This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861
THERE WERE a number of sparks blowing about the Six Counties in the 1960s, any one of which might have ignited a conflagration. In the event the one that did was the housing question. We will examine later the statistics of the electoral system which helped to shape the housing issue, but let us for a moment eschew the statistical approach for the human one. We will begin our journey through the labyrinth of the north of Ireland’s troubles by following in the footsteps, or more accurately the cycle path, of one Co. Tyrone man and his family as, through the generations, they moved towards the most significant confrontation on the housing problem by Catholics since the state was set up.
John Currie had not realised that he was cycling towards Northern Ireland’s destiny that evening in 1945. All he was aware of was that his family was growing. He already had four children and he correctly anticipated that he could expect many more. (He eventually had eight boys and three girls.) He knew he needed a new house urgently. The man to see about the provision of this necessity was Moses Busby, a prosperous Protestant farmer, who was also chairman of the local rural district council. Although Busby was not only a Unionist and an Orangeman, but was even rumoured to be a Freemason, he had the reputation amongst Currie’s fellow Catholics of being a ‘decent enough old sort’.1 Perhaps he would prove helpful. Amongst the other changes which the ending of World War II had brought to Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, had been a slight but noticeable increase in the provision of public housing. Also, Currie knew that some houses were becoming vacant on an existing estate. Perhaps one of these might be given to him. On the face of it he had an irrefutable case. As he cycled along, Currie rehearsed the arguments he intended to deploy: the size of his family; the length of time for which he had been waiting to be rehoused, since before the war; the unsuitability of his present two-bedroomed home. Those facts did not constitute a problem. The fact of his religion did. Were he a Protestant he would have been rehoused long ago.
Currie was not normally resentful about being discriminated against. That was simply the way things were, like the fact that although he had given some of his children Irish names like Sean and Seamus, these would only be accepted for registration by the authorities in their English forms of John and James. There was no point in railing against such matters. One might as well feel aggrieved at the way that, approaching the July marching season, his Orange neighbours not only paraded ostentatiously with banner, fife and drum in commemoration of King William’s victory over the Catholics of yore, they also became distant and withdrawn from the Catholics of the day. They ceased to either speak or mingle with them until after the ‘twalfth’, when normal Irish friendly relationships would re-establish themselves for another year as though nothing had happened. If one elected to live in the Six Counties, rather than emigrate as so many were forced to, then one accepted the system. He earned a reasonable income from his job as a lorry driver. It at least enabled him to live in the land of his forebears, a pleasant land, free of crime, where traditional family values flourished and he and his wife, Mary, could bring up their children in the fear and love of God and of His Blessed Mother.
As befitted a man on an important occasion, Currie had worn his Sunday suit for the interview with Busby, who indeed turned out to be decent enough. They got on together as Christians should. Then, having explained his mission, Currie, as the liturgy demanded, discreetly produced a five-pound note, ‘to make up for any trouble’ that his request might cause. Busby graciously accepted the large white English banknote, folded it carefully, put it away, and, assuring his Catholic caller that he was ‘a dacent man’, delivered his verdict on Currie’s request: ‘The next time one of your own leaves a house vacant I’ll see that you get the first offer.’
Currie cycled home, more slowly than he had set out. He made no complaint about Busby’s reaction, but, as he was hanging up his Sunday suit, he said to Mary: ‘Next time I’ll find a better use for my good five-pound note than giving it to Moses Busby.’ Five pounds was, after all, a week’s wages in those days. But somehow Currie saved up £400 with which he one day bought a house standing on an eight-acre farm. His eldest child, a boy, Austin, took full advantage of another change brought about by the war, the Butler Education Act of 1944. He studied, became eligible for a free university education at Queen’s University, Belfast, and in 1964 won a by-election in East Tyrone as a Nationalist candidate, which made him at twenty-five the youngest MP ever to enter Stormont.2
Dungannon was an important town in his constituency. Apart from the historical significance of being the starting point for both the Irish Volunteers in the eighteenth century and the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s rebirth in the twentieth,3 it had the contemporary relevance of being the home of Dr Conn McCluskey and his wife Patricia, both Catholics. In January of 1964, the year in which Currie entered Parliament, the McCluskeys had founded the Campaign for Social Justice. The aims of the CSJ were to collect and disseminate accurate statistical data on how discrimination in all its various forms worked in the Six Counties: in electoral practices, such as the existence of a property vote, or the redrawing of electoral boundaries so that Catholic voting power was nullified; in employment, in public appointments, and, in what as we will shortly see was the keystone of the arch, in housing. Here is Dr McCluskey’s description of the results of discrimination in Dungannon, in the year of the CSJ’s foundation:
…most of the good shops were owned by Protestants. There were two factories in which the lower echelons were Catholic, but they had no managerial representations in the factories. There were two secondary schools: St Patrick’s, the Catholic institution, and the Protestant Royal, a fine school. But the difference between the Royal and St Pat’s was that the people there knew that its pupils were going to get the jobs when they were educated… because of what had happened before, the worst farms were in the mountainy parts and they were the Catholic farms. The good lowland farms were mostly Protestant because they had owned them since the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The picture was one of Catholic workmen looking after the roads under a Protestant supervisor or foreman… among solicitors and doctors there was a fair allowance on each side, because people could choose their school and they could choose their doctors. This was one of the few areas where there was equal treatment. It was a middle-class thing, the golf links, there wasn’t the opportunity to discriminate and the community got on well together.
We can see by looking at the career of Michael Farrell that McCluskey’s description applied not merely to Dungannon but all over the Six Counties. Farrell, whose destiny was to intertwine with that of Austin Currie and the McCluskeys, played a significant role in the northern upheavals at a crucial stage. Like the McCluskeys and the Curries he no longer lives in Northern Ireland, but in Dublin, where, at the time of writing, he is a prominent lawyer and historian.4 Growing up in south Co. Derry, he had a somewhat untypical childhood, in that both of his parents came from the south and therefore had no inherited knowledge of the northern situation. He learned about Six County life ‘from the other kids’ and says that:
The two things that came across very clearly were one, the almost apartheid nature of society. Though people, Protestant and Catholic, lived side by side literally, there was very little contact between them. Secondly you learned very quickly from the other children at school that Catholics couldn’t get jobs in a whole range of occupations. There was no point in applying for jobs under the local authorities or within the Northern Ireland civil service for instance. Nor in a whole lot of private employments, the shipyard and the aircraft factory [Short Brothers, and Harland and Wolff in Belfast] and so forth. That was just the inherited folklore of all the children around, they didn’t bother applying for these jobs, they were just closed to them.
An important part of Farrell’s childhood folklore concerns the B-Specials, an official, armed Protestant militia, which during his formative years was an all-pervasive feature of the Six County scene:
I was a teenager during the IRA campaign of the 1950s. There was a very heavy B-Special presence in our area and I remember the oppressive nature of their patrolling. My father had no political involvement whatsoever. He was a very peaceable individual. But I remember him getting very annoyed at the aggressive behaviour of the B-Special patrols who would stop people [i.e. Catholics] and question them. Even when they were neighbours and knew their names well, they would demand their names and addresses and identification and so on. It just gave an impression that the Catholic community were an oppressed and suppressed group to whom all sorts of avenues were blocked and who had no redress against that.
