Some historic dates resonate through the years: 1798, 1848 and 1968, an eventful year, the highlights of which are being commemorated on this 40th anniversary.
Just like 2008, 1968 was election year in the United States; the country was riven by dissent over the Vietnam war, and the race for the Democratic nomination was thrown wide open by the announcement of the incumbent Lyndon Johnson that he would not seek – nor would he serve – a second term as president. The front-runner, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel in June. The Democrats then selected the serving vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who lost to Richard Nixon in the election of November that year.
The first time that I ever watched television in colour was in a house in east Tyrone in August 1968, and the news was dominated by reports of riotous scenes during the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley sent in the riot squad to quell the protests of thousands of young demonstrators who were protesting against the war in Vietnam and expressing their disillusion after the killing of Kennedy, who had pledge to end the war. Hillary Clinton inadvertently opened some old wounds recently. On being advised that the 2008 contest for the Democratic candidacy should soon be brought to an end, she reminded her critics that Bobby Kennedy's campaign had gone on into June. That was considered distasteful given that her adversary Barack Obama may well be a target for an assassin, and that Hillary's remarks came in the same week as the last surviving Kennedy brother was diagnosed with a very grave tumour.
In May 1968, there were riots in Paris which became known as 'Les évenéments'. The upheavals began after a dispute about dormitory arrangements at the Sorbonne, the Paris university long a hotbed of radicalism, and unrest spread to involve transport workers, municipal employees and left-wing militants. The disturbances unsettled President Charles de Gaulle, the wartime hero who saved the Republic from anarchy in 1958, but who ten years later was to witness his authority seriously weakened. Within a year, De Gaulle was out of office and holidaying at a Kerry resort, where they had great difficulty in finding a bed that would fit him. De Gaulle's grandmother was a McCartan from Co. Down. Photographed beside the General, the Long Fellow – Eamonn de Valera, then President of Ireland – did not look such a long fellow, by comparison.
Racial unrest disfigured many towns and cities in the United States, after the assassination early in 1968 of Rev. Martin Luther King.
In that fateful year also, the former Czechoslovakia made a bid to loosen its ties with Soviet Russia, as the East Germans, Poles, and Hungarians had tired to do in abortive uprisings in the 1950s. You can still see the shrapnel scars from 1956 on the walls of the city of Budapest, near the banks of the River Danube. Eventually, the Russians sent the tanks in and the heroic leaders of the 'Prague spring', under Alexander Dubcek, were brutally brought to heel. One of the dissenters at the Russian and Warsaw pact armies invading Czchoslovakia, was, ironically, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, himself to be one of the victims of the remarkably bloodless events that accompanied the eventual collapse of communism in Eastern Europe at the end of 1989. I recall being in Dublin during the final days of the Czech resistance. It was in that city, too, and about the same time, that a loud noise heard in the skies over Dublin was said to be the sonic boom of an early Concord plane passing overhead.
At the end of August 1968, the first march organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association took place along a three-mile route from Coalisland to Dungannon. A second march held in Derry in October 1968 was attacked by the RUC and footage of leaders such as Eddie McAteer and Gerry Fitt being assailed by police batons was flashed around the world. A new media age was dawning and the international spotlight became focused on what the Sunday Times at the time was to call "John Bull's political slum."
The original Civil Rights movement was made up of a broad front of nationalists, republicans, liberal unionists, socialists, trade unionists, communists and independent thinkers and activists, who demanded basic rights that were the norm in Britain, in areas such as housing, universal suffrage, appointments on merit, and the end of repressive special legal powers that were the envy of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. The Unionist system could not accommodate those basic demands, and the Unionists had to have their arms twisted by Westminster.
Finally, it was in September of 1968 that this column first appeared. An eventful year... and it all seems to me as if it were only yesterday.
In evidence, the court heard that the defendant, a local publican, had been discovered to be operating a licensed premises well after the permitted time for the purchase and consumption of alcohol. There had been many comings and goings, exits and entrances observed at the premises at an early hour of the morning. A defending solicitor pointed out that the defendant had never been in trouble with the law before, and that he was an individual of excellent character, a pillar of the community, and a figure of renowned generosity, an inveterate contributor to local charities who never failed to help those in need. "It could be said," said the RM, "that his door was always open."
Customs officers at Japan's Narita airport recently decided to test the efficiency of their sniffer dogs by planting a stash of cannabis in the side pocket of a passenger's suitcase. The dogs failed to detect the drugs and, worse still, the officers could not remember which suitcase they had used. One unknown traveller found himself the better of 142g of cannabis.
At a recent investiture ceremony at Queen's University, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern looked resplendent in academic robes and a mortar-board cap. It is not known whether he borrowed the mortar-board from Paddy the Plasterer.
A recent RTÉ agricultural programme made much mention of heifers. For a while, I though they were quoting Brian Cowen.
Charlie McCreevy, asked what would happen if Irish voters rejected the Lisbon Treaty in next week's referendum.
Sez he, "We do not have a plan C."
Perhaps Brian Cowen has a plan F.
Dustin the Turkey, since his recent experience with Eurovision, has become something of a pundit on European affairs. Asked for his views on the Lisbon Treaty, he observed, "What Lisbons do in the privacy of their own homes is nobody's business but their own."
