment of the fight took over. The order to dump arms was finally issued on 24 May 1923. What is the legacy of the Irish Civil War? Civil wars inevitably leave a bitter legacy, and Ireland’s was no exception. But Ireland was unusual in the speed and success with which constitutional politics were restored in the later 1920s. After de Valera returned to the Dáil in 1927 (taking the very oath which had sparked the civil war), his party, Fianna Fáil, and the Treaty party, Cumann na Gael (which in 1933 became Fine Gael) dominated Irish politics for the rest of the 20th century. Against expectations, proportional representation – as imposed by Britain – produced largely majority governments. Ireland had many problems, but stability was not one of them. Read more | The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments Charles Townshend is Professor Emeritus of International History at Keele University. His latest book is The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885–1925 (Allen Lane, 2021)
A brief history of the partition of Ireland
The partition of Ireland in 1921 was a seismic moment in the island’s history; it divided Ireland and led to the creation of Northern Ireland. But what events led to Ireland being divided? Professor Heather Jones explains the causes and aftermath...
What led to Ireland being divided? Professor Heather Jones explains... A worsening devolution crisis Before partition, all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and governed by the British government in London. However, by the First World War, Irish nationalists, who were predominantly Roman Catholic, had succeeded in getting legislation passed for Home Rule – devolved government for Ireland within the UK. But Home Rule’s imminent implementation was suspended when the First World War broke out in 1914. Home Rule was vehemently opposed by Ireland’s unionists, mainly Protestants, mostly based in the north, who wanted no change to Ireland’s direct governance by Westminster. Religious differences mattered greatly in Ireland and many unionists feared that ‘Home Rule’ would be ‘Rome Rule’, leaving them as a religious minority under a Dublin parliament dominated by Catholicism. The situation dramatically radicalised when, at Easter 1916, an Irish republican uprising broke out in Dublin. Its leaders believed devolution – Home Rule – did not go far enough. They wanted a complete end to British rule in Ireland and an all-Ireland republic outside of the UK. The rising was quickly suppressed, but the British execution of its leaders led Irish nationalists to abandon Home Rule in favour of seeking full independence: in 1918, nationalists voted overwhelmingly for a pro-republic political party, Sinn Féin. In 1919, supporters of the rising mobilised an Irish Republican Army (IRA) and launched a war for an independent Irish republic. This brutal guerrilla conflict of ambush and reprisals saw Britain lose control of nationalist areas, while sectarian violence also broke out, particularly in the northern city of Belfast. Read more about the Easter Rising There were unionists all across Ireland, but they were weak in numbers in the south and west. By contrast, in Ireland’s northern province of Ulster, unionism was politically very well-organised and had powerful supporters in London and a large population base. From 1912, Ulster Unionism became the most important strand of the island’s unionist movement. Yet those supporting Irish independence never developed a coherent policy towards Ulster Unionism, underestimating its strength and rejecting unionists’ British identity. Republican leader Éamon de Valera’s proposed solution was as follows: “The so-called Ulster difficulty is purely artificial as far as Ireland itself is concerned. It is an accident arising out of the British connection, and will disappear with it.” The Government of Ireland Act and the creation of Northern Ireland Desperate to end the war in Ireland, which was damaging Britain’s international reputation, the British government proposed a solution: two home rule parliaments, one in Dublin and one in Belfast. The details were outlined in the Government of Ireland Act in late 1920. Fearful of the violent campaign for an independent Irish republic, many Ulster unionists, who had been adamantly against any change to direct British rule, accepted this idea. It would create a border between the territory governed by the devolved northern home rule parliament and the southern one, but both areas were to remain within the United Kingdom. The border was also designed so that only a part of the historic province of Ulster – six counties chosen because they represented the Protestant Ulster heartlands which had a clear unionist majority – would be governed by the northern parliament, ensuring unionists would dominate it. In May 1921, this new Northern Ireland officially came into being. Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s new prime minister, stated: “I’m going to sit on Ulster like a rock, we are content with what we have got.” Home Rule’s greatest opponents in Ireland – Ulster unionists – had become its most fervent supporters. The northern parliament took root, helped by heavy spending on security forces to support it from London. By contrast, its southern equivalent was a failure, proving impossible to start up as nationalists boycotted it. When the British government tried to open its new Dublin Home Rule parliament after holding elections in 1921, only four elected representatives of its House of Commons – all southern unionists – showed up. The rest of those elected took seats in the Dáil instead, a rival clandestine parliament that Irish republicans had established in January 1919 as part of their planned republic, and which, by 1921, despite being illegal, had usurped many state powers and was thriving. Former British prime minister Herbert Asquith quipped that the Government of Ireland Act gave “to Ulster a Parliament which it did not want, and to the remaining three-quarters of Ireland a Parliament which it would not have”. Unable to get politicians willing to sit in it, the operation of the southern parliament was effectively suspended. The Government of Ireland Act thus proved impossible to implement in the south. A history of Irish-Anglo relations since the Easter Rising Meanwhile, the new northern regime faced the problem of ongoing violence. The IRA waged a campaign against it, while sectarian violence, which had worsened from when the plans for the Government of Ireland Act first emerged, continued to rip apart northern society. Between 1920 and 1922, an estimated 550 people died in the six counties – approximately 300 Catholics, 170 Protestants and 80 members of the security forces. Unionists believed this period to be one of existential threat to their survival on the island. Little wonder that when King George V, opening the new Northern Ireland parliament in June 1921, before a unionist audience, called for peace and reconciliation, some of the women present wept. The epicentre of the violence was Belfast where, in July 1921, there were gun battles in the city between the IRA and pro-partition loyalist paramilitaries. Belfast’s Catholics made up only a quarter of the city’s population and were particularly vulnerable; thousands were expelled from their shipyard jobs and as many as 23,000 from their homes. Unable to implement the southern home rule parliament, the British government changed policy. In December 1921, an Anglo-Irish Treaty was agreed. It ended British rule in the 26 counties that had been meant to be under the southern devolved Home Rule parliament. This area now became an independent Irish Free State and, unlike Northern Ireland, left the UK. What had been intended to be an internal border within the UK now became an international one. However, the Free State was not a republic but an independent dominion within the British empire, and the British monarch remained the Head of State; the British government had only agreed to accepting Irish independence on these terms. This outcome split Irish nationalism, leading to a civil war, which lasted until 1923 and weakened the IRA’s campaign to destabilise Northern Ireland, allowing the new northern regime to consolidate. Resolving the 'Irish Question': 5 key moments on the path to partition The aftermath of partition The first year of partition was a bloody one. Sectarian atrocities continued into 1922, including Catholic children killed in Weaver street in Belfast by a bomb thrown at them and an IRA massacre of Protestant villagers at Altnaveigh. As the Guardian newspaper noted in June 1922: “We cannot now pretend that this partition idea has worked: the whole world would burst into laughter at the suggestion.” Partition created two new fearful minorities – southern unionists and northern nationalists. Tens of thousands chose or were forced to move; refugees arrived in Britain, Belfast and Dublin. Ulster unionists felt guilt at the fate of those unionists left as a minority in the rest of Ireland, who had to integrate into the new Irish Free State as best they could; some emigrated to Britain or Northern Ireland, while others slowly assimilated. The Good Friday Agreement explained Yet it was Ireland’s other new minority – northern Catholic nationalists left within the UK – that proved the most vulnerable. Safeguards put in place for them at the time of partition, such as proportional representation in elections to the northern parliament, were swiftly removed; they had virtually no protection from rampant discrimination and sectarian violence. Successive governments in Dublin also pursued a policy of non-recognition of Northern Ireland and demanded northern nationalists boycott it, heightening the minority’s difficulties. The British government hoped that the border would only be temporary: both the Government of Ireland Act and the Anglo-Irish Treaty were designed to facilitate future reunification of the island if this ever became possible. Nationalists believed Northern Ireland was too small to economically survive; after all, designed to fit religious demographics, the border made little economic sense and cut several key towns in the north off from their market hinterlands. In 1925, a Boundary Commission, established to fix the border’s permanent geographic location, effectively approved it as it stood. It ran through lakes, farms, and even houses. Its idiosyncrasies matched those of the implementation of partition itself. Most infrastructure split in two – railways, education, the postal service – and entirely new police forces were founded in the north and the south. But a range of civic organisations, including the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, the Irish Dental Association, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy and Irish rugby continued to operate on an all-Ireland basis. Such connections became precious conduits of social communication between the two Irelands as the relationship between northern and southern governments proved glacial. By the time the Irish Free State unilaterally declared itself a republic in 1949, the border – a source of bitterness for nationalists – had become an integral aspect of northern unionist identity which viewed Northern Ireland’s survival as interwoven with unionism’s own. Heather Jones is professor of modern and contemporary history at University College London
How accurate are the most famous films about Titanic?
