The Dynamics of Social Movement Development: Northern Ireland'S Civil Rights Movement in The 1960

THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT DEVELOPMENT:
NORTHERN IRELAND’S CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN THE 1960S*
Lorenzo Bosi†
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This article extends our understanding of social movement development through a qualitative
longitudinal analysis of Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement during the 1960s. It applies
Diani’s (1996) approach that links categories of master frames with political opportunity
structures. The analysis chronicles how political context shaped the evolution of the
moveSment’s dominant message and traces how political opportunities imparted advantages
to a reformist civil rights message that reflected a realignment master frame in early stages of
Northern Irish mobilization. Later, changes in political context—police repression, lack of
political responsiveness, and countermobilization—rendered reformist political realignments
impossible and gave advantages to elements in the civil rights network that stressed the tra-
ditional ethnonational divisions and revanchist, antipartitionist messages. Specifically, this
article asks how the inclusive and reformist mobilizing messages of the 1960s Northern Irish
civil rights movement came about and then reverted to the exclusivist Nationalist message of
the 1970s, and how the shifting political opportunities brought about these changes.
Bernadette Devlin was a young leader of Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement in the
1960s and later an icon of the militant Irish Nationalists. She reflects upon her transformation
from a reformist to a radical and, more generally, the transformation of the movement as a
whole:
Social movements are not static things. Social movements do not work like that.
Between the asking and the getting, the process of getting there just totally changes
the people who are involved. Social movements are dynamic. If the [Northern
Ireland] government had provided and implemented equal rights before 1969 then I
would think that there would not have been a Nationalist program later on. But after
1969, and more importantly after Bloody Sunday [January 30, 1972], the agenda of
the movement has changed completely. (Author interview, July 29, 2003) 1
This quote provides an apt starting point for my analysis because, in a key activist’s own
words, it articulates a lacunae in social movement theory that this article seeks to redress.
Despite recent work on the dynamics of contention (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly 2001), most
social movements scholars still prefer to deal with the determining factors of mobilization
rather than study the dynamic processes of movement actors across time. Social movement
theorists have long recognized the need to move from a static concept of collective action to
an explicitly interactive one. For example, almost two decades ago McAdam, McCarthy, and
Zald stated, “While we have a number of specific theories of movement emergence, we lack
for any comparable theory of movement development” (1988: 729; see also McAdam 1999;
*
I would like to thank Richard English and Manlio Cinalli, the participants at Social Movement sessions of the ESA
Conference gathering in Murcia (September 2003), in addition to the journal editors and the three anonymous
referees for their helpful comments and support on this article. Lynn Press and Lesley Veronica have courteously
helped with the language. Any errors in the article are entirely my own.
†
Lorenzo Bosi is an assistant professor at the School of Politics and International Studies, Queen’s University Belfast,
21, University Square, BT7 1NN, Belfast, UK. Email: l.bosi@qub.ac.uk
© Mobilization: An International Journal 11(1): 81-100
81
82 Mobilization
Tarrow 1988; Kriesi, Koopmans, Dyvendak and Giugni 1995; McAdam, McCarthy and Zald
1996; McAdam et al. 2001). The intent of this article is to take a further step towards a theory
of dynamic movement development by looking at the intersection of political opportunities,
master collective action frames, and the evolving movement message. It views social move-

ments as heterogeneous networks that develop interactively over time and through different
stages of mobilization, and then elaborates how Diani’s conceptual framework (1996) that
links framing processes and political opportunity structures can be used to understand why a
movement’s message and focus can change. To explore this, I focus on the evolution of the
civil rights movement in Northern Ireland (hereafter, the CRM) during the 1960s.
Since the partition of Ireland in December, 1920,2 Northern Ireland has been charac-
terized as a society deeply polarized between two ethnonational communities: the Nationalist
minority (antipartitionist and Catholic) and the Unionist majority (partitionist and Protestant).
Even before WW II, these two communities were almost completely socially and physically
segregated, living in separate areas, attending separate schools, joining separate unions, read-
ing different newspapers, and playing different sports (Rose 1971; Ruane and Todd 1996). A
high level of decentralization and localization in the region was “rationally” organized to en-
sure Unionist hegemony even in areas where they constituted numerical minorities. This was
done predominantly through endemic gerrymandering and the political control of housing
allocation, which underpinned gerrymandering. Furthermore, after 1945 the local government
franchise in Northern Ireland remained restricted to ratepayers (property owners), which was
not the case in the rest of the UK (Whyte 1983; McGarry and O’Leary 1996). This further
discriminated against Irish Catholics and strengthened Unionist dominance.
By the early 1960s, a loose network of activists, groups, and organizations, which I call
the CRM network, started to challenge these discriminatory and sectarian practices by em-
bracing a pro-active “reformist,” civil rights message that focused on constitutional objec-
tives, with the intent to make the regional political system more open and fair. By 1968,
however, the apathy and incapacity of the political establishment to answer the CRM’s
demands on electoral, housing and policing reforms, together with international influences
coming from new-left and student movements, worked to transform the movement’s reformist
message and nonviolent tactics. The CRM moved aggressively into the streets with a more
radical, unconventional, but still nonviolent message. The other side of the coin was that the
Unionist establishment’s reluctance to reform the sociopolitical system, together with its coer-
cive police tactics and the rise of a violent Loyalist countermovement,3 also pushed the CRM
to radicalize it’s message. Then, after the violent repression of several protests, a new gener-
ation of yet more militant and less flexible activists—lacking any confidence whatsoever in
the Stormont institutions—entered the ranks of the CRM. By 1969 a strong sense of intrac-
table conflict was at the heart of Northern Ireland’s political system and the CRM shed its
reformist goals and embraced ethnic sectarianism and militant Irish nationalism.
This broad canvas depicts the first decade of what was to become thirty-five years of
violence in Northern Ireland. Although the region’s “troubles” cannot be explained solely in
terms of the CRM’s initial mobilization and subsequent transformation, neither can they be
understood without reference to what could have been—as represented by the CRM’s initial
reformist and antisectarian message. Moreover, the 1960s were clearly watershed years for
the region and subsequent events cannot be fully understood without reference to them and to
the CRM’s activities during that period. Even today, the CRM’s impact on the cultural and
institutional structures of Northern Ireland is apparent. For these reasons, the CRM is a topic
of tremendous interest among scholars studying the area and remains the focus of an
extraordinary number of different and conflicting interpretations. Part of the problem has been
a striking absence of any theoretical awareness in scholarly literature—a problem that I hope
to ameliorate in a small way with my analysis. For reasons of space I do not deal specifically
with all the organizations and groups that formed my case study (see appendix A for a listing).
Rather, following Diani (1992), I broadly define the CRM as an informal and heterogeneous
Northern Ireland’s Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s 83
network of groups, organizations, and individuals that perceived themselves as united in a

broad movement. Between 1960 and 1969, this network transformed drastically.
Mobilizing messages such as those that competed in the 1960s Northern Irish political
milieu are social constructions reflecting complex interactions between significant actors in

