To Westminster And Back: The Life And Times Of Gerry Fitt
The banqueting room in Belfast's city hall is used for the really big occasions. It is there that the politicans gather to hear the verdict of the electorate upon them. It is here that they are wined and dined in the successful years. A large stained glass window spells the message out for them. Pro Tanto, Quid Retribuamus. For all this, how will we repay you?
On Friday June 10, 1983, at 1.39pm the politicians of West Belfast gathered in the banqueting room and the verdict was read out. Gerry Adams, of Sinn Fein, was elected to Westminster. Gerry Fitt, who had held the seat since 1966, was stripped of office. The RUC formed a massive funnel around Adams, down which he sped into the limelight of the world's media.
"There's more police protecting him than attacked me in Derry" quipped Fitt. It was a joke for insiders. Outwardly, the police were protecting Adams against the wrath of loyalists, gathered in City Hall, who did not like the election result, as seventeen years earlier they had protected Gerry Fitt against the loyalists who didn't like the result then either. Unlike Fitt, though, Adams won't b'e referring to the matter in his maiden Westminster speech in London, England. The difference between the two Gerries was established as long ago as Monday April 25, 1966, 7pm, exactly when the Right Honourable Gerald Fitt, Esquire, Republican Labour Party, rose to his feet to speak for the first time in the House of Commons.
"Since my election", said the newly arrived MP, "I have read in sections of the British press that I have been c1assifled as an Irish Republican. I should take this opportunity to classify my political allegiance. To classify me as an Irish Republican is not strictly correct. The Irish Republican Party in Ireland does not recognise the authority of this House in any part of Ireland and its members would indeed refuse to take their seats in this House. I have not yet given up hope,and I have not yet determined to follow the line of the Irish Republican Party, because I believe that during my term as the representative of West Belfast in this House I will be able to appeal to every reasonable member in the Chamber, and through them, to every reasonable member of the British public. I feel certain that at the end of this Parliament dramatic changes wiIl have taken place in the North of Ireland .... "
Through all the dramatic changes that subsequcntly took place in the North Gerry Fitt never did give up hope that the British Government would sort things out. He placed particular trust in the British Labour Party, which had in 1966 swept to power under Harold Wilson with a hundred seat majority.
The sobriquet "Fitt the Brit", applied with such bitterness to him now by Northern nationalists who have suffered under direct rule from England since 1972 could have been applied with equal accuracy but a lot more affection in 1966 and more before that. For many of Gerry Fitts generation and background, religious and political, England offered an escape and refuge from the direct rule of the Unionist Party in Northern lreland. Back in the North, he told his Westminster audience on that first day, Catholics couldn't get homes, couldn't get jobs, couldn't even get the vote. They couldn't even get a hearing in the Stormont parliament, where a contrived Unionist majority turned a deaf ear to such as him, the democratically elected Stormont representative for Dock. "No matter what pleas I made to the Unionists, I wouldn't get anywhere.
Born in Belfast in 1926, Gerry Fitt got out quick. His father died whcn he was eight and his mother was left to bring up the children in the depressed 1930s. He ran away from home to become a fifteen year old cabin boy, in the British merchant navy, in 1941. He sailed in wartime convoys to Russia. After the war, during a port call to London, he met his future wife Anne Doherty, from Co Tyrone, who was then working as a clerk in the Conservative Ladies' Club. "I used shout Vote Labour during elections and they were annoyed", she remembers.
Fitt read James Connolly at sea and other socialist literature. "You know the way it is", he says, "you dock into any port in the world and in some wee back lane you'll find the Communist Party bookshop, and wee cheap pamphlets."
When he finally returned to Belfast and started his political career as a councillor, Fitt quickly attracted the attention of student militants like Eamonn McCann and Michael Farrell. "There was no smell of the Catholic grammar school off him", says McCann. "He was an urban working class man. He was abrasive. He was nice."
Paddy Kennedy, the other half of the Republican Labour Party presence at Stormont, learned his politics at Fitt's electoral knee. "He came off the merchant ship and back into Belfast and he used to say to me that what he would really love to be was an MP for Cardiff or Liverpool, a dockside place where he could get stuck into a straight fight. Gerry called himself Republican Labour because the Northern Ireland Labour Party was tied into union with Britain and the Irish Labour Party was preoccupied with the border." Also, he added, Gerry didn't like big parties.
Fitt's republicanism was entirely internal and personal, freeing him from bondage to any flag, although being Gerry Fitt he could wave flags with the best of them when electoral advantage was to be gained from it. He blithely welcomed the defeat of Glasgow Rangers, heroes of the Shankill, by Glasgow Celtic, heroes of the Falls, shortly after his own Westminster defeat of the sitting Unionist MP for West Belfast. "We beat them in politics, now we've beaten them in football", he told the Catholics who had come onto the Falls Road after the match.
The Belfast Telegraph ran an editorial criticising him for being sectarian. "The editorial was a joke to us", Paddy Kennedy recalled. "We'd never heard of sectarianism or ecumenism in those days. There were bigoted Protestants in Belfast as top dogs, and poor wee Catholics as under dogs. The only time the Catholics won anything was when Gerry was elected and the night Celtic beat Rangers. I rang him down at the pub to tell him and it didn't mean a thing to him, because he backed horses, not football teams but I said they were out celebrating on the Falls and he'd better come up. He was up like a flash and they carried him along the street, since they couldn't carry the football team. Fans meant votes, and if football teams kept their spirits up, Gerry identified with the football team. It was just another way to keep the fight going against the Unionists."
