The Rest Is History - 698. The Troubles: The Brink of Civil War (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Why did the violence of the Troubles escalate as it did in Ulster? How did a series of marches from Belfast to Derry in 1969 result in terrible violence, and heighten the conflict? And, which terrible events saw the British army cross the border to intervene? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the next tumultuous stage of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.  *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton  Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill   Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What are you doing on the 4th of September? Oh, you're still free? Why? Haven't you heard that me and me? Are all going to be at the South Bank Centre? We have full weekend live shows for you all from your favourite gold hang of podcasts. Hello, all Shep. I'm going to be there with Tom Holland talking about the most scandalous housewives of Regency England.

And I'm going to be sitting down with the wonderful Anita, Anna, my co-host on the Empire Pod, to talk about the history of modern Iran with the... the absolutely brilliant Ali Ansari. And Dominic and I will be telling a thrilling Victorian adventure on the Friday night to kick things off. And it's not just us. Mary Beard is coming. Stanley Tootie's coming. You really couldn't ask for a better guest list, unless you were on it.

If you want to join us, head to southbound centre.co.com. For the full line up, buy your ticket now. See you there. See you there. Ulster stands at the crossroads. I believe you know me well enough to appreciate that I am not a a man given to extravagant language. But I must say to you this evening that our conduct over the coming days and weeks will decide our future. What kind of ulster do you want? A happy and

respected province, in good standing with the rest of the United Kingdom, or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations regarded by the rest of Britain as a political outcast. As always, in a democracy, the choice is yours. I will accept whatever your verdict may be. If it is your decision to live up to the words, Ulster is British, which is part of our creed, then my services will be at your disposal to do what I can. But if you want a separate, inward-looking, selfish, and divided Ulster,

then you must seek for others to lead you along that road, for I cannot and will not do it. So that was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and Old Etonian. Terence O'Neill addressing the nation on television on the night of the 9th of December 1968. And I probably didn't adequately convey in that reading the sheer sense of weariness and desperation that led him to make that speech. You were chipper. You were positively chipper. No, he's a military man. and so he knows the importance of preserving a sense of optimism.

But that has a very ironic, a kind of bitterly ironic ring today, doesn't it? Because we know where Ulster is heading. And it is going to lead to a separate inward looking selfish and divided Ulster, I guess, because it's going to lead to breakdown of law and order, sectarian hatred, sectarian killings, triumph of extremism, riots, shootings, bombings, hunger strikes, troops on the streets, at all kinds of, well, troubles

doesn't really do justice to what's going to happen. No, exactly. And actually probably not even Terrence O'Neill in his darkest moments could have imagined exactly how grim elements of Northern Ireland's future would be. So that speech is the end of 1968. Last time we were talking about really 1965-66,

we were talking about the roots of the troubles, the legacy of partition, the border campaign of the IRA, the rhetoric of Ian Paisley. and then we ended with the first UVF killings in the summer, spring and summer of 1966. And today we're really going to turn to 1968 and 1969. So this is when the sectarian tension becomes real street fighting. And when Harold Wilson's government in London takes the fateful decision to send the British army onto the streets of Northern Ireland.

And that's something that even a few years earlier would have been unthinkable, but for Tom for most of our, the first 20-odd years of our lives was a fact of life. The British Army were in Northern Ireland, and it seemed at one point that they always would be. So, where to start this story? Well, we'll start it in what might seem a very unlikely place. We'll start it in a pebble-dash terrorist council house in the village of Caledon in County Tyrone in June 1968.

Sir Caledon is just inside the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was a majority Protestant and it's controlled in 1968 by the Unionist Party. And as we described last time, if you're controlled by the Unionist Party, if you're in a village there or town, then most of the houses, almost all of them are given to Unionist voters, i.e. Protestants. There are more than 250 Catholic families in the area that are on the waiting list for housing. And some of those families have been waiting for as long as a decade. But this particular council house, which is Nine Kinnaird Park, has just been allocated to a 19-year-old woman called Emily Beatty, who is a secretary for a local solicitor who's very big in the unionist party. Emily Beatty is engaged to a member of the reservist be specials, and she is, of course, a Protestant. And to local Catholics, the fact that she's getting this house seems absolutely outrageous.

And one of the people who rejects is the nationalist MP for East Tyrone, who is a young man called Austin Curry. And on the 20th of June, Curry decides he's going to occupy this house in protest. He wants the world to notice. And with two friends, he breaks in to the house using a poker to get in. But they're not there for very long. The local police, the RUC, throw them out a few hours later. And one of the RUC men who throws them out is Emily Beatty's brother who's come armed with a sledgehammer. Nobody is hurt, nobody is killed. It's not a massive story in the grand scheme

of things. So why does it matter? Well, we talked last time about just how divisive, how toxic the issue of housing is in Northern Ireland in the 60s, both in itself, but also as a symbol of something bigger. The sense among the Catholic minority that they are second-class citizens, shut out of the top jobs, denied votes and local elections, even denied homes of their own. Now, it has to be said, a lot of working-class Protestants would take a different view of this and we'll come back to them a bit later. And this has been going on for 40 years or so, but Austin Curry, the guy who occupied the house, is typical of a new generation.

These are people who don't remember the original troubles, because the troubles, the name was used to refer to the earlier conflict. They don't remember the troubles of the 1910s and 1920s. Somebody like Austin Curry, they've got TVs, they've seen the American Civil Rights Movement, they've seen Martin Luther King, marching in Selma and Montgomery, all these places. and they're impatient to see change and they're keen to learn from the American civil rights activists. Example.

This is June, 1968, so a month after the events in Paris. Would that be an inspiration as well, the sense that the world can be turned upside down? Yeah, not as much, I would say. It's a civil rights movement. Yeah, it is. I mean, there was a 68 mood, which I do think matters, and there are other people who are perhaps more influenced by Paris 68, but not so much Austin Curry, I would say.

Anyway, so he's an example of this. He's a history graduate from Queens, and he's become the youngest MP at Stormont, but there are others. There's a guy called Jerry Fit. Jerry Fit had been a stoker on a merchant navy ship. He became an Irish Labour politician, and then in 1966 he won a Westminster seat for West Belfast as a Republican Labor candidate. So Republicans are starting to win seats now. At the start of the 60s, you were saying that they didn't have any. They had zero, yes, exactly.

But they're starting to get one or two. I think there were two at this point. And then there's a guy called John Hume, later very well known. John Hume came from a working class family in Derry. He got a degree in history in French, like me. He ran the campaign to have Northern Ireland's second university in the second city, Derry. And he was absolutely outraged when the authorities said, no, we're going to put it in a place called Coleraine,

which is a small Protestant town, not in a Catholic city. So all three of these men, Austin Curry, Jerry, and John Hume become associated with this new movement for Catholic civil rights. They want fair electoral boundaries and end to gerrymandering. They want the fair allocation of housing. They want the end of the B specials, these kind of armed reservists, auxiliary is helping the police. And above all, I mean, the thing they say that really resonates,

particularly because of what's been going on in America, they say in local elections we should have one man, one vote. enough of this business of only getting a vote if you're a tenant or a homeowner. It should just be one man, one vote, universal suffrage. So when most people in Britain or America hear about this it seems completely unobjectionable. Why would you disagree with the principle of one man one vote?

But actually, we've already met through your amazing powers of impersonation. We have met one person who would find this very objectionable indeed, the Reverend Ian Paisley. He and his supporters would say, this civil rights movement is a Trojan horse. It is an IRA front to bring down the state that we have built here in Northern Ireland and to force us the Protestants of Ulster into a united Ireland.

Now, most people listening to this will say, well obviously he would say that, but that's bigoted and mad and totally wrong. But actually, this is a really, really interesting question and a surprising story. So the main civil rights organisation was called the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association NICRA and it was founded at the beginning in 1967 and most of its members were middle class Catholic activists and they were genuinely outraged at what they saw

as the legacy of sectarian discrimination. But you know when Ian Paisley and people like him said this is just an IRA front, there was actually a grain of truth in it. Do you remember last time we said the IRA had done their board a campaign and they'd kind of given up on the arms struggle and they'd focused on left-wing politics. Yeah, they'd gone off and become woke.

