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===== A Cartography of Resistance:
The British State and Derry Republicanism =====

S E C T I O N 3

INTRODUCTION

The function of Chapter 5, which constitutes the third section of the thesis, is to examine a specific instance of the social praxis of resistance to the state, to examine a specific site of the intersection and interaction of the two main discursive formations, of the state and of Irish Republicanism, outlined in the previous section. Such an analysis is necessary in order to grasp the complexity of interaction between the British state and Irish Republican community, and the precise nature and extent of this community's resistance to the power of the state.

I have suggested above, particularly in Chapter 1, that there is an important sense in which the discourse analysis of Chapters 3 and 4 can be regarded as having a crucial ethnographic component. That is, the process of mapping the regularity of statements in discursive formations via an analysis of written and spoken texts ought properly to be conceived as ethnography. By the same token, much of what can be referred to as 'ethnography' is properly regarded as 'discourse analysis'. The collection and analysis of documents from the field is a common feature of ethnographic study. The use of interviews and the subsequent 'production of speech', most commonly as an authentic voice, ia a standard, if not compulsory, feature of ethnographic methods. Understanding, further, ethnographic reports as a process of writing suggests that ethnography itself may be understood as the analysis of statements and discourse formations. This is crucial to note because as Manning (1987) suggests, semiotic or linguistic analysis has often been regarded as 'hard' analysis and contrasted with ethnography as 'soft' analysis. This distinction is made all the more possible, of course, by the failure to adequately theorise the ethnographic 'real' and thus the theoretical status of ethnographic analysis. Manning argues that the two forms of inquiry are not only 'compatible' but necessary components of all inquiry. What this thesis argues, however, is that whilst ethnographic methods should take cognizance of semiotic methods for the analysis of texts, there can be no neat distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' methodologies. That is, the two methodological techniques are compatible because they are both aiming to achieve the same task, the elaboration and discussion of specific discourse formations.

It is true to say that there is much work to be done in terms of the analysis of actional or behavioural 'texts' when compared with written or spoken texts. Lemke (1987) suggests the concept of heteropraxia, a term related to the concept of heteroglossia, as a possible way forward. Nevertheless, it is clear that, despite any difficulties, the analysis of both actional/behavioural texts and written/spoken texts is an analysis of the regularity and dispersion of statements within discourses and the relations of power and resistance across discursive formations.

The reframing of the dichotomy between the 'hard' and 'soft' analysis of semiotic and ethnographic enquiry via a theory of discourse has crucial implications for the organisation of this thesis. Knowledges cannot be conceived as purely theoretical architectures; discourses are embedded in material practices. The thesis follows the adoption of what Ricouer (1971) calls the textualist metaphor, what Spivak (1981) refers to as 'texting the world' and 'talk about the world'. Chapter 5 of this thesis should not be read as the 'ethnographic' case-study of the thesis, that is, the part of the work concerned with the 'place' where the more general formations discussed in section 2 are occurring. Although Chapter 5 begins with a discussion of the importance of a retheorised notion of 'place' and ethnography, it needs to be stressed that because one can never outline discourse formations in the abstract, the previous section has already begun the process of discussing a particular 'place', a particular specificity.

The purpose of Chapter 5 then, is to discuss particular aspects of a discursive conflict outlined in the previous section, those aspects related to the strategies of resistance found at a mundane level in the Catholic Republican community of the Bogside/Creggan of Derry. This chapter then, after some initial discussion of the concept of place in ethnography, and some comments on the concept of community, outlines the range (or rather something of the range) or strategies of resistance of the Bogside/Creggan community to the state. This latter task involves discussing, significantly, the linkages between paramilitary activity and community self-help measures of what are often regarded as more 'local' and 'legitimate' in nature. The chapter concludes by arguing that these two strategies, those of a community development and a military nature are inextricably linked because they are both aspects of what constitutes Bogside/Creggan community—that is, aspects of the social praxis of resistance of this community to the state.

== CHAPTER 5
REPUBLICAN DERRY: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE ==

1 Ethnography: Knowing Your Place

'What in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them ... to substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define those objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things. To write a history of discursive objectsthat does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion' (Foucault, 1972: 48).

'Derry is, as everybody knows and says far too often, for both communities, a symbolic city. It even looked symbolic with the walls and Walker's pillar and the Protestant Cathedral and the Orange hall built high over the alummy Bogside which nevertheless began to grow up the other side of the valley to be dominated there again (and again symbolically) by the Army camp at Piggery Ridge—the best-named ridge in contemporary Europe. Bracketed between Orangeism and the British Army, the Bogside and Creggan, the pre- and post-welfare state Catholic ghettos, seemed to accurately represent the fate and the feeling of the Catholic community in the North... What happened in Derry in 68-69 is, of course, politically speaking, less important than the events which took place in Belfast. But as usual, the fact that Derry shadowed forth what Belfast gave substance to; that Derry, geographically, rendered brutally manifest the divisions which zigzagged through all of Northern society; and that Derry stood, with all its poverty and discrimination, in relation to the area west of the Bann as the Lagan valley, Protestant and prosperous, stood in relation to the area east of the Bann, gave the city a salience in people's minds which would be ridiculous if it were to be judged, in terms of sheer size of economic importance, against suburbs like Newtonabbey, new towns like Craigavon, or even a disaster area of unemployment and discrimination like Newry. For even Newry, so similar to Derry in so many respects, never competed with Derry as a focal point. Derry had Bloody Sunday; Newry had the Sunday after' (Friel, undated: 2).

This chapter of the thesis discusses the Bogside/Creggan community of Derry and focuses on a number of interrelated aspects of this community. Firstly, the community Burton calls 'radical gemeinschaft' (Burton, 1978: 9-36). Secondly, the militarised nature of Bogside/Creggan community, and significantly the place of Provisional IRA within this community. Thirdly, community development initiatives in Derry, and here, most significantly, the Derry Youth and Community Workshop (DYCW). The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a history of Derry, to tell the story of its past and present, but rather to construct a cartography of Republican community within Derry in terms of the discursive formation of Northern Ireland, to examine the diacritica of a specific community of resistance to the (British) state.

In the introduction to this thesis it was suggested that the problems of 'locating' the DYCW in Bogside/Creggan community and this community in the wider context of Northern Ireland were problems of ignorance and knowledge. This should rightly indicate the particular difficulties of both a lack of knowledge of the specific operation of this community and also the plethora of mythic and ideological fore-knowledge all researchers bring to the field, fore-knowledge which in the case of this particular 'field' is likely to be perhaps stronger and more pernicious than usual. Both these features outlined above then, are problems, and are rightly identified as such. In ethnographic work in particular, however, there are even more important problems to be dealt with. If one can summarise two identified problems as relating to the 'way' one proceeds in the field (in order to gain knowledge, avoid biases and so forth), secondly a more important, perhaps less visible problem, might be summarised as relating to that which one produces through the way one proceeds in the field. That is, to what it is that one has actually produced when one has completed the ethnography. The problems with ethnographic approaches are not unrelated to the theorising of the concepts of ethnicity and community. Far too often, researchers suggest that what is produced is an account (more or less accurate) or a 'place', unproblematically 'out there', outside of discourse, This particular problem is highlighted by what was referred to in Chapter 1 as the 'mimetic gaze' of the ethnographer 1.

The analysis of Bogside/Creggan community in Derry conducted in this chapter then aims to produce an account, not of events in a 'real place' outside of discourse, but an account of a specific dispersion of statements and discursive regularities.

Obviously, the traditional concept of place within ethnography, with its crude empirical baggage, needs to be challenged. 'Place' is normally (un)theorised as a banal, physical, non-discursive category which simply exists. The fame or infamy of 'the Bogside' and 'the Creggan' within and outside of Northern Ireland should indicate that much more than mere physical geography is being indexed when these 'places' are mobilised in discourse. Geographic discourse involves one fundamental characteristic: being essentially a linguistic discourse, it presents space as a natural reference. Ethnography then, should rather be concerned to discuss the privileged connection between place, a priori geographic, and a linguistic discourse.

Derry, and more widely Northern Ireland, is significantly the intersection of a multiplicity of discourses, the conjuncture of a plurality of voices. When one talks of Derry one is articulating various aspects of this multiplicity. Edward Said's conception of Orientalism is relevant here. Orientalism, Europe's discourse about Islam and the Arab world, is described as 'an enclosed space, a theatrical space affixed to Europe' (Said, 1978). Equally, the Bogside, even perhaps Northern Ireland, might be considered a theatrical space affixed to Britain, as part of the extra-British world ransacked for its alien and exotic characteristics 2. In this view, for example, Republican iconography becomes a visual display of this exoticism, a field of 'artefacts' to be scientifically recorded and analysed in the usual anthropological manner, the colourful exotica of an alien 'tribal' society.

Even within Northern Ireland, however, Derry is special, the 'heart of the two traditions' as John Hume pronounced. 'The City of Derry is the heart of the Irish problem, a place where Ireland's two traditions meet in strength ... Its foundations a mixture of the bible and the sword' (Hume, 1970). John Hume develops a more extensive characterisation of the special place (of) Derry in an interview in a special edition of Fortnight, entitled The City where it all began (Fortnight, 3 March 1985).

'Derry—the Oak Grove—is a common placename in many parts of Ireland. When used topographically by the ancient Irish, it was always accompanied by a distinctive epithet. Hence our Derry was first known in pre-Christian times as 'Doire Colgach'. Colgach was a warrior, a rather well-known one, as references to him in the pages of Tacitus would indicate. From its beginnings a significant place, it has had long associations with conflict. It owes its very existence to conflict. Its natural geography, with its military and trading advantages, were the reasons for its choice at the beginning of the 17th century as the site of the walled city or fortress for the colonisation of north-west Ireland and the breaking of the power of the Irish chieftains. By then it took on its third epithet—Londonderry. Ironically London, in its derivation meaning 'The fort of the ships', as to sum up the siege tradition and mentality which has been such a force in the area, and wider, ever since. In the name is summed up the conflict that dominates Irish life today.

Throughout all the centuries, back to 546 AD, if there has been a common thread, it is the thread of the Columban tradition with its roots in both traditions. Columba is accepted as the founder of Derry, in spite of Colgach, geography again influencing the choice of island sites for his monastic foundation. Colmcille—the dove of the church—was the epithet appended to Derry in his honour for many centuries before London arrived.
Whether in its original warlike name, its sixth century monastic settlement by one of the main figures of early Irish history, its London connection, its siege tradition, its role as a major port of emigration to North America, its location in post-partition Northern Ireland with Donegal at its back, or as the Achilles heel of the 1920 settlement, it has always been a significant place. The sharp wind of dissent has always blown from the north-west.
Today it is in many ways the microcosm of the Irish problem. For some, the siege tradition, the place where the battle was once fought. For others, the place where their battle is being fought now' (Hume, 1985: 4).

Nell McCafferty challenges the phallocentric nature of the 'place' of the Derry imaged by Hume:

'Derry is the mother of us all', John Hume once solemnly intoned in a little film about civil rights. Derry is also the Maiden City, never having been taken, men proudly pronounce. The supposition that a city, invested with a female gender, can be at once a mother and a virgin, comes as no surprise given Derry's religious majority. Roman Catholics have been peddling that belief about a real woman, for nearly two thousand years' (McCafferty, 1985: 9).

For McCafferty then, Derry becomes the place, par excellence, of the oppression of women in Ireland, the place, par excellence, where

'women have been written out of history' (Mccafferty, 1985: 9).

Martin McGuiness, at one time a Sinn Fein Assembly representative, argues that Republicanism in Derry is special. Disagreeing with McCafferty, at least in part, McGuiness sees Derry Republicanism, being unfettered by more 'traditional' Republicanism, as capable of addressing gender as well as class and ethnic issues. McGuiness states,

'There has always been the tacit acceptance that an armed Republican is part of the general community, and many SDLP supporters see no contradiction in actively assisting armed resistance on the streets of Derry ... Republicans are patently not outcasts in Derry. Republicans are seen, even by our political opponents, as exponents of a legitimate philosophy, and while some people may disagree vehemently with our support for armed struggle, they recognise that IRA volunteers are determined and dedicated individuals who have made a particular political choice.

That recognition was never more clearly expressed than at the recent funeral of volunteer Kieran Fleming. People who have voted SDLP in the past, and many who in all probability will continue to vote SDLP, attended that funeral, knowing full well that the RUC was intent upon attacking the mourners. It cannot be denied that their presence in that huge crowed enabled the IRA to defy the RUC's show of strength, an act of defiance applauded by even the most dyed-in-the-wool John Hume supporters' (McGuiness, 1985: 7).

Despite this, however

'Contrary to popular belief Derry does not have a strong Republican tradition. Outsiders very often are impressed by the vibrancy and energy of Sinn Fein in Derry, but it should not be forgotten that prior to 1971, internment and Bloody Sunday, Republicanism in Derry was the preserve of less than a dozen steadfast and tenacious families who were isolated and out-of-tune with the prevailing nationalistic and conservative political reality in the town' (McGuiness, 1985: 7).

McGuinness argues then that Derry has historically been a nationalist rather than Republican town. In his view both McAteer, one time leader of the old Nationalist Party and John Hume, leader of the SDLP, are more nationalist than Republican. The distinction here between nationalism and Republicanism is complex and is returned to below, but it can be glossed as a difference in the class basis of the two concerns, nationalism and socialism forming the basis for Republicanism 3.

The tradition in Bogside/Creggan has been significantly nationalist rather than Republican but the events and experiences of the 1970s and early 1980s changed this. The hunger strikes, the development and expansion of Sinn Fein organisation and initiative meant the development and discussion of tensions which had always been present in Republican discourse—those of class and of country.

'The hunger strike ... began to sort out the confusion that was in my head and in other peoples between nationalism and Republicanism ... there's always been a great deal of confusion between the two. The hunger strike was in many ways the final nail in the Independence Party, ... it wiped them out. It seriously affected the SDLP's position too ... You can see a great deal of similarities between the SDLP's position and the old Nationalist party. There's very little difference between the SDLP and even the Unionist parties in terms of their class politics, both very conservative despite the fact that the SDLP would like to see itself as a socialist party ... Nationalist politics in this country have always been constitutional, about preserving the status quo, and if the British left tomorrow we'd still be in the same position. Nothing very much would change. We'd have the same kind of structure they had in the south in the 1920s, when the British pulled out there. A kind of elitist nationalist government, paying lip service to Irish culture and they would not set about changing the economic structures of the country. That's essentially the difference between the Republican and the Nationalist movements. Republicans seek to bring about economic change, to bring about some changes in class structures, some kind of socialist structure' (Mary 1985).

The rapid and strong growth of Republicanism in Derry, particularly over the last ten years, is regarded by McGuiness as highly significant.

'Our city has been and still is to a degree, the nerve centre of Northern constitutional politics, and given the pedigree and credentials of our nationalist opponents, the upsurge of support for Sinn Fein within the city from a handful of followers in 1971 to over 11,000 votes won in the 1980s is an important and revealing development' (McGuiness, 1985: 7).

Peter Mackenzie argues that the unusual or special nature of Derry applies not just to the sphere of civil rights or Republicanism. He states,

'It is not just in the sphere of civil rights and Republicanism that Derry has shown its radical tradition, Derry City Council was the first council in Ireland to declare itself a nuclear free zone. Its motion to oppose uranium mining and not to facilitate any transportation of nuclear fuel must be one of the few motions to have been passed unanimously in the council's history.

Derry must be one of the few places where the alternative bookshop, Bookworm Community Bookshop, enjoys so much popular support that it is in fact the main bookshop in Derry. The city has a thriving third world education project, the World Development Group, whose politics would be more radical than most in N Ireland. At the moment plans are in motion for Derry to twin with a third world town' (Mackenzie, 1985: 11).

Therefore the 'place' of Derry is marked or special in several ways. The city is situated in the North West corner of Northern Ireland and sits astride the river Foyle, five miles south of its confluence with the large sea inlet of Lough Foyle. Provincially it is the second largest town in Northern Ireland, but although it is only seventy five miles from Belfast, it has always been isolated from the more highly urbanised and industrialised eastern part of the Province:

'the concentration of industry east of the Bann in the name of rationalisation and efficiency graduated from the status of a tacit assumption to explicit development policy' (Stetler, 1978: 3).

In the context of Ireland, Derry is the fourth largest city equal in size to Limerick but is even more isolated within an all Ireland context than it is at a provincial level. Its north-west seaboard situation on the margins of both Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom make it one of the most remote urban areas in the British Isles. Within the European Economic Community (EEC) context it is arguably amongst those areas which have the severest economic and social problems. Unemployment in Derry now is chronic. Strabane nearby, has some of the worst unemployment figures in the whole of Europe. Dr Wolfgang Stabenhow of the EEC Regional Policy Directorate stated that the North West area of Ireland is one of the few areas in the EEC where the four basic criteria suggested for aid under a regional policy were found together. It is an area of declining industry, an agricultural region with high unemployment, it is on the periphery of the community and it is a transfrontier area (Stabenhow, cited Cavanagh, 1976).

After Catholic emancipation in 1829, and with the rise of Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century the urban structure took on a political meaning, this it retains today. Controlled urban growth and segregation in Derry were furthered after 1945 by the policy of the Protestant and Unionist controlled Corporation. It used its powers as a housing authority and landlord to determine the direction of movement and residential location of its tenants within the City. The large post war Creggan Estate and Shantallow are almost totally Catholic.