In Westminster, Gerry dispensed with football teams and flags. He thought the facts would suffice. The Queen's speech, outlining the priorities for Wilson's incoming government, had lain heavy emphasis on the Rhodesian problem, where Ian Smith's white government had just declared independence from a Britain that had been considering reforms for Rhodesia's black majority. There was an exact parallel to Ireland, Fitt argued where a minority had used guns in 1912 to subjugate the majority and Northen Ireland had resulted.
As with so many of his subsequent speeches, he did not tease out the difficult abstract problem any further, but relapsed into telling stories. His stories were wonderful and vivid that day, about the 2,000 couples he knew in Dungannon who couldn't get a house, the intricate saga of why Derry didn't get the University and Coleraine did, and the "468 telegrams, 700 letters and 1,000 phone calls", from people who opposed him in religion but supported him in his new approach to politics. Unionists he finished "cannot believe that 3,000 Protestants voted for me".
Sir Douglas Glover, Conservative member from Ormskirk, followed him. "Whatever we may think about the arguments put forward, we like people who speak with sincerity and fire in their bellies." He praised Fitt's "descriptive turn of phrase" and smoothly dismissed the complaints about Stormont. "In any parliament that is always the view of the minority about the actions of the majority." Why, he too was about to spend five years watching the majority Labour Party members go through the lobbies like fodder, "used by whips in carrying. through legislation in which they do not believe".
Captain L.S. Orr, Unionist member at Westminster for South Down said smoothly that Mr Fitt had made no complaints to the police upon his election, that the University had been sited in Coleraine following recommendations by an independent board that included many prominent and eminent British academics, that the Northern Ireland Labour Party should confirm that religion was never mentioned when the NILP fought elections, and he finished with a quotation from the Irish Independent editoriaL "Captain O'Neill has a new respect from the Catholics of Belfast who cannot remember a time when the police were more fair or more efficient than they were last Sunday, when two rival parades were taking place in the city."
But still Gerry Fitt had faith that when Harold Wilson's government knew the facts, they would take corrective action in Northern Ireland. One hundred Labour MPs had come together in a caucus called "Campaign for Democracy in Ulster", and in Ulster itself a dossier of irrefutable information was being painstakingly compiled by Campaign for Social Justice, fore-runner of the Civil Rights Movement.It was just a matter of presenting it to the Wilson government and getting them to move.
The British government did not want to know the facts.
In 1967, a party of Stormont Nationalist MPs were received in Westminster by Roy Jenkins, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. After they had presented their case and left, a horrified aide said to Jenkins "something will have to be done". Jenkins replied that nothing would be done because any Englishman who set foot in Northern Ireland affairs would be setting a foot in his political grave.
A journalist in the Observer at that time, Mary Holland heard the story from the aide after she had been persuaded by Gerry Fitt to break the paper wall on Northern Ireland that existed in the British media at that time. In the summer of 1968 she had been writing a series of articles entitled "Them and Us", in which she detailed cases of discrimination against individuals. "A lot of it had to do with the difficulties experienced by black people, whose problems in England were then attracting a lot of attention. I got a phone call from Gerry Fitt, saying Catholics were undergoing the same discrimination in Northern Ireland. It's a measure of our ignorance in England at that time that I asked him if he was sure he could prove his case. I'd had a lot of difficulty establishing actual discrimination against black people, given the subtleties of bureaucracy, and I was about to drop the series and accept promotion to a position as arts columnist on the Observer."
Fitt was insistent and she agreed to meet him for lunch. "I named a restaurant in Soho, Wheeler's, and then there was something about his accent and his way of talking that made me add by way of caution 'It's very fashionable and it only serves fish dishes'. 'Ah, Jaysus, Mary', he said, 'I want a real dinner. We'll go to the Irish Club and eat meat'." When she arrived there, Gerry Fitt ordered drinks and opened a suitcase of documents and cuttings from the Irish News, gospel of Belfast Catholics, and the Skibbereen Eagle of everything Unionists had ever done anywhere in the North against the nationalist population. He held her spellbound for several hours. "I couldn't believe it", she says simply of the things she heard that afternoon. He cajoled and charmed and bullied and lured her across the Irish sea. Three days later, on Tuesday October 1,1968, the reluctant would-be arts columnist found herself in the Fitt home on the Antrim Road. "It was a complete culture shock. I sat in the room he uses as a clinic on the ground floor. The basement underneath was the kitchen where his family spent their time. He had a wife and five daughters. Every time he wanted a cup of tea he'd stamp three times on the floor, and up from the basement beneath would come a woman with a tray. I sat there and listened to him and the stream of constituents who called into the room to see him. They were still calling well after midnight."
Next day she hired a car and drove him to Dungannon to see Austin Currie, Stormont Nationalist MP. Fitt didn't know the way and it took them ages. Fitt's lifelong refusal to learn how to drive, which made him dependent on someone who could, and his ignorance of areas west of the Bann were to be major factors in his later political career. "When he first started operating out of Dock, the Falls Road was Outer Mongolia to him", Paddy Kennedy said. Politically, Dungannon must have seemed beyond Mongolia to Mary Holland. Austin Currie told her of the house allocated to the single unmarried female secretary of the local Unionist party branch, and the dozens of large Catholic families on the waiting list. Currie had squatted in the house in protest and the police had evicted him.
