Despite the British Labour Party's traditional sympathy with Irish nationalism, the strategic importance of Northern Ireland during the war had impressed itself upon leading members of the Attlee government. Although Baron Chuter-Ede, the Home Secretary, surprised and annoyed some of his officials by referring to Brooke's administration as ‘remnants of the old ascendancy class… very frightened of the catholics and of the world trend to the left’,1 he soon became a strong defender of Stormont against the interventionist demands of the substantial backbench ‘Friends of Ireland’ group. The key pro-Stormont minister in London was Herbert Morrison. Like many in the Labour Party, Morrison had been unsympathetic to unionism, but the war transformed his attitude. As Home Secretary he had regularly visited Belfast and in a speech in 1943 praised the loyalty of the North, contrasting this with Irish neutrality and declaring that it was bound to have a permanent effect on the attitude of the British people to the two Irish states.2 Although he had no direct involvement in Irish policy after the war, as Lord President and Leader of the House of Commons his views were influential on other senior members of the government, particularly Attlee and Lord Addison, the Dominions Secretary. In 1946, after a private visit to Ireland during which he had met de Valera and Lemass, Morrison wrote a memorandum for the cabinet in which he advocated total support for partition whatever the consequences for Britain's relationship with Eire. On the same trip he had also gone North, where he was privately dismissive of de Valera's regime: ‘Eire was in a bad way… the Government had no real human sympathy for the people.’ He impressed on his unionist hosts the need to cultivate Chuter-Ede and emphasized that the Attlee government did not intend to continue with nationalization beyond electricity, gas and transport, praising Brooke's government for ‘behaving like moderate socialists’.3 However, the pragmatic approach adopted by Brooke in his dealings with Labour had been assailed from the start by those who, like one senior Stormont official, denounced the direction of Brooke's government between 1945 and 1950 as ‘the path of the fellow-travellers to the Socialist State’.4
For some in the government and party, the division of powers set out in the Government of Ireland Act, which had assumed a laissez-faire world, had been superseded by the pro-Keynesian policy consensus at Westminster. This meant, according to Sir Roland Nugent, the Minister of Commerce, that Britain, even when the Conservatives returned to power, would accept a large amount of government planning and direction. While this was perhaps appropriate for a largely urban and industrial society, such policies were alien to Northern Ireland, where the importance of small-scale agriculture and medium-sized family firms produced a strongly individualist culture. The only way to avoid a major constitutional crisis that would play into the hands of anti-partitionists was to negotiate a much larger degree of independence in the form of the dominion status enjoyed by Australia and Canada.5
Nugent's vision of a largely independent Ulster liberating local agriculture and industry from ‘socialistic bureaucracy’ and with lower rates of direct taxation had at least one major problem. As the only working-class member of the cabinet, William Grant, the Minister of Health and Local Government, pointed out: ‘Any suggestion that our party had deserted its Unionist principles for Conservatism, or as our enemies would say, reactionary Toryism, would almost certainly result in the loss of a substantial portion of our Unionist–Labour support.’6 That support for dominion status had by 1947 become significant within the party reflected the dominance within it of the urban and rural middle class. This group was prone to complain that the North, rather than being a net beneficiary of the post-war welfare settlement, was being over-taxed to support a range of benefits that would only serve to undermine the ‘sturdy individualism’ of the province's workers. The war years had seen a large increase in the taxation generated in Northern Ireland, a combination of increased income produced by economic expansion and increases in tax rates. In 1939–40 income tax raised in Northern Ireland amounted to £4,485 million, and by 1944–5 it had risen to £18,711 million, while customs and excise revenue had quadrupled. As a result of these buoyant revenues the Imperial Contribution, Northern Ireland's share of the cost of the UK's defence and foreign policy, had soared from £1.3 million in 1939 to £36 million in 1945.7 At the core of the support for dominion status was the longing of the province's bourgeoisie and farming class for a reactionary utopia, an effectively independent state with low taxes and minimal social services.
Brooke's increasingly hard and dismissive tone towards dominion status reflected economic, political and constitutional considerations. He was influenced by the major financial benefits that flowed to the Northern Ireland Exchequer through a series of agreements negotiated with the Treasury from 1946. These ensured that the key principles of ‘parity’ and ‘step by step’ were maintained at a time when the range of services and benefits was being extended radically. The agreements covered National Insurance (including unemployment, sickness, maternity and retirement benefits) and social services (which dealt with non-contributory entitlements including national assistance, family allowances, old age pensions and health). Essentially they allowed for the transfer of resources to Northern Ireland when it could not pay for the cost of these services out of its own tax revenues. There was also provision for the Ministry of Finance to divert revenue from the Imperial Contribution to a new capital-purposes fund to support industrial development and other projects. It was made clear to Brooke and his ministers that the price of these favourable financial arrangements was closer Treasury control of the North's budgetary process.
The economics of the dominion status case simply disregarded the fact that Northern Ireland could not maintain her post-war standards of social services on her own income, even ignoring the questions of the cost of defence and law and order. Farmers might whinge about having to pay National Insurance contributions for their labourers, yet if the province became a dominion they would also lose the benefits of price guarantees for their produce, which represented a payment from the British Exchequer of £3 million in 1948. Brooke pointed this out to a Tyrone landowner who had written to him demanding that the premier ‘cease to follow England along her socialist road to ruin’.8
Brooke had to take the possibility of defections of Protestant workers seriously. Even some of the leading proponents of dominion status in the cabinet accepted that it was not an option if it involved any deterioration in working-class living standards, a fairly damning concession to political realism. Brooke spelled out the danger to a party rally in Larne:
The government is strongly supported by the votes of the working class, who cherish their heritage in the Union and to whom any tendency towards separation from Britain is anathema… The backbone of Unionism is the Unionist Labour Party Are those men going to be satisfied if we reject the social services and other benefits we have by going step by step with Britain?9
Brooke was convinced that any move to change radically the framework of the Government of Ireland Act would reopen the Irish question at Westminster, and ‘once that Act is open for fundamental amendment, Westminster would, some would say gladly, seek to merge Northern Ireland with Éire rather than grant greater independence to Northern Ireland’ 10 This exaggerated the amount of anti-partitionist sentiment in the higher reaches of the British state. More typical would have been the reflections of a senior Home Office official on the danger that ‘if Eire workers continue to flood North there will in some future election be a Nationalist majority and a Government that wants to break with the United Kingdom and join with Eire.’ The experience of the war, which showed the vital importance of British control of the coast and ports of Northern Ireland, meant that such a prospect ‘may raise grave strategic problems’.11 This sort of thinking determined the civil service advice to the Attlee cabinet after the Free State's withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1948 that ‘it will never be to Great Britain's advantage that Northern Ireland should form a territory outside His Majesty's jurisdiction. Indeed it would seem unlikely that Great Britain would ever be able to agree to this even if the people of Northern Ireland desired it.’ 12 The government did not go as far as this, but in the Ireland Act of 1949 there was a significant strengthening of the Unionist position by the assurance that Northern Ireland would not cease to be part of the UK without the consent of the provincial parliament.
