But Major Bunting may have had a more personal reason to feel threatened by this march. Among the scruffy demonstrators with their hippie songs and righteous banners was his own son. A student at Queen’s with heavy sideburns, Ronnie Bunting had drifted into radical politics during the summer of 1968. He was hardly the only Protestant among the marchers. Indeed, there had been a long tradition of Protestants who believed in Irish independence; one of the heroes of Irish republicanism, Wolfe Tone, who led a violent rebellion against British rule in 1798, was a Protestant. But Ronnie was surely the only member of the march whose father was the architect of a nettlesome counterprotest, leading his own band of loyalist marchers in a campaign of harassment and bellowing anti-Catholic invective through a megaphone. ‘My father’s down there making a fool of himself,’ Ronnie grumbled, shamefaced, to his friends. But this oedipal dynamic seemed only to sharpen the resolve of both father and son.

Like the Price sisters, Ronnie Bunting had joined People’s Democracy. At one meeting, he suggested that it might be better if they did not proceed with the march to Derry, because he thought that ‘something bad’ was likely to happen. The police had cracked down violently on several earlier protests. Northern Ireland was not exactly a bastion of free expression. Due to fears of a Catholic uprising, a draconian law, the Special Powers Act, which dated to the era of partition, had created what amounted to a permanent state of emergency: the government could ban meetings and certain types of speech, and could search and arrest people without warrants and imprison them indefinitely without trial. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was overwhelmingly Protestant, and it had a part-time auxiliary, known as the B-Specials, composed of armed, often vehemently anti-Catholic unionist men. One early member, summarising how the B-Specials were recruited, said, ‘I need men, and the younger and wilder they are, the better.’

As the march progressed through the countryside, it kept running into Protestant villages that were unionist strongholds. Each time this occurred, a mob of local men would emerge, armed with sticks, to block the students’ access, and a cordon of police officers accompanying the march would force them to detour around that particular village. Some of Major Bunting’s men walked alongside the marchers, taunting them. One carried a Lambeg drum – the so-called big slapper – and its ominous thump echoed through the green hills and little villages, summoning other able-bodied counterprotesters from their homes.

If there was a violent clash, the students felt prepared for it. Indeed, some of them welcomed the idea. The Selma march had provoked a ferocious crackdown from the police, and it may have been the televised spectacle of that violent overreaction, as much as anything else, that sparked real change. There was a sense among the students that the most intractable injustice could be undone through peaceful protest: this was 1969, and it seemed that young people around the world were in the vanguard. Perhaps in Northern Ireland the battle lines could be redrawn so that it was no longer a conflict of Catholics against Protestants, or republicans against loyalists, but rather the young against the old – the forces of the future against the forces of the past.

On the fourth and final day of the march, at a crossroads ten miles outside Derry, one of the protesters shouted through a megaphone, ‘There’s a good possibility that some stones may be thrown.’ It appeared there might be trouble ahead. More young people had joined the procession over the days since it departed Belfast, and hundreds of marchers now filled the road. The man with the megaphone shouted, ‘Are you prepared to accept the possibility of being hurt?’

The marchers chorused back, ‘Yes!’

The night before, as the marchers slept on the floor of a hall in the village of Claudy, Major Bunting had assembled his followers in Derry, or Londonderry, as Bunting called it. Inside the Guildhall, a grand edifice of stone and stained glass on the banks of the River Foyle, hundreds of hopped-up loyalists gathered for what had been billed as a ‘prayer meeting’. And there, ready to greet his flock, was Ian Paisley.

A radical figure with a rabid following, Paisley was the son of a Baptist preacher. After training at a fringe evangelical college in Wales, he had established his own hard-line church. At six foot four, Paisley was a towering figure with squinty eyes and a jumble of teeth, and he would lean over the pulpit, his hair slicked back, his jowls aquiver, and declaim against the ‘monster of Romanism’. The Vatican and the Republic of Ireland were secretly in league, engineering a sinister plot to overthrow the Northern Irish state, he argued. As Catholics steadily accrued power and numbers, they would grow into ‘a tiger ready to tear her prey to pieces’.

Paisley was a Pied Piper agitator who liked to lead his followers through Catholic neighbourhoods, sparking riots wherever he went. In his basso profundo, he would expound about how Catholics were scum, how they ‘breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin’. He was a flamboyantly divisive figure, a maestro of incitement. In fact, he was so unsympathetic, so naked in his bigotry, that some republicans came to feel that on balance, he might be good for their movement. ‘Why would we kill Paisley?’ Dolours Price’s mother, Chrissie, had been known to say. ‘He’s our greatest asset.’

Though the population of Derry was predominantly Catholic, in the symbolic imagination of loyalists, the city remained a living monument to Protestant resistance. In 1689, Protestant forces loyal to William of Orange, the new king, had managed to hold the city against a siege by a Catholic army loyal to James II. In some other part of the world, an event of such faded significance might merit an informative plaque. But in Derry, the clash was commemorated every year, with marches by local Protestant organisations. Now, Paisley and Bunting suggested, the student protesters who were planning to march into Derry the following morning might as well be re-enacting the siege.

These civil rights advocates might pretend they were peaceful protesters, Paisley told his followers, but they were nothing but ‘IRA men’ in disguise. He reminded them of Londonderry’s role as a bulwark against papist encroachment. Did they stand ready to rise once again in defence of the city? There were cheers of ‘Hallelujah!’ It was Paisley’s habit to whip a crowd into a violent lather and then recede from the scene before any actual stones were thrown. But as his designated adjutant, Major Bunting instructed the mob that anyone who wished to play a ‘manly role’ should arm themselves with ‘whatever protective measures they feel to be suitable’.

In the darkness that night, in fields above the road to Derry, local men began to assemble an arsenal of stones. A local farmer, sympathetic to the cause, provided a tractor to help gather projectiles. These were not pebbles, but sizable hunks of freshly quarried rock, which were deposited in piles at strategic intervals, in preparation for an ambush.

‘We said at the outset that we would march non-violently,’ Eamonn McCann reminded Dolours and the other protesters on the final morning. ‘Today, we will see the test of that pious declaration.’ The marchers started moving again, proceeding slowly, with a growing sense of trepidation. They were massed on a narrow country lane, which was bordered on the right by a tall hedge. Up ahead was a bottleneck, where Burntollet Bridge, an old stone structure, crossed the River Faughan. Dolours and Marian and the other young protesters continued trudging towards the bridge. Then, beyond the hedges, in the fields above, where the ground rose sharply, a lone man appeared. He was wearing a white armband and swinging his arms around theatrically in an elaborate series of hand signals, like a matador summoning some unseen bull. Soon other figures emerged, sturdy young men popping up along the ridgeline, standing there in little knots, looking down at the marchers. There were hundreds of people on the road now, hemmed in by the hedges, with nowhere to run. More and more men appeared in the fields above, those white bands tied around their arms. Then the first rocks sailed into view.

To Bernadette Devlin, a friend of Dolours who was one of the organisers of the march, it looked like a ‘curtain’ of projectiles. From the lanes on each side of the road, men and boys materialised, scores of them, hurling stones, bricks, milk bottles. Some of the attackers were on the high ground above the road, others behind the hedges alongside it, others still swarming around to head the marchers off at the bridge. The people at the front of the group sprinted for the bridge, while those in the rear fell back to avoid the barrage. But Dolours and Marian were stuck in the middle of the pack.

They clambered over the hedge, but the stones kept coming. And now the men started running down and physically attacking the marchers. It looked to Dolours like a scene from some Hollywood western, when the Indians charge into the prairie. A few of the attackers wore motorcycle helmets. They descended, swinging cudgels, crowbars, lead pipes and laths. Some men had wooden planks studded with nails, and they attacked the protesters, lacerating their skin. People pulled coats over their heads for cover, stumbling, blind and confused, and grabbed one another for protection.

The ambush at Burntollet Bridge

As marchers fled into the fields, they were hurled to the ground and kicked until they lost consciousness. Someone took a spade and smacked a young girl in the head. Two newspaper photographers were beaten up and stoned. The mob seized their film and told them that if they came back, they would be killed. And there in the midst of it all was Major Bunting, the grand marshal, swinging his arms like a conductor, his coat sleeves blotted with blood. He snatched one of the banners from the protesters, and somebody set it on fire.

The marchers did not resist. They had agreed in advance to honour their pledge of nonviolence. Dolours Price found herself surrounded by young people with gashes on their faces and blood running into their eyes. She splashed into the river, the icy water sloshing around her. In the distance, marchers were being pushed off the bridge and into the river. As Dolours struggled in the water, she locked eyes with one attacker, a man with a club, and for the rest of her life she would return to that moment, the way his eyes were glazed with hate. She looked into those eyes and saw nothing.

Finally, an officer from the Royal Ulster Constabulary waded into the river to break up the fracas. Dolours grabbed his coat and wouldn’t let go. But even as this sturdy cop helped usher her to safety, a terrifying realisation was taking hold. There were dozens of RUC officers there that day, but most of them had done little to intervene. It would later be alleged that the reason the attackers wore white armbands was so that their friends in the police could distinguish them from the protesters. In fact, many of Major Bunting’s men, the very men doing the beating, were members of the police auxiliary, the B-Specials.

Later, on the way to Altnagelvin Hospital, in Derry, Dolours cried, seized by a strange mixture of relief, frustration and disappointment. When she and Marian finally got back to Belfast and appeared, bruised and battered, on the doorstep of the little house on Slievegallion Drive, Chrissie Price listened to the story of her daughters’ ordeal. When they had finished telling it, she had one question. ‘Why did you not fight back?’

Evacuation

Jean McConville left few traces. She disappeared at a chaotic time, and the children she left behind were so young that many of them had yet to form a rich catalogue of memories. But one photograph of Jean survives, a snapshot taken in front of the family’s home in East Belfast in the mid-1960s. Jean stands alongside three of her children, while her husband, Arthur, squats in the foreground. She stares at the camera, arms folded across her chest, lips pursed into a smile, eyes squinting against the sun. One detail that several of her children would recall about Jean McConville is a nappy pin – a blue safety pin, which she wore fastened to her clothes, because one child or another was always missing a button or needing some other repair. It was her defining accessory.

She was born Jean Murray, in 1934, to Thomas and May Murray, a Protestant couple in East Belfast. Belfast was a sooty, grey city of chimneys and steeples, flanked by a flat green mountain on one side and the Belfast Lough, an inlet of the North Channel, on the other. It had linen mills and tobacco factories, a deepwater harbour where ships were built, and row upon row of identical brick workers’ houses. The Murrays lived on Avoniel Road, not far from the Harland & Wolff shipyard, where the Titanic had been built. Jean’s father worked at Harland & Wolff. Every morning when she was a child, he would join the thousands of men plodding past her house on their way to the shipyard, and every evening he would return as the procession of men plodded home in the opposite direction. When the Second World War broke out, Belfast’s linen factories produced millions of uniforms and the shipyards churned out navy vessels. Then, one night in 1941, not long before Jean’s seventh birthday, air raid sirens wailed as a formation of Luftwaffe bombers streaked across the waterfront, scattering parachute mines and incendiary bombs, and Harland & Wolff erupted into flame.

Jean McConville with Robert, Helen, Archie and her husband Arthur

Educating girls was not much of a priority in working-class Belfast in those days, so when Jean was fourteen, she left school and went in search of work. She ended up finding a job as a servant for a Catholic widow who lived on nearby Holywood Road. The widow’s name was Mary McConville, and she had a grown son – an only child named Arthur, who served in the British Army. Arthur was twelve years older than Jean and very tall. He towered over Jean, who stood barely five feet in her shoes. He came from a long line of soldiers, and he told her stories about how he had gone off to fight the Japanese in Burma during the war.

When Jean and Arthur fell in love, the fact that they came from different sides of the religious divide did not go unnoticed by their families. Sectarian tensions were less pronounced during the 1950s than they had been in the past or would become again, but even so, ‘mixed’ relationships were rare. This was true not just for reasons of tribal solidarity but because Protestants and Catholics tended to live in circumscribed worlds: they resided in different neighbourhoods, attended different schools, worked different jobs, frequented different pubs. By entering Arthur’s mother’s house as a domestic employee, Jean had crossed these lines. When she took up with Arthur, his mother resented it. (Jean’s mother may not have been delighted, either, but she accepted the marriage, though one of Jean’s uncles, a member of the Orange Order, gave her a beating for the transgression.)

The young couple eloped to England in 1952 and lived in an army barracks where Arthur was posted, but eventually they returned to Belfast and moved in with Jean’s mother, in 1957. Jean’s first child, Anne, suffered from a rare genetic condition that would leave her hospitalised for much of her life. Anne was soon followed by Robert, Arthur (who was known as Archie), Helen, Agnes, Michael (whom everyone called Mickey), Thomas (whom everyone called Tucker), Susan and, finally, the twins, Billy and Jim. Between Jean, her mother, her husband and her children, there were a dozen or so people crammed into the tiny house on Avoniel Road. Downstairs was a small front parlour and a kitchen at the back, with an outdoor toilet, an open fire for cooking, and a cold-water sink.

In 1964, Arthur retired from the army with a pension and set up a small building-repair business. But he struggled to stay employed. He found a new job in the Sirocco engineering works but eventually lost it when his employers discovered that he was Catholic. He held a job in a ropeworks for a time. Later, the children would recall this period – when the photo was taken – as a happy interlude. There were privations, to be sure, but nothing out of the ordinary for a working-class childhood in postwar Belfast. Their parents were alive. Their existence seemed stable. Their life was intact.

But during the 1960s, the mutual suspicion between Catholics and Protestants gradually intensified. When members of the local Orange Order conducted their triumphal summertime marches, they would make a point of starting right outside the McConvilles’ door. For years, Ian Paisley had been exhorting his Protestant brethren to seek out and expel Catholics who lived among them. ‘You people of the Shankill Road, what’s wrong with you?’ he would bellow. ‘Number 425 Shankill Road – do you know who lives there? Pope’s men, that’s who!’ This was retail ethnic cleansing: Paisley would reel off addresses – 56 Aden Street, 38 Crimea Street, the proprietors of the local ice cream shop. They were ‘Papishers’, agents of Rome, and they must be driven out. There was no television in the house on Avoniel Road, but as the civil rights movement got under way and Northern Ireland became embroiled in riots, Jean and Arthur would visit a neighbour’s house and watch the evening news with a growing sense of trepidation.

Michael McConville was eight when hell broke loose in 1969. Every summer in Derry, a loyalist order known as the Apprentice Boys held a march to commemorate the young Protestants who shut the city gates to bar the Catholic forces of King James in 1688. Traditionally, the marchers concluded their festivities by standing on the city’s walls and hurling pennies onto the pavements and houses of the Bogside, a Catholic ghetto, below. But this year the provocation did not go unchallenged, and violent riots broke out, engulfing Derry in what would become known as the Battle of the Bogside.

As word of the clash in Derry reached Belfast, the riot spread like an airborne virus. Gangs of Protestant youths tore through Catholic neighbourhoods, breaking windows and torching homes. Catholics fought back, throwing stones and bottles and Molotov cocktails. The RUC and the B-Specials responded to this unrest, but the brunt of their authority was felt by Catholics, who complained that the police would simply stand by while the loyalists committed crimes. Barricades sprang up around Catholic neighbourhoods as people hijacked school buses and bread vans and turned them on their sides to block off streets and create defensive fortifications. Young Catholics prised up paving stones to pile onto the barricades or to throw at police. Alarmed by this onslaught, the RUC deployed squat armoured vehicles, known as ‘Pigs’, which lumbered through the narrow streets, their gun turrets swivelling in all directions. Stones rained down on them as they passed. Petrol bombs broke open on their steel bonnets, blue flame spilling out like the contents of a cracked egg.

There were moments of anarchic poetry: a bulldozer that someone had left on a building site was liberated by a couple of kids, who sat atop the huge machine and drove it jauntily down a West Belfast street, to great whoops and cheers from their compatriots. At a certain point the boys lost control of their hulking steed and crashed into a telegraph pole – where somebody immediately lobbed a petrol bomb at the bulldozer and it burst into flames.

Loyalist gangs started moving systematically through Bombay Street, Waterville Street, Kashmir Road and other Catholic enclaves, breaking windows and tossing petrol bombs inside. Hundreds of homes were gutted and destroyed, their occupants put out onto the street. As the rioting spread, ordinary families all across Belfast boarded up their doors and windows, as if for an approaching hurricane. They would move their old furniture away from the front room so there was less to burn, in the event that any incendiary material came crashing through the window. Then they would huddle in the back kitchen, grandparents clasping their rosaries, and wait for the chaos to pass.

Nearly two thousand families fled their homes in Belfast that summer, the overwhelming majority of them Catholic. Some 350,000 people lived in Belfast. Over the ensuing years, as much as 10 per cent of the population would relocate. Sometimes a mob of a hundred people would converge on a house, forcing the inhabitants to leave. On other occasions, a note would come through the letter box, instructing the owners that they had a single hour to vacate. People crammed into cars that would shuttle them across the city to safety: it was not unusual to see a family of eight squeezed into a single car. Eventually, thousands of Catholics would queue at the railway station – refugees, waiting for passage on a southbound train to the Republic.

It was not long before the mob came for the McConvilles. A gang of local men visited Arthur and told him he had to leave. He slipped out under cover of darkness and sought refuge at his mother’s house. At first, Jean and the children stayed behind, thinking the tensions might subside. But eventually they, too, were forced to flee, packing all the belongings they could into a taxi.

The city that they traversed was transformed. Lorries whizzed to and fro with whatever furniture people could gather before moving. Men staggered through the streets under the weight of ageing sofas and wardrobes. Cars burned at intersections. Firebombed school buildings smouldered. Great plumes of smoke blotted out the sky. All the traffic lights had been shattered, so, at some junctions, young civilians stood on the street, directing traffic. Sixty buses had been commandeered by Catholics and placed along streets to form barricades, a new set of physical battle lines delineating ethnic strongholds. Everywhere there was rubble and broken glass, what one poet would memorably describe as ‘Belfast confetti’.

Yet, in the midst of this carnage, the hard-headed citizens of Belfast simply adapted and got on with their lives. In a momentary lull in the shooting, a front door would tentatively crack open and a Belfast housewife in horn-rimmed glasses would stick her head out to make sure the coast was clear. Then she would emerge, erect in her raincoat, a head scarf over her curlers, and walk primly through the war zone to the shops.

The taxi driver was so fearful of the chaos that he refused to take Jean McConville and her children any further than the Falls Road, so they were forced to lug their belongings the rest of the way on foot. They rejoined Arthur at his mother’s house, but Mary McConville had only one bedroom. She was half-blind, and because she had always disapproved of the former domestic employee who married her son, she and Jean did not get along. Besides, there were frequent gun battles in the area, and Jean and Arthur were concerned that a timber yard behind the house might be torched and the fire could spread. So the family moved again, to a Catholic school that had been converted into a temporary shelter. They slept in a classroom on the floor.

The housing authority in Belfast was building temporary accommodation for thousands of people who had suddenly become refugees in their own city, and eventually the McConvilles were offered a newly constructed chalet. But when they arrived to move in, they discovered that a family of squatters had beaten them there. Many displaced families were squatting wherever they could. Catholics moved into homes that had been abandoned by Protestants, and Protestants moved into homes vacated by Catholics. At a second chalet, the McConvilles encountered the same problem: another family was already living there and refused to leave. There were new chalets being built on Divis Street, and this time Arthur McConville insisted on staying with the workmen who were building it until the moment they finished construction, so that nobody else could get in first.

It was a simple structure, four rooms with an outside toilet. But it was the first time that they had a place they could legitimately call their own, and Jean, delighted, went straight out and bought material to make curtains. The family stayed in the chalet until February 1970, when they were offered permanent accommodation in a new housing complex known as Divis Flats, which had been under construction for several years and now loomed into view, throwing the surrounding neighbourhood into shadow.

Divis Flats was meant to be a vision of the future. Built between 1966 and 1972 as part of a ‘slum clearance’ programme, in which an ancient neighbourhood of overcrowded nineteenth-century dwellings, known as the Pound Loney, was razed, the flats consisted of a series of twelve interconnected housing blocks, containing 850 units. Inspired by Le Corbusier, the flats were conceived as a ‘city in the sky’ that would alleviate housing shortages while also providing a level of amenities that would seem downright luxurious to ordinary Belfast families like the McConvilles. Residents of Divis Flats would have a shower and an indoor toilet, along with a hot-water sink. Each level of the housing block had a wide concrete balcony running from one end to the other, onto which the flats opened. This was meant to evoke the little streets outside the terraced houses of the Pound Loney – a recreational area where children could play. Each door was painted a candy hue, and the reds and blues and yellows offered a vibrant pop of optimistic colour against Belfast’s many shades of grey.

The McConvilles moved into a four-bedroom maisonette in a section of the flats called Farset Walk. But any excitement they may have felt about their new accommodation soon dissipated, because the complex had been constructed with little consideration for how people actually live. There were no social amenities in Divis Flats, no green spaces, no landscaping. Apart from two bleak football pitches and an asphalt enclosure with a couple of swing sets, there were no playgrounds – in a complex with more than a thousand children.

When Michael McConville moved in, Divis seemed to him like a maze for rats, all corridors, stairwells and ramps. The interior walls were cheap plasterboard, so you could hear every word of the dinnertime conversation of your neighbours. And because the exterior walls were built with non-porous concrete, condensation developed, and a malignant black mould began to creep up the walls and across the ceilings of the flats. For a utopian architectural project, Divis had yielded dystopian results, becoming what one writer would later describe as a ‘slum in the sky’.

The same summer that the McConvilles were ousted from their home in East Belfast, the British Army had been sent to Northern Ireland in response to the Battle of the Bogside and the riots. Young, green-jacketed soldiers arrived on ships, thousands of them pouring into Belfast and Derry. Initially they were greeted warmly by Catholics, who welcomed the soldiers as if they were the Allied troops who’d liberated Paris. The Catholic population had been so furious at the RUC and the B-Specials, whom they regarded as sectarian authorities, that when the army (which appeared neutral by comparison) showed up, it seemed to hold the promise of greater security. In West Belfast, Catholic mothers ventured up to the army’s sandbagged posts and offered the soldiers cups of tea.

Michael’s father was more circumspect. As a retired army man himself, Arthur McConville did not like it when the soldiers came around on patrol, speaking informally to him, as if he no longer held a place in the chain of command. At one end of the Divis complex, a twenty-storey tower had been constructed, becoming the tallest building in Belfast that wasn’t a church. The first eighteen floors consisted of flats, but the British Army took over the top two for use as an observation post. As tensions mounted below, army lookouts could monitor the whole city with binoculars.

The troops had scarcely arrived before they began to lose the goodwill of the community. The young soldiers did not understand the complicated ethnic geography of Belfast. They soon came to be seen not as a neutral referee in the conflict, but rather as an occupying force – a heavily armed ally of the B-Specials and the RUC.

Catholics had started to arm themselves and to shoot at loyalist adversaries, at the police, and eventually at the army. Gun battles broke out, and a few Catholic snipers took to the rooftops by night, lying flat among the chimneys and picking off targets below. Incensed by such aggression, the army and the police would shoot back, with heavier weaponry, and the neighbourhoods echoed with the crack of M1 carbines and the harsh clatter of Sterling sub-machine guns. Thinking that it would make them harder for the snipers to spot, the B-Specials used revolvers to shoot out the street lights, which plunged the city into darkness. British troops patrolled the empty streets in their half-ton Land Rovers with their headlights off, so as not to present a target. For all the chaos, the number of people actually killed in the Troubles was initially quite low: in 1969, only nineteen people were killed, and in 1970, only twenty-nine. But in 1971, the violence accelerated, with nearly two hundred people killed. By 1972, the figure was nearly five hundred.

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