On the evening of June 20th, 1968, Austin Currie sent a letter of thanks to Mrs McKenna, of Kinnard Park, Caledon.
“I think today we have made history together,” he wrote.
Currie – then a Nationalist Party MP representing East Tyrone at the Northern Ireland Parliament in Stormont – had squatted in a house in the Tyrone village in a protest over discrimination in the allocation of housing.
Currie and two companions, Patsy Gildernew and Joe Campbell, broke in through a back window of No 9 with the assistance of a poker borrowed from Mrs McKenna.
With the media alerted, Currie, Campbell and Gildernew broke into the house. They barricaded the front door – and then waited.
The situation was brought to a head with the arrival of Emily Beattie’s brother, who was a policeman.
“He demanded that we come out and I said no, and this was an injustice and this a non-violent protest,” said Currie.
Instead, Beattie knocked the front door down with a sledgehammer, and the protest was over. Currie was immediately interviewed – and that evening, Caledon made the national BBC news.
Sources:
How Austin Currie’s 1968 housing protest ignited NI’s civil rights movement, by Freya McClements. Irish Times (15 Jun 2018)
The Caledon Protest, RTE Archive.
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