Читать книгу Northern Ireland’s ’68 - Simon Prince - Страница 12

CHAPTER ONE

Unionism and its State

BUILDING A PROTESTANT STATE

Sir Basil Brooke sat underneath an oak tree on his family’s estate of Colebrooke, Fermanagh, one night a week for much of 1920 and 1921.1 Brooke began his vigil after accompanying his pregnant wife to Dublin, which he found had been transformed in the four years since the Easter Rising. Sinn Féin, which had won a majority of Irish seats in the 1918 Westminster election, was striving to bring into being the republic that had been proclaimed during the insurrection. The struggle to end British rule was spearheaded by the movement’s military wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During Lady Brooke’s confinement, from March to May 1920, the IRA scored a significant victory: Dublin Castle capitulated to Republican hunger strikers and released hundreds of prisoners. Brooke returned from the capital determined to stop the lawlessness that he had seen there from spreading to his part of Ireland. With a dozen other local men, Brooke formed an illegal vigilante force. He had spent the previous decade in the British army – defending the Empire in India and South Africa, at Ypres, Suvla, Vimy, Cambrai and Arras.2 In 1920, the same ‘loyalty and devotion to empire’ required Brooke to ‘fight the agents of murder, anarchy, and terrorism’ in the place of his birth.3

Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned to their homes after the First World War to fight similar battles against revolutionary change. Frenchmen formed the Union Civique, Italians the Organizzazione Civile and Germans the Freikorps and the Einwohnerwehr. In rural, conservative and Catholic Bavaria, war weariness allowed a left-wing Jewish journalist from Berlin to transform a massive peace demonstration into a revolution. Between November 1918 and April 1919, this unlikely revolution regressed into an absurd attempt to erect a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Munich’s rag-tag ‘Red Army’ was easily defeated by regular German troops and Bavarian Freikorps units. The brutal suppression of the Räterepublik and the vengeance visited upon its leaders failed to exorcise the fear of revolution. Bavaria’s small farmers and middle classes believed that when the next insurrection came the police and the army would be no match for the Bolsheviks. Concerned citizens reacted by organising themselves into ‘civil guards’, the Einwohnerwehr. By the start of 1920, around 357,000 men had volunteered to serve in the Einwohnerwehr. The Allied governments saw these paramilitary forces as a way for Germany to get round the commitment it had made to reduce its army to 100,000 men. At the Spa disarmament conference in July 1920, Germany agreed to disband the Einwohnerwehr after the Allies had threatened to occupy the Ruhr. David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, had admitted to the conference that if millions of guns were in the hands of English civilians he would not be able to sleep at night.4

During that same month, Lloyd George agreed to consider enrolling vigilante forces in the North of Ireland into the service of the state. Brooke was one of the men lobbying for official recognition: he told the top British general in Ireland that ‘If the government will help [the people] they will do all they can to help the government.’5 With the war in the South against the IRA escalating, the overstretched British state welcomed the idea of letting loyalists defend the North. In return, Westminster consented to bear the huge costs of arming, equipping and maintaining a Special Constabulary. For leading Ulster Unionists and the British government, this arrangement also had the benefit of calming Protestant fears that they had been left unprotected. Brooke was not alone in worrying that the more extreme loyalists might otherwise have taken matters into their own hands, sparking an accelerating cycle of attack and reprisal.6 Serious sectarian violence did occur – men wearing Special Constabulary uniforms did murder Catholics. But the battle for the North did not degenerate into a full-scale communal conflict. Indeed, it was the new Southern state that descended into civil war following the IRA split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, which had established the Irish Free State. Both factions, however, remained allies in the North. Brooke, County Commandant of the Fermanagh Special Constabulary, led an unsuccessful amphibious assault on the village of Belleek, which had been occupied by IRA irregulars with the help of pro-Treaty forces at the end of May 1922. Although the Belfast government had to turn to the British army to recover the village for the empire, the IRA’s Northern campaign was ultimately defeated by the resistance of the Special Constabulary. When the new Irish Free State army moved against the anti-Treaty IRA in June 1922, incursions across the border ended and Northern volunteers flocked south to fight.7 The immediate threat to the existence of Northern Ireland faded away.

The Special Constabulary not only guarded against the irredentist South, but also against perfidious Albion. With Britain desperately searching for a way out of the Irish bog, Ulster started to lose its friends. The Special Constabulary reduced the North’s dependence upon its doubtful ally. However, the formation of the force did not make the Protestant community master of its own fate. Self-determination required self-government – something that the Unionist population lacked as the crisis came to a head. During the Anglo- Irish truce, which began in July 1921, the British had the Special Constabulary stand down. The IRA’s observance of the truce was not so strict.8 In Fermanagh, volunteers drilled, enforced the economic boycott of Belfast, carried out kidnappings, and attacked police barracks.9 For the British, securing a deal with Sinn Féin mattered more than the security of Northern Ireland. The Unionists therefore were relieved to assume responsibility for law and order under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act at the end of 1921 – just before the IRA’s spring offensive. The Act established the devolved institutions of government, the division of responsibilities between the British and Northern Irish parliaments, the legal requirement for the regime to exercise its legislative and executive powers free from discrimination, and Westminster’s supreme authority. Despite its beginnings as a movement that defended direct rule from Westminster, Unionism had come to embrace devolution as a defence against being abandoned by London. As Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader at the time, explained in the House of Commons debate on the legislation, ‘you cannot knock Parliaments up and down as you do a ball, and, once you have planted them there, you cannot get rid of them.’10 By the summer of 1922, Northern Ireland had become a political fact.

Northern Ireland’s difficult birth marked the state and its inhabitants. A senior British civil servant who was assigned to Belfast in June 1922 was reminded of a previous posting to the Baltic states: ‘The Protestant community of the North feels that it is an outpost of civilisation set precariously on the frontiers of Bolshevism.’ The victorious but embattled unionists believed that they had been ‘misunderstood’ and ‘betrayed’ by Britain.11 The long-standing alliance between Ulster Unionism and the British Conservative Party had faltered, while the cross-class alliance of Protestants had held firm. In March 1922, under pressure from London and under attack from Dublin, the Northern Irish government had agreed that Belfast’s mixed districts should be policed by a force made up of equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics. As the South turned in on itself and Britain turned away from Ireland, the need to build a non-sectarian state disappeared. Without allies to please and enemies to appease, the Unionist leadership was left only with supporters to indulge. The power compromise between the party elite and its grass-roots was continually being renegotiated. Extreme Protestants successfully pushed for the law to be strictly enforced against Catholic offenders and to be applied with discretion when loyalists were accused of criminal acts.12 Plans to establish a secular public education system fell foul of the Churches. Integration gave way to segregation: Protestants attended state schools while Catholics were catered for by the voluntary sector. Unionist associations campaigned for changes to the structure of local government that would allow them to take control of councils previously held by Irish Nationalists.13 In Fermanagh, the abolition of proportional representation and the redrawing of boundaries ensured that when the 1924 local elections were held a county with a Catholic majority returned a Unionist council. Brooke represented the new ward of Brookeborough.14 The safeguards for minorities contained in the Government of Ireland Act proved no more effective than similar provisions in the treaties of recognition concluded between the Allies and the new states of central Europe. Britain had more pressing concerns than protecting minorities.15

By pandering to Protestants, the Northern Irish government further alienated Catholics from the new state. But peace could never have brought reconciliation. The two communities could not forget the riots, the shipyard expulsions, the burning houses, the bombings, the kidnappings and the assassinations. As the violence receded, the conflict mindset persisted in the form of conspiracy theories. They described a society marked by a binary divide between patriots and a diverse – often incongruous – collection of traitors.16

In Bavaria, the Right portrayed the short-lived Soviet as a Jewish– Bolshevik conspiracy that had stabbed the Germany army in the back and unleashed a reign of red terror. This myth was embraced by a Bohemian corporal serving with the Munich garrison: Adolf Hitler.17

In Northern Ireland the unionist population believed that the global conspiracy was being orchestrated by the Vatican, not the Kremlin. A Catholic civil servant ‘learned’ that his Protestant colleagues were convinced that he was ‘subject to malevolent direction by black-robed priests to whom Rome had entrusted its master plan for world domination’.18

Conspiracy theories disfigured Northern life. They even gripped the mind of the otherwise phlegmatic Brooke. On 12 July 1933, the anniversary of the Protestant William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne, Brooke warned that Northern Ireland was being undermined by its enemies. The new MP for Linaskea explained: ‘There was a definite plot to overpower the vote of unionists in the north. He would appeal to loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ protestant lads and lassies … catholics … had got too many appointments for men who were really out to cut their throats if opportunity arose.’19 Brooke was never allowed to forget these comments. When he claimed that ‘his own view was that a man’s religion was his own affair’ during a 1967 television interview, the Derry Journal reminded its readers that this was the man who had once boasted that ‘he had not a Roman Catholic about his place’.20 But Brooke’s plot was not a figment of a rabidly sectarian imagination. In June 1933, the Unionists had lost the previously safe council ward of Linaskea to an independent farmers’ candidate. Brooke blamed the defeat upon the way that the rural depression was being exploited to weaken Unionism’s cross-class alliance and upon the ‘peaceful penetration’ of Southern workers. There was no doubt in his mind that the new government in Dublin was behind both these threats. Eamon de Valera, one of the leaders of the Irish revolution, and Fianna Fáil, the successor to the Sinn Féin faction that had rejected the Treaty, had taken office in 1932 promising to end partition. A slight increase in Catholic numbers and the defection of part of the Protestant vote to independent candidates would deliver Fermanagh to de Valera. Brooke’s speech was warning the unionist people to stand firm and remain vigilant against Irish nationalism.21

