Word: mccanns
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People's Democracy, a student civil rights group, was formed at the University of Belfast immediately after the march. McCann smilingly explains that the printer didn't know what to put on the top of the poster for the group's first meeting. He started with "Students for Democracy," changed it to "People for Democracy." because there were more than students in the movement, and finally changed it to "People's Democracy" when he realized that "People for Democracy" didn't make much sense. "There were a lot of starry-eyed, romantic people in it," McCann said...
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...
...Eammon McCann explained casually that a hundred people marched from Belfast knowing that they would be attacked at every step and that the cops were on the other side. "Those who love the world serve it in action." Yeats tells us. I understood that I would never really hear McCann until I had experienced much more...
...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...