Author: Brian Dolan

Chase Chiamulera, Brian Dolan, and Katie Snider

Introduction

The overall purpose of this project is to highlight the ways in which the structure and strategy of policing in Northern Ireland created a climate of fear and discrimination for the working class Catholic residents of the country. This project makes use of a range of documents to establish a historical context of Northern Ireland’s policing problem in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Ultimately, the flashpoint of the policing issue in Northern Ireland was the tragic Bloody Sunday massacre on January 30, 1972.

Image: A youth is arrested at gunpoint on Bloody Sunday

Through the use of documents such as Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth (1969), Seamus Heaney’s The Ministry of Fear and A Constable Calls, and written accounts from Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, this project aims to delineate clearly the degree to which policing strategies negatively affected the working class, Catholic population of Northern Ireland.

Image: Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet

Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth (1969) provides convincing eyewitness accounts of police brutality as well as startling statistics regarding the disproportionate representation of Protestants among Northern Ireland’s police forces. In this way, Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth provides a good starting point for understanding the extent of Northern Ireland’s policing problem. Heaney’s The Ministry of Fear and A Constable Calls provide a first-hand account of what life was like under the ever-present authority of Protestant police. The sentiments conveyed by Heaney in these two poems are reflective of the environment detailed throughout Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth.

Building on this contextual background, this project will describe in detail the tragic events that took place on Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972. Bloody Sunday was not just an isolated and unfortunate incident of police brutality, rather, it was the culmination of a period of increasing belligerence on the part of Protestant police forces and was the direct result of systemic disproportionate representation and discrimination, as highlighted in Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth and throughout Heaney’s The Ministry of Fear and A Constable Calls.

Finally, this project will attempt to draw historical connections between the policing situation in Northern Ireland and more modern instances of police brutality and discrimination. Specifically, this project aims to establish connections between the situation in Northern Ireland in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and the situation surrounding the Los Angeles riots in 1992 as well as the conditions in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

NEXT: The Plain Truth (1969)

ROADMAP

• The Plain Truth
• The Ministry Of Fear
• A Constable Calls
• Bloody Sunday
• LA Riots
• Ferguson
• Consulted Sources 

Background

A Constable Calls is the second poem in Seamus Heaney’s series called Singing School. It immediately follows The Ministry of Fear and reflects a similar theme. In this poem, Heaney recounts a memory of a constable visiting his house to take account of his father’s agricultural assets. Throughout the poem, Heaney incorporates diction that creates an ominous air around the constable. The main takeaway from the poem is that the constable’s very presence creates an overwhelming anxiety in the young Heaney. When his father omits mentioning a small row of tulips in the garden, Heaney begins to fear his father will be taken away to prison. Heaney’s feelings of fear and anxiety as a result of this encounter are meant to mirror the larger relationship between Catholics and police in Northern Ireland, and how Catholics cannot even trust the very people that are supposed to be tasked with protecting the citizens of Ulster.

2. A Constable Calls [1]

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,
The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher
Skirting the front mudguard,
Its fat black handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’
Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back [2],
The pedal treads hanging relieved
Of the boot of the law [3].

His cap was upside down
On the floor, next his chair.
The line of its pressure ran like a bevel
In his slightly sweating hair [4].

He had unstrapped [5]
The heavy ledger, and my father
Was making tillage returns
In acres, roods, and perches.

Arithmetic and fear [6].
I sat staring at the polished holster
With its buttoned flap, the braid cord
Looped into the revolver butt.

‘Any other root crops?
Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’
‘No.’ But was there not a line
Of turnips where the seed ran out

In the potato field? [7] I assumed
Small guilts and sat
Imagining the black hole in the barracks [8].
He stood up, shifted the baton-case

Farther round on his belt,
Closed the domesday book [9],
Fitted his cap back with two hands,
And looked at me as he said goodbye.

A shadow bobbed in the window.
He was snapping the carrier spring
Over the ledger. His boot pushed off
And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked [10].

