by Denzil McDaniel

It can be a little disconcerting to see a time in one’s early life analysed as a period of history using black and white television footage.

Fifty years on, the fifth of October, 1968’s Civil Rights march in Derry has been dubbed “the start of the Troubles” and many people have been recalling their memories of the day itself, or giving their take on the circumstances in Northern Ireland which led to the historic day.

I was just 15 years old. To be honest my recollections of Derry in the 1960s were more about my uncle bringing me to the Brandywell football ground as a boy to watch Derry City play in the Irish League.

Events that I watched on the news as the RUC battered protesters and bystanders with batons and blackthorn sticks seemed to have, initially anyway, little relevance to me.

But my homeland was changing for ever. Less than four years later, 1972 was an even more awakening year for me.

Within a week in January of that year, I was shocked to hear of the death of a former neighbour, only a year or so older than me; Raymond Carroll, who’d joined the RUC, was gunned down in Belfast and his remains were brought back to Enniskillen for burial.

And that week-end, Derry was back in the news, as Bloody Sunday saw civilians shot dead in the streets by the British Army.

The fight from 1968, and earlier, for fairness and rights in jobs, housing and votes had now become a bloody conflict which would go on for decades. I was still in my teens when it started and by the time it ended (has it ended?) I was middle-aged.

The coverage of 1968 has seen and heard a number of narratives. Some of them conflicting, and there seemed to be an unseemly scramble in some Nationalist quarters over who was involved in the early civil rights movement. Some have accused Sinn Fein of organising their own events in an attempt to rewrite the campaign’s early history.

Most of us look at things, including the past, through the prism of personal experience and indeed personal opinion. Which is why the formation of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland holds some interest for me, a Protestant who has often expressed the view that unfair treatment of families like us by the powers that be is often overshadowed by the justifiable highlighting of discrimination against Catholics.

In the early 1960s when my father returned to full-time education briefly, we lived for a while with my grandmother at Westville Terrace. It was basic, an outside toilet and few facilities for a couple of families. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very happy time for us and I suppose it was only on reflection that I remember families like us having to run around Unionist Councillors to lobby them to give us a house.

This is something that has been focused on in the last week, and indeed Ken Maginnis attended and spoke at a festival event in Derry to mark the anniversary, and he has spoken about his personal experience about the difficulty of getting a house.

Perhaps the best summing up of it was when someone said that unfairness was a common problem for Catholics and Protestants, but Catholics suffered more. As far as Derry was concerned, the sight of large families crammed into huts at Springtown were vivid reminders of the scandalous conditions.

And Derry was also an example of the gerrymandering of areas, there were more Catholics crammed into one of the three electoral areas than the other two put together so that, despite being in a minority Unionists retained a majority on the city’s Corporation. One businessman had 26 votes while many working men had none.

Among the narratives was one that surprised me, with economist Graham Gudgin claiming that, actually in the 1960s Catholics were over-represented in State housing. He based this on a report from an American professor who said that only six out of the 68 local authorities at the time discriminated in the allocation of houses at the time, and there was a serious problem of discrimination against Protestants in areas where Catholics ran the Councils. Yeah, maybe, proving that in Northern Ireland, the majority community of whatever hue used that majority unfairly.

I’m not sure what planet Mr. Gudgin lived on then, and I suppose statistics can be used to prove anything. But from my memory, Catholics were second-class citizens in the Northern Ireland of my childhood, and many working class Protestants were ill-served by the Unionist leadership which they continued to vote for.

I recall interviewing a Belfast loyalist who recalled his mother going to a Unionist Councillor, with his father saying to her: “Aye, go ahead, he’ll get you a better class of slum.”

Also this week, a former Unionist politician suggested that in the 60s the Civil Rights campaign was “unnecessary.” It would seem the Unionist leadership didn’t quite get it then, and one wonders if their people are being well served now?

Whatever the analysis, the fact is that Protestants generally didn’t embrace the Civil Rights movement, and within a short space of time those on the Nationalist side who chose violence over politics had moved into a campaign which raged for years and cost the lives of thousands of our people on both sides of the divide.

Divide? There’s the word. It’s been ever present throughout Northern Ireland’s history.

It was there in 1968 and it’s still there in 2018, with the Orange or Green issue still dominating everything. Terrible common social and economic problems in the 1960s didn’t produce a mass working class movement to cross the divide, and you have to say that in 2018 society at large is missing an opportunity to share this space and join forces in putting housing, health, jobs, education and the rest, above each side’s identity.

We still hear, as someone put it, the language of division, we don’t accept difference and people still identify with their own community above all else.

Nobody’s suggesting that the slums of 1968 still exist (although the report this week on the investigative website thedetail.tv about the numbers of people sleeping rough and the numbers of homeless people dying while still on a housing waiting list is disturbing.)

But our people still do have many problems, and just like 1968 we deserve better – to borrow a phrase from Dylan Quinn.