Housing fights in Dungannon helped spark a wider rights wave
Civil rights movements worldwide peaked in the 1960s as drives for equality before the law, often through nonviolent protest. In Northern Ireland, activists from Dungannon housing campaigns to Belfast’s Campaign for Social Justice fed the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association’s late-sixties marches.
Civil rights movements are a global family of campaigns for equality before the law, and they reached their height in the 1960s. Many relied on nonviolent protest and civil resistance, though some were accompanied or followed by unrest or armed rebellion. Their goals range across minority rights, women's rights, disability rights and LGBT rights, and while many have not fully succeeded, several won real legal gains for groups that had been shut out.
Northern Ireland shows how such a movement can begin with a practical grievance. After the 1920 partition of Ireland, the region had a British, largely Protestant and unionist majority and an Irish, largely Catholic and nationalist minority. In Dungannon, activists led by Austin Currie fought for fair access to public housing for Catholic families. That mattered politically because being a registered householder was a condition for voting in local elections. In January 1964 the Campaign for Social Justice was founded in Belfast, taking up housing and job discrimination and vowing to take its case to the human rights commission in Strasbourg and to the United Nations.
The effort grew into the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which campaigned from the late 1960s into the early 1970s and deliberately copied the methods of the American movement. Its demands included fair treatment by councils, electoral maps no longer rigged to weaken Catholic votes, and the disbanding of the B-Specials, an all-Protestant police reserve. Republicans were encouraged to join, but they never controlled NICRA, which took no position on whether the state itself was legitimate.
Marches met loyalist opposition, and the police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was then more than 90 percent Protestant. The Battle of the Bogside in Derry, beginning on 12 August, pushed events from civil disobedience toward armed conflict, and internment without trial followed, lasting years for more than 300 people. On 30 January 1972, Bloody Sunday, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot dead fourteen unarmed marchers protesting internment in Derry. Later ceasefires and anti-discrimination laws have made rights issues far less pressing for most residents.
Source: Civil rights movements
