Thirty years ago today I used a poker to smash a window and barricade myself into a house in Caledon, Co Tyrone. I committed my first act of civil disobedience and I did it deliberately and with premeditation.
Six months earlier, in mid-January 1968, at a meeting at the House of Commons, Paul Rose MP, Chairman of the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster told me: "No British government - including this Labour government - will intervene to remedy injustice in Northern Ireland unless you people there force it to do so". The breaking of that window in Caledon was my first action to bring about that objective.
Dungannon and Derry had been focal points for housing protest for a number of years. In Dungannon the Homeless Citizens League, which was later broadened to become the Campaign for Social Justice, had been formed by Con and Patricia McCluskey. The allocation of local authority housing was a central element in Unionist control of a number of councils. "One person, one vote", did not exist for Stormont and Local Authority elections, unlike elections to Westminster. For council elections the vote was confined to householders and their spouses. And therefore, the allocation of a council house was effectively the allocation of two votes. In places like Derry, Dungannon, Co Fermanagh, Lurgan and Omagh, the allocation of council houses along with the gerrymandering of ward boundaries were the measures employed to translate a Catholic majority into a minority on the council.
I had been elected MP for East Tyrone in June 1964 succeeding Joe Stewart, Leader of the Nationalist Party. From the beginning I had closely co-operated with the McCluskeys and two Dungannon councillors, Michael McLoughlin and John Donaghy.
The four councils in my constituency (Cookstown Urban and Rural and Dungannon Urban and Rural) were Unionist-controlled with the help of gerrymandered boundaries and all discriminated in house allocation. I campaigned for a points system for the allocation of houses but to no avail.
The hope of the early days of Terence O'Neill's premiership began quickly to erode and by 1967 was being replaced with disillusionment, frustration and anger. By late 1967, with Gerry Fitt MP, who was continually frustrated in his efforts to raise at Westminster matters devolved to the Northern Ireland government I was publicly calling for a campaign of civil disobedience and supporting those who squatted in council houses at a protest against unfair allocation.
The allocation of a council house in the village of Caledon, Co Tyrone, in May 1968, was the final straw.
A 19-year-old single girl, Emily Beattie, employed by a solicitor who was the prospective Unionist candidate for West Belfast, was given a house at Kinnaird Park in preference to 269 other applicants on the waiting list of Dungannon rural council. Even by the standards of Dungannon council it was a blatant case of discrimination.
To add injury to insult was the humiliation of the eviction in front of photographers and TV cameras from the house next door of a Catholic family, Mr and Mrs Goodfellow and their three children who had been involved in a squatting protest for the previous eight months.
I decided to make the Caledon affair a test case of the professed reform intentions of the O'Neill government. I used all the avenues opened to an MP in an effort to redress an injustice about which I felt strongly I made representations to the council, to the Minister in charge of housing, put down Parliamentary Questions, discussed it with the Prime Minister and finally on June 19th, 1968 initiated an adjournment debate. All to no avail. That night there was standing room only in the front of my home. Present were a number of people from Caledon, including the Goodfellow family. I told them of my intention to squat in the house allocated to Emily Beattie and I asked for as many as possible to accompany me.
The following morning my wife drove me the 12 miles to Caledon where I was joined by Phelim Gildernew (a brother of Mrs Goodfellow) and a local farmer, Joe Campbell.
At my suggestion to signify our joint commitment, the three of us jointly used a poker to break a back window, enter the house and barricade ourselves in.
The media arrived within an hour. To our relief, after 3 1/2 hours the bailiffs arrived with a sledgehammer. The door was smashed down and we were ejected none too gently - into the lenses of the waiting media.
That night the main BBC news from London for the first time carried a report of injustice in Northern Ireland. Paul Rose rang to congratulate me. The process of forcing the British government to intervene to remedy injustice in the North had begun.
Austin Currie now lives in Lucan, Co Dublin, and is a Fine Gael TD for Dublin West