They'd become woke, exactly. And as part of this wokeery, they had set up a series, what they called, Wolftonne societies. So these were basically radical Republican talking shops. Men in polo necks and very earnest-looking women would join a wolf-tone society. It's named after a revolutionary from the 1790s. And they would talk about how to bring about. Irish unity, how to smash sectarianism, ideally how to bring down imperialism and capitalism as well. And it would be presumably joined up with other freedom struggles across the world.

Of course. The wretched of the earth. Yeah. How can we take inspiration? All of that kind of somebody would bring along a dogged copy of France Fanon and Albert Camus. No question whatsoever. But there would be a hard-faced man in the corner who's no strange to blowing up a post office, that kind of thing. And it was actually from the wolf-ta... own societies that the idea of a big civil rights campaign really took off. And when you look at the first meeting of this NICRA, Northern Ireland's civil rights association, when you look at who was there at the first meeting, yeah, there are a load of people who like civil liberties and are members of like a Labour Party this and a Labour Party that or whatever, but there are

communists and there are IRA men, including the commander of the IRA's Belfast Brigade. I mean, this isn't just me making this up. There's a brilliant book on all this by Richard English. with a definitive history of the IRA called Armed Struggle. Right, Richard English. Yeah, I know, he's got very unfortunate. He would say that, wouldn't he? I know, mental. He's a Northern Irish historian called Richard English

who writes about the IRA. I mean, Richard Prod. So here's the thing. In some ways, it does kind of start as an IRA front, but it becomes something much bigger. I mean, you mentioned Paris, because it does catch the mood of the mid-60s. It attracts loads of people,

especially students who are not really interested in the IRA. They're not interested in overthrowing the state. They're not Marxists. They actually are genuinely interested in housing and in fair voting and all of this kind of stuff. So in that sense, Ian Paisley and people who are talking about the Trojan horse, they're right in one way but wrong in another.

Isn't that history all the time? Yeah. History is a land of contrast. The civil rights movement might have in some ways started as an IRA front, but it has become something much bigger. and much broader. And actually the real tragedy of the civil rights movement really is its timing. Because as we said, it's modelled on the American Civil Rights Movement.

But the thing about the American Civil Rights Movement is easily forgotten, is that it comes to fruition and it peaks at a point when people in America are extremely well off, including people in the South, which is booming. You know, it's the affluent society, massive economic growth, rising wages, people are very optimistic about the future. It's easier to make changes. against that background than it is when things are bleak. And of course, in Northern Ireland, the civil rights movement is coming to prominence,

1967, 68, precisely the point when the traditional industries on which Northern Ireland depends are in real trouble, the jobs are drying up. The working class Protestants that probably you do need to persuade are frightened about economic and cultural change. So it's much more difficult. If you've come back from the shipyard, you're worried your job's going to go. when you open the newspaper and you see a load of people are complaining about something, effectively you have to make the concession, it's much harder to do, I would say.

And this is one reason why I said we'd come back to this issue about second-class citizens. It's why it's very hard for a lot of unionists to accept the second-class citizen criticism. So there's a great book called Loyalists by Peter Taylor. Peter Taylor, BBC journalist, did three books called Provo's Brits Loyalists, basically oral histories, lots of interviews, looking at the conflict through three different lenses. And this is one on loyalists. It's full of interviews with poor, working-class Protestants,

who are very defensive, indeed, outraged, when they hear about Catholics saying they are second-class citizens. Our housing was the same as our Catholic next-door neighbor, two up, two down, with an outside toilet. It really irks me when I hear about the disadvantages that the Catholics had. Protestantism and unionism in Northern Ireland, it's not a monolith. There are a lot of very poor people who are part of that community. And they feel, you know, when they're told, oh, you are the first class citizens,

you have the whip hand over in your neighbours. They're offended by this because they don't feel that way at all. And so, of course, the tragedy in some ways, the tragic irony of the civil rights movement is that it actually inadvertently, through no fault of their own in many ways, drives people like this into the arms of Ian Paisley and away from the centre ground and away from Terrence O'Neill because there was never any opportunity that they could have signed up with housing activists

in Protestant community, do you think? Well, they didn't have housing activists in Protestant communities because they were getting housing. But they were kind of houses with no toilets. We get together and improve housing across Northern Ireland. There were organisations like that for you. You could join the Northern Ireland. Labour Party.

And the Northern Ireland Labour Party would say we are open to all people irrespective of a religion and we're fighting for better conditions and rights and whatnot for working class people. That's what we're all about. But it's a less sexy story, isn't it, than one that is about suffering and adventure and fighting and dying to quote, was it, Gusty Spence, all of that kind of thing. That's a story that seems richer and has much more traction and is more emotionally meaningful than one that's just a bit bland and sort of.

of old working class people getting together and fighting for better toilets or something, I would say, better washing machines. Better washing machines. Well, this is the Samba review of history. Anyway, let's get back to Austin Curry and that house in Caledon. You know, asked about Paris, 1968. Of course, it's also the Prague Spring, student protests in America, all of this kind of thing. And when people read about Austin Curry occupying the house, they're like, yes, this is exciting. You know, the revolution is coming to Northern Ireland. Brilliant. And a few weeks after his Caledan protest, Curry goes to a meeting of the civil rights groups. And he says, let's do something bigger. Let's have a march like they have in America.

Martin Luther King would do these marches through Alabama or something. Loads of publicity. Let's have a march of her own. We'll have a march to draw attention to housing discrimination in County Tyrone. And so it is that on the 24th of August, 4,000 people join him in Northern Ireland's first. big civil rights demonstration. They march from the village of Coal Island to Dungannon. And it all goes well. You know, 4,000 people, they're trudging along. They're all happy, singing songs, whatever. But the people who are the more radical side of the movement are very

disappointed. They say, well, come on. The thing about Martin Luther King's marches is they got the publicity because they were attacked, because they ended in violence. If you want to grab people's attention, you actually do need a bit of violence. You need a bit of violence. You need confrontation. You need to expose the sordid reality of the state. So then people will see you as martyrs and they'll see the state for what it really is, which is repressive and cruel and violent and so on. And so they say the next march should be somewhere much more high profile, namely the city of Derry or officially London Derry. So this, as we said last time, Northern Ireland's second city, 6040 Catholic Protestant. Economically Derry is really struggling. One in five men

are out of work. The mood is very bleak, it is very fractious, it is the worst possible place to hold a demonstration. And not just because it's poor, but because it has such a symbolic resonance for the Protestants. Symbolic for both sides. Symbolic for the Catholics, because it's a Catholic majority city, run by Protestants, symbolic for the Protestants, because there was this siege in 1689, and they hold the apprentice boys of Derry March every year to remember it. But if their goal is to get a kind of violent reaction, then they need to annoy Protestants, don't they? Yeah, and this is the place. You know, they want the kind of the equivalent of the bullneck sheriff going in.

