BiographyForty-one years ago, in 1966, Gerry Fitt was elected MP for West Belfast in the Westminster parliament.
It was a crucial moment. Harold Wilson's Labour government had just been re-elected and a number of his backbench MPs were interested in the situation in Northern Ireland. Gerry Fitt's maiden speech was a searing indictment of the record of the Unionist government at Stormont and broke the convention that Northern Ireland affairs could not be discussed at Westminster.
Two years later, Fitt was batoned by the RUC at the head of the first major Civil Rights demonstration in Derry on October 5th, 1968 and focused world attention on the Northern Ireland situation. That was when the Civil Rights movement took off.
Gerry Fitt went on to become the first leader of the SDLP when it was set up in 1970 and Deputy Chief Executive in the first power-sharing administration in the North in 1974. He ended up being nominated to the House of Lords by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and died in August 2005.
Two recent books tell the remarkable story of Gerry Fitt. Chris Ryder was a long time friend of Fitt's and had worked with him on a projected autobiography which was never published. His book is, in his own words, "not a rigorously critical" account. He draws on long conversations with his subject as well as interesting and indiscreet memos by British and Irish officials of discussions with Fitt and other political figures. Unfortunately, however, he does not cite his sources or give the dates of quotations from Gerry Fitt, so that it is hard to tell what are contemporary views and what are later, highly coloured, reflections.
Michael A Murphy has attempted a more political analysis of Gerry Fitt's career, relying on a number of frank interviews with Fitt himself and his former SDLP colleagues.
Chris Ryder's most intriguing discovery is that Gerry Fitt was born in the Belfast Workhouse Infirmary in 1926 and adopted by the Fitt family, something he kept secret all his life. Ryder captures well the grinding poverty of Fitt's early life in the Catholic back streets of Belfast's docks area, a poverty that deprived him of a secondary education and sent him to sea at 15 on dangerous wartime convoys. It also saw him back on the dole in Belfast in the 1950s and left him with a bitter resentment of a system that kept working class people down and kept the Catholics at the bottom of the heap.
FITT FOUGHT HIS way up in the tough world of ghetto politics in the 1950s and early 1960s, winning seats on Belfast Corporation, in the Stormont parliament and eventually at Westminster. He was strongly anti-Unionist and made militant speeches in the early days, calling himself a "Connolly socialist", but he was not an ideological politician. He was against the system and had a strong sympathy for the underdog but, as Ryder comments: "He was a natural loner, impetuous and instinctive, and liked to have helpers rather than thinkers around him".
When the SDLP was set up, Gerry Fitt was the senior anti-Unionist politician in the North and his position as the only Westminster MP gave him access to the British government. He was the natural choice to lead the new party and to become its nominee for Deputy Chief Executive when the power-sharing executive was established in 1974. But both books make clear that it was an uneasy alliance in the SDLP. Fitt was not used to collective decision-making and resented the "f**king schoolteachers" with whom he was surrounded in the new party.
Despite his early anti-partition speeches, Fitt was also less interested in Irish unity than his colleagues and was more ready than them to compromise on the Council of Ireland dimension of the Sunningdale Agreement at the time of the 1974 UWC strike that brought down the power-sharing executive.
Both authors detail the constant bickering among the SDLP leaders after 1974 and Fitt's annoyance as the party emphasised the Irish dimension in reaction to the British government's failure to defend the Sunningdale Agreement. Chris Ryder recounts the party leader's tendency to talk directly to British officials without consulting his colleagues and to disparage them in colourful language.
There were also differences over how strongly the SDLP should oppose internment, British security policies generally, and the RUC. Gerry Fitt was deeply affected by the horrific violence of those years, much of it happening in his own area of Belfast. His house was often targeted by Republican supporters and in 1976 it was invaded and he had to hold off the intruders with his licensed gun. He developed a deep hatred for the IRA which began to colour his attitude to security policies which his colleagues believed were alienating the whole nationalist community.
FITT FINALLY SPLIT from the SDLP in 1979 but took no one with him and became increasingly isolated politically. In the intensely emotional atmosphere surrounding the IRA hunger strikes in 1980-1, he opposed any concession to the hunger strikers and angered many of his former supporters. He lost his Council seat in 1981 and lost his seat at Westminster to Gerry Adams in 1983, with the SDLP also standing against him. That was when Mrs Thatcher nominated him to the House of Lords and he moved to live in London.
Gerry Fitt sat in the Lords for 22 years but he was increasingly out of touch and out of sympathy with developments in Northern Ireland and the emerging peace process. Chris Ryder comments that his later contributions "reflected his remoteness from his roots . . . It was as if all of his perceptions had been frozen in the late 1980s and he didn't want them to thaw".
It was a sad and politically lonely end to an extraordinary career. In a way Gerry Fitt himself was a casualty of the conflict. With peace returning to Northern Ireland it may now be possible to come to a more rounded assessment of Gerry Fitt's career and significance. These books are a beginning to that process.
• Michael Farrell was an activist in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and is now a solicitor in Dublin
• Fighting FittBy Chris Ryder The Brehon Press, 400pp. €18.99 Gerry Fitt: A Political ChameleonBy Michael A Murphy Mercier Press, 403pp. €20