By 1948 the Prime Minister had won the economic and political arguments not only within the cabinet but also within the parliamentary party, where the leading proponent of dominion status, the MP for South Tyrone, W. F. McCoy, had the support of just two other MPs. There remained much unease at the general direction of government policy in the party at constituency level, particularly in rural areas and in the border counties. Here the conservatism of farmers was allied with a broader fear of the disruptive effects of welfarism on the local class and sectarian balance of power. One prominent Unionist in Londonderry supported dominion status as a means by which the government could ensure that the only immigrants from the South were members of its Protestant minority. In this way the extra labour needed if the city was to expand would not undermine Protestant control of its government.13 The welfare state and the associated drive by Stormont to buid up alternative sources of employment created much turbulence within unionism, and it implicitly raised major questions about the future direction of the state. McCoy's supporters were aghast not simply at the possibility of a deluge from the South but also at evidence that some working-class unionists were becoming less deferential. As one female party activist complained to the MP, ‘things had come to a pretty pass’ when McCoy's services were declined at the opening of an Orange fête in Dungannon because of his support for policies that were perceived to threaten a recently opened factory. The local Orangemen were apparently all pro-Labour.14 For many rural and border unionists, Brooke's support for the welfare state and new industrial development policies was a slap in the face for ‘loyal farmers’ who, as one wife of a Tyrone landowner put it, ‘are more valuable voters than the factory workers, whose politics may be inclined to be Red or Green!’15
Although Brooke gave no strategic ground to the government's critics, he did make a number of tactical concessions. British schemes were modified for local conditions. The legislation to create a new public housing body, the Northern Ireland Housing Trust, bitterly attacked at the Ulster Unionist Council in 1946, departed from the British pattern by providing subsidies for private builders.16 A Statistics of Trade Bill, similar to one introduced in the rest of the UK to provide government with a range of information from the private sector, including value and ownership of fixed capital, created waves of apoplexy in chambers of commerce and Unionist associations and was watered down.17 Fears of ‘Eirean infiltration’ were assuaged by persuading the British government to accept the replacement of the wartime system of residence permits with a new Safeguarding of Employment Act in 1947. This demanded that anyone who was not born in Northern Ireland or could not fulfil stringent residency requirements had to obtain a work permit from the Ministry of Labour. There was also a residency requirement of five years for eligibility for welfare benefits, something not required in the rest of the UK. The central concerns of the unionists in border areas had been addressed in Stormont's rejection of the British Local Government Franchise Act, which extended the franchise to all citizens over twenty-one. Disenfranchisement of many working-class Protestants was considered a small price to be paid if ruling ‘loyal’ minorities were to be defended against the nationalist majorities. The pressures from sections of unionism most prone to see the post-war world as full of threat damaged Brooke's limited attempts to improve relations with the minority community.
The conventional wisdom about Sir Basil Brooke's two decades in power is that a major opportunity for change was missed. Sabine Wichert expresses it well: ‘For the first time Unionism was in a position to use the chances of post-war changes to improve life in the province substantially and thereby, however indirectly, make a positive case for Stormont rule.’18 Instead, under the leadership of a rigid and sectarian Prime Minister, it was a period of social and economic change but political stagnation. More recently released archival material shows a more complex picture. It is reflected in a subtle analysis of a major conflict within Unionism in the early 1950s made by an Irish government official:
There is a definite cleavage of opinion between those like Lord Brookeborough and Mr Brian Maginess who believe that the best way of preserving partition… is to pursue ‘moderate’ policies designed to pacify the minority and impress opinion abroad, and those Unionists like Mr Minford, Mr Norman Porter and Mr Harry Midgley who consider that the only sure course lies in an uncompromising adherence to Orange and Protestant principles.19
The analysis had been prompted by the poor performance of the Unionist Party in the 1953 Stormont election: it had lost two seats and been attacked by the Independent Unionists, who had accused the Prime Minister of appeasing Catholics and nationalists. This backlash was a response to an attempt by the Prime Minister, supported by the more liberal elements in his cabinet, to tone down the more stridently sectarian aspects that the Stormont regime had acquired in the 1930s and make a direct appeal to the minority to accept partition for the economic and social benefits it delivered.
The motivation behind this shift was a dual one. The Prime Minister believed that changed national and international circumstances demanded a more emollient public face from Ulster Unionism. As Brookeborough's nationalist critics were aware, not only would future British governments have more leverage with Stormont because of the increased financial dependence attendant on integration into the welfare state, but the new US-dominated ‘Free World’ was ideologically committed to principles of democracy and freedom from discrimination that could easily be integrated into the traditional anti-partitionist repertoire. After 1945 Brooke's diaries reflect his concern to educate an often recalcitrant party in the new realities: ‘I told them that the Convention on Human Rights compelled us to be fair and I insisted that I was not going to be responsible for discrimination.’20 Much had changed from the days when he had boasted of not having a Catholic about the place.
There was more to this than concern with the province's image in the rest of the UK. Like his few liberal colleagues, he appears to have accepted that a combination of circumstances made a more inclusive form of unionism a possibility. The modernizers believed that the benefits of the welfare state had encouraged a pragmatic acceptance within the Catholic community that partition, now a quarter of a century old, was the inescapable framework within which they must work out their future. Such pragmatism was increasingly encouraged by the travails of the southern economy. Brian Maginess, the Minister of Home Affairs and the most optimistic interpreter of post-war trends, told the Prime Minister that ‘the number of Roman Catholics who are gradually coming to have faith in us, our permanent constitutional position and our fair administration, would appear to be increasing considerably.’21 Brooke publicly echoed the analysis, proclaiming during the 1951 general election campaign that ‘even in Nationalist areas electors are beginning to realise that life in British Ulster is to be preferred to existence in a Gaelic republic.’22
The sharp disparity between social conditions North and South created by Northern Ireland's integration into the British welfare state was undeniable, and while Unionists made much of it in their propaganda war with Dublin, there was a genuine, if myopic, hope that such material advantages would lessen Catholic alienation from the state. At the first post-war Orange Order celebrations Brooke referred to the new system of family allowances as one indication of the government's ‘progressive policy’, which he claimed was aimed at benefiting ‘all sections of the community’.23 From family allowances, where five shillings a week was provided for each child after the first, in comparison to two shillings and sixpence for each child after the first two in the South, to unemployment benefit, where a single man got twenty-four shillings in the North and fifteen shillings in the South and a married couple forty shillings in the North and twenty-two shillings in the South, and with equally significant differences in sickness benefits and pensions, the welfare advantages of northern citizenship were clear.24 Within three years of the end of the war the North was also enjoying a comprehensive health service, free at the point of delivery, which, as F.S.L. Lyons pointed out, was so much better than what existed in the South that little comparison was possible.25 The Education Act of 1947 began the process of developing mass secondary education in the province, which resulted in the number of secondary school students increasing from less than 20,000 in 1945 to 104,000 by the time Brookeborough resigned.26 It increased the capital grants for voluntary (i.e., Catholic) schools from 50 per cent to 65 per cent. It was complemented by the provision of grants for university students, which contributed to a more than doubling of the number of students at Queen's University in the twenty years after 1945.27
Housing was another area where there was substantial progress. According to a government survey carried out in 1943, 100,000 of the province's houses, almost a third, had to be replaced rapidly and, in order to deal fully with substandard and overcrowded dwellings, another 100,000 new houses would be needed.28 The Housing Act of 1945 provided for the first time for a large expansion of subsidized local authority housing, breaking with the pre-war policies that had relied on private enterprise for the bulk of new housing. Aware of the obstacles that a combination of sectarianism and a concern for minimizing rate bills might have on a housing drive based solely on local authorities, the government had created the Northern Ireland Housing Trust with powers to clear slums and build and let houses throughout Northern Ireland. There was a substantial increase in the provision of housing after 1945: by 1961, 95,326 new houses had been built, compared with 50,000 in the whole inter-war period.29 More than half, 56,000, were provided by either local authorities or the Housing Trust. From the outset, to the chagrin of many Unionist councillors, Housing Trust allocations were based on a points system and the system was free of allegations of discriminatory intent. Even in the much more contentious area of local authority housing, the record of a small number of Unionist-controlled authorities west of the River Bann has, because of their role in sparking the civil rights movement in the 1960s, been allowed to convey an overly black picture of the housing situation in the post-war period. Councils such as those of Dungannon, Omagh and Armagh, which built few houses for Catholics, were not typical. Recent academic studies of the question have tended to emphasize that there were no complaints against the majority of local authorities, and the veteran Nationalist MP, Cahir Healy, actually praised local authorities in Belfast, Antrim and Down for their fairness in allocating houses.30 On the eve of the dissolution of the Stormont parliament, Catholics, who comprised 26 per cent of households in Northern Ireland, occupied 31 per cent of local authority households.31 However, any improvements in the provision of public housing, and in access to such housing by Catholics, have to be set against the widespread charges of discrimination that dominated local government politics. These flowed from two features of Northern Ireland's system of local government. The first was that in twelve of the seventy-three local authorities, including the city of Derry and the county councils of Fermanagh and Tyrone, the Unionist Party controlled the councils, despite Catholics being a majority of the population. This was brought about by electoral gerrymandering, which had been a grievance since the local government boundaries were redrawn in the early 1920s. The second related to the local government franchise. This emerged as a major political issue after the 1945 Labour government abolished the householder franchise in the rest of the UK, while the Unionists retained it in Northern Ireland. The business vote, which allowed owners of business premises more than one vote in local elections, was also retained in Northern Ireland. Although this was fundamentally a piece of class discrimination – the largest group disenfranchised were working-class Protestants – it had clear sectarian implications, given that Catholics were generally less prosperous than Protestants. The franchise issue would eventually destroy all attempts to modernize and ameliorate the regime.
