Donegall Square, outside Belfast City Hall, was the assembly point for the student protesters who set out on 1 January 1969 on a march from Belfast to Derry. The square marks the beginning of a journey that put demands for Catholic civil rights onto the roads of Northern Ireland, and introduced Dolours Price to a protest whose promise of peaceful change would soon be tested by violence.

Setting and political context

The march began on a cold, clear morning in the centre of Belfast. The protesters planned to cover roughly seventy miles to Derry over several days. Their cause was systemic discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland: Catholics were often excluded from good jobs and housing, while the political system at Stormont had not placed a Catholic in executive office during its first half-century.

The book sets that grievance within the divisions produced by partition. Protestants were a majority in Northern Ireland but a minority on the island as a whole, while Catholics were a majority on the island but a minority in the six counties. Catholics also frequently emigrated in search of work. Against this background, Donegall Square was not simply a convenient meeting point; it was where a group of young demonstrators made their opposition to discrimination a visible, collective action.

The march sets out

The marchers had studied the American civil-rights movement, including the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. Leaving Belfast arm in arm in duffel coats, they carried placards identifying their action as a civil-rights march and sang We Shall Overcome. Among them were eighteen-year-old Dolours Price and her younger sister, Marian Price, who were closely bonded and known around Andersonstown as Albert’s daughters.

The mood at the outset combined resolve with an expectation that confrontation might follow. Some students believed that peaceful protest could expose injustice and prompt change; the example of the police crackdown in Selma had made the public impact of violent overreaction part of their thinking. They hoped the conflict’s dividing lines might be redrawn as a struggle between young and old, or future and past, rather than simply Catholic and Protestant or republican and loyalist. Their departure from Donegall Square gave that hope a public starting point.

A starting point under pressure

As the procession moved through the countryside, it encountered Protestant villages where local men armed with sticks blocked its way. Police accompanying the marchers directed them around the villages, while some of Ronald Bunting’s men taunted them and a Lambeg drum summoned counterprotesters. The route thus carried the march beyond the orderly image of its departure and into increasingly direct encounters with opposition.

On the fourth and final day, with hundreds of people now in the procession, a speaker warned of the possibility that stones would be thrown and asked whether the marchers were prepared to be hurt. They answered yes. The response gave concrete form to a tension already present at the square: the march was committed to peaceful protest, but its participants knew that the act of marching could expose them to violence.

Significance in Dolours Price’s trajectory

For Dolours Price, Donegall Square was the beginning of a march that preceded a profound political change. She returned to school after the attack at Burntollet Bridge, but that experience altered her and Marian. Dolours came to believe that marching would not persuade those who upheld the injustice she opposed. In 1971 she joined the IRA, describing that decision as a return to her family’s republican convictions.

The square therefore stands at the opening of a path whose destination was not fixed when the marchers assembled. Its civil-rights demonstration expressed faith in collective, nonviolent pressure; the violence encountered along the way helped undermine that faith for Dolours. The book’s contrast between the march’s hopeful beginning and her later armed commitment makes Donegall Square a significant point of departure in the story of protest, disillusionment, and political transformation.