Click on the image to get the latest on our Hedge School Programme and to view one full length film and five podcasts of recent hedge schools
On this day
Editor’s recommendation
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The tensions existing between what historians call ‘the two histories’.
1969: the North erupts
Towards the end of 1968 Northern Ireland seemed to have pulled back from the brink. In response to pressure from the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and from the Labour government in Westminster, and in spite of opposition from within his own cabinet, Prime Minister Terence O’Neill announced a reform package. Buoyed up by the positive response to his ‘Ulster at the crossroads’ speech of 9 December, he sacked his hard-line home affairs minister, William Craig, two days later. But within days of the New Year, the Belfast to Derry People’s Democracy march, and the violent loyalist response to it (particularly at Burntollet), had polarised opinion even more sharply. Gordon Gillespie takes the story up to the British general election of June 1970.
Ian S. Wood outlines how a reconstituted Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) re-emerged in Northern Ireland well ahead of August 1969 and played a key role in the events of that year.
Was the IRA really as weak and inactive in the North in August 1969 as many accounts have later claimed? Brian Hanley looks at the evidence.
Dermot Keogh assesses the performance of Taoiseach Jack Lynch in response to the August 1969 crisis.
What if the British army hadn’t intervened in Derry on 14 August 1969 and the B-Specials had inflicted a critical level of civilian casualties? And if Jack Lynch had ordered Irish troops to go in, how prepared were they? Edward Longwill assesses the evidence.
When opposition leader Liam Cosgrave informed Taoiseach Jack Lynch on 5 May 1970 of efforts by two of his ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, and others to import arms, Lynch claimed that he had only gotten wind of the plot weeks previously; others have suggested that he knew for months. But what if someone had put the information into the public domain much earlier? Rumours about guns and where they came from were rife in the autumn of 1969. Most of this was merely pub talk, but John Devine, public relations officer (PRO) of the Irish Labour Party, was concerned enough to find out for himself. Niamh Puirséil looks at the report he drew up in October 1969.
This summer will see the release of a remake of Public Enemy, starring Johnny Depp as the charismatic bank robber John Dillinger, who will always be associated with the Thompson submachine-gun, immortalised in countless other gangster movies. Lar Joye outlines the less well-known story of the Thompson in Ireland, including in Belfast in August 1969.
The images that have come to dominate our understanding of August 1969 in Belfast are those of families and neighbours hurriedly gathering together their life’s possessions as they abandoned their homes; burnt-out houses; street rioting and violence; and a variety of hastily constructed barricades. But, as Liam Kelly explains, there was another side to the story.
Jonathon Byrne traces the evolution of the most enduring architectural legacy of the Troubles.
Without a passport or a plan, Bernadette Devlin arrived to a press conference at New York’s Kennedy Airport straight from the ‘Battle of the Bogside’ in August 1969 with the goal of raising $1 million in aid for its victims. Tara Keenan-Thompson takes up the story.
In April 1969 Denis Healey told the British cabinet that they knew little about Northern Ireland, and that if they got more deeply involved they would be ‘the blind leading the blind’. But how ignorant can British politicians really have been, asks Paul Bew?