NEXT: Bloody Sunday

PREVIOUS: The Ministry of Fear

[1] Heaney, Seamus. “Singing School.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 1 December 2014. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178022.

[2] Heaney’s use of the phrase “cocked back” strongly connotes the hammer of a pistol as it is being readied to fire, indicating the fear that the mere presence of this constable instills in the young Heaney.

[3] In using the word “relieved,” Heaney is reminding the reader of the sense of pressure and weight ordinary citizens felt under the authority of the R.U.C. and the B-Specials. The “boot of the law” weighs down upon citizens of Northern Ireland.

[4] Heaney again brings up the idea of this always present pressure, and of the necessity to conform to standards of good, honest behavior, especially among Catholics, for fear of dire consequences.

[5] “Unstrapped,” like “cocked back,” calls to mind the image of a constable’s pistol. “Unstrapped” would refer to the holster, and by ending the line on that word, Heaney leaves the reader wondering for a moment what exactly was unstrapped. This mirrors the fear and apprehension toward the constable Heaney felt as a youth.

[6] Here, Heaney is making it clear to the reader how even mundane things like mathematics could be infused with an air of fear and suspicion.

[7] Heaney worries that his father’s failure to mention the line of turnips will end up landing him in jail. The fact that a minor omission could have such dire consequences mirrors the overall climate in the “Ministry of Fear,” and further emphasizes how disenfranchised working class Catholics were.

[8] By referring to the “black hole in the barracks,” Heaney is suggesting that the barracks was a place people disappeared to, a place that they might not come back from.

[9] Referring to the ledger as a “domesday book” makes it clear to the reader that Heaney felt this constable had his father’s fate in his hands. If it were found that his father had lied, he would almost certainly be jailed.

[10] The ticking of the bike can serve two meanings. On one hand, it could be meant to connote the counting down of a timer towards his father’s lie being discovered. On the other hand, it could also be meant to connote the ticking of a bomb, such as those commonly used by paramilitary forces against police at the time.

Roadmap

• Introduction
• The Plain Truth
• The Ministry of Fear
• Bloody Sunday
• LA Riots
• Ferguson
• Consulted Sources 

Background

In his poem, The Ministry of Fear, Seamus Heaney recounts personal experiences from his time in grammar school under the watchful eye of his strict, Roman Catholic educators. Throughout the poem, his diction and allusions weave the narrative of his childhood education with the broader narrative of Catholics’ subjective experience in the primarily Protestant Northern Ireland. The harsh teaching style of his Catholic educators is meant to parallel the policing strategy in Northern Ireland at the time. Anything less than full cooperation with police, especially for Catholics, was met with swift and severe punishment, just as Heaney was punished by his teacher at school. The final two stanzas of the poem weave together the two narratives to give the reader a complete picture of how Heaney’s school experience serves as a microcosm for the broader historical issue of policing in Northern Ireland.

1. The Ministry of Fear [1]

(for Seamus Deane)

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived
In important places. The lonely scarp
Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted
For six years, overlooked your Bogside [2].
I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat
Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,
The throttle of the hare. In the first week
I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat
The biscuits left to sweeten my exile [3].
I threw them over the fence one night
In September 1951
When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road [4]
were amber in the fog, it was an act
of stealth [5].

Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.
Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,
Dabbling in verses till they have become
A life: from bulky envelopes arriving
In vacation time to slim volumes
Despatched `with the author’s compliments’.
Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine
Of your exercise book, bewildered me—
Vowels and ideas bandied free
As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.
I tried to write about the sycamores
And innovated a South Derry rhyme
With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.
Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain
Were walking, by God, all over the fine
Lawns of elocution. [6] Have our accents
Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak
As well as students from the Protestant schools [7].’
Remember that stuff? Inferiority
Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on [8].
‘What’s your name, Heaney?’
‘Heaney, Father.’
‘Fair
Enough.’
On my first day, the leather strap
Went epileptic in the Big Study,
Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,
But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life
Was not so bad, shying as usual.