As one of the most infamous maritime disasters of modern times, the tragedy of the Titanic has been the subject of a succession of films. Mark Glancy looks at three pivotal portrayals of the ship's fateful voyage…
The first film to recreate the Titanic disaster reached the screen just four weeks after the ship sank during the night of 14–15 April 1912. Saved From the Titanic (1912) starred Dorothy Gibson, an actress who had been on Titanic and survived to tell the story. It would be told in many more films, including American, British and German productions, and in many different styles, ranging from lavish melodramas to restrained docudramas. In all of its guises, the story of this fateful journey, filled with hubris, tragedy, chivalry and selfishness, has captivated audiences for nearly 100 years. Read more about the real disaster, with our guide to the sinking of Titanic Titanic, 1953 Dir: Jean Negulesco, US, 1953. With Barbara Stanwyck, Clifton Webb, Robert Wagner For decades, filmmakers borrowed events and details from the tragedy without acknowledging it specifically. Both the early British talkie Atlantic (1929) and Hollywood’s History is Made at Night (1937) climax with a luxury liner hitting an iceberg, passengers being put into lifeboats, and the ship’s band playing ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’, but the ships are given fictional names. In 1939, Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film was set to be the Titanic story, but on the eve of the WW2 British officials objected to a film portraying a notorious maritime disaster, and Hitchcock made Rebecca (1940) instead. Hence, Twentieth Century-Fox’s Titanic had some novelty value in 1953. Read more | Where & how was Titanic built? The film’s documentary-style opening seems to promise adherence to real events: the creation of an iceberg is seen as it breaks off the ice shelf. From that point onward, however, the film focuses almost entirely on the fictional Julia Sturges (Barbara Stanwyck), an American fleeing from Europe and her husband’s high-society lifestyle so that she can raise her children in the wholesome environment of the midwest. RMS Titanic is her means of escape. Her husband, Richard (Clifton Webb), unexpectedly joins her on board and the revelations and confrontations flow, interrupted only by the disaster. At that point, Richard redeems himself, and demonstrates that refinement is not necessarily a mark of bad character. Nevertheless, he has no place on a journey portrayed as one away from Old World elitism and toward New World democracy. Julia and her daughter survive on the lifeboats, while Richard and her son go down with the ship. But is it accurate? The depiction of the transatlantic journey as one of liberation clearly appealed to James Cameron, who borrowed the theme for his own melodramatic story. But this Titanic has less interest in real people and actual events than the subsequent films. Curiously, well-known passengers are portrayed, but the attitude taken towards them is inconsistent. In some cases recognisable characters are given fictional names, while in others real names are used. More curiously, the iceberg is correctly spotted on the starboard side of the ship but cuts a gash along the port side. Accuracy: 5/10 Read more | 9 important places in the history of Titanic, including where the liner sank A Night to Remember, 1958 Dir: Roy Baker, UK, 1958. With Kenneth More, Honor Blackman, Michael Goodliffe Based on Walter Lord’s meticulously researched book, this British version of the story is strikingly different from its Hollywood counterparts. Made in the restrained documentary style that had developed during WW2, the film has little interest in glamour, romantic fulfilment or happy endings. Its most notable submission to box-office demands is the central role played by Kenneth More, a major star of 1950s British cinema. More plays the ship’s second officer, Charles Lightoller, as the sort of morally incorruptible figure often found in the period’s war films. His casual level-headedness represented a more modern form of the stiff upper-lip, and it is seen to be effective: Lightoller saves lives among passengers and crew. Read more | 8 stories of passengers who sailed on Titanic His centrality hardly limits the film’s scope: there are dozens of characters, giving the impression that everyone’s part in the tragedy is acknowledged and affirmed. Hundreds of extras and an impressive replica of the ship convey the enormity of the events. Mounted on a scale rare in British films, the film cost over £500,000 to make. Its most controversial sequences portray steerage passengers forcibly locked behind gates and prevented from reaching the lifeboats by the crew. Reliable accounts cast doubt on these confrontations, but the scenes fit with the filmmakers’ vision of Edwardian Britain as an era in which the class system was entrenched and unquestioned. The film dramatises the night’s tragic events without ever becoming overwrought. We see the tremendous faith in the ‘unsinkable’ ship, the unheeded ice warnings, ice falling on deck at the moment of impact, ‘women and children first’ in the lifeboats, the Californian ignoring the distress signals, the band playing ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’, the loss of life as Titanic goes under, and the arguments over whether the lifeboats should go back for survivors. It is a judicious account. Whether it has the dramatic impact of Cameron’s film is a matter of taste. But is it accurate? There are some tiny inaccuracies and slightly misleading moments to be found here. The ship was not christened with champagne, as the opening scene suggests. The wrong painting is hanging in the dining room. The documentary sequences purporting to show the real Titanic actually show other ships. Nevertheless, A Night to Remember is that rarity among historical films: one that is both well-researched and faithful to its research. Accuracy: 9/10 Titanic, 1997 Dir: James Cameron, USA, 1997. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane James Cameron was reportedly inspired to make Titanic when he saw A Night to Remember, and this inspiration can be detected at times: some shots of the ship and particularly its sinking are clearly inspired by the British film. A quasi-documentary approach is also apparent in the early scenes, showing submarine footage of the ship’s wreckage on the ocean floor. But this initial interest in the real Titanic, or at least its wreckage, quickly leads into the fictional story of Rose (Kate Winslet), an upper-class woman travelling on the Titanic with her mother (Frances Fisher) and millionaire fiancé (Billy Zane), who wish to confine her to a miserably privileged life of marriage and respectability. Enter the penniless, orphaned artist Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a steerage class traveller intent on liberating the rebel in Rose. The melodrama that ensues borders at times on the ridiculous, not least when the villainous fiancé chases the couple through the sinking ship, firing wildly at them with a pistol. One can only wonder why, with real characters and high drama in abundance, Cameron thought these clichés were preferable. On the podcast | Everything you wanted to know about the Titanic disaster However, the value of a new generation of special effects is undeniable, and in every frame the production values afforded by a staggering $200 million budget are apparent; not least the vast reproduction of the ship itself. The iconic image of the film – of Jack and Rose standing at the bow, arms outstretched as though they are flying forward – is central to its theme of emancipation through romantic fulfilment, but audiences were just as likely to be thrilled by the spectacle of the ship’s sinking, captured in some sequences with nail-biting intensity. This Titanic made stars of its central couple, won 11 Oscars, and took $1.8 billion at box-offices throughout the world, making it the highest earning film ever. But is it accurate? With the exception of the outspoken Molly Brown, whose character fits perfectly with the film’s egalitarian leanings, the historical figures are mostly confined to the background. Lightoller may have been the hero of A Night to Remember, but he is a minor figure here. The film’s most significant error was to portray the Scottish first officer, William Murdoch, as a hysterical figure who shoots at passengers before killing himself. Cameron apologised to Murdoch’s surviving relatives for this inaccuracy, but the scene was not removed from the film. Accuracy: 6/10 Other films about the Titanic: Titanic (Dir: Herbert Selpin, Germany, 1943) A pet project of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, this version blames greedy British aristocrats for the disaster. The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Dir: Charles Walters, US, 1964) A musical about the rags-to-riches life of the legendary American survivor. SOS Titanic (Dir: Billy Hale, UK/US, 1979) The familiar story but with less than spectacular sets and special effects. Raise the Titanic (Dir: Jerry Jameson, US/UK. 1980) A notoriously expensive box-office flop, this is a Cold War thriller about the race to retrieve rare minerals from the ship’s wreckage. Mark Glancy teaches film history at Queen Mary University of London. He is the co-editor of The New Film History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
From the drawing board to the sea: how and where was Titanic built?
RMS Titanic would be the jewel in the crown of the White Star Line company, but its construction posed a colossal task for its builders…
Before RMS Titanic had even left Southampton in April 1912, the ominous signs of tragedy were there. Thousands had gathered at the port to wave off friends and family and catch a glimpse of the record-breaking vessel, then the biggest ship in the world. To the horror of onlookers, Titanic was almost immediately met with disaster: as the ship was pulled out of the dock by tugboats and began to get underway, water displacement caused the nearby SS City of New York to be drawn towards the new vessel. Quick thinking by Captain Smith and a nearby tugboat managed to prevent a collision and City of New York was towed out of harm's way, but a serious accident that could have led to cancellation of the voyage was only very narrowly avoided. The Edwardian era was a golden age of shipbuilding. Developments in steamships allowed people to cross the oceans more quickly and safely than ever before. Soon, luxurious passenger ships were being built that attracted high-paying clientele, and companies tried to outdo each other with increasingly lavish vessels – no expense was spared. Ruling the oceans White Star Line was founded in 1869 by English shipowner Thomas Henry Ismay. Initially a cargo haulier, the company soon became one of the most prestigious in the transatlantic passenger trade and, from 1908, began work on three liners: RMS Olympic, RMS Titanic and RMS Gigantic, later renamed Britannic. The trio of ships, which comprised White Star Line's Olympic class, were intended to give the company an advantage over its rivals and were noted for their comfort, luxury and reliability rather than speed. Belfast shipbuilders Harland and Wolff undertook most of the design work for Titanic. The team was spearheaded by naval architect Thomas Andrews, aided by deputy naval architect Edward Wilding and chief draughtsman Alexander Carlisle. Andrews had taken over the role of chief architect from Carlisle, who had officially retired in 1910, though he continued to work on the project as a consultant. It was Carlisle who was responsible for Titanic's