‘No redress’? Leaving aside the question of the responsibility and jurisdiction of the two parliaments involved, those in London and Belfast, to which we shall advert in the relevant context, what about the ordinary structures of democracy? Could a Catholic like Currie Senior not have gone along for example to a local representative, a Nationalist, rather than someone like Moses Busby, and had his problems addressed at county council level? The answer is that he could perhaps have had his problems raised, but not solved. Farrell explains why:
Our area had a small Catholic majority which voted Nationalist. Prior to partition the local rural council, under the system of proportional representation, had been Nationalist-controlled. But the abolition of PR after the state was set up, and the practice of gerrymandering and discrimination, which went hand in hand with the abolition, meant that for all of my youth it was a Unionist-dominated council. No Catholics were employed by the local council and the bulk of council housing was allocated to Protestants. Gerrymandering meant that electoral boundaries were drawn in such a way that an area with a Nationalist majority would be hived off to form a single electoral unit. Then two areas with very small Unionist majorities would be set up as separate electoral units.
How this system worked in practice can best be seen in Derry City, the capital of the county Farrell grew up in. It was also the storm centre where, in a real sense, the gerrymandering system blew up in the Unionists’ faces, bringing British troops on to the streets in 1969 and thus inaugurating the contemporary Irish Troubles. The population of Derry was roughly two-thirds Catholic to one-third Protestant, and the Catholic population kept growing. Nevertheless, the population increase did not mean that the Catholics could ever overtake the Protestants. Successive gerrymanders repeatedly redrew the electoral boundaries, so that the Unionist one-third were able to control the city. The results were that Catholics could not get municipal jobs or houses. Unemployment was rife and Farrell recalls:
…appalling slum conditions in Derry and yet people just couldn’t get houses. They had to live in converted army huts. They had to live a couple of families to a house and so on.
The enforcement of these conditions was not due to an inherent cruelty on the Unionists’ part. Inefficiency played a role, because they did not build enough houses anyway for either Catholic or Protestant, but, overall, housing policy had a basic political goal. It could be summed up in the same word that governed Sir James Craig’s action in turning down the recommendation of a British cabinet committee in 19195 which offered not a six- but a nine-county Ulster. The word is: control. The principle of adult suffrage – that is, one man, one vote – was severely distorted in Six County elections. The electoral methodology employed will shortly be described, but here it should be noted that, bearing in mind the fact that most business and property was owned by Protestants, although long abolished in England both business and property votes still counted in local elections when Austin Currie entered Parliament. The general vote was confined to the occupier of a house and his wife. Occupiers’ children over twenty-one, and any servants or subtenants in a house, were excluded from the local franchise. Austin Currie explained how the system worked and how it affected him as a young MP:
Housing was the key to the vote. The vote at local government elections was restricted to property owners and their spouses. Or to tenants of public authority houses and their spouses. I was an MP at Stormont. I could just as well have been an MP at Westminster. I had a vote in general elections to either Stormont or Westminster. But I did not have a vote in local elections to elect councillors because I wasn’t married and lived at home with my mother and father. My mother and father were the only two in our large household who had a vote in council elections.
The purpose of the exercise was to ensure that Unionists had continued supremacy in the areas where in fact they were in the minority. Places like Derry, Armagh, Dungannon, Enniskillen and so on. This was the only way in which the Unionists could remain in control. That’s why housing was such a fundamental matter. The allocation of a public authority house was not just the allocation of a house. It was the allocation of two votes. Therefore, in marginal areas, he who controlled the allocation of public authority housing effectively controlled the voting in that area.
For four years after his election Austin Currie struggled within the confines of the parliamentary system to improve the housing system in particular and the lot of Catholics in general. Like other young Catholics of his background whose names we will become familiar with throughout this book, such as John Hume, and Bernadette Devlin, he had presentational skills and a confidence acquired through his Butler Act education. The confidence was often more apparent than real. ‘I was shaking, ’ he recalls, ‘when I stood up to ask my first question in Stormont.’ It was about discrimination and was addressed to the imposing figure of Lord Brookeborough, the then Six County prime minister. However, the fact that Currie was wearing a new suit gave him the extra impetus he needed to master his fears and speak out clearly. After that, he said, ‘I felt that if I could confront Lord Brookeborough I could confront anyone.’ Confront the system he did, as, bolstered by the McCluskeys’ research, he went on to build up a justifiable reputation for being courageously articulate. However, he achieved little in the way of tangible reform. In his own way he was traversing the same fruitless political cycle path which his father had travelled to see Moses Busby twenty years earlier.
Then, in June 1968, he stepped outside the confines of Parliament to make his protest. There was talk of civil rights in the air. The activities of students on the continent of Europe, and of Martin Luther King and his followers in America, were beginning to work their alchemy in Northern Ireland also. A specific civil rights issue came to hand in the improbably picturesque setting of Caledon, a tiny, stone-built Co. Tyrone town that looks as though it was transported to Ireland from the estate of some great English landowner. In and around Caledon there were as usual many Catholics waiting patiently and uselessly for a council house. The housing list contained a total of 269 names; many of them had been on the list for ten years and more. Some of the families had as many as fourteen children. All of them were outraged when the eighteen-year-old Protestant secretary of a nearby Unionist politician was awarded a house when she became engaged – to a local B-Special.
It was decided that, for once, something positive should be done about this injustice. Inspired by the new ideas of protest emanating from the civil rights movements abroad, two aggrieved local families, the Goodfellows and the McKennas, staged squats in vacant council houses. The squats, promptly and brusquely dealt with by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, raised ripples of local interest only. But then Austin Currie decided that the time had come for such a protest and personally led a third sit-in. This one caught the headlines because Currie was an MP. It is generally regarded as the first significant direct action initiative of what was to grow into a historic civil rights movement. For the Catholics in the Six Counties of north-eastern Ireland, the era of Bicycling to Busbys was drawing to a close. The Curries and their like had decided to sit down and be counted.
By now readers should have a reasonable grasp of the ‘feel’ of Catholic grievance and what it focused on. But the Unionist and British Establishment is not without its apologists. Even at the time of writing, subtle attempts continue to be made to suggest that these injustices were somehow exaggerated and unreal. A professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Steve Bruce, who has become something of a media figure through his writings about loyalism and Unionists, has stated that:
The civil-rights slogan ‘One Man – One Vote’ was aimed not at domestic audiences but at London, Paris and Washington, and it was successful in mobilising international support for the movement.6
Here is the precise statistical background to the system at which the slogan ‘One Man – One Vote’ was addressed. The 1961 Census Report for Northern Ireland gives the population as 1, 425, 462. Computed by the normal standards of adult suffrage, i.e. ‘one man – one vote’, the electorate for Westminster in 1964, the year Currie entered Stormont, was 891, 107. However, if one consults the electoral register for that year (published on 15 February), a different statistical picture emerges for what might be termed the ‘domestic’ electorate. This retained the business and property votes which ‘the UK mainland’ had abolished and broke down as follows:
Stormont Electors
| Adult suffrage | 885, 514 |
| University second vote | 13, 763 |
| Business second vote | 12, 663 |
| Total | 911, 940 |
Local Government Electors
| Residents and spouses | 648, 417 |
| Business second vote | 6, 467 |
| Company votes | 3, 894 |
| Total | 658, 778 |
One can see at a glance how the inbuilt unfairness of the system distorted both sets of statistics to a greater or lesser degree. In the case of Stormont, the university votes, overwhelmingly Protestant, favoured the Unionists. They obtained a vote both in the perpetuation of a hold on the four university seats and in their local constituencies. In local government they secured a property vote, for both husbands and spouses, on premises valued at £10 and over. They thus legally obtained more votes than there were voters on the electoral lists. (Illegal methods, for instance the widespread custom of personation, not confined to Unionists by any means, served to create the impression that in Northern Ireland the dead somehow reached beyond the grave at election time.) As a former Stormont minister has written, no one in the Unionist Party ‘considered it incongruous that 80, 000 people in Belfast should be denied a Local Government vote while 12, 091 graduates at the University could claim a sizeable parliamentary representation’.7 The Queen’s University franchise gave it four seats out of fifty-two. At least two of the four were invariably Unionist. By redrawing constituency boundaries, or by giving equal parliamentary representation to widely disparate population and geographical areas, it was possible to obliterate the Catholic vote. For example, Co. Antrim had a population of 273, 905. Of these, 66, 929 were Catholics. Yet all seven Stormont seats went to Unionists. Mid-Down had 41, 402 electors but was given equal representation with Belfast’s Dock division, which had only 7, 612. The discrimination was even greater in the case of local government where, as can be seen in the table above, some 220, 000 voters were disenfranchised from the number shown on the Westminster lists. How this worked in practice is best seen in Derry, important to the Unionists in both psychological and political terms. Derry, the Maiden City, was the scene of that historic gesture of ‘conditional loyalty’, the shutting of the gates in the faces of King James’s troops by apprentice boys who defied the governor of the city, Lundy. Lundy is today burnt annually in effigy by the Protestants of Derry, while the apprentice boys’ memory is correspondingly venerated. Deep in the Unionists’ psyche there still lurks a hope that some contemporary apprentice boys will arise to make a similar gesture in the faces of oncoming liberalism, Dublin, Irish-America, the media, and betrayal from London.