the political system. They do not simply exist a priori in a condition of stasis but they change
repeatedly, generating identity shifts, collective redefinitions of opportunities, new alliance
structures, strategy changes, and goal transformations. Thus, the framing of political oppor-
tunities and threats does not depend on static “objective categories” of a unique single actor at
a particular time, but on the dynamic, contingent, interactive, and subjective evaluations of
different actors—social movements, political and social institutions, countermovements,
political parties, and the mass media—at different stages of mobilization (Gamson and Meyer
1996; McAdam et al. 1996; McAdam 1999; McAdam et al. 2001).4 Because social move-
ments are part of a larger sociopolitical system that varies over time, the effective mobilizing
message of a movement may change during its development. Additionally, as political oppor-
tunities also change over time (McAdam et al. 1996), they could favor the mobilizing mes-
sage and/or political identities of some groups over others, depending on congruence with the
master frame dominant at that particular stage. Analyzing the activities of different actors at
different stages of movement development highlights the contingent, interactive, and dynamic
interpretative production of social movement actors over time. This is the approach I take as I
trace changes in the CRM’s mobilizing message and analyze the variations according to
changing political opportunities.
Diani (1996) has developed a conceptual framework that allows the systematic analysis
of how movement messages align with dominant master frames and how both of these are
shaped by changing political opportunities. Initially, he proposes a combination of two vari-
ables “the opportunities created by the crisis of the dominant cleavages” and “the opportun-
ities for autonomous action within the polity” (1996: 1056), both of which depend on actors’
subjective evaluations. How does one measure these two variables? Diani has reformulated
Tarrow’s work on political opportunities (1994), in which the first variable relies on the
stability of the sociopolitical alignments that structure political participation and aggregation,
and the second one relies on possible conflicts within the ruling elites, accessibility to
participation in the political system, and the availability of influential allies. The cross-
classification of these two variables results in four possible representations of the political
system in question, each of them related to a different “master frame” (Snow and Benford
1992): “antisystem,” “inclusion,” “revitalization,” and “realignment” (Diani 1996: 1056-1057).
Following Snow and his associates (1986), Diani concludes that for a mobilizing message
to succeed, compared to others in a specific period, alignment with the dominant master frame
configuration that is associated with the dominant political environment is a crucial determinant.
Figure 1. Political Opportunities and Master Frames
Opportunities for Autonomous

Action within the polity
HIGH LOW
Realignment Antisystem
HIGH
Opportunities Frames Frames
Created by a Crisis
of the Dominant Inclusion Revitalization
Cleavages LOW
Frames Frames
Source: Diani (1996: 1056)

84 Mobilization
Furthermore, the frame activities should be interpreted as “abstract forms of political rhetoric
rather than as belief systems anchored to specific contents” (1996: 1058), and the frame
alignment as “the integration of mobilizing messages with dominant representations of the
political environment” (1058).

Although this framework helps to avoid “ad-hoc explanations” of social movement mo-
bilization (Diani 1996: 1055-1058), it does not provide “explicit” dynamic and interactive
scenes of collective action mobilization over time that are essential to understanding changes
in CRM development. Therefore, I propose to apply Diani’s conceptual framework to the
sequential development of the CRM network through the decade of the 1960s. My intent is to
trace how the CRM message changed according to a changing political environment via the
activation of dominant master frames. The analysis takes as its starting point the simmering
sectarianism created by the Irish partition in 1920 that established a political and social
context whereby the only possibilities for collective action were within existing ethnonational
organizations and institutions—a revitalization mater frame (in figure 1, the lower-right quad-
rant). After World War II, changing structural conditions opened political opportunities and
created conditions for a resonant realignment master frame (in figure 1, a shift to the upper-
left quadrant). This realignment master frame created conditions in which the CRM’s initial
reformist message (1960-1968) was able to resonate with selected segments of Northern Irish
society. By 1968, however, sectarian cleavages in Northern Ireland reasserted themselves, and
this led to the privileging of an antisystem master frame (in figure 1, a shift to the upper-right
quadrant) and favored elements in the CRM that were more radical in tactics and message.
Finally, escalation of ethnonational conflict and the hardening of the Unionist establishment
forced the reactivation and intensification of the old revitalization master frame (a shift back
down to the lower-right quadrant in figure 1. By the 1970s, the CRM had become a militant
irredentist insurgency and had become a movement that was very different from its 1960s
incarnation. During its transformation, different sectors of the CRM whose messages aligned
with these master frames at different times in the movement’s development were in privileged
positions to push forward their agendas and strategies over less resonant ones. By tracing the
activities of these social actors, a clear and dynamic element of agency is injected the deter-
minism of Diani’s original schema.
DATA COLLECTION
To investigate the CRM’s emergence, I used a longitudinal qualitative research strategy that
was “methodologically pluralist” (Aminzade and McAdam 2001: 50; Klandermans and
Staggenborg 2002). My research combines twenty-seven semistructured interviews with num-
erous secondary sources and extensive archival and newspaper research. This pluralist stra-
tegy has four advantages: (1) it provides “a richly detailed and holistic understanding” (Snow
and Trom 2002: 151) of the CRM case; (2) it offers a “multiperspectival orientation” (Snow
and Trom 2002: 154); (3) multiple methods complement and remedy problems of validity;
and (4) multiple methods better permit a complete longitudinal analysis because they can
compliment and fill data gaps.
The semistructured interviews were conducted by the author between 2002-2004. They
ranged in length from forty-five minutes to two hours, with an average interview of seventy
minutes. I identified initial respondents from those who were prominent in the historical
records of the movement and sampled names so as to achieve a representation of different
background characteristics—political, ethnic, class, gender, forms of participation, and re-
gion.5 At the end of each interview, I asked for names of other possible respondents and
proceeded to construct a snowball sample of ex-CRM participants from that pool (see
appendix B). Based on the experience of previous interviews and my progress in conceptual
elaboration, I reshaped the interview guide and introduced new questions and topics. In view
of the fact that participants are often “the worst narrators of the events in which they have
been involved, insofar as they have a direct interest in them” (Della Porta 1992: 181), these
interviews were not so much to accumulate facts about particular events as they were to
elaborate linkages and behaviors of the heterogeneous CRM network, identified previously in

documentary sources. Interviews also provided insight into the participants’ individual and
collective visions of the world and their collective identities (Della Porta 1992; Blee and
Taylor 2002).6
But how can one be certain that, after more than thirty-five years, the respondent’s words
were not merely selective memories and/or self-serving reinterpretations? To this I respond
with four answers: (1) One can never be one-hundred percent sure—there is no such thing as
a completely objective report. (2) In fact, so-called “objective” event data in newspapers are
certainly not unbiased either, as recent studies have demonstrated. (3) For this reason, metho-
dologically pluralist approaches are much more desirable because they permit multiple
checks. (4) Finally, archival and newspaper investigation and secondary-source consultation
were important to elaborate, compliment, and verify interview materials.
In the case of the CRM, historical archives had the advantage of providing a huge
quantity of internal source material, such as biographies and diaries, pamphlets, posters, leaf-
lets, magazine reports, campaign officers’ personal correspondence, reports of the organiza-
tion’s public meetings and political party records. These were kept in the Special Political
Collection of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, which has thirty-nine boxes containing mater-
ial specific to the CRM network. Supplementary material was archived in the PRONI (Public
Records Office of Northern Ireland) and in CAIN service (Conflict Archive on the internet,
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/).
Regarding newspaper data, I qualitatively examined three of Northern Ireland’s news-
papers for the period 1965 through 1969. The Newsletter was considered at the time the most
important traditionalist Unionist voice. The Irish News was regarded as a mainly Nationalist
paper. Finally, the Belfast Telegraph represented the more liberal attitudes of the time, called
“constructive unionism.” Awareness of the political leanings of these three newspapers per-
mitted me to reconstruct the various contemporary perspectives on the political system and on
the processes of CRM’s changes.
NORTHERN IRELAND’S SOCIOPOLITICAL SYSTEM
The “partition issue” refers to the debate over whether Northern Ireland should become part
of the Republic of Ireland or remain part of the United Kingdom. Until the early 1960s, the
debate over partition was the dominant political issue in the region and practically the sole
basis of any form of political affiliation—between 80 and 90 per cent of the electorate voted
exclusively for political parties that defined themselves according to the partition issue (Elliott
1973). Very little space existed for groups that did not align according to region’s ethno-
national cleavage. As a consequence, observers labelled Northern Irish elections as “sectarian
head-counts,” and the political system as highly “parochial” (Rose 1971). Between 1921-
1972, Northern Ireland was a highly “imperfect two-party system” in which the UUP (Ulster
Unionist Party) dominated and the NP (Nationalist Party) frequently abstained from partici-
pation, compounding the UUP’s power. The NP’s main features were profoundly conser-
vative, antipartitionist, and pro-clerical. Because the Nationalist community perceived itself to
be unjustly treated, it refused to participate in the building of the state, and the NP had neither
the opportunity nor the determination to exert a positive influence on reformist policy in
Northern Ireland. The Nationalist community was “a society within a society,” alienated and
living in a sort of sociocultural ghetto (Ruane and Todd 1996). At the same time, the Unionist
establishment disregarded and demonized it as a disloyal and a perilous fifth column.
86 Mobilization
Tocqueville’s idea of the “tyranny of the majority” was perfectly applicable in Northern
Ireland insofar as the Unionist majority disregarded the rights and needs of the Nationalist
minority (McGarry and O’Leary 1996). Most of the region’s political parties reinforced
sociopolitical segregation by constructing exclusive identities (as they do today), facilitating

