That led into 5th October. In early 1970 it undertook its first actions (including the armed defence of St. Mathew’s church in the Short Strand, which loyalists were attempting to burn). First, how bad was discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland? On 12 August an In Derry we have finished up participating in the “Defence Association” locking ourselves inside the Catholic area. "During the following month, "Free Derry" (as it became known) "was surrounded by barricades... and was administered by the DCDA, in constant negotiation with the local British army commanders. "But once the violence started, and there began to be attacks on the Fountain [housing estate], it became sectarian. While Republicans, including the young Gerry Adams, did campaign around housing in Belfast in the late 1960s, they complained about the quality of the housing being built and the slow pace of slum clearance, but did not allege that Catholics faced discrimination in its allocation.Unionists are therefore not entirely wrong to say that discrimination in electoral boundaries and housing was geographically limited.
Deirdre O'Doherty was a trainee radiographer who ended up working in Altnagelvin hospital on 5 October 1968 These are external links and will open in a new window"A policeman came in with a baton in his hand with the blood dripping off it. DHAC, founded in early 1968. Eighty one republicans were executed by firing squad in the Where the North was different, however, was that emergency legislation was overwhelmingly used against one section of the community, even though illegal violence also came from loyalist paramilitaries. At a time when political activism was on the rise in Europe—from the events of May 1968 in France to the Prague Spring—and when the American civil rights movement was making great strides, Catholic activists in Northern Ireland such as John Hume and Bernadette Devlin came together to form civil rights groups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). Terry Wright was a teenage school boy at a Protestant school in Derry in 1968. As mentioned, the 1960s was a time of social upheaval and civil rights movements around the world. The march was banned by the Home Affairs Minister, Willaim Craig, but the organisers decided to go ahead. It would only have been possibly to find a political solution with some form of power-sharing, something unionist were not willing to concede until late 1990s.Nor is it easy to see how a unionist government could have sold such reforms to its own supporters. Northern Ireland Catholics, from all classes and backgrounds, had been impressed by the Martin Luther King and his non-violent campaign to liberate the black people of the U.S.A. and they began to emulate his tactics by planning a series of Civil Rights marches across Northern Ireland. "We joined the march at the old railway station," Ms O'Doherty recalls. You could see it on people’s faces - excitement, or alarm, or anger. Bernadette Devlin, leader of the People's Democracy (PD) and a foremost figure in the civil-rights movement, described her return to QUB after the Derry march: United States Segregation New collection of mural images shows that the writing on the walls is really changingThe Linen Hall Library's Northern Ireland Political Collection celebrates its 40th anniversary with the return of the Troubled Images exhibitionDonated cards from the Linen Hall Library's Northern Ireland Political Collection. Left out, however, is the radical, grassroots movement for civil rights that was … Bernadette Devlin (who took part) recalled: During the next few months the DCDA became the dominant organisation in Derry, displacing the DCAC. Similar incidents had occurred before but on this occasion, within hours of the events, the rioting was seen all over the world as the scenes of violence, particularly film shot by RTE cameraman Gay O’Brien of policemen baton-charging civilian demonstrators, were shown on television. However, the march was banned by Minister for Home Affairs Derry is a dead city: about one in five of the men is unemployed and the whole feeling is depressed. Despite a campaign to encourage participation, most people in Derry decided to ignore the event - the Derry soccer team was playing at its home ground in the Brandywell that Saturday. "We had found a voice, stood up for ourselves, refused to accept any longer this yoke that had been placed on us by the state.
Michael Farrell, the most influential figure in the PD, has said that they were influenced by the radical democratic practices of the Sorbonne Assembly.In January 1969, the PD organised a "Long March" from Belfast to Derry modelled on the civil-rights march to Montgomery, Alabama. The march was criticised as "reckless", with the DCAC and NICRA opposing it.