Eammon McCann, radical Labour Party leader from Derry, Northern Ireland, arrived in New York last week and presented the keys to New York City to the Black Panther Party. Mayor John Lindsay had given the keys to Bernadette Devlin when she was in New York last fall. Angered at her treatment by American politicians, she decided to send the keys to the Panthers in the spirit of international solidarity.

THE workers' movement in Northern Ireland, from the way Eammon McCann describes it, seems to have grown with such assurance that it could not have happened otherwise.

In March 1968, McCann was working on a Vietnam solidarity campaign in London, and went to Derry "for a fortnight's vacation." A Catholic family was about to be evicted from their house trailer by the Protestant government. Ten or twelve people dragged the trailer on to a road and blocked traffic for forty-eight hours. They forced the mayor to house the family.

Though Derry's 25,000 Catholics are half of the population of the city, they are crammed together in an area called Bogside. Most of the housing in the city is public, and the Protestant government doles it out to consolidate the Protestant vote. Though much of the working class is Protestant, almost none of the bourgeoisie is Catholic. The religious division masks a serious class division. The lack of housing in Derry is only one example of the discrimination in Northern Ireland against the thirty-five per cent of the population that is Catholic.

A month later the Derry movement disrupted a series of corporation meetings with first one hundred, than two hundred, and finally five hundred people. McCann decided to stay in Derry, and the movement grew.

IN NORTHERN Ireland, there are days for Protestant parades and there days for Catholic parades. There are Protestant routes and there are Catholic routes. In fact, Proestants and Catholics go to different schools and even learn different games.

In October 1968, one thousand Catholics decided to march down a Protesrant route as a demonstration for Catholic civil rights. The Protestant cops couldn't take it, charged the marchers and sprayed them from water cannons.

People's Democracy, a student civil rights group, was formed at the University of Belfast immediately after the march. McCann smilingly explains that the printer didn't know what to put on the top of the poster for the group's first meeting. He started with "Students for Democracy," changed it to "People for Democracy." because there were more than students in the movement, and finally changed it to "People's Democracy" when he realized that "People for Democracy" didn't make much sense. "There were a lot of starry-eyed, romantic people in it," McCann said.

People's Democracy held a march in January 1969 from Belfast to Derry. The right-wing Paisleyite Protestants attacked the march every five or six miles. Catholic farmers and fishermen turned out to protect the marchers, and concrete working-class support gathered around the march "like a rolling stone."

THE DAY of the TDA march in Boston, I walked around for three hours trying to figure out why it was necessary to get my head beat in again. I had to close my eyes every time I thought of the three hundred riot equipped cops outside of the Instrumentation labs last November with dogs and Mace and rifles and clubs. Even after I knew that I had to go, I shivered every time I thought of the cops.

Eammon McCann explained casually that a hundred people marched from Belfast knowing that they would be attacked at every step and that the cops were on the other side. "Those who love the world serve it in action." Yeats tells us. I understood that I would never really hear McCann until I had experienced much more.

In the following weeks, working class groups sprung up all along the route of the march. Despite growing agitation, only a few bills passed the Northern Irish parliament, and nothing changed substantially. People's Democracy held more marches, and at least five times they were attacked by the cops. In what McCann called a "police pogrom," hundreds of police invaded the Catholic Bogside, beat people up, and broke nearly every window in the area.

When, on August 12, the Protestants began to march to commemorate the victory at the seige of Derry, there was no doubt that both sides would be fighting. A Defense Committee was formed in Bogsick, and they prepared to barricade the forty-one entrances to the Catholic quarter and stockpiled over 2500 gasoline bombs. McCann, the Committee's Information Officer, helped organize the defense. All of the barricades could go up in fifteen minutes. "Once we prepared to fight, people would have been disappointed if it hadn't happened," McCann said.

Some of the street kids. who appropriated "hooligan" as their own name, attacked the Protestant march, and then the Protestants followed the Protestant police to attack the Bogside. Using every milk bottle in the quarter for gasoline bombs, and with the help of thousands of newly-arrived Catholics, the residents held off the attack for fifty-one hours. The British Army was mobilized and cordoned off the area to end the attack. The Army is still there today.

A few French students with experience from the previous May helped to build the barricades and organize the fighting. With buildings afire all around, the barricades were thrown together from cars, scaffolding and rubble. Scaffolding poles were lodged in the barricades and wooden stakes driven into the ground in front to prevent assaults by armored cars.