By Monica McWilliams, Professor Emeritus of Ulster University, and Avila Kilmurry, Director of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland. Both were founding members of the Women’s Coalition.

The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was established in January 1967, drawing on a number of progressive political strands that prioritised equal citizenship and the realisation of democracy in Northern Ireland – demands that were seen as a challenge to the single party Unionist Government that had itself been in power for some 50 years.  It was August 1968 that NICRA took to the streets seeking to highlight grievances concerning housing, employment and electoral discrimination experienced mainly by the Catholic/Nationalist population within the North.  The couple of thousand protesters that walked for civil rights in Dungannon, and later in Londonderry/Derry, swelled to some 20,000 in November 1968, after the batoning of the peaceful protest by the Northern Irish police (RUC) in October 1968.

 Local anger was matched by international interest when the abuse of the civil rights marchers was captured on television cameras.  NICRA had called for the Westminster Parliament to abide by its responsibility to exercise good governance in Northern Ireland as set out under the Government of Ireland Act (1920) Section 75. Despite the parliamentary convention that the Stormont Parliament in Belfast should exercise devolved authority, the British Government could no longer ignore developments in its embarrassing hinterland.

By June 1969, NICRA had honed its demands and organised itself as a movement of mass mobilisation. This article explores the too often unacknowledged role of women in that mobilisation. NICRA Executive Committee member, Rebecca McGlade, recalled that ‘women were the backbone of the civil rights struggle’.

 

The Indignation of Women

One of the seeds of NICRA was the Mid-Ulster based Committee for Social Justice, identified with the husband and wife team, Dr. McCluskey and Patricia McCluskey.  Even prior to the establishment of the CSJ, Patricia McCluskey was one of 67 people – mainly women – who set up the Homeless Citizens’ League to protest about the discrimination in the allocation of housing by Dungannon Urban Council.  They held a protest march in March 1963 to make representation to the Council, with the League being led by a youthful Angela McCrystal.  Women were fed up living in unsanitary and crowded conditions, resulting in the illness of their children and a sense of hopelessness in terms of family prospects.  This was not a political conspiracy, as some would have it, but the clustered grievances of a section of the population that felt done down and oppressed.  It was women that organised originally to say enough was enough.

Some years later in Derry, women were to the fore in the Derry Housing Action Committee.  The McNamee, Dillon, Oliphert and Quigley women all lived in 8, Limavady Road, without adequate sanitary facilities or electricity.  They staged a sit in at the Corporation Housing Department but to little avail. Other women including Brigid Bond and Sadie Campbell also expressed their frustration by occupying the Lord Mayor’s chambers. The late trade union leader, Inez McCormack described how ‘I remain in awe of women like Sadie Campbell who marched into the mayor’s parlour to demand better housing and was arrested. . .Women who endured rather than enjoyed life, who washed dishes and went out to protest on the streets, and went home and washed more dishes.’  The occupation of the Derry Guildhall, that Brigid Bond participated in, formed the basis of Brian Friel’s celebrated drama – ‘Freedom of the City’.  Indignation drove women to join the ever-increasing number of protestors who found their voice in NICRA.

 

Women as Civil Rights Leaders

Stalwart trade union activist Betty Sinclair, served as an early chairperson of NICRA, having attended its first meetings in her capacity as Secretary of Belfast & District Trade Union Council.  Some years previously (1965) she had organised a conference on civil liberties that was held in the meeting room of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union.  As a working class Protestant member of the Communist Party of Ireland, she believed that democracy was the Achilles heel of Unionism and there was a need for mass democratic struggle in the North.  During her tenure as chairperson, Betty faced down what she saw were ultra-left provocations that served to further alienate sections of the Protestant working-class.  Speaking at a NICRA meeting in Dungiven in 1969, she argued ‘If steps are to be taken in a programme of civil disobedience they must be such as to bring people together and not put them further apart’.  Betty was one of a number of Communist Party members that had themselves been reared in Protestant/Presbyterian families, but whose political affiliations brought them into left-wing political activism.

Another such woman, Edwina Stewart, replaced Betty as NICRA Executive member in the late 1960’s, whilst the indomitable, Madge Davison, took up the position as Assistant Organiser in NICRA’s Belfast Marquis Street office, in December 1969.  The following year Madge joined the women’s march to break the British Army’s Falls Curfew.  When she and her friend and fellow activist, Ann Hope, were arrested in the face of Christmas 1970, Madge rolled a cigarette, and faced down the British squaddie who was pointing his gun at her, saying ‘What else did Santa bring you?’  Madge was to remain the backbone of NICRA until its dissolution.  She then went on to help organise a conference on the Administration of Justice in Northern Ireland in June 1981, which set up CAJ – Committee for the Administration of Justice.

 

Women as Activists for Rights

Women were organisers, they were activists, they were strategists and they sewed the NICRA banners that many of them carried at protests.  They were drawn from a range of different political allegiances, and none.  Cathy Harkin was an activist from the Derry Labour Party, bringing her young son to NICRA meetings across Northern Ireland.  Janet Wilcock stood as a Labour candidate in a by-election.  Hilary Boyle, an author and progressive, travelled up from Dublin, wearing her trademark hat and waved her umbrella in the face of RUC baton charges.  Rebecca McGlade spoke about the mother of a large family from Cliftonville in North Belfast, marshalling her large family into the minibus to bring well-stocked picnics and their own banner to civil rights marches. 

Women were also at the forefront of tragedies.  Brigid Bond was the chairperson of Derry Civil Rights Association on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January 1972.  Both she and Ann Hope wrote the eye witness accounts of the events that unfolded.  ‘Unheard Voices’ from Derry recently partnered with the Tower Museum to present Brigid’s archive, which included a blood splattered NICRA banner from that day.  Brigid unveiled the Bloody Sunday memorial in Derry in January 1974.

When Madge Davison died in January 1991, a legal colleague, Barry McDonald, said ‘I wouldn’t insult Madge’s memory by saying that she was the equal of any man; I don’t know any who was the equal of Madge’.  The same could be said of many women who took up the NICRA banner and marched for civil rights with determination and a commitment to pacifism.

When the Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement was formed in the mid- seventies, many of its founding members had cut their political teeth in the civil rights movement. They had reflected on the male domination of the previous struggles and were determined to show that women’s rights were human rights as well. That struggle remains as pertinent today as does the need to remind archivists that the women civil rights activists should not be written out of history.