Even in the most contentious area of policing and public order there were signs of an attempt to soften the harder edges of the regime. Brian Maginess began to withdraw many of the regulations made under the Special Powers Act and in 1950 came to cabinet with a proposal to repeal the Act in its entirety.32 Both he and Brooke supported the policy of the Inspector-General of the RUC that, unless there was a substantial threat to public order, nationalist parades should not be interfered with. Worse from the point of view of more traditionalist unionists, Maginess supported the police when they put limits on Orange parades, most dramatically in his ban of an Orange march along the predominantly nationalist Longstone Road in County Down in 1952.33
The universalistic implications of British welfarism and the more liberal and inclusive type of unionism associated with it brought an inevitable reaction. For many unionists, particularly in the border areas, they flew in the face of the post-war resurgence of anti-partitionist politics within the North, supported as it was by a much more aggressive international campaign by the inter-party government in the South after 1948. Despite the province's less than sterling contribution on the volunteering and industrial fronts during the war, nationalist resistance to conscription and the South's neutrality fed a strong current of resentful indignation that the minority should receive any benefits from the post-war settlement. The sentiments expressed by the Unionist MP Dehra Parker in an address to County Derry Orangemen were commonplace: ‘These people who are protected under our laws are turning around and biting the hand that feeds them and are trying to blacken Ulster's good name at home and abroad.’34
The Orange Order, whose membership had declined during the depressed conditions of the inter-war period and that had forgone its traditional parades during the war, reasserted itself as a major force within unionism after 1945. The post-war expansion in state services and expenditures provided the Order with a whole range of new opportunities to pressurize party and government to ensure the proper defence of Orange and Protestant interests. The 1947 Education Act was seen by many Orangemen as a major concession to the Catholic Church, and the Order waged a rearguard action against the implementation of the Act and for the replacement of the Minister of Education, Colonel Samuel Hall-Thompson. When the Minister further enraged the unionist right and the Order by proposing in 1949 that the state should pay the employer's portion of Catholic teachers' National Insurance contributions, Orange pressure was so great that the Prime Minister had to attend a meeting of its supreme authority, the Grand Lodge of Ireland, to explain the government's position. He attempted to convince the leaders of the Order that the government had to be fair to all sections of the people and that ‘they would still have a large minority in Northern Ireland and if they were treated unfairly as an “oppressed people” it would create a bad impression in England.’ His listeners were reluctant to accept such conciliatory ideas, for, as one reverend gentleman from County Antrim put it, ‘Not a single Roman Catholic was dissatisfied with the bill. They were getting butter on their bread and they wanted more butter.’35 Brooke was able to save the bill only by sacrificing Hall-Thompson, whom he persuaded to resign and be replaced by the Labour renegade Harry Midgley, who had joined the Unionist Party in 1947. Midgley, embittered by the role the Catholic Church had played in his election defeat in the 1930s when he had been a champion of the Spanish Republic against the Church's hero Francisco Franco, had become evangelical in his opposition to ‘concessions’ to the Catholic school system.
The resignation of Hall-Thompson is illustrative of the need for a more nuanced reading of the relationship between the Order and the Unionist regime. The conventional view is one of an ‘Orange state’ in which the Order had direct representation at the party's ruling Ulster Unionist Council, and the vast bulk of Unionist activists and almost all MPs and cabinet members were members. This, it is assumed, had a determining effect on a range of government policies. In fact, while Orange pressure almost always evoked a government response, it was not always one that satisfied Orange militants.
The Prime Minister expected the leadership of the Order to take heed of the imperative of maintaining unionist unity and of not giving nationalists easy propaganda material. Thus, although he lost his Minister of Education, the legislation was unaffected, and Midgley's desire to claw back the increase in grants to Catholic schools in the 1947 Act was frustrated. It has been argued that Midgley's prejudices did have significant effects in ensuring that the Catholic sector got fewer resources than it might have from the large increase in government expenditure on education in the 1950s.36 His ministry's estimates rose from less than £4 million in 1946 to more than £12 million in 1957. In the new sector of secondary intermediate schools, by 1957–8 there were 28,000 places in state (Protestant) schools and only 5,000 places in the voluntary (Catholic) sector. There were places for more than half the Protestant primary-school leavers but for less than a fifth of the potential demand from Catholic primary schools, although these contained 44 per cent of the primary-school population.37 This was, in part at least, the price that Catholics paid for their Church's determination to maintain untrammelled control of its schools. Yet, as Unionists pointed out, the 65 per cent capital grant was higher than what was available in the rest of the UK, and a recent history of Ulster Catholics by a Jesuit referred to the provisions as generous.38 Nevertheless, a yet more generous policy might have paid political dividends.
Where Midgley's views did seriously affect policy and provide the Catholic Church with justifiable cause for complaint was in the concession to the governing committees of schools within the wholly funded sector of the right to supervise denominational religious instruction and to assess teachers on ‘faith and morals’. This substantially increased the influence of the Protestant clergy in the state sector. It was also the case that the often protracted process of getting planning approval for the building of new Catholic schools at times reflected strong grass-roots Orange pressure against what one Belfast lodge referred to as ‘this subsidy of Popery and Nationalism which are the enemies of our Ulster heritage’.39
The strongest pressure against any ‘appeasement’ policies came not from the Orange Order, which was internally divided on the issue, but from an upsurge of Protestant fundamentalism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This was the period when a young evangelical preacher, Ian Paisley, first emerged as a scourge of those in government and the leadership of the Orange Order, who were allegedly making concessions to ‘Popery’ and Irish nationalism. The initial focus of attack was the 1947 Education Act, which Paisley denounced for ‘subsidising Romanism’.40 This was linked to claims that Brooke's government was acquiescing in an invasion of southern Catholics getting jobs and buying up land in border areas. Sectarian animosities were intensified by developments in the South, where the influence of the Catholic Church on public policy was highlighted by the Mother and Child Affair in 1951, and by the preliminary report of the Irish census of 1946, which showed a decline of 13 per cent in the Protestant population in the 1936–46 period.41 In Northern Ireland the Bishop of Derry, Dr Neil Farren, made his own contribution to community relations when he referred to Catholics being ‘contaminated’ by going into non-Catholic halls for dances.42
Protestant and Orange dissatisfaction with the government's education policy was surpassed in intensity by an increasingly hysterical chorus of complaint about ‘soft’ public-order policy. Maginess's attempts to implement a more balanced approach, which culminated in the banning of the Orange march on the Longstone Road in 1952, produced a fierce reaction from the Order and from within the party at all levels. Reaction had intensified as a result of sectarian confrontations over the enthusiastic displays of the Union flag occasioned by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. Some loyalists had insisted on the display of the flag on houses and businesses in the heart of predominantly Catholic and nationalist areas like the Falls Road, and the RUC had been able to prevent riots only by persuading the loyalists to remove the flags.43 For the government's loyalist critics this amounted to a cowardly ceding of public space to nationalism. Their disquiet was magnified when nationalists in the predominantly Catholic village of Dungiven, in County Londonderry, prevented a Coronation Day march by an Orange band.44
The government's alleged ‘appeasement’ policy was the main element in the campaign of the group of Independent Unionists who made substantial inroads into the Unionist Party vote in the 1953 election. Paisley's brand of Protestant fundamentalism was influential during the election that saw Hall-Thompson defeated by Norman Porter, an ally of Paisley who was the editor of the Ulster Protestant, a monthly paper fixated on the government's ‘subsidies to Popery’. Brookeborough's response was a substantial tack to the right. Brian Maginess was shifted from Home Affairs and was never again a substantial figure in the government. In deference to loyalist fundamentalists, and against the advice of the Inspector-General of the RUC, a Flags and Emblems Act was passed in 1954. This obliged the police to protect the display of the Union flag anywhere in Northern Ireland and empowered them to remove any other flag or emblem whose display threatened a breach of the peace. The latter provision would be used by loyalist ultras to demand that the RUC remove the Irish Tricolour even when it was being displayed in a predominantly nationalist area.45
There was increasing evidence of a reluctance on the Prime Minister's part to challenge the demands and prejudices of his more extreme supporters. He was prepared to support a Family Allowances Bill in 1956, which, while increasing allowances in line with Britain, proposed to abolish payments for the fourth and subsequent children. The bill reflected the fear, particularly strong in border areas, that a higher Catholic birth-rate would lead to a Catholic majority by the end of the century. Brookeborough reconsidered only when some of the Unionist MPs at Westminster pointed out that even their Tory allies would criticize what would be seen as a blatant piece of discriminatory legislation.46 Behind the scenes he exerted himself in the interests of those Derry unionists who were afraid that if the government's industrial development policies were successful, the new industries would employ too many ‘disloyalists’.47 The Prime Minister's intervention appears to have been decisive in ensuring that the US multinational DuPont, which was planning a major investment in the city, appointed the secretary of the Derry Unionist Association as its personnel officer.48 Although the appointment did not prevent DuPont becoming a large employer of Catholics, it was an indication of Brookeborough's firm belief that he had to show a continuing responsiveness to the most reactionary voices in the party. These depressing concessions to sectarian pressures were not uninfluenced by increasing signs of a resurgence of republican militarism, which culminated in the launching of a full-scale campaign against the northern state in December 1956.