However, in the 1960s Derry’s ruling Unionists had more tangible reason to believe in the continuing supremacy of their cause than ancestral yearnings. The 1961 census gives the population of Derry City as 53, 744. Of these 36, 049 were Catholic and 17, 695 Protestant. The franchise stipulations cut this two-to-one Catholic ratio so heavily that only 14, 325 Catholics were entitled to vote. However, this still represented a sizeable majority over the 9, 235 Protestants who had the suffrage. But incredibly enough, this numerical superiority was turned into a minority on the council by an exercise in gerrymandering. The town was divided into three wards: North, Waterside and South.
North contained 6, 711 voters, divided in the Protestants’ favour in a ratio of two to one. It returned eight representatives, all of them Unionists. Waterside had 5, 459 voters, again roughly divided in the Protestants’ favour by a majority of two to one. It returned four representatives, all Unionist. This left some 11, 390 voters penned into the South Ward, which returned eight representatives. Of these voters, 10, 130 were Catholics. Understandably, this ten-to-one majority returned a clean sweep of Catholic representatives. But when the Catholic South Ward’s eight seats were placed against North and Waterside’s combined return of twelve seats, the majority population of Catholic Derry was outvoted 12–8 and housing policy remained in Unionist hands. What this meant in practice was that in 1965 – while there were only a handful of unhoused Protestants – there were 2, 000 Catholic families on the city’s waiting lists. Of the 177 employees of Londonderry Corporation, 145 were Protestants, earning a total of £124, 424. Thirty-two were Catholics, earning £20, 424. Derry is the microcosm which enables the reader to understand why the Catholic one-third of the north’s population furnished 58 per cent of the north’s emigration between 1937 and 1961. Emigration was the reason why the ratio of Protestant to Catholic remained at the same two-thirds:one-third ratio which had obtained when the Government of Ireland Act was passed forty years earlier in 1920 – despite the high Catholic birth rate.
At this stage the question which logically arises – and which has to be answered before we can hope to proceed towards understanding what subsequently befell in both Ireland and England – is: how did England allow a political slum like the Six Counties, whose public housing system and much else besides embodied such marked departures from British practice, to develop into what London claimed to regard as as much a part of the UK as either Scotland or Wales? The short answer is given in the historical introduction to this book. Partition was viewed as a device for getting Ireland off Britain’s agenda. Ireland, north or south, was a notoriously thorny issue, a graveyard of political reputations. Getting involved in the internal affairs of the six-county state meant facing the high risk of fetching up in that graveyard.
The longer answer would involve producing a thick book documenting the number of occasions on which London was informed of injustices in Northern Ireland, either by Six County Nationalists or others, and did nothing about them. The reason why this was done was spelled out at a top-level, off-the-record seminar8 in London by the former British prime minister, James Callaghan. The seminar was one of a series run by the Institute of Contemporary British History. It attracted former decision-takers on Northern Ireland, who included British and Irish prime ministers, generals and senior civil servants. Callaghan was addressing the question: ‘Did the Government miss an opportunity to take policy initiatives that could have prevented the breakdown of law and order in August 1969?’ He said:
I think it was like so many things in politics. It took a crisis to enable us to take the action that was necessary. It is like so many things that you cannot really act [on] even though you know it is logical to act and you ought to be able to act, until circumstances are right that permit you to do so. This is why, probably, we shall enter the European currency, because it will be seen that is inevitable and must be done, and this happens all the time in politics. So I think yes, theoretically and logically we should have taken action to press the Stormont government to do things. In practice it was not, given the surrounding circumstances, politically possible to do it. That’s the answer.
Put bluntly, what Callaghan was saying was that it took a crisis, not to ‘enable’, but to force Britain to do something about the political slum which it had allowed to fester under its jurisdiction for half a century. The ‘surrounding circumstances’ to which Callaghan was referring were not merely those of the Wilson-Callaghan era. They relate back to the state’s inception. For, as the seminar was also informed,9 since 1922 there had been a Speaker’s ruling that Northern Ireland matters could not be raised in the House of Commons. Peter Rose has commented that: ‘So successful was this muzzle that during the 1960s the amount of time spent on Ulster at Westminster averaged less than two hours a year.’10 The original ruling, which quickly became settled policy, was to prevent discussion of sectarian assassinations, which at the time were mostly of Catholics. However, as a result of pressure on London by Michael Collins to hold a public inquiry into the murders, Colonel Stephen Tallents was ordered to produce a report.11 He found the behaviour of the B-Specials to be ‘disgusting’12 and said privately that the northern Government had ‘failed to perform the elementary duty of guaranteeing life and property’. Nevertheless, the report was suppressed and Tallents was bribed into silence by being appointed the British Government’s permanent representative in Belfast.
Neither Tallents nor anyone else attempted to prevent the Unionists from abolishing proportional representation in local government elections the following year (1923), thus facilitating the introduction of the system of discrimination and gerrymandering described earlier. The British Government connived at the abortion of the Boundary Commission in 1925, leaving the Unionist Party, secure within the state’s existing boundaries, to carry on as it wished, unhindered by London. As the storm clouds gathered in the latter half of the 1960s, the level of awareness in the House of Commons concerning Northern Ireland was, according to Callaghan, that ‘Most members of Parliament knew less about it than we knew about our distant colonies on the far side of the earth.’13
The subject seldom, if ever, came up at Cabinet, and Northern Ireland’s concerns had ‘…fallen into a settled routine at the Home Office…’14 When Callaghan took over at the Home Office in 1967 he found, on his first day, that there was not one word in his dispatch box about what was shortly to become Britain’s worst headache.15 Some pains had been experienced: the first riots and car burnings of the era had occurred in Belfast, in 1964, and the re-created UVF had been responsible for sectarian murders in 1966. But as Callaghan opened his Home Office dispatch box it was still impossible to foresee the migraine that was to come. In fact, if one were of an optimistic cast of mind, the political situation in the Six Counties, viewed from London, and in particular from Dublin, could be, and was, perceived as taking a turn for the better.
True, the Unionist Party was firmly in power, as it had effectively been since the passing of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920. Indeed, the party had but recently given a demonstration of its effectiveness in the manner in which it had seen off a growing challenge from the Labour Party during the 1965 Stormont elections. Under the leadership of the Prime Minister, Captain Terence O’Neill, the party had simply wrapped the Orange flag round itself and declared that a vote for Labour would weaken the Union. Election literature of the period spoke of the Labour Party being more of a threat to ‘Ulster’ than the IRA, the communists, or all the parties in the Republic put together. The growth of a broad-based Labour movement, embodying a commitment to civil rights and, remarkably, embracing both Catholic and Protestant, came to an abrupt stop with a swing to the Unionists of some 7 per cent. The handful of Nationalist MPs at Stormont, outnumbered as usual by the order of three to one, had neither the clout nor, on average, the calibre to force reform.