Derry was one of the worst gerrymandered towns in the whole of the North, culminating in:

Total % of Total Roman % of Roman

population population Catholic Catholic

North Ward 12,479 23.2 5,005 40.1Waterside 11,704 21.8 4,459 38.1South Ward 29,579 55.0 26,609 90.0Derry CB 53,762 100.0 36,073 67.1
Source: 1961 Census of Population (cited Robinson, 1970: 214)

The old corporation has since been replaced but the historical process which led up to the present system of segregation has important current and future implications for the City. Particularly:

'Within Derry there exists what can only be described as a strong sense of community, and this particularly so in the Bogside. Strong family and kinship patterns exist in an area where so many people have had to share the common problems of poverty, bad housing and lack of work. Political gerrymandering in Derry has helped this growth of community feeling, in the sense that, apart from Creggan, which was built soon after the war and is located in close physical proximity to the Bogside, all rehousing for Bogsiders had to take place within the Bogside itself, thus protecting Unionist electoral control over other parts of the City, and therefore the City Council. It was cruel policy but it did strengthen and solidify the already strong sense of community' (Bogside Community Association (BCA), working paper no.3).

To conclude this section one can note firstly that 'place' as a category has a special significance for ethnographers. It is literally, in most cases, the ground on which the ethnographer stands. 'Place' in this ethnography refers importantly to a discursive terrain. Secondly, Derry, as part of the discursive terrain of Northern Ireland, has a special, that is, unique place. Although the community of the Bogside and Creggan of Derry is properly regarded as an instance of Republican community and a site of the social praxis of resistance to the state, the specific conditions of this praxis need to be discussed. The task of the following section is to outline a theoretical model of community which will allow a discussion of the specific character of this praxis of resistance.

5.2 Community: The Social Praxis of Resistance to the State

Before beginning the discussion on Bogside/Creggan community in Derry a discussion of the concept of community is necessary. Community is a much overworked, yet under-theorised concept within sociology. The work group on community studies at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) describe the field as 'a particularly untheorised, naturalised, impacted problematic which methodologically conceals its own tracks' (The Work Group, CCCS, 1976: 10). Parry notes that despite the fact that

'the grand sweep of the philosophical commentators and the 'classical' elite sociologists such as Pareto and Mosca has given way to the apparently more modest studies of local 'community power structures' ... the conceptual literature on community in general is intellectually remarkably poverty stricken' (Parry, 1972: 126-135).

Further, he concludes that,

'Unless such theories are placed in a wider setting there is a real danger of a massive accumulation of data which in itself can point nowhere ... and which does not begin to bear on the major issues about power and control in modern society' (Parry, 1972: 135).

Community studies are predominantly consensus-orientated accounts.
Some of the conflict perspectives that are available concerning community and particularly ethnic community strategies are as unhelpful. The orthodox marxist position holds that resistance organised around anything other than class, for example an ethnic or community interpellation, merely constitutes a form of false consciousness and thereby serves bourgeois interests. Further, as Williams notes

The evolutionism of Marxism shares with Structural Functionalism the tendency to be historical and teleological, leading to an analysis which fails to account for specific agencies and contexts. Marxism also suffers from the functionalist reductionism within which superstructural forces are held to 'function' to sustain an infrastructure. As in the modernisation thesis, the state is presented as functioning as the general factor of social cohesion, with ideology existing as a function of its role in legitimising capitalist relations of production. Similarly ethnicity is treated as an ideology which is 'explained' by reducing it to some hidden infrastructure which logically precedes it. This essentialist view of ethnicity means that it becomes superstructural, or epiphenomenal. Only to a limited extent does this reductionism treat ethnicity as a feature of an autonomous or relatively autonomous superstructure. If ethnicity is an aspect of ideology that is irreducible to the economic base, having its own separate historicity, it would appear to have its own internal law of development. This means that ethnicity is explained in terms of itself which is to reify ethnicity (G. Williams: in Press, 3).

As several writers remark community tends to be a 'God word' (Bell and Newby, 1971) and contains 'all or some of the following meanings, a territorial area, a complex of institutions within an area, and a sense of shared culture' (The Work group, CCCs, 1976: 2) 4. One of the more extreme examples of the sociological attempts to define community is presented in Hilary (1955), where no fewer than ninety-four 'definitions' are listed.
Bell and Newby (1971) attempt to discuss the concept of community in their book Community Studies. They rightly point out that 'post industrial' critiques of the 'death of community' are problematic. The nostalgia for a golden era of the past is identified as a fault common to much mass society theorising, dependent not only on an overly romantic and metaphysical conception of community but also on an inadequate theory of social structure in contemporary capitalism. Unfortunately Bell and Newby's work seems to be more of a commentary on the methodology of community studies than a critical examination of the concept of 'community' upon which such work must be premised. They are concerned with problems of the generalisability and possibility of comparison and not predominately with the analytically prior imperative of defining exactly what is being compared 5.

Bell and Newby, because they fail to discuss the state or the wider operation of power, remain unable to define community, and admit as much,

'In considering the concept of community, the sociologist shares an occupational hazard with the architect and the planner: the more he (sic) attempts to define it in his own terms, the more elusively does the essence of it escape him' (Bell and Newby, 1971: 21). 6

Bell and Newby point out that most 'community' researchers are functionalist,

'whether they have bothered to use the rhetoric of functionalism or not' (Bell and Newby, 1971: 17).

They summarise the influential, but misguided position of Talcott Parsons from 'The Principal Structures of Community' in his Structure and Process in Modern Society (originally in Freidrich, Community, 1959). Parsons argues that the concept of community is something which pertains to the relationship between people and territory, rather than the state and people. Thus, 'community' refers to,

'that aspect of the structure of social systems which is referable to the territorial location of persons (ie human individuals as organisms) and their activities' (Bell and Newby, 1971: 32).

What Bell and Newby produce is an argument which rightly draws our attention to the non-cumulative nature of community studies and the inadequate and misplaced theorising around the concept of community.

'Our motive ... partially the negative one of demonstrating the non-cumulative nature of so much of the work on community ... (and) the positive function of showing the catholicity of the field despite the terminological arguments. It now appears that something of an impasse has been reached concerning the definition of community' (Bell and Newby, 1971: 32)

This impasse is where Bell and Newby leave us, exhausted and abandoned. Far too often then,

'many community studies erect a social reality which is taken as given and giving of itself in immediate appearances. A relatively unquestioned reality is reported on relatively unquestioningly.

We are confronted with a single-levelled social totality consisting of attitudes, behaviour, activities and institutions, and the relationships between these things. There is little awareness of PROCESS or dynamic relations between different forces and groupings ... thus community studies cannot examine the dialectic between local and national factors' (The Work Group, CCCS, 1976: 1).

Williams discusses a more useful model of community, one which allows escape from the impasse Bell and Newby describe. Williams traces the influence of the Enlightenment on the discourse of community,

'The Romanticism of the Enlightenment drew heavily upon the concept of community. Rousseau conceived of the original community of primordial society as a form reinforced by a moral order which generated an organic solidarity. This was reiterated within German social philosophy by the moral imperative which typified the work of Kant. The Romanticism of this train of thought is clarified when the primordial community is opposed to its converse, the anomic society produced by social change, and its evolutionist conception as progress, meant that the state, was held to replace the mutual inter-dependence of organic solidarity. The state was responsible for transforming 'natural' individuals into 'moral' beings. The state was the source of integration of the national community. In order to achieve this goal all intermediary groups which prevented the individual from assimilating into the rational state had to be eliminated ... the driving force was progress and the ultimate goal a culturally homogeneous society, created by, and submissive to, the state' (Williams, in Press: 5—my emphasis).

He continues,

'The concept of culture is linked with this idea of progress ... this much is evident in the social Darwinism of Spencer. The idea of progress as involving the change to a more complex, more differentiated and more integrated society was related to both a historical and a comparative perspective. In combining the Montesqueian idea of a closely knit, interdependence of institutions with the ideas of Comte and Condercet on progress by postulating a global and permanent trend towards increasing inter-dependence or integration, Spencer was concerned mainly to deduce ethical norms from social evolution. Progress involved competition between societies in the struggle for survival. Success in this struggle depended on the ability of a society to adapt, with culture playing an important role in such adaptation' (Williams, in Press: 11).

Williams notes that 'with characteristic ethnocentrism' it is English society that becomes the standard form, the unmarked case against which social complexity and 'development' is measured. Williams' own work on Wales (1981, 1984) and the account of Northern Ireland presented in this thesis (particularly in Chapter 3) would support this claim 7. What is being argued is that the state is defined outside of both ethnicity and culture; Bogside / Creggan community in this sense then is doubly marked.

Williams,

'The consequences of treating the converse of the ethnic group as ambiguous, as unspecified, is that the dominant entity is never conceived of as ethnic, but also that the relationship between them is not treated in terms of dominant/subordinate, nor as majority/ minority, but rather as ethnic/majority. That is, the discourse emanates from the place of the dominant while concealing its identity. Labelling becomes an expression of power. Yet it is clear that the converse of the ethnic group is the state, and that the discourse in question focuses upon the community, albeit a very specific form of community, and the state. This is the nature of the opposition in question and it is hardly surprising that the dominant element is not conceived of in terms of ethnicity if its ethos is that of integration. The state is never marked except in an implicit form involving constructs such as the norm' (Williams, in Press: 14).

Further,

'Given that the diacritica of ethnicity tend invariably to involve some aspect of culture it is again inconceivable that the state would be marked since the state is above culture. Again the discourse presents a blindness while simultaneously drawing the debate in a certain direction. This inability to identify the adversary is partly responsible for the tendency not to conceive of ethnicity as the basis of struggle. Such a perspective would invariably raise the question of a struggle against who or what, and over what? This is also the case among those who reduce ethnicity to the ethnic who have an ethnic identity. This is the epitomy of the centred, conscious, rational actor, even if such an actor's behaviour is conditioned by cultural forces, a factor which can transform his/her behaviour into the emotional.

In this respect, it is interesting to consider the adjectives that are linked with 'ethnic'. It is common to refer to the ethnic community/ minority/ feeling/ identity/ nationalism/ voting and so on. This raises interesting questions about the unspecified converse, about the non-community, the majority, devoid of an identity based upon culture or whatever features are seen as the diacritica of ethnicity, about the voter who is not predisposed to an explicit form of nationalism and who, by implication, is rational rather than emotional' (Williams, in Press: 18).

FIG 5.5 FIG 5.6FIG 5.7FIG 5.8FIG 5.9FIG 5.1
FIG 5.11FIG 5.12

The conjunction of a people/state and an ethnic difference produces a community of resistance, both in terms of a differential ethnic identification and as a corollary to the power of the state in terms of its social policy. These articulations are strengthened in the Bogside/Creggan community because of the degree of putative illegitimacy of the British state, and its consequent naked use of repressive apparatuses—that is, put simply its use of a counter insurgency policing regime.

The policing regime of the state ensures that its actions are seen by the community as a continual series of incursions into the community bringing disorder, suffering and sometimes as in the case of, for instance, James Brown and Gary English, even death. Brown, 17 and English, 19, were 'mown down' by a British army landrover in the Creggan on Easter Sunday 1981. Liz Stafford quotes BBC reporter Paul Clements describing what happened,

Eyewitness Paul Clements, a BBC radio reporter, was at the scene in the course of duty. This is his story:'I was standing by the junction watching the rioting and recording events. The first thing I heard was a loud, high-pitched whine. I swung round and saw the two Land Rovers coming down the hill at a fast speed into the junction and straight into the crowd.

I saw one young boy go up into the air four or five feet. I saw two shoes flying through the air. I was dumbfounded, I couldn't believe my eyes; I expected to see at least half a dozen people dead. Many people must have stumbled off, too frightened to go to hospital in case they were arrested for rioting ...'
Clements says he saw no stones being thrown at the Land Rovers before the crash, and the youths were running away when they were hit. Whether the two boys were rioting is immaterial—the punishment for rioting in Britain is not yet the death penalty.
(Liz Stafford, New Statesman, 29 January 1982: 9)

There are many in the Bogside/Creggan of Derry who believe this tragedy to have been a deliberate and murderous attempt to intimidate the community. They are firmly convinced that the 'death penalty' operates in Northern Ireland, even for the innocent. As such this event joins the ever growing list of attacks on Derry Republicans, a list which includes countless rubber and plastic bullet attacks and most well-known of all, Bloody Sunday. This community then, is under little illusion about its antagonistic relation to the state.

Williams discusses the consequences of failing to perceive the community and the state in a relation of antagonism for social science, social conflict is played down and accommodation is emphasised. The ethnic group is held to adapt by drawing on its uniqueness in cultural terms in order to generate accommodation with wider society:

'such accommodation is often seen as beneficial to the ethnic group in question in that it is discussed within the context of a liberal society whose aim is to present advantages and benefits to all citizens. Given that the predominant philosophy surrounding this discussion is that of individual liberalism it is the individual, as a member of the ethnic group, that is the focus of attention. The emphasis is on accommodation through individual mobility. Rights are not seen as the prerogative of the group but of the individual citizen. This means that group inequality and differentiation, be it based upon ethnicity, class , gender, race or any other dimension, takes second place to individual achievement. Not only is the differential distribution of these advantages ignored, but it is assumed that accommodation leads to advantage. This is the crux of the melting pot argument. Yet there is another, more recent, argument from within this liberal tradition. It is an argument which assumes that ethnicity is good, that it is an important resource which can be of benefit to the wider society. Thus, it is claimed, the state should encourage ethnicity. Again antagonism is removed and conflict denied' (Williams, in Press: 21).

The former 'melting pot' argument then, suggests that once the Irish forget or grow-out of their ethnic and cultural traditions and become 'proper' British people the problems of Northern Ireland will be solved. The latter argument for the encouragement of 'ethnicity' is dependent on the schema of selective incorporation and the state's ability to control and singularise the plurality of the margin. In this latter view only what Adams (1986) calls 'leprechaun' or 'jelly-bean' Irish culture is seen to enrich Britishness.
To summarise then, ethnicity and community are features which derive from struggle, they are neither fixed nor permanent. As such they represent the social praxis of resistance to the power of the state. The diacritica of both ethnicity and community can be seen as those features that result from precisely such a struggle rather than as continuities from the past which are labelled as 'tradition' through their contrasting with 'modernity'.

Ethnicity, the product of struggle is never static but, rather, constitutes a dynamic quality, ever changing in relation to the terms of reference of that struggle. Groups only achieve meaning in struggle, therefore, there is no reason why one form of struggle should dominate any other form of struggle. Since struggles are located within discursive contexts, part of any struggle involves establishing the salience of any particular form. What is implied is that individuals are formed as subjects through social experience. Thus the reductionism which derives non-class forms of struggle from class struggles through the claim that class struggle constitutes the only 'real' form of struggle is avoided. By abandoning the primacy of the class struggle the salience of struggles which focus upon alternative bases of interpellation are established.

This is not to suggest that within any discursive formation all discourses are equal. It is generally the case that the discourse of the state, in its constitution as the official discourse, represents the highest status among the constituent discourses. Any statement is influenced by the condition of its enunciation. Such conditions include economic, institutional and ideological factors. This is important in conferring the predominant status on the official discourse. On the other hand, wherever there is power there must be resistance. Thus the official discourse, partly through its guise as social policy, has such an effect.

Not only does the official discourse generate discourse as resistance but, in its dominance, it also, to an extent, constrains the nature of the alternative discourse in that any resistance must bear relevance to that which it resists. On the other hand, this resistance generates a response on the part of the official discourse. Thus, in claiming that ethnicity constitutes resistance to the power of the state I also recognise that the specific nature of the ethnic discourse must accommodate the official discourse. It is the discursive relationship implicit in the discursive formation which is responsible for the dynamic quality of ethnicity and community strategies cohering around ethnicity.

It is now useful to move from the sociological discussion of ethnicity and community to the specific circumstances of Derry. Williams notes that ethnicity as a sociological construct acquires a particular strategic significance when placed in a model of community as oppositional praxis to the state. Something of the particular nature of this conjunction in the Bogside/Creggan needs to be emphasised at the outset.

There are two parallel popular cultures in Northern Ireland, Protestant Loyalist and Catholic Republican 8. These are both, in differing ways, opposed to the British state but are also arranged in antagonistic relation to each other 9. With one important exception, the Fountain area, Derry's population of Loyalist Protestants and Catholic Republicans are largely divided by the river Foyle. This sectarian population division was crucial to the deliberate maintenance of electoral boundaries in Derry and is discussed above. One of the consequences of this population division, however, is that the Bogside/Creggan or city-side of Derry is largely a Catholic Republican community. It is a relatively small and in this sense homogeneous community. (I make important comments on its 'homogeneity' below). Rolston makes an important point about the Catholic community and its relation to the British state.

'Never having had a view of the state as theirs, nationalists had to rely on community. But more than being merely used to their ghettos, they came to see the strength of community in terms of both community action and military struggle against the state' (Rolston, 1987: 13).