graceful lines, as well as a – rejected – design to enable Titanic to carry double the number of lifeboats. Lord Pirrie, who was a director of both Harland and Wolff and White Star Line, was in charge of the whole project. In July 1908, the plans for Titanic were formally approved by Joseph Bruce Ismay, White Star Line's chairman and the son of founder Thomas Henry Ismay. Olympic and Titanic were constructed alongside each other, with work beginning on Olympic in December 1908 and on Titanic the following March. A mammoth task Harland and Wolff was considered one of Britain's most prestigious ship builders. But despite boasting the largest shipyard in the world, the firm didn't initially have facilities big enough to build these two mammoth ships, so three slipways were converted into two larger slipways to accommodate the huge vessels. A steel gantry was added, as were cranes and electric lifts. The usual workforce of 6,000 was more than doubled for the construction of both Titanic and Olympic. It took 26 months for Titanic to be built. First to be constructed was its keel – the backbone and very bottom of the ship. The hull, the watertight steel body, was then built around it. Four 20-metre funnels towered above the vessel and ensured that it dwarfed any other ship. At 269 metres long, Titanic was the largest man-made moving object in the world. Expectations were certainly riding high. Harland and Wolff was one of Belfast's largest employers. Many of the shipyard workers lived with their families in the streets around the docks. Working in a shipyard was tough and dangerous, though, and there were 246 injuries recorded while Titanic was being built – including severed limbs, falls from the ship, or legs crushed under steel. There were also eight fatalities during construction, and one worker died on the day of the ship's launch when a wooden support fell on him. When was Titanic launched? At just after midday on 31 May 1911, Titanic was launched in Belfast in front of a crowd of around 100,000 people. Those lucky enough to have tickets watched from the slipway, with many more standing on the riverbanks as the ship slid into the River Lagan. Titanic was then towed to its fitting-out basin further down the river at Thompson dock, the specially built largest dry dock in the world at that time, where the ship's machinery and interiors were fitted. Titanic was powered by two nine-metre-tall steam engines, which drove the ship's three propellers: two directly and one via a turbine. The ship's 29 boilers were fed by 159 furnaces, which needed 660 tonnes of coal each day. This allowed Titanic to reach a maximum speed of 24 knots (28mph). Those wealthy enough to travel first class were surrounded by luxury and comfort. No expense was spared, and everything was specially made, from the gilt light fittings to the oak staircases. Second-class accommodation and facilities rivalled that of first class on board Titanic's rival ships. Even for third-class passengers, the standards would have been better than many of them were used to. The ship boasted 10 decks – eight of which passengers could use. Only the bottom two decks were out of bounds: these were the orlop deck, where cargo was stored, and the tank top, the bowels of the ship and the deck upon which the engines and boiler rooms stood. Why did people think the Titanic was 'unsinkable'? White Star Line marketed both Olympic and Titanic as "practicably unsinkable" – and stated as much in a 1910 publicity brochure. Titanic's hull boasted 16 special watertight compartments, which could be sealed off in case of emergency and prevent water in damaged sections from flooding the rest of the ship. The ship could remain afloat if no more than four of its forward compartments became flooded – but when the collision with the iceberg occurred, the impact caused six compartments to become open to the sea. Many of the bulkheads (walls between the compartments) had watertight doors, which closed automatically in the event of emergency. Moreover, though the bulkheads extended above the waterline, they were not capped at the top – in other words, water could (and did) spill over the top into neighbouring compartments. Read more | 8 stories of passengers who sailed on Titanic On 3 February 1912, Titanic moved to the dry dock, where its huge propellers were added. Following a final coat of paint, Titanic was complete. It could hold up to 3,547 passengers and crew and, when full, weighed more than 52,000 tonnes. A number of sea trials were carried out to ensure that the engines were in full working order and to see how the ship performed under different speeds, with a practice emergency stop proving it could be brought to a halt from a speed of 20 knots (23mph) in just over half a mile. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/04/GettyImages_2665309-ea43f60-e1649433871133.jpg" width="1024" height="733" alt="The anchor of the White Star liner Titanic is transported to its destination in Belfast by horse-drawn cart" title="The anchor of the White Star liner Titanic is transported to its destination in Belfast by horse-drawn cart. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)" /> From Belfast, the ship made for Southampton to prepare for its maiden voyage. Titanic's first journey was originally scheduled for 20 March 1912, but was delayed; in September 1911, Olympic had been involved in a collision with HMS Hawke, which had diverted manpower and resources away from Titanic's construction for Olympic's repairs. Who knows what may have happened if Titanic had set off on its original March sailing date, before the ice region had extended so far south? On 10 April, after a near-miss with City of New York, Titanic was finally ready to begin its journey to New York. Crowds lined Southampton's dock to wave goodbye to friends and family and catch a glimpse of the magnificent ship. Titanic sailed to Cherbourg in France and then Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland to pick up more passengers, many of whom hoped to start a new life in America. On 11 April, Titanic left Europe behind and sailed into the Atlantic. Read next | When did Titanic sink & how long did it take? Titanic construction in numbers 159 | The number of furnaces that powered Titanic’s boilers 176 | The number of firemen (stokers) who shovelled coal into the furnaces and kept them going £1.5m | The cost of building Titanic. Today it equates to roughly £120m £2 | The weekly wage for a Harland and Wolff construction worker 22 | How many buses could fit in the length of Titanic 9 | The number of workers killed during the ship's construction and launch This article first appeared in the July 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed
The history of St Patrick's Day traditions – and the importance of the colour green
Why do we celebrate St Patrick's Day and who was Saint Patrick? On 17 March each year, millions mark the traditional feast day of St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Here's everything you need to know about past celebrations – from the first ever St Patrick’s Day parade to the history behind the traditional dish of corned beef and cabbage…
Who was Saint Patrick? St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was born Maewyn Succat to a Christian family in Roman Britain in the late fourth century AD. Shortly before he was 16, Patrick was captured from the villa of his father, Calpurnius,by a group of Irish raiders who took him to Ireland and forced him into slavery. Six years later he escaped home to Britain, his religious faith strengthened during his time in slavery. Believing he had been called by God to Christianise Ireland, he later returned to Ireland as a missionary of the Catholic church (adopting the name Patricius, or Patrick, which derives from the Latin for ‘father figure’). He played an important role in converting the native Irish to Christianity, travelling around the country performing baptisms and confirmations. When is St. Patrick's Day 2022? St. Patrick's Day is celebrated on 17 March 2022 When was St Patrick’s Day first celebrated? By the end of the 7th century, St Patrick had become a legendary figure and was venerated as a saint – although he was never formally canonised. Legends around St Patrick – which are still told today – include the story that he drove the snakes of Ireland into the sea to their destruction, supposedly after they began attacking him during a 40-day fast. Natural historians have suggested that there is no evidence of snakes having ever existed in Ireland, as the country was too cold during the Ice Age for reptiles to survive. (Though, of course, many have highlighted the metaphorical link between the snakes of the legend and Patrick’s promotion of the Christian faith). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/03/GettyImages-523899592-c2cbde6.jpg" width="1024" height="1633" alt="A St Patrick's Day postcard depicts St Patrick standing on cliff side, with blue robes, chasing the snakes from Ireland. (Image by Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images)" title="A St Patrick's Day postcard depicts St Patrick standing on cliff side, with blue robes, chasing the snakes from Ireland. (Image by Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images)" /> It wasn’t until the 1630s that 17 March, the traditional day of St Patrick’s death, was added to the Catholic breviary (a book of prayers) as the Feast of St Patrick. By the late 17th century, Irish people were celebrating the day by wearing crosses, ribbons or shamrocks – the latter which St Patrick used (according to tradition) to explain the concept of the Holy Trinity to an ‘unbeliever’ by showing him the three-leaved plant with one stalk. Read more | 11 milestone moments in the history of Ireland Why is St Patrick's Day linked with the colour green and the shamrock? Though green dominates the celebrations today, it was the colour blue – a shade known as St Patrick’s blue – that was first associated with the saint. The earliest depictions of St Patrick show him in blue garments, and the colour also appears on ancient Irish flags. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/03/5343795-3-5812024.jpg" width="1029" height="1147" alt="Though green dominates the celebrations today, the colour blue was first associated with St Patrick. The earliest depictions of the saint show him in blue garments, as in this 13th century folio, La Vie des Sains. ( Image ©The British Library Board/Leemage / Bridgeman Images)" title="Though green dominates the celebrations today, the colour blue was first associated with St Patrick. The earliest depictions of the saint show him in blue garments, as in this 13th century folio, La Vie des Sains. ( Image ©The British Library Board/Leemage / Bridgeman Images)" /> In 1541, when King Henry VIII was declared the first English king of Ireland, he used a gold Irish harp on a blue flag for the Irish coat of arms. The blue shade also appears on the 18th-century Order of St Patrick, an order of chivalry created by George III. As the blue symbols became more associated with English rule, green grew in popularity as a symbol of rebellion. During the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the shamrock became a symbol of nationalism and the ‘wearing of the green’ on lapels became regular practice. When was St Patrick's Day first celebrated? Although Patrick was venerated as a saint in Ireland from the seventh century he was never formally canonised. It wasn’t until the 1630s that 17 March, the traditional day of his death, was added to the Catholic breviary (a book of prayers) as the Feast of St Patrick. By the late 17th century, Irish people were