Bull Connor. Yeah, all that kind of thing. And smacking up civil rights protesters in America, if they want the same thing, then they have to kind of press Protestant neuralgic areas. Yeah, totally. Totally. And this is what they're doing. Their plan is they will start on the east side of the city across the lower. River Foil. They will cross the Craig Avon Bridge. They'll go into the city centre. They will go through

Protestant areas. They will end inside the city walls, which are of course sacred really to Protestants, where the apprentice boys of Derry have their parade. And they will end near the war memorial in the centre of Derry again, a sacred spot for Protestants. Now, as the Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan, and not everybody's cup of tea, quite nationalist history, but as he rightly says in his book, The Troubles, he says it was as though Hamas were to parade through Jerusalem's holy places and conclude with a rally at the wailing wall. Well, when you put it like that, but it's not quite as bad as that,

but it's kind of, it's very provocative. And at Stormont, the hardline home affairs minister, William Craig, who's always keen to bolster his popularity with the sort of more extreme unionists. He does the obvious thing he bans the march, as he's empowered to do. But on the 5th of October, 1968, about 400 people, including Austin Curry and Jerry Fitt, and some, I think there's three British Labour MPs, they turn up at the appointed spot on Duke Street anyway. And when they turn up, they find the street is blocked at both ends by lines of RUC

policemen who have been ordered to clear the road by force. Now, if you read some accounts, they will say that the Derry IRA had had a meeting beforehand. They are planned for this and they had said, when it kicks off, make sure those MPs are in the front line so they get hit because that will give us the publicity that we want. Well, this is exactly what happens. The RUC, you know, they play the part appointed for them as the bullnicked kind of American sheriff. they pile into the marchers. Some of the marchers managed to get to the bridge, but there they are driven back by a water cannon

into a kind of hail of baton blows. 80 or so people are taken to hospital with injuries, and one of them is Jerry Fit. Remember, a Westminster MP, who is beaten, he's dragged away, put in a police van, and taken to the police station. At the police station,

the police say to him, clean yourself up, and he refuses, I wanted the outside world to see the blood flowing strongly down my face. And what is really toxic for Northern Ireland's image is that an Irish TV crew, an RTE crew, had filmed the whole thing.

So the footage of the RUC officer's absolutely leathering fit in the others with their batons and their sticks goes around the world. If you kind of Google it, you can see photos of it. I mean, that is what they wanted, isn't it? I mean, it couldn't be better for them. You're right, from their perspective, it couldn't be better. but I think if you were to pick one moment well there are lots of different moments

but this is a contender for one of the moments where the sort of spiral into disaster becomes inevitable because it's followed by days of rioting in Derry in the working class bogside area very heavily Catholic there are young men throwing stones and petrol bombs at the police

and then there are kind of copycat riots across Northern Ireland watching all this from Belfast Terence O'Neill knows that he has to do something and five days after he says to his cabinet, he meets his cabinet, he says, I'm going to go to London, I'm going to see Harold Wilson, and I know that Harold Wilson is going to ask me for some pretty big changes.

And O'Neill, I mean, I have to admit, I think O'Neill is hapless, but I feel really sorry for him because I think his instincts are often, you know, admirable. He says to his colleagues, look, we know how this works. Whenever there is trouble, and I quote, the first reaction of our own people is to retreat into old hardline attitudes. He says, come on, let's be honest. Can any of us truthfully say in the confines of this room that the minority has no grievance calling for remedy?

He says we cannot govern by police power alone. It will be a very hard job to sell concessions to our people, but in this critical moment may this not be our duty. I mean, I think now you read that and you think very, very much. enough. But not all of his ministers agree with him. So I already mentioned the hardline home affairs minister William Craig. William Craig says to him, hold on, you can't go over to London and meet Harold Wilson and sell out and let him and make you introduce reforms. Because if you do that, you will, and I quote, provoke a massive uprising in the loyalist community. I mean, this is the dilemma for Terrence O'Neill.

Basically, the obvious thing might seem to be to make concessions to the Catholics, but if you do that, you're in danger of losing your base. Now, a very skillful politician might be able to do that, whether he is that man we will find out. He flies off to London, 4th of November, to meet Wilson and his home secretary, friend of the show, Jim Callahan. Now, just for people who haven't listened to our series about Britain in the 70s, Harold Wilson, enthusiast for scouting. Tight shorts, isn't he? Very tight shorts on holiday in the city islands. Loves modernisation, the White Eaters technology. Giving the Beatles MBEs.

Correct. Exactly. Economic growth. He came to power. People thought he might be quite left wing. He became more and more centrist as time went on. He had become prime minister in 1964. Some Labour backbenches, as we said last time, were already complaining a lot about discrimination

against Catholics in Northern Ireland. But most people in the Labour Party don't really care that much. Harold Wilson certainly doesn't care. He's much more interested in the economy, in the trade unions, in Rhodesia, even in Vietnam. When he read the diaries of his minister, like Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, Richard Crossman, they basically never talk about Northern Ireland at all.

It's not the top of their list. I think what listeners will want to know is Marcia on the scene at this point, his domineering secretary who, in the mid-70s, people are plotting to kill. Yeah, there's no plots to kill Marcia at this point. Marcia and Harold, if they had their affair, they've had it. Remember, they slept together a number of times, but it was not satisfactory. Found it disappointing, yeah.

So she's lurking, but it hasn't all complicated. completely gone mad at this point. It's quite understated. His home secretary is Jim Callahan, friend of the show, Portsmouth, the Royal Navy, very puritanical, big man, a bit of a bully, great San Brookian hero. He's been home secretary since the end of 1967. As we said before, he has an Irish background, hence the name Callahan. His grandfather had moved to England during the famine, but Callahan basically has very little knowledge or interest of Northern Ireland. He wrote a book about it or had a book ghost written for him in the early 1970s about it. I can't remember what was called a problem of Ulster or something like that. And he said that when he arrived at

the home office, they gave him a huge sort of briefing document. There's lots of stuff about prisons, race relations, the fire service, the police, and there was nothing in this document about Northern Ireland at all. There isn't at this point a secretary of state for Northern Ireland? No, no, no, no, no. We don't need one because it's being run from Belfast. However, Wilson and Callahan are interested now because there's a lot of fighting. You know, there's been this business in dairy. They can see there's a problem. But at the end of 1968, they've got a problem.

They want Terrence O'Neill to fix it. And they're quite hard on him, actually. For people who listen to previous series who think they're sort of all a bit limp, not at all. Howard Wilson said to him, look, you need our money. You can't survive without British money. If you don't start introducing reforms, we'll cut off your money. Callaghan, we have had enough of you stringing us along. He says, we've got a list of changes. We want to see them right away. And O'Neill said to them,

look, I'm going as far as I can. I'm getting death threats from loyalists. You know, don't push this. I can't. If you push us too far, there'll be a loyalist uprising or whatever. Anyway, he goes back to Belfast and he says to his colleagues, they were very tough, I've got to give them something. And so he unveils this very limited reform package. So limited to reformers and who gets the vote. There's a new system for allocating housing. Some police reform as all of this. And it is your classic case of, if you had offered this in 1963, it would have been a different story, but now it's 1968 and you please nobody at all. The civil rights activists say, come on, this, like you've got to dismantle the whole discriminatory

system. You can't just give us this. But on the other side, some of O'Neill's own ministers say, God, you're a total wuss and appeaser. You go over to London, you let them push you around, tell us what to do in our own country. It says, well, Paisley was obviously right about you. You know, you're just a weakling. You don't stand up for Ulster. You're just too interested in pleasing the English. You know, you're basically in an Englishman anyway with your Eaton background.

I mean, just to remind people, this is a guy who'd fought in the Second World War and taken out tank proteins, I imagine. Most people in their story have some sort of war. I mean, it's always the way with 60s and 70s, UK history, isn't it? Set for Jerry Adams. Yes, yes. Well, Amy Pace didn't advise in the war. No doubt made warlike speeches, but I don't think he took out a German machine gun nest or anything like that. It's the shabby men in London, isn't it? Who did that?

Men with glasses, yeah, who become incredibly ineffectual ministers of transport or something. Anyway, so this is the context for O'Neill to give that speech that you read at the beginning. This speech where he basically says to people, look, come on, this is where we are. Peace on one side, total disaster on the other. If you read the text, it's a very sincere appeal. by a man who's clearly exhausted in the end of his tether. He says to the civil rights activists, you know, sure, I'm not going to completely satisfy you,

but this is a democracy, I ask you now with all sincerity, to call your people off the streets. You're Ulstam and yourselves. You know we are all of us stubborn people who will not be pushed too far. And then of his critics, the hardline loyalist critics, he says, they're not merely extremists, they are lunatics who would set a course along a road

which would only lead to an All-Ireland Republic. They're not loyalists, but disloyalists, disloyal to Britain, disloyal to the Constitution, disloyal to the Crown. I mean, it's quite strong stuff. It's punchy, isn't it? It's punchy. And at first, it seems that it might do the trick. Actually, the civil rights campaigners do listen to him.

