The British government decided to split Ireland into two parts (partition) - a solution that neither side wanted.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 marked the South’s acceptance of the partition. Southern Ireland’s 26 counties were to be known as the Irish Free State, it was to have its own parliament, government and army but an oath of allegiance was taken to the British king, Ireland was to remain part of the British empire.
In 1937 a new constitution was introduced in the south calling for a united Ireland and which said that N.Ireland had no right to exist. An Irish president as head of state replaced the British king.
In 1949 the Irish republic was proclaimed and the country left the British Commonwealth.
I am now going to investigate what social and economic factors led to the growth of protests in the 1960’s. Firstly I am going to look at employment. Many Catholics believed that they were victims of discrimination, especially during the depression of the 1930’s and 60’s, when Northern Ireland faced far higher unemployment than England.
Statements of Lord Brookborough. Prime minister of Ulster. “ I recommend those people that are loyalists not to employ Roman Catholics. 99% of whom are disloyal (1934)”.
“They say why aren’t we given more higher positions? But how can you give someone who is your enemy a higher position in order to allow him to come out and destroy you”? (1968)
These statements from Lord Brookborough clearly show discrimination against Catholics in the employment sense.
This case is further evident if we look at the aim of the Ulster Protestant Action, formed by Ian Paisley (1959). It reads and I quote,
“To keep Protestants and loyal workers in employment in times of depression in preference to their fellow Catholic workers”
Again this clearly shows favouritism towards Protestants in the employment world.
To further my case more another piece of evidence that holds deep significance is from the Sunday Times. It reads,
In Derry in 1966 the heads of all city council departments were Protestant. Of 177 salaried employees, 145 earning £124,424 were Protestant and only 32 earning £20,420 were Catholic. Of 10,000 workers in the Belfast shipyard- the biggest source of employment in the city- just 400 were Catholic.
This source along with the two above clearly show discrimination against Catholics in employment. Statistics show that 36% of male Catholics were unemployed, compared to 14% of male Protestants.
As I have mentioned in the source above the vast majority of council city workers were Protestant, this fact leads me into my next topic of discussion Council houses. The discrimination of Catholic employment left many local city councils Protestant as shown above. This gave the local councils power to further discriminate against Catholics. There are several ways in which Protestant councils have discriminated against Catholics. One has been to put Protestants in better homes than Catholics, but charge the same rent. In Dungannon for an identical rate, you got 42 square feet of space less on the mainly Catholic Ballymurphy Estate than you got on the exclusively Protestant Cunningham Lane Estate. Another way has simply been to house more Protestants than Catholics. Of 1589 houses built by Fermanagh County Council between the end of the second world war and 1969, 1021 went to protestant families.
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Another bonus of controlling the councils available to Protestants was the ability to strongly influence how schools and the education service was run. Again this topic links in with discrimination. An investigation by the Sunday times obtained the following results,
“The county council itself employed 370 people, 332 of the posts, including all the top ones were filled by Protestants. On the county education authority the most wanted jobs were the ones of school bus drivers, because of the long rest and the long holidays. Of about 75 school bus drivers all but seven were Protestant”.
This source again shows discrimination by the city council against Catholics when applying for jobs in the education sector.
Education is an area of marked segregation between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Early in its life the Unionist government at Stormont introduced an education act that was aimed at establishing an essentially secular publicly funded system of primary education throughout the province. But there was strong opposition from both the Catholic and Protestant churches (who wished to retain control over education) that the government was obliged to drop the measure. Although the amended act asserted that the state education system should be non sectarian, it also stipulated (as was the case elsewhere in the United Kingdom) that Christian religious education be included in the syllabus. To qualify for a full government subsidy, however, a school had to supply distinctively Protestant “Bible Teaching”. In effect this meant that the state primary education system was a protestant one.
The 1923 education act of Lord Londonderry tackled the problem of poor secondary education and division within schools. Local education authorities were created to provide public elementary schools for their area, and no religion was to be taught. Lord Londonderry reasoned that
“All the quarrels between Roman Catholics and Protestants arose out of the teaching of the bible” and as he wished the children of different denominations to meet in the same school and grow up in a friendly atmosphere, he thought this could only be achieved if there was no bible instruction and if Roman Catholic and Protestant children mixed in the same schools. But these statements were strongly opposed by the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. As a result the education act of 1930 conceded that
“It shall be the duty of the education authority to provide bible instruction should the parents of not less than 10 children who are in regular attendance at such school make application to the education authority for that purpose”.
It was clear that no compromise could be made with regards to educating the two religions together. This therefor meant that separate schools were used. However the Protestant schools were funded by the state and peoples taxes, including Catholics taxes. Catholic children attended their own school set up by the church. These schools were very under equipped in comparison to the Protestant State schools. The fact that Catholic families sent their children to a Catholic only, under equipped school, and paid for Protestants to have their education would certainly have angered them greatly. It is this anger that would have certainly contributed to the eruption of violence in October 1968.
The next topic that I am going to discuss is that of the city of Craigavon. Craigavon was to replace Londonderry as Northern Irelands second city. After the closer of the rail link to Derry through the