Conspiracy theories, therefore, were not irrational: they constituted the dark reflection of competing visions of the future. Conspiracy theories gave expression to anxieties and reduced them to order. This was implicitly acknowledged by Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, when he declared that the devolved Parliament should contain ‘men who are for the Union on the one hand or who are against it and want to go into a Dublin Parliament on the other’.22 Unionists had no illusions about what the reunification of the island would bring. The Southern state’s 1937 constitution paradoxically reflected a Catholic worldview while purporting to speak for a thirty-two-county Ireland that included two million Protestants.23 ‘One person’s Utopia usually means another person’s hell,’ a former IRA volunteer later observed.24

The unending struggle over the existence of the Northern Irish state deeply affected those charged with running it: the civil servants. When Sir Earnest Clark, a former tax inspector, arrived in Belfast in September 1920 to set up the new administration, the city had nightly gunfights but no institutions of government. There was no parliament, no high court, no departments, no senior officials, and no plan. Displaying the discipline, diligence, and determination upon which bureaucrats pride themselves, Clark helped to conjure a state out of thin air. He organised the elections to the new devolved Parliament; he devised a comprehensive scheme setting out the new Ministries and the staff needed to operate them; he ensured that the four British principles of anonymity, confidentiality, impartiality, and incorruptibility were adopted; and he found – mainly in London and in Dublin – the experienced personnel required to work the new machinery of government.25 In 1924, Clark told the first annual dinner of the new civil service that the ‘Government of Ulster is the child of its people, and if the Ministers and their Parliamentary Secretaries are its Godfathers and Godmothers, we are certainly its nurses’.26 As Northern Ireland grew into adolescence, the civil service nursed its ward through the Great Depression. In the words of one official, it carried on ‘an administration as good, as liberal, and as humane as political conditions allowed’.27 Those final four words are telling – the Unionist godfathers never allowed their civil servants to do anything that could jeopardise their party’s control.

Clark’s successor as head of the Northern Ireland civil service was a man whose many enthusiasms included the German constitution.28 This attempt to reconcile liberal parliamentarianism with mass democracy excited people across Europe. The keenest student of the new Weimar order was the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Liberal constitutionalism, he argued, was trying to hide the fact that politics lies behind the law. As the chaos that followed the First World War demonstrated, it was impossible to write a constitution that could foresee and foreclose every crisis. ‘In the exception,’ Schmitt contended, ‘the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.’29 The strong rule that Schmitt advocated could no longer be justified by the divine right of kings, so he turned instead to the people as a source of legitimacy. For Schmitt, ‘the political’ was the most intense and extreme antagonism between friend and enemy.30 An authoritarian state was justified by the need to preserve the political unity of the people and defend them against the enemy within and without.

The development of Northern Ireland seemed to support Schmitt’s ideas: the liberalism of the Government of Ireland Act had given way to a ‘Protestant state’.31 At the start of the Anglo-Irish truce, Brooke hoped that ‘within the next few days the healing process will begin whereby all Irishmen can unite for the good of their country’.32 By the early 1930s, at the very latest, he had concluded that the hostility that existed between the two communities could not be overcome. As Brooke explained to Parliament, ‘There is a catholic political party which … ranges from benevolent nationalism to the extreme of the extreme … but the one plank in their platform is the destruction of Ulster.’33 To defend the state against this ever-present danger, the Special Powers Act authorised the government to ‘take all steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving the peace and maintaining order’.34 But Northern Ireland fell short of Schmitt’s stipulation that the state should have a monopoly on the political. While the German jurist wanted interest groups excluded from the political sphere, Stormont – the seat of the Northern Ireland government from 1932 onwards – received an endless stream of delegations.35 Schmitt’s beliefs brought him into the service of the Nazis; the unionist people’s beliefs brought them into conflict with the Third Reich.36 Indeed, Brooke was prepared to accept reunification as the price for the South entering the Second World War. He instead had to make a much greater sacrifice to defend the empire: two of his sons were killed.37

POST-WAR APPEASEMENT

On the night of 15–16 April 1941, the Luftwaffe dropped incendiaries, bombs and landmines on Belfast. In Brian Moore’s novel The Emperor of Ice Cream, Freddy Hargreaves cheers on the destruction of the city: ‘Blow up … Stormont Castle and Lord Carson’s statue and the Houses of bloody Parliament.’38 These buildings survived the Belfast blitz, but the government of John Andrews was dealt a major blow. The smooth succession of the sixty-nine-year-old Andrews to the premiership after Sir James Craig’s death in November 1940 betrayed the Unionist leadership’s growing complacency. The German bombers had attacked the least prepared city in the United Kingdom and inflicted the highest casualty rate – over 900 people were killed – for any single night’s raid outside London. Belfast’s working-class districts were the worst hit, revealing the city’s hidden poverty and the need for urgent social reform.39 From 1941 onwards, increasing labour unrest provided a constant reminder of the government’s unpopularity and incompetence. A rebellion of junior ministers and Unionist backbenchers finally deposed Andrews in April 1943. Brooke, the only Unionist leader who was having a ‘good war’, was installed as the new Prime Minister.40

Although he harboured doubts about the expense of post-war reconstruction and had pushed for a stronger approach to industrial relations, Brooke recognised that Northern Ireland would have to change.41 The civil service was eager to start work on reform. Some officials had taken a part-time course in social studies at Queen’s University Belfast in 1941–2 and afterwards had kept together as a reading group. The circle’s sacred text was the Beveridge Report.42 Drawing upon the experience of three decades in social administration, Sir William Beveridge brought together and expanded existing welfare schemes into a comprehensive system of national insurance. He also recommended the creation of a national health service and an end to mass unemployment. Surveys found that nine out of every ten people in the United Kingdom backed Beveridge’s crusade to slay the giants of poverty, ignorance, want, squalor, idleness, and disease.43 A return to the failed laissez-faire order of the 1930s was out of the question; a better new world had to be built.

The Beveridge Report reasoned that: ‘A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions.’44 Brooke might appear to have been an odd revolutionary: he was fifty-seven years old when the 1945 Northern Ireland general election was held and had been involved in politics for over a quarter of a century. However, the welfare states of post-war Europe were all built by men from similar backgrounds. Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, and Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first Chancellor, were even older and more seasoned than Brooke. The exhausted populations of Western Europe desired social and economic reform, but they also wanted political stability. Brooke and his generation of statesmen provided a living link to the old Europe that had perished in 1914. After the ideological conflict between communism and fascism during the inter-war years, they offered the voters pragmatic, consensus politics. Like Germany’s Christian Democrats, Brooke piloted a middle course between the extremes of laissez-faire and socialism.45 Although there was substantial support within the party for low taxation and limited public spending, Brooke stood firm. ‘The backbone of Unionism is the Unionist Labour Party,’ he reminded a rally in 1947. ‘Are those men going to be satisfied if we reject the social services and other benefits we have had by going step by step with Britain?’46

Unionist opponents of the welfare state objected not only to the high rates of taxation demanded by the system, but also to the beneficiaries of the redistribution of resources. The welfare state was universal: Catholics as well as Protestants would receive benefits. ‘These people who are protected under our laws are turning around and biting the hand that feeds them,’ one MP indignantly remarked.47 Brooke reacted to this criticism. To allay fears that the welfare state would attract Southern migrants, eligibility for benefits was made dependent upon the fulfilment of a five-year residence requirement. Such tactical manoeuvring, however, did not head off the growing rebellion over the apparent concessions being made to the minority. The confrontation between the leadership and the dissidents came over the issue of education. The Brooke government was proposing to increase capital grants to Catholic schools, yet was refusing to ensure that local authorities were represented on their management committees.48 The internal discussions on the legislation involved a February 1951 meeting of the party at which the wider unease with ‘appeasement’ was voiced. Brooke recalled that he had recently been forced by the Orange Order to defend the new Northern Ireland Housing Trust (NIHT). This public body had the power to build and to manage housing estates – allocating tenancies without any regard to religion. The Prime Minister explained that he had ‘finished by saying that if they … thought we were not handling the Socialist government right and wanted a government which would discriminate against Roman Catholics they could do so [but] I would not take on the job’.49 Brooke pointed to the European Convention on Human Rights: minorities would now be better protected. The post- war trend towards internationalism would expose Stormont to much greater scrutiny. When Unionists thought of the defence of Northern Ireland, they had to think about Strasbourg and New York as well as the borderlands of Fermanagh and Tyrone.