They say, fine, we will suspend our demonstrations for a month as an act of goodwill. And the Belfast-Telegraph newspaper organises a petition. I'm backing O'Neill, and they get 150,000 signatures, which is the tenth of the population. But deep down, I think even O'Neill knows that he's actually left this too late. So on Christmas Eve, he wrote a note to his private secretary. He said, 1968 has been a terrible year, but 1969 is going to be even worse. As I look in the glass darkly, I see demonstrations, counter-demonstrations, meetings, rouse, and general misery. And really telling is that at this point, O'Neill says to his secretary,

The only real solution for this is basically for London to shut us down and impose direct rule from Westminster. But they will never do it. They don't have the courage to do it. And so we will drift from crisis to crisis. Just 10 days after that, the hopes for a sort of peaceful resolution take another big hit. So we talked about the radicalism in 1968. On New Year's Day in 1969, a radical kind of socialist Republican group began a civil rights march from Belfast to date. And this was a group that called themselves People's Democracy.

And they'd been founded at Queen's University of Belfast. And their best known member was a young woman called Bernadette Devlin. It was 21 years old. She was a Catholic student, psychology, I think. And the People's Democracy members had been watching Paris and Prague and the American civil rights marches. And they really did want to provoke violent reprisals. Because they said this is the only way to expose.

the true nature of the state we're living in. Sir Bernadette Devlin, what we really wanted to do was to pull the carpet off the floor to show the dirt that was under it. And O'Neill begged them not to go ahead and do this march. Other civil rights activists

asked them not to go on the march. They go on the march? And by the 4th of January, they have reached a place called Bern-Tollett Bridge, which is six miles east of Derry. And here, 400 loyalists are waiting for

them armed with sticks and stones and iron bars and cudgels studded with nails and many of these people waiting in ambush are off-duty be specials and they absolutely lay into the student marches beating their living daylights out of them and meanwhile members of the police the r uc are standing there watching and doing absolutely nothing and it's covered on tv and it's basically just what Bernadette Devlin and the other marches had expected in a way what they wanted. And this is, I think, is a really good example at the point that we were talking about earlier. People often talk about the troubles as though they sort of arise organically by accident or by magic. Actually, this is a really good example of how they are willed into being by people who could have made different choices.

Because as we said, lots of other civil rights campaigners had said, please don't go on this march. You'll only make things worse. They thought that by marching through, I mean, the People's Democracy March goes through the small Protestant towns of County Antrim. And they said, don't do this. It is needlessly provocative. But Bernadette Deflin and Co., their attitude was, well, we're suffering terrible discrimination.

We want to provoke people. We want the reaction. We want the publicity. And of course, on the other side, the loyalists didn't have to turn up with their kind of cudgels and nails. I mean, they could have just let them do it. They could have just let them march. It just, their strategy seems mad.

I mean, it's like the nationalists have said, here's an elephant trap. Oh, brilliant. Let's jump into it. It's just lunatic behavior from them. They would say, we're defending our state from people who want to destroy it. I mean, I know what they say, but they have failed to understand how it will play on the screens of the world. I mean, I suppose they would say they don't care. I suppose they would say they don't care, but I agree with you that so they haven't been watching TV.

Because when Martin Luther King did his marches in America, the ones that were, best were the ones where the forces of authority or white racists or whatever showed the ugly side to their society. And if you don't do that, then it's much harder to cut through with the public. To cast yourself as the victim. Of course. So I think everybody involved in that burnt toilet bridge story, you know, they got what they wanted. And the person who loses most is, of course, the one person who's trying to hold the whole thing

together, which is Terrence O'Neill. because this is terrible for him because first of all, Catholics say but these TV pictures of people being beaten once again shows the state will not protect us the RUC will not protect us the B specials are not the solution

they are the problem they are violent, bigoted sectarian they cannot be reformed all this on the other hand the loyalists and unionists say or burnt hollet bridge shows that the civil rights activists they're only interested in provoking disorder

They deliberately sought to provoke chaos because they want to undermine our state And Terrence O'Neill has given them far too much He makes concessions but it's never enough for them Somebody one day will have to stand up to these people This is what both sides say And this leads O'Neill in a really, really tricky position And what he decides to do He says basically sod it

I'm going to gamble everything And on the 3rd of February He decides to throw the dice He says I'm going to dissolve the parliament in Stormont, I only call a general election, and I'm going to say to the people of Northern Ireland, what do you want? Do you want peace or do you want civil war? Back me or sack me.

I mean, he's taking a massive risk. And at the point that he's doing that, in London, Harold Wilson's government at last finally wake up to how serious this is and they say, God, we're going to have to think about a doomsday scenario here. So just six days afterwards, Callahan tells one of his cabinet colleagues, Richard Crossman, who writes a diary, he says, we have been drawn. drawing up a contingency plan. If things go wrong for Terrence O'Neill in this election,

we may have to send British troops into the streets of Northern Ireland and to take over the government ourselves. So, as the people of Northern Ireland prepare to go to the polls, the stakes could not be higher, not least for O'Neill himself, because in his own constituency, in Bandside in Antrim, where for election after election he has been unopposed, he now faces a challenge from a union and, hardliner, a rival unionist. And Dominant, who is this unionist hardliner? Surprise, surprise. It is the

Reverend Ian Paisley. Unbelievable. Okay, we'll come back after the break to find out what happens in this Titanic clash. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Now, ever since the Industrial Revolution, one of the great themes of capitalist society has been the desire to reform and improve injustices. And I suppose a classic example of this would be the drive in the Victorian period to stop young children being sent up chimneys to work there as sweeps. Yeah, and you can draw a thread, can't you, between the fight for kind of better rights for workers and better working conditions and benefits and things in the 19th century, all the way through to what happens in the 21st. So a good example of the kind of benefits that employees get these days, the benefits that Amazon offers

to its employees, so they get funding of up to £3,000 a year, every year, towards training and career growth. And Amazon offers term time working to employees with school-age children so they can apply to get a guaranteed 10 weeks off in the year to coincide with school holidays, all the while continuing to have access to their full benefits. Find out more at about amazon.com.uk slash benefits dash and dash workplace. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers, the rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. When we talk about beating cancer, we often focus a lot on survival.

And that can mean overlooking impacts that last long after treatment ends. Yeah, for example, take cancers in children and young people. the treatments themselves can be incredibly harsh. They can cause lifelong side effects like infertility or hearing loss. And Cancer Research UK is working to change that because young people, they should be able to grow up hearing the voices of the people that they love and living their lives at the fullest. That's right.

And one clinical trial led by Cancer Research UK showed that giving another drug alongside chemotherapy nearly halved the number of children losing their hearing. And today, the treatment combination is being used by doctors, across the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org slash rest is science. Hola, Camaradas. It's Dominic here. Sorry to interrupt the episode, but I just thought you'd like to know that we've been thinking about something that you've been writing to us a lot, one of the most requested subjects ever since we started the Restis history, which is the Spanish Civil War.

Now, I can tell you exclusively that plans are afoot for us to do the Spanish Civil War at some point, hopefully next year in 2027. But as a little taster or teaser on our sister show, The Book Club, my co-presenter, Tabby and I have just released an episode on perhaps the emblematic novel of the Spanish Civil War, which is Ernest Hemingway's book for whom the bell tolls. So in this episode, we do dig into the history. We talk about the clash between fascism and idealism. We talk about the roots of the conflict. And, of course, the way in which it drew in so many foreign intellectuals and artists and writers. Hemingway, of course, among them. And many of you will know that Hemingway was in Spain during the war.