and consolidating the ethnonational cleavage and its crystallization in the political system. In
part, the Unionists survived because the “partition issue” remained so central. It kept the
region divided and diverted attention away from issues such as voting rights, housing,
employment, and so on. This is why the emergence of the CRM whose mobilizing ideology
embraced reformism and building bridges between sectarian differences was so threatening to
the Unionist majority.
THE LATENT CRM NETWORK (1960-1967)
How is it that after forty years of political and social ossification a movement with a different
vision of Northern Irish politics began to take shape in the 1960s? The first indications of a
shift came after World War II, when Northern Ireland underwent a period of economic and
social change inspired by intervention of the Keynesian welfare state. British policies
regarding the economy and social reforms in areas of health service, public housing, edu-
cation, and employment affected all citizens. There was a perceptible relaxation of communal
tensions in urban districts (the situation in rural areas was different, especially for those close
to the border) as everyday concerns focused on social and economic topics such as unem-
ployment and the faltering regional economy (shipbuilding, linen, and agricultural sectors
suffered serious reductions). Second, there were several conjectural factors at the macro level
occurring in the early 1960s such as the changing nature of Anglo-Irish relations, the Cold
War “thaw” process, the U.S. Black civil rights movement, and the election of the Labor
government in 1964 that created conditions for transcending the old cleavages. 7 Third, several
pre-existing groups, among them trade unionists, Communists, students drawing on
nonviolent principles for social change, ecumenical groups, peace and anti-imperialist
organizations, among others, began to consider the costs and benefits of progressive
challenges the current political stalemate. This was a heterogeneous network and there was no
one dominant group —neither trade-unionists, Communists, “new-look” Republicans8, nor
liberal Catholics held sway. What matters for our purposes is that a ideologically diverse
groups activists began to forge new ties and relationships that spanned several groups in order
to “symbolically produce” a reformist mobilizing message of civil rights, social justice, and
progressive politics, rather than getting mired in time-worn discussions about partition. Their
reformist goals were pursued mostly within established institutional and political channels
using legal tactics such as petitions, letter writing, leaflet production, and public meetings.
This is why I characterize this stage of the movement as “latent,” in contrast to the CRM’s
high visibility in the streets in the late 1960s
These early activists drew a lot of inspiration from 1960s movements elsewhere in the
world, in particular the Black civil rights movement in the U.S. According to Bernadette
Devlin, “Almost everything we learnt from outside was by osmosis. We watched the TV, that
is why we probably got it wrong” (Author interview, July 29 2003). Songs like “We shall
overcome” and “We shall not be moved” became the songs of the CRM in Northern Ireland.
Parallels (only partly appropriate) were drawn between the black community in the U.S. and
the Nationalist one in Northern Ireland (Farrell 1988; Purdie 1990; Currie 2004). One CRM
activist, Fionnabar O’Doghartaigh, invented the famous slogan “Ulster’s White Negroes” to
define the Nationalist community (it also became the title of his memoirs published in 1994).
Eamonn McCann, a radical young leader of the CRM network, recalls:
We have seen us as part of the same movement that was developing internationally;
this was quite important for such a small place like Northern Ireland, where politics
was generally very parochial and rooted in local experience and local communal
conflict; there was something liberating about being able to relate our experience to

these broad global issues and this gave us a sense that we were part of the world and
that as part of the world we were entitled to be treated in not a different way, that
civil and human rights should be important and mean the same, here as well.
(Author interview, October 22, 2003).
Another activist, Paddy Joe McClean, recalls:
What really activated me was the all explosion of the civil rights awareness in
America. Their example provided the necessary spur first of all to gets the facts and
secondarily to get mass demonstrations on the streets to highlights those facts.
(Author interview, October 28, 2003)
The decline of the Northern Ireland’s staple industries and the economic difficulties of
the late 1950s and early 1960s started a process of instability in the political alignments that
deeply tested the interclass alliance that held the UUP together (Bew, Gibbon, and Patterson
2002). Between 1949 and 1962 electoral support for political parties and groups that did not
take a position on the “partition issue” (the Northern Ireland Labor Party, or NILP, Indepen-
dent Labor, and the Liberals) increased from 9.3% in 1949 to 23.7% in 1953, to 28.7% in
1958, to 37% in 1962 (Elliott 1973). The isolated communal subcultures that up to this time
structured people’s daily lives and voting behavior were beginning to decline and these poli-
tical realignments were instrumental in giving the early CRM activists visions of what might
be possible. This represented what Diani calls “the decreasing salience of traditional political
identities” (1996: 1063) and coincided with a shift in the salience of dominant master frames.
According to Diani’s schema, there occurred two important changes: an opening of oppor-
tunities for autonomous political action and an opening of opportunities as traditional political
cleavages lost relevance. Taken together, these shifts in political opportunities privileged mes-
sages that emphasized the possibilities of political realignment. Specifically, a social move-
ment (or a sector within a movement) whose mobilizing messages synchronized with this new
realignment master frame would be particularly well-positioned to broadly mobilize support.
With these shifts in electoral support, the Unionist elite became acutely aware that they
were faced with fundamental realignments of their sociopolitical base. Specifically, they
feared losing votes to NILP, a mainly “non-militant” partitionist Labor party whose “moderate”
platform better meshed with the new conditions favoring a realignment master frame. The
new Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill (1963-1969), acted in accordance with these calcu-
lations and, in order to maintain the UUP’s political power, opened a palliative process of
“rhetorical” social reforms and better relations with the Nationalist community. His goals
were, first, to recover the Unionist working-class vote and, second, to relaunch unionism as a
political project for the future of Northern Ireland (Bew et al. 2002). This was a political
change that in the short term gained success in the 1965 parliamentary elections with a swing
of 7% of the electorate to the Ulster Unionist Party (Elliott 1973), but which frightened and
alienated one part of the Unionist community that thought O’Neillism went too far.
These developments also awoke a response by traditional Loyalists, who saw the hand-
writing of political realignment written clearly on the wall: O’Neill’s “reformist” unionism;
the Catholic ecumenical movement, the new Anglo-Irish relations, and the awakening of the
Nationalist community. Fearing that their interests were being “downgraded” and seeing
availability of political allies among the Unionist elite, the Loyalist opposition began to
coalesce into a reactionary countermovement in the early 1960s, with the intent to resist
O’Neill’s reforms. While O’Neill’s “building bridges” policy appealed to the liberal-unionist
Belfast Telegraph, it received mounting criticism and dissent from the more conservative
88 Mobilization
Unionist Newsletter, representing clear evidence of conflict inside the Unionist ruling elites
and in the UUP.
This emerging division was perceived as an opening of political opportunity that further
reinforced the realignment master frame and favored autonomous action by the CRM net-

