Abstract
This text was written in 1992. 20 years before, British soldiers came on to the streets of Northern Ireland. It was the start of the fresh round of the Irish trouble. Was it inevitable? Was it postponed by the partition of Ireland in 1920? Was it the result of an IRA plot which manipulated the civil rights movement? Interviews undertaken by the author (oral data) - complexity of participants' own perceptions, motivations and actions
Historical issue which is central: chaotic/rapid transition from a civil rights movement to a bloody intercommunal strife - frame of references for the 20 years of Troubles which followed.
What was the social world of the Catholic people of NI in the mid-1960s?
Civil rights literature: accumulating grievances that took a ‘second-class' to the point of revolt.
Unionist literature: natives led to bite the hand that fed them by ruthless enemies of the state.
Several characteristics are underlined by people interviewed:
-Divided society polarised along religious lines - different schools, different games/sports (at least different clubs)… Belfast was ghettoised.
-Various affirmations of Protestant superiority - physically: an assertion of what was seen as territorial rights (e.g. Dungannnon - Market square as a Unionist domain)
-Overwhelming impression of physical force to maintain segregation and to contain any Catholic spark of rebellion - Special Powers Act: RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) - people arrested
-Nationalist celebrations of the 1916 Easter rising were illegal, whereas Unionist rituals of affirmation (e.g. 12th July: Orange parades) were promoted.
-Discrimination at job interviews - e.g. it was asked the schools they were from