Even without pressure from Protestant fundamentalists and the IRA, there were strict limits to the more inclusive form of unionism proposed by Brookeborough and Maginess. It did little to address nationalist grievances about discrimination in the employment practices of central and local government. The charge of ‘vicious sectarian discrimination’49 ignored important dimensions of the problem: lower levels of educational attainment and the attitude of suspicious hostility adopted by some Catholics to those of their co-religionists who joined the civil service or the police.50 It also ignored the fact that at manual labour and clerical level Catholics generally received their proportionate share of public employment. Yet there could be no denying the stark under-representation of the minority in the higher ranks of the civil service, local government and the judiciary.
While discrimination was not solely responsible, it undoubtedly played a role. Brookeborough's conception of fairness seems to have entailed a belief that Catholics should have a proportionate share of the total number of public service jobs while leaving Protestant dominance of key positions unchallenged. In 1956, amidst Orange concern about Catholics employed in Belfast law courts, he asked Brian Maginess, the Attorney-General, to get figures that he hoped would soothe his critics: ‘Brian showed that in the higher grades the proportion of Unionists was very high indeed and in the lower grades not worse than three to one. I said we had to be fair in giving employment but we need not go further than that.’51 While he accepted that Catholics had a right to their share of the positions as law clerks, he was determined that there should be no more than one Catholic amongst the senior judiciary. A Catholic had been appointed to the Supreme Court in 1949, giving the minority one out of forty senior positions in the higher courts. When the Lord Chief Justice nominated a Catholic QC for a High Court judgeship in 1956, Brookeborough told him he would oppose it: ‘I did not like the idea of another Nationalist on the bench.’52 The man concerned, Cyril Nicholson, was a prominent opponent of republican violence and a proponent of a more positive engagement by Catholics with the state.
The undoubted material improvements of the post-war period – real income per head rose by one third during the 1950s – did not diminish Catholic resentment over actual or alleged discrimination in private employment. Although a largely political explanation of the Catholic economic disadvantage emphasizing the role of the ‘Orange state’ has been disputed by scholars,53 the facts of Catholic disadvantage are undisputed. There was Protestant over-representation in skilled, supervisory and managerial positions and massive predominance in industries like shipbuilding, engineering and aircraft production, which provided well-paid and relatively secure employment. Catholics were over-represented amongst the unskilled and the unemployed and crowded into industries such as construction and transport, where wages were lower and employment more insecure.54 In workplaces such as the shipyard there were strong Orange and loyalist influences on hiring, although they were countered to some degree by trade union organization. Perhaps even more important than overt pressure was the pervasive influence of kin and neighbourhood in a society with high levels of residential segregation on what was a largely informal recruiting mechanism.
Longer-term structural factors disadvantaged Catholics in the indus-trial heartland; they produced a clear east–west gradient in unemployment and living standards as well. The core of the industrial economy of the province remained the greater Belfast area. The government was accused of favouring majority Protestant areas like Belfast and the east of the province in its industrial development policies and neglecting the western periphery where Catholics were in a majority.55 In fact, the Stormont regime did show some concern for high levels of unemployment in Londonderry, Strabane and other largely nationalist towns, particularly after a visiting British Labour Party delegation in 1954 warned of the potential for civil unrest and potential subversion.56 However, the Ministry of Commerce officials involved in the government's programme of advanced factory building had major problems interesting potential investors in what were perceived to be remote areas that, although they had high percentage rates of unemployment, lacked large pools of the skilled and experienced labour that incoming industrialists often demanded. Although Belfast had the lowest rate of unemployment in the North, it also possessed the largest pool of unemployed skilled labour, and this, together with its port, meant that many new industries simply refused to look elsewhere. As the Minister of Commerce explained to the cabinet in 1956, ‘we are not in as strong a position as to be able to turn away industry that is prepared to come to Belfast or not at all.’57
Although the charge of malign neglect of the west will not hold up, there was undoubtedly a tendency to pay more attention to the large concentrations of unemployed Protestants in the east, whose dissatisfaction could mean a loss of electoral support. There was also the complacent assumption that unemployed Catholics would remain quiescent because they had a realistic grasp of conditions in the South. When, in 1954, R. A. Butler, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, questioned Stormont about the British Labour Party claim that high unemployment could lead to ‘serious political trouble’ in places like Derry and Newry, Brian Maginess dismissed the idea as ‘complete nonsense… so long as these people continue to enjoy Northern Ireland rates of unemployment benefit or national assistance… we have no fear of any kind of trouble.’58
The fear of senior Derry Unionists that new industries would undermine their control of the city by bringing in an unmanageable influx of Catholic workers had an inhibiting effect on attracting new industries. Teddy Jones, MP for the city of Londonderry constituency, was the main messenger boy for the city's Unionist hierarchy. His lobbying ensured that these fears were discussed at the highest level of the state, where a cabinet subcommittee was set up to try to ensure that indus-trial development was made compatible with continuing Unionist control of the city. Brookeborough exerted himself to ensure that government departments and the Housing Trust did all they could to address the problem.59
Apart from its effect on employment, the local Unionist power structure also impacted on the city's housing. To maintain the situation of 1961, whereby Derry was 67 per cent Catholic but still under Unionist control, it was necessary that new housing for Catholics be concentrated in the south ward, where two thirds of the city's Catholics lived.60 The need to maintain the gerrymandered system meant not simply a reluctance to house Catholics in the other two wards on the part of Derry corporation but also severe restraints on where the Northern Ireland Housing Trust could build. The result was a substantial amount of overcrowding and a long waiting list, largely Catholic, for public housing.61
The Derry situation epitomized the dynamics of the regime's sectarianism, which was more about the central government's complicity in a limited number of flagrantly unjust situations than Stormont being an activist ‘Orange state’. There were limits to Brookeborough's willingness to indulge Jones and his friends in the north-west. When he received a letter from the MP opposing any further industrial development in Derry, the perversity of this caused the Prime Minister to exclaim, ‘No government can stand idly by and allow possible industries not to develop.’62 Derry Unionists did not prevent the Stormont government supporting investment in the city in the late 1950s or Brookeborough's vigorous lobbying of London to prevent the closure of the Navy's anti-submarine training base at Eglinton, near Derry, in 1958.63 But the existence of a local authority with such deep hostility to development had serious effects on the government's industrial development policy. By the beginning of the 1960s Derry had a potentially explosive combination of unemployment and housing shortage, both of which could be given a plausible political explanation in terms of a hard-faced Unionist elite.