work. According to one CRM activist, “The fact that the ruling party appeared to be split at
the top certainly encouraged people to mobilize” (Author interview with Eamonn McCann,
October 22, 2003). Also, according to my interviews, these changes raised the expectations of
the Nationalist community, whose members saw the realignment master frame clearly reflec-
ted in an expansion of access in the political system (Cameron 1969; Rose 1971). For
example, Denis Haughey, a young CRM activist at the time, recalled how the minority com-
munity in the early 1960s became moderately optimistic about the direction in which the
regional political situation was moving and felt that the time had come to abandon the two old
hard-line Nationalist tactics, constitutional anti-partitionism and physical-force Republican-
ism, and to seek a constructive part in the running of the state.9 In his own words, “There was
a growing mood in the Nationalist community that they had to engage with the institutions
around them in order to win a better deal and to get a better outcome” (Author interview,
October 10, 2003).
It was within these conditions that the CRM network coalesced out of existing networks
of political affiliation. Activists entered into informal and cooperative linkages that spanned
organizations and overlapped memberships to make their reformist claims. The CRM was a
dense and heterogeneous network of constructive Nationalist reformers, socialist-republicans,
leftist members of the NILP, progressive Unionists, liberals, trade unionists and Communist
activists who engaged in cooperative activities in different intensities and scope. They made
claims for civil rights and social-justice reforms within established channels of grievance ar-
ticulation. These activists worked to create a new anti-sectarian, inclusive, polycentric
collective identity that transcended in part the old ethnonational divisions of the region. At
this stage in the CRM’s development, member organizations and groups worked with a high
degree of cooperation and common sense of belonging, solidarity, and commitment to the
civil rights cause. There also was a fluid ideological mix that left the old Nationalist rhetoric
behind and embraced a mix of hybrid ideas and values: nonviolent principles, anti-
sectarianism, “new-look” Republicanism, Marxism, trade unionism, anti-imperialism, and
new-left and student movement principles. The adversary against which the CRM activists
mobilized was the Northern Irish political system and its discriminatory practices, but the
movement also criticized the sectarianism and the hegemonic structure of the Unionist estab-
lishment as well as the NP’s self-defeating “abstentionist” tactics.10 John Hume, a moderate
leader of the CRM (2000 Nobel Prize winner), wrote in the Irish Times in 1964:
It must be said at once that the blame for the situation that prevails must lie
principally at the door of the Unionist government. But the present
Nationalist political party must bear a share of it. Good government de-
pends as much on the opposition as on the party in power. Weak opposition
leads to corrupt government. Nationalists in opposition have been in no way
constructive. . . . In forty years of opposition they have not produced one con-
structive contribution on either the social or economic plane to the develop-
ment of Northern Ireland. (Irish Times, May 18, 1964).
Based on my review of Northern Ireland’s newspapers, the CRM network reached its
highest level of media coverage in autumn 1968. Its main theme at this time was condem-
nation of the “old Nationalists” and their six sins of weakness, corruption, collusion, neglect,
apathy, and arrogance. The majority of the CRM leaders aspired to the idea of a united
Ireland, but they did not openly connect it with the goals of the movement. It might be said
that this self-control reflected the potency of the realignment master frame at this stage
insofar as the traditional anti-partitionist message would have slowed the progress toward new
identities and new alignments. (Diani 1996). When they talked about “boundaries,” CRM
activists limited themselves to social and geographical boundaries in order also to engage
British opinion, arouse interest, and draw support (McCluskey 1989). Whereas there were

certainly Republicans participating in the CRM network who had the “explicit intention of
bringing down the Northern Ireland state” (English 2003: 82), it is worth noting that “these
members [were] efficient stewards, maintaining discipline and checking any disposition to
indiscipline or disorder” (Cameron 1969: 78).11
THE VISIBLE CRM NETWORK (1968)
The congruence between the CRM’s “reformist” mobilizing message and the realignment
master frame was based on the tentative withering of the traditional ethnonational cleavage
and the subjective perception of opportunities for political action within the polity. Under
these circumstances, the CRM network gathered support and started to press the Northern
Irish and British institutions for social justice and reforms. Movement organizations and
groups in the CRM sent letters to the Westminster and Stormont parliaments, compiled lists
of demands, gathered petitions, conducted leaflet campaigns, and highlighted grievances
through numerous meetings.12 But after several years of these tactics the closed nature of the
two parliaments and their incapacity to deal with the initial political demands of the CRM
became evident. The Unionist establishment seemed unable to deliver reforms on electoral
practice, gerrymandering, fair allocation of houses and jobs, and policy issues. This immobil-
ity increased the resentment of the Nationalist community and called into question whether
indeed “opportunities for autonomous action by challengers” (Diani 1996: 1057) were avail-
able. Accordingly, among sectors of CRM activists there arose an uneasy sense that the
conventional channels of political participation in the region were not open at all and that
O’Neill’s “building-bridges” policy was no different from previous exclusivist Unionist pre-
mierships. Also, influenced by the international repertoire of direct action (such as civil dis-
obedience, squatting, sit-downs, strikes, and marches) CRM activists began to consider
whether unconventional methods of political contention might better influence public policy
and sway public opinion, both locally and internationally (McCann 1974; Ó Dochartaigh
1994; Currie 2004). Gerry Fitt, a Republican Labour MP for Westminster, nicely summed up
the emerging consensus among many CRM activists. During a public meeting in Londonderry
in the summer of 1968, one month before the first civil rights march between Coalisland and
Dungannon (when these sentiments were put into practice), he announced that:
The days for talking have long since gone. The time for action has arrived . . . if
constitutional methods do not bring social justice—if they do not bring democracy
to the North then I am quite prepared to go outside constitutional methods. (Belfast
Telegraph, 22 July 1968).
These words nicely represent the general shift: there was a growing reorientation among
CRM activists who questioned the reformist mobilizing message of the early 1960s and pro-
gressively replaced it with a more radical one. The new strategic goals were to increase pres-
sure and disorient elites through street protests and the resulting media attention (McCann
1974; Currie 2004). Rather than calling for efforts to work through institutional channels, this
new mobilizing message directly challenged the legitimacy of the region’s political system.
The result was a new and innovative repertoire of contention that used a form of symbolic
provocation inspired the Northern Irish tradition of communal marches and parades, combined
with nonviolent confrontational action that drew on the “master template” of the U.S. Black
civil rights movement (McAdam and Sewell 2001).
90 Mobilization
According to Diani’s framework, the CRM’s mobilizing message was shifting away from
the revitalization master frame stage to advocate “a radical transformation of the polity”
(1996: 1057). This new message successfully aligned with an emerging antisystem master
frame, whose structural conditions included the crumbling of the traditional alignments along

with the perception of poor opportunities for autonomous action within the system. To put it
another way, a political opportunity structure favors an antisystem master frame when, in
Diani’s words, there is a “representation of political reality that defines political actors along
lines other than established cleavages and denies legitimacy to the routinized functioning of
the political process” (1996: 1057, italics mine). It must be stressed the CRM network was not
unanimous in this “radical’ shift,” but rather changes in the political context meant that mod-
erate CRM sectors were less effective in mobilizing people because of a lack of consistency
between their reformist mobilizing message and the antisystem master frame. Simply stated, a
mobilizing message that reflected the antisystem master frame was better able to respond to
the political opportunities of 1968 (Diani 1996).13 Fred Heatley, honorary treasurer of the
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association’s (NICRA, the best-known civil rights group), later
recalled:
In the spring of 1968 there was much rethinking within the NICRA’s leadership; the
tactics of Martin Luther King in America had been absorbed inasmuch that it was felt
by some that only by public marches could we really draw world attention to what we
were trying to achieve by normal democratic means. (Fortnight, April 1974: 9)
In the context of this tactical shift, a “transformative event” occurred in Londonderry at

