THE ULSTER CONFLICT for the priesthood, had become a teacher and then a salmon smoker. He had organized a credit union and a housing association locally, and had agitated for economic development of Derry. Within a few months he had replaced the old Nationalist leader at Stormont as M.P. for the Catholic area of Derry. But his precise concern at this moment was to attain the reform of local government in Derry. The result of the agitation was just such a reform. Hume subsequently joined the Social Democratic and Labour Party, a predominantly Catholic social democratic party which aimed to operate inside the Northern Ireland system to obtain ·reforms, but also to further the cause of Irish unity. Latterly Hume has acquired a job as a Public Relations for the image of the E.E.e., but he still retains his Ulster parliamentary seat. PEOPLE'S DEMOCRACY By now another factor had entered the situation. I.R.A. men had been recognised in the Derry agitations, but now the People's Democracy, a vaguely New Leftist students' organisation, which took its basic ideology from the whole series of student/authority confrontations that had developed worldwide in 1968, but which also contained many people with strong Republican sympathies, had decided ata crucial period in the relations between the Ulster Protestant and Catholic communities, to stage a march through Protestant rural strongholds, to demand a rather abstract programme of civil rights. It was obviously an attempt to imitate the black civil rights marches through Alabama earlier in the decade. The Protestant small farmers who felt particularly strongly about the "new course" in Ulster economics, assumed that the whole Civil Rights agitation was a front for a renewed I.R.A. Catholic Nationalist assault on the North, and when a Republican banner was unfurled on the march, and the march was protected at night by a local I.R.A. unit, they drew their own conclusion and attacked the march before it reached its destination. Symbolically the march had been from Belfast to Derry - the agitational link was finally made in August 1969 when rioting spread from Derry (where a Catholic attack on an Apprentice Boys march escalated into the well-prepared phenomenon of "Free Derry") to the Catholic ghettos in Belfast. Protestant working class response to Catholic provoca69
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