The result in Derry City was particularly galling for unionists. Of the forty seats, unionists won nineteen, Sinn Féin and the Nationalist Party won ten seats each, and Hugh C. O’Doherty, an independent nationalist, won the final seat. Margaret Morris was elected for Sinn Féin as the first female member of the Derry Corporation. O’Doherty became ‘the first nationalist mayor of the city, and the first Catholic to hold the position since Cormac O’Neill was appointed by James II in 1688’.75 O’Doherty, a Derry solicitor, ‘who, along with removing the name of Lord French from the list of Derry Freemen, also refused to attend any functions where an oath of allegiance was made to the Crown’.76
Tensions in the city soon boiled over. In April and May, street riots began, with skirmishes taking place between the IRA and the revived Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).77 The violence escalated in June, leading to the deaths of twenty people and many more wounded. Two children were amongst the dead – George Caldwell, a ten-year-old orphan, and Joseph McGlinchey, aged fifteen. Adrian Grant claims that ‘there is evidence of deliberate sectarian targeting by both unionists and nationalists, despite efforts of the IRA leaders to contain such action by the latter’.78 The violence in the city only abated once 1,500 British troops were deployed to Derry on 23 June.79 Within days, the violence moved further east.
Edward Carson used his 12 July 1920 speech to 25,000 Orangemen at a field in Finaghy to deliver an incendiary message: ‘We must proclaim today clearly that come what will and be the consequences what they may, we in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin – no Sinn Féin organisation, no Sinn Féin methods … And these are not mere words. I hate words without action.’80 According to Alan F. Parkinson:
the sheer force of external influences in the summer of 1920 – the spread of death and destruction throughout the south and west of Ireland, including many attacks on Protestants, the ongoing passage of the Better Government of Ireland Bill and the increasing proximity of violence to Belfast, as witnessed by events in Derry – combined to create a most threatening situation in Belfast.81
By 1920, the war in the south and west of Ireland had reached Ulster. Before then, ‘difficulties experienced by even the most militant IRA units in acquiring weapons and the resolute opposition presented by large sections of both the unionist and nationalist communities meant that the first phase of the War of Independence had virtually no impact in the north-east’.82 As well as the violence in Derry, there were many IRA attacks on RIC barracks in Monaghan, Cavan, Armagh, Tyrone and Down.83 Ambushes on railways in Ulster were becoming almost daily occurrences. At Easter 1920, the IRA Belfast Brigade ‘took part in a countrywide campaign of arson attacks on tax offices ordered by GHQ [General Headquarters] to mark the anniversary of the 1916 Rising’.84 The increased activity in Ulster led to Carson’s claims of a Sinn Féin ‘invasion of Ulster’.85 Days after his 12 July speech, the RIC divisional commissioner of Munster, Gerard Smyth, a native of Banbridge in County Down, was killed by the IRA in Cork.86 Loyalists were ‘further outraged when the southern rail crew assigned to transport the police chief’s body back to his home town of Banbridge refused to do so’.87 His death and funeral were the catalysts for the violence that spread to Belfast in late July 1920. After his burial in Banbridge, local Catholics and their property were viciously attacked there, as well as in nearby Dromore and Lisburn, with many Catholics driven from their jobs and their homes burned.88
The violence then spread to Belfast. Returning from the 12 July holiday on 21 July, shipyard workers were greeted with notices calling for a meeting of ‘all Unionist and Protestant workers’ during their lunch hour outside Workman Clark’s yard.89 The meeting called for the expulsion of all ‘non-loyal’ workers from the shipyards. Straight after this, a mob ‘armed with hammers, iron bars, wooden staves and, reportedly, revolvers’ went on the rampage, looking for potential victims. Some workers, fearing the worst, left before lunchtime. Others escaped, suffering only verbal abuse. Some of the unluckier ones were stripped to their undergarments in the search for Catholic emblems, such as rosary beads. Many were severely beaten. Others, whilst swimming to safety across the Musgrave Channel, ‘were pelted by a fusillade of “shipyard confetti”, consisting of iron nuts, bolts, ship rivets and pieces of sharp steel’.90 Catholics were soon expelled from their jobs by numerous employers, such as the Barbours, Musgraves, Mackies, Gallahers, the Sirrocco Works, McLaughlins and Harveys.91 Most ‘Protestant employers looked on with tacit approval’.92 According to the Catholic Protection Committee – a welfare agency established by Dr MacRory, the Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor – a total of 10,000 male and 1,000 female workers were expelled (about 10 per cent of the nationalist population of Belfast).93 Protestant socialists (‘rotten prods’) were also expelled from their jobs.94 During the two years of intense sectarian violence in Belfast, from 1920 to 1922, over 1,000 Protestants were forced out of their homes.95
The unrest travelled from the workplace to the streets of Belfast, resulting in nineteen dead and many more wounded or homeless within just five days.96 ‘Retaliation from the Catholic community was not long in coming, provoking yet more retribution from the loyalists.’97 As the city was besieged by sectarian violence, the Government of Ireland Bill was still manoeuvring its way through the House of Commons. Devlin summed up the incredulity felt by many nationalists in relation to the British government’s insistence on proceeding with the bill whilst Ireland was in a state of unrest, with the vast majority of its citizens totally opposed to the proposed settlement. He accused the government of not inserting
a single Clause … to safeguard the interests of our people. This is not a scattered minority. Will the House believe we are a hundred thousand Catholics in a population of four hundred thousand? It is a story of weeping women, hungry children, hunted men, homeless in England, houseless in Ireland. If this is what we get when they have not their Parliament, what may we expect when they have that weapon, with wealth and power strongly entrenched? What will we get when they are armed with Britain’s rifles, when they are clothed with the authority of government, when they have cast round them the Imperial garb, what mercy, what pity, much less justice or liberty, will be conceded to us then? That is what I have to say about the Ulster Parliament.98
Rather than listening to Devlin or those whom he represented, the British government took two steps in late 1920, on the advice of James Craig, that showed the inevitability of partition and highlighted that the only voices being listened to in Ireland were those of the Ulster unionists. Before the Government of Ireland Bill even became law in December 1920, Craig’s proposals to commission an official policing force – the Specials – for the area that would become Northern Ireland and create the post of assistant under-secretary for the same area were granted.99 The machinery of the new northern jurisdiction was being put in place. The partition of Ireland was taking a tangible form.
CHAPTER THREE
‘Armed only with a table, a chair and an Act of Parliament’
During the summer of violence in Ulster in 1920, unionists looked to take responsibility for the enforcement of public order in the province. Although the UVF had not been active between 1914