An Náire (The Disgrace)
Background
Merrick Clark (right, 1920-2000) was the Community's first far-right leader, and openly co-operated with settler-separatist militias
In 1965, the Cogadh (Tìrrish War of Independence) had largely frozen; whilst the province's politics was quite dysfunctional and unstable, and sectarian sentiment still ran high, the outright violence being committed by paramilitary groups such as BTAN, GN, and Aonadh, had subsided. Despite efforts from the central Great Sutherland government in Eamont, the crisis had persisted since it was first incubated during the Richeist War of the 1920s.
The incumbent Liberal-VDA (VDA meaning Civic Democratic) government was divided internally over the policy to hold towards Tìr - the Liberal party was opposed to the formation of "settler zones", which were informally walled off settlements that claimed a level of self-governance in opposition to the decades of violence at the hands of partisans and paramilitaries, as many had fomented and become ripe for racism, violence, and irredentism. By the early 1960s, militias were openly controlling these settlements through armed checkpoints; the tolerance for these became a key dividing line in the Liberal-VDA and Labour governments alike, but this inaction allowed them to proliferate.
In an effort to quell the first set of rebellions in the 1920s and 1930s, Sutherland had formed a military internal security force - the HSW-T - which was (unlike the other policing forces of Sutherland) armed and acted in conjunction with the conventional police.
The HSW-T, while receding into the mid-to-late 20th century, remained a major part of life in Tìr; the allegations of anti-Cumbrish bias and violence perpetrated by the HSW-T had gradually reduced its use and powers, which had only partly managed to assuage the feelings of oppression from Tìr's Cumbrish population. The HSW-T had transitioned into an elite paramilitary policing unit, used only in the most extreme or necessary times.
The VDA, meanwhile, was co-operating with the Community party, which had increasingly become co-opted by the fundamentalist settler movement. The Clarkists, named after Merrick Clark (the far-right Community leader in the 1950s and 1960s), had largely sidelined the more moderate forces in his party and openly avowed the separation of Cumbrish and Gotic regions of the country.
With a number of internal opponents to the Community's conciliatory but not openly supportive approach to the militias - including the leaders of one of these unionist militias, the S60 - Clark managed to install himself and his faction as the party leadership by 1960, and became the largest party amongst the settlers abruptly in the 1964 provincial elections after running on the "Us or Them" ticket, claiming that the Community's centrist flank was negotiating with partisans and communists. As a result of his victory, Clark formed a coalition of the settler parties to become governor.
Meanwhile, with violence at the local level slowly increasing and the first skirmishes between the nationalist and Clarkist militias, the situation had provoked a level of public protest.
An Náire
(left) A photograph taken of the chaos at An Náire at around 10:25am, 2 February 1965, Altna
After two weeks of harsh snow prevented marches in Altna, a city affected by socially-sorted partition between the Cumbrish and settlers, the march on 2 February, 1965 was one of the most heavily-attended that the city had seen up to date. The city, situated at the southernmost tip of Tìr, suffered from deindustrialisation and "deliberate isolation" from the rest of the island, being left out of infrastructure projects - neither community sought to represent the city, allegedly. The protest only grew in size as a result - people made plans to take busses down to the city, university students rallied one another to attend, and trade unions also increasingly convinced their members to attend, in what was becoming increasingly a march for better representation of all communities simultaneously.
The march began at 8:30am, in the bitter cold, but the snow having melted the day before allowed the march to go ahead largely without interruption. With roughly 8,000 people attending, the Altna marches were covered on SBS (Sutherlander Broadcasting Service, the country's state broadcaster) and Channel 2, and were some of the largest of the time on the island. The protesters were entirely peaceable, however a tipoff that the BTAN intended upon weaponising the marches meant that the HSW-T had established positions along the route of the march. Tìr's governor, Merrick Clark, had already warned that the protest would be "treated as unlawful civil disobedience", whilst the Sutherlander government had given express warnings to Clark not to intervene if it remained peaceable.
