The Nationalist population was meticulously marginalised in daily life and prevented from functioning as citizens of the State. Those changes for the better that have occurred in the last fifty years, result not from political change of direction by Unionism but are the product leverage by Westminster in response to the demands of the Civil Rights Movement. Legislative change was happening in all these areas before a shot was fired .
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No Catholic was employed above the level of junior clerk by Londonderry Corporation in 1966; no council houses in the North and Waterside wards were allocated to Catholics, regardless of their circumstances; Seamus Heaney ‘s first anthology of poems , ‘ Death of a Naturalist’ , was
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In my post about the late Seamus Heaney, I alluded to some difficulties that I had experienced as a student, arising from a piece which I had written on the quality of local government in Derry during the sixties. Among other things , I was critical
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