Fitt whirled her onto Derry that evening. She was worried that they hadn't made appointments. "Ah, not at all", he said, "you just arrive in the City Hotel and it all happens". They arrived, she ordered tea and sandwiches, he went out into the street for a few minutes and returned with Eamonn McCann, Ivan Cooper, and the future brigade staff of the Official IRA, Provisional IRA and the INLA. On that night though, they were no more than what they represented themselves to be, young militant civil rights activists. Ivan Cooper was the radical mascot, a Protestant who had defected from the Unionist Party. They were going to march in Derry that coming weekend.
Mary Holland flew back to England on Wednesday. Her story "John Bull's Political Slum" was scheduled as a major feature on the inside pages of the Observer of Sunday 6. Gerry Fitt came on the phone again pleading with her to return to Derry for October 5, just to see, just to see. Three Labour Party MPs had agreed to come. Ah come on Mary, for Jaysus sake. The Observer agreed, and sent over a photographer as well. He was the only photographer from a British newspaper.
The picture he took of Gerry Fitt being batoned on the head by the police and the blood spurting down his shirt went all over the world accompanied by RTE film. Mary Holland phoned the story in from a fish and chip shop in Duke Street, dictating amid the screams and shouting and standing in a crush of bodies drenched with water from the cannons and blood from their wounds. The proprietor handed her his card hoping for a mention. There was a sense that the North was about to attract journalists on expense accounts.
Was she frightened? "I was outraged. This was a part of Britain and the police were hitting a Westminster MP over the head." That night she flew back to London and rang all the journalists she knew. She was crying with vexation, frustration, anger, outrage and pity. She rang Bernard Levin. He rang David Frost. The Observer front-paged her story of the October 5 march, and directed readers to the background expose on the inside page. David Frost came to Northern Ireland within days to do a live programme. The media wall burst to flood Britain with the facts.
Gerry Fitt had done what he set out to do. He had turned the spotlight on Northern Ireland, though he was run off his feet in the process. The Irish News recorded proudly that on one historic day he attended Belfast Corporation as Councillor, in the morning, Stormont as MP for Dock in the afternoon, and Westminster as MP for West Belfast in the evening. To Unionist protests that the whole civil rights thing was a plot by communists, republicans intent on overthrowing the Crown, murdering gunmen standing in the wings etcetera, Gerry would say across the floor of Stormont, "when I was on the Murmansk convoy ... " He then reminisced about the dangers of the merchant seaman's lot in World War Two when he had helped defend Britain and the Free World. The titled peers and majors on the Stormont government benches, most of whom had never fought in the war, chewed their lips.
The reasonable response from the reasonable members of Westminster, by which he had set such store, came in the Cameron Report. The Labour government had commissioned Lord Cameron to report on the events and marches preceding and following October 5, and assign reasons. This Report, which Harold Wilson and the entire Commons accepted, stated that Gerry Fitt "must clearly have envisaged the possibility of a violent clash with the police as providing the publicity he so ardently sought. His conduct, in our judgement, was reckless and wholly irresponsible in a person occupying his public position." From that moment on Gerry Fitt was effectively rendered impotent at Westminster. Back in the North the high terrain of anti-unionism was about to be occupied by a whole new batch of articulate, pragmatic political operators who swept into Stormont in the spring of '69, on a civil rights wave which had drowned out the old Nationalist party. Hume, Cooper, O'Hanlon and Paddy Devlin waved no flags and did not gaze hopelessly into the Celtic mist. Austin Currie had long abandoned green fields for street smarts.
Gerry Fitt abandoned his own party. He had been campaigning for a republican Labour councillor from Belfast who wanted a run at a seat -- any seat - and Gerry had sent him off to fight in mid-U1ster. They addressed a small crowd after the ten o'clock mass, and hung around to see how their opponent Ivan Cooper would do after the eleven o'clock mass. Cooper attracted a massive crowd to his Independent Civil Rights tag. Gerry got up on the truck and spoke in support of Cooper. These civil rights guys wanted to slug it out toe to toe with the Unionists and they were men after Gerry's involved gurrier heart. He was no longer alone. He was in fact, surrounded and obscured, as they marched people all over the areas west of the Bann, in Newry, Armagh, MidU1ster, Fermanagh and Derry.
Besides which, Bernadette had arrived at Westminster. Together they should have made a colourful picture, the sailor home from the sea and the maiden in from the hills. The Irish Times went mad over Gerry with "his sailor's roll, his malapropisms, his Belfast turn of phrase which makes stiff upper lips wince, his yea-saying to life", but oh, Bernadette! Starting sonorously with "youngest MP ever elected to Westminster", journalists trundled down the Thesaurus runway and took off into the wild blue yonder. She arrived, an orphan in a miniskirt, a real live Left winger, a megastar, in the Commons, on her birthday, April 22, 1969.
"That made me 22, which spoiled the script so nobody mentioned it", she recalls tartly. She represented the newly militant civil rights movement, no longer prepared to turn the other cheek to batons, if Britain was going to turn a blind eye to the facts. It was one thing being beaten from Belfast to Burntollet, quite another to be pursued on arrival all the way into Bogside which the police now frequently did. Sammy Devenney had been beaten by them in his home, in front of his family, on April 19 and he died from injuries. A Scotland Yard enquiry subsequently found a conspiracy of silence among the RUC and no one was charged. The barricades were going up.
