BACK PAGES:This incident in Dungannon in the early days of the Northern civil rights campaign might sound like farce now, but it illustrates the atmosphere of intimidation and the questionable role of the police when a handful of students planned a public meeting in the town square – factors that were to fuel the Troubles.
Fergus Pyle reported on what happened as loyalists prevented the meeting from taking place.
ABOUT 150 Orange and Black [preceptory] men – the description was vouched for by police – together with wives, sweethearts, mothers and youthful hangers-on, kept the centre of Dungannon free from civil rights demonstrators on Saturday afternoon.
Among their achievements were knocking down a pregnant woman when they invaded a café where the civil rights group eventually met, pulling the hair of a number of girl students whom they isolated and damaging a press photographer’s camera.
They also laid siege for a couple of hours to Dungannon Post Office, where a Protestant official – a Labour member of the urban council – was at work.
Police held back a few attempts to rush the building, but the crowds shouted and jeered and two mini-skirted girls, followed by some young men, carried a Union Jack into the building.
The crowd, some from outlying districts, gathered half-an-hour before a dozen Queen’s students from the People’s Democracy were to hold a meeting in the square. They prevented a loudspeaker van from being set up and the students, advised by the police, withdrew.
There were several isolated assaults on members of the public, who mostly kept a prudent distance. Two passersby were taken by police into protective custody after scuffles.
It was the press, however, that took the brunt of the crowds attention. Photographer Jack McManus of The Irish Times had just arrived on the steps of the post office and was debating where to start when he saw a group advancing and decided the right course was to buy a postage stamp. The police escorted him from the back of the post office to the police station across the road.
There were other incidents: a reporter from the Belfast Telegraph had left a telephone box when a girl saw his notebook with written prominently in it the provocative words “Austin Currie”. She questioned him and a crowd gathered. He could be seen from the police station window being pummelled by several hefty men before police rescued him.
He said later that, while the others were at work on his head and shoulders, an old lady was endearingly poking him around the lower stomach with her umbrella. A photographer was hustled away by police when the crowd turned on him.
The first press victim was Jim Corrigan of the Tyrone Democrat, whose camera was noticed. He was chased by a section of the crowd and protected by a line of police before being led away. Two local Protestants, he said afterwards, were among those who helped to hold off the attack.
At the station, a constable recalled that this was the building whose plans should have gone to the Punjab in Victorian times. Listening to the crowd ululating outside, it seemed more like an outpost of the seventh cavalry.
Maj Ronald Bunting, an associate of Ian Paisley, arrived about an hour after the crowd gathered. To cheers, he addressed them with apparently telling words – one phrase overheard was “snakes in the grass”, with directions accompanied by graphic hand movements illustrating how to deal with them.
The press was not present when he addressed the crowd from a low wall, after which a verse of the British national anthem was sung and the crowd shortly afterwards moved down towards the end of the square, where the civil rights meeting was going on in a café.
The journalists were then released from protective custody and escorted by plainclothes men, followed by the crowd to their cars and instructed to leave Dungannon as fast as possible.
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