The reaction of the leaders of nationalism to Labour's Westminster victory in 1945 was the predictable obverse of loyalist apprehension. Attaching an exaggerated importance to Labour's already frayed tradition of supporting a united Ireland and to the formation of the backbench pressure group ‘The Friends of Ireland’ at Westminster, the ten Nationalist MPs elected to Stormont in 1945 promoted a new organization, the Anti-Partition League (APL), whose purpose was to energize and unify nationalism within Northern Ireland and press London to reopen the partition question. The role of the US as the dominant power in the non-communist world and Britain's economic and strategic dependence on America were seen as giving a new opportunity for Irish-American lobbying of Washington. Expectations of progress from London were soon dashed as the Attlee government's pro-Union sentiment became obvious. By 1947 the APL was denouncing Labour as the enemy and beginning to consider the possibility of attempting to organize the Irish vote in Britain to punish Attlee at the next election.
The Nationalist MPs returned to Stormont in 1945 were largely drawn from the Catholic rural and small-town middle class – farmers, lawyers, journalists, auctioneers and publicans – from the west and south of the province.64 Belfast nationalism had never recovered from the death of Joe Devlin and his combination of pragmatic nationalism and pro-Labour views. The city returned one Nationalist MP in 1945, the barrister T. J. Campbell, who soon shocked the party by accepting a county court judgeship. The Nationalists were subsequently never to hold a Belfast seat, and their local government base in the city had almost vanished by the early 1950s.They were pushed aside not by the more militant nationalism of Sinn Féin but by organizations labelling themselves socialist republican and, after a split in the NILP in 1949, by Irish Labour. The Nationalists' lack of appeal to the Catholic working class in Belfast was not unrelated to their strong denunciation of the welfare state, which it was proclaimed might be suitable to an industrial nation like Britain but was ‘wholly unsuitable to an area such as the Six Counties which is predominantly agrarian and underpopulated’. Echoing the Unionist right's arguments, they alleged that the ‘extravagant scale’ of benefits provided by the welfare state and the National Health Service would reduce the ‘people’ to bankruptcy.65
The Nationalists' conservatism was a northern manifestation of the Catholic Church's opposition to the welfare state for its allegedly ‘totalitarian’ dangers. It reflected the strong Catholic faith of Nationalist MPs and the central role that the clergy played in their primitive electoral machine. Despite the formation of the APL the Nationalists failed to develop a modern party organization. They concentrated on those areas where Catholics were in a majority. Six of their ten MPs were returned without a contest in 1945. The only real activity was carried on by registration committees dedicated to ensuring that all eligible Catholics were registered to vote and as many as possible of the ‘other side’ had their eligibility challenged. Candidates were chosen at conventions often presided over by a priest and composed of delegates selected at after-mass meetings. As Conor Cruise O'Brien, then an official of the Department of External Affairs, noted, ‘The nature of the structure at parish level plays into the hands of those who regard the nationalists in the Six Counties as a purely sectarian organization.’66
O'Brien acerbically commented that the APL ‘can hardly be called an organization at all; it is an invertebrate collectivity. It has an allegiance but no policy.’ Although Nationalist hopes in radical action from the Labour government were quickly disappointed, they were replaced by what would prove to be an equally empty faith in the new inter-party government in Dublin. Seán MacBride, as Minister for External Affairs, had promised to provide a right of audience in the Dáil for northern Nationalist MPs and to nominate leading northerners to the Senate.67 This seemed to offer Nationalists a form of institutional involvement in the southern state after more than two decades of much resented neglect. However, the proposal was too much for MacBride's colleagues, and it was vetoed by Costello. Nevertheless, before disillusion could set in, the torpid waters of northern nationalism were churned up by the decision to repeal the External Relations Act and declare a republic.
The President of the APL and the leader of the Nationalist MPs at Stormont, James McSparran, a barrister who was MP for Mourne, saw the purpose of attending Stormont and Westminster as highlighting the iniquities of Unionist rule – not to elicit reform but rather to embarrass the British government sufficiently to make it willing to reopen the partition issue. Rather predictably, the adoption of a much more rhetorically republican tone by the Irish government dealt a shattering blow to such hopes. The Ireland Act, by strengthening the Unionists' constitutional guarantee, produced a strong emotional reaction in the South that served only to underline the futility of constitutional anti-partitionism. The creation of the all-party Anti-Partition Campaign and its raising of funds for Nationalist candidates in the 1949 Stormont election by a collection outside Catholic churches throughout the island helped to ensure that the election was fought in the most viciously sectarian environment since the 1930s.
The inter-party government's rhetorical breach in the wall of northern nationalist isolation had an energizing effect, particularly in border areas like Derry, where Eddie McAteer, the leading APL politician in the city, attempted to give a new activist edge to anti-partitionist politics. In the pamphlet Irish Action he suggested a nationalist campaign of obstruction against Stormont involving a refusal to deal with such bodies as the Inland Revenue and the Post Office.68 More realistic was his determination to exploit Derry Catholics' still-raw resentment over the gerrymandering of the city's government. This resentment was amplified by the determination of Unionists to define the centre of the city, enclosed within its plantation walls, as a loyalist public space. The upsurge of nationalist self-confidence in 1948 led to a proposal for a large anti-partition demonstration in Derry, which was banned under the Special Powers Act. McAteer became active in challenging future bans on nationalist parades within the city centre. The local Catholic bishop, Dr Farren, was opposed to what he regarded as ‘anti-partitionist stunts’, but McAteer saw in the inevitable conflicts with the police a means of maintaining a sharp sense of Catholic grievance and counteracting the integrative effects of the welfare state.69
When the return of de Valera to power in 1951 brought a shift towards a softer line on the North and an attempt to build up practical links in areas such as cross-border cooperation on transport and electricity production, the response from the APL was hostile. McAteer denounced the ‘fraternization’ policy as shoring up partition, and when officials of the South's Electricity Supply Board were invited to meet their northern counterparts at a lunch in Derry the event was boycotted by the APL. A frustrated Conor Cruise O'Brien, charged with liaising with the APL, noted the criticisms but added ‘they did not have any alternative policy to propose… their main interest was in the local situation in Derry and in how it could be exploited for the discomfiture of Unionists rather than in any general strategy on partition.’70
McAteer's interest in more militant tactics reflected an awareness that as the sound and fury of southern-sponsored anti-partitionism dissipated in failure, it would leave the APL dangerously vulnerable to republican exploitation of the disenchantment with constitutionalism amongst a younger generation of nationalists. MacBride's presence in government had contributed to a decline in police activity against the IRA in the Republic and enabled it to regroup and be in a better position to benefit from the rise and decline of official anti-partitionist fervour. The IRA calculated that as long as violence was directed at the northern state, popular sympathy for ‘the boys’ would weaken the southern state's capacity to act against them, and a military council was created in 1951 to plan a full-scale campaign.71 Although the Ebrington Territorial Army Base in Derry was raided for arms in 1951, the return of de Valera to power appears to have weakened IRA capacity to operate in the North. The next, and much more spectacular, raid, on Gough Army Barracks in Armagh did not take place until June 1954, when a new inter-party government was in power.