"The Devenney death was being raised at Westminster and Gerry wanted me over for it. I had won the by~lection only a few days before and I hadn't a penny. He gave me fifty pounds for the fare and to buy myself something to wear. Things went wrong right from the start. I had decided that the youngest MP should be introduced by the oldest MP, Manny Shinwell of Labour, and of course Gerry. Gerry had decided I should be introduced by himself and Paul Rose, one of the leaders of the Campaign for Democracy. We hadn't consulted on it, and Gerry found himself having to withdraw the invitation to Rose."
The slight and unintended erosion of Gerry Fitt's authority was compounded by the events of the day. "The publicity was unbelievable. He had booked me into the Irish Club, and I sat ther.e in my mini-skirt and the press just drooled. If I had been older or wiser or just more thoughtful or even courteous or machiavellian, I would have ended every remark with a reference to Gerry who was sitting ignored, in the room." The alliance in any case was doomed from the start, she says. "It was a matter of emphasis. Gerry would plead for reform, saying the police and later the soldiers were only making martyrs by their handling of what was called security. I would stand there saying you've tried everything down the centuries. from hanging drawing and quartering to straight bullets and the Croppy will never lie down."
There was also the acute difference of the socialist approach. "I appeared on every left-wing platform in England. speaking on gypsies rights, defending the Dagenham strikers against Wilson, and I spoke in Trafalgar square in defence of the PLO. Paul Rose took the Israeli side and wrote me a letter criticising my stand. I released it to the papers and the split with Labour widened. There was them and Gerry: and there was me."
And then there was the battle of the Bogside in August 1969, which brought the British Army into Northern Ireland, with a resultant quagmire of political and anned struggle into which Gerry Fitt was to hopelessly flounder. There had been increasing ambiguity among all shades of nationalist opinion about how best to defend Catholics against attacks from the RUC and loyalists, especially in Belfast. Whole shifts of population were occurring there as Catholics and Protestants retreated into the safety of the ghettoes, but Gerry Fitt warned on August 7 at a meeting in Trinity College, Dublin that the swapping of houses was not a mutually polite arrangement. Catholics were being forced out of their homes, he said, and "the people" (whom he did not specify) did not like it. "The time is coming when they will change their tactics and instead of moving people elsewhere under these circumstances they will have to protect them in their homes. The RUC are messenger boys of the UVF." More was needed than a telephone network against the arrival of the RUC and the UVF in the area, he warned, but he did not specify what.
In Derry that August the Citizens Defence Committee had been set up alongside the Civil Rights Association, with overlapping Executive membership, and community halls were used to store petrol bombs. No elected representative shouted stop. On August 12 Orangemen marched in the city centre, a few desultory stones were thrown at them, and the RUC and Bogsiders reacted as to a referee's whistle starting the match, both sides running onto the pitch under the High Flats, in the heart of Catholic territory. The set piece battle lasted three days and Belfast street fighters came out in support in an effort to siphon off RUC strength. Guns were used on both sides in Belfast. People died there.
Jack Lynch moved his troops up to the border, four miles from Derry, and Harold Wilson moved British soldiers onto Northern streets. Gerry Fitt in Belfast welcomed the army, and Bernadette in Derry opposed them. The RUC were removed, and eventually disarmed, but, says Derryman Michael Canavan, now SDLP spokesman on security, the first mistake had already been made by Britain. "Control of the Army was left in the hands of Stormont." Effectively the Unionists had been handed an even more powerful weapon with which to assert their authority. That authority was copperfastened by the removal of Harold Wilson and his replacement as Prime Minister by Edward Heath of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in June 1970. Bernadette Devlin and Gerry Fitt were both returned in that election.
Fitt went over to England to sit in even more obscurity, on the opposition benches behind Labour. Bernadette, upon re-election, went straight into Armagh jail to serve a six month sentence for her part in the Battle of Bogside. Derry rioted for three more days. Two weeks later on July 3, a rifle was discovered in a house off the Falls Road and British soldiers sealed off the entire surrounding area, put residents under curfew for the weekend and killed three men. Captain John Brooke, a Stormont Minister, arrived in a truck with the media horde and the Army escorted them on a televised tour of the suppressed area.
While Republicans formulated their own disorganised and poorly armed response to these matters (starting with a split in January 1970), the Civil Rights MPs came together in a broad political front. "We met in Donegal and Toome " (always west of the Bann) said Austin Currie, "and John Hume favoured the Social Democratic approach, because he was into the European perspective, and Paddy Devlin and Gerry Fitt favoured the Labour approach. Fitt had the senior political experience so labour was given priority. The Labour and Social Democratic Party was the agreed name and we started drawing up policy. Around three in the morning Paddy Devlin sat straight up and said 'Jesus Christ, the LSD Party, they'll think we're spaced out capitalists'." This was in pre-decimal currency days. The SDL was born in August 1970 with Fitt as titular head, and his political currency still shrinking in value, from Republican Labour to Social Democratic Labour, to a party identified more by initials than policy.
Paddy Devlin and Ivan Cooper visited Bernadette in jail and informed her that, among other things, reform not resistance was to be the future order of the day. If she did not fall in step with SDLP policy they would oppose her in future elections, splitting the vote rather than let a unity candidate take the seat. Her Westminster colleague, Gerry Fitt, did not come to see her in Armagh.
"It's a miracle that a party which includes elements from west of the Bann and the Falls Road should come together", Gerry Fitt had said when the SDLP was launched. While he became embedded in the stable body politic of Westminster, the political and military landmines detonating all over the North caused tlie SDLP to step in, step out again of Stormont and the moves they took were indeed dictated by the areas in which they lived.