Nevertheless, O’Neill was widely regarded as a reformer. He had surrounded himself with liberal-minded advisers, made gestures to the minority, such as visiting a Catholic convent, unprecedented in the history of the northern statelet, and, above all, had received the Republic’s Prime Minister, Sean Lemass, at Stormont Castle, the first time a southern prime minister had crossed the threshold since the inception of the state. Later that year, ironically, the same 1965 in which he decimated the NILP by playing the Orange card, he again made history by visiting Lemass in Dublin. But above all O’Neill’s main attraction to what might be termed optimistic political opinion was that he was not Lord Brookeborough.
But this was both his strength and his weakness. In the interviews I conducted with him I found that, while O’Neill was no seminal intellect, he was an open, fair-minded man who, within the limits of his conditioning, genuinely sought to move his state forward. This was precisely his demerit in the eyes of his opponents within the ranks of Unionism. The Unionist Party which he inherited from Brookeborough was not the monolith it seemed to outsiders. It was united on upholding the Union and maintaining the border; any drift of Protestants to more exotic shores such as the NILP could speedily be checked, as we have seen, by a rattle on the Orange drum. But within the laager there was a great gulf fixed between the working-class Protestant in, say, the Shankill Road district of Belfast, and the Anglican mill-owner, landlord, or textile baron who reigned on the upper reaches of the party. The grandees of Unionism were able to so ordain matters that meetings were often held midweek, when workers would not normally be free. But social tensions were contained and diluted through membership of the all-pervasive Orange Order. The Order was the keystone of the arch of Unionist patronage and political advancement, its role in the Six County Government and ethos described in the classic summation of the state’s first prime minister, James Craig: ‘I have always said that I am an Orangeman first and politician afterwards, all I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant State.’16
When O’Neill took over, every member of the Northern Ireland Government was also a member of the Orange Order, as was every Westminster MP. He had to become one himself, joining the Ahogill Co. Antrim, branch, which was considered so staunch that it gave rise to the parable of the apocryphal Sammy McFetridge. Sammy had been a fine, upstanding bigot all his life, but on his deathbed the dreadful rumour swept the village that he was turning pape. Fearing that Ahogill was in danger of losing its place amidst the Nations of the Earth, a delegation of elders visited the dying man to enquire how the rumour had spread. With his dying breath, Sammy gasped out: ‘It’s no rumour. It’s the truth – it’s better that one of them goes than one of us.’
However, most Catholics saw little humour in the Orange Order’s activities. With very few exceptions, Unionist local government representatives, such as county councillors, were also members of the Order, which had the right to nominate some 130 members to the Ulster Unionist Council.
Writing around this period, Andrew Boyd estimated that:
…nearly every other member of the Unionist Council, apart altogether from the direct nominees of the Orange Order, is also an Orangeman or an Orangewoman… the local lodges of the Orange Order have the right to nominate delegates to every local Unionist Association….17
Another characteristic of Unionism, particularly strong in the Presbyterian Dissenting tradition, was, and is, the concept of conditional loyalty. This strain, deriving in part from the Scottish covenanters, had, and has, a certain view of what one should be loyal to. So long as the Crown, or Parliament, did as one wished then one was unswervingly loyal. If not, one reserved the right to take action as one saw fit in defence of the state or constitution. The concept of being British did and does not imply a fidelity to British standards of parity of esteem, respect for Parliament or civil and religious liberties. This was made clear by the leadership of the Orange Order not long before O’Neill became prime minister. From an enlightened wing of Unionism there had come a proposal that Catholics should be admitted to the Unionist Party. It was even suggested that some day they might stand for Parliament.18 The Orange Order was outraged. Sir George Clark, Grand Master of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, issued a statement to the papers saying that ‘under no circumstances would such a suggestion be countenanced by our institution’. He went on:
I would like to draw your attention to the words ‘civil and religious liberty’. This liberty, as we know it, is the liberty of the Protestant religion, fought for and given to us by King William who at the time secured the Protestant succession to the Throne and gave us our watchword: The Protestant religion and liberties of the nation I will maintain. In view of this it is difficult to see how a Roman Catholic, with the vast differences in our religious outlook, could either be acceptable within the Unionist Party as a member or for that matter bring himself unconditionally to support its ideals.19
Sir George’s words of course carried the implication that if Catholics were not suitable for membership of the party which ruled the state, they were not kosher where the state was concerned either. Many Unionists would have accepted this corollary without question. Sir Basil Brooke is on record as having told a Twelfth of July gathering in 1933 that because Roman Catholics were disloyal they should not be employed. He said that he took care to ensure that not one was employed about his estate. Pleased with the reaction this statement elicited (from Unionists), he repeated it several times, ultimately becoming the object of a censure motion put down by Nationalists at Stormont in 1934. The then prime minister, Lord Craigavon, responded by moving an amendment which said that the employment of ‘disloyalists’ was prejudicial to the state and took jobs away from loyalists.20 Sir Basil went on to become Viscount Brookeborough and to rule as prime minister for twenty years until O’Neill succeeded him in 1963.
O’Neill described his predecessor as follows:
He was good company and a good raconteur and those who met him imagined that he was relaxing away from his desk. What they didn’t realise was that there was no desk. 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.21
Within Nationalist circles Brookeborough was depicted in more sombre hue. He was regarded as epitomising both the control which the security forces exerted in Northern Ireland and the essential lawlessness of the statelet. Brookeborough was the man who had first conceived the idea of the B-Specials, actively assisted in their setting-up, and connived at the turning of a blind eye to their murders and widespread illegalities. He was also rumoured to be the biggest smuggler in Northern Ireland.
Another, authenticated, cattle smuggler tells a tale of woe concerning what is alleged to have befallen when, as a young man, he once flouted ‘the Lord’s’ authority in this area. The smuggler had come to an agreement that he would pay £1 a head for every beast he took across the border to a prominent RUC inspector. As a result he was not stopped on his nocturnal crossings of unapproved border roads. For some years he observed the arrangement faithfully, but as his business grew so did his resentment at the levy. Finally, having built up a herd of 700 cattle, he decided to save the £700 involved, and crossed the border by a normally deserted road – into the arms of a patrol of B-Specials and RUC.
Following his trial, which involved a fine and forfeiture of the cattle, he was disconsolately emerging from the courthouse when he was accosted by his former business associate, the district inspector, who bought him a commiseratory drink over which he said to him: ‘Weren’t you the foolish man. That pound did a lot more than give you the clear run. Two and six went to the lads on the patrol, two and six went to the sergeant, five bob went to the DI and ten shillings went to the Lord.’ All I can say with certainty about this and other stories is that ‘the Lord’ did have an agent in Dundalk who discreetly bought cattle for him. Whether these Fenian Friesians found themselves, in their subsequent careers, transported back and forth across the border so as to avail him of the various subsidies and tariffs which the presence of borders inevitably create, I simply do not know. But it is certainly curious that a man in Brookeborough’s position would have tolerated Catholic cattle about his place while making a virtue of excluding Catholic herders. Loyalty to the half-crown, rather than the Crown, has long been a Nationalist taunt hurled at Unionists.
Like many things in the Six Counties it is not the details of such stories that really matter but the perception they give. The image conveyed by the foregoing was that held of Lord Brookeborough by many Catholics, particularly in the farming community.