Out of office, MacBride had done his best to encourage republican militancy by going North to speak in favour of the IRA dissident Liam Kelly, who won the Mid Tyrone seat in the 1953 Stormont election. Kelly, who was expelled from the IRA for unauthorized ‘operations’, went on to establish a party, Fianna Uladh (‘Soldiers of Ulster’), and a military organization, Saor Uladh (‘free Ulster’). He followed MacBride in arguing that republicans should accept the legitimacy of the Republic and direct their energies solely against Stormont. This made him popular beyond the republican hard core. Cahir Healy, whose Westminster seat for Fermanagh and South Tyrone was vulnerable to republican challenge, bewailed the support given to Kelly in the South, particularly by the Fianna Fáil-supporting Irish Press, whose editor believed, despite the policy of de Valera, that only force would get rid of the border.72
MacBride, who was supporting the new coalition from the backbenches, managed to get Kelly nominated for the Senate. At a time when the Senator was serving a year's imprisonment for seditious statements during the election, MacBride's action helped to strengthen republican self-confidence, already boosted by the Armagh raid. Although McAteer had been enthusiastic about the effects of the raid in ‘keeping up morale amongst a population which had been cowed and defeated’,73 many of his colleagues in the APL were dismayed by the signs that disillusion with constitutional politics was feeding into increasing sympathy for those prepared to use physical force. Brookeborough's concession on the Flags and Emblems Act gave the republicans a major propaganda victory when, on Kelly's release in August 1954, the RUC's attempt to prevent the flying of the Irish flag by a crowd of 10,000 that had gathered to welcome him in his home village of Pomeroy caused a major riot.74
In an evaluation of opinion in the wake of the Armagh raid, Conor Cruise O'Brien noted that while the event was ‘greeted with universal approbation and even glee by all Nationalists in the Six Counties’, many of those who applauded did so ‘in a more or less “sporting” spirit without reflecting on the consequences of the actions or the logical conclusion of the policy behind them’. Bloodshed would alienate support for the IRA.75 There was bloodshed during the next IRA arms raid, a botched attack on Omagh Army Barracks in October 1955. Five soldiers were wounded, two of them seriously. However, the absence of deaths amongst what even the Taoiseach referred to as ‘forces of occupation’, and the fact that the eight young men arrested, all southerners, were sentenced to long prison terms, ensured that moral and prudential qualms were submerged by waves of sympathy for what was widely perceived to be a group of brave young idealists.76
Sinn Féin was quick to exploit this popular mood and the APL's divided and demoralized state by putting up candidates, some of them serving time for the Omagh raid, for all the North's Westminster constituencies in the general election of May 1955. The result was a clear propaganda coup. It won Fermanagh and South Tyrone and Mid Ulster, where two of the imprisoned Omagh raiders were elected, and was able to boast of amassing the largest anti-partitionist vote ever: a total of 152,310 votes. Yet, as its APL critics bitterly but justly pointed out, this was a hollow victory. The size of the vote reflected the fact that the majority of seats had previously not been contested. As a result of Sinn Féin's intervention, Jack Beattie of the Irish Labour Party lost West Belfast to a Unionist and the other two Nationalist seats at Westminster were lost to Unionists after the disqualification of the two Sinn Féin MPs. Nor could Sinn Féin use its vote as a popular sanction for future IRA violence, as its candidates had insisted that they were not asking people to vote for the use of force.77
Nevertheless, the apparent surge in republican political fortunes did quicken the pace of IRA preparations for a northern offensive. The IRA leadership was also anxious to pre-empt a rival campaign by Kelly after Saor Uladh attacked a police barracks in Roslea in Fermanagh in November 1955. ‘Operation Harvest’ was launched in December 1956. From the start its focus was on the border counties where, it was hoped, local IRA units assisted by ‘flying columns’ from the South would destroy communications links with the rest of the province, destroy RUC barracks and, with the at least tacit support of local nationalists, create ‘liberated zones’ free of Stormont control. Whether this was envisaged as a prelude to a general nationalist uprising, perhaps provoked by a heavy-handed government response, or simply as a dramatic event that would force Britain to re-open the partition question is not clear.
The largely southern leadership of the IRA had a weak grasp of northern realities. Seán Cronin, the ex-Irish soldier who was IRA Chief of Staff and the strategist behind Operation Harvest, had some awareness of the dangers of IRA actions triggering the sort of sectarian violence that had occurred in the 1920s and in 1935. For this reason, and despite the complaints of northern IRA men, there were to be no attacks on the part-time and locally based B Specials.78 Although the RUC was defined as a legitimate target, initially IRA attacks took the form of frontal assaults on police barracks by IRA members wearing surplus US and British Army uniforms. The most famous attack of the campaign, on Brookeborough RUC station in January 1957, in which the IRA's main martyrs of the campaign, Sean South and Feargal O'Hanlon, were killed, typified this approach. Whatever the military futility and political obtuseness of this type of attack, its capacity to ignite sectarian animosities was less than the more classically terrorist attacks on police personnel by booby-traps and ambushes carried out by local IRA men in civilian dress. Although the RUC death toll was comparatively light at six, as the campaign failed to maintain its initial momentum and relied increasingly on local resources, it shifted to tactics more likely to provoke a violent loyalist response.79
That such attacks did not provoke a loyalist backlash was in large part owing to the fact that the campaign was clearly a failure and had not affected Belfast. Although Cronin has claimed that Belfast was excluded from his plan in order to avoid sectarian confrontation,80 it does not appear that this was known by the Belfast IRA, which had drawn up plans for attacks on targets ranging from RUC stations and the homes of policemen to contractors who did work for the security forces.81 RUC intelligence on the Belfast IRA was good, and the arrest, just before the campaign started, of one of their leading members in possession of important Belfast battalion documents was followed by a series of arrests that put the city's organization out of business for the rest of the campaign.82
Although the campaign was not called off until February 1962, its failure had been evident much earlier. Republicans had overestimated the degree of nationalist alienation from the Stormont regime and failed to understand that initial sympathy for what were often seen as brave but misguided idealists would not extend to the killing of policemen along with the attendant risks of loyalist retaliation. Condemnations of the campaign by Cardinal D'Alton, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and by the Taoiseach did not impress the members of the RUC Special Branch, who thought they would not have the slightest effect on the IRA.83 It was also the case that some of the local clergy in Fermanagh and Tyrone had strong republican sympathies. The defeated APL MP for Mid Ulster was bitterly critical of the clergy of the constituency, some of whom had openly supported Sinn Féin, while others had instructed local convents not to vote and refused the APL the use of parochial halls during the 1955 campaign.84 Liam Kelly's closest advisers were two local priests.85 However, as the campaign continued, denunciations of IRA membership or support made by the local bishop and the clergy in Tyrone and Fermanagh were seen as having more effect.86 Much more important in determining the attitude of the vast bulk of nationalists to the campaign was the evidence from its earliest days that it was little more than a series of pinpricks against the formidable security apparatus of the northern state. The RUC, with the aid of 13,000 Specials, the British Army and the introduction of internment, had little problem in ensuring that the idea of ‘liberated zones’ proved as illusory as the IRA appeal to the Protestants of Ulster to support Irish unity.87 MacBride's support for the inter-party government did not prevent the coalition taking immediate action against the IRA, and when de Valera returned to power he did not hesitate to introduce internment. The result was clear from the RUC's figures for major incidents, which fell from 138 in 1957 to eighty in 1958 and nineteen in 1959.88
Sinn Féin's vote in the 1959 Westminster election slumped by over a half compared with 1955, but there was little sign that the setback to militant republicanism would do anything to lift the APL out of its organizational and intellectual torpor. The success of the NILP in the 1958 elections served to underline the ineffectuality of the Nationalist MPs at Stormont. An attempt by some of the less inert MPs, together with Irish Labour and Republican MPs to dissolve the party and replace it with a new formation, was only narrowly defeated.89 The apparent collapse of the physical-force tradition and the growing dissatisfaction of a section of the Catholic middle class with the ineffectual negativism of the APL opened up the possibility of a more engaged and participationist type of nationalism. Unfortunately for the future of the North, the Unionist Party's increasing problems with its core support group, the Protestant working class, prevented a more positive engagement with these changes.
Despite the Brookeborough government's aggressively optimistic view of the economy in public, it had a much darker private assessment. For most of the period from 1945 to the early 1960s the major political foe of the regime was seen to be Irish nationalism. In its response to the anti-partitionist campaign it was easy for the government to point out the economic and social advantages that the Union brought to all the citizens of Northern Ireland. The British and American journalists who had arrived in Ireland to cover the IRA campaign were given the following riposte to nationalist tales of a northern minority thirsting for unity: ‘In agriculture, in the social services, in education, in industrial development and in our standard of living, we are streets ahead of Eire and are strengthening our lead every day.’90 The government's problem was that precisely because the majority of the electorate did not expect or desire to be part of an all-Ireland state, their frame of reference was British, not Irish. Wages and unemployment levels in the rest of the UK were the standards against which Stormont's economic record would be judged.