He was a correspondent in Madrid, which was under siege by Franco's forces. And he draws on that experience in for whom the belt holds to tell the story of an American volunteer who's part of a guerrilla unit who are fighting for. Franco's troops. So if you keep listening at the end of this episode, we will have an exclusive short clip which discusses the history of the Spanish Civil War. Hello everyone and welcome back to the rest of history, where it is the evening of the 24th of February, 1969, and the polls have closed in the elections for a northern Irish parliament at Stormont. And the mood is incredibly tense, isn't it? Because for the last few weeks. The Reverend Ian Paisley has been tramping the streets with bands and drummers and

holding up Bibles and he's been denouncing the traitor who will soon be crushed beneath the marching fate of the Protestants. This takes the highest-o-sand-band side. Terence O'Neill's supporters are watching very anxiously as the pile of Ian Paisley's votes is going to getting higher and higher and higher. And eventually the result comes through and Terrence O'Neill has just scraped home. He's won a majority of just 1,400 votes over Paisley, and this for somebody who had always been unopposed before is a real shock. But actually, this is the only good news that he gets of the night. Because when you look at the rest of the results, they're very confused. He hasn't got the mandate that he wanted. In working-class Protestant areas, moderate unionism has hemorrhage support.

The hardliners have done very well, and his party, although the unionists are still in control of stormments, of course, their party is now very deeply fractured. And after this, it's the classic story, you know, a prime minister calls a snap election to try and shore up their authority. They don't get the mandate they wanted, and after that they're basically a dead man walking. And the end for O'Neill comes a few weeks later, and it comes in very dramatic circumstances. On the evening of the 30th of March, 1969, he's waiting for a vote of confidence from the Ulster Unionist Council when a bomb goes off at the Castle-ray electricity substation, and that plunges half of Belfast into darkness.

And in the next few weeks, there are more bombs at water installations and water pipelines and electricity stations. And so by the 26th March, much of Belfast is without water. There are actually trucks crawling through the streets, giving water to people who can't get to standpipes. Now, in his Protestant telegraph, Ian Paisley says this is the handiwork of the IRA. loyalists must now appreciate the struggle that lies ahead and the supreme sacrifice that will have to be made

in order that Ulster will remain Protestant. But do you know what, the irony of this is? These bombs weren't planted by the IRA. They were planted by the Ulster Volunteer Force working alongside Ian Paisley's own Ulster Protestant volunteers. Which Paisley presumably knew about? He must have known about it, surely. So he was lying?

I guess so yeah Yeah he was I mean that's poor from a man of the cloth Remember the bloke we met last time Who runs the UVF Gusty Spence Oh the guy who shot everyone in pubs Yeah

He's in prison at this point Because he's been Because of his pub shooting record Although he actually denied That he'd pull the trigger He's in prison And he says quite openly afterwards He says we did this

To expose O'Neill's weakness To show people that he would be He would be soft on the IRA If the IRA were to blow things up It was carefully planned to bring down O'Neill, to quote him directly. And it works. Because two days after the peak of the water business,

O'Neill resigns as Prime Minister. He's absolutely exhausted. He's totally demoralised. He can't see any future to a prosperous future for Northern Ireland. And when he goes on TV to explain this, he's completely candid. He says, the old fears, the old prejudices, the old loyalties were too much for me and I couldn't overcome them. I suppose the problem for him was that he seemed too kind of posh,

landed, two grand. And so I imagine that the obvious strategy for his party is to elect as his replacement, someone with roots in the local community, someone who, you know, the average guy in the pub on the Shankill Road could identify with. So is that what they do? No. They basically choose the same person again. I mean, this is a bit harsh because there are differences.

But the person they choose is yet another member of the landed gentry. and he's James Chichester Clark. He's a landowner from County Londonderry. So Terrence O'Neillian may remember went to Eton. James Chichester Clark went to Eton. So he's another old Etonian. Yeah. He joined the Irish Guards.

I think actually Terence O'Neill did as well. He rose to a major. He was at Anseo. Oh, so better than O'Neill. Yeah, exactly. He was wounded at Anseo and he was left with injurers that played him all his life. He is more hard-line. than O'Neill. He'd actually resigned

because he didn't agree with the way they were bringing in one man, one vote. But O'Neill is more urbane. Chichester Clark is a bit of a farmer. He's sort of slow. He's a bit wooden. He's very earnest. He has no sort of flair or imagination. And Ian Paisley, when he was asked,

what do you make of Chichester Clark? He said, I've already taken down a captain. I reckon I can handle a major. So, ominous. And Chichester Clark inherits a situation that's now really spiraling out of control. role. So in Derry, we talked about Derry, in Derry, random sectarian violence has become much more common. People being beaten up at night. You're walking down the street. There's a

group of men. They say to you, what's your name, where are you from? If you give the wrong answer, they basically kick the living daylights out of you. There's a terrible story which is in the headlines at this point. So in Derry, in the Bogside District, a group of policemen had invaded the home of a taxi driver called Samuel Dauveni, and they beat him. up so badly that he later died of his injuries. And this is a huge scandal. And on top of all this, there was just been a by-election in Mid Ulster, a Westminster by-election, and the winner was the 21-year-old Bernadette Deflin of the People's Democracy Group, who at the time became the youngest woman ever to win a Westminster seat. And she gave her maiden speech on 22nd of April in the Commons,

in London, Westminster. She gave a speech that got enormous attention and praise at the especially from sort of more left-leaning papers in Britain. She said there can be no justice in Northern Ireland while the unionists run it. They are corrupt, bigoted and self-interested. She basically dared Harold Wilson to abolish Stormont and rule Northern Ireland from Westminster. I was reading the speech yesterday. It's a very telling moment. She says to him, people are saying now maybe you could send in troops to keep the peace.

She says, this is a very bad idea. If British troops are sent in, I should not like to be. either the mother or the sister of her unfortunate soldier station there. The one point in common among Ulstermen is they are not very fond of Englishmen who tell them what to do. So they'll be enjoying this podcast. Surely. I suspect that what Northern Ireland audience we have switched off when they heard

the first two minutes of the first episode and the dulcet tones of Ian Paisley being performed by somebody from Wiltshire. Can I just say? I checked with my friend Michael Taylor, who is from Ulster. Yeah, a man of very strong opinions, no? He has very strong opinions, and he's, you know, he wouldn't be afraid to tell me that I was making a catastrophic mistake. I'll tell you what he said. He said, I would love to hear it.

He'd be the third great Balamina figure to feature on the show after Neeson and Casement. Well, and we've had Neeson again. Yeah. In some ways, too much Liam Neeson on this show, I think. He's like the Welsh, just keeps getting in. All right. So Bernard Dufflin has given her speech. What's Harold Wilson up to? Wilson and his government, you know, they've lost Terrence O'Neill now. They've got this other bloke. Chishister Clark. And on the 7th of May, the cabinet have a meeting. And Jim Callahan says to, look, you know, I know we hate talking about Northern Ireland because it's really boring. But we have to talk about it. Here are the different options. And he says, one of the options is we could send in troops and run the province ourselves. And loads of Harold Wilson's ministers to say, oh, that's mad. No, we don't know anything about this. Best not get involved. We don't know anything about it.

So Dennis Healy, the Defence Secretary, also an Anzio man, of course, with their famous hinterland. Dennis Healy says, and I quote, it would be crazy to go in there and take things over. We would be siding with the Roman Catholics and the civil rights movement against the government and the IUC,

although we know nothing at all about it. That line, we know nothing at all about it. The amazing thing about this, I think that it's so comical in some ways that runs through this story for about 10 years, as people in Britain say, well, obviously we know nothing at all about this, and we never will.

So let's either not get involved or just make terrible, random decisions. But obviously, informing themselves about it would be that landish. Yeah, I mean, he wants to bother with something as dull as that. Whenever they say, we know nothing about it, they talk as though that's like a fact of nature

or an act of God that cannot possibly be remedied, and they shouldn't be ashamed of it. Isn't that a legacy of how intractive, the Irish question was in the early decades of the 20th century, that it's hardwired into British politicians. We don't understand this. We don't understand this. And there's something wrong with you if you take an excessive interest in it. It's somehow suspect to be overly informed about this. And the best thing to do is to take no interest in it whatsoever. Of course, though, the British government may not be interested in Northern Ireland, but Northern

Ireland's going to be interested in them. And a big theme of this story is that British governments are constantly sort of struggling to catch up because they are always behind the pace of events. So the 12th of July, there are big parades. This is the high point of what's called the marching season. So for people unfamiliar with Northern Ireland, there are annual parades held by the Orange Order and other Protestant societies to celebrate things like the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. And they are always tense. And this time, 12th of July, 1969, the sort of fighting and rioting surrounding the parades is worse than ever. And in the next few weeks there is more rioting, especially in Belfast, you have rival gangs

forcing Catholic and Protestant families out of their homes, you know, different gangs. And everybody knows the next flashpoint will come on the 12th of August, because this is the annual March of the Apprentice Boys of Derry. So this is the biggest of all Northern Ireland's Protestant parades. and it commemorates the relief of Derry by William of Orange's troops in 1689. Derry had been under siege by James II and the sort of Jacobite army and the Protestant William of Orange, William III, relieved the city. And it's seen as this totemic moment in the history of Ulster Protestants.