At all events, O’Neill states that when the Governor-General asked Brookeborough who should be his successor, mentioning O’Neill’s name, Brookeborough made no comment. Seemingly he intended that his son, Captain John Brooke, should succeed him. The problem was that the son did not even have a seat in Parliament at the time. In the Unionist Party, ‘hands were laid on’ when it came to the selection of a prime minister. In other words, there was a convention that the outgoing prime minister informed the Governor-General whom he thought should succeed him, and the Governor-General rubber-stamped the choice. But before John’s career had had a chance to blossom to a point where he became an MP (in fact he did not become one for another five years), two unforeseen events occurred. One was an unprecedented call for Lord Brookeborough’s resignation, signed by ten Unionist backbenchers worried by rising unemployment levels. The other was a duodenal ulcer which made Brookeborough fear he was developing cancer. The twin pressures caused him to take the unusual step of submitting three names to the Governor-General; Brian Faulkner, Sir John Andrews and Terence O’Neill.
There may have been a third pressure. Faulkner, heir to a sizeable shirt-manufacturing concern – which incidentally did a thriving business in the south – was not a member of Unionism’s ruling ascendancy, which was both Anglican and landowning. He was out of the prosperous Presbyterian trader class, who were not altogether chic in the eyes of the squirearchy. Moreover, Lucy Faulkner, his wife, had been Brookeborough’s secretary, and it has been suggested that the strong-minded Lady Brookeborough, who exerted considerable influence on her husband, did not wish to see the former secretary elevated to the status of prime minister’s wife in her stead. At all events, when the Governor-General consulted the chief whip of the Unionist Party, William Craig, as to who would be the most acceptable, Craig informed him that an exhaustive canvass of the party had revealed that O’Neill had overwhelming support. Faulkner was in America at the time, and hands were duly laid on. However, it is said that Brookeborough adopted the triple nomination approach to block Faulkner, whom he thought would make a success of the job and thereby seal off John’s chances of ever becoming prime minister. Andrews, whose main claim to the post was that his father had also been prime minister of Northern Ireland, had no chance of being appointed. This left O’Neill, who was Minister for Finance and who, it is alleged, Brookeborough reckoned would inevitably make a mess of things and be forced into resignation, thereby perhaps giving John his opportunity. Peut-être as the French say, for as finance minister O’Neill certainly held the senior posting after Brookeborough.
But three things may be said with certainty about the foregoing. One is that a senior Unionist minister of the time, Harry West, Minister for Agriculture, is on record as saying that he never encountered any member of the Unionist Party who was canvassed by Craig as to O’Neill’s suitability. Secondly, O’Neill came to the premiership not only with no following amongst the working-class and evangelical elements within the party, but with the undying enmity of Brian Faulkner. As the former Stormont minister David Bleakley would write later, O’Neill and Faulkner were always ‘on a collision course’.22 Thirdly, there was such dissatisfaction within the party amongst Faulkner’s supporters that new rules were drawn up for the selection of future prime ministers. These factors combined to make O’Neill a sitting duck for attack by Ian Paisley’s fundamentalist opportunism once his reformist colours began to peep through his Orange straitjacket. Unionism was not about reform. It was, and is, about control. David Trimble, of the Official Unionist Party, has articulated this feeling perfectly:
…the Apprentice Boys myth is very deeply embedded within the consciousness of the Ulster British community… a community that had then been abandoned or misled by the natural leaders of society… if they feel their leaders are taking them down a road they do not wish to go or are in any way abandoning them then they are prepared to act themselves… the banding together element has always been present within rural Ulster at times of unrest… Terence O’Neill never really sounded or behaved as if he was one of us. Not like Brookeborough, not like Craigavon, not like Faulkner… really until he arrived here to as it were inherit one of the family seats he had no connection with Ulster…
O’Neill’s career epitomised the twilight of the Big House, as the homes which formed the centrepieces of the great Anglo-Irish estates were known. The light had already gone out in the Republic, to be lit only in remembrance by writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane. But in the north there was still a plethora of majors and captains to be found commuting between their country residences and the upper slopes of the Stormont political establishment. Colonels were scarcely met with and sightings of generals were almost unknown until the British began sending them over from England at the close of the decade to patch up what the captains and the majors had wrought. O’Neill was a direct descendant of Sir Arthur Chichester, the Lord of the Plantation in Ulster under James I. His father, again a captain, had been Westminster MP for Mid-Antrim, and was the first MP to be killed during the 1914–18 war. Both O’Neill’s brothers were killed in the Second World War, in which he served in the Irish Guards. His uncle, Sir Hugh O’Neill, had also represented Antrim at Westminster, from 1915 to 1949, and was a founder member of the Conservative 1922 Club. His aunt, Dame Dehra Parker, represented South Derry from 1920 to 1931 and then passed the seat on to her son, Major Chichester-Clark. However, he died only two years later and, things being as they were in Unionism, the Dame repossessed the seat, and, having become a minister in the interim, passed it on in 1959 to her grandson, James Chichester-Clark. When O’Neill became prime minister the chief whip at Stormont was a cousin, as was the Stormont MP for North Antrim. Two other cousins represented Derry County and North Antrim at Westminster.
It was an impressive superstructure, but the foundations were susceptible not only to an erosion of mistrust as indicated by Trimble, but to a form of economic erosion which had already begun when O’Neill succeeded Brookeborough. The economic situation was now about to trigger explosive political and religious consequences. Prior to O’Neill’s taking over, unemployment had risen at a steady rate which traditional Unionism showed neither the will nor the capacity to arrest. A development council, set up under Lord Chandos in 1955, ‘did little more than wine and dine visiting industrialists and had little success’.23 The Hall Committee, a conglomeration of British and Northern Ireland civil servants, issued a report in 1963 suggesting that an economic advisory council be set up – and that the unemployed be encouraged to emigrate to Britain.24 In 1963 unemployment was running at 9.5 per cent of the workforce (45, 000). The Six Counties’ principal industries were those most exposed to world trends: agriculture, engineering, and textiles. During the period 1951–61 the decline in agricultural and textile employment was of the order of 40 per cent. In the deep heart of militant loyalism, the Belfast shipyards, it was nearer to 60 per cent. Moreover, it was not merely in the realm of civil rights that the area had been allowed to depart from British standards – average weekly earnings were only 78 per cent of those in Britain. While the significance of the possession of a house has already been adverted to, it should also be noted that the quality of the housing which the captains and the majors – who of course lived in the Big Houses – had made available to the ‘other ranks’ was a further source of discontent, and one which bore heavily on Protestants. Some 32 per cent of all the houses in the statelet either had no piped water or no flush toilets. The rate of house building, some 6, 000 a year, was woefully inadequate either to deal with new demand or improve existing conditions.25 Ten years after the decade covered by the foregoing figures, an authoritative report, speaking of the proportions of aged to newer housing stock, said that ‘…the housing stock in Northern Ireland is worse balanced than any region of the United Kingdom’.26
By that time, however, an appalling tide of violence had already broken over Northern Ireland. The traditional Unionist response towards meeting social needs was articulated by two Unionists shortly before O’Neill took over. One, Professor Corkery, a Unionist senator, opined that ‘The parents of large families should be fined for having so many children.’27 This was no isolated view. In 1956 the Catholic birth rate had caused the Unionists to attempt a derogation from the established policy of moving in step with Britain to introduce to the north any social welfare improvements effected in the ‘UK mainland’. The initial enabling Bill sought to give fourth and subsequent children less than the British benefits. But liberal Protestant opinion forced Brookeborough to announce on 12 June 1956 that he was dropping the proposal. History does not record the views of the other Unionist, Robert Babington, a barrister, on the question of birth control, but we do have his opinions on unemployment policy. He suggested that:
Registers of unemployed Loyalists should be kept by the Unionist Party and employers invited to pick employees from them. The Unionist Party should make it quite clear that the Loyalists have the first choice of jobs.28
This was vintage Brookeborough philosophy and its articulation helped Babington to succeed in his ambition of becoming a Unionist MP. However, O’Neill was no traditionalist. He set out to introduce such modern theories as economic planning, and co-operation with trade unions, to the Six Counties, and achieved a measure of success. Brookeborough had had an aversion to both. Accepting that the traditional north of Ireland industries were in terminal decline, O’Neill encouraged a number of industrial giants involved in twentieth-century technology to come to the province. These included Courtauld’s, Du Pont, Enkalon, Goodyear and ICI. Unlike Brookeborough, who had refused to recognise the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) because it was an all-Ireland body, he opened a link with ICTU through a Northern Committee of Congress, which paved the way for the formation of an economic council based on government, employers and labour.