With violence breaking out on all sides in Belfast, Fitt called in February 1971 on the British Army to raid the homes of Protestants as well as Catholics, so that it would not be seen as an agent of Stormont. But when in July, in a stone throwing riot, the first two Derrymen were shot dead by the soldiers John Hume insisted that the party withdraw from Stormont in protest.
Fitt, never a man for abstention, disagreed. Hume won and went a step further, setting up an alternative Parliament in Dungiven, so far west of the Bann that the Glenshane Pass had to be negotiated to get to it. Fitt had no car, couldn't drive, and they wanted him down there to consider abstractions. In August 1971 internment was introduced and hundreds of Belfast Catholics were lifted from their beds. Fitt endorsed the SDLP decision to not even discuss things with the British government and flew off to America to counteract the propaganda being put about by a Tory Minister who had gone over to disinform.
A soldier was shot on the Louth/Armagh border while both were over there, and Gerry Fitt said of this on TV that it was "one more regrettable and tragic incident which we have to expect while the Border exists and the British troops continue to carry out the sectarian will of the Unionist government." He raised funds among Irish Americans for the campaign of civil disobedience, including the withholding of rent and rates, upon which the entire nationalist community had launched, with the united backing of both Republicans and the SDLP.
Then came Bloody Sunday, January 1972. "It's a United Ireland now or nothing", John Hume raised the first green flag. Bemadette punched Reginald Maudling in the face on the floor of Westminster and nationalist politicians withdrew even from the lowest form of political engagement, local government in the North. It was all too much for Gerry, the political in-fighter, to bear.
Never an electoral pacifist, he hated seeing Unionists step into uncontested city council seats as one by one the anti-unionist councillors withdrew from the ring or were counted out for non-attendance. He dashed down to City Hall, signed the attendance sheet, made a token attendance and dashed home. Paddy Devlin, a gut-fighter himself, persuaded the SDLP to ignore this breach of the rules, but even he had to restrain Gerry publicly when Unionist jeers about Fitt's token presence in City Hall provoked Gerry to throw down a challenge that he could resign altogether, fight as an abstentionist and still beat them.
When the other Dock seat fell vacant, with the prospect of a Unionist setting foot in Gerry's political birthplace he "went mad with frustration altogether and walked that floor like a lion", his wife Anne recalled. "He and [Stormont) Senator Paddy Wilson set off down town to scour the pubs. Gerry swore he'd find somebody to fight the seat before the night was out. Towards closing time I got a call from him. 'I've found someone, Anne', he said. 'Great', I said. 'It's a woman, Anne', he said. 'Even better', I said. 'It's you Anne', he said."
Unable to wriggle out of the party bonds that tied him down, Fitt watched with delight while Anne toured the streets handing out the election address which she wrote herself. "When elected I will not be attending City Hall but I will be preventing a bigoted Unionist from doing so in your name". She won by 2,536 to 288, obtaining a larger vote than Gerry ever did in that ward. On March 24, 1972 Stormont was prorogued to the sound of guns and bombs as Northern Ireland was engulfed in the cross fire between the British Army, the UDR, the RUC, UVF, UDA, UFF, Official IRA and Provisional IRA. Gerry Fitt and Bernadette Devlin were the only two antiunionists left with political status, and even they were forbidden from negotiating with anybody.
While the politicians chaffed at redundancy, people who were in jail as a result of the war chaffed at their criminalisation. A hunger strike was called and Gerry Fitt was instrumental in persuading Northern Secretary Willie Whitelaw to grant in June special category status to prisoners convicted of political offences. This, coupled with a mass release of internees, and the famous talks in London with IRA leaders, who included Gerry Adams, (specially released from internment for the talks) broke the political deadlock. The IRA declared a ceasefire and the way was open for the SDLP to return to constitutional politics.
The IRA cease fire lasted nine days. Within a month of the granting of special category status, the Provos were responsible for the bombing of Belfast on Bloody Friday and the bombing of the village of Claudy. Many civilians died. The Shankill butchers were also out that July with knives and many Catholics died. It seemed to Gerry Fitt, who lived in the murder mile that stretched from Carlisle Circus
up along the Antrim Road in which he lived, that every time he opened his front door, or his newspaper, somebody was dead. Whatever sympathetic links had ever existed between him and "the people" who defended the area where he lived - "the vigilantes only ever stood in my front garden with big sticks, in 1969 and 1970" - were well and truly broken.
1973 opened with a British white paper that suggested the formation of an Assembly to which power would be devolved if it was shared between Protestants and Catholics. An election was called for June and exactly one week before polling day Gerry Fitt received a phone call from Assistant Chief Constable Sam Bradley.
"He asked me if I had thirty pounds, and I said I had, and he said he was sending a detective up right away with a gun and a permit. 'It won't stop the loyalists killing you, Gerry', he said, 'but if you fire it in the air when they come at you they'll have to put a bullet through you. They won't get close enough to cut your throat'."
He got the gun on Friday night and set off from Belfast with Senator Paddy Wilson for a tour, as leader, of the SDLP country constituencies. "I paid £28 for the hire of a car and Paddy drove me round. A police sergeant in Cushendall, a pal of mine, took me up into a quarry and taught me how to fire it. We came back to Belfast on Monday night. Paddy met a bird in a pub and went off up the Cave Hill in a car. The butchers followed him into a quarry." Both-bodies were stabbed and mutilated from top to bottom. Gerry Fitt identified them in the morgue.
