The Troubles: The Brink of Civil War (Part 2)

**Tom Holland** (0:10)
ULSTER Ulster stands at the crossroads. I believe you know me well enough to appreciate that I am not a man given to extravagant language. But I must say to you this evening that our conduct over the coming days and weeks will decide our future. What kind of Ulster do you want? A happy and respected province, in good standing with the rest of the United Kingdom? Or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations regarded by the rest of Britain as a political outcast? As always in a democracy, the choice is yours.
I will accept whatever your verdict may be. If it is your decision to live up to the words, Ulster is British, which is part of our creed, then my services will be at your disposal to do what I can. But if you want a separate, inward-looking, selfish and divided Ulster, then you must seek for others to lead you along that road, for I cannot and will not do it. So that was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and Old Etonian, Terence O'Neill, addressing the nation on television on the night of the 9th of December, 1968
I probably didn't adequately convey in that reading the sheer sense of weariness and desperation that led him to make that speech.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (1:39)
You were chipper. You were positively chipper.

**Tom Holland** (1:42)
No, he's a military man.
And so he knows the importance of preserving a sense of optimism. But that has a very ironic, a kind of bitterly ironic ring today, doesn't it? Because we know where Ulster is heading, and it is going to lead to a separate inward looking selfish and divided Ulster, I guess, because it's going to lead to breakdown of law and order, sectarian hatred, sectarian killings, triumph of extremism, riots, shootings, bombings, hunger strikes, troops on the streets, all kinds of, well, troubles doesn't really do justice to what's going to happen.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:18)
No, exactly. And actually probably not even Terence O'Neill in his darkest moments could have imagined exactly how grim elements of Northern Ireland's future would be.
So that speech is the end of 1968 Last time we were talking about really 1965-66, we were talking about the roots of the troubles, the legacy of partition, the border campaign of the IRA, the rhetoric of Ian Paisley, and then we ended up with the first UVF killings in the summer, spring and summer of 1966 And today we're really going to turn to 1968 and 1969 So this is when the sectarian tension becomes real street fighting. And when Harold Wilson's government in London takes the fateful decision to send the British Army onto the streets of Northern Ireland, and that's something that even a few years earlier would have been unthinkable, but for Tom, for most of our, the first 20 odd years of our lives was a fact of life. The British Army were in Northern Ireland and it seemed at one point that they always would be. So where to start this story? Well, we'll start it in what might seem a very unlikely place. We'll start it in a Pebble Dash terraced council house in the village of Caledon in County Tyrone in June 1968 So Caledon is just inside the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was a majority Protestant and it's controlled in 1968 by the Unionist Party. And as we described last time, if you're controlled by the Unionist Party, if you're in a village there or town, then most of the houses, almost all of them are given to Unionist voters, i.e. Protestants.
There are more than 250 Catholic families in the area that are on the waiting list for housing. And some of those families have been waiting for as long as a decade. But this particular council house, which is 9 Kinnaird Park, has just been allocated to a 19-year-old woman called Emily Beatty, who is a secretary for a local solicitor who's very big in the Unionist Party. Emily Beatty is engaged to a member of the Reservist Bee Specials. And she is, of course, a Protestant.
And to local Catholics, the fact that she's getting this house seems absolutely outrageous. And one of the people who objects is the Nationalist MP for East Tyrone, who is a young man called Austin Curry. And on the 20th of June, Curry decides he's going to occupy this house in protest. He wants the world to notice.
And with two friends, he breaks in to the house using a poker to get in. But they're not there for very long. The local police, the RUC, throw them out a few hours later. And one of the RUC men who throws them out is Emily Beatty's brother, who's come armed with a sledgehammer. Nobody is hurt, nobody is killed. It's not a massive story in the grand scheme of things. So why does it matter? Well, we talked last time about just how divisive, how toxic the issue of housing is in Northern Ireland in the 60s. Both in itself, but also as a symbol of something bigger. The sense among the Catholic minority that they are second-class citizens, shut out at the top jobs, denied votes in local elections, even denied homes of their own. Now, it has to be said, a lot of working-class Protestants will take a different view of this and we'll come back to them a bit later. And this has been going on for 40 years or so, but Austin Curry, the guy who occupied the house, is typical of a new generation. These are people who don't remember the original Troubles, because the Troubles, the name was used to refer to the earlier conflict. They don't remember the Troubles of the 1910s and 1920s.