O’Neill’s blueprint for these and other innovations was provided by a number of academics: chiefly Professor Thomas Wilson of Glasgow University who, in October 1963, was appointed economic consultant to the Government; and Sir Robert Matthews who had been commissioned to produce a report on regional development before O’Neill became prime minister. Following the Wilsonian prescription really meant no more than attracting multinationals to the Six Counties, with the consequential drawback of profit repatriation elsewhere. However, while they led to the successes outlined above, they also led O’Neill to espouse policy initiatives involving both Northern Ireland and the Republic which would eventually bring him down. His drive for new outside investment meant that the economic and political dominance of the old Unionist industrialists diminished, albeit very slightly. Both the Unionist rulers and the Protestant working class saw danger signals in the fact that the institutionalised discrimination practised in the older firms could not easily be translated to the newer businesses. Discrimination apart, the old industrial élite’s resentment rose as the newer industries begin to dominate the economic landscape, while their own financial and political clout diminished. The workers found that the tradition of the discreet word in Orange or Freemason lodge was not given its customary due by young personnel managers in Courtauld’s or Du Pont. The latter were not greatly concerned whether fingers were Catholic or Protestant. All they asked was that they be deft. As a result there was a noticeable increase in female Catholic employment, especially around Derry. Here there was a tradition, described in a famous song by Phil Coulter, that the Catholic ‘…men on the dole played the women’s role’, while the women worked in the mills.29
These tensions, which had been growing during O’Neill’s sojourn at Finance, crystallised around Brian Faulkner early on in O’Neill’s reign as prime minister. A stalking-horse of Faulkner’s, William Warnock, a hard-line former Attorney-General, sponsored an ineffectual backbench challenge to O’Neill in October 1963. Warnock’s stated casus belli was the manner in which O’Neill had been appointed. He suggested that Faulkner was the man for the job. This threat soon petered out, but other aspects of the new Matthews-Wilson approach, or rather the attempt to adapt it to the old-guard Unionists’ concerns, began to open up a second front for O’Neill, bringing him into conflict with the Catholics and undermining the value of his ecumenical approach to them.
Apart from the ongoing complaints about housing, there were four principal issues which aroused strong Catholic protest during 1964–5. All were concerned with another aspect of Unionist policy, the strengthening of the Protestant east as against the Catholic west of the province. In 1963 the position was as follows. Belfast held half the north’s population and half of its industry. The triangle formed by the eastern countries Antrim (which contains Belfast), Armagh and Down contained the bulk of the rest of the Six Counties’ industry and population. Two official employment statistics of the period record the gross imbalance thus created between east and west.
In the east the number of people employed in manufacturing by firms with twenty-five workers or more, classified by counties and county boroughs, was 160, 392. In the west, embracing the counties Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone, the figure was 28, 773. In the Republic of Ireland to the south there was, and is, a constant complaint against the imbalance of the power and wealth of Dublin and its environs in the east compared with that of the west. But in the Republic no one thought the imbalance was based on religious grounds; everyone believed the problem to be political and economic. Some government action, however faltering and ineffectual, could be forthcoming through normal parliamentary pressures. In the Six Counties the position was reversed. Everyone believed the discrepancies arose for religious reasons. No one seriously thought Parliament would do anything to improve matters.
This belief was strengthened when in 1964 the Government cut one of the two rail links serving Derry City and county. The severance left most of the county, and those of Fermanagh and Tyrone, with no railways. The strongly Catholic Newry was also affected by a rail closure and in addition Derry suffered the loss of a shipping link with Glasgow. On top of the railway issue there came the Copcutt controversy. Geoffrey Copcutt was an English town-planner appointed by the Government to design a new town in Co. Armagh. On 13 August 1964 he resigned his post and issued a statement to the press, saying: ‘I think there are better regions, environmentally and strategically.’30 He cited the development of Derry City as a ‘priority’. However, the Government went ahead with the building of the new city of Craigavon, called after the man who had declared Stormont to be a ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’. Apart from the choice of site and name, chosen to commemorate Sir James Craig, later Lord Craigavon, the founding father of the six-county state, Catholics had other reasons for believing that the new venture was less an exercise in town planning than in fortress Unionism. For example, despite the fact that Catholics made up only a third of the overall population of the north, their higher birth rate meant that 48 per cent of the Six Counties’ primary school children were Catholic. But the new town plans only provided for the building of five Catholic schools, thereby practically guaranteeing that many young Catholic parents would be discouraged from taking jobs in the town, no matter what new industries were sited there.
The following year, 1965, while the echoes of the Craigavon controversy were still rumbling through the correspondence columns, the Government adopted a development plan drawn up by Professor Wilson, incorporating Sir Robert Matthews’ ideas,31 which proposed to create 65, 000 new jobs by making a total investment of some £900 million in all sectors of the economy, including housing, for which a target of 64, 000 was set. However, the implications of these very desirable goals were offset for Catholics by the publication of the list of growth centres wherein most of the employment and development was to take place. Of the ten specified in the report, eight32 were clustered within a thirty-mile radius to the east. Only one, the last mentioned, Derry, was in the west. It would have appeared to have been a logical area for development as it possessed a port, an airport and some existing industry. But its placing in the list indicated to Catholics that its inclusion was cosmetic and there was no real intention to develop it.
The feeling was intensified beyond anything seen in the state for many years by the publication the same year (in February) of the Lockwood Report on Higher Education. The terms of reference of this committee were: ‘To review the facilities for university and higher technical education in Northern Ireland having regard to the report to the Robbins Committee, and to make recommendations.’ There was nothing in that remit about also making recommendations as to the site or sites of any proposed new educational institutions. However, this is what the committee did. Its recommendation, Coleraine, in the east, was accepted by the Government.
Derry, which had hoped to be the beneficiary of any extension of university facilities, was outraged. Firstly, it already had a university college, Magee, a constituent college of Queen’s University, Belfast. Being the only university unit outside Belfast, Magee had appeared the logical base for expansion. Secondly, Coleraine only had a population of 12, 000, less than a quarter of Derry’s 54, 000. Thirdly, and the third was more than equal to the first, there had not been a single Catholic on the committee. The resultant protest movement was unprecedented. The same sort of liberal Unionist sentiment which had prompted the suggestion that Catholics be admitted to the party surfaced and made common cause with the Catholics of Derry and with the opposition parties at Stormont. A University for Derry Campaign was founded, under the chairmanship of a young Derry schoolteacher, John Hume, who had built a reputation for himself through his pioneering work in establishing the Credit Union movement throughout Ireland. On 18 February 1965 the city of Derry virtually closed down; shops, schools, businesses of all kinds. A motorised cavalcade containing 1, 500 vehicles drove the ninety miles to Stormont to protest the Coleraine decision.