And they mark it every year, 15,000 members of the Orange Order marched through the streets Flutes, drums, they're wearing the sashes, they've got the bowler hats on. They would say, I mean, they do say to this day, this is an expression. It's one of our great communal traditions and expression of our history, of our culture, of our identity. There was that famous image of an American tourist in a cab getting caught up in it and thinking it was great and kind of grooving along to it. Loving Irish customs. Yeah, exactly. I remember that.

Yeah, that was so comical. Now, obviously, in 1969, this is going to be incredibly fraught. James Chichester Clark could ban it. He has the power to ban it. But of course he's not going to because that would tank his reputation among the Protestants of Northern Ireland.

And it would be a massive gift to Ian Paisley. He's never going to ban it. James Callaghan as Home Secretary could ban it. But Callahan decides, I'm not going to ban it. A delegation of Labour Backbenches went to see him and said, come on, Jim, what are you going to do about this march? He said, we have a policy we don't interfere in Northern Ireland.

The problems of Northern Ireland should be solved within Northern Ireland without any outside intervention. Goes back to your point about the Irish question. Basically, he would say we've learned in Britain to stay out of Ireland and to get involved as little as possible because when we do it always goes wrong. But of course, this means the march goes ahead and this sets the stay to one of the landmark set-piece confrontations of the entire troubles. So in early August, in Derry, the Catholic. Catholics are preparing for a fight.

They have set up a Citizens Defence Association under an IRA veteran called Sean Keenan. They are stockpiling petrol bombs. They are planning barricades at street corners. They're preparing for trouble. We get to the night of the 11th, the day before the parade. The first barricades go up in the Catholic bogside area. But in the Protestant areas, people have already lit bonfires celebrating the parade. Everybody knows this is going to be very, you know, it's going to be very,

spicy tomorrow. The 12th dawns, a noon, the apprentice boys as they're called, the kind of fraternal order and their allies. They form into parade order on the city walls. And below, there are groups of kind of Catholic teenagers and young men are shouting abuse up at them, and they're throwing coins down, sort of traditional gesture of contempt. They're throwing pennies down at the Catholics below. A couple of hours later, the first scuffles break out. People are throwing nails and stones as the apprentice boys set off on their march. The RUC, the police, have put barriers to keep the two sides apart, but by late afternoon, most of these barriers have been dismantled, and basically the march was degenerated into a kind of general melee. At this point, desperate to kind of regain

control of the streets, the RUC launch a baton charge into the bog side. So this is a kind of fairly tightly packed Catholic area of London Derry or Derry. And when they go advanced, they're actually walking into a trap because the Derry Citizens Defence Association, they've got kids with petrol bombs on top of the high-rise flats at the entrance to the bogside. So they're throwing down these petrol bombs. And as night falls, there's a scene of total chaos. There are batten charges, petrol bombs, there are burning shops. The IUC bring up their water cannons. They start firing tear gas. It's an incredible sort of scene of disorder. By dawn the next morning, which is the 13th, the Bogside has basically become a battle zone.

The RUC camped at just outside it, kind of holding a front line. Inside it, people have set up emergency first aid stations. They've got women and children and kind of relays making petrol bombs. And they've got a kind of weird catapult thing on top of these high-rise flats. It's like firing petrol bombs down at the police. One British reporter who was there said, he said, I wasn't really shocked by the hatred of the Catholic residents for the police because I kind of expected that.

He said, what shocked me was the hatred coming from the RUC, from the police themselves. And I quote, the obscenities, the threats, the religious tauntings, and all coming from a peacekeeping force. But it has to be said, Derry's Protestants don't see it that way. So I mentioned Peter Taylor's book, Loyalist.

In that book, he's got a quote from a shop assistant who went down to the front line to help the police. And this bloke said, what I saw was an insurrection. I saw groups of people defying law and order, trying to destroy Norris. Northern Ireland and the police were the bulwark against them. They needed all the help they could get. So all day the fighting continues. And then night falls on the 13th. This is a day too,

remember, and there's still a stalemate. The RUC is still camped at the entrance to the bogside. There are shops and homes burning. There are clouds of tear gas. And at this point, the Derry Citizens Defence Association issues a public statement and they say we're appealing to every able-bodied man in Ireland to come and help us. Now, every able-putted man in Ireland, of course, there are a lot of people who aren't who live in the Republic of Ireland. And all this time, the government in Dublin has really tried to stay out of this. Remember, they still have this sort of nominal claim to the entire island of Ireland, which they have never really bothered to pursue. All this time, they have issued well-meaning statements defending Catholic interests, but they have kept pretty quiet. But

that evening, the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, so he's from Cork, actually. He says, okay, I'm going to have to say something. You know, I have to. And he's quite a mild man of man. You can see the clip online. Lynch goes on Irish TV and he says, we've been watching in horror the scenes in Derry, and this cannot continue. The Parliament of Northern Ireland has clearly lost control and the Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse. He says, I'm asking the British to allow UN international peacekeepers to keep the two sides apart. And I've told the Irish army to set up field hospitals along the border so that injured Catholics who don't want to go to Northern Irish hospitals can be treated by our army field hospitals. The Irish army. Right. And as soon as you mentioned, the Irish army, right, that makes things immeasurably worse. because in Northern Ireland the reaction to Lynch's speech

is like, oh my God, the Irish Army are coming. They're going to get stuck in as well. And loads of people completely wildly don't really pay attention to the details of his remarks, but they just genuinely assume that the Irish Army is about to cross the border and it's really all going to kick off. So in the bog side, people are delighted.

They're like, brilliant. Our co-religionists are coming to our aid. But local Protestants in the town and the surrounding villages, they're like, oh my God, the Irish Army are coming. We've got to go and support our police. so they all pile into the streets to support the RUC. You then that evening have a scene of unbelievable chaos.

So the RUC who've been actually fighting the people in the bog side, there's now a third element, which is this great Protestant mob, which breaks through the RUC lines into the bog side. The Catholics then pile into them, massive fighting. One RUC man starts shooting and wounds two people. How many people have died in this? Have anybody died? Nobody has died yet.

Meanwhile, that same night, so we're on the 13th. Jack Lynch has made a speech. It's day two. Fighting breaks out in Belfast. People in Belfast have been watching this. And everybody in Belfast now is expecting a similarly apocalyptic showdown in Belfast. So to quote one young loyalist, everybody was involved, the whole community. Basins of water were set out and doors left open for people to run into.

Everybody was bracing themselves. What they believed was going to be a massive attack from their nation. Nationalists on the Falls Road. Of course, the people on the Falls Road are expecting exactly the same thing. They're like, oh, the people on the Shankill Road are about to attack us. So we enter the third day of this, Thursday, the 14th of August. In Derry, the RUC are basically exhausted. They've lost control.

They send out a call, mobilize all the B specials. And all these B specials start to assemble outside the bogside with all their weapons, right? They've got makeshift weapons and all this. They're intermingle with crowds of problems. Protestant teenagers and young men and whatnot, getting ready to launch, like, let's go in and take this by force. In Belfast, things are actually, if anything, even worse. It's properly kicked off in Belfast. So there are loyalist gangs roaming the streets. They're throwing petrol bombs into Catholic schools. They're burning down Catholic houses. You know, we're right back in the 1920s, back in 1921 or 22 or something.