The Unionist leadership was not merely seeking to present a positive image of Northern Ireland. Brooke and his liberal allies believed that the welfare state could serve as the foundation for a rapprochement with the Catholic community. Given that social and economic conditions were far superior to those in the South, the assumption grew that the minority population was starting to accept partition. By softening Stormont’s sectarianism, liberal Unionists hoped to aid this process. The dominant position of Protestants in Northern Ireland would be left untouched by this strategy. Catholics would receive a fairer share of public appointments, but the important posts would still be reserved for Protestants.50 Nevertheless, key features of the regime that had developed during the inter-war years would have been dismantled. Home Affairs Minister Brian Maginess, the most prominent moderniser, recommended the repeal of the Special Powers Act.51

The Brooke government’s liberal policies towards the minority made many Protestants uneasy. The complexities of the leadership’s stance had proved too sophisticated; the simplicity of the claim made by its critics that this was appeasement had won the argument. The rebellion over this issue proved much more difficult to contain than the earlier one over building the welfare state. With Northern Ireland threatened by a reinvigorated Irish nationalism and the election of the Labour government in Britain, Brooke had been able to emphasise the need for unity. In the intervening years, the danger to the state’s continued existence had receded. Following the South’s unilateral decision to leave the Commonwealth, Westminster had made reunification conditional upon the consent of Stormont. After this crisis, a more prudent government had taken office in Dublin and the Conservatives had returned to power in London. Protestants felt free to vote against official Unionist candidates without weakening partition. Eight Independent Unionists contested the 1953 parliamentary election on an anti-appeasement platform. Maginess’ less partisan approach to law-and-order matters came under the fiercest attack. During the celebrations to mark Elizabeth II’s coronation, the Home Affairs Minister and the police had clamped down on provocative displays of the Union flag. The Independents portrayed this sensible desire to keep the peace as a capitulation to Republicanism. Their campaign helped to reduce the official Unionist vote by about 37,000 in contested constituencies. At the beginning of 1954, the Independents pressed home their advantage by organising a massive loyalist meeting. This gathering passed a symbolic vote of no confidence in the government and its appeasement policies. Showing his customary pragmatism, the Prime Minister, who had been made Viscount Brookeborough in 1952, opted to regain his lost support and to retreat from a more inclusive Unionism. The government passed the 1954 Flags and Emblems Act, requiring the police to protect the display of the Union flag in all circumstances and to remove the Irish tricolour when it threatened a breach of the peace.52

The Act has frequently been cited as evidence that Northern Ireland was a police state.53 However, an almost identical law had been added to West Germany’s penal code a few years earlier.54 Indeed, the Federal Republic shared many of Stormont’s supposedly undemocratic features – justified by the threat posed by the other half of the country.55 The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) remained in sole power from the creation of West Germany until 1966; Unionism’s political hegemony lasted from partition until 1972.56 To their enemies, Northern Ireland was the ‘Orange state’ and the Federal Republic was the ‘CDU state’.57 Admittedly, the Christian Democratic stranglehold on the Bundestag was tempered by West Germany’s federal structure. With the Social Democratic Party holding office in several Länder, their voters did not feel the same estrangement from the state that Northern Ireland’s Catholics did. Nevertheless, at a federal level, the CDU’s position appeared impregnable: in 1957, more than half of all the votes cast went to the party.58 Such ‘dominant party systems’ were so common in Western Europe at this time that Raymond Aron lectured on the phenomenon at the University of Paris. ‘It is not a one-party system,’ he explained. ‘Opposition parties exist, and intellectual and personal freedoms are respected. But one party has an overwhelming majority, and the opposition parties are so divided that no-one can see any possibility of the majority party being replaced in power.’59 Following the advent of the Cold War, the French Communist Party, which enjoyed the allegiance of nearly one-quarter of the electorate, had been actively excluded from government. This was hardly surprising as the Communists were committed to the revolutionary transformation of France – albeit after taking power through the ballot box instead of armed insurrection.60 Moreover, as the veteran Socialist Léon Blum recognised, the Communists were a ‘foreign nationalist party’.61 Their ultimate allegiance was to the Soviet Union, not France. Northern Ireland’s Catholic parties occupied a comparable position: effectively barred from power, supported by a substantial minority of the population, pledged to overthrow the constitution, and loyal to a political entity beyond the territorial boundaries of the state.62

CHANGING THE FACE OF ULSTER

In August 1962, more than 10,000 workers marched through the streets of Belfast in protest at plans to shut down the city’s aircraft factory. At the head of the march were Stormont MPs from the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) and the Nationalist Party. Unionism’s fears had seemingly been made flesh: part of the Protestant proletariat had made common cause with its Catholic counterpart.63 Previously, when the problem of unemployment had started to undermine Unionist control, Stormont had turned to Westminster for aid. As Northern Ireland’s strategic importance and the IRA threat diminished, however, such appeals lost their potency. By the beginning of the 1960s, Whitehall civil servants had come to regard the septuagenarian Brookeborough as an anachronism.64 In October 1962, a working party of Northern Irish and British officials published a report that favoured a different economic policy.65 The Derry Journal delighted in outlining the political implications of this assessment: ‘the report amounts to a total rejection by the British Government of the requests for assistance made by Lord Brookeborough on his many futile visits to London’. ‘In any other democracy,’ the editorial concluded, ‘the Government’s resignation would already have been tendered.’66 Within six months, Brookeborough had indeed left office – diplomatically citing ill health rather than the personal humiliation of the working party’s findings. According to Lord Wakehurst, Northern Ireland’s Governor, Brookeborough said that ‘he could step down without loss of face’.67 During the final years of the Brookeborough premiership, the Northern Irish civil service became frustrated at the failure to build upon the success of post-war reconstruction. When a protracted dispute with Belfast Corporation over whether or not to extend the city’s boundary offered an opportunity to regain lost momentum, the Stormont administration eagerly grasped its chance. In March 1960, the Ministry of Health and Local Government invited Sir Robert Matthew, Edinburgh University’s first Professor of Architecture, to select a few sites outside the city on which housing estates could be built. Matthew instead agreed to draw up a development plan – originally for the greater Belfast region, but ultimately for the whole of Northern Ireland. His report recommended that suburban sprawl should be halted by surrounding Belfast with ‘Greenscape’, creating a ‘substantial new Regional Centre’, designating a number of ‘centres for development’, and improving the transport network.68 The Belfast Regional Plan was published four months after the working party on unemployment had rejected Brookeborough’s policies. The Matthew Report mapped out a different road for Northern Ireland: what a senior official at the ministry later described as ‘the path of a positive, activist approach to the physical and economic problems of the province’.69 Britain was already travelling along the road of regional planning – away from the over-heating south-east of England to the North, Scotland, and Wales. By adopting and adapting the new Whitehall vogue, the Stormont civil service hoped that this road and the resources it would bring would come to Northern Ireland.70

The political benefits of Stormont’s conversion to planning were reaped by Brookeborough’s successor, Terence O’Neill. As Finance Minister since 1956, he had stressed that Northern Ireland’s future prosperity should be based upon the people’s own resourcefulness. In May 1962, O’Neill lamented that ‘Northern Ireland has become too sorry for itself’. He proposed that the country should take as its motto ‘similar responsibilities for similar opportunities’.71 The rhetoric of self-help was the ideal language in which to present the new economic policy devised by the administration. Matthew himself had called for ‘a replacement of the general attitude that the best thing that can be done is not to get too far behind the rest of Britain, by a determination to go straight ahead’.72 O’Neill had already cultivated close relations with a group of rising civil servants in Belfast and with the mandarins at the Treasury. This was partly the result of his rift with the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, which had encouraged the Minister to seek out the advice of other officials and to deal directly with Whitehall. O’Neill persuaded the Treasury to include him in the United Kingdom delegation to World Bank conferences – allowing him to network and come into contact with the latest ideas.73 He was therefore well placed to negotiate the planning world. O’Neill would secure resources from London by framing requests in the new language of economic modernisation rather than by repeating traditional calls for stopgap subsidies.74

Northern Ireland’s new Prime Minister was not elected; he ‘emerged’ in the fashion of Conservative leaders until Ted Heath. Brookeborough and Wakehurst discussed ‘the best man for The Governor to send for’. ‘Two or three possibilities were mentioned,’ London was told, ‘but it was clear that The Governor and Lord Brookeborough were of one mind.’ O’Neill’s standing in Parliament and with the public had been on ‘the increase for some time’. However, it was only in the immediate aftermath of the Matthew Report’s publication that he had become ‘the obvious choice’.75 O’Neill therefore was not an elegant anachronism, but his aristocratic and military background may still have made a crucial difference. The O’Neill family were substantial landowners and descendants of the High Kings of Ireland. O’Neill’s father was the first Westminster MP to die on the Western Front, while his maternal grandfather was a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. After leaving Eton, O’Neill eventually joined the Irish Guards and was wounded during Operation Market Garden.76 These impeccable credentials probably account for why the Governor contacted O’Neill ahead of his rivals. This gave O’Neill and the Chief Whip, his close ally Bill Craig, the chance to develop an irresistible momentum for his candidacy.77 Craig had served in the Royal Air Force as a Lancaster bomber rear-gunner and had risen rapidly through the ranks of the Unionist Party. However, his boyish charm and youthful enthusiasm barely masked his inexperience, impatience, and irritability. Craig shared O’Neill’s technocratic approach, but he preferred to steamroller through reform rather than secure it through more subtle arts.78

Brian Faulkner was the opposite: an inveterate intriguer and – in 1963 at least – a traditional Unionist. In July 1960, as Minister of Home Affairs, Faulkner had allowed 10,000 Orangemen to parade through the Catholic village of Dungiven. Two days of rioting had, predictably, followed.79 With a background in the region’s shirt-making industry, Faulkner became the spokesman for the interests of local factory owners. This put him at a disadvantage in the struggle to succeed Brookeborough: he was identified with the old man’s failed economic policy. A further obstacle was that he had spent the Second World War running his father’s factory in Northern Ireland, not fighting in Europe.80 John Andrews, O’Neill’s principal challenger and the son of Northern Ireland’s second Prime Minister, did possess the necessary qualifications of status and service. The difference between the contenders was O’Neill’s ‘constructive ruthlessness’.81 The new premier displayed this characteristic again a year later when dispatching Andrews to the safety of the Senate. O’Neill also benefited from the premature deaths of Maynard Sinclair and William Morrison May – both potential successors to Brookeborough.82