The conjunction of ethnicity (Catholic Republican Irish) and community in Bogside/Creggan then leads to a particular, doubly oppositional social praxis of resistance to the state and implies two distinct but related struggles—the 'military' struggle and the 'community' struggle. This separation of two struggles as that which defines Bogside/Creggan community is discussed in a paper by Paddy Doherty, a Derry community leader, in a talk analysing the relation between community action, local authorities and government (discussed below). For now it is important to note that although these two strands of resistance should not be seen either as totally homogeneous strategies in themselves, or as two completely separate entities, this is not to suggest that one is a 'front' for the other. Despite what some members of the security forces in Derry pronounced, the DYCW was not a front for PIRA, both organisations are part of the social praxis of resistance to the state which construct Bogside/Creggan community, any part of which may influence another and any part of which may be more or less prominent at a given moment in any given situation. This is important to stress because, in the official discourse of the British state the Bogside/Creggan community must be seen as terrorist or terrorised by the PIRA; further, the PIRA must be seen as isolated or isolatable from the community. The official discourse then, frequently portrays the 'community struggle' as either frustrated by the military struggle or controlled by it, precisely as a 'front' for militant Republicanism. This is the reason, for instance, that John Biggs Davidson is able to characterise the IRA as 'Ulster's mafia', 'managers of murder', 'the millionaires of extortion', and the 'manipulators of co-operatives'.

The relationship between the discourses of the British state and Bogside/Creggan community is crucial because these discourses do not operate in a vacuum, insulated from one another, but operate precisely in a relationship of antagonism. Heteroglossia assumes that

'languages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways ... It might even seem that the very word language loses all meaning in this process—for apparently there is no single plane on which all these languages might be juxtaposed to one another. What is said of languages applies equally to 'cultures' and 'subcultures' (M Bakhtin), Discourse on the Novel (1935) in Holquist(ed), 1987: 259FF).

British politicians, bureaucrats and soldiers do meet and interact with people from the Bogside/Creggan. Such meetings, however, occur within and tend to reinforce the discursive strategies of both sides. What has already been discussed but now needs to be emphasised is the way in which this relationship occurs in the Bogside/Creggan community of Derry.

The relationship between the state and the people of the Bogside/Creggan in Derry is one of total alienation and far from being 'reformed' by the British intervention in 1969 (leading eventually to direct rule in 1972) the situation is getting no less conflictual, if anything it is growing more antagonistic. A tutor in the workshop where I taught for the majority of my stay in Derry explained why he had no time for the security forces, either the RUC or the British army.

'I played a bit of cricket in the old days. Cricket is known to be an Orangeman's game here in Derry and in the North. I even played with two policeman at the time, Sgt Tinney and Constable Pat Doherty. At that time I even watched the 12th Parade as it passed my street to the Field. Then came the Civil Rights march and Duke Street. We were stopped by the police. I was standing by a plain clothes detective called Bob McIndre. The reason I knew him was he was a coin collector and drank in our local, the Alleymans Bar. He told me I had better get out of it quick. Then he pulled his truncheon and started battering anyone and everyone. That was William Craig for you—Minister of Home Affairs. Then came the murderous slaughter of Bloody Sunday. I myself could have been killed as the bullets whistled up the old Bog as we called it. They were shooting from the walls, target practice for them. I will never forget that day. A neighbour P McEnkinney only 16 and Gerald McKinney a pal of mine were shot dead. So to this present day, I cannot look at a policeman or a soldier' (Neil, 1979).

The incursion of the state into every level of society is well illustrated by an account given by a young man from the Bogside describing the process of collecting his dole cheque or even just walking down the main street of Derry.

'The office of Social Security called the 'Dole' by the people in Derry, is situated in the City Centre 10, beside the Strand Road Police Barracks. Every day hundreds of men and women, boys and girls walk the well-worn paths to the Dole and sign on for the work which does not exist. And every day British soldiers and policemen stationed along the route to the Dole, carry out a 'stop and search' operation. This exercise is confined mainly to the 16-25 year old group. The soldiers stop the young people, ask them their name and address, where they are coming from and where they are going to. The soldiers, who have been patrolling the streets of Derry for the past fifteen years, know where we are coming from and know we are going to the Dole.

The stop and search operations are not designed to find guns or explosives. No weapons or explosives have ever been found on any young person walking on the streets. Yet, they do this every day. It is such a common occurrence to see young men spread-eagled against the wall, and soldiers emptying out their pockets and frisking them down, that people just walk on and ignore it.
The purpose behind all this is to humiliate and provoke a reaction from the young people and to show the 'Paddies' the power of England's army on Irish soil.
I get stopped nearly every day; so do my brothers. At least once a month we are arrested and held for 3 days or 7 days. Our house gets raided every other week. Last night as I was writing this, the RUC broke in our door and ran upstairs, shouting obscenities. My father tried to stop them but they told him to f... off. Then one policeman hit him in the stomach with a rifle. They pulled all the clothes out of the wardrobe and cupboards.
There is nothing we can do about this for they have the guns and the power. The only people who help us are in Sinn Fein. They know what the police and the army are doing and they understand why we are afraid. The young people respect Sinn Fein because they know that Sinn Fein will not treat them the way the 'respectable' politicians have, and they know that Sinn Fein people suffer the same harassment.
Despite all that happens, young people are growing stronger and are more politicised. I know that I'm not alone I know that getting arrested, and having your house searched is part of everyday life for nearly everyone living in the Bogside area of Derry.'
(McMenamin, 1982)

This regular and pervasive intrusion into the community by the state makes the division between the national/military and the community struggles somewhat arbitrary. The IRA operations are designed at least in part to prevent incursions into the mundane life of the community and are organised in several different ways on a community basis. Provisional Sinn Fein fixes people's drains and organises transport for old people on top of their other activities. Community organisations and community workers not only fix people's drains or whatever but are called upon to retrieve, or at least establish the whereabouts and condition of, people who have been 'lifted'.

Whilst this analysis will for analytic purposes discuss two different strands of resistance to the state, the military and the community struggle, these should importantly be seen as facets of the same structure of social praxis of Bogside/Creggan community.

Something of the interrelation between the national/military struggle and the community struggle was revealed to me shortly after arriving in Derry. I had been working as a tutor in the workshop for about six weeks when the father of one of the young people in my class was shot dead by the British army. As a matter of simple courtesy and humanity although I had only known the young person for a few weeks I attended the funeral. The coffin was carried from the Long Tower church, through the Brandywell, one of the older parts of the Bogside. I recognised many young people and tutors from the DYCW in the parade of people following the funeral procession. Not only were they there, but thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people were also there. It seemed like the whole community was there. The procession stopped, as is customary, outside the dead man's house and to my surprise, though fairly clearly to no-one else's, three masked figures in combat gear ran from the house and fired a volley of hand gun fire in salute over the coffin. The figures disappeared as quickly as they had emerged and the procession continued, with a Fianna escort slow marching the coffin draped in a tricolour to the Republican plot in the cemetery. This for me was the first time I had been within 10 yards of a hand gun, let alone several hand guns being fired over a coffin by masked members of an illegal paramilitary. What made an even more lasting impression on me at this event, however, was the huge number of people following the coffin. They all knew what was going to happen, it had happened before and would again, significantly during the hunger strikes. Their presence indicated at least some tacit approval of paramilitary activity. This experience was made more powerful by seeing people in the crowd with whom I worked and had, now I realise how foolishly, isolated from if not their 'general community' at least from a community which could support paramilitary activities.
This is not to say that all people in the community either carried out or even supported paramilitary activities. Such is not the case. It is merely to say that the boundary between what constitutes military and what constitutes community struggle is more blurred than one would imagine in this community. Further the community is one in which paramilitary activity is seen as a viable, if not necessary, option against the state. Whilst not all Bogside/Creggan people support the IRA, several are at times outspoken against it 11, it is of that community and an important part of that community's social praxis of resistance to the state.

To understand this it is necessary to understand the relationship of the military to the community struggle in Derry.

5.3 A Portrait of Struggle: Sinn Fein, the IRA and the Military Struggle

Poodle and Burkey were delighted to show me the sights of Derry. 'Make sure you take him around the Bogside', said Colm. It was my first day as a tutor in the workshop, I had been in Derry for five days. my guided tour of the physical and ideological terrain of Derry was quite instructive. My guides were pleased to show me around for a number of reasons. Firstly it gave them a chance to get out of work and have a cigarette. Poodle and Burkey, young people from the workshop clearly enjoyed their role as experts, as much as they enjoyed my 'tailor-mades'. They were careful to explain oppositional points of view as well as giving me their Republican version. Thus Burkey explained that while he called the town Derry, there were others, on the Waterside (the Protestant side), who knew it as Londonderry. When explaining FTQ (fuck the Queen) and UTP (up the Pope) he reminded me that these same people, from the Waterside, would reverse these slogans FTP and UTQ. Poodle asked me if I knew what PROVOS meant. I said 'Provisional IRA?' Burkey explained:

Please Remember Our Victory On Sunday
or
Please Remember Our Victory Over Soldiers

The former a reference to Bloody Sunday in Derry, which occurred on the 30th January 1972, when British paratroopers opened fire on an unarmed civil rights procession, killing thirteen people that day and wounding one so badly he died the following day 12. The second version became very popular in Derry some months later after the Warrenpoint Point bombings, when the IRA killed eighteen British soldiers in one action.

The young people's enjoyment of their 'expertise' on this tour derived partly from my status as a tutor, partly from my status as an outsider—they were in charge of me and were more knowledgeable than me. There was also a certain amount of what Burton (1978: 112) and Coogan (1970: 117-18) describe as the 'romance of the rah' operating 13. This, of course, was tempered by the fact that as insiders in a militarised community, and as trainees in an institution where I was a tutor they were checking me out, carefully gauging my responses to their account of Derry.

I learnt much on this afternoon walk around Derry and five years later, when I left Derry for the last time I retraced part of that tour and took a camera. Much of the graffiti was similar but there were many more murals painted on walls and buildings. I wish now with the help of a different guide 14 to present a short guided tour of the Bogside in order to begin the discussion of the military struggle in Derry's Bogside and Creggan.

Before presenting the pictures of the Bogside a few important points need to be made about what Roland Barthes calls the rhetoric of the image (Barthes, 1977). To attempt a portrait of the Bogside is precisely that. Portraits are framed, posed designs motivated by specific intentions and generic considerations. Portraits are very much productions, as opposed to simple reflections, they necessitate decisions about what to include and exclude and how what is included is included. As Clifford reminds us

'the ethnographer transforms the research situation's ambiguities and diversities of meaning into an integrated portrait' (Clifford, Representations 1:2, Spring, 1983: 132).

Barthes reminds us that if written and spoken language is deceptive, ironic and rhetorically organised, as I have argued throughout this thesis it is, then pictures and especially photographs are doubly so. Firstly, because like written and spoken language, photographs are never neutral, but always framed, cropped, positioned. Secondly because, as photographs they appear not to be 'motivated' they appear to be literally mimetic, reflecting reality directly. It is crucial to remember that even things as innocuous as the ordering and juxtaposition of the photographs, nevermind the written commentary, strongly affect their meaning potential. Having said this I do believe the photographs provide a useful, if not unproblematic, entry into the Bogside of Derry.

(Figures 5.1-5.21)

FIG 5.1
FIG 5.2
FIG 5.3
FIG 5.4

The photo essay begins with what documentary film makers call an 'establishment shot' (Figure 5.1). A view of the Bogside/Creggan from Derry's walls. The Brandywell, the district in the left of the picture's foreground is one of the older parts of Bogside. The houses rising up the hill at the back are part of Creggan estate. The Bogside, then, is outside the walls of Derry at the bottom of a hill. The statue of Governor Walker high on the hill with his outstretched arm pointing down at the Bogside was for many a physical manifestation of the dominance of the local Orange state over the Bogsiders. So much so that when the IRA blew up the statue as Paddy Doherty explained it was like a holiday below, people were out on the streets, singing and dancing. Mary explains what it was like to grown up in the Bogside.

'One had a great view of these streets, from Derry Walls, so my first memories of living there are of looking up at Derry Walls, on the 18th December each year, when an effigy of the 'traitor' Lundy was burned. He hung there, that is, this dummy, from the statue of Governor Walker, (no longer with us, since the IRA spectacularly blasted him off his pedestal) and I always felt this great excitement when the torch was put to his coat tail and he went up in a mass of flames. We children in Wellington looked forward to this exciting episode every December. We looked up at the walls and the Protestants looked down on us' (Mary, 1981).

Mary was born in Wellington Street which used to run parallel to Nelson Street and the Bogside (which at that time was a particular street rather than an area). Wellington Street was a village on its own. It contained among its sixty one houses a bookmakers shop, general grocers, sweet shop, watchmakers, toy shop, barber, shoemaker, pub, undertakers, coal merchant, green grocer, music shop, and a few others of general purposes.

These traders all lived in the street and earned their living from selling their wares to what were then very poor people. The entire community survived on 'tick' or debt. Most of the people had 'accounts'—tick—and bills were paid 'If you had the money', at the end of the week. You never really paid the entire bill, you always left something, the impli-cation being that it 'spoiled' the relation-ship between shopkeeper and customer. My mother worked so the neighbours, without being asked, kept their eye on us children. Very few closed their doors, as far as I can recall. It was open house to everyone, and people tripped in and out to each other all day. The few who closed their doors were regarded as 'snobs' or 'odd ones' as my mother called them. We children lived in the street, marbles, skip-ping, tag, ball, hop-scotch, knock-knock at night (great fun), swinging on the lamp posts. We went messages for neighbours and got a thank you by way of a piece and jam, luxury in those days. Although everyone was poor, they were fiercely proud. There were different levels of poverty. For instance, a man died, and the street all chipped in to bury him and the entire place looked with pity at this 'poor' family, though many of them wouldn't have had shoes on their feet or a bite to eat. The insurance man was important and if you could afford to pay him your 6d a week in order to receive a decent burial then you were not considered really poor' (Mary, 1981).

Wellington Street no longer exists and the old Brandywell district is fast disappearing. Many Bogsiders were rehoused as Creggan estate was developed. The flyover which is in the foreground in Figure 5.1 was built in the early 1970s and runs through the heart of the Bogside. One of the least highlighted weapons in the state's battery of surveillance and control mechanisms, apart from the issue of rubber dusbin lids (see below), is the design of the places in which people live.

Figure 5.22

Troops Out 1984:18

Even the humble concrete flyover is a weapon (see Figure 5.22). Although,

'Car ownership in the nationalist community is low. It does (the flyover), of course, provide ready access to the area for British military vehicles ...

If you go to what used to be known as Free Derry you will discover roadways and pavements the size of a prairie. The ground is covered with a level of macadam tough enough to accommodate a tonnage of British saracen or RUC armoured car. There are no paving stones in the pavement, nothing to use as ammunition or barricades. The wide streets provide no cover for crowds or individuals from security force snipers. It has become an indefensible space ...
The most recent innovation in housing design can be seen in Derry. Here there are new houses which are small, only two-storied and evenly spaced apart. In contrast to the cluster of large blocks they are eminently suitable for observation from the British army posts on the old city wall' (Troops Out, 1984: 18-19). 15

Free Derry corner is certainly the most famous part of Derry if not of Northern Ireland. This corner now serves the community as a meeting place, a gathering point at the beginning and end of marches, a place to give speeches. It is also the place where Bloody Sunday occured and it was here at a Bloody Sunday Commemoration rally on the 28th January 1979 that a Sinn Fein spokesperson said to an assembled crowd of thousands,

'You people here today say more to us, give us far more of a mandate than any crosses you could put on a piece of paper'.

Free Derry Corner is also the place where the majority of confrontations between Republican youth and the British army take place. Strategically placed at the entrance to the Bogside it is a crucial boundary for the community. The front and back of the Free Derry wall illusrates this point usefully. The wall facing outwards can be read either as a tourist icon or a warning sign and is in English (Figure 5.3). The wall facing into the community is in Irish and is a message of comfort and solidarity—Eire amhain, pobal amhain—an t-aon rogha (one island, one people, the only alternative) (Figure 5.4). You are now entering Free Derry' is probably one of the most famous signs in the whole of the north (Figure 5.3). Located at Free Derry corner at the entrance to the Bogside it is a reminder that the working class community behind it once declared itself a 'no-go' area for the state. Where,

'A housing estate stood against the might of the British Empire and declared itself an Independent Republic'

as one Derry resident graphically put it. After the introduction of internment without trial by the British state on 9th August 1971, the people of the Bogside and Creggan erected over thirty barricades and excluded the police and the army from these areas, thus was the no-go area established. Many of these barricades were quite substantial with overturned cars, concrete and scaffold poles, needing excavators to remove them 16. Similar areas were subsequently established in Belfast, mainly in Catholic areas, bu also from time to time in Protestant areas, notably the Woodvale and Shankill Road. Free Derry was one of the largest and most successful no-go areas (MacStiofain, 1975: 251). The no-go areas were finally entered by the security forces on 31st July 1972. This period in Derry's history was a time of great energy, as the following section on the community struggle makes clear. Within the no-go areas of Free Derry, Barricade Bulletin was distributed to co-ordinate action and distribute news. A rent and rates strike was started and the Bulletin urged its readers to join in the effort.

'Remember one thing: if everyone stands together—if everyone refuses to pay—there is nothing anyone can do about it. They can't evict the whole of Creggan for example! They couldn't even try! For the moment just tell your rent collector: we will pay when all the men are released. And encourage your neighbours to stand firm ... SO KEEP WITH IT: NO RENT UNTIL EVERY MAN IS OUT'(Barricade Bulletin, 11th August 1971—emphasis in original).

The tactical use of the Bulletin, as well as its clear articulation of a state/community conflict is clearly demonstrated in the same Bulletin.

'There was a big response to the alarm at two o'clock this morning. In the event, the army did not try to take the area; we owe the people an explanation why the alarm was raised.