one of the early civil rights marches on October 5, 1968. This was the second march that had
been scheduled under the new tactical repertoire, and the RUC responded to it violently by
beating unarmed demonstrators with batons. The violent images of police brutality were
captured by Gay O’Brien, a cameraman for Radio Telefìs Eireann, and shown throughout the
world. Inez McCormack, a young activist of People’s Democracy (PD, the university student
component of the CRM network), later remarked in her memoirs on the importance of that
day:
People of my generation are all supposed to know precisely where they were on 22
November 1963, the day of John Kennedy’s death. Knowing where you were on 5
October 1968 similarly marks you as a member of the civil rights generation in
Northern Ireland. (Farrell 1988: 26)
The events of that day galvanized the movement and made it visible worldwide.14 For
many, the violence clearly confirmed the CRM’s new radical mobilizing message that the
Ulster authorities were not willing to listen, and rewarded the new tactical repertoire in the
short term by transmitting the civil rights issue broadly via the mass media. As a measure of
these events’ importance and the growing vigor of the more radical CRM network, local
branches and organizations staged seventeen more demonstrations and marches in the next
seven weeks.
Images of the RUC’s violence that day “inflamed and exacerbated feelings of resent-
ment” (Cameron 1969: 93), and played “a significant role in fostering a sense of affective
engagement, common identity and solidarity between the CRM and the wider Nationalist
community” (Ellison and Martin 2000: 694). Intense anger at the violence mobilized students,
both Unionist and Nationalist, at the Queen’s University of Belfast, who framed the RUC’s
repressive tactics in terms of the events of May 1968 and the broader student movement
around the world. However, the infusion of radical students into the CRM alienated most of
the moderate Unionists who had sympathy for the cause of civil rights.
On the other hand, the major conservative and clerical parts of the Nationalist community
had always been sceptical of—if not clearly opposed to—the latent CRM network and its alli-
ance with leftist activists. Ivan Cooper, a leader of the CRM network, attests: “In those days
to be a Communist was highly unfashionable and highly disapproved by Catholics and by the
Catholic Church.” (Author interview, January 24, 2004). The scenes of violence of October 5
changed this situation, as the Nationalist community, “emotionally fresh” (Aminzade and

McAdam 2001) with its sense of ethnic oppression and its anti-system consciousness, iden-
tified immediately with the CRM activists beaten by the police. Ann Hope, trade unionist and
member of NICRA, recalls: You can say maybe that the overreaction by the state created the
Civil Rights Movement, more than anybody did. People reacted to that sort of violence.”
(Author interview, October 10, 2003).
During the second half of the 1960s, and especially after the riots of May 1968 in France,
there was mass mobilization of students in universities throughout the Western world. They
were clearly attuned to and influenced by one another, resulting in the elaboration and
diffusion of anti-institutional, counter-cultural, and anti-authority frames. These developments
had profound psychological impact on young radicals in Northern Ireland and led many
Queen’s University (Belfast) students to form an organization called Peoples’ Democracy, or
PD (Devlin 1969; Arthur 1974). Michael Farrell, a PD leader, has recalled: “We believed that
our generation could change the world and that students could be the catalysts in setting off a
social and political revolution.” (1988: 13). This group tried later on to develop, “with some
naivety,” a student-proletariat alliance in order to produce a class struggle in the region. At the
same time, as Bernadette Devlin points out, the events of October 5 in Londonderry were
interpreted by the students through a local and parochial lens characteristic of the region:
In terms of student political movement in the sixties, we were very rural, different
students. There was only one university in the North of Ireland; all of us lived at
most fifty miles from home. . . . The very small group of radicals held demon-
strations, but the mass student support came when the police beat up the people in
Derry, and then all the students said: “That’s my neighbor,” “That’s my daddy,”
“That’s us,” and that is what really mobilized the students. . . . The new actors that
joined the CRM after the march in Derry brought with them particular feelings that
were different from the initial issue of civil rights. (Author interview, July 29, 2003)
In contrast, the Unionist community remained loyal to the public institutions and called
for maintence of public order in the region. Even the most moderate members tended not to
partake in CRM mobilization after October 5. Instead, Unionists predominantly mobilized in
opposition to the CRM campaign, asking for tougher repression of the entire Nationalist com-
munity. Ellison and Martin (2000) speak of a kind of “umbilical cord” that linked the RUC
with the Unionist community.
The Unionist establishment framed the CRM challenge as a threat to the Northern
Ireland’s status quo and downplayed the violence used by the police in Londonderry. William
Craig, Minister of Home Affairs at the time, stated after the march, “The police used no more
force than was absolutely necessary, and showed a great deal of restraint.” (Irish News 7
October 1968). He also branded the movement as a Republican-Communist conspiracy to
overthrow the Northern Ireland’s institutions (Newsletter 7 and 17 October, 1968).15 In the
words of one CRM leader, “The Ulster Unionist Party decided to poison Protestant minds so
they labelled us all as Republicans” (author interview with Ivan Cooper, January 27, 2004).
Nevertheless, pressed by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, O’Neill announced a five-
point program of reforms (November 22, 1968)16 that dealt with most of the CRM’s demands
in order to placate the moderate component in protest activities and divide the CRM net-
work.17 It was too little too late.
Contrary to earliest intent of CRM, changing political opportunities of 1968 and the new
radical mobilizing message which arose in response activated part of Northern Irish society
along the traditional ethnonational cleavage. For the Nationalists, scenes of October 5 defin-
92 Mobilization
itively eroded faith in the RUC and solidified and broadened opposition to the regime
(Cameron 1969). No longer could the Northern Ireland establishment be seen as a neutral
component of the political system. Progressively it was becoming the enemy, and it was
painted as “a neofascist dictatorship” by the young radicals (Belfast Telegraph, October 7,

1968). The October 5 violence led to more protests, but because international media coverage
focused attention the state’s response, repression was not so brutal and complete so as to
crush all dissent, but rather just repressive enough to create popular anger and mass mobil-
ization. The radical mobilizing message was, at this stage of CRM’s development, more em-
bedded among certain groups than others, especially Nationalists and students. The immature
and weak cross-community ties of the latent CRM network, based on informal cooperative
interorganizational linkages and on the overlapping membership of its activists, progressively
dissolved, leading the CRM into its final stage in which closing political opportunities favored
a master frame that revitalized the old sectarian and ethnonational cleavages, “forming a new
and durable political framework; a framework within which conflict could be sustained for
decades” (O’Dochartaigh 1997: 12).
CONFLICT AND DECLINE IN THE CRM NETWORK (1969)
The aftermath of October 5 set in motion a process in which moderate and radical elements of
the CRM network were in competition for the same support base and public opinion sectors.
The inherent ideological contradictions of a diverse movement network—contradictions that
were transcended or at least remained latent in previous years—started to become apparent at
this stage and changed the trajectory of the CRM in the weeks and months that followed. As
new waves of participants entered the movement, they exacerbated the ideological
differences. The Unionist establishment’s dual strategy of repression and reform, led the
moderate CRM sectors to pause agitation in order to give the reforms a chance and allow the
situation to normalize. Meanwhile, radicals mocked the moderate’s moratorium decision and
announced on December 20, 1968 that the PD would stage a march between Belfast and
Londonderry between January 1-4, 1969 that would pass through both Nationalist and
Unionist villages (Devlin 1969; Arthur 1974). The “naive” intent of this route was to protest
sectarianism, but Loyalists saw it as a confrontational tactic. Paul Bew, a young PD activist at
the time, recalls:
I would say that we were more dangerous, precisely because we were influenced by
these international trends. If one had been more attuned to society itself, one would
have said, “Well can one march 70 miles between Belfast and Derry through these
little Protestant villages, but is this a wise thing to do?” In fact what we said was,
“We are socialists. We are progressive. Trying to stop us marching through your
villages is ridiculous because we are carrying a banner of enlightenment.” This is
not meaningful, meaningful in our eyes but not meaningful to the citizens of these
villages. It is a very unfortunate misfortune, an accident of history, by which two
trends of very underdeveloped, unsophisticated society were coming into contact
with some very advanced, and perhaps slightly crazy, general ideas. And it was
explosive. (Author interview, July 28, 2003)
From the beginning, the march was characterized by violence and brutality. The worst
came towards the end when two hundred Loyalists, with the collusion of the RUC, attacked
about five hundred marchers in Burntollet, six miles from Londonderry (Cameron 1969;
Arthur 1974). That night widespread rioting broke out in Londonderry, and barricades went
up for several days. Journalists had shadowed the march from start to finish, and the brutal
incidents were once again given international media exposure. It was becoming clear that
Northern Ireland was becoming more polarized along the sectarian lines and falling into
communal disorder. Roy Johnston, one of the first organizers of the CRM campaign, speaking
afterwards on the PD march, observed:
It helped to reduce [the CRM] to a Catholic ghetto movement, and it made it