On the day after he became Prime Minister, O’Neill telephoned his former Private Secretary in America. ‘I want and need you at home,’ he told Ken Bloomfield.83 O’Neill’s patronage speeded Bloomfield’s inexorable rise. But the political master also owed much to his favourite civil servant. Although the term O’Neillism implies a personal leadership style, the Prime Minister heavily relied upon his advisers. Policy emerged not from Cabinet meetings, but from the long discussions that O’Neill regularly had with this reform-minded clique. According to Bloomfield, who served as ‘assistant and later deputy secretary to the cabinet’, this ‘team’ consisted of himself, ‘the cabinet secretary (at first Cecil Bateman and from 1965 Harold Black), [and] the prime minister’s private secretary Jim Malley’. Bloomfield’s ‘role was to be the word-spinner and ideas man’, which entailed ‘preparing the prime minister’s public utterances’. As this was the era of John F. Kennedy, the team were dubbed ‘the presidential aides’.84 It was also the age of Charles de Gaulle. At the beginning of the 1960s, in both France and Northern Ireland, a tiny elite of politicians and bureaucrats was pursuing economic and social modernisation.85

ANNIHILATING THE NORTHERN IRELAND LABOUR PARTY

In June 1963, over a century after his eight great-grandparents had left its shores, President Kennedy came to Ireland. When he arrived in Wexford town, a choir began singing a ballad celebrating the 1798 rebellion. The President joined the schoolboys for the second chorus and reduced even cynical journalists to tears.86 This may well have been sentimental, but Kennedy’s once-removed Irish patriotism had a political impact. As an up-and-coming Senator, he had supported a congressional resolution supporting Irish reunification. Nevertheless, O’Neill had hoped that the leader of the free world would find time to open the Giant’s Causeway Park. The invitation – made through the British government – was politely but firmly turned down.87 Despite this public snub, O’Neill continued to idolise Kennedy. He undertook a pilgrimage to Washington in March 1964 and offered his condolences to Jackie Kennedy – they then went on to discuss eighteenth-century Whig politics.88 O’Neill found inspiration in Kennedy’s teachings. At Yale in 1962, the President had told the students that ‘The fact of the matter is that most of the problems … that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems … that do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.’89 Six years later, the Prime Minister echoed this sentiment: ‘Democracy – let us face the fact – is better attuned to broad simple issues than to complex and highly technical decisions.’90

O’Neill was not the first Northern Irish politician to advocate a technocratic approach to the region’s economic problems. The NILP had been winning over Protestant working-class voters with the claim that it would succeed in cutting unemployment where the gentlemen amateurs of Brookeborough’s Cabinet had failed. On the other side of the Irish Sea, a similar campaign swept Labour into power. Harold Wilson, the Leader of the Opposition, had mocked Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s emergence: ‘In this ruthlessly competitive, scientific, technical, industrial age, a week of intrigues has produced a result based on family and hereditary connections.’91 Wilson, the grammar-school boy who had gone on to lecture at Oxford and to work as Beveridge’s research assistant, portrayed himself as a meritocratic, technocratic manager with a plan to get the country going again. Staking his claim to the political legacy of the martyred President, he called upon ‘the youth of Britain to storm the frontiers of knowledge, to bring back to Britain that surging adventurous self-confidence and sturdy self-respect which the Tories have almost submerged with their apathy and cynicism’. Nineteen sixty-four presented a ‘chance to change the face and future of Britain’.92 Nine months before, O’Neill had declared that his ‘task will be literally to transform the face of Ulster’.93 This Old Etonian’s mastery of the new language of politics rivalled that of Wirral Grammar School’s former head boy. O’Neill had stolen the NILP’s thunder.94

For O’Neill, planning was more about politics than economics. In late 1963, Tom Wilson, who had succeeded Harold Wilson as the economics fellow at University College, Oxford, was invited to prepare an economic plan for Northern Ireland. The Belfast-born professor may actually have invited himself.95 When the Prime Minister belatedly informed his Cabinet that Wilson had started work, economics was far from his thoughts. O’Neill instead stressed that Stormont ‘must not only be active, but be seen to be active’; the likely ‘improvement of confidence [as] had clearly resulted from the Whitaker Plan in the Republic [of Ireland]’; and the importance of ‘the Treasury, in considering the well documented claims of other areas, [taking] into account a similar survey for Northern Ireland’.96 Moreover, when Matthew and Wilson’s blueprint for Ulster’s new face threatened Unionism’s delicate electoral position, sectarianism prevailed over modernisation. Geoffrey Copcutt, an Englishman responsible for implementing part of the Matthew Report, resigned in protest. He told the British press that the ‘situation of the Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland was very similar to that of the Negro in the United States’.97

O’Neill’s economic plans may have been flawed, but his political plans appeared flawless. The Derry Journal grumbled that the 1965 Stormont general election was ‘thrust on a jaded public, in the dead of winter, eighteen months before it is due, and on what grounds is anyone’s guess’.98 It was called on the grounds that O’Neill wanted to exploit communal divisions within the NILP and it succeeded in repulsing the party’s advance into Unionist territory. The NILP lost half its seats and saw its share of the vote fall by a third. ‘The unfortunate Labour Party’, O’Neill gleefully recalled, ‘was in fact practically annihilated.’99 The Prime Minister had not always been such a committed enemy of the NILP. ‘In an interview given to the New Statesman, in 1958,’ the party’s main strategist remembered, ‘[O’Neill] came as close as any Unionist politician could do to welcoming the advent of Northern Ireland Labour as a constitutional opposition’.100 However, as the New Statesman interviewer acknowledged in a later article, the then Deputy Prime Minister’s endorsement of the NILP had ‘got him into serious trouble with his party’.101 It was widely believed that losing working-class votes to the NILP – whose support for the Union was far from certain – was the beginning of a process that would lead to the end of partition. Similarly, the West German Christian Democrats viewed their Social Democratic opponents as the party that would let in the Communists.102 Historians have tended to regard O’Neill’s subsequent attack on the NILP and its gradualist, parliamentary approach to civil rights reform as a ‘classic misjudgement’.103 O’Neill though had recognised that his survival as Unionist leader depended upon driving the NILP to the edge of political extinction.

THE ARCH TRAITOR

O’Neill’s self-appointed task may have been to ‘transform the face of Ulster’, but he later defined this ambition rather narrowly.104 In an October 1963 television interview, which was reported in the Derry Journal, O’Neill ‘explained that “what he really had in mind” in that statement was simply the promotion of better industrial relations and enterprise with a view to economic recovery’. O’Neill, the newspaper regretfully concluded, ‘implied that his objective as Premier had nothing to do at all with … co-operation … between the two sections of the Six County community’.105 Although he was an interventionist when it came to the economy, the new Prime Minister preferred to entrust the problem of community relations to the free play of forces. Protestants should content themselves with playing good neighbours to Catholics until the ecumenical movement, the welfare state, and all the trends associated with modernisation finally delivered communal harmony. Conceiving of the British link as a source of economic benefits and privileged access to the international community, O’Neill hoped that ‘those who are now in opposition’ would be convinced ‘that their own ultimate best interests’ lay with the Union.106

O’Neill’s reluctance to intervene disappointed liberal Unionists. Jack Sayers, the editor of the influential Belfast Telegraph, marked O’Neill down in this area when he delivered his end-of-year report. ‘[O]n the subject of political evolution, of communal relations,’ Sayers observed in his radio broadcast, ‘the Prime Minister’s statements and those of his ministers have been … muted’. He concluded ‘that the Unionist leadership has done little or nothing to come to terms with [the] feeling for tolerance and … freedom of expression among a great many people on both sides of the politico-religious fence’.107 O’Neill could not ignore this disenchantment: Faulkner had not given up on his leadership ambitions and his plotting was forcing the Prime Minister to seek liberal support.108 Shortly after Sayers’s negative review, O’Neill took what he later described as his ‘first step in the direction of improving community relations’.109 On 24 April 1964, he became the first Northern Ireland Prime Minister to visit a Catholic school. O’Neill listened to the school choir, attended a hurling match, and had his photograph taken with some nuns.110

This focus upon symbolism rather than substantive reform climaxed the following year with the invitation of Seán Lemass, the Southern Prime Minister, to Stormont. Lemass was a veteran of the Easter Rising, but economic modernisation mattered more to him than traditional Irish nationalist concerns. Like O’Neill, he was confident that economic and social change would bring an end to the island’s ancient animosities. Unlike O’Neill, he believed that a modernised Ireland would be a united Ireland.111 The Northern Prime Minister was effectively forced into responding to the overtures from the South: Lemass was planning to speak at Queen’s University, the media were calling for a meeting, liberal Unionist pressure was growing, and Faulkner was apparently considering a similar initiative.112 Nevertheless, when Lemass arrived in Belfast on 14 January 1965, it came as a surprise to politicians as well as to the general public.113 O’Neill’s Cabinet was informed only on the morning of the meeting – just a few hours before the news was released to the press. Standing in ‘the rather spacious loo at Stormont’, the Southern Prime Minister confided to his Northern counterpart that he was going to ‘get into terrible trouble for this’. ‘No, Mr Lemass,’ came the reply, ‘it is I who will get into trouble for this.’114 O’Neill was right.