This was not a record of unadulterated failure. The government had to deal with an economy that suffered from remoteness, higher transport costs, and a lack of domestic supplies of raw materials and fuel for industry. Its narrow range of staple industries had overcome these disadvantages, but all of them faced major problems in the post-war period. In 1950 the province's economic structure was dominated by three industries: shipbuilding and engineering, linen and agriculture. By the beginning of the 1960s agriculture still employed 14 per cent of the province's labour force, compared with 4 per cent in the rest of the UK. It was the area's largest employer of labour, although its workforce had declined from 101,000 in 1945 to 73,000 in 1960. This was the inevitable result of mechanization (there were 850 tractors in 1939 and 30,000 in 1960) and the elimination of smaller, uneconomic holdings, which the government encouraged. The result was an 80 per cent increase in output by 1960.91 There were also improvements in productivity in linen as it faced competition from low-cost, ex-colonial producers and the expansion of the synthetic fibre industry. Substantial amounts of state support for modernization were given through a Re-equipment of Industry Act introduced in 1950. Such modernization entailed a substantial amount of rationalization and concentration of production and the inevitable closing of plants and shedding of labour. Between 1954 and 1964 the number of jobs in plants employing twenty-five workers or more (the bulk of the industry) fell from 56,414 to 33,957.92
Unlike linen, shipbuilding had maintained its role as the region's preeminent employer of skilled male labour up to the end of the 1950s. In 1950 more than one tenth of the North's manufacturing jobs and one fifth of those in Belfast were in Harland and Wolff. Employing 21,000 in four yards on the Queen's Island, it was the largest single shipbuilding complex in the world. Until 1955 its major problem was a steel shortage due to the rearmament programme. Subsequently, as with the rest of British shipbuilding, it came under increasing pressure from more productive continental and Japanese yards. By 1960 the yard was still employing over 22,000 workers and the unemployment rate amongst shipyard workers was just 2.5 per cent, a third of what it was in British centres such as Tyneside and the Clyde. But, at a time when world shipbuilding capacity was double what was required, the cabinet's employment committee was anticipating between 5,000 and 8,000 redundancies.93 The crisis in shipbuilding turned out to be much worse: employment was slashed by 40 per cent, or 11,500 jobs, between 1961 and 1964. It would coincide with fears of job losses in aircraft production at Short and Harland, whose workforce had fluctuated significantly in the post-war period and stood at 6,900 in 1962.94 It was not part of either of the two main groups into which the British government planned to rationalize aircraft production, and its future appeared increasingly precarious. The problems created for Brookeborough's government by the decline of the staple industries were intensified by the province's demography. A birth-rate that was much higher than anywhere else in the UK fed through into a natural increase of 15,000 per annum throughout the 1950s.95
Pressure on the job-creating capacity of the economy was to an extent relieved by the direct and indirect effects of government policy. Although its contemporary critics and some later commentators have criticized Brookeborough's administration for passivity, there is considerable evidence of a long-standing concern to counter the anticipated decline of traditional industries by a strategy of diversification based on the attraction of external investment. In 1944 the government had decided that inter-war legislation aimed at attracting new industry was inadequate and replaced it with the Industries Development Act, which aimed to attract British, American and European firms by providing desirable packages, including advance factories, newly built factory premises at low rents, the necessary infrastructure and grants of up to one third of capital cost, which could be exceeded for ‘desirable’ projects.96 This legislation put the North in a favourable position compared to British regions suffering similar problems, which, under the 1945 Distribution of Industry Act, were subject to rigorous Treasury control. No advance factories were built in Britain between 1947 and 1959.97
By 1961 almost 48,000 new jobs had been created, an average of 2,500 per annum for the 1950s. New employment was also created by the substantial expansion of the public sector, particularly in the areas of health and education. Higher incomes were reflected in an expansion in the distributive trades. The total number of insured employees in the province increased from 438,000 in 1950 to 449,000 in 1960, broadly in line with the trend in the rest of the UK.98 However, despite these positive developments, unemployment in the province never fell below 5 per cent and averaged 7.4 per cent for the decade, four times the UK average and, more significantly, higher than the figures for other regional black spots such as Merseyside and Scotland.99 The position would have been even worse had it not been that net migration was running at 9,000 per annum.100
Brookeborough, although already sixty-two in 1950 and subject to recurrent bouts of illness after an operation for a stomach ulcer in 1955, was initially quite effective in extracting extra resources from Westminster to mitigate the problem. He mercilessly exploited metropolitan gratitude for the North's wartime role and the more fundamental consideration that it was still of strategic value to the UK, given Irish neutrality. British annoyance at Dublin's anti-partition campaign also helped. In 1949, when unemployment in Northern Ireland was at 6.5 per cent, Attlee had written to his Home Secretary noting how much worse the situation was there in comparison with the rest of the UK and adding, ‘It is, of course, of considerable political importance that we should do all we can to ensure full employment in Northern Ireland.’101
When the unemployment figure rose to a peak of 11 per cent in 1952 as a result of an international slump in textiles that hit linen badly, Brookeborough descended on Churchill and his ministers demanding a range of special measures. Although the Treasury and Board of Trade resisted, the Home Office stressed the political and strategic importance of helping ‘Sir Basil’:
The problem of unemployment in Northern Ireland was fundamentally different from that in this country because political considerations were involved which did not arise here. The adjacent Republic was politically hostile and there was in Northern Ireland a large dissident minority. Large numbers of unemployed constituted a potential source of serious civil disturbance, which might even lead in the long run to civil war.102
Brookeborough went home with extra Admiralty orders for ships, subcontract work for Short and Harland, and new textile orders from the Ministry of Defence. He also extracted the setting up of a joint committee of British and Stormont officials to investigate possible long-term solutions to the problem. There was strong resistance from the Treasury and other Westminster departments to many of the proposals that the Stormont officials put forward, particularly the remittance of employers' National Insurance contributions, but eventually a subsidy for the indus-trial use of coal and support for the creation, in 1955, of a Northern Ireland Development Council chaired by Lord Chandos were conceded.103
More important than these essentially palliative measures was the acceptance by the Treasury of the principle of ‘parity plus’. It could be argued that this principle was implicit in the post-war agreements that underlay the extension of welfarism to the province, but the formal statement of the new principles underlying the financial relationship between Belfast and London strengthened Brookeborough's hand. In 1954 the Treasury representatives on the Joint Exchequer Board accepted not simply parity of social services and standards but the necessity to incur special expenditure to make up a substantial leeway on such services and amenities as housing, schools and hospitals. Crucially, it accepted the need for special expenditure to offset the economic disadvantage suffered by Northern Ireland by reason of geographical remoteness.104 The result was in evidence by the end of the decade. In 1960 capital expenditure on hospitals in Northern Ireland over the previous five years was 12 per cent of the UK total at a time when the North's share of the population was 2.5 per cent. The share of the university building programme was 4.6 per cent; of roads, 5.3 per cent; and of housing, 3.6 per cent.105 The success of Brookeborough and his officials in pushing the North's case for special treatment was reflected in the decline of the Imperial Contribution, which hovered between £17 and £20 million at the beginning of the 1950s but by 1961 had fallen to £8.7 million at a time when the annual subvention from Westminster had reached £44.8 million.106
If, despite this, the Prime Minister was under increasing political pressure on the unemployment question, it was in part because of rising popular expectations. The government's constant emphasis on how much better economic and social conditions were in the North compared to the Republic cut little ice with many of its trade union supporters, who were, like 80 per cent of northern trade unionists, in British-based unions and whose fundamental economic, social, and cultural frames of reference were set by developments in the rest of the UK. The regime was the victim of its own propaganda, which, in response to the dominion status lobby, had emphasized Stormont's distinct powers and its relative autonomy from Westminster. This played into the hands of the NILP, whose solution to the unemployment problem was a more activist government.
The fundamental problem was that Stormont's demands for special treatment were regarded in London as having been quite substantially indulged by the mid 1950s; and not even the onset of the IRA assault softened this attitude. To add to Brookeborough's problems, the UK investment boom of 1954–5 and what the Treasury perceived as inflationary pressures and a threat to the balance of payments led to a credit squeeze and interest rate rise. This had a severe impact on the linen industry in Belfast at the same time as UK firms were reluctant to consider new investments in the province. Unemployment, which stood at 6 per cent in June 1956, rose to 10 per cent in the same month in 1958.