celebrating the day by wearing crosses, ribbons or shamrocks (tradition had it that he had used the three-leafed plant to explain the Holy Trinity). These early celebrations of St Patrick’s Day in Ireland were relatively low-key affairs. It took emigrants, particularly to America, to begin the transformation of St Patrick’s Day into the largely secular celebration commonly marked by boisterous revelry across the world. The large events we see across the world today, with their banners and music, can trace their roots back to New York in 1762 when Irish soldiers in the British Army marched to a St Patrick’s Day celebration with their band playing and their regimental colours flying. More patron saints' history England | St George’s Day: 11 things you might not know about England’s patron saint Scotland | St Andrew’s Day: 11 things you might not know about Scotland’s patron saint Wales | 16 things you (probably) didn’t know about St David’s Day traditions Were early American St Patrick's Day parades expressions of Irish nationalism? No. Initially they were dominated by Protestants loyal to Britain. It was only after American independence, the suppression of the 1798 Irish Rebellion and the flood of Irish Catholic immigrants into America in the mid-19th century that the ethos changed. There was also a change in colour as blue, traditionally associated with St Patrick, was gradually replaced with the Irish green that defines the event today. When did the first St Patrick's Day parade take place? The first parade has long been believed to be a small celebration by Irish colonists, held in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1737. However, in 2018 historian J Michael Francis of the University of South Florida found evidence to suggest that, in March of 1601, residents of St Augustine in Spanish Florida gathered together and processed through the city’s streets in honour of St Patrick, who seems to have served as the official ‘protector’ of the city’s maize fields. In 2008, St Patrick's Day religious celebrations in Ireland were moved forward two days to 15 March because 17 March 2008 fell on the second day of Easter Week, a celebration which takes priority over any other feast days. In 1940, the religious celebrations of St Patrick's Day were also moved when the day clashed with Palm Sunday. However, secular celebrations usually take place on 17 March, regardless. Why is corned beef, cabbage and potatoes the traditional fare of St Patrick's Day? When he was inaugurated on 4 March 1861, the 16th president of the United States chose a meal of mock turtle soup, followed by corned beef and cabbage, a dish traditionally associated with St Patrick’s Day feasting. Beef was not traditionally an Irish dish; it was under British rule that the cow came to be farmed for meat. In the era of colonial rule, beef’s prohibitive cost in Ireland meant that it “became synonymous with the well-fed British aristocracy and middle class.” Later, with the invention of ‘corned beef’ in the 17th century (and the ‘corn’ did not refer to corn kernels but to the kernel-sized salt crystals used to cure the beef) it was Ireland’s substantially lower salt tax, and not the beef itself, that cemented its reputation as an Irish export. As large numbers of settlers moved to America and gained greater prosperity, beef was back on the menu – and once Irish Americans popularised St Patrick’s Day as a celebration, the corned beef and cabbage of their ancestors became the traditional fare of the day. Why does Chicago turn its river green during St Patrick's Day? And when did it start? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/03/GettyImages-141496968-6ff5e16.jpg" width="1023" height="683" alt="The city of Chicago celebrates St Patrick's Day in 2012, with the tradition of dying its river green. (Photo by Brian Kersey/Getty Images)" title="The city of Chicago celebrates St Patrick's Day in 2012, with the tradition of dying its river green. (Photo by Brian Kersey/Getty Images)" /> The city of Chicago, Illinois, has coloured its river green to mark the holiday since 1962. In 1961 sanitation workers realised that the green vegetable dye they used to check for dumped sewage could double as a St Patrick's Day decoration – and so a tradition was born. It reportedly takes 40lbs of dye to achieve the verdant hue, while the colour can last anything from a few hours to two days. Meanwhile, the Caribbean island of Montserrat stages its own celebration that lasts between a week and 10 days each year, commemorating both the island’s Irish settler history (in 1678, more than half of the Caribbean island’s white population was Irish Catholic, including labourers and plantation owners) and also an unsuccessful slave uprising that occurred on 17 March 1768. The honour of the shortest parade is held by Hot Springs, Arkansas, which travels over just 98 feet, while the town of New London in Wisconsin (population 7,000) changes its town name to New Dublin for St Patrick’s Day and attracts more than 30,000 visitors each year.
To mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Diarmaid Ferriter speaks about the event and its tangled legacy today
To mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, historian Diarmaid Ferriter speaks to Rhiannon Davies about the events of 30 January 1972 and their tangled legacy for the people and politics of Northern Ireland today. How to download the HistoryExtra podcast Download as MP3
"A defining moment in the Troubles": why we should remember Bloody Sunday
“Bloody Sunday was a defining moment in the Troubles. As well as generating huge emotion, it also screamed a political challenge.” As we approach the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Diarmaid Ferriter speaks to Rhiannon Davies about what happened on 30 January 1972 – as well as its destructive legacy...