The blaze of publicity surrounding O’Neill’s bridge-building gestures was soon to be eclipsed by the dark fears that they raised. Lemass’s invitation to Stormont brought an unwelcome guest to the seat of government: Ian Paisley. The Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church, an evangelical Protestant sect that he had helped to found, came to accuse O’Neill of treachery.115 For Paisley, there was no halfway house between truth and error, good and evil, Christ and Antichrist. The Protestant conspiracy theory had undoubtedly found its most eloquent and most inventive spokesman. Paisley invoked an IRA–Vatican plot marked by darkness, secrecy, violence, and sexual perversity. The Protestant Telegraph, Paisley’s weekly newspaper, contained articles with headlines such as ‘Love Affairs of the Vatican’, ‘Jesuit Plots Unmasked’, and ‘Papal Conspiracy’.116

Paisley believed that Christ had sent him forth as a sheep in the midst of these black-robed wolves. As a gifted Bible scholar, he understood that God’s instruments were expected to be as wise as serpents. For the Unionist leadership at least, however, Paisley was not as harmless as a dove. When, in June 1963, Belfast City Hall flew the Union flag at half-mast to mark the death of Pope John XXIII, Paisley explained that he would not tolerate such actions because he ‘remembered … men like [the sixteenth-century Reformers] Calvin, Knox, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer broke rather than bent for the Gospel and liberty’.117 The post-war ecumenical movement was attempting to forge closer links between the world’s Churches. But Paisley and other Protestant fundamentalists, such as the American Baptist preacher Bob Jones Jr., remained at war with Rome.118 Since the 1950s, Paisley had been at the forefront of protests against the Protestant Churches and the Unionist government’s supposed appeasement of Catholics. As religious and political ministers started to build bridges in the 1960s, Paisley stepped up his campaign against those he saw as the ‘Iscariots of Ulster’ crossing over to the other side.119

Although his language echoed seventeenth-century sermons, Paisley’s message still resonated with a twentieth-century audience. During a period of rapid change, he reaffirmed unionism’s traditional values. But Paisleyism was not simply a regressive phenomenon, retarding O’Neill’s efforts to modernise Northern Ireland. Like the New Catholicism of the late nineteenth century, the Protestant preacher criticised liberalism while embracing many contemporary developments.120 He set up a newspaper, founded voluntary associations, organised mass demonstrations, travelled regularly to Continental Europe and North America, and forged links with like- minded foreigners. These were the means that Paisley used to reach those unionists who had benefited from post-war social and economic reforms but nevertheless wanted Northern Ireland to remain a Protestant state. This was a small but growing constituency. Beginning in 1965, the Orange Order and frontier Unionists came together to oppose further concessions being made to Catholics.121 At a rally held that year to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne, the Grand Master of the Orange Order was heckled into silence for supporting O’Neill.122 In 1966, the Order passed resolutions condemning ecumenism and calling for a return to the fundamental principles of the Protestant faith. By pandering to Paisley’s views, the Orange leadership was hoping to isolate Paisley the man. Indeed, the Grand Master urged the Order to bar Paisley from speaking at its events.123

The Unionist government also followed the risky strategy of co-option and condemnation. When Paisley threatened to march into the heart of Catholic Belfast in September 1964 to remove the Irish tricolour from Sinn Féin’s election headquarters, the police were sent in before he could act. Home Affairs Minister Faulkner vainly tried to balance out this decision by banning Paisley from entering the Catholic Falls Road district. Paisley instead held a meeting in the city centre, but a hostile crowd gathered in the Falls in case he defied the ban. These protesters clashed with the police, thus provoking the worst rioting that Belfast had witnessed in decades.

The Irish flag was again placed in the window of the Sinn Féin office and was again removed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Barricades were built, petrol bombs were thrown, police Land Rovers were sent in, and water cannons were used.124 O’Neill blamed Paisley for the disturbances and warned against a return to the sectarian violence of the past.125 However, the heightened tensions helped to deliver to the Unionists the marginal Westminster seat for West Belfast. As one Nationalist politician observed, the party leaders believed that they had exploited Paisley for their own ends and, in turn, he was certain that he had used them to score a notable victory.126

The political calculations upon which O’Neill’s triangulation strategy rested were upset by the events of 1966. The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising presented the Unionist government once again with a choice between keeping public order and maintaining party unity. On this occasion, fears that the IRA intended to renew the armed struggle led O’Neill and his ministers to prioritise security over sectarianism. Stormont warned Westminster that the Republicans were planning to provoke sectarian violence and bring the army onto the streets. Harold Wilson was told that the ‘IRA campaign would then be publicised as a people’s uprising against the excesses of the Crown forces’.127 The Northern Ireland government therefore decided – with a few exceptions to appease loyalists – to allow the parades to go ahead and the Irish tricolour to be flown. The Derry Journal praised Stormont’s restraint, which had ‘paid off handsomely in the unruffled peace and calm throughout the community that has prevailed at this commemoration’.128 Although Northern Ireland escaped serious disturbance, the government would have been prepared for it. In the week running up to the anniversary, the press were briefed that ‘police and other security forces have been placed on a footing of instant readiness to meet any unlawful activity which may be mounted by the IRA’.129 The Nationalist Party accused Stormont of indulging in ‘scaremanship of the worst type’. Indeed, O’Neill appears to have hoped that the massive display of state power would placate Protestant extremists. It did not. At a huge Ulster Hall rally, O’Neill was denounced as an ‘arch traitor’.130

The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising was celebrated in stanzas as well as in the streets. Seamus Heaney’s Requiem for the Croppies linked the risings of 1916 and 1798. The poem’s theme is resurrection. The eighteenth-century rebels, the ‘Croppies’, marched with ‘pockets … full of barley’. The Croppies were defeated by the British army, vainly ‘shaking scythes at cannon’, and their dead were buried – ‘without shroud or coffin’ – in mass graves. ‘And in August the barley grew out of the grave.’131 For Heaney, 1916 was the political harvest of the seeds sown in 1798. In 1966, the Republican crop competed for light with Unionist flowers. During and after the First World War, poppies grew on the battlefields where Irishmen died in their tens of thousands. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and the sacrifice of the Ulster Division, O’Neill travelled to France. Many of the men who served with the division had previously belonged to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a paramilitary organisation that had been founded in 1913 to resist Home Rule. Half a century later, a small group of militant loyalists decided to resurrect the UVF name. The new UVF saw itself as part of a long tradition of defending Protestant Ulster from its enemies; everyone else saw it as a murder gang that killed Catholics in cold blood. In the early hours of 26 June 1966, three Catholic barmen leaving a pub in a Protestant area of west Belfast were shot by UVF gunmen.132 One of the men, eighteen-year-old Peter Ward, was killed and his companions were wounded.133 O’Neill, who had flown back from France to deal with the crisis, highlighted to the Stormont Parliament the contrast between men who had willingly laid down their lives fighting on the Somme and men who had senselessly taken life in the back streets of Belfast.134

One of the UVF killers supposedly said in police custody, ‘I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him.’ He later denied in court having made this statement.135 O’Neill – encouraged by reports from the RUC – also believed that the UVF was part of the wider ‘Paisleyite Movement’.136 Paisley himself had immediately condemned the murder and called upon the government to use the full rigour of the law against the guilty men.137 He apparently felt no need to ask himself, ‘Did that sermon of mine send out certain men that shot Peter Ward?’ While there was categorically no direct connection, Paisley’s words and indeed his actions undoubtedly fuelled the fears of militant loyalists. At the beginning of June 1966, Paisley and his Church had marched on the Irish Presbyterian General Assembly along a route that passed close to a Catholic area of Belfast. The Protestant marchers were met by stone-throwing Catholic youths. The Free Presbyterians had provoked the violence, but they were protected by the police. As the RUC battled with the rioters, the marchers continued on to the city centre. Trouble flared up again when they reached the assembly: the Paisleyites shouted anti-ecumenical slogans at the Irish Presbyterian leadership and abused Northern Ireland’s Governor. With moderate opinion outraged at Paisley’s conduct, O’Neill felt confident enough to draw analogies with the 1930s: ‘The contempt for established authority; the crude and unthinking intolerance; the emphasis upon monster processions and rallies; the appeal to a perverted form of patriotism: each and every one of these things has its parallel in the rise of the Nazis’.138 The counter-attack continued with Paisley being charged with public order offences. Having been found guilty, the Protestant preacher decided not to pay his fine but instead embrace the martyrdom of a prison sentence.139 The blood on Belfast’s streets had not made Paisley less sanguine. During late July 1966, the loyalist vigils held outside the city’s Crumlin Road gaol degenerated into riots. The Cabinet accepted the Home Affairs Minister’s proposal to use his powers to impose a three-month-long ban on all marches and meetings within a fifteen-mile radius of city hall.140 The ministerial order transferred the crisis from the streets into the Unionist Party.

Six years later, O’Neill claimed that the ‘seeds of 1966, germinating in 1968, unfortunately have now bloomed into violence’.141 Throughout the Western world, the radical Right played an important supporting role in the political street theatre of ’68. Comparisons can be made between Northern Ireland and the American South: protests against the half-heartedness of efforts to dismantle the old order and prevent murders motivated by hate.142 But drawing parallels with Continental developments is perhaps more revealing. In 1964, the same year as the riots in the Falls district of Belfast, the extreme right-wing Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands was founded in West Germany. The party’s successes in the 1966 Land elections prompted considerable concern.143 Theodor Adorno, one of the country’s most important philosophers and social critics, warned that many West Germans had not yet let go of the reactionary beliefs of the last century. He feared that ‘so-called national renewal movements in an age in which nationalism is outdated are especially susceptible to forming sadistic practices’.144 Across the border in France, the rabidly nationalist group Occident had already been seduced by violence. From 1964 onwards, drilled commando units armed with iron bars launched a series of attacks in Paris on left-wing students as well as on Jews, Africans, and Arabs.145 When leftists in Western Europe took to the streets to provoke confrontations, they found that the radical Right was only too willing to oblige.