A counter-protest, of some 2,000 people, was held alongside the march. Deliberately established by Clarkists and the Altna branch of the S60, the marchers were quick to attempt to break the barricades between the two; "break the barricades" has since become known for breaking a taboo or precedent with disastrous consequences.
A mural of An Náire in the city of Altna, photographed in 2022 (right)
At 10:03am, the two groups largely merged; much of the protest became a riot, while many of the Clarkist rioters had brought knives or blunt objects, even using stones and bottles to bludgeon their counterparts. Two of the four deployments of the HSW-T successfully separated the breakouts at their area by roughly 10:10am, whilst a third was attempting to separate them, when the fourth detachment began to engage in a pincer movement to outflank the rioters and surround them with the intention of separating them.
As the situation worsened, the march refused to stop at the entry to the barricade into the S60-controlled region of Altna, resulting in the foremost detachment re-engaging to outmaneouvre the protest and prevent it from entering, while the armed men at the checkpoint shouted for the protesters to "stop or be shot".
At 10:22am, the men at Wall 9 opened fire. Whilst these shots were warning shots and hit nobody, the crowd at the front rushed back away from the gunfire, sparking chaos. This completely destroyed the separation between the two groups of protesters, enabling the counter-marchers and marchers to fight and brawl once again, whilst looting and petrol-bombing also began at this time. Fearing a total loss of control, the HSW-T moved in to separate out the S60-aligned rioters, however one detachment mistook the order to instead attempt to block passage back and forth through the barricade as had been attempted before. "We were just trying to maintain order," one trooper told the Strothes Inquiry a month later.
Youths and trade unionists began to jeer and throw projectiles like rocks and eggs at the HSW-T, escalating rapidly to attempts to bludgeon and stab them. The HSW-T responded violently in a mixture of panic and emergency to control the issue, injuring two people. This contributed to a crush as protesters scrambled to get away from the violence. From this period, the repeated gunfire caused complete chaos; the water cannon brought to drench the protesters had to be withdrawn because a gas canister exploded near the crew, who therefore could not operate it. One crew member recalled in a 2010 SBS interview that the cannon had "drenched half the crowd in purple", but achieved little else.
At 10:25am, a straggler group broke off from the march in an effort to escape; the paratroopers mistook the stragglers for those few truly attempting to break through Wall 9 through a number of passages.
After an official request for deployment through these streets was granted, the paratroopers swarmed to make arrests, however came under attack from projectiles thrown by youths. Two men were shot dead (one accidentally, one as a suspect of an assault on a paratrooper previously) in the back by Trooper S along Strangsway, while a third survived his injuries. The official inquiry afterwards found that 47 rounds of live ammunition had been fired in their direction.
Meanwhile, the paratroopers remaining in the protest itself struggled to maintain control, as it dispersed into an "informal rabble". Trooper R would subsequently follow a throng of protesters onto some rubble, and shoot one dead, as well as injuring another.
(left) Colourised photograph of An Náire, near Wall 9 in Altna, around 10:30am on 2 February 1965
A group of men took refuge in an abandoned mill, and - having broken some windows to get onto the walls and throw debris at the paratroopers - "defiantly" stood above this street. Two paratroopers (Troopers G and J) entered covertly, and when met with open fire, returned it in panic, killing one of them and wounding another two, before de-escalating the situation.
One of the men, 26-year-old Ian McAllan, fatally shot Trooper A in return, but would later die of his own gunshot injuries in hospital. Another man would be hospitalised after trying to jump from the mill onto the street below, breaking his leg. The man later rehabilitated himself, becoming a wapentake elected official for his home ward in Altna for the PLO, attributing his participation to resentment in his youth, a broken family upbringing, and the "gang culture" within the BTAN that he had been brought into from the age of 13.
At 10:29am, two paratroopers then found a group of protesters who had broken into a grocer's shop waving a white flag. One man got up rapidly in an attempt to rush out of the shop's back entrance, leading one of the paratroopers to hesitate but decide not to shoot the man; he was later ascertained to be 44-year-old Aidan MacConor, the grocer.