On long vacations, then, I came to life
In the kissing seat of an Austin 16
Parked at a gable, the engine running,
My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,
A light left burning for her in the kitchen.
And heading back for home, the summer’s
Freedom dwindling night by night, the air
All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen
Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round
The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing
The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye [9]:
‘What’s your name, driver?’
‘Seamus …’
Seamus?
They once read my letters at a roadblock
And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,
‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

Ulster was British, but with no rights on
The English lyric: all around us, though
We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear [10].

 

NEXT: A Constable Calls

PREVIOUS: The Plain Truth 

 

[1] Heaney, Seamus. “Singing School.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 1 December 2014. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178022.

[2] The Bogside is the primarily Catholic part of the city of Derry, located outside the city walls.

[3] The use of the word “exile” implies that Heaney did not leave home voluntarily.

[4] Lecky Road is traditionally associated with Free Derry corner, an iconic symbol of the Troubles.

[5] Here, with the use of the word “stealth,” Heaney is emphasizing the climate of fear in Northern Ireland that made him nervous about even such a petty act as littering.

[6] Hobnailed boots were traditionally worn by those who lived in rural villages, such as Heaney. This reference is meant to invoke a sense that Heaney’s early attempts at poetry were not received well. His rough Irish language was, in the minds of others, trampling, “by God,” all over the English language.

[7] Heaney is invoking a sentiment that was common in his youth; he is quoting an anonymous adult figure who told him and others that Protestant children were better educated and thus spoke better. This further demonstrates the climate of fear, as Heaney was always made to feel inferior to his Protestant peers.

[8] Heaney is wondering how young Catholics such as himself could possibly have big dreams themselves when they were constantly being denigrated and reminded that they are less than their Protestant counterparts.

[9] In this stanza, Heaney is recounting a night spent enjoying summer’s freedom that was abruptly ended when his car came to a police roadblock. This is another example of the “Ministry of Fear” at work, as a young Heaney cannot even enjoy a night out without the fear of being aggressively confronted by armed police.

[10] Heaney is suggesting that despite Ulster’s strong cultural connection with England, he can still use the English language to his own ends. He goes on to say that while there was no formal name for what he refers to as “the Ministry of Fear,” it was a sort of zeitgeist that people at the time felt in their core. It was a reality without being recognized as such.

Roadmap

• Introduction
• The Plain Truth
• A Constable Calls
• Bloody Sunday
• LA Riots
• Ferguson
• Consulted Sources 

Image: C.E.M.J Pailpoint, Two Royal Ulster Constabulary Officers (2000s)

More information about this painting here.

Excerpts from “Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth”

“At the first Londonderry Civil Rights march the Royal Ulster Constabulary sealed off the marchers in Duke Street in front and behind and batoned them indiscriminately. Gerry Fitt, M.P., was wounded on the head. Edward McAteer, M.P., in the groin. A girl was batoned on the mouth. The people were hosed with water cannons. This was all witnessed by two British labour M.P.’s, John Ryan and Mrs. Anne Kerr. While this was going on, police not actively engaged were laughing.” (Minister of Home Affairs – Mr. William Craig) [1]

“At a later date student marchers at Burntollet Bridge received scant protection from the R.U.C. who fraternised freely with the Paisleyites led by Major Bunting. Students were stoned, beaten with nail-studded clubs, and thrown into a stream. Threats of rape were made on the women.

In January 1969, police, some alleged to be intoxicated, broke into houses in Lecky Road, Derry, and, using obscene and sectarian abuse, attacked the citizens indiscriminately with batons and kicks. As a result, 190 formal complaints against the police were documented.