There was information, which appeared to be based on more than rumour, that the troops would move in to dismantle the barricades—perhaps make raids on houses at two o'clock. This seemed to be confirmed by a build-up of troops in William Street, and army vehicles behind Creggan. Thus we arranged a loud-speaker which was to go into action at the first sign of the army moving in. We also alerted people at barricades to sound car horns and use bin lids.
Shortly after two o'clock, soldiers advanced over Eglinton Place. A saracen drove down the Bogside as far as Abbey Park.
At this point, it was decided that we would have to rouse the area. The evidence seemed clearly to confirm that, indeed, the area was to be attacked. As soon as the alarm was seen, the troops withdrew quickly.
Probably this was a test, the British Toops wanted to test what would happen if they did attempt to come in (Barricade Bulletin, 11th August 1971).

The person who gave me the particular edition of the Bulletin above informed me that they are now given rubber bin lids—even the humble dustbin lid can be useful. Bin lid warnings of danger or threat given often by the women in Republican communities have a widespread and long history of usage.

Liam exlained to me the story of the Free Derry wall (figure 5.3).

'The Free Derry sign was scrawled on the gable end of a house where someone called Jimmy Cain lived, a fellow called Caker Casey, in a moment of inspiration scrawled You Are Now Entering Free Derry. It was very roughly done but when the whole thing became popularised, I think it was Paddy Doherty decided that it was a bit scruffy looking so it was done neatly. So it's actually been painted about twenty times you know. Sinn Fein has more or less taken responsibility for preserving it now, and they've rebuilt the wall for instance. There was a Brit in a moment of madness who took an armoured car and drove right through the wall, took a whole lump out of the side of it, so they had to rebuild the whole thing again. That's the only thing—they keep paint bombing it, painting over it and wrecking it and we fix it up.

There were barricades in the old days, all along this road. This has all been redeveloped; all this new flyover and bypass and stuff. People, when the redevelopment was going on actually wanted to move the wall, but there was a campaign to save it, and it was kind of kept as an historical monument, and as I was saying, Sinn Fein have now taken over prserving it. It's being continually painted because the RUC and the British army are continually trying to wreck it. It's just an eternal battle, you know; paint bomb ... repaint, paint bomb ... repaint, that's the way it goes' (Liam, 1985).

'Eire amhain, pobal amhain, -an t-on rogha' (Figure 5.4) was the Sinn Fein slogan in the 1984 elections for the European Parliament.

'as you can see, it has been defaced again by the RUC and the British army. The Battle of the Bogside goes on' (Liam, 1985).

The Rossville Flats (Figure 5.5) are very close to the Free Derry wall, also strategically placed at the entrance to the Bogside. They are also an interesting example of the continuing struggle between the community and the state. Housing, or rather the lack of it, was an important feature of the early community struggle in Derry in the late fifties and early to mid sixties. Long campaigns were fought for new houses, but a long campaign was also fought against high-rise and the Rossville flats in particular (see following section). The Bogsiders lost the battle and the flats were built. When the troubles started, however, in the late sixties, the flats became useful for Republican youth to petrol bomb the security forces from. The high position and commanding view of Free Derry corner was too dangerous for the British army to ignore for very long and they established an observation post on the roof of the flats. As Figure 5.5 shows, however, the buildings have become literally a text on which to inscribe the community's Republican sentiments 17. As Liam explains,

'The murals on the Rossville flats ... that's a series of murals there done by the young people from the Bogside, and also a group called the Irish Freedom Movement, who came over one Easter, Easter '82, and with the help of the young people did a few murals as well. They were from England, Scotland and Wales. You have the walls up behind the flats and the kids used to chuck petrol bombs down from the top.

The British Army had a spy post up there which was discovered by the young people and burnt out. When we came down here (addressed to the author) you see that camera up there on the wall, it was actually facing the other way, you know, but since we've come down it's now directed towards us.
The Starry Plough is the flag of labour. It's associated with James Connolly and the citizens army. More and more now the Starry Plough is seen alongside the Tri-colour. Tri-colour's the nationalist aspect of the struggle and the Starry Plough symbolises the class and socialist aspects, you know.
The Celtic Cross is the traditional sign. So you have kind of Nationalist, Irish and Socialist in a line. The cross also symbolises the deaths of those who died in the struggle.
The bird with the barbed wire comes from a story by Bobby Sands called the Lark and the Freedom Fighter. He symbolised his plight by telling the story of the Lark. There was a man who imprisoned a lark in a cage and tried to make it sing, but just because he had it in a cage didn't mean the bird was going to sing so the bird didn't sing. No matter how he starved it the bird wouldn't sing. It died, so it never sung.
The weapon of resistance is an RPG 7, a rocket launcher. It's called the tin opener. The Phoenix is the symbol of the Provos. It always rises; it keeps coming back again and again—symbolic of the Irish struggle. It doesn't matter how much they try and put us down, alright, they may sort of destroy the rebellion in one phase, but the idea they can't destroy; it's still there. There's always a come back' (Liam, 1985).

Gerry Adams points out the relationship of the Irish language to the Republican strategy of resistance in the North. Adams quotes, Padraig O Maolcraoibhe who records,

'When the men in the H-blocks of Long Kesh and the women in Armagh prison were stripped of everything they discovered that they could not be stripped of their language. it became a means of resistance, of asserting their dignity and identity. In the H-blocks, with no books, no paper, no pens, no professional teachers, young men living in filthy conditions, frequently beaten, stripped naked ... but unbowed, taught each other Irish by shouting lessons from cell to cell. And as one hunger strike was followed by the other the people outside learned these lessons also and they determined to carry on the cultural struggle—each one from where s/he was' (Adams, 1986: 144-45—my emphasis).

It is not surprising to find the IRA referred to in Irish (Figures) 5.8 and 5.9) 18. Oglaigh na h-Eireann is the Republican name for the IRA, translated into English it 'literally' means Irish warriors or volunteers 19. Fianna Eireann refers to a Republican cadet force or youth organisation, what the British refer to as the junior IRA (Figure 5.6). Adams also notes not only the crucial role played by Republican prisoners in maintaining the Irish language, but the importance of media, education and community structures.

'In practice this revival is expressed in small ways, with language classes in social clubs, with all-Irish nursery schools, with the Gaelicisation of street names. As a result one finds young people with Doctor Martin boots, knee-high denims and punk hairstyles peppering their talk with Irish phrases. Rough as it may be it represents culture in a iving sense. It is 'survival' Irish, which enables people to exchange greetings and have some basic conversations. There is an all-Irish daily paper, La, published in Belfast, the first ever daily newspaper in any Celtic langauge. In West Belfast there are more than 60 adult Irish classes, but the greatest hope lies in the growth of education through the medium of Irish.

In 1970 there were no schools in the 6 Counties in which education was through Irish. Scoil Phobal Feirste opened in West Belfast as an all-Irish primary school with nine pupils in 1971. By 1977 it was still the only school in the 6 Counties, with just 30 pupils and two teachers. By May 1986 it had 194 pupils and nine teachers, plus a nursery school with 120 pupils. There are now also four other nursery schools in Belfast and three in Derry as well as two all-Irish streams in a County Derry primary school at Steelestown.
In 1977 there were 22 all-Irish nursery schools in the whole of Ireland. Today there are 150' (Adams, 1986: 145).

The revival of the Irish language then, may be small, such as saying 'slan' instead of goodbye or it may be a more full-blooded commitment to supporting the Gaeltachtai (Irish speakers) in their demands. There is nothing trivial or folksy in this current interest in language in the north (and south) of Ireland. As Adams explains, such an interest is one which places the langauge in a total model of culture and sees the fight as a crucial dimension to a refusal of British invasion. Adams,

'Irish people cringed when (Garret Fitzgerald) replied in English to a question in Irish at a press conference in Chequers. Later I had the opportunity to contrast his behaviour with the attitude of a foreign administration, at the extradition of Gerry Kelly and Brendan MacFarlane in Amsterdam, where English is gaining primacy. The hearing was in Dutch and translated into English not, as the President of the Court explained, 'because we don't understand English but because Dutch is our langauge'. Irish people were to cringe even more when Fitzgerald as 'their leader' left the country on St Patrick's Day to be televised sharing a 'begorrah' with Ronald Reagan, together with a jar of green jellybeans and a midget dressed up as a leprechaun ...' (Adams, 1986: 142).

'The struggle against cultural colonialism must be a key part of the reconquest of Ireland, of the making of a new Irish humanity. As we have seen, this does not mean going backwards. neither does it mean merely preserving our language or our culture. Some people talk about 'preserving' the language; it is as if it was something to be kept as an archaic object to be brought out occasionally and shown to tourists. It is a notion of 'jam-jar' Irish ...' (Adams, 1986: 143).
'Cultural colonialism demands today, as it did in the past, the lowering of national spirit, the revision of history and the destruction of our separate identity. Our cultural identity and our language would act as a counter or, in MacSwiney's words, as 'the frontier' against our submergence by a West British, shoneen ethos or by a rampant Anglo-American 'Rambo' ethos. If we are to accept our lot as a poor, partitioned off-shore island, if we are to be obedient to the dictates of the nuclear powers, the directives from Brussels; if our rulers are to be free to collaborate with the British in governing part of our country as a British possession; even if we are to accept emigration or the dangers caused by Sellafield, then we must be conditioned to become 'mere things' because 'things have no allegiance' ...
I agree with the late Mairtin O Cadhain, IRA activist, professor and writer, when he said, 'Tosoidh athghabhail na hEireann le hathghabhail na Gaeilge' (The reconquest of Ireland will begin with the reconquest of the Irish langauge)' (Adams, 1986: 144).

Between the death of Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker to die (5th may 1981) and the following autumn at least 100 nationalist murals appeared in Belfast and about 50 in Derry. Bobby Sands was a common topic of these murals and sometimes as in Derry (Figure 5.11) all the hunger strikers appeared together. Other themes were images from the writing of Sands such as the Lark and the Freedom Fighter and the H of H-block (Figures 5.5 and 5.7). Rolston (1987) notes that the H was often represented as a brick or concrete edifice being broken apart by a clenched fist or blanketman rising up defiantly. What is being represented is not a victim but a defiant and unbroken rebel. This confidence is also expressed in the graffiti featured in Figures 5.12 and 5.13. The RPG7 mentioned in Figure 5.13 is an amour-piercing rocket launcher. Figure 5.12 refers to the Hyde Park bombing where as Liam remarked

'although a whole rake of soldiers were killed, all the fuss was about a horse' (Liam, 1985).

Rolston develops the theme of confidence and optimism in Republican murals and graffiti,

'Thus, out of seeming defeat comes triumph, a notion portrayed in the murals in the common use of the Phoenix. As a symbol of hope and rebirth, the Phoenix thus came to be used not just for the blanket protesters and hunger strikers themselves but for the whole Republican movement, born out of the flames of August 1969 in Belfast. 'Out of the ashes rose the Provisionals' was a common slogan, and in one mural in Twinbrook, it is not a Phoenx rising from the flames, but an armed IRA volunteer,

Already the main topic treated in the murals should be clear: the Republican armed struggle. There was no attempt by the muralists to distance themselves from the armed struggle for the sake of gaining purely humanitarian support for the hunger strikes. On the contrary, murals proudly proclaimed the armed struggle. In one, armed volunteers prepare to fire an RPG rocket launcher; another in Divis Flats served as a memorial to Irish National Liberation Army volunteers McLarnon and Loughran; a third in Gobnascale, Derry, painted on a commercial advertising hoarding, carried the message: 'Warning! Irish Republican Army occupied territory. British forces enter at own risk' ...
Sometimes the historical roots of the present struggle were shown, as in the Beechmount mural which juxtaposed volunteers from 1916 and the present, or more obliquely in the nearby murals of Patrick Pearse, leader of the 1916 Easter Rising, and James Connolly. The historical mural par excellence was the Beechmount one which copied Jeff Perks' linocut 'The Training Ground' (see Figure 5.23).
However, history as such proved relatively unimportant in the murals. It was the current struggle that was prioritised, in terms of either repression—such as the use of plastic bullets—or resistance. In fact, in locating that struggle politically, muralists often turned either to international comparisons—as in the third world-like depiction of a guerrilla in Andersonstown—or to their own ingenuity, as in a Derry mural where a Britain with Thatcher's head had its teeth sunk in the North of Ireland and is shaking the whole island furiously' (Rolston, 1987: 22).

The Phoenix rising can be seen in Figures 5.5 and 5.10, the final mural referred to by Rolston in figure 5.5 also. Figure 5.10 lists the ten dead hunger strikers and the 'five demands' referred to in Chapter 4. The night that Patsy O'Hara died, Patsy was from Derry, was described by Liam,

'The night Patsy died was one of the worst riots I've ever seen. It's estimated there were about three hundred people injured that night. There was at least seven or eight hundred plastic bullets fired, and up to a thousand petrol bombs thrown. There was a really fierce riot' (Liam, 1985).

The graffiti in Figure 5.14 was painted at the time of another hunger strike, that of the Basques in July 1984.

'The sign used to read 'Basque Independence Now'. It was painted I think last July when the Basques were on hunger strike. We did it as a gesture of support. After the strike we figured it might as well stay, why waste paint eh. Some lads painted over the Basque, so now it applies to us' (Liam, 1985).

The reference to other nationalist struggles is continued in Figure 5.15 20. Such intertextual references are common among Republicans in Northern Ireland. In the official discourse of the state such references are, as Chapter 3 demonstrated, related to a conception of a communistic network of international terrorism. Republicans, however, are indexing a community of solidarity, either a pan-gaelic struggle or more widely of wars of national liberation.

Figure 5.23

The Training Ground—Jeff Parks ; 1979 (CWI: Undated)

Republican spokespersons have themselves commented on the 'network of international terrorism'. Gerry Adams in his recent book The Politics of Irish Freedom comments that in more recent times internationalism has been an important element in Republicanism.

'Republicans have learnt from struggles in other countries and movements in many countries have acknowledged a debt to Irish Republicanism. Most guerrilla movements study the IRA and its mode of struggle and see it as a major example of how to develop a people's war. In the post-colonial era the emergence of successful struggles internationally has had a substantial effect on Republicans ...

The 'network of terror' propaganda put out by the likes of the Monday Club in Britain or in newspapers, books and magazines from the USA, by pet jouranalists of the CIA in particular, is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent our internationalist position. One of the ways in which this is done is by associating the Republican movement with the actions of groups such as the Red Brigade, the Red Army Faction/Bader-Meinhoff and Direct Action, despite the fact that at successive Ard Fheiseanna Sinn Fein has denounced the actions of such groups' (Adams 1986: 130).

The PLO, the ANC and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas are specifically named by Adams as groups that Irish Republicans would empathise with (see Figure 5.24). This distinction in Republican discourse of different struggles within what the official discourse golbalises as 'international terror' is interesting enough. What is also of interest, however, in Derry and other places, is the local knowledge of wider struggles. The popularity, for instance, among Derry Republicans of Christy Moore is significant. Christy Moore is a Dublin balladeer who sings about South American and political struggles all over the world. The range of Republican writings are significant in this Figure 5.24 cited, Leigh, 1987; 26)respect too, ranging from the writings of Bobby Sands on Nicaragua and Chile (Sands, 1983) to articles in Iris, a Republican magazine, on aboriginal Australia. Talks with prisoners and ex-prisoners also reveal a lively interest in world politics. John a recently released prisoner I talked to in the Creggan startled me with the depth and breadth of this knowledge and thinking about world affairs. In the most difficult of conditions the prisons act as a tremendously important site of politicisation. As Mitchell explained, in prison people,

'had the chance to talk about mistakes the movement had made, the time to take into consideration all the other struggles across the world.

And I would say that thinking back to the early days... that the people from Derry who ended up being interned in the main weren't readers, they were people who'd reacted to the type of experiences that were happening on the streets, which was police brutality, the British army, Bloody Sunday-type of events, and there was an awful lot of emotionalism. Among them, maybe out of every 3 or 4, you had one who either was reasonably political and socially conscious, or you would have had that one who had the potential to be so, and they in turn of course affected people. And now, in the blocks, in the H-blocks, there's very intense discussion and counselling-type of activities. All of that developed so that it became an extremely politicising experience. I mean what happened here during the Hunger Strike was intense solidarity under very very difficult living conditions, that which eventually kind of brought about the Hunger Strike protest, which was 6 years of unremitting protest and agitation against the prison regime. It had that effecct of bringing people together and creating that intense solidarity and they were drawing strength from struggles all over the world. I mean it's reflected in the type of writing that Bobby Sands was doing, right up to the time of his embarking on the Hunger Strike. It does actually represent, you know, a breadth of interest in international struggles, struggles all over the world. I mean from the Red Indian struggles through to Aborigines, and also a knowledge of that in a situation where he wasn't allowed the stimulus of books I mean they simply weren't allowed them as part of the prison regime of isolating them and breaking them down. Breaking down their resistance. Their sole reading material consisted of comics and some of the Pitman series of books and the Bible. That was what they were allowed in, so everything else was done on the basis of smuggling stuff in, clandestinely, smuggling for instance, these little crystal radios to let them keep in touch, in tune with what was happening on the outside. There was an incredible amount of ingenuity involved in getting material into and outside of the gaols and that was something that bound together the friends and supporters and family of those inside, because they were part of that whole sort of network of information and support. All of that contributes, that's why I'm telling you about it. All of it like little pockets of experience contribute and all of it kind of coming together, gelling, those prisoners having been through the system and we've any amount of them here, like young Keiran is out now, working for Sinn Fein. He's been through the whole H-block thing from start to finish and he's now out here on the streets working for us' (Mitchell, 1985).

