civil rights movement

civil rights movement, a grouping devoted to political and social reform in Northern Ireland, led by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. NICRA was founded in Belfast early in 1967 by a group which included liberals, trade unionists, communists, and republicans, but no active politicians. It drew inspiration from the success of Martin Luther King's movement in the USA and more practical guidance from the British‐based National Council for Civil Liberties. Its aims were to achieve universal suffrage and the abolition of multiple business voting in local government elections; the abolition of the Special Powers Act and of the Ulster Special Constabulary; an end to religious discrimination in public employment and housing allocation; and an end to the manipulation of electoral boundaries (‘gerrymandering’).

NICRA made little progress until it was sparked into life by an especially glaring case of housing misallocation at Caledon, Co. Tyrone, in June 1968. Civil rights protest marches followed, first at Dungannon and then in Derry on 5 October 1968, where unjustifiably violent police suppression of the banned march was exposed on the world's television screens. By this time NICRA's activities had secured the support of various Nationalist and Northern Ireland Labour Party politicians. Its activities, and British government pressure, forced the Northern Ireland government to make some concessions, which in turn sparked a unionist backlash. After December 1968 NICRA was increasingly influenced by the People's Democracy. It became more militant, and many of its original committee withdrew from public life during 1969; others who first entered politics through civil rights activities later became founders of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). By 1971 NICRA was strongly influenced by the official republican movement. Its civil liberties focus had less appeal in the context of massive rioting and growing paramilitary activity. It was revived somewhat by its opposition to internment after August 1971, and it was once more in the spotlight as a result of Bloody Sunday in 1972, but its style of street protest had been overtaken by events, while its libertarian concerns were more effectively articulated, in such a bitterly divided society, through different means.

A. C. Hepburn