Meanwhile, we've got the first gunfights between the police and the IRA. Remember, the IRA had gone quiet in the 1960s, but they had not. not gone away. And the local IRA commander of Belfast, Liam McMillan, has called up some of his old comrades, says, come on, we've got to go and defend our people. But you asked about guns before. They don't have many guns. They have two submachine guns. They've got a Lee Enfield rifle, and they've got six revolvers. So that's sort of all competing to see who gets the guns. And the fighting becomes concentrated on Divis Street. So when you look at the map, the people are interested, Divis Street is basically the entrance to the Catholic Falls Road area. And there you have

The IRA firing with these two machine guns and whatnot at loyalists and the police and the RUC are firing back with armoured cars with heavy machine guns on the armored cars. And in all of this kind of chaos, the armored cars start firing into the high-rise flats, the Divis Street flats. And they hit a Catholic schoolboy called Patrick Rooney who was in bed trying to sleep through this. And he was the first child killed in the troubles. He was just nine years old. Actually, the amazing thing is that the casualties aren't even higher. Seven people were killed in total. Two of them shot by the IRA, one by loyalists, and four of them by the security forces.

Probably 1,000 injured. It's hard to tell because it was often said that Catholics would be less likely to go to hospital. But what's very ominous, of the people injured, more than 100 of them are injured with gunshot wounds. So this is the point where the shooting has really started in earnest. 200 homes are destroyed, probably get just under 2,000 families have to flee their homes and a lot of those end up basically going as refugees across the Irish border. I mean, as melodramatic as it sounds, the Irish government actually established kind of refugee camps on the southern side of the border.

Now, in Britain, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, who of course can't have been expected. to do anything about this because they don't know anything about it. They're watching the TV pictures in absolute horror because it's pretty clear at this point that unless something changes, Northern Ireland is going to head for a full-scale kind of civil war. And the pressure to intervene is overwhelming. So the civil rights campaigners,

people like John Hume and Jerry Fit, in the last couple of days, have started begging Westminster to send troops. Jerry Fit tells the story that on the 14th of August, he's in Belfast, he's actually taken refuge from the fighting in a bookmakers. That's his excuse anyway. He's in a book is and he says a crowd of Catholic people came in and they were quote screaming and shouting that they were going to be murdered in their

beds and begging, begging me to get the army in. And he rang James Callahan and said, I'm pleading with you, Jim, send in the army and I'll never forget his reply. Jerry, he says, I can get the army in, but it's going to be a devil of a job to get it out. It's a very good story whether this actually happened. I don't know. But actually the decisive request comes from Stormont itself from the Northern Ireland government. Late that afternoon, the 14th of August, James Chichester Clark formally asked London to send troops into the streets of Derry. Now Callaghan, when he got the call, was on a plane. He was coming back, almost unbelievably, he was coming back from the Silly Isles,

where he'd gone to meet Harold Wilson, who was on holiday in his shorts. And he got a note from the navigator on the plane, basically Chichester Clark, was asking you to send in the troops, permission to send in the troops, and Callahan scribbled a note on it and handed it back to the navigator, the words permission granted. And at 5 o'clock that afternoon, the first battalion of the Yorkshire regiment marched towards the bogside. And almost immediately at that point, the various combatants kind of down tools

and retreated back into their homes and whatnot. And the next afternoon, the 15th, Calan got a second request. This time can you send troops into Belfast as well? And by nightfall on the 15th, British soldiers are marching down the Catholic Falls Road. And this is a massive moment in this story. A massive moment. I mean, we grew up with British troops on the streets of Northern Ireland, but this is when it all started. And all those kind of search points and helicopters and things.

And it is obviously seen as a mistake, a terrible mistake. to send the troops in. But what alternative was there? If they didn't get sent in, then the whole thing just explodes and becomes Bosnia or whatever. It's one of those things that American newspapers in the 60s used to always have this joke

that Americans have gone holiday to Ireland and they get lost in the lanes of Ireland and they wind down the window, you'd ask a sort of farmer or something, how do I get to Dublin from here? And the farmer would say, well, to start with, I wouldn't start from here. And this is, I think, what you'd say about this story,

that by the time when you're making that decision, do we send troops in or not, it's actually too late. The ship has sailed. You're in a massive mess, and you're not going to put it right. I think there is no scenario at this point when the fighting is so bad,

when people are firing submachine guns and people are being shot and there's like armored cars with machine guns firing into tower blocks. There is no way you're not going to say, send troops. I mean, any British government at this point would have sent the troops. The problem, of course, is they have sent the troops and they have absolutely no political strategy about how they're going to put this right. And the time to fix it would have been 10 years previously,

20 years previously, but not now. When you've let it get to this point. That's not very helpful advice, is it? If you're... No, it's not helpful advice. I wouldn't start from here. Advising. Yeah. So basically, they have to do it despite all the horrors that will then follow. they hadn't done it, lots of people would have been killed and everyone would have said, everyone internationally would have said, what an unbelievable act of irresponsibility of the British government, they won't, they have this army, but they won't use it to protect citizens of the United Kingdom. But at this point, it is seen by Catholics as peacekeeping. Yes, totally. I mean, this is the great irony of this, right? The British army was sent in to protect, largely to protect

Catholics. Because I'm just thinking of Withanelle and I, famous film, set in late 69, and with Nail pretends that he's been in the army in a pub in Cumbria. Yes. He said, I've served in Northern Ireland. And the land old says, ah, crack at the Mick. Yes. But actually, that's historically inaccurate, because at this point, that is not how it is being seen. It's a very good point.

It's seen as protecting the Catholics, exactly so. I mean, if the British troops, almost, I mean, if the politicians don't know anything about Northern Ireland, I think it's a pretty safe bet that, like, a load of 18, 19, 20, or old squatters don't. they have no idea what awaits them. There's this famous story that when they sent the first lot of reinforcements, the reinforcements were flown into an airfield and they were sort of bust into the center of Belfast or to their barracks or whatever. And they all stopped at a petrol station to buy maps of Belfast because they didn't have any maps.

And as far as they're concerned, this is going to be pretty easy. I mean, don't forget they've been in Cyprus in the 50s. They've been in Malaya. They've been in Kenya. Malaya, they had defeated an insurgency. hadn't they? Of course they had. It's the kind of the model of how to defeat an insurgency. A lesson for the Americans of Vienna, which

the Americans did not eat. And they think well, by these standards, this is going to be pretty straightforward. As far as I understand you know, can imagine them saying to each other. As far as I understand it, there's a load of Protestants, a lot of Catholics. The Protestants are kicking some bells out. The Catholics. Our job is to go in, tell them to stop, separate them, and then we can all go home. Bang, job done.

And at first, they are welcomed with open arms. I mean, you can see the news footage, you can see photos, you can read the reports online. Catholic shouting at them, thank you for coming, people clapping and cheering them. Stories about in dairy, people would bring them fish and chips. You know, people would kind of winch fish and chips up the city walls to them and stuff. There was a, in Peter Taylor's book, Brits, he has a quotation from an interview with a soldier in Belfast. I felt like a knight in shining armor. Kids were following you everywhere.

There were tea and buns and sandwiches. They'd be. you out there with trays. I must have put on about a stone, this guy says. You can see photos of soldiers leaning on their armoured cars. They're showing kids, their guns. They're chatting up housewives. It's very chummy. In fact, so chummy. The old Republicans were shocked by it. So Brendan Hughes, who was later the commander of the IRA in Belfast, said, he said, you know, I was young and I can remember people bringing them tea at the street corners. And my dad, who was an old kind of IRA bloke, and my dad objecting to him saying I never thought I would see the day

when, you know, nationalists, Catholics would be bringing cups of tea and fish and chips and cakes and stuff to British soldiers. The end of August, so not long afterwards, Callahan flies to Northern Ireland and see how it's all going. And he goes to Derry.