It was to no avail. The Government carried the proposal by a majority of 32–20. This, though substantial, was one of the smallest in the history of the state. Two Unionists voted with the opposition and two more abstained. The university agitation led to the expulsion from the parliamentary party of a prominent Unionist, Dr Robert Nixon, Stormont MP for North Down. His crime was to reveal publicly that prominent Derry Unionists had colluded with the Government against the interests of their own area in favour of Coleraine in order to preserve overall Protestant hegemony. More educated Catholics were the last thing the Unionist hierarchy wished to see coming out of Derry. A petition containing 15, 000 signatures was collected, asking in vain that his allegations be investigated. However, although defeated on the university issue, for John Hume, and many other educated young Catholics, the seeds of a civil rights street protest movement had been planted by the Magee controversy. They would shortly sprout.
But in Ireland overall these tensions between the newer, technocratic policies which O’Neill strove to introduce and the visceral ‘them and us’ nature of northern politics were obscured, for the moment, by another watershed event in which he was involved. On 14 January 1965 he received at Stormont his opposite number from the Republic, the Taoiseach, Sean Lemass. It was a meeting of seismic importance in Irish terms, the first time in the history of the two states that there had been a prime ministerial meeting.33 Lemass, like O’Neill, was also a moderniser. As with O’Neill from Brookeborough, he had inherited a situation in which his predecessor had stayed on well beyond the point of usefulness. It is one of the tragedies of contemporary Ireland that the aged de Valera did not yield the reins earlier. The Republic, which, unlike the Six Counties, had no subsidies, had almost collapsed economically by the time he did so in 1959. By then he was seventy-eight, blind and incapable of innovation.
As the fifties drew to a close, income in the Republic overall was only some 55 per cent of that in the UK. But as it was nearer 65 per cent in the eastern province of Leinster where Dublin is situated, the sort of imbalances we have seen in the Six Counties were if anything worse in the impoverished western province of Connacht. The population was falling, but the Catholic birth rate meant that births were greatly in excess of deaths. As an outspoken economist, Professor C. F. Carter, said, it was a situation:
…dangerous both to the Republic and to her neighbours. Faced by it, the universal resort of politicians is to seek refuge in fantasy, and usually in the dreary fantasy that prosperity must await the re-union of Ireland.34
Lemass was not a man to indulge in fantasy. As a youthful idealist he had fought in the 1916 rising at the age of sixteen. Of Huguenot stock, he was nevertheless a pragmatic politician who understood clearly the co-relation between the growth, or demise, of democracy and economic prosperity. Once, while I was interviewing him about the economic changes he was making in the Republic, he broke off to discuss the fall of the Weimar Republic and urged me to study how economic conditions had helped the rise of Nazism. ‘Oh, read about it, you must read about it, ’ he said. Long sat upon by de Valera, who refused to act on his ideas while he was Minister for Industry and Commerce, as Taoiseach he cut through the old dogmas of protection, tariffs, self-sufficiency and sloganising about the fourth lost green field which had passed for policy. New men were appointed to the Cabinet. The Secretary of the Department of Finance, Dr T. K. Whitaker, produced a Programme for Economic Development which became government policy which Lemass seized upon. Together he and Whitaker revolutionised Irish society. International capital was sought, the country began to look outward.
As in other parts of the western world the sixties were a time of optimism in Ireland. As a new generation took over, new ideas began to permeate the Catholic Republic from a variety of sources: the liberalising influence of Pope John XXIII and his Vatican Council; the coming of television; increased travel; and the relaxation of literary and cinema censorship. The travel was made possible by increased prosperity, the invigorating side effect of new industries. Buoyed by all this, Lemass, in his sixty-fifth year, decided to drive north and meet O’Neill, who reciprocated by coming to Dublin a month later (on 9 February 1965), nine days before the Derry cavalcade set off for Stormont to protest about the Coleraine decision.
The visits had the effect of both adding to the forces ranging against O’Neill, and bringing to centre stage in the swelling northern drama an actor who had hitherto played relatively minor roles: Ian Kyle Paisley. I have heard him defend the term bigot on the grounds that it stems from the last protestations of the Protestant martyrs, who, during the Spanish Inquisition, proclaimed their faith, as they were led to the stake, ‘by God’. Paisley’s eruption before the footlights of twentieth-century western European politics made him appear a ludicrous figure to some observers. He seemed an aberration from the Thirty Years War who had somehow survived in a theological version of Plato’s cave, only to appear, appalling and bawling, into the light of an ecumenical setting in which he was totally miscast.
Paisley in fact was rooted in a historical line of fundamentalist political evangelists like Henry Cooke and Hugh ‘Roaring’ Hannah, who in times of economic, political or sectarian tension arose in stentorian fashion to make a bad situation worse. Of them all Paisley deserves to be regarded as Stentorius Maximus, the loudest political voice in Northern Ireland. He cannot be fully exculpated for his own contribution. For most of the period of the Troubles under review he was a dominant figure, bestriding the political landscape of Northern Ireland with the Bible in one hand and both eyes on the ballot box. Apart from the mesmeric effect of his husky oratory, raw sex appeal, and powerful personality and physique, he articulated key elements of some forms of Northern Irish Protestantism.
Conditional loyalty, for example. He stated that: ‘If the Crown in Parliament decreed to put Ulster into a United Ireland, we would be disloyal to her Majesty if we did not resist such a surrender to her enemies.’35 His anti-Catholicism was the purest and most virulent available: ‘Through Popery the Devil has shut up the way to our inheritance. Priestcraft, superstition and papalism with all their attendant voices of murder, theft, immorality, lust and incest blocked the way to the land of gospel liberty.’36 Using such language in press (he founded his own newspaper, The Protestant Telegraph, in February 1966), platform and pulpit, Paisley and his ‘attendant voices’ did more than anyone else in Ireland over the entire period of the troubles to ‘block the way’ to a constitutional solution of the problems.
Paisley was born in 1926 in Armagh. Conditional loyalty was the leitmotif of his early life. His father had been ‘loyal’ in the classical Unionist sense through having been a member of Carson’s original defiant volunteer corps. He was also deeply steeped in the north’s Bible culture and became a Baptist minister – an Independent Baptist minister who founded his own church. At twenty-five, after being a preacher since his middle teens, Paisley too formed his own church, the violently anti-Catholic Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, with himself as its moderator. A few years later he made headlines through being mixed up in the proselytising of a fifteen-year-old Catholic girl, Maura Lyons, who was kidnapped from her home in 1956. Paisley was ordered by a Belfast court to stay away from her.
He was in the news again in 1959 for throwing a Bible at the liberal-minded Methodist minister Dr Donald Soper, during a visit to Ballymena. He derived more valuable publicity amongst the north’s anti-Catholics through getting himself arrested in Rome for protesting at the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. In 1966 he organised a march to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Belfast to protest against its ‘Rome-ward trend’ at which the Governor of the province, Lord Erskine, as well as the various church dignitaries present, were heckled and abused. This was one of Paisley’s more beneficial pieces of hooligan street theatre. He refused to be bound to the peace in subsequent court proceedings and earned for himself the martyr’s crown of a three-month jail sentence, whose value could probably be translated into votes at the rate of a thousand a week. The following year Paisley’s influence had grown to a stage where he was able to force the cancellation of a planned visit to the north by the ecumenical-minded Bishop of Ripon, Dr John Moorman.
Part of Paisley’s anti-Catholicism has sexual overtones. Bob Cooper, the head of the north’s Fair Employment Agency, a body which strives to undo everything Paisley stands for, has described him as ‘the great pornographer’. Certainly Paisley can mix sexual imagery with incitement to hatred and fear of eternity in the most extraordinarily potent fashion. The night after Pope John XXIII died, Cooper attended a sermon preached by Paisley in Belfast’s Ulster Hall. He recalled hearing Paisley describe ‘the flames of hell at that moment licking around the dead Pope. It was so graphic and colourful that the audience could almost feel the flames and feel the heat. I will remember the horror till the day I die.’37 Cooper went on:
It is certainly extraordinary the close relationship there appears to be between the effects of pornography and the anti-Catholicism preached by Paisley. It is not just that the vast majority of his images are sexual. Rome is always described as the painted woman out to seduce the innocent Ulster Protestant youth. His sermons are full of sexual innuendoes about priests and nuns. Following the visit of the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland to the Pope, Paisley produced the extraordinary front-page headline in The Protestant Telegraph – ‘The Church of Scotland drunk with the wine of the fornication with the Roman whore’.
