People's Democracy

People's Democracy (PD), a grouping formed at Queen's University, Belfast, in response to the Royal Ulster Constabulary's suppression of a demonstration in Derry on 5 October 1968. In its early days a ginger group on the flank of the civil rights movement, it added to the American influences on that body something of the flavour of the international student movement. Its ‘long march’ of January 1969, from Belfast to Derry, involved only a few dozen marchers but provoked an ambush by Protestant counter‐demonstrators at Burntollet Bridge in Co. Londonderry which sharply escalated the developing Northern Ireland conflict. PD won 4 per cent of the vote in the Northern Ireland general election of 1969. Initially aiming for a radical break with ‘sectarian politics’, it soon diverted into a socialist republicanism which restricted its appeal to radicals in the Catholic community. It resurfaced spasmodically as an independent republican ginger group in local elections and in pamphleteering until the early 1980s.

A. C. Hepburn