The Assembly was formed and though more votes were cast for the dissident Unionist parties of Paisley and Craig than were cast for the unionist party of Brian Faulkner, the former Stormont premier went off to Sunningdale to en·gage in talks with the SDLP and the Alliance parties. Between them these three parties cobbled out a power sharing agreement, under the direction of Edward Heath. They returned to Northern Ireland to form an Executive which took office on January I, 1974. The British Governmen this time kept control of the army and police. Heath however, lost office that January, brought down by miner's strike which resulted in the return of a Labour government with a tiny majority of three. Bernadelti Devlin too bowed out, as the SDLP split the mid·Ulster vote.
Gerry Fitt, Deputy Chief Executive under Brian Faulkner, had no specific portfolio as did John Hume in Commerce or Austin Currie in Housing. SDLP sources said at the time that he had not the intellectual capacity or disciplinle to handle a department, but Ben Caraher, policy adviser to the SDLP, captured the raison d'etre of the man perhaps more accurately. Fitt told Caraher then that he hated not being able to represent his constituents properly, in capacity as dole lawyer, arguing at tribunals on their behalf against the government of the day.
He did, however, manage to civilise the austere house on hill, persuading teetotaler Faulkner to install a drinks cupboard and ignoring Faulkner ordinance against smoking during Executive business sessions. Gerry Fitts rough charm, cigarette in one hand, glass in the other, helped enormously in bridging the gap between men seperated by centuries of cultural, religious and political tradition.
The gap between his house on the Antrim road Stormont, four miles away, was bridged by the RUC which provided him with a car and armed driver. Paddy Devlin, too, was given an armed escort for travel through loyalist areas on his way to Stormont but he always drove his own car, and was followed by the police in theirs. "I kept my distance from them in all ways" Devlin said. "Once you step into a police car you have to surrender a bit of yourself"
Austin Currie had policemen living in his garage in mid-Ulster, but he criticised the force when he thought necessary, leading the Police Federation at their annual general conference to speak bitterly against him.
The Executive and the Assembly lasted a mere five months. It was brought down by the Protestent workforce who held key positions in energy, transport and engineering, and who paralysed the Province by withdrawing their labour in unofficial action. Frantic calls to Wilson to order the Army to step in yielded only the sour televised response that Northerners were "spongers"
"The Labour Government were afraid to shoot the Prods, which is what it would have amounted to" Fitt said of the period. "They told me that if they established the precedent of using the Army against workers, they'd be handing the Tories a stick to break the unions with next time the Tories got in. Heath was just waiting to get back at the miners"
The collapsed Assembly was repalced by a six month Convention in 1975, when the same political factions were elected to a talking shop whose brief was to come up with another power sharing plan or be banished to the wilderness. The Convention could not agree and was abolished. Gerry Fitt was now the only anti-unionist with a parlimantery seat, and he snuggled further into Westminster. Always, when he came home to Belfast, the police provided an car and armed companion-driver. The two men became good friends.
From 1975 until the 1983 Westminster election, says Michael Canavan, the " SDLP was left with no constitutional place to go. Only a revolutionary party could have continued to operate without status, or office or pay". Those were the years when the British government withdrew political status from even the prisioners and sought a military solution to the North. Those were the years when the Provos, through the prisioners, emerged as a politicla force in the North.
Those were the years when the SDLP abandoned the search for an internal solution and said the North could only be solved in an all-Ireland context. Those were the years when Gerry Fitt, from 1975 until he resigned from the party in November 1979, and John Hume, Euro MP from June 1979 onwards, were the only SDLP politicians with a seat and a salary. While Hume operated from Brussels, Washington and west of the Bann, Gerry Fitt operated almost exclusively from Westminster and his perspective on the North was formed from that distant point.
He could have forged, but didn't, links with such as the Socialist International to which the SDLP was affiliated. His entire temperament went against formal relationships of any kind - "I hate being in parties, they keep trying to tell you what to do, passing resolutions on every little thing" - and it was his proud boast that the SDLP never had a branch in his West Belfast constituency.
He was a saloon man and his saloon was Westminster, and he liked wandering in and out of hotels and bars, seeing people when he came home. Since the fall of the Executive, he spent more and more time in the Europa Hotel in Belfast. The bars were dangerous places now for him and his very home was unsafe. He was under attack from his own constituents. When the Executive collapsed they were left with internment, punitive repayment of the rent they had withheld during the years of protest against it, replacement of internment in 1975 by non-jury courts, and army camps and police stations all over West Belfast.
Their sole representative upheld British rule as an alternative, he said, to civil war and they turned on him. In 1976 on the eve of the anniversary of internment they petrol-bombed his home, burst down the door and mobbed up the stairs to his bedroom. Gerry Fitt fired a shot over their heads. The experience made him rely more and more on the army and police for protection, as the mob returned again and again and again. His home had to be protected by floodlights, wire netting and a direct two way radio link to police headquarters.
There was little link with the SDLP, most of whose members were turning, in those wilderness years, to drink or business affairs or home life. Paddy Devlin, the left-wing voice of the party, turned to Trade Union affairs, saying in his resignation statement that the SDLP made not even a pretence of uniting the workers, never mind uniting, Ireland. Austin Currie remembers Gerry Fitt turning up at his home in a police car, and asking Currie to drive him the rest of the way to his boat moored on the Shannon, where he was going on holiday. The RUC, said Currie, were worried about going over the border.