O’NEILLISM

In his autobiography, O’Neill ‘face[d] up to the difficulty of saying a word about my predecessor, Lord Brookeborough’:

A man of limited intelligence, his strong suits were shooting and fishing in Fermanagh and when he came up on Monday night or Tuesday morning it was difficult to shake him from some of his more idiotic ideas. In short, it would have been quite impossible, even with his immense charm, for him to have been a minister in London.146

What O’Neill failed to grasp was that the qualities needed to run a big Whitehall department were not necessarily those needed to govern Northern Ireland and lead the Unionist Party. When the future viscount began to become involved in politics, he claimed that he knew ‘what is being thought by the people here’.147 As the head of a government and a party that had to be responsive to the popular mood, Brookeborough’s common touch proved invaluable. By contrast, as a senior civil servant later observed, O’Neill ‘liked politics as an art’ and ‘didn’t find it easy to meet the ordinary middle-class people’.148 With the bloody and battered year of 1966 limping into the autumn, this weakness would almost cost him the premiership.

During September 1966, backbenchers were asked to sign a document calling for O’Neill’s resignation.149 Paisley had weakened the Prime Minister’s position, but the Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church was one concern among many in the party. O’Neill’s modernisation strategy had stripped local authorities of some of their jealously guarded functions. This loss of patronage had damaged the clientelism upon which Northern Irish politics was largely based.150 Unionists from the West of the province were unhappy that development had been concentrated in the greater Belfast region. Liberals were disappointed by the absence of ambitious reform. Traditionalists were dismayed by the North–South summit and the Easter Rising commemorations. What united this disparate discontent was a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with O’Neill’s detached, presidential style.151

The Prime Minister made clear to the rebels that this would not be a bloodless coup. He counter-attacked in the media as well as in meetings of the parliamentary party and local associations. He disingenuously associated the rebellion with Paisley and exploited internal party divisions. Faulkner calculated that the moment was not right and declined to offer himself as an alternative leader. The revolt subsequently lost all momentum. Having overwhelmingly won a vote of confidence, O’Neill recognised the need to appease his critics. Bill Craig, who headed the Ministry of Development that had removed responsibilities from local government and neglected the West, was demoted to Home Affairs.152 A high-level civil servant maintained: ‘That’s when Craig first got the idea that he could be a rebel himself.’ ‘In fact, [Chief Whip] Jimmy Chichester-Clark … found Bill drunk. And Bill said, “Well, if Faulkner can be a rebel I’ll get to the right of Faulkner, so”.’153 The internal revolt and the loss of a key ally darkened further O’Neill’s pessimistic disposition. Assessing the dying year in a letter to Bloomfield, he observed that at the end of September he could not fully appreciate his supposedly much stronger position after the Stormont election. ‘My forecast for 1967’, he concluded, ‘is that it will be much worse than 1966.’154

The rebellion persuaded O’Neill to start to base his premiership upon appeals to a public opinion that he believed was substantially more liberal than official Unionism. O’Neill had declared in response to 1966’s loyalist violence and Republican triumphalism that ‘Those who seek by word or deed to incite hatred and widen divisions in the community can be crushed by the universal disapprobation and distaste of decent people’. With his references to ‘the steady ground-swell of moderation’ and the ‘dignified expression of moderate opinion’, O’Neill appeared to embrace Sayers’ contention that there was an expanding middle ground.155 Following the party revolt, the Prime Minister actively sought to cultivate this emerging moderate consensus.156 This became the ‘Programme to Enlist the People’ (PEP): an attempt to ‘get away from jargon and bureaucratic complications, and to tell the average Ulsterman what “building the new Ulster” actually means’.157 O’Neill outlined his full ambitions for PEP to the North Antrim Unionist Association:

Our work is not a dreary effort of plans and blue-prints and statistics. Forget jargon words like ‘infrastructure’ or ‘community relations’. Rather keep before your eyes a vision of an Ulster which – if we will and work for it – can be … An Ulster in which our economic growth will keep pace with a growing population, providing satisfying and useful work for all … an Ulster in which these material benefits will create such a spirit that our constitutional position will cease to be an issue in politics.158

As well as helping to bridge the gulf between ‘us’, the people, and ‘them’, the government, PEP was seen as a way of providing a space in which the two communities could co-operate to achieve shared goals.159 O’Neill hoped that PEP would encourage ‘youth organisations’, ‘Chambers of Commerce’, ‘Rotary Clubs’, and ‘the Churches’ to ‘consider working together in some field of public benefit’.160 ‘Is it, for instance, too visionary’, he asked the Belfast Irish Association, ‘to look forward to Protestant young people helping to re-decorate a Youth Club in Andersontown, or a young Catholic reading to a bed-ridden old lady on the Shankill Road? The firmest links can only be forged at the basic level of ordinary, warm, human contact.’161 PEP was not, therefore, a complete retreat from O’Neill’s laissez-faire approach to community relations: he was seeking to build a structure that would support pre-existing trends.162

O’Neill offered the most coherent analysis of the thinking behind PEP at a June 1968 conference on community work. In the opening speech, he claimed that the complexity of the modern state ‘accounts for much of the detachment, the “couldn’t care less” approach … which we see here and everywhere else’. ‘Alienation of government from the governed,’ continued the Prime Minister, ‘of town from country, of employer from working people – these are some of the chief ills of our age.’163 This instant analysis of the causes of the global revolt of 1968 bears comparison with those offered by some of Europe’s greatest minds. Within a few short months, however, O’Neill would no longer be in a position to deliver lectures on how the Western world could overcome alienation.

Narrowing his focus to Northern Ireland, O’Neill highlighted the specific difficulties rapid change posed in a society of ‘very fixed sympathies’ and in a political system ‘accustomed to saying “We are attacked; we must defend ourselves.”’ In its ‘modest’ attempt ‘to tackle some of those problems’, PEP based itself in the ‘local community, which people could know and understand’, and ‘sought to involve as many diverse interests as possible in some form of active work in the interests of the community’. For O’Neill, ‘civic spirit’ constituted the ‘building blocks out of which some wider sense of loyalty and involvement might one day be constructed’.164 Catholics would gradually be assimilated, a process that would in turn encourage Protestants to abandon their mistrust. Nationalism, as well as what O’Neill regarded as the coarser aspects of Unionism, would wither away to reveal a society comparable with Britain or Canada. While visiting North America in the spring of 1968, he was surprised to discover that the Grand Master of the Newfoundland Orange Order regularly took sick Catholics to mass. ‘I have often thought,’ O’Neill wrote in his autobiography, ‘that if only the Order in Ulster had developed in the same way as the Order in Newfoundland then today’s troubles might never have taken place.’165

PEP was supplemented by efforts to redress some substantive Catholic grievances. This was a gradual process that never went further than what the parliamentary party and the wider Unionist movement would accept. O’Neill had no intention of provoking another rebellion against his leadership. Indeed, the Prime Minister and key members of the Cabinet agreed in March 1967 that ‘there would be further consultations with representatives of the Orange Institution before final decisions were made’.166

‘Of all the proven injustices that exist in the Six Counties,’ commented the Derry Journal in May 1963, ‘none is more glaring than the manner in which the Mater Hospital is treated by the Stormont Government.’167 At the hospital’s 1966 prize-giving ceremony, the Bishop of Down and Connor noted the O’Neill administration’s professed good intentions towards the Catholic community and suggested that the Mater was ‘the place where it should be easy to begin to do something’.168 Protestant opinion, which was probably more influential with the Prime Minister, similarly favoured state aid for this hospital, which had opted out of the National Health Service. A Belfast Telegraph poll conducted in December 1967 found that 81 per cent of Unionist voters backed such a move. This perhaps reflected the substantial number of Protestants treated by the Mater.169 Progress on the issue was impeded by backbench opposition – championed in the Cabinet by Faulkner – to public funding for a Catholic institution. In January 1967, following much manoeuvring, the party conceded in principle state aid for the hospital. This was conditional upon the government reaching an agreement with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church about protection for the Mater’s religious character.170 Mutual suspicion, however, ensured that almost two years later these negotiations had yet to be concluded.171

The bishops appear to have entertained even greater doubts about the motives underlying Stormont’s October 1967 White Paper on education. The Bill offered Catholic schools ‘maintained’ status: increased grants in exchange for Local Education Authority (LEA) nominees sitting on the management committee. The Bishop of Down and Connor almost immediately accused the government of ‘taking advantage of our grave financial need’ to ‘introduce representatives’ of bodies whose ‘attitude’ to ‘Catholic interests [in many cases] is so notorious that we can only regard with dismay their direct involvement’. At a later stage, ‘a mere alteration in the proportion of representation could turn the position into one of complete control by non-Catholic and indeed anti-Catholic forces’. By contrast, the Nationalist Party and the teaching unions cautiously welcomed the proposals.172 Such feelings proved sufficiently wide-spread within the community to encourage the hierarchy to seek a compromise. In May 1968, the bishops agreed to a model scheme whereby teachers would be appointed by the school committee subject to the requirements of the Ministry. Other staff would be employed by the LEA after consultation.173 During the Bill’s second reading, the Education Minister had reassured the hierarchy that ‘this was not a deep-laid plot to take over the voluntary schools’.174 In the privacy of the Cabinet, however, he described ‘what he proposed … as a useful first step towards breaking clerical control’.175

The government’s response to a paper on citizens’ rights presented by the NILP and the trade unions also confirms the Catholic conspiracy theory. This memorandum stated that ‘the time is overdue … for the Prime Minister … to give an earnest of his liberalism and enlightenment by the acceptance of the basic principle that equal citizenship should confer equal civic rights in every part of the United Kingdom’. In practice, this entailed bringing electoral law into line with Britain, fair representation for minority groups on public bodies, measures to diminish discrimination in employment and in the allocation of public housing, the appointment of an ombudsman, and reform of the existing trade union legislation.176 A few years later, this would have been a moderate reform package. In October 1966, however, the Unionist Cabinet regarded most of the proposed changes as a threat to the party’s dominance.

