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From Socialist Worker, No. 118, 19 April 1969, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
THE PICTURE was taken on January 4 in a field above Burntollet Bridge, a few moments before the ambush by Paisleyites was launched on a People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry.
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The police officer on the extreme right is Head Constable Patterson, chief of the Royal Ulster Constabulary special force, better known as the riot squad.
Third from the right, in civilian clothes is Ronald Cook, a member of the B-specials.
One of the stated reasons for the introduction of the Public Order Amendment Bill, at present making its controversial way through parliament, is that the police need greater power to control counter-demonstrations.
It is obvious from the photograph that at Burntollet the police were in close contact with a group of men whose clear and unmistakable intention it was to launch an assault on a peaceful march, and who had armed themselves for that purpose.
Under existing legislation the police in the photograph had authority to arrest at least the two persons on the left, seen carrying clubs.
Not only did they not do this, they have not, since January 4 charged any of the men shown, all of whom took – and were seen by the police to take – an active part in the ambush. The police did not lack the power to prevent the Burntollet ambush, they lacked the will.
During the debate on the second reading of the Bill, Mr John Hume, MP, elicited from the Minister of Home Affairs the information that B-specials – even in plain clothes – will have power to intervene with all the authority of the state on occasions such as Burntollet. This power will be given to such as the aforementioned Ronald Cook.
Mr Cook works at the quarry owned by W. Leslie Ltd. about a mile from Burntollet Bridge. It was from this quarry that stones were carried in a lorry on the night of January 3 to be left in piles ready for the preliminary stoning of the marchers.
On Tuesday, March 18 Bowes Egan, PD candidate for Enniskillen, Eamonn Melaugh of the Housing Action Committee and I went into Leslie’s Quarry in the course of an investigation into the background to the Burntollet affair (the results of the investigation will be published shortly in a book by Mr Egan).
We were assaulted by a group of men. Mr Cook ripped a roll of film from Mr Melaugh’s camera.
He then told us that ‘we could kill you here and bury your bodies. No one will ever know.’
Before we left Cook said ‘if there is any more talking or writing about that march we will kill you, and we mean that’.
It is to men like Mr Cook that wider powers are to be given. It is worth noting in passing that the allegedly liberal Home Affairs Minister, Mr Porter, recently praised the the B-specials fulsomely and said that the security of N. Ireland depended on them.
Yet, for all that, the basic objection to the public Order Amendment Bill does not rest on its detailed provisions nor on the character and calibre of some of those who will interpret and implement it.
One of the central planks of the civil rights platform was opposition to the repressive legislation embodied in the Special Powers Act and the existing Public Order Act. The reaction of the O’Neill regime has been further to restrict the area of freedom allowed political and quasi-political movements.
The Bill, by appearing to curb ‘both sides’ was designed to create the impression that O’Neill, the moderate, stood between and above two contending groups of extremists.
He has been assisted in making this plausible by the recent spate of resignations from civil rights groups and by the smear campaign against ‘extremists’ carried out by Miss Betty Sinclair, Mr McAnenny and others.
O’Neill introduced this fake measure because he CANNOT solve the problems of N. Ireland.
The civil rights campaign focused around specific reformist demands such as ‘One man, one vote’ and ‘Abolish the Special Powers Act’. But it was, at bottom, an elemental expression of discontent accruing from a society which could not provide decent housing for its people nor provide any solution to the unemployment problem.
Mr Robin Baillie MP gave the game away recently when he said that in N. Ireland the demands ‘one family, one house’ and ‘one man, one job’ were not reformist, but revolutionary.
Mr Baillie could be right. O’Neill could possibly concede universal franchise and end discrimination, and get away with it – although he is probably too effete and spineless to carry it through.
He cannot, however, end the underlying shortage of houses, because he cannot break the bankers’ strangle hold on the local councils and the Housing Trust which is the root cause of our housing problem.
He cannot end unemployment because the lack of investment in N. Ireland in this period is linked to the general crisis in Britain which, as we have recently seen, is also having a cataclysmic effect on the ‘republic’ in the south.
To solve the problems of N. Ireland it is necessary to mount an assault on the whole Tory system, not just to demand a more ‘liberal’ regime. To do this in a non-sectarian way, to minimise the possibility of evoking a conditioned sectarian response from the Protestant working class, any such continued campaign would have to be seen clearly to be in the interests of all workers.
It is not enough merely to repeat over and over again, ‘we are non-sectarian. We are fighting for social justice for Protestants as well as Catholics.’
The civil rights’ demands should be linked to demands for a minimum wage, to a campaign against redundancies such as occurred at BOC recently and for work-sharing on full pay as an alternative a campaign against rent rises such as those recently announced by Belfast Corporation.
It is clear that until we have built a viable movement based on such policies, measures like the Public Order Amendment Bill will be introduced by panicking Tory politicians and political policemen like Head Constable Patterson will go on condoning the criminal activities of people like Ronald Cook.
This article first appeared in Rampart, journal of the Londonderry Labour Party.
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