He goes to the bog side. They've already, you know, there are already no-go areas that are painted with white lines. And he steps over the white lines to go into the no-go areas. And it's fine. People, you know, thank him. They clap him and stuff. They cheer him. And when he gets back to London, the papers say, well, James Callahan, who'd been a terrible chancellor and had moved to him secretary, this Northern Ireland business has completely rebuilt his reputation. It's the man of the hour. British decisiveness and son foie have prevailed. But actually on this trip, Callaghan, because he's not an idiot, he notices that he's getting a lot of smiles from the Catholics, but he's not getting many smiles from the Unionists. And a lot of the hardliners are really not happy at all.

As one of them said later, it felt as if we were being invaded by our own army. And he has this incredible exchange with Ian Paisley. Callaghan, who was a Baptist, said to Ian Paisley, you know, Dr. Paisley, we're all the children of God. And Tom, what does Ian Paisley say? No, we are not, Mr. Callahan. We are the children of Roth. Yeah. And I guess at some level Paisley is right.

Because at this point, August 1969, they are the children of Roth. It is too late probably to turn back. There is too much distrust. There's too much antagonism. There's too much violence. And I think a point that's probably not brought out as often as it should be. Because in the wake of the sort of peace agreement, there's to some degree a slight culture of forgetting, which is completely understandable, by the way, politically.

But I think what's underestimated is how much, everything that goes wrong, a lot of it is willed by people who actively wanted to see things get worse because they would suit their political interests. So people who wanted to see fighting and who connived at killing and escalation and all of this. So loyalists who wanted a showdown with the sort of the enemy within, Republicans who wanted to see the violence escalate because they wanted to do. turn people against the British. They wanted to get a united Ireland. I always think that the obvious parallel is the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. So in, you know, 1994 or something in Bosnia, people would say, well, this is all the result of ancient hatreds. There's nothing anyone can do about it. Or they would say, well, actually, it's just being directed by a few malevolent, monstrous people who've led, you know, led their voters sort of down the road of chaos and hatred and all

of this. And actually, the truth is, it's the interplay of two different things. It's the interplay of the context, the history of suspicion and conflict, which can't be wished away, but also individual decision makers. We've seen them in already, you know, Ian Paisley or whoever, or the people who organise the marches, or the people who deliberately try to provoke violence, or the people who pick up their guns, people who, for what perhaps seem to them rational, political reasons, they consciously decide to choose escalation and tension rather than, as they would call it, appeasement. And already, actually, at this point, so in late summer of 69, there are lots of people, young men largely in Belfast and Derry, who are saying, okay, well, that was

round one, but round two is coming very soon. The state won't protect us. We need to protect ourselves. We need guns. We need to get ready. And, you know, when the shooting starts next time, we will be you know, we're not going to mess around. And the fact, they don't have long to wait. Because on the 10th of October, the British government published a report on the recent disorder. And insanely, this report was written by Sir John Hunt,

the man who had led the expedition to conquer Everest in 1953. It wasn't the fact that he was a great mountaineer that gave him the expertise. He was also in the British Army. His recommendations were, the army should take over kind of military policing from the RUS and led us disband the be specials. The Catholics hate them. They see them as a tool of oppression, get rid. And this sets off

three days of rioting in the Protestant Shankill Road. You have these extraordinary spectacle of mobs attacking British troops while waving the Union Jack. You know, we are the defenders of Britain against you. And the climax comes on the night of the 11th, 2,000 people marching on these high-rise flats on Divers Street, which have been guarded by lines of British troops. It's a pitch battle, stones, petrol bombs, tear gas, the usual. Somebody starts shooting in the chaos and the troops start shooting back. Sixty-six people are injured, 21 of them soldiers. Two local men, George Dickey and Herbert Howe, who were both Protestants, are shot dead by the British Army and also killed is a young RUC constable called Victor Arbuckle, who's 29. He was married with two very small

children, a boy and a girl, and he was killed, ironically, by a sniper, not from the IRA, but from the Ulster volunteer force. He was the first Northern Irish policeman to be killed in the troubles, but he was not, alas, the last. No, far from it. So next time we will be heading into the 1970s and Northern Ireland will be spiraling towards effectively a civil war. So in the next episode, the provisional IRA will be entering the story. The British Army will be taking its first casualties. The bombings will worsen. And Ted Heath, hero of our series on 1974, enters the chat.

And people will be stunned to hear that Ted Heath's government is preparing to take a truly disastrous gamble. What are the odds on that? And then in our final episode, the bloody steer of the troubles, which is 1972, Bloody Sunday in Derry, Bloody Friday in Belfast, and one last chance for peace. So club members, of course, can hear those two episodes right now. And if you're not a member, you can join them on the rest is history.com. And members also receive our brilliant newsletter full of amazing features, quizzes, competitions, just unbelievable value.

Essays by historians. Essays by historians. Who doesn't love an essay by a historian? I know I love an essay by historian. Of course you do. Thank you everyone for listening. Thanks, Dominic. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Hi, everybody, Dominic again. Now, here is the clip that we promised to you from our show The Book Club, which talks about Ernest Hemingway's book for whom the bell tolls and specifically the history of the Spanish Civil War.

So Spain has not been involved in the First World War at all. It's been a backwater. Basically, it's been really politically turbulent. There is a king. It's normally a parliamentary system. Most of Spain is untouched by the modern world. So it feels like these these huge estates called the Latifundiae, which go back to the Roman period. I found this extraordinary. I had no idea until I started reading up for the second. Well, this is true of Spain and Portugal, actually. They would have absolutely gigantic rural

estate run by landowners, almost going to feudal system. The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialized, the Basque Country, the North and Catalonia, but those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured, and there's lots of labour unrest, there's a big anarchist movement, there was a socialist movement, there was a communist party. In the 20s, there was a coup and a general took power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera, under the king. But that didn't really work out.

They brought back democracy at the beginning of the 1930s, but it's incredibly polarized and unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes. So, for example, in the north in 1935, there are assassinations, there are kind of paramilitary movements and whatnot. The son of the previous dictator, Primo de Rivera, sets up a little fascist party called the Falange, which actually sort of gives its name, really, to, it's then co-opted by the right, by the conservatives who win the Spanish Civil War. I mean, whether they're really fascists or whether they're just basically using the fascist label is an interesting question. Right, so it all comes to our head in 1936. There's an election at the beginning of the year,

which means that a popular front, which is a kind of left-wing alliance. of liberals, socialists, you know, sort of left-wing parties, some of the separatists, or more nationalist groups from the areas like the Basque Country or Catalonia, they come to power. And there's a lot of social unrest because they want to push through radical changes and the right don't like that. And in July 1936, the army launches,

right-wing elements within the army launch a coup. The reason the Spanish Civil War happens is the coup doesn't fully work. So basically, trade unions, the big cities in Madrid, Barcelona and so on, stay loyal to the elected government. So Spain is divided between the rebels, the coup people in the army, and their allies who are often like big landowners, the Catholic Church and so on, who want to defend the status quo. They've got half the country, often kind of rural areas, more conservative and so on.

But the big cities and Catalonia and so on, so on, so, Madrid, Barcelona, places like that, they stay loyal to the elected government. So on the one hand, you have what are called the nationalists, and these are the forces of the right, the army, the coup-plotters and so on. Effectively, from day one, they have very, very strong international backing from Mussolini in Italy and then Hitler in Germany. And then on the left, you have the elected government, who are the Republicans, and they get help eventually from the Soviet Union, which is something of a poison chalice. And they do appeal to Britain and France for help, but they don't really get it. And they have help from foreign volunteers. And this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody.

I mean, this is always the way with civil wars, because people feel it's an existential struggle, the future of their country is at stake. They come to believe, you know, their neighbors, the people in the next town, the landowners or the priests, or the anarchists or whoever, are going to kill them in their families, so we've got to kill them first. People, in some places, there are horrendous, horrendous, sadistic massacres and things.

I think they found something like at the end of, maybe the start of the 21st century or something, that Spain had the highest number of mass graves after Cambodia. So if you want to hear the full episode, just go to Apple or Spotify or YouTube and search for The Book Club. And there it is.