Attorney-General Teddy Jones, who had long acted as a lobbyist for the interests of Londonderry Unionism, made a comprehensive attack on the Labour memorandum.177 Jones asked rhetorically,

what equity is there for a Government, which represents the majority in Northern Ireland, to be subjected to influence to alter laws which suit the Province and are the basis of, and essential to, its constitutional existence and have been duly passed and accepted by the superior government and which have no way infringed the safeguards laid down in the Government of Ireland Act?

According to the Attorney-General, the constitution had been enacted to avoid a united Ireland – for which the ‘Nationalist opposition’ were still contending. The ‘minority groups’ were therefore ‘seeking, in the name of progress, to force the government here to change to procedures which they feel will suit them better when, in fact, what is sought to be changed is the very basis on which the constitutional structure of Northern Ireland was established’. The ‘day’ had ‘not yet been reached’ when ‘Catholic citizens, in general, would look on political issues as open questions’.178 In the heart of Stormont Castle, the Protestant conspiracy theory was being advocated as government policy.

The influence of the conspiracist mentality was less obvious in the subsequent Cabinet discussions. Nevertheless, ministers were uniformly hostile towards the assumptions underlying the Labour memorandum. It was ‘generally agreed’ that it ‘would be wise’ to accept only those changes that ‘would have no marked political effect’. Consequently, the business vote would be ended, the university seats abolished, and an independent boundary commission for Stormont elections established. To avoid the appearance of being forced to make concessions, the Cabinet opted to announce these changes in Parliament rather than to the Labour delegation. The accusations of discrimination that had been made in the NILP/trade union paper were dismissed without debate. Addressing the question of the local government electoral franchise was postponed until the review of the entire system had been completed. Indeed, it was suggested that the eventual restructuring would probably strengthen the case for a property franchise. The issue of reforming the trade union laws was also deferred – in this case pending the report of a royal commission.179

O’Neill looked upon political concessions as both risky and unnecessary. Given the vulnerability of his position as party leader, O’Neill could ill afford to have his critics accusing him of appeasement. Faulkner and Craig may have been compromised by their involvement with the modernisation strategy, but they still remained close to the traditionalist position in their attitude towards the minority. The problems that would be created within the party would not be offset, O’Neill calculated, by a rise in Catholic support. He assumed that civil rights only mattered to a small number of political activists and that the majority of Catholics were interested in houses, jobs, and public services. The Union’s ‘economic and social advantages’ would eventually convince the minority population to abandon Irish nationalism.180 While waiting for economic and social change to transform political allegiances, the O’Neill government offered Catholics increased funding for their community’s institutions and the PEP.181 Pressure from outside Northern Ireland, however, pushed him into at least giving the appearance of wanting to do more. From 1967 at the latest, O’Neill reluctantly found himself in danger of provoking another rebellion within the party.

BUYING TIME FROM THE BRITISH

Harold Wilson used to joke that more Irish Catholics cast their vote for him than for any Irish politician. But his once-removed Irish nationalism was not solely motivated by electoral calculation. Wilson’s spin doctor later recalled that his former boss ‘had the traditional attitude of the Left that Ireland should be united under Dublin’.182 During the 1964 general election campaign, Wilson promised to tackle discrimination in Northern Ireland. In a well-publicised reply to a letter from a Catholic pressure group, he stated that ‘a Labour Government would do everything in its power to see that the infringements of justice to which you are so rightly drawing attention are effectively dealt with’.183 Wilson failed to fulfil this promise when he came to office. Nevertheless, O’Neill still found himself under greater pressure than any of his predecessors to treat the minority fairly. Westminster had considered vetoing the 1922 Local Government Bill, but had backtracked after the Unionist Cabinet had threatened to resign and fight an election on the issue. The British government had no desire to provoke a constitutional crisis.184 By the 1960s, however, London could impose its will upon Belfast without testing the limits of the Government of Ireland Act. The post-war expansion of the state had been funded by the Treasury, which made Stormont susceptible to financial blackmail. O’Neill had to tread softly.

Even before Wilson moved into Downing Street, O’Neill found himself struggling against separatist tendencies within his party. A constant theme of his premiership was that Northern Ireland and by extension – the Unionist regime were ‘utterly dependent’ upon continued British goodwill.185 ‘There can be no room in Unionist philosophy’, O’Neill warned a local association, ‘for a kind of loyalist Sinn Féin which would turn its back upon British opinion.’ He instead proposed to demonstrate to ‘the ordinary, decent Englishman, Welshman, or Scot’ ‘that behind all the talk about “discrimination” ’ was a ‘warm and genuine community spirit’. This strategy was designed to ensure that ‘the voices of criticism’ would ‘fall increasingly upon deaf ears’.186 At the 1967 annual meeting of Unionism’s governing body, O’Neill formalised this approach by launching the largely ineffective Campaign for Truth about Ulster.187 As part of this endeavour, the Prime Minister told the party conference that detractors should have ‘the humility to appreciate that we in Northern Ireland live in a complex social and historical setting and can best be left to work out our own social problems for ourselves’.188

The British civil service was inclined to agree with O’Neill. Whitehall’s mandarins shrewdly recognised, however, that they had to indulge their political master’s Irish obsessions. When he came to power, Wilson received a letter from the Nationalists requesting that he intervene to stop discrimination in the allocation of public housing. The ‘Prime Minister’, according to the inter-departmental correspondence, ‘asked that the Home Secretary should advise him how to deal with it not simply as an isolated letter but in the context of the new relations with Northern Ireland.’189 In light of ‘the interest taken in this matter by the Prime Minister’, the higher reaches of the civil service decided that it was ‘undesirable merely to follow without any modification’ the previous practice of simply ‘defining the constitutional position’.190

The rather limited research conducted by both the state and party bureaucracies emphasised the NILP’s reading of the situation.191 They studied a series of Guardian articles written by the party’s Charles Brett during early 1964. In these pieces, the NILP’s leading theoretician adopted a ‘plague on both your houses’ attitude. According to Brett, the allegations that both Unionist and Nationalist councils were allocating public housing to their respective supporters were ‘justified’. ‘In general,’ he concluded, ‘it appears that there is less deliberate discrimination on the part of the Unionist Government than the Nationalists allege; but in the sphere of local government, and in the private sphere, there is far more discrimination than the Unionists will admit.’ Brett detected that ‘Many Catholics and many Protestants are coming to regard the old deadlock with repugnance.’ However, the ‘Nationalists and Unionists are now under the control of their own extremists’.192 The implication was that there was an emerging moderate constituency – which would be increasingly drawn to the NILP’s centrist approach. With the party confident of advancing under the existing system, the leaders wanted their British counterparts to stay out of Northern Irish politics.193

The civil service’s report on the constitutional relationship between Belfast and London was also against intervention. It was noted that ‘successive Governments have taken the view that … it would be quite wrong for the United Kingdom Government to interfere in matters for which responsibility has been delegated to the Northern Ireland Government’. As regards discrimination, the report recognised that the Nationalist accusations usually involved matters that had been transferred to Stormont. Indeed, the Home Office’s existing procedure for dealing with letters alleging discrimination was ‘to outline the Northern Ireland Government’s constitutional responsibilities and to decline to comment further’. Similarly, if ‘the subject is raised directly in the United Kingdom Parliament, it runs the risk of being ruled out of order’. The report concluded that it would be ‘difficult to see how any departure from this view could be reconciled with the existence of the Parliament and Government of Northern Ireland’.194

Relatively early in this process, Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice informed his civil servants that ‘the United Kingdom Parliament is still supreme and it may be the time has come to intervene in matters of this kind’.195 Less than two weeks later, however, the rudimentary analysis conducted within Whitehall had convinced Soskice that such a policy was impractical. In a letter to Wilson, he presented his ‘reluctant’ conclusion that ‘it would be constitutionally wrong, and most unwise in practice,’ for the government to ‘offer any comment upon or attempt directly to intervene in matters which clearly fall within the field of responsibility of the Government and Parliament of Northern Ireland’.196 Wilson dutifully dispatched to the Nationalists the reply that had been prepared by the Home Office civil servants: he stressed that the issue fell within the responsibility of the Stormont regime.197

A Westminster intervention would have seriously drained the Wilson premiership’s limited reserves of time, energy and authority. As Roy Jenkins – Soskice’s successor at the Home Office and H.H. Asquith’s biographer – warned his colleagues, embroilment in Irish affairs had derailed other reforming ministries.198 Labour had more politically pressing matters to attend to than Northern Ireland. The first Wilson government was defined by the balance of payments deficit, with which almost every crisis was inextricably bound up. American requests for Britain to support the Vietnam War, the seamen’s strike, the end of the military presence east of Suez, the 1966 wage freeze, and, the following year, devaluation were all linked to the unrelenting pressure on sterling. Jenkins’s time at the Home Office was dominated by the task of laying the legislative foundation for what he termed the ‘civilised society’. He would later admit that Northern Ireland ‘was about 12th on my agenda’.199 The next Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, reached the same conclusion as his predecessors: ‘theoretically and logically we could have taken action, [but in] practice it was not … politically possible to do so’. It was therefore unsurprising that British policy was ‘to use O’Neill to put the reforms through and not in any circumstances to get our fingers burned’.200