Sinn Fein then, carries on this education work outside the prison in the broader community. Such education work was always a concern of Sinn Fein,

'but now it's been given its proper priority, there is an external affairs department in Sinn Fein and they would handle that. For instance I was over in Italy last year. We had people in central America. We do send people out and we get people coming here all the time. A tremendous amount of contact now and interest in other people's struggles. We have people scattered about the country who take particular areas of interest. People who will monitor the situation in Africa in the Middle East, Latin America, etc.

Young people are very important on this education programme. We talked to them about the kinds of things that other people have to do as a way of developing their own political consciousness and the channels are kind of many and varied' (Mitchell, 1985).

Another Bogsider remarked to me that,

'In the old days, the people you would have talked about would be Dan Green, Bobby Sands or James Connolly. They now talk about Soweto or El Salvador—that's reflected in our music and our struggle now—an awareness of other people's struggles. it's part of the greater interest in politics and theorising the political experience of Ireland' (Pat, 1985).

This concern with theorising the politics of Ireland means that,

'The Republicans are emphasising a political role in that it's not just enough to keep fighting the Brits militarily. You have to challenge the Brits on every front. You have to create a political alternative to the SDLP. And so there is an emphasis on politics, on ordinary ground, spade-work and replacing the SDLP at every level. That's a long process that could go through a number of failures. But it's a committment that the Republican movement has made' (Morrison, undated).

It is necessary to understand Sinn Fein's definition of Republicanism in order to understand some of the conflict between Sinn Fein and the SDLP.

'Well, you'd need to be aware of the nuances, of course, because everybody is a Republican, including the SDLP. They want to see a 32 county Ireland. The nationalist party want to see a 32 county united Ireland.

I mean everybody has a British withdrawal scenario, of course, as well. Even the British. If they can get out of it with a 32 county Ireland which is tied or congenial strategically, economically tied to Britain would suit them very well. What would they need to be spending a thousand million pounds a year here for? You'd need to be aware of all this, then, I mean everybody has a British withdrawal scenario. I mean even the Yanks have it. Reagan, in his St Patrick's Day message prayed for a united and free Ireland consistent with the needs of the Western Alliance in America. he just said it straight out. So you say Republican; you now actually do mean Republican/Socialist.
It's a Sinn Fein classification, then, I mean, mind you I hasten to add that not everybody in Sinn Fein wuld subscribe to that but that's the kind of thing that we're working on. I mean, there are nationalists in the Republican movement, people who should be in the nationalist movements and they're there because they support armed struggle and that, for a lot of people, was sufficient to be called the Sinn Fein. But it really isn't sufficient now even in terms of Sinn Fein's own policies and our demands on our numbers, and a result we're having quite a lot of shake-outs, I mean, we're losing people and bringing in people. The whole complexion of our movement is changing. We're demanding, now, that people have a political attitude and not a solely militaristic one. It's a constant kind of education programme (Mitchell, 1985).

The SDLP is increasingly seen by Sinn Fein then as a Nationalist rather than Republican organisation, middle class rather than working class, and as such more and more prejudiced by encroachment and incorporation by the state—hence 'vote John Hume 21for a better Londonderry' (Figure 5.17) Liam explained Derry/Londonderry (see also Figure 5.11).

'there's a big controversy over the name of the city, you know, because the old name of Londonderry is symbolic of the struggle and the oppression here. It's a symbol, really, so the Unionists insist on it being called Londonderry, and we insist on it being called Derry, so this continuous motion goes through the council and the SDLP refuse to take steps to revert the name back to Derry. So they changed the name of the council because they were put under pressure. The name of the council is Derry.

The Stoop Down Low Party is actually the SDLP; the Social and Democratic Labour Party. What that means actually is that the SDLP will go to any lengths, you know, in order to stay where they are and get concessions and stuff like that. They're always compromising and selling out. This would have been just the young people. We've seen also SDL25P. That was a reference to when they had some power in the government here. One of the first things they did was imposing a 25p fine per week on people who didn't pay their rent and rates. The Rent and Rate strike was a protest against internment' (Liam, 1985—see Figure 5.16).

The main charge against Republicanism from the state is, as I have pointed out in Chapter 3, that they are incoherent, pathological violent criminals, destructive of their own communities and a major source of the disorder. Figure 5.19 presents a dramatic reversal of this accusation and suggests the British state as the source of pathology and disorder in the community.

'Steven McConomy was a young fellow, who was only ten and was killed by a plastic bullet in 1982. The bullet was fired from a range of about twelve yards; the young fellow never had a chance. He suffered severe brain damage and died a week later in hospital. It was just the machine that was keeping him alive, you know. They tried to justify it by saying he was a rioter, but he was only ten year old' (Liam, 1985).

Eamonn McCann documents the emergence of the Provisional IRA in Derry,

'When in 1969, Johnnie McMenamin saw a crowd of men in the street in St Columb's Wells in the middle of the night smashing into houses and beating up his neighbours and rushed to the phone to dial 999 he was reacting as any working class person in an 'ordinary' society would. But what does one do when it is the police force itself which is doing the marauding? Who, then, does one call in?

A little later that question might have been answered in the Bogside: the British Army. And when the army begins to behave exactly as the police had done, what then? ... The logic of that demanded a physical campaign against the state' (McCann, 1980: 134).

The activity of the Provisionals over the last 15 years has been seen by members of the Catholic community as largely reactive to threats to the physical and social integrity of their community; a reaction for instance to attacks made by the police in 1968-69 to those made by the Army in 1972-73 and again in 1978. But even this documentation underestimates the incursions, they are a part of everyday life. Sometimes they are well publicised, as was Bloody Sunday, some less so as when at 4 am on 31st July 1972:

'They came ... unceasing lines of them in convoy, Ferrets, Whippets and APCs. Landrovers, Saladins and bulldozers coming up Rossville Street, past the High Flats and into Lecky Road, search-lights playing down from the city walls ... 'Jesus Christ' said Tommy McCourt, watching from Westland Street and getting his military parallels crossed in his awe, it's bloody Dunkirk' (McCann, 1980: 114-15).

Often they received no publicity at all:

'In September 1972 on a Saturday afternoon, my son and I were washing the car outside our home. My daughter, Laura, aged ten years and my youngest child aged two years were in the garden playing with our family labrador dog. A British army patrol passed by and Mutley our dog barked at them. He made no effort to go near them. The patrol moved on to the corner of the street. A soldier raised his arm to take aim. I thought nothing of this as soldiers frequently adopt this posture and survey the street through their rifle sights. A shot rang out and the dog leapt in the air, yelped and fell to the ground. The children started screaming' (McAllion, 1979).

In the light of these incursions the policy of the Provisionals is logical and coherent. To secure the community one must defend it, to defend it one must remove the British army, to remove the British army one must remove the community from the influence of the state and contest the British army outside the boundaries of the community.
The coherence of the Provisional's activity can also be measured by their increasing control over their own activities and their responsiveness to community influence. In the early days the IRA was created out of the front-line hooligans; young and urgent, with all the arrogance of their age, they were not very responsive to community control. Under community pressure, however, things changed. Some of the control was formal, by the church, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Bogside Community Association, some of it was informal:

'On one occasion they (the army) took up position at the top of a laneway near Westland Street. It was mid-morning and in the laneway a woman was buying bread from a bread van at her back door. Round the corner bounced a teenage Provisional with an M1 carbine. He loosed off half a dozen shots up the lane at the soldiers. This obviously put the woman and the breadman in some danger. 'Get out of it you wee bugger', she shouted enraged, 'Can you not wait until the breadman's finished serving the bread" (McCann, 1980: 95-96).

Control was established and developed and the Provisional IRA became an integral part of community response to their situation. Of course, this view of the integration of the Provisional IRA with the community could not be spoken or postulated through the official discourse of the British state, except in as far as it illustrated the pathology of the whole community.

The British state's position is that by 1976-77 their policy of anti-terrorism had been very successful, the Provisional IRA was all but beaten and their influence on the community destroyed and terrorist acts reduced. This view is a result of the state's discursive position which denies the relationship between the Provisional IRA and the community as seen and understood from within the community itself. Community support for the Provisional IRA is a complex variable which is in danger of being portrayed as being static. One important aspect of the relationship needs to be explored. Prior to 1976, the Provisional IRA in Derry was organised on traditional lines similar to that reported by Burton in 'Anro' in 1972.

'Anro has a company in one of the three Belfast battalions which constitutes the Belfast brigade of the IRA (Provisionals). The company has a number of officers and volunteers' (Burton, 1978: 76).

Backing up the volunteers were the auxilliaries:

'The women's IRA the 'Cumann na mBan' and the two youth movements, 'Cumann na gCailini' for the girls and 'na Fianna Eireann' for the boys. Closely connected to the IRA but having a separate organisation is Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA and a legal political party in the north of Ireland' (Burton, 1978: 77).

This organisation was supported by the community, primarily as a local defence force. Burton's comments on the volunteers illustrate this:

'As a volunteer he will be paid a minimal wage. In Anro that wage was not enough to support him. In addition to friends and relatives supplementing a volunteer's income or diet, some shop owners and club managers would contribute goods and services' (Burton, 1978: 18-79).

But:

'In 1976 every battalion of the IRA in Derry was wiped out, that's a fact, the intelligence gathering that went on from Motorman was quite sophisticated and that meant that there were massive sort of arrests that year' (Paddy, 1979).

The reaction of the Provision IRA leadership was to regroup and reorganise into tighter cells so that their organisation could be less easily penetrated by the security forces. They retrained, selected better recruits and re-equipped. This process was characterised by the British state as one of detaching the IRA from its community base and on the surface this was so, the auxilliaries, women's organisations and the youth groups became less important. This reorganisation, however, rather than isolating the Provisional IRA, more effectively integrated the military into the community.

'It has turned out in the light of experience that, in fact, the emulation of traditional military structures, brigades and so forth, didn't enhance the possibility of involvement in the community. In the same way, for instance, as the cellular, more secretive organisation has actually propelled Sinn Fein into a more open role. Sinn Fein then becomes the medium by which the community makes its feelings known and its support, but it makes it much more possible for the IRA to operate in a sense because there is now a much more adequate division of labour. One could say that before 1976 the IRA was also having to do the political work. Sinn Fein was some form simply of auxillary support and that's about all they were' (Mitchell, 1985).

An indication of this change can be seen in the events in Derry towards the end of 1980 and during 1981. One effect of the IRA's reorganisation was a considerable reduction in its recruitment of young people. For many youngsters, the height of whose ambition it was to join 'the boys', this was seen as a rejection and an indication that they were unworthy. The result was that these 'rejects' began to form psuedo-paramilitary gangs sporting such names as 'Hoods'. Being undisciplined, they caused a good deal of petty theft and vandalism within the community. The problem was ameliorated by community leaders who, with the Provisional IRA organised these young people, offered them a role in the campaign for the hunger strikers and gave them responsibility for organising part of the community protest. More generally the events of April, May and June—the days of rioting in Derry, and the result of the by-election in Fermanagh and South Tyrone—indicates that rather than the Provisional IRA leading and cajoling the communtiy into activity, it was the community that was making the running, with the Provisional IRA being part of a wide based coherent response to the incursions of the British state.

Figure 5.18 demonstrates one relationship between the 'new' military and the community.

'The story behind one-sided McGuiness ...

There was an INLA bomb placed outside a pub in Strabane where there were a lot of cops, you know, peelers, in. There were also lots of civilians in the bar and they planted this no-warning bomb outside and there were a lot of civilians as well as cops injured, and Martin McGuiness put out this statement saying it was pretty reckless of them to do that because no matter what, they shouldn't kill civilians just to get cops. So a lot of the Republican youth from the Bogside though that this was being hypocritical. So we put up this slogan saying 'One-sided McGuiness"to get an explanation as to why he put out this statement. So they went up and had a meeting and Martin discussed it with them and they came down again and painted out the '-sided' so 'One McGuiness' BRY (Bogside Republican Youth) (Liam, 1985).

As Rolston notes,

'despite the current hysteria about international terrorism, the Republican element within the national camp does not have an image problem. Their confidence is clearly expressed in one mural in Derry, destroyed within a short time of completion by police throwing paint bombs. It shows a series of hands holding a brush, a spanner, pencils and a placard reading 'Tiocfaidh Ar La' ('Our Day Will Come'). Above them all is a hand raising an automatic rifle on high. The primacy of the armed struggle is thus in no doubt, but the importance of the other tasks in the movement is emphasised, not just by the accompanying quotation from Bobby Sands: 'Everyone, Republican or otherwise, has his or her own particular part to play" (Rolston, 1987: 26)—Figures 5.20 and 5.21.

The recognition, or rather open thematising of a 'role for everyone' is a significant new development in Republicanism,

'Ten years ago a young person, if you didn't join the boys then you were somehow not a proper Republican or you didn't have the bottle or something like that. Whereas nowadays it's accepted that there are many different ways of fighting. I mean Sinn Fein themselves, I mean this wasn't really their role but they suddenly saw themselves as being merely a kind of auxilliary movement to the Republican military movement. It's a protest, a reactive kind of organisation lurching from crisis to crisis. If it wasn't, say, a protest about prison conditions it was a protest about plastic bullets or some other thing. I mean they actually needed the crises to justify their existence. They were a marching or commemorative organisation rather than people as they are now, people who are members of trade unions, education groups, and so forth' (Mitchell, 1985).

Liam develops the significance of the new Sinn Fein,

'This mural was actually painted last June, June 1984. The mural is about the roles of Republicanism. What it's trying to show is that, as Bobby Sands said, everyone has their own particular part to play, and it's to get people to think about how they can actually participate in the Republican struggle, in what's happening here. In the old days, you know, perhaps people thought if you wanted to fight the Brits you had to go out with a gun in your hand. but, you know, there are many ways of fighting them. The people who made this mural, for instance, made a good contribution to the struggle. It was vandalised by the RUC and normally we would paint it over, repaint it, but this time we thought we would do something different, so we put a plaque here to say—This mural was designed and painted by the creative talents of Derry Republicans , it was vandalised by the destructive talents of the RUC and British army.

That's actually a new tactic now. Instead of painting over them we just kind of let people know what's happened. It's a better idea, actually, I think.
You can see it says over there 'slimmer of the year' and 'fuck the IRA'. I mean, that's got to be RUC. The RUC are not impartial and non-sectarian. I mean, it says UVF there; that's a Loyalist paramilitary organisation, respons-ible for the deaths of many innocent Catholics.
It must have been the RUC because the UVF aren't very active in Derry and certainly not around here. They'd think twice about coming into this area, and besides people saw the RUC do it. Mind you, there's considerable cross membership so maybe the police were members of the UVF, that's been heard of before.
It says there 'Tiocfaidh ar la' and that has become more or less the Republican warcry. See, young people shout it all the time 'Tiocfaidh ar la'(see Figures 5.20 and 5.21) (Liam, 1985)

Before moving to discuss more exclusively the 'community' struggle in Derry I leave a summation of the new Sinn Fein by one of its architects, Gerry Adams.

'Recruitment to Sinn Fein used to occur primarily in the wake of events such as the 1969 pogroms, internment, Bloody Sunday and the hunger strikes, so that many people became absorbed into Sinn Fein but not educated into it. Thus there was a lack of unified political education process there was no planned development of Republican politics. This vacuum was, of course, filled by other political groupings and it assisted, for example, the growth of the SDLP just as the same kind of lack had contributed to the growth of Fianna Fail decades earlier. It also led to a certain ignoring of the need for political struggle in the 26 Counties.

In the 6 Counties, while Sinn Fein was more heavily involved with nationalist communities, few structured and thus durable links were forged from this relationship and no real advances were made. Sinn Fein was by and large perceived, and was in reality, a poor second cousin to the IRA. This was not only how we were seen by supporters and opponents; in many ways it was also how we viewed ourselves.
Much of the change in this situation has come about because of the length of the struggle, for the struggle itself has politicised Republicans. So, while there is still a spontaneous move towards Sinn Fein in the wake of some specific action like a British attack on a Republican funeral, there is also, as Sinn Fein becomes more relevant on a whole range of issues and more competent on the national question, a steady and consistent flow of recruits into our ranks. New members, especially young people who have lived their entire lives in the struggle, are of a developed political calibre. They have been politicised because the political situation has been continuously developing and because the crisis has been going on for so long.
While spontaneity may be regarded as an element in the political weakness of organised Republicanism, in many ways when properly harnessed it is also one of its greatest strengths, making it a living movement in struggle. Republicanism is a very potent force in Irish politics but the vehicle of organised Republicanism is still weak organisationally and our underdevelopment in this respect is something which we recognise and which we are constantly addressing.
Electoral success in the 6 Counties and in specific areas in the 26 has accelerated this process of developing a party political organisation. There is nothing which concentrates the mind of a political party as much as an electoral campaign and while we do not restrict ourselves to electoralism—indeed we see it merely as one facet in a many-faceted struggle of campaigns, street agitation, cultural resistance, publicity work and education—our electoral successes have played a major role in changing the nature of Sinn Fein' (Adams, 1986: 151-52).

The photo essay on the Bogside has discussed the complex nature of the military struggle in Derry and continued the relationship between Republican community and paramilitary organisation begun in Chapter 4. It has argued that although photographs and other visual images could and should be produced as ethnographic data, they do not provide unproblematic access to an 'out there' reality. Such materials should rather be regarded, like other ethnographic texts, as statements forming part of a specific discourse formation. The essay demonstrates that even buildings, monuments and other spatial relations are part of the complex architectonics of resistance. It points to the role of Republican iconography and Irish language in the struggle against the British state. The section concludes with a discussion of the relationship between all of the above and the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Sinn Fein. It argues that the contemporary organisation of the IRA into a more anonymous cellular structure has, contrary to the British state's belief, allowed a closer integration into Republican community in Derry. Further, the section notes the way in which the changed organisational structure of militant Republicanism has encouraged the development of a 'new' (more active and visible) Sinn Fein.