What was the mood in Northern Ireland before the events of Bloody Sunday? It was very fraught. The Troubles [conflict between mostly Protestant unionists (loyalists), pushing for Northern Ireland to remain within the UK, and largely Catholic nationalists hoping for the region to become part of the Republic of Ireland] had begun in earnest in 1969. Nobody knew how long they would last or what their extent would be, but by the early seventies it was clear that things were very, very difficult. Bloody Sunday happened at the very beginning of 1972, which proved to be horrendous – the worst year of the Troubles, with almost 500 people killed. It had huge implications, not just for people in Northern Ireland but also for Anglo-Irish affairs, which were reaching one of the most difficult points. The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments What happened on Bloody Sunday 1972? The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association had organised a march in Derry/Londonderry on 30 January 1972 to protest against the deeply unpopular policy of internment [imprisonment without trial] introduced in Northern Ireland in August 1971. The original plan was for the protesters to leave the Creggan area and march towards the city centre. But they were diverted away from the centre and ended up moving towards Free Derry Corner, as it was known. At this juncture you get very contested narratives of what precisely occurred. It’s been subjected to endless scrutiny and a number of inquiries over the decades. The organisers were determined to try to keep the protest peaceful, but there were some who objected to attempts to prevent them from going where they wanted to go. Of course, the presence of British Army troops was seen as particularly provocative. It was in reaction to those who were challenging the British Army – whether that was with missiles or taunts – that the Parachute Regiment was mobilised and it was they who began to shoot at the unarmed protesters. How many people were killed? These events happened very, very quickly. Within a few seconds, soldiers had fatally shot in the back both 22-year-old Jim Wray and 27-year-old William McKinney. This was another very difficult aspect of Bloody Sunday – the shooting of civilians in the back. In total, 13 people were killed outright on Bloody Sunday, and a fourteenth victim died later as a result of his injuries. In addition, at least 13 people were injured, and countless others were traumatised by the events. What was the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday? It did enormous damage to Anglo-Irish relations. If you read the transcript of a telephone call between the British prime minister Ted Heath and the Irish taoiseach (prime minister) Jack Lynch, made on the night of Bloody Sunday, you can feel the anguish on the part of Lynch and the defensiveness on the part of Heath, who really blamed the IRA for – as he put it – trying to take over the country. There was also a huge reaction in the Republic of Ireland, which I think represents a highpoint of cross-border emotion about the Troubles. People walked off their jobs on the Monday after Bloody Sunday. There were all sorts of impromptu protests – the British embassy in Dublin was set ablaze. Did Bloody Sunday lead to increased support for the IRA? Most certainly. The IRA enjoyed an upsurge in enthusiasm for its project and its methods. There were many who were drawn into its ranks because of the scale of the anger at Bloody Sunday; people were queueing up to join the IRA in Derry/Londonderry after the shootings. A brief history of the partition of Ireland What other impacts did the events that day have on the Troubles? Bloody Sunday was a defining moment in the Troubles. As well as generating huge emo- tion, it also screamed a political challenge. Could there be dialogue? Could there be an attempt to try to bring together the British and Irish governments to talk about a potential political solution? Ultimately, that did gain momentum. Another fundamental issue raised by the events was whether or not Northern Ireland could continue to be run by Northern Ireland politicians. Bloody Sunday led to the introduction of direct rule shortly afterwards. The episode showed that the complex situation in Northern Ireland was not being sufficiently controlled by unionist politicians, who had been dominating Northern Ireland politics since the foundation of the territory 50 years previously. Two official inquiries into Bloody Sunday were subsequently launched. How did their findings differ? In 1972, immediately after Bloody Sunday, Lord Widgery [lord chief justice at the time] was charged with the task of presiding over an inquiry into what had happened. At this point, there was a determined attempt to control the narrative from the British perspective, to show that what was done by the soldiers of the Parachute Regiment was a reaction to them being placed in mortal danger – that they were reacting to shots being fired by the IRA and they were not to blame. That narrative was sustained by the Widgery Inquiry, which ultimately became completely discredited. A brief history of the Good Friday Agreement Then, in 1998, the Saville Inquiry [officially the Bloody Sunday Inquiry] was launched. Unlike the Widgery Inquiry, it really gave weight to the personal testimonies of those who were involved in and impacted by Bloody Sunday. It found that firing by the British soldiers caused the deaths of 13 people and injury to a similar number, none of whom posed a threat, and that none of the soldiers fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks. Those killed were un- armed and entirely innocent. After the findings of the Saville Inquiry were published in 2010, there was a very moving day when then British prime minister David Cameron unreservedly apologised for what had happened on Bloody Sunday, saying it was unjustifiable. That was a moment for which thousands had been waiting, for decades. Their reaction was very emotional, very dignified. In its own way it was also joyous – like the lifting of a suffocating weight that so many people had struggled under for so long. Diarmaid Ferriter is a professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. He was speaking to Rhiannon Davies, section editor at BBC History Magazine This article was first published in the January 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine