[5][6] During its formation, NICRA's membership extended to trade unionists, communists, liberals, socialists, with republicans eventually constituting five of the 13 members of its executive council.
[14] Basil Brooke, who would later serve as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland for 20 years, in a speech to the Orange Order in 1933 stated "Many in this audience employ Catholics, but I have not one about my place.
[37] The idea of developing a non-partisan civil rights campaign into one with wider objectives as an alternative to military operations, which the IRA Army Council had formally ceased on 26 February 1962,[38] was pursued by the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society,[5] although redirecting the civil rights movement to assist in the achievement of republican objectives had been mooted previously by others (including C. Desmond Greaves, then a member of the Connolly Association) as "the way to undermine Ulster unionism".
[39] The idea shared certain attributes with that of infiltrating Northern Ireland's trade unions as a means of furthering republican objectives, which had previously been tried and abandoned by the IRA in the 1930s.
"[42] At a meeting which took place in Maghera on 13–14 August 1966 at the home of Kevin Agnew (a Derry republican solicitor),[43] attended by the Wolfe Tone Societies of Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Derry, and County Tyrone, and the IRA's chief of staff, Cathal Goulding,[44] it was proposed that an organisation be created with wider civil rights objectives as its stated aim.
Tony Smythe and James Shepherd from the National Council of Civil Liberties in London were present and there were more than 100 delegates from a variety of organisations, including Northern Ireland political parties.
NICRA's executive council brought together such diverse groups as the republican Wolfe Tone Society and the Campaign for Social Justice, whose founders and leaders believed traditional nationalist politics were ineffective in serving the needs of the Catholic minority.
[57] In 1968, Derry civil rights leader Finbar O'Doherty would refer to Northern Irish Catholics as Ulster's "white negros" in a speech that gained traction in the world's press.
[59] NICRA's innovation (drawing on the approach adopted by the Campaign for Social Justice) was to rely on and seek to vindicate civil rights, i.e. rights adhering to all citizens of Northern Ireland as British citizens under the existing constitutional settlement, rather than base its demands on the nationalist goal of reunification in a republic comprising the whole island of Ireland.
For many supporters of NICRA, that did not mean accepting the constitutional settlement or entail any obligation of loyalty to the UK: assertion of those rights was a device by which the condition of the Catholic minority could be improved.
However, from the outset there were tensions within the association between those advocating militant and confrontational methods, in particular the socialist and republican elements of the movement, such as Eamonn McCann, Michael Farrell and Cyril Toman, and those who remained wedded to the pacifist American civil rights model.
The involvement of republicans, such as IRA chief of staff Cathal Goulding, and groups like the Irish National Foresters, the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Wolfe Tone Societies would only further fuel their suspicions.
After the failure of the IRA's Border Campaign, republicans had been seeking peaceful ways of advancing their cause by joining Trade Unions and the Northern Ireland Labour Party, and then NICRA when it was formed in 1967.
[64] Bob Purdie has maintained that the outright republicanism of NICRA was more an issue of perception than of purpose and that the "civil rights movement was perfectly sincere in its view of its marches as non-sectarian".
[67] A counter-protest was planned by Ian Paisley's Ulster Protestant Volunteers, who viewed the proposed march through the unionist-dominated Market Square as provocative.
Hoping to avoid a confrontation, the UUP MP for South Tyrone, John Taylor, tried to get Paisley to abandon the counter protest, and have the NICRA march rerouted.
The Tyrone Brigade of the IRA sought permission from its Dublin headquarters to participate, resulting in a call for as many republicans to attend from Northern Ireland as possible.
[69][70]The march is considered to have passed off peacefully, though there are accounts of minor stone throwings with several marchers trying to break through the police line only to be rebuffed by the RUC and restrained by the marshalls.
[69][70][68] The chairperson of NICRA Betty Sinclair managed to convince the marchers to restrain themselves and show that they were "peaceful people asking for our civil rights in an orderly manner".
[73][74] On 1 October, the Apprentice Boys of Derry announced their intention to march the same route on the same day and time,[75] although its governor said he knew nothing of a planned parade.
At a meeting of the South Derry IRA it was decided to push any of the politicians present on the day of the march into the police lines if marchers were blocked.
[80] Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill made his "Ulster at the crossroads" speech on television on 9 December, appealing for calm.
[81] Leading Derry Housing Action Committee member, Eamonn McCann, later admitted that, "our conscious if unspoken strategy was to provoke the police into over-reaction and thus spark off a mass reaction against the authorities".
In a subsequent official inquiry, Lord Scarman concluded, "We are satisfied that the spread of the disturbances [in Derry in August 1969] owed much to a deliberate decision of some minority groups to relieve police pressure on the rioters in Londonderry.