"Gerrymandering, discrimination in employment, undisguised patronage by Unionist-controlled local authorities in the allocation of jobs and council-built houses and, above all, the dictatorial powers that the Stormont Government has assumed through the Special Powers Act, were among the many abuses which the Civil Rights movement set out to abolish."

"Another abuse is the restriction of the local government franchise to ratepayers only. This denies the vote in municipal elections to nearly a quarter of a million adults." [Ended in 1969].

"Northern Ireland's civil rights' problem arose from the presence of the Catholic minority, whom the Unionists were determined to treat as unwanted aliens. That this was their attitude had been made clear by Lord Craigavon when he said that he was proud to be an Orangeman and that the government he led was a Protestant government. He always put his membership in the Orange Order above his responsibilities to Parliament, saying that he was an Orangeman first and an MP afterwards."

" The post-war free education system and increase in university scholarships was creating a much larger, better-educated Catholic middle class, ambitious, anxious to participate in politics and to end their second class status. Free education and the welfare state also made them less anxious for immediate unity with the South with its inadequate social services, and more willing to work within the Northern system."

"In the years between 1968 and 1972, violent death in Derry was a rare and confusing occurrence, and when someone was killed one side would protest, the other would bluster, and there was a general insistence that it was not meant to happen. This was a struggle for civil rights, not a war."

"Very quickly civil rights became old-fashioned nationalism. The claim for fair treatment within Northern Ireland became the old rebel demand of a united Ireland. Much of that change can be seen as a response to the intransigence of the government in its unwillingness to face down its own right wing."

"It is clear that many of those involved in the Civil Rights protests were every bit as ‘sectarian’ as their Protestant opponents. For many, civil-rights marches were deliberate exercises in coat-trailing. The supposedly non-sectarian People’s Democracy deliberately chose a route for the Belfast-Derry march that went through staunchly loyalist areas."

"The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association is at first a genuinely broad-based organisation. In includes all shades of anti-Unionist opinion from those on the extreme left such as the revolutionary People's Democracy - to Republicans of all varieties. This is the principal organisation involved. The IRA - the military arm of the Republican Movement - is not organised or equipped to play a significant independent role within this body. However, members are encouraged to join and take an active role as individuals. Indeed a member of the IRA council is on the Executive of the Civil Rights Association and many others have taken part in demonstrations without identifying themselves by tricolours and banners ."

"[A very prominent member of NICRA] did provide NICRA funds for the Republican movement just prior to August 1969 in the belief that the guns might be needed to protect Catholic areas, and it must be said that he was later involved with the defence organisations which also sought guns from the Dublin government."

"There is plenty of evidence in the accounts of civil-rights activists that many of them were thoroughly cynical in their claim for equal treatment within the Ulster state; they saw civil rights as another stick with which to beat the Prods, another device to destabilise Stormont."

"It is worth adding an important reason why some loyalists reacted to the civil-rights movement with so much hostility; they were as poor as the Catholics who were doing all the complaining  .. Like Catholics, they had rising expectations that were not being met. Divis Flats may have been hell to live in but to the Prod watching them being built from his rat-infested house, they may seem proof positive to him that his traditional leaders are not even sharing out their new found wealth evenly but are giving it all to his traditional enemy."