Gerry Fitt says Michael Canavan "hardly ever turned up at SDLP Executive meetings" (most of which were held in Donegal, west of the Bann, think-tanks). There was, of course, little to turn up for. The only political action, and it was little enough, was at Westminster. In the North, in November 1977, Gerry Fitt was to exclaim, there was Roy Mason "a colonial administrator, always dressed in a safari suit, walking down the main street in Belfast, with the natives holed up in substandard wigwams on the Falls and Shankill reservations."
There wasn't even much the politicians could do about the wigwams. The Housing Executive, established as an independent body because of the way politicians had exercised discrimination when they had control of housing, was "treating politicians with contempt", Fitt snarled in 1979. He was "beginning to regret the decision to set it up at all." His political base, ward heeling, which he had assiduously tended since first becoming a councillor was being cut from under him.
In lesser wigwams, in the cells of Long Kesh, men wrapped only in blankets had spent the years since 1976 signalling with excrement smeared on the walls that life was unbearable.
"I remain convinced to this day that some of the men sentenced were absolutely innocent", says Michael Canavan, "Confessions had been tortured out of them by the RUC in Castlereagh. There was a definite breakdown in the administration of law and order. That only increased the alienation between the Catholic population and them, and reinforced the support for the Provos. I had difficulty in persuading the SDLP that brutality and corruption was going on. Reluctance to admit that things were so was reinforced by the knowledge that every time you criticised the police you were strengthening the hand of the IRA, I issued a detailed statement one morning, criticising the UDR, and a few hours later a UDR man and his young daughter were blown up in their car. I was physically sick all day but I stood over my statement."
Gerry Fitt, he said, "always got things just slightly wrong" on the issue of law and order, highlighting the activities of the IRA and the loyalists and never totally appreciating the more covert activities of the security forces. Paddy Kennedy, erstwhile colleague of Fitt, had a meeting with him in Dublin around that time. "Gerry had raised the wrongful imprisonment of Giuseppe Conlon in Westminster and I mentioned to him the framing of an IRA man well known to us both. 'I know he's innocent of that particular charge, but he's guilty of plenty of other things', Fitt replied." He refused to pursue the matter.
The ethics of handling law and order was something that was to puzzle Fitt always. "When the Shankill butchers were caught and charged", he says, "I was over the moon. Then in walks Paschal O'Hare", an SDLP councillor, "and announces that he's defending them. I refused to drink with him. A Catholic defending Prods that cut Catholic throats. I've heard of ethics but that was just ridiculous."
The breakdown of ethics in police and army behaviour was revealed in the Bennet report in 1979 and the Labour government refused time to discuss it in Westminster. They were by now a minority government and were holding onto power by means of a deal with Unionist MPs at the House of Commons. If the Unionists abstained from any vote against them, Labour would increase Northern Ireland representation at Westminster from twelve seats to seventeen. A vote of confidence was called and Gerry Fitt held the balance of power. "This will be the unhappiest speech I have ever made in the House", he began, and he explained that he would abstain from voting for Labour, citing the Bennet report, the deal with the Unionists and Roy Mason's behaviour in Northern Ireland as his reasons for standing aside while Labour fell.
"The Labour government", he finished bitterly, "are not the best government to grapple with the Irish problem ... I respect the Conservative government of 1970-74 which tried courageously to reach a settlement in Northern Ireland." He left the Chamber without hearing the vote. "I saw a Tory when I finished speaking", he said later, "a real bloated Tory. You could have identified him anywhere as a Tory. He was sneering at the Labour government side. If I'd stayed on, I'd have had to vote against anything he was voting for." The SDLP, which did not know how Gerry was going to vote over there, heaved a sigh of relief.
Gerry Fitt was returned for West Belfast, for the last time, in the May 1979 general election which followed. Michael Foot, who had negotiated the deal with the Unionists, paid glowing quoted tribute in Fitt's election literature. Frank Cluskey, leader of the Irish Labour Party signed himself "deeply impressed by your unrelenting opposition to social injustice and sectarianism". Joe Gormley, President of the Mineworkers Union was quoted too, as was Ray Buckton, General Secretary of ASLEF.
The SDLP got the vote out for him.
They did not attempt to get the vote out in FermanaghTyrone, that peculiar seat west of the Bann, where Frank Maguire was returned as a Unity candidate. Austin Currie resigned as chief whip of the party to fight Maguire as independent SDLP and he lost.
In June, John Hume won a northern Euro seat without the help of Gerry Fitt, who went to Dublin to campaign for the Irish Labour Party. In September the Pope came. In November the SDLP annual conference barely rejected a motion from the mid-Ulster branch calling for talks with the Provos and suppressed motions critical of Gerry Fitt. Later that November, Humphrey Atkins, with the approval of Margaret Thatcher, published a white paper suggesting yet another Assembly to which, if etcetera, and everybody being agreed of course, but there was to be no mention of an Irish dimension.
Fitt urged acceptance of the paper in Belfast. "An Irish dimension will always be there while the six counties exist on the island of Ireland", he said. The party rejected the paper in Dungannon, west of the Bann. Fitt supported their stand and flew back to Westminster from where, one day later, faced with a government that was fast losing patience with the Irish, he resigned from the SDLP.
