Her wee lad, she complained indignantly, had been hurt when the brick he had thrown at Fitt’s house bounced off and hit him on the head. “How do you cope with the likes of that?” Fitt would ask wonderingly.In the end he had to leave Belfast, where his home, in a dangerous republican northern area of the city, was heavily fortified against such attacks. His backyard was often knee-deep in bricks and stones that had rebounded from his toughened windows. Perhaps the enduring image of Gerry Fitt will be that of him standing at the top of his stairs, pistol in hand, re-enacting how he had repelled a rampaging mob which had invaded his home in the night.Gerry Fitt was born in north Belfast in 1926, receiving no secondary schooling and beginning his working life in a barber’s shop before joining the Merchant Navy. His 12 years at sea included Second World War service in the hazardous Baltic convoys.

He said once:I got my political ideals during the war and I remember being on a convoy in 1943, going on the Atlantic run to Canada. When you were a stoker down in the bowels of the ship, you heard the depth charges going off.Back in Belfast, he became involved in the small Labour groupings which offered ineffectual opposition to the Unionist governments which ran Northern Ireland via the Stormont parliament His labels included Irish Labour and Republican Labour. A brilliant ward politician, he built a backstreet powerbase which won him a seat on Belfast Corporation and, in 1962, at Stormont. There his earthy, humorous rhetoric and natural flair for publicity often saw him running rings round staid Unionist opponents.But his complaints of systematic anti-Catholic discrimination by the Unionist regime fell on deaf ears, since Westminster politicians adamantly refused to take an active interest in Belfast matters. Fitt played a major part in changing this state of affairs, paving the way by winning the West Belfast Westminster seat in 1966 by beating a Unionist to become the first nationalist in the Commons for many years.He ensured his victory by distinctly questionable means which included personation, the ancient and dishonourable practice of vote-stealing, which was then practically universal. Comparing notes in later years, I told him of my Unionist grandmother’s parlour, which on election day was filled with hats and coats to give personators a change of clothing for their numerous return visits to the polls.

Fitt cheerfully explained the finer points of such dodgy democracy, not just admitting the practice but bragging about how he had matched and defeated the Unionists at their own game. He recalled that even the illicit had a protocol:You didn’t take the other side’s votes You only did your ownside. It was for somebody who was maybe sick, people who would be voting for you anyway.Once at Westminster, he was highly effective, linking up with Labour MPs such as Kevin McNamara and Paul Rose to build a case against Stormont. The journalist Mary Holland recalled he had “bullied and cajoled and persuaded me that there was intolerable discrimination against the Catholic minority”. But, despite years of pressure, the Commons turned a Nelsonian blind eye, clinging doggedly to the convention that all Northern Ireland matters were the business of Stormont and not Westminster.Things changed utterly, however, in October 1968 when a Londonderry civil rights protest was broken up by police, with many marchers being batoned. Fitt was among those injured, an official report later concluding that he had been struck “wholly without justification or excuse”. He later recounted:A sergeant grabbed me and pulled my coat down over my shoulders to prevent me raising my arms Two other policemen held me as I was batoned on the head.

I could feel the blood coursing down my neck and on to my shirt.As I fell to my knees I was roughly grabbed and thrown into a police van. At the police station I was shown into a room with a filthy wash basin and told to clean up but I was not interested in that. I wanted the outside world to see the blood which was still flowing strongly down my face.The images of Fitt’s bloody head and shirt flashed around the world and at a stroke rewrote the basic grammar of Northern Ireland politics. The convention disappeared immediately, he became a nationally known figure and Northern Ireland became an important issue.In the years that followed much of the civil rights movement crystallised into the SDLP with Fitt, as its sole Westminster MP, becoming its natural leader. He stayed leader for close to a decade, but during all that time there was a sense that he would have been happier as a one-man-band. The former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald described him as “essentially an independent who was never comfortable in the role of party leader”.