Women fought alongside men at the barricades. In fact, Bernadette Devlin was one of the few members of the Defense Committee to fight in the streets. In Northern Ireland, men are often unemployed while their wives work, a situation which McCann says tends to reverse sex roles. Women were therefore very insistent on participating in the fighting.
Bogside lived as a commune during the attacks. No doors were locked, and people ate and slept together. There was even competition among some of the older women to see who would house the foreign students.
The cops pumped CS gas into Bogside continuously during the attacks. Though the gas is made in England, none had been used in Britain before Derry. Nixon once said that it was all right to use CS gas against students because no one had ever died from it. Movement medical cadre in this country have said often that someone with asthma could die from it. In Bogside, a nine-month-old baby died from the gas that permeated the city.
When the British troops moved in, McCann said that many supposed that they were there to invade the area. McCann calmly told me that he thought that they would have lost a shooting war. By that time the war had spread to Belfast and eight people had been killed.
Eventually the British troops sealed off the area with barbed wire and guarded a few roads into the Bogside. Inside Bogside, Radio Free Derry began broadcasting and two newspapers were printed. There were Black Panther movies shown on the sides of buildings. free donkey rides and toffee-apples and a music festival with rock groups.
McCann said that most of the street people enjoyed it as much as he did. "The fighting was exciting. I enjoyed it tremendously. In fact, I'm rather nostalgic for it." Many of the people in Derry learned politics as they fought. They learned through their own fighting to support the Panthers and the NLF.
THE Weathermen say that most people who live in ghettos and poor working class areas in this country are forced to live violent lives because of the violence around them. Kids in street gangs already feel how society oppresses them, and the only way to organize them into a revolutionary movement is to provide a radical alternative to gang wars. Ideally the violence should be turned against the state.
For kids forced to go to schools that are jails and deprived of any possibility to improve their lives, fighting back comes naturally. A friend of mine who works in a PBH project in the South End told me about a group of kids who had found a black kid one night, poured gasoline on him and set him afire. In fact in New York, "Bum burning," is good sport. The point is that there's no need to convince these people that they have to fight. They're already doing it.
For the Northern Irish, the problem is just as clear. From everything McCann said, Northern Ireland is a British colony by any definition of the word. The British government gives over two hundred million dollars in direct subsidies to Northern Irish industry, almost all of which is directly owned by English companies. Those same companies remove over three hundred million dollars a year in profits from the island. In other words, English taxpayers subsidize English industry in Northern Ireland which pours profits into the pockets of the English industrialists.
About forty-five per cent of capital investment in Northern Ireland is by direct grant from the government each year. About eighty-two per cent of the total capital investment has come from the English government.
Both Northern Ireland and the Republic to the South have massiveunemployment. As long as the profits continue to leave the country and the English government maintains import quotas on Irish goods, the Irish economy cannot develop.
With the economic conditions as bad as they are, the movement throughout Ireland should continue to grow. McCann said that one of the main problems last August was the lack of a solid political organization that could consolidate the rebellion into a united force.
Slowly, that alliance is now being forged. However, the Catholics are still divided into innumerable political factions. The groups range from the openly-socialist Irish Republicancal steps remains an alliance with sigbanned only in the Republic-to a few right-wing Irish Catholic nationalist groups.
Perhaps the most important politiextremist Protestants charging into nificant numbers of the Protestant working class. If the British troops left Derry, the fighting would certainly break out again between Catholics and Protestants. "When Catholics see evtremist Protestants charging into the Bogside carrying the Union Jack, it's hard to convince them that the Protestants aren't the enemy," McCann said.
The Catholic Church in Northern Ireland has denounced the rebels, which has helped to prove to the Protestants that they are not the Pope's agents. The revolutionary socialist part of the movement has already gained a foothold in the Protestant working class. They have been able to convince some of the Protestants that unemployment comes from the policies of the British government. Catholics and Protestants are in the same unions, and the Left's politics have begun to seem more and more reasonable to the workers in a country whose growth industries are controlled from the outside.
The fighting has only begun in Ireland. Buildings are dynamited every week. To McCann it's very clear, "It's the lines of the battle that have to be decided, not whether there's going to be one."