The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA; Irish: Cumann Cearta Sibhialta Thuaisceart Éireann) was an organisation that campaigned for civil rights for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Formed in Belfast on 9 April 1967, the civil rights campaign attempted to achieve reform by publicising, documenting, and lobbying for an end to discrimination against Catholics in areas such as elections (which were subject to gerrymandering and property requirements), discrimination in employment, in public housing and abuses of the Special Powers Act.
The genesis of the organisation lay in the emergence of a more self-confident Catholic professional middle class who, following the example of the US civil rights movement, campaigned for equal rights and reform. The Campaign for Social Justice was formed in January 1964.
A younger generation, inspired by the 1960s wave of worker and student protests across Europe was also ready to take to the street to protest. They would go on to form People's Democracy in 1968.
The failure of the 1956-62 IRA border campaign encouraged Irish Republicans to prioritise radical popular street campaigns rather than rely on traditional physical force tactics. In this rethink of Republican strategy a key meeting took place in Maghera in August 1966 between the Wolfe Tone Societies which was attended by Cathal Goulding, then chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
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. The organisation initially also had some unionists, with Young Unionist Robin Cole taking a position on its executive council. Official Sinn Féin and Official IRA influence over NICRA grew in later years, but only as the latter's importance declined, when violence escalated between late 1969 until 1972, when NICRA ceased its work.
Since Northern Ireland's creation in 1921, the Catholic minority had suffered from discrimination from the Protestant and Unionist majority. James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, declared to the Stormont Parliament "we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State". 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. Catholics are out to destroy Ulster". Many historians regard the ethos of Northern Ireland as unambiguously sectarian.
Electoral representation. In order to ensure that the interests of minorities were protected and limit the electoral success of Sinn Féin, the Government of Ireland Act established proportional representation (P.R.) as the electoral system to be used in local government and the parliaments of Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. It did, however, allow for the parliaments to change the electoral system three years after first meeting. The Government of Northern Ireland contemplated abandoning P.R. in 1924, but feared antagonizing the Labour-led British government, so shelved the idea. However, after the Unionist Party lost 8 seats in the 1925 Northern Ireland general election, first past the post was introduced in time for the 1929 election. Despite losing more than 4% of the vote share compared with 1925, the Unionist Party managed to pick up 4 seats. Proportional representation for local government elections was abolished by the Northern Ireland government in 1920 for Northern Ireland's local elections in 1924.
The property franchise (which granted votes in local elections only to those who owned property) weighted representation heavily in favour of the Protestant community, as did the plural business votes they enjoyed for parliamentary elections. The result was that many towns and cities with a Catholic majority, even a substantial one, were Unionist-controlled: examples included Derry, Armagh, Dungannon, and Enniskillen. Electoral boundaries were carefully engineered: Belfast's representatives in Stormont went from 4 to 16 in 1921, but there was no increase in the nationalist representation, and Belfast continued to return one Nationalist Member of Parliament (MP).
In the 1965 Stormont elections the Ulster Unionist Party won 34 out of the 52 available seats, while in the 1966 elections to the Westminster parliament they won 11 of Northern Ireland's available 12 seats. The Stormont Assembly returned the Ulster Unionist Party to office continuously between Northern Ireland's founding in 1922 and the abolition of the Parliament in 1972.
Policing. Of the institutions of state, the police in particular were rightfully, based on all available evidence, seen by Catholics and nationalists as supporting (and in many cases collaborating with) the Protestant majority and Unionist cause. Representation of Catholics in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, formed in 1922, never exceeded 20% and by the 1960s had sunk to 12%. The reserve police force (the Ulster Special Constabulary) was composed upon its formation largely of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers and led by the Ulster Volunteers' former commander, Wilfrid Spender and remained almost exclusively Protestant until its disbandment.
Employment. The 1971 census offered the first opportunity to assess the extent of any discrimination in employment, as it was the first census since 1911 that provided cross-tabulation by religion and occupation. The census documented that Protestant male unemployment was 6.6% compared to 17.3% for Catholic males, while the equivalent rates for women were 3.6% and 7% respectively. Catholics were over-represented in unskilled jobs and Protestants in skilled employment. Catholics made up 31% of the economically active population but accounted for only 6% of mechanical engineers, 7% of 'company secretaries and registrars' and 'personnel managers', 8% of university teachers, 9% of local authority senior officers, 19% of medical practitioners, and 23% of lawyers.
Housing. Housing was inter-related with electoral representation, and therefore political power at local and Stormont levels. The general vote was confined to the occupier of a house and his wife. Occupiers' children over 21 and any servants or subtenants in a house were excluded from voting. So the allocation of a public authority house was not just the allocation of a scarce resource: it was the allocation of two votes. Therefore, whoever controlled the allocation of public authority housing effectively controlled the voting in that area.
Since 1964, the Campaign for Social Justice had been collating and publicising in its journal The Plain Truth what it regarded as evidence of discrimination. Its precursor, the Homeless Citizens League, had been holding marches to press for fair allocation of social housing. Both of these organisations had arisen at a time when the African-American civil rights organisation was headline news around the world. Both achieved success in bringing anti-Catholic discrimination to the attention of the media and, in the case of the Campaign for Social Justice, to politicians in Westminster.
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, was pursued by the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society, 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". 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.
The concept (set out in the August 1966 bulletin (Tuarisc) of the Wolfe Tone Societies) was to "demand more than may be demanded by the compromising elements that exist among the Catholic leadership. Seek to associate as wide a section of the community as possible with these demands, in particular the well-intentioned people in the Protestant population and the trade union movement." In 1969, after the civil rights movement had been active for several years, the strategy was described in Ireland Today, published by the Republican Education Department, as requiring that "the civil rights movement include all elements that are deprived, not just republicans, and that unity in action within the civil rights movement be developed towards unity of political objectives to be won, and that ultimately (but not necessarily immediately) the political objective agreed by the organised radical groups be seen within the framework of a movement towards the achievement of a 32-county democratic republic."