The concluding remarks in the previous section pointed out that the 'community struggle' is the other major element in this community's social praxis of resistance to the state and it is to this aspect that the discussion will now turn.

=== 5.4 Its Not Called War Any More its Called Community Work: The
Community Struggle in Derry ===

'Believe it or not we did develop an almost medieval society in the Bogside. There was a tremendous amount of idealism ... If you consider Derry, for instance, everybody comes here to talk to Derry people, to look inside their heads, to analyse the situation, and then go away and write books on it. I've got fed up listening to these people for its a pity they didn't come in 1966 when there was nothing here. There were no jobs, nor houses ...

In the final analysis the community struggle goes on, the struggle against the helplessness of ordinary people to manage, to cope in a very complex, fast-changing society' (Doherty, July 1974).

As Percival points out, many of the problems community activists have had to face in Derry stem directly from the 'Troubles' 22, equally, many of the problems they face are similar to those found in other western societies. Community action in the Bogside/Creggan, although it operates against a background of violence, does in fact highlight many of the problems and issues facing those involved in community action in more peaceful settings (Percival, 1977). Percival notes that between 1968 and 1977 at least 500 permanent community organisations had been established across Northern Ireland—roughly one per 3,000 head of the population.

Community action and mutual aid was established long before the start of the current 'Troubles' in Ireland, however. In the thirties there was widespread resistance in several working class areas to the imposition of a major rent increase. In the forties and fifties tenants associations and workers co-operatives were in existence in Belfast. In Derry, the Derry Credit Union, a people's bank and the Derry Housing Aid Society, which began a house building programme, were both established in the fifties (The Credit Union in 1959). 1968, however, brought a rapid increase in the growth of such community groups and 'the style and content of much of this community action has been ultimately linked with the origins and progress of the disturbances' (Percival, 1977: 2). Following comments in the preceding section of this chapter, the 'community struggle', like the 'military struggle', must be seen in terms of a struggle with the state over the provision of resources for the Bogside/Creggan. Figure 5.25WEA & BCA, 1980: 4)

Before commenting on the development of community organisations in Derry a brief clarification needs to be made. I have already discussed the significance of seeing military and community struggles as related. In the case of community development in Northern Ireland a further issue needs to be noted.This concerns the supposed valency (or in some discourses necessity) of community development to combat or 'solve' inter-community, or sectarian conflict. The first point to be noted following comments in the introductory chapter is the proximity of the moral claims of the official discourse (what I earlier called the 'priestly voice') and the liberal humanist desire for an end to the violence. The success of the official discourse of the British state is contingent on the degree to which it can establish a close relation beween itself and any or every 'reasonable person'. The Community Relations Commission (CRC) began in Northern Ireland in 1970. It was part of a larger pattern of increasing state intervention into communities in most western societies, for example, the Community Development Projects in Britain and the War on Poverty in the United States of America. Maurice Hayes, first chairperson of the CRC, said in 1970,

'Harmonious relations are the product of life in a well-functioning community with which the individual can identify and in which she wants to participate. This suggests an approach by way of community development—of helping to produce in local areas such healthy communities' (Hayes, CRC (mimeo), 22nd November 1971).

One of the functions of the CRC from the place of the official discourse, was to 'foster harmonious relations throughout the community'. Thus community relations and community development have been inextricably intertwined. Williams' (in press) contention of the 'evolutionist' phrasing of the power base of the official discourse is relevant here, that is, progress in Northern Irish communities is seen as a movement away from community and difference, towards a homogeneous moral community organised by the state which is 'above' culture and ethnicity.

Such a position was not true of the CRC itself, however, and this tension was crucial to the state's eventual decision to disband the organisation. Clearly, Hayes' use of the concepts of 'community' and 'community development' are at least ambiguous, if not directly at odds with those of the state. 'Healthy communities' in terms of the CRC refers precisely to the ability of a community to defend itself against the state. The conflict between the state and the CRC is, however, obscured by the complex relationship between Stormont and Westminster and the British state's general framing of the 'Northern Ireland Problem' as community pathology.

Two important features of the situation in Derry during the period 1970-72 need to be borne in mind here. Firstly, at this time, the time of the 'no-go' areas and Free Derry, the state agencies, both the military and social work agencies were unable to operate inside Bogside community. Social and welfare workers could not operate within the Bogside and for a variety of reasons were not trusted by the community. One of the most important reasons, of course, is the fact that much social work is ultimately dependent on the law and the support of the police. Secondly, one needs to bear in mind the tension which existed between the local (Stormont) state and the British (Westminster) state. It was to Derry, remember, that the British army had recently been dispatched to prevent an RUC led pogrom of the Catholic community. The British state then, regarded both Protestant and Catholic working class communities as dominated by and poorly represented by both their politicians and the paramilitaries. A major feature of the domination of these communities was concerned with the ability to distribute resources. Community development, within the official discourse, suggested a path out of two dilemmas. The development of a new 'grassroots' leadership structure enabled both 'better' representation and the greater ability of the state to regulate the communities in question.
Deane outlines two consequences of the intertwining of community development and community relations.

'Firstly, community work concentrates itself on a particular clearly identifiable neighbourhood and encourages the people of that neighbourhood to win whatever resources they can to better the quality of their lives (Deane, 1981: 17).

The gaining of extra resources from the state, however, is always at the expense of some other community and

'When neighbourhoods are sectarian ghettoes to begin with, this means that, willingly or not, the competition for resources (which may be based on parochial considerations) inevitably has sectarian consequences' (Deane 1981: 17-18).

This zero sum argument has some validity in general terms over the ten year peiod, 1970-80, that Deane is talking about. During the period 1970-72, the time of the CRC, however, there were 'extra' resources coming into Northern Ireland. The fact that the CRC, via community development initiatives, often significantly by-passed the sectarian distribution system was another reason for its eventual downfall. After 1972, then, the sectarian distribution of resources was re-introduced (see below and Rolston, 1981).

Secondly,

'Much of the emphasis within community work is put into developing a sense of solidarity and self worth in specific communities, in the belief that from a position of strength better inter-community relations may be established. However, inevitably, this again has reinforced rather than weakened ghettoes and division ... where there are only two types of community (Republican and Loyalist) or appear to be only two, then this isn't on. This is made all the more certain when one community is in a position of overlordship over the other. Thus, community work is caught and bound in the context of community relations and the last ten years have clearly shown that what is needed is the development of approaches which are concerned with issues and philosophy rather than simply resource allocation and geographical identity' (Deane 1981: 17-18).

As Rolston notes, inter-community strife and community politics can co-exist.

'This is because community politics is not an abstraction, but politics in and between communities which in Northern Ireland are divided along sectarian lines. Because of this divsion even those actions carried out without any sectarian intentions involved can have sectarian consequences' (Rolston 1981: 41).

To see community development as a 'solution' to sectarianism in Northern Ireland then, is to accept, of necessity, that sectarianism is simply, or even most importantly, a matter of attitudes and bigotry—precisely dependent on the 'bog Irish' characteristics outlined in Chapter 3 which are fundamental to the discourse of the British state. Once again, in this discourse, the British state is portrayed as a neutral arbiter, at least in terms of sectarian positionings, trying to help the 'Irish' solve their problems. It is, of course, interventionist in that it is attempting to incorporate both Irish communities into a discourse of class and thus the state, rather than 'ethnicity'.

Rolston notes,

'It could hardly be argued that there is a scrupulous pursuit of 'balance' on the part of the British reformist state in Northern Ireland in the provision of community facilities. But such balance as there is is sectarian, requiring, for example, one leisure centre in a Protestant area for every one in a Catholic area. Similarly, the Housing Executive designates a Protestant housing action area for every Catholic one designated, again pursuing 'balance', even when it is obvious from the executive's own surveys that it is in the Catholic areas where the worst housing conditions exist. The same commitment to 'balance' is apparent in the Fair Employment Agency, even though it can be argued that a policy of equality in employment would require not just 'fairness' but positive discrimination in order to counter the present imbalance whereby Protestants continue to be more likely to be in skilled employment and Catholics in unskilled' (Rolston 1981: 41).

In this view then sectarianism is much more than attitudes and prejudices, equally community development implies more than the changing of attitudes. In the light of this official discourse community development can be posited as the state discourse of community. There is as Rolston notes, much in the 'pedigree' of community devlopment to support this case.

'Significantly, CD (community development) was in the forefront of counter-insurgency in the British colonies. For example, the British in Malaya 'resettled' half a million people; they were moved into camps behind the barbed wire in areas where insurgency was occurring on the assumption that anyone outside the wire was a guerrilla and could be dealt with accordingly. In 'Rhodesia' such camps were called 'protected villages'; in Malaya they were called 'CD villages'. CD became part of isolating the guerrilla from the population. In this light, then, it is perhaps not surprising that some of those who had learnt the method in Malaya should have used it when over a decade later they were posted to Northern Ireland. The army in Northern Ireland became involved in community endeavours in local areas for a number of reasons, among them being PR (one example was Operation WHAM—Win Hearts and Minds) and intelligence gathering. But above and beyond that there was a logic to the army's involvement in the community, a logic that relates back to the colonial experience' (Rolston 1981: 39).

Rolston notes the influence of Kitson,

'Kitson developed his theory in Malaya. But it was in Northern Ireland as Commander of 39 Brigade in Belfast that he had a chance to put his ideas into practice with a team of Civil Liaison Officers (CLOs). These officers were to chair local CD Co-ordinating Committees, bringing together police and army Community Relations personrel and community workers.They were also to act as go-betweens between community groups and government departments. In fact, the Civil Liaison scheme never lived up to the Kitsonian promise. The number of CLOs was small, and their contact with community groups was for the most part minimal. That wasn't for want of trying, however, one CLO confided to me that on one occasion he knew that a main road in a certain area which badly needed re-surfacing was about to be re-surfaced. He went along to a local Tenants' Association meeting and raised the issue of re-surfacing. When the Association asked him to get the job done, he said he couldn't promise anything, but he would see what he could do. Shortly afterwards the road was re-surfaced, and he got the credit. When the Ministry of Community Relations was disbanded in 1975, these CLOs, by then retitled Community Relations Representatives, disappeared into the growing bureaucracy of Direct Rule, first into the Department of Education, and later into the Department of the Environment, where they still exist, as the centre spread of Ulster Commentary, 398, April 1980 ('Men Who Get Things Done') makes clear' (Rolston 1981: 39).

Rolston's commentary demonstrates the necessity for understanding the way in which the concepts of community and community development change meanings depending on which discourse formation they are part of. It is clearly the case that community development practices of the RUC, the British Army, Sinn Fein and voluntary community groups are quite different which is, of course, not to say that they are unrelated or always at odds with each other. Community development is better regarded as a field of struggle, a site where 'meanings' are continually fought for.

The setting up of the CRC in 1970 as well as the tenfold increase in the number of full-time paid community workers and the increasing professionalism of community work since the mid 1970s (Deane, Rolson and Frazer in Frazer, 1981) can all be seen importantly as an attempt by the state to win ground in this crucial discursive field, that is, as an attempt by the state to use community development as a technology of social control rather than a means of promoting radical change.

'The Community Officers were put into the field just to pour oil on troubled waters. There is no doubt about that. Those involved were conscious of this and they did kick against the system. The first Chairman of the Community Relations Commission (CRC) was told by the Minister of Community Relations that his job was to make the Government look good. However, on something like 41 out of 57 separate occasions when detailed plans for community development were submitted by the CRC they were not looked at by the Ministry. So all the research undertaken by the CRC didn't mean a thing as far as the politicians were concerned. The sacking of the CRC was the most blatant act of political thuggery I have witnessed for many many years here in Northern Ireland' 23Doherty, July 1974).

The British state attributing to itself the role of unbiased arbiter in sectarian conflict in Northern Irish communities naturally supported the idea of community development and the CRC. Logically also the CRC in particular and 'community development' in general are linked to a general strategy of policing the social. Naturally enough, when the CRC began to produce reports which suggested sectarianism was more than simply attitudinal and further that the state itself was implicated in sectarian structures, the CRC was dissolved. The CRC, then, was seen by the state as aiding rather than preventing the challenge to the moral authority of the state from a community base and thus had to be stopped. It was stopped, in fact, by the Northern Ireland politicians who reinstated the earlier sectarian structures.

'The decisions by Cooper and Moyle (the abolition of the CRC and the decision to give the responsibility for community work to the district councils), changed the method of allocation of resources and the level of resources available. Cooper's decision to abolish the CRC was based on the belief that people would be encouraged to use their local councillors and thus to operate with a system of privilege—the party political machines. He saw community activity as an alternative to party politics and tried to demolish it. Moyle was more subtle in that he hoped that by giving responsibility for community development to district councils he would stem the tide of complaints about the lack of powers of the councils and effectively render community work answerable to the party political machine' (Deane 1981: 14-15—my emphasis).

The conflict between the community and the state, however, is precisely one of struggle. The policing of the community aby the state, whether by military or community development means, creates conditions of resistance from that community and it is to this experience in Bogside/Creggan that I now wish to return.

The Catholic Church in Derry was, and still is, a key institution in the production and nonproduction of sites of community resistance to the state as a continuation of Mary's biography illustrates. mary remember, lived in Wellington Street in what is now the Bogside,

'Religion was very important in everyone's eyes. Every Wednesday night the women of the street went to the Chapel (St Eugenes Cathedral), for the 'confraternity', a religious service for women. The men went on Tuesday night. Those who didn't were talked about on the street.

Father Browne, long since departed, was the quthority and his word was lawl. The terrible 'sins' of the day were going with Protestants, dancing in Protestant halls, and actually marrying one. For that you were excommunicated from the church and your name read out from the pulpit. Everyone went to Mass on Sunday and Devotions. The young men went to the boy's sodalitry and the young women to the girls Sodalitry. During World War II the entire street assembled at their front doors and recited the Rosary every night.
Every year there was the Retreat, First Communion and Confirmation, processions, St. Columba's Day and the Fifteenth of August. The former were all church centred events, they provided excitement and 'occasions' for people to get dressed up. The Fifteenth of August was slightly different. Although it was primarily a religious feast of the Virgin Mary, it was celebrated as a political day for Catholics in the Nationalist context. Bonfires were lit throughout the town and everyone went tripping around to see which street had the biggest and best. They all eventually returned to their own and danced and sang songs until the morning. The songs were political, 'Ireland Mother Ireland', 'Wrap the Green Flag Round Me Boys' and 'Kevin Barry' etc. Each street had its accomplishment of singers and musicians; Wellington Street was exceptionally talented.
There was lots of things by way of entertainment in my tennage years. Dances, pictures, the Sunday night walks on Carlisle Road.
This peculiar but very socially acceptable event was that boys and girls all went to Carlisle Road (now considered a Protestant area) and down the street, girls on one side, boys on the other. If you saw a boy you fancied and it was reciprocal, you paired off and went home together.
Dances were mainly organised by the Church, in the Guildhall and were big events. No bars were permitted at the dance hall. Drinking was not socially acceptable.
From my earliest years I was taught to respect my elders, fear the priest, and not allowed to go 'up the banking'. The banking led to Derry Walls, and to Walkers Square, which was classified as a rough area of the City.
There was an unwritten code about morality in the sexual sense; you just did not talk about it and I never heard the word 'sex' used, when it was discussed it was in school or Church and it was called purity or impurity depending on the subject.
Women were prohibited by unspoken laws from frequenting pubs, bookies, housey-housey (Bingo). Not all women conformed, but those who went to such places were generally regarded as low class. My father never permitted my mother to go to these places. She didn't want to anyhow. The same codes applied to wearing make-up and women going to dance halls frequented by military personnel, mainly Navy men.
Work was scarce for men and the women worked in the factories. Practically every girl in our street left school at fourteen and went to work in the shirt factory. This was where I personally learned about Protestants and Catholics. All the management and staff of the factory where I worked were Protestant. The bulk of employees, machinists, Catholics. The male work force, mechanics, cutters were all Protestant. A notice on the wall told Catholics that if they overslept on Saints holidays (compulsory attendance at mass required) they would not be permitted time off to attend.
I clashed with the management over this, when one of the girls who had missed the early seven o'clock mass, asked permission to go to the twelve o'clock one. She was refused and rather than miss mass, she walked out. When she returned in the afternoon she was sacked. I organised a strike over this and forced the management to reconsider their actions.
It never occurred to me to organise a strike over pay or working conditions, as strikes were frowned on by the community but a religious issue was different and so recieved support' (Mary, 1981—my emphasis).

For Mary, and many others in Bogside/Creggan then, the Catholic Church supported and prevented forms of resistance. Community, in Mary's speech, is a machine of surveillance tied to the church, as much as any kind of community of solidarity against an external enemy. Clearly, any discussion of Bogside community in Derry during this period, the 1950s and 1960s and earlier, needs to be aware of the relations between the Catholic Church, the Stormont Parliament, its local representation and Westminster (see Farrell, 1976; Bew et al, 1979 and Darby, 1976).

Paddy Doherty explains the situation in Derry in the 1950s and 1960s as far as party politics was concerned.