difficult for Protestant trade unionists to rally in support of local government
electoral rights. After Burntollet, civil rights became a “crypto-nationalist” issue.”
(Author interview, January 26, 2002)
In February 1969 elections for the Stormont parliament showed that support for political
parties that did not identify themselves on the partition issue dropped significantly to 11.7%
(Elliott 1972), even though turnout was the largest in two decades. It appeared that the newly
embraced revitalized Nationalist mobilizing message (confrontational, communal, and anti-
partitionist) of the CRM network proved now to be the most realistic option.18 It better
reflected changed political opportunities and successfully aligned with the revitalization mas-
ter frame, that is, the restoration of the traditional, ethnonational political cleavage along with
the perception of poor opportunities for autonomous action. In Diani’s words, this “reflects
the fact that the most reasonable option open to challengers is that of entering established
[traditional and communal] political organizations in order to redirect their goals and
revitalize their structures from within.” (1996: 1057). The revitalization master frame at this
stage resulted from the dynamic interplay of structural conditions, institutional and organiza-
tional constraints, individual actors, and transformative events in Londonderry and Bruntollet.
If we refer back to figure 1, all this meant that the dominant master frame in Northern Ireland
had come full circle (back to the lower right quadrant), returning it with renewed intensity to
where it was after World War II.
By the end of 1969, the “reformist” and “radical” mobilizing messages that guided the
earlier stages of the CRM had lost their momentum—rendered irrelevant by changing
political opportunities and a new master frame. This does not mean that moderate and radical
activists had completely ended their involvement, but they lost the possibility of leading the
movement (McCann 1974). Their old mobilizing messages had a “lack of consistency” with
the new revitalization master frame. The inclusive, anti-sectarian, and polycentric collective
identity of the CRM’s first stage had been gradually replaced by an exclusive communal
identity. The CRM’s leaders and supporters increasingly interpreted events in ethnonational
and communal terms. Also, by early 1969, the CRM network’s message was almost exclu-
sively anti-partitionist. The political issues at stake passed from civil rights reforms to the
overthrow of the Unionist state and the subsequent unification of Ireland. These were passion-
ate, “hot-botton” issues that fed strong patterns of solidarity and fuelled militant action in the
years to come.
The composition of the movement also changed. This new sectarian and ethnonationalist
message activated many participants from the Nationalist “ghettos” (McCann 1974), with a
significant number of young working-class activists and “rock-throwers” (O’Dochartaigh
1997) whose backgrounds differed significantly from participants in the CRM’s early stages
of mobilization. For the most part, the grievances that animated these youth were not voting
rights, housing issues, and employment access, but policing issues, and—from 1971 in
particular—the end of internment.19 During the daily street battles and the violent face-to-face
confrontations with the police and the Loyalists, the young Nationalists intensified and hard-
ened their militant ideological frame, revitalizing their anti-partitionism and pan-nationalist
communal attitudes, and decrying the current social and political situation as “immoral” and
“unjust.” Their indignation and moral outrage justified the use of violence as a legitimate
political means (English 2003: 101-104), and a “new grassroots leadership which was not
averse to violence” emerged (O’Dochartaigh 1997: 41). Although these new participants may
have shared a with old CRM activists strong antagonism towards the Northern Ireland’s
institutions, they allowed no room for any kind of reform as suggested by the moderates—the
94 Mobilization
overthrow of the Northern Irish state and the unification of Ireland was their only goal. The
confluence of these factors engendered the progressive demobilization of many original CRM
participants. Fergus Woods, a member of PD, offers the following remarks, which are
representative of other reformist CRM members:

In the beginning the CRM was a very wide-ranging group of people. It was not
sectarian; it was focused on basic civil rights. But then after we started to emerge,
the notion of the two groups, of the Republican-Loyalist kind of conflict, was back
again, then I did not see what involvement I could have in it. I just felt that the
picture had changed so much that I did not see a clear role for myself in what
happened subsequently, so I could not remain involved in it. (Author interview,
October 9, 2003)
Paradoxically, it seems that the original misperception of the CRM network’s intentions by
the Unionist elite and the Loyalist countermovement contributed to what they feared most: a
new military Republican campaign.
Nationalist activists started to take measures (barricades, vigilantes, citizens’ defence
committees) to defend themselves from Loyalist attacks. Civil resistance replaced civil
disobedience, and from then on the nonviolent and anti-sectarian strategies of the CRM
network were progressively overtaken by violent communal conflicts. From 1969 onward, the
scenario in Northern Ireland became dominated by full-scale violence and sectarianism, with
no space available for civil rights and social justice themes. Defensive resistance became the
main preoccupation of the movement, not only as a way to protect Nationalist neighborhoods
from violent attacks, but also to create and reinforce solidarity and mutual support—to
indirectly increase activists’ commitment to the social movement network at a time when risk
of injury and social condemnation were reasons for disengagement. Although the early CRM
drew inspiration from the Black civil rights campaign in the U.S., one commentator summar-
ized the unreality of the situation. According to Eammon McCann:
It was like children who learned some foreign language by phonetics. We had no
understanding of the personal discipline involved in nonviolent politics. It was
totally naïve to expect that we would take people out onto streets, and stones would
bounce off their heads, and then expect them not to react simply because we were a
nonviolent movement. People just took it until they’d had enough, and the non-
violent movement was lost. (Recorded interview, Channel 4, May 7, 1988).
Sectarian ghosts increasingly returned to Northern Ireland. The initial CRM slogan of “British
Rights, for British citizens” was replaced by the cry of “Brits Out!” In the words of one
respondent, this was particularly true because “after the events of Bloody Sunday there was
no space for nonviolent politics in the streets, the violence just took over” (Author interview
with Ivan Cooper, January 24, 2004).20
CONCLUSIONS
Drawing on the case of the Northern Ireland CRM network, I have shown how shifting
political opportunities influence the process of social movement development and how this
process is led by the congruence of the mobilizing message best aligned with the master frame
dominant at a given stage. Analyzing the development of the CRM network with this ap-
proach brings several insights that can inform future research.
First, looking at social movements with this approach allows us to understand more
explicitly their ongoing development, the shifts in their repertoire of action, and their con-
tingent interrelationships within social movement organizations and groups and with the
broader sociopolitical system in which they are set.

Second, this approach emphasizes the internal heterogeneity of social movements. It
documents not only the dominant shifts of the movement’s collective identity, but also high-
lights the mobilization and demobilization of particular associations and groups as part of the

movement’s internal dynamics. It also suggests that social movement decline can be under-
stood as a lack of consistency between the social movement’s mobilizing message and the
master frames that are dominant at a certain stage.
Third, this framework sets the time dimension firmly back in social movement research.
Social movements, then, pass from being static subjects, to dynamic and interactive ones that
undergo various stages of mobilizations over time.
Fourth, and most important, this analysis has highlighted a way of thinking about the
relationship between political opportunities, the cultural milieu in which social movements
develop, and individual agency—why some individuals act and are able to act. Drawing on
temporal changes in Diani’s schema, we saw how the CRM changed from a peaceful and re-
formist movement to a militant insurgency, at least in part, through the constraining force of
dominant master frames. We saw that as political structures change, broad schemata of inter-
pretation, or master frames, shape the perceptions of social movement participants so that
some mobilizing messages and some collective identities are favored over others. Indeed, this
means that some groups, some leaders, and some individuals within a diverse movement net-
work will be privileged—some voices will be heard above others, and some actions will carry
the day while others will fall flat. Because all social movements are composed of a hetero-
genous and emergent multi-actor dynamic, the CRM case points to processes that trace how
social movements change more generally, highlighting the interplay among structure, culture,
and agency. While this analysis has been based on only one case, it nevertheless poses im-
portant questions for further theoretical refinement of how movements develop through time.
NOTES
1
Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, was when British soldiers fired on and killed fourteen unarmed civilians during
an anti-interment march in Londonderry. Although this article focuses on the early stages of the mobilization during
the 1960s. Bloody Sunday was the most significant event in the subsequent escalation of the Northern Irish conflict.
In its aftermath, direct rule from London was introduced in April 1972.
2
The British royal assent of the Government of Ireland Act, in December 1920, partitioned the island of Ireland into
two political systems: an independent twenty-six county Irish Free State, from 1949 the Republic of Ireland; and a
six-county Northern Ireland formally dependent on the United Kingdom, but with its own Parliament at Stormont in
Belfast.
3
Loyalists, generally, are prepared to use physical force to protect their community, Protestantism, and to oppose any
change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.
4
I agree with McAdam et al. (1996) when they say “that both political opportunities and framing processes are more
the product of organizational dynamics” during subsequent movement development “than they were during the
emergent phase of the movement” (15), but this does not alter the possibility of using Diani’s analytical framework,
after having accepted that political opportunities are not static and “objective categories”.
5
As this research is looking into events that happened more than thirty-five years ago, there is a generational
overrepresentation in favor of the younger activists of the time. I have tried to redress this through the use of archival
and newspaper material.
6
In order to comprend participants’ subjectivity and to analyze the structure of meaning, I will use other sources such
as personal memoirs, unpublished diaries and autobiographies, for example, Devlin (1969); McCann (1974); Farrell
(1988); McCluskey (1989); O’Dochartaigh (1994); Currie (2004). These sources have also been useful as a further
check in measuring the validity and reliability of the semi-structured interviews. For a discussion of reliability and
validity in oral sources, I refer to Della Porta’s work (1992).
7
Later factors that facilitated CRM’s mobilization were the radicalization of the civil rights movement in the U.S.,
student mobilization in the late 1960s, the politicization of world political protest through the international mass
media. For considerations of space, I do not deal in depth with each of these factors, which are treated extensively in
the literature on the subject, I simply underline their heterogeneous character as confirmation of the network plurality
and complexity of the CRM.
8
Republicans traditionally have stood for a united Ireland and are prepared to use physical force to achieve it. Having
96 Mobilization
said that, we should remember that during the 1960s the leadership of the Republican movement (Cathal Goulding,
Tomas MacGiolla and Sean Garland), after the fiasco of the 1956-1962 Border Campaign and under the influence of
the Wolfe Tone Societies (1963), attempted to keep in reserve the use of physical force, preferring and promoting a
new gradualist-reformist grass-roots agitation strategy focused on civil rights demands (here the influence on the

Republican movement of Desmond Greaves through people like Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston is unmis-
takable). Much of the information I gleaned on the Republican movement during the 1960s comes from interviews
with Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan, further material was gained from Desmond Greaves’s diaries, which are
unfortunately still unpublished, and contain more than seven thousand handwritten pages.
9
Though strongly committed to the aspiration of a united Ireland, several Nationalist groups in the late 1950s and
early 1960s embraced a more social consciousness, constructive, and reformist outlook which based its appeal on the
need to work inside the Northern Ireland political system in order to, first, secure its reformation and, second, to win
Unionist consent for Irish unification. These standards were to provide the crucial ideological underpinning for the
emergence in August 1970 of the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP) (Staunton 2001: 230). Apart from this
majoritarian strand in the Nationalist community, “there was the reappearance after 1969 of a strong Republican
undertow—especially in the most deprived Catholic urban areas—which was to find expression in the Provisional
IRA.” (Bew et al. 2002: 138).
10
This was reflected in the slogan, “Green and Orange Tories Out”, chanted by the young radicals in the late 1960s
who wanted a Northern Ireland politics neither dominated by Orange Unionists nor from Green Nationalists, an anti-
sectarian politics.
11
Without abandoning the option of using the tradition of armed force tout court, which after the 1956-1962 abortive
Border Campaign seemed to become less appealing, the new Republican leadership wanted to turn the movement, not
without fierce resistance from within (Belfast Telegraph, October 3, 1968), into a radical coalition of agitation cap-
able in their view of winning Unionist working-class support by exposing the discriminatory strategy of keeping the
workers apart in Northern Ireland. Working-class unity would be attainable then not through unilateral militarism
(guerrilla war, bombing campaigns, etc.), which in the past had the only result of increasing sectarianism, but through
the involvement with radical politics and a civil rights campaign (Tuairisc, No. 6, June 1966).
12
A large part of this material is now kept at the Linen Hall Library of Belfast.
13
The daily reports in the Belfast Telegraph and in the Irish News during June and July 1968 are excellent accounts
that highlight the internal debate occurring inside the Nationalist community and more broadly in the CRM network
on the shifting of strategy toward civil disobedience and confrontational tactics. In particular see the reports from the
NP conference in the Irish News and in the Belfast Telegraph of June 24, 1968; see also NICRA’s official history
records (1978: 20).
14
Maney has counted in his important work (2000), almost 204 groups and associations from outside the region,
which had campaigned for civil rights demands in Northern Ireland.
15
Cabinet Conclusions, PRONI CAB/4/1405-1409.
16
Cabinet Conclusions, PRONI CAB/4/1412-1419.
17
In this short period the CRM achieved more than any other opposition group or political party in Stormont’s fifty
years of history (1921-1972). O’Neill’s reforms were not a definitive solution, but they represented a recognition of
the civil rights issue by the state. Subsequently the themes of civil and human rights became a central issue in the
formal agenda of Northern Ireland after 1969, by “changing the language of politics in the region” (author interview
with Eamonn McCann, October 22, 2003), this can still be seen in the current context. Kevin Boyle, a PD leader,
stated during an interview: “The CRM brought out in the long term that there was no way the old discriminatory
system could be restored; and that it was necessary to do so if ultimately peace was to emerge. Furthermore I believe
that CRM inserted the emphasis on human rights and especially on equality into the option for the future” (Author
interview, August 18, 2003).
18
It also was favored by the transnational network of Irish Nationalist organizations, which to a large extent
“increasingly openly advocated reunification” (Maney 2000: 162).
19
The Special Powers Act gave special authority to the police in a state of emergency. It authorized indefinite arrest
and internment without an imminent charge or trial, the search of private property without a warrant and the
prohibition of meetings and processions (Ellison and Martin 2000).
20
With the rebirth of traditional Republican militarism, in the form of the Provisional IRA in1969 (English 2003: ch.
3), and the overwhelming alienation in the Nationalist community from the Northern Ireland regime, even the
constructive and reformist leadership of the SDLP was forced to adopt an ever more radical agenda and to withdraw
from Stormont in July 1971 (Staunton 2001).
APPENDIX A. KEY ORGANIZATIONS AND GROUPS IN THE CRM NETWORK
Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU) Around ninety British Labor and Liberal MPs launched
the CDU in the House of Commons in Westminster on June 3, 1965. The aim of this pressure group was

to force Westminster to legislate reforms in Northern Ireland and to promote concern about abuses of
human rights in the region. The political leader of the CDU was Paul Rose, MP for Blackley,
Manchester.
Campaign for Social Justice in Northern Ireland (CSJ) The CSJ began in Dungannon, County
Tyrone, with a committee made up mainly from the Nationalist intelligentsia of the county (1963). It
stood for liberal and democratic reforms within the Northern Ireland system. Its main approach was to
send letters to Stormont and Westminster, compiling a list of demands, denoting grievances through
leaflet campaigns, pamphlets, and meetings in church halls.
Derry Citizens Action Committee (DCAC) On 9 October 1968 at the City Hotel in Londonderry about
120 people set up the DCAC. It included local professionals, business people, trade unionists, clergy,
tenants’ associations, and members of the five groups that organized the march on October 5, in the city,
members of the Liberal Party, the NILP and some members of the liberal wing of the Unionist Party.
The leadership of the organization was very much in the hands of moderates who after the October 5
march decided to play an active role in order to take the initiative out of the hands of radicals in the city
and to prevent a repeat of violence. The DCAC was acting predominantly in Londonderry. Every
evening the organization prepared and trained a large number of stewards committed to preventing
violence during the marches (Interview: Ivan Cooper, January 24, 2004).
Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) A small, radical, group set up in November 1967 to
campaign for improvements to housing in Derry. Its establishment was the result of a radical and left
wing mobilization in the city from the beginning of the 1960s. The DHAC’s tactic was direct action
through sit-ins, sit-downs and public obstructions of different forms (imaginative protest). One of the
prominent members of the group was Eamon McCann.
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) On January 29, 1967, at the International Hotel
in Done-gall Square, Belfast, the NICRA was formally set up. The constitution of the association,
accepted at this meeting, was modelled on that of the National Council for Civil Liberties based in
London. The NICRA attempted to work as an inclusive umbrella at a Northern Ireland level with a
regional council, trying to bring together all organizations, political parties and cultural groups interested
in civil rights issues, strengthening inter-organizational communications with social-organizational,
human, and material resources essential for solidarity and collective action. The leadership agreed that
the association should not be affiliated to or identified with any political party, and should be non-
denominational.
People’s Democracy (PD). On October 9, 1968 three thousand undergraduates and academics marched
from Elmwood Avenue to the City Hall in Belfast, on their return to Queen’s University the students
reassembled and established PD. The most charismatic figures of PD were Michel Farrell, Bernadette
Devlin, Cyril Toman and Kevin Boyle. PD issued a newssheet called Voice and also distributed leaflets
and posters; it contributed to the CRM’s mix of different-pluralistic ideas and values bringing in
addition the principles of the new-left and new international student movement. It tried to relate
revolutionary theory to revolutionary practice. Certain segments in PD used the orderly protests of more
moderate CRM groups as a platform for disruption and conflict.
Wolfe Tone Societies (WTS) The WTS, the strongest of which were in Dublin and in Belfast, were
formed in 1963 after the commemoration of the bicentenary of Wolfe Tone’s birth (1763-1798). They
had their own bulletin called Tuairisc (information). Similar to a loose forum of discussion among
intellectuals, not limited to the IRA or Sinn Fein supporters, but open also to other Nationalists,
Communists, trade unionists and members of the Labor Party. The aim of WTS was a united,
independent, and socialist Irish Republic.
98 Mobilization
APPENDIX B. PERSONS INTERVIEWED, AFFILIATION, AND POSITIONS
Paul Arthur: student and postgraduate at Queen’s University, member of the NILP and active in PD,
now Professor at Ulster University.

Paul Bew: student at Cambridge University, member of the NILP and active in PD, later member of the
British and Irish Communist Organization, now professor at the Queen’s University of Belfast and
adviser to David Trimble, former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party.
Kevin Boyle: lecturer at Queen’s University, active in PD and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights
Association, now Professor at the University of Essex.
Ivan Cooper: employed in the shirt industry, involved in the Young Unionists in the early 1960s, later
secretary of the Londonderry branch of the NILP. Chair of DCAC (Derry Citizens Action Committee),
from 1969 Stormont and Westminster MP for the SDLP, now active in social-justice activities.
Anthony Coughlan: lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, founding member of the Wolfe Tone Society,
now lecturer at Trinity College Dublin.
Benadette Devlin: student at Queen’s University, member of PD, Westminster MP from 1969 for PD,
later member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, now active in social-justice activities.
Jeff Dudgeon: secondary school teacher, member of PD and of the British and Irish Communist
Organization, now president of the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association.
Slan Fergus O’Hare: student at University College Dublin, member of PD, now involved in social-
justice and cultural activities.
John Gray: journalist, activist in the Liberal Unionist Party, member of PD, now librarian of the Linen
Hall Library in Belfast and involved in social justice and cultural activities.
Denis Haughey: secondary school teacher, member of NICRA, Stormont MP for the SDLP, now active
in social-justice and political activities.
Fred Heatley: engineer, member of the Wolfe Tone Society, treasurer of NICRA, now retired.
Ann Hope: Trade unionist, Wolfe Tone Society member, and treasurer of NICRA, now a trade unionist.
Tony Kenedy: student, member of the NILP and active in PD, now chief executive of Co-
operationireland.
Roy Johnston: employed by Aer Lingus, founding member of the Wolfe Tone Society and active in the
Republican movement, now active in social-justice and cultural activities.
Rory McShane: student at Queen’s University, early involvement in the Irish Workers’ Group, member
of the NILP and active in PD, now solicitor.
Eamonn McCann: journalist, active in the Londonderry branch of the NILP from the mid 1960s until
the early 1970s, member of the Derry Housing Action Committee and the Derry Unemployment Action
Committee, now commentator and civil rights activist.
Paddy Joe McClean: secondary school teacher, NICRA member, now active in social-justice activities.
Monica Mc Williams: high school student, member of NICRA, later MP for the Women’s Coalition,
now president of the Civil Rights Commission.
David Morrison: student at Queen’s University, member of PD and of the British and Irish Communist
Organization, now active in social-justice and cultural activities.
Mike Morrisey: student at Oxford University, member of the Communist Party of Northern Ireland and
of NICRA, now professor at Ulster University.
Joe Mulheron: student in Queen’s University, member of PD and later of the Irish Republican Socialist
Party, now owner of Sandino’s pub in Londonderry.
Fionnbarra O’ Dochartaigh: unemployed, activist in the Republican movement in Londonderry during
the 1960s, member of the Derry Housing Action Committee and the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee,
founding member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, now civil rights activist.
Bob Purdie: machine operator in a light engineering factory, member of the Young Socialists and of the
International Marxist Group in London, now Tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford.
Edwina Stewart: high school teacher in Belfast, member of the Communist Party of Northern Ireland
and of NICRA, now retired.
Brian Tipping: secondary school teacher, active in the Republican movement during the 1960s, mem-
ber of NICRA, now retired.
Claude Wilton: solicitor in Londonderry, Ulster Liberal party candidate for the administrative elections
in Londonderry in 1965 and 1969, former chairman of DCAC, now retired.
Fergus Woods: student at the Queen’s University of Belfast, member of PD, now teacher at St Mary’s
Christian Brothers School in Belfast.
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THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT DEVELOPMENT:

NORTHERN IRELAND’S CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN THE 1960S*

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© Mobilization: An International Journal 11(1): 81-100

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network of groups, organizations, and individuals that perceived themselves as united in a

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Figure 1. Political Opportunities and Master Frames

Opportunities for Autonomous

Source: Diani (1996: 1056)

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NORTHERN IRELAND’S SOCIOPOLITICAL SYSTEM

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THE LATENT CRM NETWORK (1960-1967)

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Another activist, Paddy Joe McClean, recalls:

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THE VISIBLE CRM NETWORK (1968)

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In the context of this tactical shift, a “transformative event” occurred in Londonderry at

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CONFLICT AND DECLINE IN THE CRM NETWORK (1969)

It helped to reduce [the CRM] to a Catholic ghetto movement, and it made it

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broader sociopolitical system in which they are set.

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APPENDIX A. KEY ORGANIZATIONS AND GROUPS IN THE CRM NETWORK

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APPENDIX B. PERSONS INTERVIEWED, AFFILIATION, AND POSITIONS

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