THE ACCUSERS The whole thrust of the ''civil rights'' campaign was to portray Catholics as innocent victims. They had been badly treated by Protestants and had finally reacted against injustice. The British role was to intervene on their behalf and force the Protestants to make changes. The strategy involved instilling feelings of guilt in the British public by painting a picture of Catholics as downtrodden and oppressed. But above all it was necessary to present the minority community as themselves free from guilt and hence able to occupy a position of moral superiority in the eyes of British (and world) opinion.
Over the years Ulster has been villified and generlly 'put down' by those whose only interest was to bring down democracy. Whatever else is said about the Ulster goverment it was elected by the democratic vote of the people. But lets have a look at those who did the accusing. Let us see how they themselves behaved.
CAMERON
The Cameron Commission was set up in March 1968 to enquire into the causes of the civil unrest. This Commission was set up by the British goverment. It consisted of a Scottish judge,a medical professor and a lecturer who had long served on the staff of a Belfast Roman Catholic teacher's training college. Its brief was to present a report at the utmost speed on the greivences expressed by the RC community. It was,however,given no power to compel the presence of persons or the production of papers nor could it examine any witness on oath. It was thus very dependent on what anybody chose to tell it.
Cameron produced a set of figures purporting to be those of an election held in Londonderry. These figures have come to be accepted by all the 'great and good'. These are the figures
.........................Catholic Voters.......... Other Voters......... .Seats
North Ward......... 2,350......................... 3,946............... 8 Unionists
Waterside Ward... 1,852......................... 3,697............... 4 Unionists
South Ward......... 10,047....................... 1,138............... 8 Non-Unionists
These figures have become quite famous. They have been produced over and over again and have memerised a generation of academics,journalists and political commentators. Just to clarify a couple of points,by ''Other Voters'' Cameron actually means Protestant voters,and when he talks of ''Non-Unionists holding 8 seats he refers to 8 members of the Nationalist Party a purely Catholic party. It would seem that 14,000 electors returned 8 Nationalists while 8,000 electors returned 12 Unionists.
In fact Cameron's figures are not a set of election results at all. They are an analysis of the electoral register. They simply show what proportion of electors were Catholics and Protestants. Their ability to impress the reader rests on the assumption that Catholics in Londonderry supported the Nationalist Party and Protestants the Unionist Party
What is not recognised by Cameron and others is that when elections were held in 1967 the pro-union Labour Party also stood in this election Electors were voting for multi-member wards. The election results were...
Londonderry Corporation Election Results 1967
Nationalist Party... 26,880
Unionist Party....... 25,535
Labour .................25,296
Independent.......... 1,461
If each party had fielded just one candidate in the wards they contested,this would be how it would have worked out
Nationalist Party... 4,692
Unionist Party....... 5,742
Labour Party......... 5,251
Independent......... 1,461
Think it is fair to say that there is some difference between the proportion of votes actually cast for each party and the figures which Cameron's statistics led a generation of political observers to expect
One complicating factor of course was the intervention of the N.I.Labour Party. Those mesmerised by Cameron's figures have become accustomed to thinking of the contest in Londonderry as simply Protestants v Catholics,Unionists v Republicans. But the Labour Party which was in favour of Ulster remaining part of the United Kingdom,drew votes from both communities.
1936 and no contest has taken place since then between Unionist and Republican parties in local elections (33 years). Not once during the period in question did a Catholic party put up even a single candidate in the North or Waterside Wards and the Unionist Party declined to field candidates in the South Ward.
BELFAST
Ian Budge and Cornelius O'Leary have carried out a study of the situation in Belfast. They noted that some unusually small wards such as Falls and Smithfield had been specifically created to provide Catholic representation. They concluded: ''From our account of the circumstances surrounding the inital drawing of ward boundries in 1896 it is apparent that if anyone was favoured then it was the Catholics and Nationalists.'' At the time the boundries were fixed Smithfield was the smallest ward with 1,985 voters and Pottinger (in Protestant East Belfast) was the largest with 4,307 electors. All wards had 4 seats. By 1967 the ward discrepancies had become more marked. Catholic Smithfield was still the smallest with 3,115 but the largest was now Protestant Clifton with 22,500. It is interesting that the Catholic wards of Falls,Smithfield and Dock with 12 seats between them contained a total of 22,614 electors,about the same number as in the single Unionist ward of Clifton,which had 4 seats on the council. Such inequalities make the Londonderry situation pale into insignificance.
Gerry Fitt was the member for Dock Ward. Gerry Fitt was the man who was to the fore in accusing the Stormont goverment of malpractice. Its noticable he never drew attention to the situation which existed in his own Ward.
HOUSING
The Unionist goverment at Stormont were accused of discrimating against Roman Catholics in the building and allocation of housing. Lets have a look at that issue.
After World War2 the Goverment of N.I. had to initiate a housing programme since,as in Britain,the community's housing stock had become insufficent and very run down and had suffered depletion from enemy action. Public housing and administration had until then been carried out mainly by the local councils and similar authorities of which there were sixty-eight,some very small. But in 1945 there was established an additional body,the N.I. Housing Trust. Using capital advanced by the N.I.Goverment,it built houses on behalf of any local authority;or where a local authority was for any reason producing an inadequate output of housing units,the Trust could initiate housing schemes of its own.
The results were good. In England and Wales 3,298,139 new homes were completed by public authorities between 1945 and 1970 for a population of 48,500,000 people,while 116,691 were completed in N.I. for 1,500,000 people. This shows that the ratio of new post-war homes to population was about 13% higher in N.I. than it was in England and Wales
Eire was a country which also joined in the accusations being made against Ulster and its goverment,so how was its house building. The Irish Republic is a country from which many allegations of discrimination and inadequate performances were made against the authorities in N.I. In the five years before the Cameron Report 33,933 new homes were completed by public authorities in N.I.,only 18,033 had been completed in the same period of time by public authorities in the Republic for a population twice as large as that of N.I. So,Roman Catholics in N.I. were not only getting a bigger share of public authority housing than any other section of the community there,but they were getting public housing which was nearly twice that available to their co-religionists in Eire.
The results of the 1971 census clearly showed the generous way in which Roman Catholics had been treated in housing,but were not published until 1975; but there were indications that the general situation which they revealed had been known to the Housing Trust before the Cameron Commission was set up or even before the circumstances which called that Commission into existence were anticipated.
Long before the census figures appeared,too, the conclusions to which they led had already been clearly indicated by an independent survey made in 1968 under the direction of Professor Richard Rose of Strathclyde University.
Professor Rose published his results in 1971. He reported that, with respect to public authority housing,''the survey found no evidence of systematic discrimination against Catholics''. Indeed ''the greatest bias appears to favour Catholics in that small part of the population living in local authorities controlled by Roman Catholic councillors''. He noted that ''systematic discrimination cannot be found when patterns are examined in each of the six counties and two county boroughs,all controlled by Unionists.