'we had politics but we didn't have any work, we didn't have houses, we were in an awful situation. In fact the people were powerless and apathetic. It's unbelievable but at that time we had a situation here where the Protestant minority of thirty per cent ruled the Catholic majority of seventy per cent. Now I'm not saying that the Protestants ruled the Catholics, but we had political parties, the Unionist Party representing the Protestant population and the Nationalist Party representing the Catholic population. The latter fought so hard for a number of years that on one occasion I remember James Hegarty (Nationalist) saying at a council meeting 'For God's sake will somebody speak because I have been here for eleven years and I don't know the sound of a man's voice, I only know the colour of his hand when he raises it against me'. That was the political situation and as far as the ordinary man (sic) in the street was concerned there was absolute and abject apathy. No attempt was made to solve the city's problems.

We cannot separate politics from the Community question, no matter what we try to do about it, no matter how idealistic we may be 24. At that particular time housing and jobs were vitally important and the Unionist Party knew that to crack the housing or to crack the unemployment problem might have disturbed the fine political balance so their faces were turned absolutely and completely against it. The Catholic representatives on the other hand, feeling powerless and not able to do anything at all about it acquiesced. In fact one politician told me on the question of housing, 'The position is simply this, they have turned their face against building outside the South Ward (the Catholic area), absolutely and completely. There will be no houses for Catholics outside the South Ward. There is a population explosion and if you want houses and you can't build out then you must build up'. Thus the most difficult battle we had against the high rise flats was against our own representatives who said, 'This is what we must take because if we don't take this we get nothing.' That was the attitude of our (Catholic) politicians at that time, if we didn't take what's handed to us, if we didn't take the crumb from the table, we get absolutely nothing' 25(Doherty, 1974).

Mary, like many others experienced this housing problem,

'I got married in 1955 and hadn't the foggiest notion about sex and babies except that I expected to have both. I spent the nine months of my first pregnancy wondering where this baby was coming from. His birth in 1956 was a nightmare.

Housing (or lack of it) was the big thing in Derry then, we lived with my parents in one room. This was the done thing.
My father, who was a school teacher by profession (but was always on the run), had some connections in high places, namely Murphy, who was then the housing officer.
We put our name on the Corporation housing list, very much aware that because we were Catholics, we would probably have to wait years for a house.
I got a house in Foyle Hill. It was magic to me and all other couples who moved into Rathkeel Way. We had only to wait five years, which by Derry standards was a short time.
We had lived in a two up two down house, no bathroom, outside toilet, etc. All thirteen of us, for by this time, 1960, I had four children.
The BSR factory, the first to give male employment on any large scale, and the greatest thing to hit Derry since the war, opened in 1953, and my husband and most of the men in Rathkeel Way worked there. We were in our new house two weeks when it closed down, throwing a thousand men out of work. There was great anger but it was acepted and the millionaire owner lived in luxury in Switzerland.
I remember at the time depression among the community, but mostly the way it was just accepted. No marches, protests, not even a 'why'? Apathy with a capital A.
Those years were very much taken up with babies, both having them and rearing them. The women in our street rarely went out, our role was to have babies and look after our husbands and homes. Rathkeel Way was to an extent an extension of Wellington Street. After we got to know each other, we went into each others homes, discussed what was common problems, how to make ends meet, nappy rash, pregnancy and other mundane but relevant issues. The first church built in Creggan opened in 1960 and the first Primary School was built. We attached ourselves to the church and participated in most of the church activities. We were parochial people. Creggan as such was a wilderness. We had to go out of it for most things. This meant bus trips to the town.
Near our house was a small field, where the children played. One day my son told me 'strange men' were in the field. I discovered that the field was earmarked for development and I was speechless with anger. I launched a campaign to save the field which culminated in the first Tenants Association in Derry and what could be termed an awakening of some of the people to the reality of what was going on ...' (Mary, 1982).

Paddy Doherty explains how the concern, initially focused around housing issues, eventually led to a whole host of community and civil rights initiatives, culminating in the development of the Bogside Community Association. His account begins in 1959 with the establishment of a People's Bank, the Derry Credit Union and a housing initiative, the Derry Housing Aid Society. His account demonstrates clearly that the problems of the Bogside and Creggan were both 'local' and 'national' and that a number of different responses were called for,

'There were two streams of activity and I was involved here and there throughout the whole situation. One we can call the 'Up by yourown boot straps brigade' who gave us, for example, the Derry Credit Union, (the People's Bank) a vitally important organisation because at that time it gave people the opportunity of at least controlling their own financial affairs. It didn't give them jobs. It didn't give them houses. Nevertheless, it was important from the Catholic point of view because they didn't ask the Church whether they could set it up or not, they just simply went ahead and did it. It was thus a break-through as far as Catholics were concerned. As well as that, it broke the law. It broke the law because it contravened the Banking Act, the Company's Act, the Provident and Industrial Society's Act, and a host of others. But we decided it didn't matter and went ahead and did it, because we agreed that if we wanted to change the legislation of the country we must create a need for change. Nobody would change it to please us, we must create the need for change so we did just that. It was the, 'Up by your boot straps Brigade' which also produced the Derry Housing Aid Society. Again the idea was to produce homes by bringing people together. The people involved in these activities were, in the main not the people who were very badly off. The original board of the Derry Credit Union consisted of teachers, doctors,JPs and business people. They were people who wanted to do something for the community. They had a kind of parent-child, professional-client approach to the whole thing but they were producing something and it was a break-through. Ulster Ceramics was an effort to create employment by the same type of people.

On the other hand, we had activities of the Derry Housing Action Committee. We could call this Community Action and the former Community Development. Community Development was the respectable end of things whilst Community Action included the people who desperately needed houses and who had to change society to get houses, who had to force the bureaucrats and the politicians into producing houses because at that time it just simply could't be done any other way.
... So people began to squat in houses and take over places and then you had that 'infamous' incident, which, I think, was a major break-through in Derry when people decided that they would take a caravan to the Lecky Road and simply block the traffic. To the ordinary Catholic in Derry it was an awful thing to do, not only were they inconvenienced but they didn't want to be associated with those concerned. Yet the squatting and the caravan were important. It was direct action, people simply went in and said to the Council, 'If you can't sove our housing problems we're not going to let you meet'. Of course what happened then was that the Council met the Committee. So there you have the two streams' (Doherty, 1974).

It was the campaign around the New University of Ulster, eventually built in Colraine when there was a strong feeling by many that Derry was the logical place for such development, that saw the increasing unification of these two streams, a process which was consolidated by the Civil Rights march of 5th October 1968.

'Then you had the University for Derry campaign, mass meetings and a motorcade to Stormont in protest against building the new University in Coleraine. The University for Derry campaign was a watershed in Irish politics and was the start of the drift of the majority of people towards direct action. The banning of the 5th October march in 1968 brought the two streams together and the subsequent action by the police drove many who were involved in Community Development into direct action. The two groups, the people who needed housing and jobs and wanted to do something about it and the people who weren't in need but wanted to help, joined forces, this was action, and whereas before we were dealing with social problems this became a kind of social/political type of organisation, bringing together different members of the community. It confronted the government with the situation and demanded they do something about it. Then of course we had the three emotive demands. One man one vote, one man one house, one man one job... The Derry Citizens Defence Association was notable for one thing. They didn't have a Community Organisation but they did have Street Committees. The Derry Citizen's Defence Association, after the initial clash in 1969, adopted a kind of social role. They went out into the various streets so that no decision was made by that Derry Citizens' Defence Association unless the Streets Representatives had a say. As well as that it was quite common, after a decision had been made, to go out into the street, having a meeting on a street corner and say that a decision had been made tonight, do you agree or not. It was a democracy which enabled people to feel that they were having a say in what was going on.

The government staggered from crisis to crisis in face of the most successful non-violent campaign ever waged in this country and to save the government Prime Minister O'Neill sacked the Derry Corporation. A Development Commission was set up in Derry and a long list of promised reforms was presented to the Catholic deputation. An election was called and the old Nationalist 'buffer' Party was almost wiped out and the new leadership that emerged from the people split the people, many putting their hopes in the new Catholic leadership and the promised reforms. But the Unionist Party dragged its feet, the hardliners fighting inch by inch against reform.
We had a period when we were waiting for something to happen. But the politicians didn't solve the problem at all ... The whole thing collapsed and we had the 1969 situation and the Derry Citizen's Defence Association. Make no mistake about it this was a group of people who faced the government and said, 'We're going to put this government out of business'. That was the result, in the first instance, of the inability of the politicians to solve the problems created by years of bigotry, injustice, apathy and powerlessness. Despite the defeat of the RUC in Derry and world sympathy for the struggle for Civil Rights, the government wasn't really overthrown, it staggered about from time to time with the amazing ability politicians have to survive in one form or another, whether they have changed colour or not. So the Derry Citizens' Defence Association decided to give the politicians a chance and the stream broke up again ... So we had politics again and then we had the Provos. But we had a vacuum again because on the one hand we had the politicians in the troubled areas able to do nothing and on the other the Provos who had a military war to fight. At the same time we had serious social problems to deal with and the Bogside Community Association was established to help fill the vacuum' (Doherty, 1974).

The Bogside Community Association was started in April 1972 when the Bogside was still a 'no-go' area. The Bogside was divided into twelve areas and a ballot held in which over 70 per cent of the total adult population participated. As a result twelve people were elected to form the first committee. Their task was to establish the association on a permanent footing and initiate a programme of community action; first, 'to improve the physical environment of the area' and secondly, 'to utilise and add to the existing recreational facilities and thus provide a fuller social life' (Bogside Community Association, Working Paper 3, 1974).

Since that time annual elections have been held and structures have been evolved to allow for fuller participation by as many people as possible. In a progress report to the BCA Council 1974, these aims are expanded upon:

'it is, however, sufficient to say that the two original aims as outlined above are too narrow. Community is all-embracing and almost all (if not all) aspects of life must be examined and action taken on them by a community association if it's to be worthy of the name. Above all else a community association must be above party politics and divisionalism and must be geared towards the good of all the people.

Many decisions have been, and are being, constantly imposed upon people living in the Bogside (and similar areas) from outside agencies. Often these agencies have been well-meaning, but to allow for the full development of each individual's potential he/she must have as much control over his/her own destiny as possible.
So it is then that the BCA is based upon the principle of the dignity of the individual and the right of the individual to fully develop' (BCA, Working Paper 3, 1974).

The BCA had a full-time paid secretary and organiser. The BCA was involved in a wide variety of activities, including running conferences, courses, preparing reports, festivals, recreation facilities, planning, housing schemes, discos, dances and provision of 'welfare' and social services in crisis situations—for example during the Ulster Workers Council strike of 1974 the BCA was involved in supplying food and petrol to the area. The BCA also ran an advisory service (as does Sinn Fein). An advisory service meant not only welfare and social problems but also advice and help upon arrest by the RUC or British army. The BCA had all the usual problems of any body claiming to represent a diverse community of people, although it should be noted that most, if not all, of the twelve people elected to the BCA Committee in 1972 and 1973 were elected on the basis of their involvement in youth groups or tenant associations rather than as party political affiliates. For a fuller account of the BCA see Percival (1977) and the BCA Working Papers 1-3, 1974.

This section has argued that although community action in Derry pre-dates 1968, and that 'community development' struggles exist outside of Northern Ireland, the 'Troubles' in Derry have dramatically affected the growth of community development initiatives, both in number and in the scope of their aims and practices. The community struggle in the Bogside and Creggan cannot then, be seen as something separate from other forces of social praxis in this community more closely associated with the 'military' struggle. Further, this section has argued that events in Derry between 1970 and 1972—the 'no go' areas and the initiatives of the Community Relations Commission—have been particularly significant in the development of Republican community development strategies.

The following section proceeds to analyse this latter initiative in more detail.

5.5 The Derry Youth and Community Workshop

The BCA had an important long term effect on community work in Derry. Th e BCA and particular personnel from the BCA were instrumental in setting up the North-West Centre for Learning and Development (NWCL D) 26 and eventually the Derry Youth and Community Workshop (DYCW). The growth of the BCA and the NWCLD were important b ecause they sought to move the self-help ideal and community development out of the Bogside, to cover the whole town and eventually the north west of Ireland. Early in the history of the BCA contact was made with many other community organisations, throughout Irel and and elsewhere. Two of these contacts were particularly significant for subsequent community work in the Bogside/Creggan communit ies of Derry. The first was with Paddy Walley who organised a community association in Ballyfermet housing estate in Dublin. The sec ond was with Ivor Browne, a professor of psychiatry at University College Dublin and consultant psychiatrist of the Irish Eastern Area Health Board. These two individuals were responsible for founding the Irish Foundation for Human Development (IFHD). The IFHD is a,

'non-government body concerned with study and action programmes relating to the essential nature of the individual, his (sic) relationships with other individuals, the environment and the community. The Foundation was incorporated in Ireland in July 1975 as a charitable institution with college status, and with a board of governors comprised of persons with significant responsibilities in business academic and social fields. It obtained exceptional initial funding for its programmes from a major Irish financial in stitution, in addition to project grants from the Industrial Development Authority and other agencies, and a capital equipment grant from the Eastern Health Board. The objectives of the foundation are pursued through the work of three independent centres: a centre for the person, the centre for human relationships and potential and a centre for community, environment and technology' (The FHD, undated).

The IFHD runs annual conferences which are similar in function and organisation to Tavistock conferences. Several Derry community workers have attended these conferences, many of whom subsequently worked as tutors in the DYCW. In September 1973 the Foundation bought a house in Derry, 45 Clarendon Street, and funded a centre for community development later to become the North West Centre for Learning and Development (NWCLD). Paddy Doherty became director of the NWCLD and Eamon Deane the secretary, both of whom had be en involved in the BCA. Colm Cavanagh was given space in the Clarendon Street building to work on the 'Derryman' a community newspaper later renamed 'Community Mirror'. The NWCLD developed a number of projects, one of the first and most significant was the 'Foyle Co-ops'. The Foyle Co-op Ltd was set up in 1975 and involved a crash maintenance and building programme in the Creggan from 1975-197 7. It was intended to be an 'umbrella' organisation and although primarily a construction oriented enterprise there were other initiatives such as a fruit and vegetable market stall in Sackville Street, Derry. Many of the builders from Foyle Co-ops were subsequently to become tutors in the DYCW and like the workshop the Co-op experimented with organisational structures. It was in the Co-op that the techniques of the IFHD (essentially Tavistock techniques) were first worked with. These were to become central to the organisation of the DYCW. The Co-op, although still legally in existence was closed down, not because it had failed, but because 'it had ceased to provide useful learning experiences' (Paddy Doherty). After some years of thought and planning, the DYCW also became a project of the 45 network. Originating in a project proposal called
'Harnessing the local dynamic for the creation of employment' and passing through some years of rethinking 27, the proposal was eventually discussed and agreed upon by the newly created Department of Manpower Services. The DYCW was officially opened on 10th April 1978. The Workshop as such is one of the many projects initiated by the Northwest Centre and is part of a l arger community development programme. The Department of Manpower Services has developed and encouraged a network of youth community workshops across Northern Ireland. These are managed by voluntary community groups, such as the NWCLD in the belief that they can in this way provide more 'locally relevant training for unemployed young people' (Deane, 1981: 16). The DYCW is important for at least two main reasons; firstly, it was one of the earliest of these youth workshops and also one of the largest, with eventually around 120 young people. Even more significantly, however, is the way in which the DYCW defines its task and the way it attempts to achieve these aims. The DYCW is importantly not simply about training for work, the unemployment figures of the Bogside and Creggan 28 would make such a task limited, perhaps even futile; rather the DYCW sees its task as a training for life. The workshop administrator defined the task of the workshop thus:

'I think that young people need basic work at expressing themselves ...the horizons of our young people should be as broad as possible ... we should set up a motor mechanic section in the Workshop that will repair one or two old buses and enable the Workshop to be really mobile—not just in Northern Ireland, or the Republic, or Britain, but across Europe to Africa and Asia ... I believe that the Workshop must be open—and not defensive. It must be ALIVE to new things - not dull and dead. We have to GENERATE new ideas ... (we) have to work against DEPENDENCY. We have to fix on our OWN THING and do it ... we must act with flair and energy. We must attract imagination. We must surprise. We must enthuse our own young people and the people of the town. We must be vibrant with ideas and new possibilities. (The Workshop must be like a) SPACEROCKET which makes a good show of light and power as it starts upwards—but their real task is to get off the ground and into space ... our real work is to create our future and not just let it happen to us. Our real work is to create a better society. And that's a helluva job—but that's what I think we're about' ( Cavanagh, report to DYCW seminar, Stranorlar, September 1979—emphasis in original).