Gerry Fitt was a man at the end of his teather. The IRA wouldn't listen to the Pope. The SDLP wouldn't listen to him. He had the ear only of the RUC and the House of Commons. And he had his gun. "I had only had it for protection", he said. "The IRA never protected anybody. The Army was there to protect people. At least they had to follow the rules of the Yellow Card. The IRA never used a Yellow Card."
"Gerry could never figure out the Republicans." Paddy Kennedy recalled the very early days. "When he was out fighting World War Two, the IRA killed a policeman on the Springfield Road". Thomas Williams was hung for that in 1943. "Gerry called the Republicans wimps and gimps and hunchies, running round with their coat collars turned up. The trouble was he was very funny about it. He can slander more wittily than anybody you'd know, and you'd be laughing without realising the damage he was causing and the real hurt he was doing to people's feelings."
For all that, Gerry manned a polling station for Sinn Fein in 1958, in the middle of their 1956-62 armed campaign against the B specials and the RUC. It was a comparatively minor campaign though, and few people died, and Sean South was regarded as a broth of a boy, though a bit of an eejit, rolling up to the Barracks door like that to get shot dead. There was no television then.
"I would have worked with anybody that got up and after the Unionists", he explained his liaison with Sinn Fein. "Sinn Fein then wasn't like it is now, and I agreed to man a polling station for them in the Belfast Corporation elections. A woman came into personate for the Unionists. I spotted her straight away and challenged her and she stood her ground so I called the police over to arrest her. 'You can't do that' says the Sinn Fein man'. 'Why not', says 1. 'Because you'll have to testify in court against her, and we don't recognise the courts', says he. 'Fucks sake, ye bunch of cunts', says I and I tore up my agent's card and walked away."
Twenty two years later, Sinn Fein weren't even recognising the prisons. In November 1980 blanket prisoners went on hunger strike in pursuit of political status. Gerry Fitt sat in the House of Commons, opposite Margaret Thatcher, on Monday November 10 and listened to speeches about unemployment. 35,900 people had been thrown on the dole in Wales in one year. A computer company had just closed shedding fifteen hundred workers. The British Steel workforce had been reduced by 826 that week. The Broadcasting Bill for a fourth television channel was discussed, plus plans for Welsh language programmes.
At 8pm the Commons moved onto Northern Ireland, Remanded Persons, and Humphrey Atkins assured the House that the current industrial strike by prison officers in the North, in support of the strike taken by prison officers on the mainland, was not affecting the security situation in Long Kesh. "In the province we do not have the rapid turnover in and out of prisons that occurs in England and Wales." Prisoners in the province were serving much longer sentences, you see. Some of those prisoners were on hunger strike this two weeks now, but Mr Atkins scarcely discussed that.
Jim Molyneux did. He spent eleven minutes explaining that "the IRA hunger-strikers" were "beasts". He urged the government not even to concede civilian clothing to them. He sat down and Gerry Fitt rose up. It was 8.39. He recalled having successfully pleaded for political status in 1972, and said "I bitterly regret having made those representations". Then he told stories, and the stories were littered with the bodies of people who died in the North over the decade.
Three soldiers killed by an IRA landmine. Two soldiers and seven civilians killed by an IRA bomb on Bloody Friday. Six civilians killed by an IRA bomb in Claudy. A woman twenty yards from his home, with no legs, because the loyalist bomb went off in a pub as she passed by. Ten Protestant workmen killed in Armagh, their lunch boxes still in their hands. Three Catholics killed in retaliation. Ten Catholics killed on July 5 by loyalists, and a "mixture of Catholics and Protestants" killed on July 8 and 9. John Turnley, Miriam Daly, Ronnie Bunting and Joe Little assassinated by loyalists. His friend Davy Walsh, with no leg, "never able to live with the fact that his leg was blown off for no known or understandable reason". No deaths caused by the RUC or the British Army or the UDR were mentioned.
He could only say with some regret, of Cardinal 0 Fiach's involvement in the hunger strike, that the Cardinal "did not avail of an invitation to visit other people on the mattress", the maimed with no arms or legs. An Irish newspaper had remarked that "if a person was imprisoned then that should be sufficient retribution, that once in prison a person should be able to do other things. I do not believe that taking away a man's liberty because he has committed a heinous crime is enough. There are certain conditions that must be fulfilled in prison."
He sat down at 9.l8pm. The House moved on to the Avoidable Destruction of Wildlife Bill. Janet Fookes, member for Plymouth-Drake rose to speak of birds "dying of starvation induced by lead poisoning of their environment", Unable and unwilling to eat, the birds suffered from "anaemia, convulsion, paralysis of the muscles, general lethargy, internal lesions and loss of weight". The House agreed to an extension beyond the 1 Opm deadline to let her speak fully of this crisis. Moles, she said were dying "painfully, underground, where we cannot see them. Out of sight ought not to mean out of mind."
On June 10, 1983, Gerry Fitt lost his seat to Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. John Hume, benefitting from the deal which Labour did with the Unionists, won the restructured seat in Foyle and set off himself to be the lone voice in Westminster. The Housing Executive announced that they were pulling down Gerry Fitt's house as part of their modernisation programme. Gerry Fitt said he was moving out his furniture anyway before the Provos came to celebrate their victory. He would consider his future in England, he said. If he took a peerage, he might not be able to contest next year's Euro elections, he said, and there were all those "Prod votes". If he does take a peerage - if a seat is offered in the House of Lords - the man who sought one man one vote in the North will not be allowed a commoners vote ever again.
Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus.