Word: mccann
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Women fought alongside men at the barricades. In fact, Bernadette Devlin was one of the few members of the Defense Committee to fight in the streets. In Northern Ireland, men are often unemployed while their wives work, a situation which McCann says tends to reverse sex roles. Women were therefore very insistent on participating in the fighting...
...following weeks, working class groups sprung up all along the route of the march. Despite growing agitation, only a few bills passed the Northern Irish parliament, and nothing changed substantially. People's Democracy held more marches, and at least five times they were attacked by the cops. In what McCann called a "police pogrom," hundreds of police invaded the Catholic Bogside, beat people up, and broke nearly every window in the area...
...Protestants began to march to commemorate the victory at the seige of Derry, there was no doubt that both sides would be fighting. A Defense Committee was formed in Bogsick, and they prepared to barricade the forty-one entrances to the Catholic quarter and stockpiled over 2500 gasoline bombs. McCann, the Committee's Information Officer, helped organize the defense. All of the barricades could go up in fifteen minutes. "Once we prepared to fight, people would have been disappointed if it hadn't happened," McCann said...
When the British troops moved in, McCann said that many supposed that they were there to invade the area. McCann calmly told me that he thought that they would have lost a shooting war. By that time the war had spread to Belfast and eight people had been killed...
...McCann said that most of the street people enjoyed it as much as he did. "The fighting was exciting. I enjoyed it tremendously. In fact, I'm rather nostalgic for it." Many of the people in Derry learned politics as they fought. They learned through their own fighting to support the Panthers...