“A fascinating account of . . . Catholic and Protestant workers coming together to protest against a harsh state relief program” (Belfast Telegraph). In October 1932, the streets of Belfast were gripped by vicious and widespread rioting that lasted the best part of a week. Thousands of unarmed demonstrators fought extended pitched battles against heavily armed police. Unemployed workers and, indeed, whole working-class communities, dug trenches and built barricades to hold off the police assault. The event became known as the Outdoor Relief Riot—one of a very few instances in which class sympathy managed to trump sectarian loyalties in a city famous for its divisions. “This is an important story to tell, part of our lost history. It shows that the interests workers share far outweigh the artificial divisions of sectarianism. It is brilliant that Seán Mitchell has brought these great events backs to life. It will be an inspiration to unite again in today’s struggles.” —Ken Loach, two-time winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival “Seán Mitchell’s blow by blow account of the great Belfast Outdoor Relief workers’ strike of 1932 masterfully recreates the drama of events as they unfolded, telling the story as it has never been told before, and in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and profoundly humane.” —Mike Milotte, award-winning journalist and author of Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business “Mitchell’s book is an outstanding testimony to the centrality of united working class struggle, just as relevant today in the light of the Good Friday power sharing agreement which has institutionalized the sectarian divide.” —Socialist Review

Sectarian violence is one of the defining characteristics of the modern Ulster experience. Riots between Catholic and Protestant crowds occurred with depressing frequency throughout the nineteenth century, particularly within the constricted spaces of the province's burgeoning industrial capital, Belfast. From the Armagh Troubles in 1784 to the Belfast Riots of 1886, ritual confrontations led to regular outbreaks of sectarian conflict. This, in turn, helped keep Catholic/Protestant antagonism at the heart of political and cultural discussion in the north of Ireland. Rituals and Riots has at its core a subject frequently ignored—the rioters themselves. Rather than focusing on political and religious leaders in a top-down model, Sean Farrell demonstrates how lower-class attitudes gave rise to violent clashes and dictated the responses of the elite. Farrell also penetrates the stereotypical images of the Irish Catholic as untrustworthy rebel and the Ulster Protestant as foreign oppressor in his discussion of the style and structure of nineteenth-century sectarian riots. Farrell analyzes the critical relationship between Catholic/ Protestant violence and the formation of modern Ulster's fractured, denominationally based political culture. Grassroots violence fostered and maintained the antagonism between Ulster Unionists and Irish Nationalists, which still divides contemporary politics. By focusing on the links between public ritual, sectarian riots, and politics, Farrell reinterprets nineteenth-century sectarianism, showing how lower-class Protestants and Catholics kept religious division at the center of public debate.

The unionist/nationalist divide in Belfast today has its origins in the 1840s when Catholic and Protestant workers were involved in campaigns for and against the repeal of the union with Great Britain. This book, a case-study of the Pound and Sandy Row, 1820-86, challenges the existing literature which dates this division from the 1880-90s and overturns the argument that some other lasting political division, such as Liberal/Conservative, could have developed in Belfast in the 1860s to 1880s. The active role of Catholic workers in nationalist movements and the strength of working- class Protestant opposition to them are revealed for the first time through an examination of the campaign for repeal of the union with Britain, the republican Fenian society and the movement for Irish Home Rule. This is the first comprehensive study of riots in Belfast. It argues that the riots became more severe as conflict between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists grew. Politics at the national level were played out on the street in riots and sectarian marches in a manner strikingly familiar to anyone observing the recent Troubles. By examining the politics of the secret society and the street this study provides fresh insight into the roots of modern conflict in Northern Ireland.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a civil war started in Northern Ireland. This book tells that story through Belfast and Derry, using original archival research to trace how multiple and overlapping conflicts unfolded on their streets. The Troubles grew out of a political process that mobilised opponents and defenders of the Stormont regime, and which also dragged London and Dublin into the crisis. Drawing upon government papers, police reports, army files, intelligence summaries, evidence to inquiries and parish chronicles, this book sheds fresh light on key events such as the 5 October 1968 march, the Battle of the Bogside, the Belfast riots of August 1969, the ‘Battle of St Matthew’s’ (June 1970) and the Falls Road curfew (July 1970). Prince and Warner offer us two richly-detailed, engaging narratives that intertwine to present a new history of the start of the Troubles in Belfast and Derry – one that also establishes a foundation for comparison with similar developments elsewhere in the world.

Sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland has often had an air of inevitability about it. For over three decades of turmoil and warfare in the twentieth century, innumerable observers spoke of the 'ancient' hatred between Protestants and Catholics, their 'primordial' quarrel, and their 'deep-rooted' hostilities. The author challenges the notion that violent conflict was ever natural or inevitable in this troubled region. Focusing on the city of Belfast, he demonstrates how, through a series of riots beginning in the 1850s, working-class Protestants and Catholics constructed a new tradition of violence that set the stage for the tumultuous twentieth century. He locates the city's tradition of violence in the everyday lives of its people. Showing how violence became a regular, routine fact of urban life - how, in effect, violence shaped people's attitudes toward one another and toward the city itself - he charts the emergence of two polarized, mutually hostile communities in Belfast. At the same time, he also examines Belfast within its broader imperial context, asking what role the British state played in fostering this violence and comparing Belfast's experience with that of the relatively tranquil city of Glasgow.

Why riot? Against whom? For what? Riotous Assemblies is an account of Irish riots, urban and rural, across Ireland from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century.