On This Day / August 6, 1971

Summary: On This Day – 6th August 1971, John Hume argued that Partition had failed to unite people as violence escalated across Northern Ireland. Edited by Éamon Phoenix.

Hume on Partition | On This Day – 6th August 1971

THE Partition problem was based on a basic misconception because to many people in the Republic, Partition had been a purely territorial problem and the real human divisions associated with it had been ignored, Mr John Hume, MP told the Social Studies Conference in Kiltegan, County Wicklow.

Speaking on ‘The Last Fifty Years: What did the People of the Republic Think?’ Mr Hume said that today, fifty years later, the total failure of the experiment stared them in the face and the reality of the failure was to be found in the streets of Belfast in 1971 where Irishman was separated from Irishman by barbed wire and a line of British soldiers.

There could be no greater monument to the failure of the Northern state than the failure of political leaders in Ireland and Britain to produce a condition for peace, justice and stability in the North and to produce a basis for a solution to the ‘Irish Question’.

Many considered the seeds of that failure were inherent in the 1920 settlement itself.

To say so, Mr Hume said it was not to absolve all those who had opposed the very existence of the Northern statelet, for in spite of the extent of the problem, its opponents failed to produce policies or attitudes which made the slightest impression on it.

It was not unfair to say that many people in the North believed that there had been very little real interest among the people in the rest of the country over the years in the Northern problem.

Police Injured in Newry

EIGHT policemen were injured in Newry last night in clashes which followed a Civil Rights protest march.

At the same time an explosion damaged a number of shops and a bank in Belfast’s Royal Avenue while in Derry two bombs went off, the first at British Army married quarters in Clooney Park and the other at the City Cinema.

MP Attacks ‘Green and Tans’

‘GREEN and Tans’ was the name given by Mr Paddy Devlin, SDLP MP for Falls, to units of the British Army in the Catholic areas of Belfast when he gave several instances of what he described as ‘people being badly beaten up by the military without reason or justification’ Mr Devlin said.

(Éamon Phoenix editor’s note: AS THE IRA bombings and street clashes between nationalists and British troops escalated, John Hume (34) voiced his long-held view that Irish unity was about uniting people, not territory.

He was equally critical of Nationalist abstentionism, Southern indifference and British moves towards a military solution as well as the use of violence for political ends.)

On This Day – 6th August 1971

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