‘For a few weeks, the reliable machinery of suburban life shut down. There was no milk, no petrol, often no electricity’the middle-class suburbs of south Belfast were among those areas least affected. All this is relative. People from that leafy locale were murdered. They had their workplaces destroyed. It was not unheard of to see a soldier’s rifle poking from a gateway when walking home from school.
Imagine if such an insurrection had occurred in Birmingham. Or in Galway. “Was it a bit like this in the drawingrooms of St Petersburg in October 1917?” historian and co-presenter of The Rest Is History podcast Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Seasons in the Sun, Britain 1974-79 quotes a Belfast lawyer as remarking.
By the beginning of May plans were under way for a strike. The day before the stoppage the Ulster Army Council laid out its objective in chilling terms. “If Westminster is not prepared to restore democracy, ie the will of the people made clear in an election, then the only other way it can be restored is in a coup d’état,” a statement read.
Meanwhile, my mother, a theatre nurse at Musgrave Park Hospital , had to contend with a sudden and dramatic shortage of petrol. “One of the specific things that was quite interesting was that the hospital supplied us with enough petrol to get to work,” she tells me. “There was a pump in the grounds and those working there could fill up their cars. You had to pay for it. But you could get that petrol.
Many may now be puzzled at the authorities’ inability to regain the levers of power. Within days the strikers had essentially taken over governance. They introduced a petrol rationing scheme. Passes were issued to those allowed to work. Faulkner’s talk of an “independent neo-fascist Northern Ireland” may have been overheated but the Workers’ Council was unrolling the paraphernalia of a provisional government. All this with a significant British army presence on the ground.
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