Consequently, O’Neill made the pleasing discovery that his fears about Wilson’s intentions had been exaggerated. Following a courtesy visit soon after the election, O’Neill met Wilson on 19 May 1965 ‘to get down to realities’.201 The British Prime Minister’s recollection was that he had only been ‘anxious that the … Unionist Government under … O’Neill should be encouraged to press on with their programme of ending discrimination’.202 Acknowledging the Stormont premier’s achievements and suggesting rather than demanding further reform became the established pattern for later meetings. On 5 August 1966, Wilson and Jenkins ‘expressed understanding of [O’Neill’s] position [but] explored serious lines along which further progress might be achieved’.203 The British ministers raised the possibility of appointing an ombudsman to examine claims of discrimination in the allocation of public housing, the current state of electoral reform, and the feasibility of Stormont passing a religious relations bill. The debate, however, was perfunctory. This enabled O’Neill to wriggle out of making specific commitments. Indeed, he was able to convince the British that it was ‘politically impossible to make further moves at present’. Jenkins simply insisted that ‘any pause should be of short duration’ and warned that ‘a return to unenlightened policies could mean Westminster “taking over”’.204

O’Neill’s success in claiming that the rise in extremist activity demanded a temporary halt to his reform programme reflected the recent IRA scare. In December 1965, O’Neill had alerted Soskice that he had ‘been advised by the R.U.C. that preparations are on foot for an early assumption of I.R.A. activities in Northern Ireland’. He stressed that the intelligence that had been acquired included ‘refer-ences to the perpetration of I.R.A. outrages in England’.205 As the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising approached, Soskice became increasingly nervous. ‘Information received from both Scotland Yard and the Northern Ireland Government’, he told Wilson in early April 1966, ‘shows that the threat is a real one.’ The British government responded by sending over ‘an additional infantry battalion ostensibly for training’.206 Violence did follow in the wake of the Easter Rising commemoration, but it was perpetrated by loyalists rather than Republicans. Westminster was therefore reluctant to weaken O’Neill’s position still further and risk this perceived reformer being replaced by a reactionary. A memorandum written in preparation for the talks outlined London’s thinking:

O’Neill has pursued a markedly more liberal line than his predecessors … there is no doubt that … O’Neill is running some political risk … Any action taken by the Westminster Government that implied that the present Northern Ireland Government did not enjoy its confidence would encourage the extremist elements which are opposed to the existence of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. It would also have an effect on the Unionist Party itself and would probably bring more extreme elements there also.207

The Stormont premier, however, confessed to his Cabinet that by playing to Westminster’s sympathy for his difficulties he had merely ‘bought time’.208

Following the September 1966 revolt, O’Neill recognised that he had to protect himself against the criticism that he was selling out Ulster to the Labour government. Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister therefore arrived at Downing Street in January 1967 with his rivals, Faulkner and Craig. Wilson and Jenkins were joined by Alice Bacon, the Home Office Minister responsible for Northern Ireland. Greater familiarity with the region on the British side – limited though that still was – coupled with the presence of Stormont’s most chauvinistic ministers led to a fractious exchange. According to O’Neill, the sniping actually began as they filed into the Cabinet room:

‘Have you got no vices?’ the Prime Minister enquired [of Faulkner]. ‘I see you drank nothing at lunch.’ ‘I’m not against smoking and drinking,’ Brian replied. ‘It is just that my father gave me £100 not to drink till I was 21.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ said Wilson, ‘you’re earning the next £100 now.’ It was some time before Brian regained his composure.209

Bacon opened her assault by discussing how the Unionist government had responded to the memorandum on citizens’ rights. She stated that the Stormont Cabinet ‘had seemed convinced of the merits of the present [local government electoral] system’ and that Craig ‘was reported to have defended the principle of tying the franchise to a property qualification’. Craig countered that the question of universal adult suffrage should be addressed only after the review of local government had been completed. He nevertheless indicated that following the restructuring his preference would still be for a property based franchise. This clumsy admission led Wilson to ‘enquire … whether the present system would still be thought right if it produced a different political result’.210

O’Neill might have calculated that his rivals would relax their resistance to his strategy after personally witnessing Labour ministers pushing for reform. Indeed, O’Neill’s reluctance to confront opposition within the Cabinet and the wider party encouraged him to exploit British pressure as justification for change. During the subsequent Cabinet meeting, Faulkner acknowledged that ‘Wilson had clearly threatened’, while Craig noted that ‘pressure on the local government franchise would continue’. The pair, however, remained convinced that warnings about a possible intervention were hollow and that serious concessions were thus unnecessary. Faulkner’s ‘own impression’ was that ‘if the critics of Northern Ireland could be satisfied about alleged discrimination in housing and employment’, Westminster ‘might press less hard’ for universal adult suffrage. Craig – even after the mauling he had received at Downing Street – continued to hope that the existing franchise ‘could be defended by reference to the process of local government reorganisation’.211 Although their reasoning lacked sophistication, O’Neill’s rivals probably assessed Britain’s willingness to intervene more accurately than he did. Ironically, O’Neill’s liberal image had allowed Faulkner and Craig to obstruct reform without fear of sanctions. If a Faulkner or Craig premiership had been equally recalcitrant, Wilson might well have resorted to financial blackmail.

At one stage, the British Prime Minister had admittedly threatened that ‘within a period of about three years’ ‘Parliament would insist on interfering more and more with the internal affairs of Northern Ireland’. This menace, however, was not intended to speed up reform. Instead, it was designed to promote ‘an arrangement’ ‘whereby the British Parliament and Government would refrain from interfering at all … provided that Northern Irish members of … Westminster … observed the same discretion on voting on matters appertaining to Britain’.212 Wilson had not forgotten how the twelve Unionist MPs had conducted themselves during the first seventeen months of the Labour government. With an overall majority of only three, the ministry’s survival was made still more precarious by the Unionists voting with the Conservatives on exclusively British questions. In early 1965, Wilson had even consulted the Attorney-General about the possibility of restricting their voting rights.213 Following the August 1966 meeting, the Stormont Cabinet had responded to the ‘considerable resentment on the Labour side’ by agreeing to exercise ‘more control over the activities of Ulster Unionist Members’.214

The ‘greatest surprise’ of the January 1967 summit had therefore been ‘Wilson’s reiteration of the theme of the Ulster Members’.215 The Labour leader was so obsessed with this precursor to the West Lothian question that it was mentioned in his memoir of the 1964–70 government.216 At the January 1967 talks, O’Neill reminded Wilson that devolution had been reflected in Northern Ireland’s reduced Westminster representation. If ‘full rights of debate and voting’ were to be withdrawn, then ‘a larger number’ of MPs – proportionate to the area’s population – would be required. While acknowledging that he was ‘aware of this’, Wilson nevertheless cautioned that ‘if the Westminster Parliament reverted to a marginal balance of the Parties, the position of the Ulster members could create a first class political crisis’.217 This showed the extent to which British party political concerns shaped Wilson’s thinking on Northern Ireland. Given that Labour and the Conservatives were neck and neck in the opinion polls, the Prime Minister’s primary objective was to retain his parliamentary majority beyond the next general election.218

When Bacon’s successor, Lord Stonham, visited the province in June 1968, he declared that the British government had ‘no wish to meddle’. With relations between the two governments ‘so harmonious’ and the ‘old differences in Ulster … being put aside’, Stonham had ‘faith in the future of Northern Ireland’.219 The civil service briefed their Minister to convey Westminster’s desire for reform of the Special Powers Act and the local government franchise – but not to exert any significant pressure. The Home Office offered no objections to Stormont’s plan to complete the restructuring of local government before studying the suitability of universal adult suffrage. Indeed, London was still more concerned with Northern Ireland’s economic problems than with civil rights.220 O’Neill had successfully persuaded Westminster to work through him rather than impose reform upon Stormont. In the process, however, right-wing Unionists had increasingly come to regard him as compromised. A report on discussions with grassroots members in September 1968 found that the ‘ordinary loyalist no longer believes that the Unionist Party is an effective influence on the course of events’.221

REFORMING A PROTESTANT STATE

O’Neill was a reformer. His conception of reform, however, differed from that of the British government and the various groups campaigning for civil rights. Stormont was not trying to meet the minority population half-way but pursuing a Catholic capitulation. O’Neill was adamant ‘that the constitutional position of Northern Ireland is not a matter on which there can be any compromise, now or in the future, and I must say, too, that I believe we have a right to call upon all our citizens to support the Constitution’.222 Economic and social modernisation, he assumed, would strengthen the Union and weaken its opponents. Catholics would eventually recognise that their material interests were best served by accepting partition.223 As Irish nationalism headed towards the dustbin of history, Protestant extremism would lose its justification and also fade away. With the expansion of the political centre ground, Stormont could finish dismantling the sectarian and authoritarian aspects of the regime.224 Partition would no longer need to be protected by discrimination and oppression. In stark contrast, the overwhelming majority of Stormont’s opponents saw civil rights reform as a stepping stone to reunification, not something to be delivered in full only after partition became permanent. Differences over reform, rather than its absence, brought politics into the streets at the end of the 1960s.