The desire to provide 'training for life' rather than 'training for work' is reflected in the organisational structure and management of the DYCW. Tavistock conference techniques, gained largely from the DYCW's association, via the NWCLD, with the IFHD, influence the functioning of the workshop at many different levels and in many different ways. The task of the DYCW is to constantly create 'learning experiences' for its trainees and tutors. In order to grasp the significance of 'learning experiences' it is necessary to briefly discuss Tavistock theory. The Tavistock approach used in the DYCW combines the work of Wilfred Bion with the organisation analysis of A K Rice and E T Mille . In his work on Northgate hospital Bion suggested that every group comprises of two distinct entities; a work group, which is rational and task-orientated and a basic assumption group which is irrational and sentient-orientated. The basic assumption part of the group is that which prevents it achieving its 'primary task'. Bion identifies three main forms of basic assumption behaviour, dependency, pairing and fight or flight. All three of these basic assumptions, if given free reign, will destroy reason and sabotage the work of the group (Bion 1961). The task of leadership in this model then, involves prticipation in the basic assumption group that is appropriate to the aims of the work group and to the extent that the primary task is supported. The notion of primary task comes from the work of A K Rice. In his work with organisations, Rice built on the work of Bion, and influenced by Melanie Klein's theories of personality development, developed a notion of the 'primary task' as that which any group must achieve to ensure its survival as an insitution (Rice, 1965). When a group is 'working' in Bion's sense it is, according to Rice, achieving its primary task. Rice defined leadership functions as having to do with the identification of 'boundaries' surrounding the task(s) and the control of transactions across them (Rice, 1969). Miller notes boundaries can be defined by task, roles and role-relationships, territory, time and technology (Miller, 1959). The notions of basic assumption behaviour, leadership and boundary-maintenance are central to Tavistock and IFHD theory and to the operation of the DYCW. Such an approach then, distinguishes between task and sentient systems and sees boundary control maintenance as relating to task system boundaries, sentient system boundaries and the regulation of task and sentient boundaries. Individuals and groups have to manage these boundaries. All transactions, even intrapsychic ones, have the characteristics of an intergroup process. Each transaction calls into question the integrity of the boundaries across which it takes place. Every transaction requires the exercise of authority and calls into question the value and sanction for that authority (Rice, 19 69). This theoretical apparatus allows the study of complex small group dynamics and institutional or organisational dynamics 29. Learning experiences were achieved in a range of different ways in the DYCW. The basic activity of the tutor workshops, where the young people spent a maximum of six weeks working with a particular tutor were the staple sources of learning situations. Here the young
people would work with anything from half a dozen to a dozen other young people in a particular craft or trade activity—carpentry , brick laying, office administration, heavy and fine metalwork, photography and gardening were among the options. Many of the tutor workshops such as carpentry, brick laying and plastering were directly concerned with refurbishing the old Georgian building in whi ch the DYCW was housed (see Figure 5.26).

Figure 5.26

The DERRY YOUTH AND COMMUNITY WORKSHOP

The tutor, within his/her workshop was given the task of monitoring the growth and development of each individual in their charge. For example a tutor teaching graphic design explained,

'Graphic design incorporates many areas of work, for example, advertising, TV advertisements, magazine advertisements, newspaper and even radio advertisements, package design, design for books, records, posters, and commercial packaging (eg cigarettes, soap powder, frozen foods). This is the kind of thing that surrounds us everyday of our lives but which most of the time we don't really see ... here then, is a very natural way that the young people who may work in my workshop can become in some ways a little more aware. I hope that through working in this area they begin to see the power and effects of design and advertising—the positive and negative aspects of it and that this in turn may stimulate them to examine other things more closely or at the very least be a lot more aware of' (Una, 1978).

The DYCW was run via a structure of large group and small group meetings. Each tutor workshop would have weekly meetings and projects for the following week and the events of the past week would be discussed. One function of these and other meetings was to give the young people some input into the running of the workshop 30. Apart from these tutor-workshop meetings there were: tutor meetings where tutors discussed the progress of the DYCW amongst themselves; various one-off meetings amongst tutors and/or trainees to deal with a specific matter; and finally, most importantly, the weekly 'large group' meeting. The function of these latter meetings, which included everyone in the workshop, was partly administration—it was here that the young people nominated
their tutor workshop for the following week and also the place where general announcements were made—more importantly these meetings were part of the structure of learning experiences in the workshop. These large group meetings would be 'worked', usually by the director of the workshop, Paddy Doherty, to force young people, and sometimes tutors to 'confront' issues and thereby be able to move or grow. In other words the director would challenge the basic assumption behaviour of the group. This confrontational technique was quite a stressful experience for many. The young people often referred to these meetings as the Piranha Parliament (see Figure 5 .27). This nervous energy is clearly visible in the sections of Gatti's film 'Writing on the Wall' that were filmed at large group meetings in the workshop. Smith compares this Tavistock technique with T-group therapy.

'in the Tavistock model, the consultant's rigidity and self-presentation and a blank screen facilitates the explorations of relations with authority and the fantasies and unconscious assumptions that underlie such relations ... as Klein and Astrachan wrily put it, the T-group is a love-in, while the study group more closely resembles making arrangements for one's own funeral' 31 (Smith, 1976: 129).

At one particular large group meeting in the workshop after the administration details had been sorted out a list of items stolen from the workshop was written on a board. The director rose slowly, looked around the room, which was now tense and silent. He melodramatically announced, 'There are thieves in this room'. A long silent pause elapsed, almost five minutes. At an increased tempo the director then said, 'What are we going to do? You know who they are!' Another pause followed. The director then said, 'What's this—a conspiracy of silence?' Director, in a quiet voice, 'I told Paul not to lock the tools away. I don't know, can you handle the freedom?' The director then wheeled around and pointed to a particular individual and loudly demanded to know, 'What would you do if you caught them?'

'Kick them out', the young person said.

The director shook his head slowly and quietly and deliberately repeated, 'Kick them out;' The director, then very loudly and forcefully shouted, 'The people who know who did this are also responsible are they not?'

A tutor interjected, 'The group knows and ought to say' The director, very loudly and angrily, 'What the hell are we about?' short pause, in a much quieter voice, 'Freedom?' short pause, 'Stealing?' A long silence followed. The repetition of what others said, the tone of voices, pauses, 'working the silences' were all used to heighten the emotion of the group.
At the end of the above meeting the director suggested a list of the stolen items be left on the board, each item crossed off as it was returned 32.

On many occasions, the large group meetings would be used to discuss identified 'work areas' in the workshop. 'Work areas' were particular issues which the director and/or tutors had

Figure 5.27
(Mansfield; 1980; 105)

identified as specific issues around which to create learning experiences, such as gender politics, sectarianism and communication. Learning experiences were sometimes specifically constructed exercises which would then be discussed at the large group meeting for that particular week. For example, the issue of gender politics, 'the male/female thing' as it was called by the DYCW, was worked at in the tutor-workshops. Attempts were made to discuss men's work and women's work and to encourage the young men to do fabric work or typing and the young women to do brick laying or carpentry. This had some limited success (see Figure 5.28) 33.

On another occasion a special exercise was constructed. A board, approximately six foot by four foot was hung on the wall with the question, 'What is freedom?' written in black letters at the top. In the centre of the board was a one foot square with 'Keep Clear' written on it. The idea was at the end of the week, the board would be taken down and the comments on it would be used as the basis for a discussion on freedom. Many comments were written on this board—'how free is a tree from the soil?', 'freedom for the cat is death for the mouse', 'Whitey was here', 'MUFC'—also, however, in the centre of the board inside the 'Keep Clear' square someone had drawn a large penis.

Before discussing what happened at the large meeting it is important to mention the conditions under which the meeting took place. One of the young men who had been suspended, in fact, for tearing off a girl's bikini top during a swimming session, had

Figure 5.28 (DYCW. 1978) Some of the more successful attempts at encouraging young prople to try something different.

returned late at night to the workshop and set it alight. About £40,000 worth of damage was done to the building, almost one third of the workshop was damaged 34. I arrived for work that morning to find fire engines everywhere and the director of the workshop gleefully striding about saying,

'There's a lot of energy (tension) around this morning. It's a good day for work Alan.'

Eventually everyone was seated in the fine metal workshop, the meeting room had been burnt down. There amidst the still smouldering rubble the large group discussed the 'sex-block' in the workshop. No reference was made to the fire, all discussion centred on the 'What is freedom?' board. During the meeting a male tutor made reference to the 'obscene drawing' which someone had drawn on the board. Later when referring to this same drawing, a female tutor said,

'that which you deliberately avoided mentioning Colm, a big weeping cock.'

A male tutor then followed this comment with,

'Oh yes, (addressing the young males) it's okay if its drawn by a man, its funny then! But if it's drawn by a woman, it's obscene (pause) cos it scares the shit out of you.'

The intense work of this meeting was followed with more relaxed small group discussions.
Fairweather records a Christmas party/disco held in the DYCW and notes the overpowering masculinist overtone of the workshop. She also notes the 'intervention' of Mary, one of the tutors,

'Music blares from a record-player, and young men with studied scowls thrust their bodies around the floor. Standing opposite one another, they frenetically jerk from their hips, almost bang their heads together, then move apart again. Two or three seem to be miming masturbation.

Up against the wall stand the girls. Intimidated by the boys' pelvic showing off, they merely watch this display, and nervously fiddle with the straps and buttons of their tight, uncomfortable clothes. Finally, one member of their sex does summon up the courage to take to the floor. The full skirt of her dress ripples around her as she rock-'n'-rolls with happy, unselfconscious energy and grace. Pleasantly, she invites each of the boys in turn to dance with her. Gradually they drop their pretence of being the Rod Stewarts of Derry, or rutting Action Man dolls. If Mary can dance in a way that is sexy but not warlike , then so can they. As the boys begin to loosen up, gaps appear in their ranks which the girls begin to fill—at first shyly, then with confidence' (Fairweather, 1984: 151).

This and other experiences led Mary and other women in the DYCW to organise women-only meetings, consciousness raising groups, discussions on sexuality and eventually an all-women strike and sit-in. Towards the end of this same Christmas party some of the young men began fighting, several had been drinking earlier. Most of the discussion (and anger) from the tutors the following day, however, centred on the fact that the 'Soldiers song' was played at the end of the dance. The playing of the 'anthem' was seen by some as bad because it was seen as deliberately marking the nominally mixed 35 workshop as Republican. All the tutors, however, were in agreement that the worst thing was that there was only one Protestant, a shy young woman, present. When the song was played she stood up in order not to be the odd one out. A number of young people in the workshop pointed out to the others how frightened she must have felt. The very next day, the director brought in a fascimile of the 1916 declaration and read it carefully to a hushed audience of young people, stressing certain particular parts (as underlined),

'The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious to the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past'

What I have said about the 1916 declaration as a key text for Republicanism in Chapter 4 and about the Republican nature of Bogside/Creggan community thus far in this chapter indicates something of the reason for the reading of this declaration and the power of its being read, especially by 'the King of the Bogside'.—Many of the young people in the workshop know the director by this name or as 'Paddy Bogside'.

The relationship between the DYCW and the community struggle and the national struggle, is then evidenced by much of the workshop practices and defined 'work areas' 36. One of the most direct linkages between the workshop and its community is illustrated by a special learning experience devised in the DYCW called the John McDaid exercise. This exercise was a play which lasted one day and involved the whole workshop. The plot was loosely structured around the incident of Ranger WM Best, a British army soldier from Derry shot by the INLA on 21st May 1972, whilst visiting his mother in the Creggan. The killing of Ranger Best in Derry,

'promoted division and dissention in the midst of the most successful no-go area in the entire North' (MacStiofain, 1975: 251).

The McDaid exercise was devised to replicate some of the conflicting loyalities and problems of this 'real life situation' 37. The idea was that the young people were given a problem, where to bury the body of the dead corporal McDaid. The story told, in order to arrive at the 'problem', came from the Republican community, particularly from the Best episode. The way the story was told derived from Tavistock/IFHD theory of the DYCW, it involved making the young people tense and therefore 'receptive to growth'.

On Friday 27th April 1979, everyone arrived in the workshop at nine o'clock as usual. Instead, however, of going to their various workshops, the young people were taken to a meeting room and divided into groups by 'leaders' from their own number. (These leaders had been appointed the previous day by the director and deputy director of the workshop). There were five groups, each with a leader and a deputy, and all the young people in the Workshop were part of one or other of these groups. The young people then came, in groups, to the main meeting room to receive instructions. The tutors were already seated in a group in this room. It was decorated with a few very simple but effective props: a Tricolour (Irish flag) on the back wall; a TV set (video tape) at the front, and in the centre of the room, the focal point of all eyes, a coffin draped with the Union Jack (British flag) 38.

When all were seated, tutors and young people, the 'drama' began. The TV was switched on and the announcement of Corporal John McDaid's death while on active service in Londonderry was made. He had apparently been killed by a fire in the Bogside while trying to rescue a woman from her burning house.

After the announcement, the leaders of the young person groups each in turn read a statement. These groups representing the army, the father, the wife and mother of John McDaid respectively. The first 'statement' to be read out was the army's:

'Corporal John McDaid joined the British army in 1969 and for ten years had been an excellent soldier. On the 25th April, while on patrol in the Bogside, he entered a burning house and rescued two young children. As he was entering the building for the third time to rescue the mother, the roof collapsed and Corporal McDaid was killed. HIS ACTION WAS IN KEEPING WITH THE COURAGEOUS DEDICATION WHICH HAS DISTINGUISHED THE ARMY IN ITS SERVICE TO THE PEOPLE OF NORTHERN IRELAND. He will be buried with full military honours on Friday, 27th April at 2.45 pm in the military graveyard.'

The printed sentence drew several disdaining remarks and hushed superlatives—the tension was mounting. The death imagery of the coffin (very powerful to young people in the Bogside/Creggan), and the profoundly symbolic flags were giving living substance to developing reality. To complicate matters a little further, the father then read a statement:

'My son John McDaid, joined the British army in 1969 because he felt it was defending the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. Despite the breakdown of relations between the army and the Catholic people he believed he was bound to stay in the army and use all his influence to soften their attitude to the Catholic population. I believe he was dedicated to peace, and his action, in which he lost his life, was typical of him. I wish to have him buried in the family plot in the Catholic part of the 'Derry' cemetery.'

This partial explanation of a Catholic boy in the British Army drew knowing glances—the situation although not ideal could now be rationalised. Further explanation of the character of John McDaid followed in the next complication to the plot which was contained in the wife's statement:

'I married John while he was serving in the Shankill Road, in 1970. He was a magnificient husband and father and although he never gave up his Catholic faith he was a very tolerant person and often went to church with me and the chilren. He agreed to having the children brought up as PROTESTANT, because he believed that by having a Catholic and Protestant mix as much as possible this country might create a better future for itself. I wish my husband to be buried in the Protestant graveyard beside our eldest child who was killed in an explosion.'

Any good the father had done to placate the listeners, if only by confusion/diffusion of loyalties had now been jarred. So far then, three versions of John McDaid have emerged and three different burial places have been named. This was complicated yet again by the final member of the family triangle, the symbol of so much in Ireland the mother:

'My son, John McDaid, believed that every young person is precious in the eyes of God and that it did not matter what church a person belonged to. He expressed to me the wish that in the event of his death he should be cremated and his ashes scattered over the country he loved so well.'

These statements had taken some while to read, the 'sinister' props had had time to take effect, possible courses of action and the organisation of thoughts had begun. The cremation of Catholics, death, religion, politics, had all been shaken; confusion, apprehension and tension were the order of the day. The young people had a problem on their hands: WHO will bury Corporal John McDaid? and WHERE will he be buried? As if this problem was not complex enough, a final twist was added by the last statement which came from the Provisional IRA:

'John McDaid joined the British Army in 1969, but after Bloody Sunday in Derry he was sworn in as a member of the IRA. Since that time he had served the movement with great dedication, passing on valuable information and material and when on leave actively participating in the struggle against British Imperialism. He was promoted to Captain in 1975 and became a staff member of the Northern Command. His death was in the highest tradition of the Republican movement and we intend to bury him with full military honours in the Republican plot in the city cemetery.' 39

The story told,the stage was set. The atmosphere was electric! The puzzlement and confusion of the first four statements had been compounded by a tense excitement resulting from the final twist—the Provo statement 40.

Each of the young person groups were then allocated a room/base in the building. The army were given possession of the coffin. They had then, using whatever means they wished, to bring the situation to a resolution.

There is much to be said about the way the days events progressed, far more than I have space for here, but to put the matter bluntly, there was a 'riot' for about two hours in the workshop and finally after some negotiation the young people who were left, many had simply gone home, decided that the body should be cremated and the ashes spread over Lough Foyle. The following weeks meetings in the DYCW were devoted to a discussion of this exercise and the part that everyone in the workshop played in it 41.

The McDaid exercise represents the DYCW's attempt to weave a specific discourse of psychoanalysis, Tavistock theory, into the fabric of a Republican community development practice. This Bakhtinian carnivalesque outlines not only the seriousness and commitment of the DYCW project but crucially its Republican community base. Like the military struggle of the community in Derry, the community development struggle is meeting a challenge from the state. In the case of the military struggle, the state is clearly identified as British and the community of resistance is therefore clearly the 'English'/British nation. In the case of the community development part of that struggle the state is identified more nebulously as 'modern times' or the 'increasing complexity of life' and thus the repression of individuality. One aspect of the struggle emphasises military resistance, whilst another demands emphasis on different methods. Both involve the removal of dependency; the removal of the Brits from the Bogside needs to include the removal of a dependency culture in the minds of Bogsiders as well as the physical removal of soldiers off the streets. The IFHD and the DYCW interpret this dependency primarily in individual and local community terms, seeing it as a kind of ghetto-mentality which although it clearly has colonial dimensions is a feature of individual and community lack of confidence brought about by poverty and social deprivation. Sinn Fein obviously concentrate primarily on the degree to which this dependency is a national dependency culture, expressed in the 'jellybean culture' of Fitzgerald (Adams, 1986: 143). Both strands of the struggle then, delimit a common enemy, the British state 42, and although the social praxis of resistance of Bogside community to the British State changes emphasis at different times, under changing circumstances its nature as a community formed in struggle will always be a reflection in some degree of both of these aspects.

=== The concluding section 5.6 Summary: Writing on the Wall
and the footnotes to Chapter 5, Section 3, are missing. ===

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 31 July, 2014 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/alanmansfield/ch5.html (it was last updated on 27 March, 2021). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.