Again, demonstrating its particular brand of ‘democracy’ the Ulster Government ordered an Enquiry to be carried out by, police officials themselves! The Government has refused to make the results of this Enquiry public.” (Minister of Home Affairs – Capt. William Long) [2]

“In April 1969, in Derry, the police were caught at a disadvantage and were stoned by a mob and some injured. Police later invaded Catholic homes and rendered many men, women (including a semi-invalid) and children hospital cases!” (Minister of Home Affairs – Mr. R. Porter) [3]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3TzmULzLuw

At the heart of the policing issue lies demographic underrepresentation. In 1969, there was approximately 1.5 million people living in Northern Ireland, of whom one-third (~.5 million) were Catholic and two-thirds (1 million) were Protestant.[4] Nevertheless, Catholics were severely underrepresented in virtually every facet of government; however, this underrepresentation was especially prominent in the realm of policing.

Images: Distribution of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland

The primary police agency in Northern Ireland was the Royal Ulster Contabulary (R.U.C.). In 1969, the R.U.C. was comprised of around 3,000 members, of which only 10% (~300) were Catholic. Of 50 Officers in the R.U.C., only six were Catholic.[5] This indicates that there was roughly a 20% disparity in representation for Catholics among the police as compared to the civilian population.

Image: Flag of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.)

There was an additional police force in Northern Ireland known as the Ulster Special Constabulary, or ‘B-Specials’. “This [was] a sectarian part-time force 11,300 strong. All members are Protestant. They are mainly recruited from members of the Orange Order.”[6] So, not only were Catholics severely underrepresented within the R.U.C., they had to contend with a separate, exclusively Protestant police force that had extremely strong Unionist ties and had the right to retain private weapons. Catholics did not have the right to keep weapons in their homes under the provisions of the 1922 Special Powers Act.

Image: B-Specials

The 1922 Special Powers Act gave the R.U.C. and the ‘B-Specials’ an unbelievable amount of latitude in determining how to police their respective districts and jurisdictions. While the Special Powers Act contained many provisions, the large majority of this legislation was designed to specifically target and disadvantage Catholics. One shining example of this can be seen in Section 3, subsection 1, which states:

“The civil authority may make orders prohibiting or restricting in any area: (a) The holding of or taking part in meetings, assemblies (in eluding fairs and markets), or processions in public places; (b) The use or wearing or possession of uniforms or badges of a naval, military or police character, or of uniforms or badges indicating membership of any association or body specified in the order; (c) The carrying in public places of weapons of offence or articles capable of being used as such, (d) The carrying, having or keeping of firearms, military arms, ammunition or explosive substances; and, (e) The having, keeping, or using of a motor or other cycle, or motor car by any person, other than a member of a police force, without a permit from the civil authority, or from the chief officer of the police in the district in which the person resides.”[7]

Image: A crowd gathers at Free Derry wall for a civil rights march

Taken in context, it is not hard to see how the Special Powers Act completely disenfranchised Catholic citizens of Northern Ireland and left them to literally fend for themselves. The combination of underrepresentation in the R.U.C. and the existence of the B-Specials meant that the restrictions set forth by the civil authority under the Special Powers Act primarily affected Catholic neighborhoods such as Derry’s Bogside. The Special Powers Act gave the police undue discretion in determining what to do when Catholics violated its provisions, such as gathering to have a meeting.

Image: A protestor is dragged away by R.U.C. constables

Hopefully, this introduction has shed some light on the conditions in Northern Ireland in 1969 and how these conditions created a tense and volatile climate that contributed significantly to civil rights abuses during the years preceding Bloody Sunday, and played a direct role in the tragic events that took place that fateful day.

NEXT: The Ministry of Fear

PREVIOUS: An Introduction

[1] Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth. Second Edition. Castlefields, Dungannon: The Campaign for Social Justice in Northern Ireland, 1969. Print.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, p. 1.

[5] Ibid, p. 7.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Fionnuala McKenna. “Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland), 1922.” Conflict Archive on the Internet. CAIN Web Service. Web. 1 December 2014. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/hmso/spa1922.htm.

Roadmap

• Introduction
• The Ministry Of Fear
• A Constable Calls
• Bloody Sunday
• Ferguson
• Consulted Sources