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Busloads of Orangemen poured into Londonderry, bedecked with bowler hats and crimson sashes and carrying banners bearing portraits of William of Orange. When the parade reached the Catholic slum of Bogside, youths who had massed behind police barriers began pelting the band-playing, jig-dancing "Prods" with rocks. The police and Prods threw rocks back, and the fight was on.
Bogsiders erected barricades of overturned vehicles and debris. Teen-agers and young adults scrambled onto rooftops and rained gasoline bombs down on the police. Children squatted in the dirt making the missiles, one bunch rounding up empty pop bottles, another filling them with gasoline and stuffing in rag wicks. The mood bordered on insurrection. From the roof of a ten-story public-housing development fluttered the tricolor of the Irish Republic, the blue plough-and-stars banner of the 1916 Irish rebels and, for a time, a U.S. flag.
Bernadette's Bark. On the barricades, dressed in jeans and boots, stood Ulster's own La Pasionaria: M. P. Bernadette Devlin, 22, who won election to the British Parliament last spring on a platform of equality for Catholics. "Let all men prepare to defend their homes," she barked into a bullhorn. "Women and children must be taken out of the area."
Night after night, the fighting spread until, as one Catholic member of Northern Ireland's Parliament put it, the government was dealing "not with riots but with an uprising." By far the most savage fighting occurred in the capital, Belfast, where the explosion of gasoline bombs was counterpointed by the sharp crackle of gunfire. As police told it, they returned shots in self-defense only. But on the first night of shooting, by official count, only three police were wounded, while four civilians died from gunshot wounds and 47 were injured. One of the dead was a nine-year-old Catholic boy, shot as he huddled inside his family's home while street warfare raged outside.
No Pope Here. The worst damage, reported TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast from Belfast, was visited on the dismal back streets that serve as borders between rows of Protestant and Catholic shanties, identical except for the telltale daubings on the walls: "No Pope here" on one side of the street, "Up the I.R.A." [for Irish Republican Army] on the other. The stunned residents of Conway Street claimed that Protestant gangs had swept down on their homes with fire bombs. Behind them stood 41 gutted houses, side by side. From Protestant territory at the next corner, a white-haired Protestant grandmother, 70, whose grocery store and home had been burned down last month, boasted: "I got me own back last night."
Across the border, Premier Jack Lynch of the Irish Republic claimed that Northern Ireland's authorities had lost control and called on the United Nations to intervene — a demand that was unlikely to get very far. Lynch also ordered military medical units to set up field hospitals on the border to treat wounded Catholics who refused to be treated in Northern hospitals.