The NILP had positioned itself skilfully to benefit from the government's problems. It had been devastated in the 1949 Stormont elections because of its internal divisions on the border, which allowed Unionists to depict it as a crypto-republican party. Its response was to take a pro-Union position, which led to the loss of its anti-partitionist elements, who then went on to set up branches of the Irish Labour Party in West Belfast, Derry and Newry.107 Its leading members lost few opportunities to denounce the ‘Franco state’ in the South and to support the government in the use of internment and the Special Powers Act against the IRA. It also benefited from a critique of government economic policy in The Economic Survey of Northern Ireland, by two Queen's University economists, published in 1957. This had been commissioned by the Minister of Commerce in 1947 and delivered to his successor in 1955. Its publication had been delayed by the government for fear that it would buttress the NILP's attack, although the Minister of Commerce, Lord Glentoran, was able to quote an Economist review that described the Survey as giving ‘a picture of the remarkable adaptation of the Northern Irish economy to the pace set by British economic progress – the adaptation of a hardy plant to an unpromising soil’.108
What the NILP extracted from the Survey was the idea that the various aids given to industry had not had a sufficient pay-off in terms of jobs created. This was linked to the accusation of a nepotistic link between the government, the Unionist Parliamentary Party and local industrialists, in particular those involved in linen production. In the 1950s twelve of the fourteen Unionist MPs for Belfast constituencies had links with traditional industry as proprietors or managing directors.109 It was certainly the case that pressure from local manufacturers, who feared that the Industries Development Act would bring in new firms that would compete for labour and force them to pay higher wages, had led to the introduction of the Re-equipment of Industry Bill in 1950, which compensated local firms by providing grants for new equipment and modernization. When the uptake on this was judged insufficient, a new and even more generous scheme, the Capital Grants to Industry Act, was introduced in 1954. Although modernization almost inevitably implied job losses, there was a widespread belief, shared by Terence O'Neill, who was Minister of Finance at the end of the 1950s, that the ‘linen lords’ were only interested in using government aid to buy up rivals and shut them down.110
Class-based tensions within the Unionist electoral bloc were nothing new, but they were given increased potency by a relaxation of communal tension in Belfast, where the collapse of the Nationalist Party and the absence of any significant IRA activity made it easier for Protestant workers to consider voting Labour. As early as the 1953 Stormont election, the Unionist Party headquarters at Glengall Street was bemoaning the fact that ‘Our Party is losing the support of the lower paid income group and the artisans to the NILP.’ The lack of any working-class Unionist MPs and the domination of Belfast Unionist representation by the local bourgeoisie were seen as important in encouraging defections. Whatever reserve of working-class deference still existed was weakened by social change, as the heartlands of proletarian Unionism began to lose population to new housing estates in which the party had failed to establish a presence. Most significantly, Glengall Street noted that ‘the “Big Drum” which has heretofore dominated Unionist politics' had lost its energizing power for at least a section of the working class.111 In the 1958 election the NILP won four new seats in Belfast. Although two of these seats, in Oldpark and Pottinger, had a sizeable Catholic working-class population, the other two, Victoria and Woodvale, were solidly Protestant. The lesson was spelt out in a ministerial discussion of unemployment:
The maintenance of a Unionist government at Stormont depends to an increasing degree on the success or otherwise of its economic policy. Particularly in the city of Belfast voters are considering such matters as unemployment when deciding how to cast their vote and unless success is achieved in reducing the present total of unemployment… the Unionist Party cannot hope to retain the allegiance of the working class population.112
With the strong prospect of serious redundancies in shipbuilding and the aircraft industry, an air of desperation descended on Brookeborough's ministers. The usually cautious O'Neill was so exercised by the threat that these redundancies ‘would kill us off’ that he may have reduced his colleagues to stunned silence by a proposal to drain Lough Neagh, the largest expanse of inland water in the British Isles, to create a new ‘county Neagh’ – this would be leased out in hundred-acre farms and have a new town at its centre.113 The redundancies, when they came, were almost as bad as feared, and they exhausted Brookeborough's declining capacity to bring back good economic news from London. Early in 1961 Harland and Wolff announced that 8,000 men would be paid off in the summer, and later in the year Short and Harland declared that, because of lack of orders, there was a real danger of closure, threatening another 7,000 jobs. The year also saw the closure of the largest linen mill in Belfast, which employed 1,700 and had received a substantial amount of government assistance.114
Although the NILP did not win any new seats in the 1962 election, its share of the vote rose to 26 per cent from 16 per cent in 1958. It had fielded more candidates, but there was evidence, accepted by Unionist headquarters, that it had consolidated its position in Belfast, where its total vote in the sixteen constituencies it contested was 58,811 while the Unionist vote in the same constituencies was 69,069.115 The inroads made by the NILP into the core working-class constituency of Unionism was recognized by Sir George Clark, Imperial Grand Master of the Orange Order, in a post-election speech in which he accepted that the election showed that the government needed a greater sense of urgency in dealing with unemployment. He also admitted that the Order contained ‘a great many Labour men who, while wearing a sash, nevertheless had a different political outlook’, adding that he had no quarrel with such members.116 Clark and some other leading Unionists recognized that the NILP had to be fought on its chosen terrain and that ‘banging the drum’ would be insufficient.
The problem was that Brookeborough, who was seventy-two when the 1960s began, increasingly appeared to have hung on to power too long, particularly when de Valera stepped down in 1959. Although Lemass was already sixty when he became Taoiseach, his promotion of a radical shift in the state's economic policies and the launch of the first economic development programme undermined the more complacent Unionist assumption about southern ‘backwardness’ and strengthened the critics of Brookeborough's lack of a long-term strategy for the northern economy. His semidetached style of government, which had allowed him plenty of time for running his estate in Fermanagh, the indulgence of his beloved fishing and shooting, and occasional long winter cruises in sunnier climates, was increasingly seen as dangerously anachronistic. He became the butt of an effective NILP campaign against a ‘part-time’ and ‘amateur’ government. The death of the talented and moderate Maynard Sinclair in the Princess Victoria ferry disaster in 1953 had removed his most likely successor, while the marginalization of Brian Maginess, who left the cabinet to become Attorney-General in 1956, meant that the government had no member who would have been a substantial enough figure to suggest an earlier exit to the Prime Minister. Four decades of power had inevitably bred complacency. The large number of uncontested seats produced many backbenchers whose only imperative was to satisfy the parochial and often sectarian pressures from their constituencies. The sectarian tone of Unionist politics had deterred a substantial section of the Protestant middle class from political involvement and drained the already shallow pool of ability from which Unionism could draw.117
Brookeborough had successfully weathered the arrival in power of Labour and the onset of the welfare state. Unionism now faced new threats on both the economic and political fronts that were beyond him. His success in extracting resources in the 1950s had reflected his ability to argue that the security interests of the UK as a whole would be threatened by economic decline in Northern Ireland and the possible political unrest it would stimulate. His charm and strong familial links with the metropolitan elite had helped Ulster's case at Westminster. By the end of the decade, with signs of the IRA's defeat and a new and apparently more pragmatic nationalism in the South, British governments had less reason to be concerned about the political and security implications of the North's unemployment figures. At the same time, Brookeborough's old allies were passing from the scene, and he was increasingly perceived in London as a conservative obstacle to the modernization of the province's politics and better relations with Dublin.
In 1961 he had been able to extract a joint-study group of Stormont and Westminster officials chaired by Sir Robert Hall to look once again at unemployment. The Northern Ireland members suggested that the Treasury provide an employment subsidy to all manufacturing concerns in Northern Ireland, but the idea was summarily dismissed.118 When the Hall Report was published in October 1962, making it clear that there was a marked reluctance to grant more special assistance to bail Stormont out of a local political crisis, Brookeborough was finished. His successor would replace demands for short-term palliatives with ambitious plans for regional planning and modernization. Unfortunately, the energy and ingenuity that were used to transform thinking on economic policy were not extended to the area of community relations.