The same two, Trooper Y and Trooper S, joined Trooper F on a courtyard outside where some rioters using counterfeit guns were situated; Trooper S was there wounded by a glass bottle thrown at his head - recalling that he "still had the shard" in a 2022 interview with IBC - but the situation was successfully de-escalated. By the time the protest itself had come under control with the help of reinforcements, there were an additional twenty-three injuries and one other brawl-related fatality elsewhere.
Police and paratroopers would go on to block off the streets to prevent further violence, and dispersed the remainder of the crowds that had not already left the city centre. The chief commissioner also ordered higher policing presence for the days and weeks that followed. The absence of crowds uncovered a scene filled with debris, damaged cars (including police cars), and shattered glass from broken windows from shops that had been looted.
A ceasefire was finally declared at 10:33am, however one counter-protester fatally stabbed a vicar who had attempted to shield a man shortly afterwards, before the protest dispersed entirely. Over two-hundred arrests were made during the march. "The cells filled up so fast," one since-retired prison warden Wauked last month, "that we had to send some of the lads a town over at Ballywater."
In all, seven people were killed (of whom the paratroopers had shot four), and a further twenty-nine people were injured.
Aftermath
Home Reeve Rhys Durling (left) signs the Second Blencathra Accords with Governor of Tìr Cillian Gallagher (right) in 1991
Governor Merrick Clark held a press conference that afternoon in response to the protest, calling it a "sorry affair" but refusing to agree with questions implying that the HSW-T were negligent or heavy-handed in their response to the protest.
The incident, meanwhile, was received in Eamont (the capital of Sutherland) with horror; AMs threatened to defect to Labour from the Liberals and VDA (the two governing parties) if the Chancellor refused to act, a motion was passed on the 4th demanding an inquiry in spite of government division on the issue at the highest level, with the President Owen Sullivan (Labour) calling for the resignation of Clark for "riling up the division" and refusing to acknowledge responsibility.
Underchancellor Anders Laveryk (VDA) would initially refuse to resign, calling on his party to "hold the line for a pro-order Tìr" - largely thanks to his warm relationship with Merrick Clark, who would later refer to him as the "only sane man in the asylum" - but eventually agreed to following pressure from the moderate wing of the party.
President Sullivan would later hold a number of meetings with Chancellor Seward Carter, who as a relatively liberal figure in an otherwise centre-right government, was ameliorative to the prospect of freezing Clark out of federal funding and investment until he acquiesced to demands such as the total disestablishment of settler zones, and a total separation of the militias from politics.
Meanwhile, Labour's newly-elected reformist leader Franklin Argall, from his position as Leader of the Againsthood (Opposition), attacked what he saw as Eamont's "vacillation to fear and division", and promised to totally end preference for settlers in favour of a "cross-community approach", as well as to discontinue the role of the HSW-T and begin peace talks with the BTAN and other paramilitary nationalist groups in an attempt to de-escalate the conflict. Anders Laveryk would resign the following year in 1966, seeing the VDA swing back to a more moderate position, causing relations between the VDA (and its new right-of-centre leader, Aled Moffatt) and Clark's Community to frost over more, with Moffatt referring to Clark as "that bloody militant". Nevertheless, the government ruled out more overt constitutional or structural change in Tìr, dubbing Labour "the party of protestors, not of peace."
Despite this, Clark would go on to attack calls for an inquiry, mirroring obstruction by the VDA on the mainland, during the brief power struggle that resulted in the collapse of the Liberal-VDA coalition on 5 February; Chancellor Seward Carter (Liberal) held a meeting on that morning, calling for all reeves and underreeves who agreed with the conduct of the HSW-T on An Náire to resign.
