DAVE MANS6LL that of Rhodesia or South Africa, but all that was at issue in Ulster was the abolition of the property franchise in local government elections which had no bearing on Stormont or Westminster elections and which disenfranchised Protestants as well as Catholics. The real dynamic of the Civil Rights agitation lay not in its demands which were all capable of being granted by the Unionist government (and when they were nobody noticed). The real dynamic was a policy of provocation and confrontation. The housing issue was the real detonator. In Derry in 1968 a Housing Action Committee had been set up by Eamon McCann out of the membership of the local Republican Club and the left-wing Labour party. It encouraged squatting and the disruption of council meetings. In Dungannon Austin Currie, a Nationalist M.P. had squatted a house to protest about the local Unionist control over housing allocation in a predominantly Catholic area. These actions led to the idea of demonstrations culminating in a plan for a march through Derry into walled city centre, a Protestant stronghold. No antiUnionist parade had ever gane along the proposed route. The Minister for Home Affairs banned the march but the Derry activists and the NICRA eventually agreed to go ahead with it. When it <lid start it was almost immediately stopped by the Royal Ulster' Constabulary and a riot developed. The march had been well covered by T.V. and viewers all over Ireland and Britain saw the RUC smashing upa demonstration. This simple image aroused sympathy for the Northern minority in both the South and in Britain and increased pressure on the British government to compel the the Unionists to grant reforms. Derry had now become the scene of intense Catholic Civil Rights agitation. It has certainly been gerrymandered in the 1920s because the Catholics elected in a majority to the local authority had repudiated the Unionist government and refused to administer on its behalf. Partition had cut it off from its hinterland in Donegal and it had experienced structural unemployment in the Catholic majority population for decades. Now the population felt that they were being missed in the new economic plans which were being developed in the East of Ulster. A Derry Citizens' Action Committee was formed, pulling together various earlier ad hoc groups; its dominant figure was John Hume a 31-year old local businessman. Hume was an exemplar of the new middle class Catholics of Ulster. His father had been unemployed for 20 years. He had trained 68
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