The Liberal minority government of Seward Carter would commission the Strothes Inquiry in March, which found that the HSW-T used excessive force in the face of panic and loss of control, and that only the killing of the man who had opened fire first by Trooper G was a lawful killing - it declared that the violence was nurtured by divisive and sectoral politicians, incubated by segregation and poor living conditions, deliberately aggravated by the weaponising of a majority-peaceful protest by looters and terror organisations (both nationalist and unionist), and turned lethal by panicked, disorganised, and poor conduct by paratroopers in the HSW-T.
However, despite this, the government would refuse to speak out against the use of paramilitary force as an institution, or to meet specifically with Ceartas or some Ar Fearann (nationalist parties, the former of which was more radical) leaders, enraging nationalist politicians who had hoped this would be a watershed moment; this refusal grew after a car bombing in Bridgwater on the 7th by BTAN, which caused the public to be alarmed by the rise in violence coming to the mainland and to want to seek a "neutral" outcome rather than one conciliating nationalists. This period also saw the rise in the more radical nationalist-separatist and liberal-progressive Ceartas (which is alleged to have connections to BTAN), at the expense of the less radical Ar Fearann, as well as what became a permanent disdain for Eamont politics on the island amongst both unionists - who felt betrayed by the apparent abandonment of support for settlers and the paramilitaries - and amongst nationalists, who felt the response to Ar Náire was reluctant and tolerant of the violence and division sown by extremists like the governor Merrick Clark.
(left) Aled Moffatt, the more moderate successor to VDA leader Anders Laveryk, severed ties from Clark's Community party "in all but name" in the late 1960s
Clark grew alienated from Eamont, becoming resentful that he had been abandoned by the previously tacitly-supportive Eamont; he would be elected out in 1968, when moderate settlers instead opted for the Labour-aligned centre-left PLO (Workers' Party), which used its position as a kingmaker to form a coalition of the moderates, including Ar Fearann (a gradualist nationalist party) and Freedom (the Liberal-aligned moderate settler party).
Clark would go on to run for a position as an Almootsman in the legislature, winning six consecutive terms at the top of the Community party list for the island until his retirement in 1990. The Community party would remain Clarkist in its attitudes into the modern day and has a frayed relationship with the more moderate VDA, while Freedom represents the centre to centre-right tendencies of settlers, and the PLO increasingly attempts to appeal to a cross-community base.
An Náire is largely believed to be the spark of the second phase of the Cogadh; the heavy-handedness of the HSW-T galvanised anger against it and feelings of bias from the nationalist population, whilst the Clarkists felt betrayed by the national government in Eamont and leant further on their militias.
This resentment and delay would continue until the election of the Labour government over a year later, by which point Argall's reformist faction had largely displaced the more traditionalist and pro-settler opinions of some of the party base, making him more capable to enforce major reforms than the incumbent Liberal-VDA government had been. The incoming Chancellor Franklin Argall, following his landslide victory in the November 1966 elections, thus hastened the speed at which Eamont moved away from conciliation with Clark and towards a cross-community, reconstructive approach. He authorised Operation Restore on 6 December, 1966, which cleared the "settler zones" and barricades in a matter of hours; Argall would also reform the HSW-T into the United Constabulary of Tìr, which was forced to take training, transitioned to more traditional policing with emphasis on the firearms units remaining separate, and an oath in human rights and commonality. This somewhat softened anger from nationalists towards Eamont, however the nearly two-year delay in more structural reforms despite the rapid inquiry had caused significant damage.
Trooper S was sentenced to a life sentence with a minimum tariff of twenty-five years in prison in 1967, whilst Trooper R was sentenced to a life sentence with a minimum tariff of twenty-years in prison the following year, both for unlawful killing. It remains unknown precisely which men shot and injured the men in the heat of the protest, and the UCT in 2011 would be compelled to urge social media users not to speculate on the identity of the paratrooper responsible. Nevertheless, An Náire is blamed for the increase in sectarian violence, and terrorist attacks both on the island and on the mainland, in the following two decades until the Blencathra Accords of 1988 and 1991 de-escalated the conflict somewhat.
TBC