Cooper has undoubtedly correctly diagnosed pornography as an essential component of Paisleyism. But there is nothing particularly new about Paisley’s form of anti-Catholicism. He may have marched visibly with the Bible clutched in his hand. As one of his opponents in the Unionist Party remarked to me during 1969 when the full horror of what the man had helped to excite could be seen in the form of burned-out streets and nightly rioting in Belfast: ‘And the trouble is, no one can say a word to him. He does all this with the Bible in his hand.’ But in this history of the debased philosophy he articulated there lay another book: The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. Along with his Bob Jones University degree, Paisley imported into Ireland the language and the hate creation that filled this ghost-written work which first appeared in America in 1836. The work, the fictionalised ramblings of a deranged woman who ultimately died in prison, was one of the foundation texts of the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic nativist movement that convulsed America circa 1835–60. Maria described how she ran away from her convent because the reverend mother forced her to ‘live in the practice of criminal intercourse with priests’. Nuns who did not were murdered. The children born of such couplings were baptised and strangled. Maria enjoyed a brief period of respectability after her story appeared, being taken up by a committee of Protestant clergymen. But both respectability and credibility vanished when her mother revealed that Maria had never been in the convent she spoke of. She had been in a home for delinquent girls from which she had run away with a boyfriend by whom she apparently did have a child. However, this Catholic version of the anti-Semitic tract, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has remained in circulation; an attempt was made to make use of it during the Kennedy presidential campaign of 1960.
In his early years as a preacher, Paisley produced ‘nuns’ at his church meetings, who, the congregations were informed, had also run away from convents rather than submit to unspeakable happenings. The Protestant Telegraph specialised in articles with headlines such as ‘The Love Affairs of the Vatican’,38 ‘Priestly Murders Exposed’39 and ‘Children Tortured – Monks Turned Out as Sadists’.40 But there is another overtone to Paisleyism: a patina of violence which tinges his presentation of popery and the bogus connection he forges between the papacy and the IRA. The Protestant Telegraph also claimed, in April 1967, that the following is the Sinn Fein Oath:
These Protestant robbers and brutes, these unbelievers of our faith, will be driven like the swine they are into the sea by fire, the knife or the poison cup until we of the Catholic Faith and avowed supporters of all Sinn Fein action and principles clear these heretics from our land…
At any cost we must work and seek, using any method of deception to gain our ends, towards the destruction of all Protestants and the advancement of the priesthood and the Catholic Faith until the Pope is complete ruler of the whole world…
We must strike at every opportunity, using all methods of causing ill-feeling within the Protestant ranks and in their business. The employment of any means will be blessed by our earthly Fathers, the priests, and thrice blessed by his Holiness the Pope.
So shall we of the Roman Catholic Church and Faith destroy with smiles of thanksgiving to our Holy Father the Pope all who shall not join us and accept our beliefs.
It is not surprising, after Paisley’s promulgation of such doctrines, that a former supporter of his who took part in an effort to kill a prominent Republican, and instead ended up shooting an apolitical Catholic barman, should have been quoted at his trial as saying: ‘I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him. I am definitely ashamed of myself to be in such a position.’41 Nor is it surprising, having successfully translated his particular brand of sectarianism into the religious life of the Six Counties, that Paisley should have done the same in politics. As his church grew throughout the fifties so did another creation of his, the Ulster Protestant Action group. The object of the group was the familiar one of keeping ‘Protestant and loyal workers in employment in times of deep depression in preference to their Catholic fellow workers’.42 The UPA also campaigned against the allocation of public housing to Catholics.
One of the earliest recorded mob actions associated with the Great Disturber occurred on the Shankill Road in 1959. After Paisley had concluded a passionate address to a UPA meeting the crowd attacked a fish and chip shop owned by Catholics. A far more serious breach of the peace occurred in 1964 during the Westminster election campaign. Paisley discovered that the Sinn Fein candidate, Liam McMillan, had displayed a tricolour, the Irish national flag, in the window of his election headquarters in Divis Street, off the Falls Road. One of the arrows in Unionism’s quiver of defence against Nationalism was the Flags and Emblems Act which prohibited the showing in public of the tricolour. No one troubled too much about its provisions when it came to displaying the flag in Nationalist areas only, particularly in a dingy, inconspicuous little back street like Divis. However, Paisley told a packed and perfervid meeting at the Ulster Hall on 27 September that if the flag were not removed within two days he would lead a march to do so himself.
Next day scores of RUC men were sent to break down the door of the Sinn Fein office and remove the flag. Accordingly, instead of holding the march, Paisley staged a meeting outside City Hall, well away from the Falls Road. But a crowd, several thousand strong, which had gathered on the Falls in the expectation of confronting Paisley’s marchers, vented its dissatisfaction at his non-arrival by burning buses, the first such activity of the period under review. Belfast’s temperature continued to go up throughout the week. The night after the bus burnings a Sinn Fein meeting broke up in rioting and baton charges. Two days later the tricolour was again displayed and the RUC smashed their way into the building with pickaxes to remove it.
The removal was the signal for the worst rioting in Belfast for thirty years. Petrol bombs began making their appearance as the RUC deployed armoured cars and water cannons. Next night, Friday, the RUC ‘pacified’ the Falls. Hundreds of helmeted police backed up by armoured cars drove protestors off the streets and some fifty of them into hospital. The tension spread to Dublin where a crowd marched on the British Embassy and stoned the Gardai. In Belfast, Nationalist leaders appealed for peace. A compromise was worked out whereby the rioting stopped and the RUC did not interfere when the tricolour was carried openly on the Sunday at a Republican parade. The increase in Orange fervour, however, benefited the Unionist candidate, Jim Kilfedder. There had been fears that the notoriously volatile West Belfast seat might have gone to an opposition candidate. But at 21, 337 votes Kilfedder came in some 7, 000 votes ahead of his nearest rival and with nearly seven times the total achieved by McMillan (3, 256). However, the display of Paisleyite power forced Terence O’Neill to temporarily forsake liberal paths, and he was driven, not to condemn Paisley’s incitement, but to comment for the benefit of his Unionist audience: ‘Today certain Republican candidates, many with backgrounds in the IRA… appear to be using a British election to provoke disorder in Northern Ireland.’43
Paisley suffered from no such constraints in targeting his enemy – O’Neill himself. The Lemass visit to Stormont gave him an opportunity he seized with both hands. O’Neill had not dared to tell any of his colleagues in cabinet about Lemass’ coming until the morning of the visit, and Paisley evoked many resonances both within and outside the Government as he stumped the province, demanding that ‘O’Neill must go’. The month after the visit, he and his supporters staged a huge demonstration outside the Unionist headquarters in Glengall Street that forced O’Neill to call off a function there. Paisley’s rhetoric was particularly directed at the Protestant working class. Again the wretched state of Northern Ireland’s housing stock was a potent political issue. He made capital out of the fact that O’Neill and his like lived in ‘Big Houses’, while many poorer Protestants lived in ‘kitchen houses’ with no flush toilets. The repetition of the term ‘dry closets’ became something of an antiphon with ‘The Big Man’, giving rise to jokes about Paisley’s ‘turd world’.
But his populist appeal was no joke. He was able to pull the Pope, O’Neill, the communists, and later the IRA, out of those closets like a conjurer plucking electoral rabbits from a hat. 1966 was a big year for Paisley, and a bad one for Northern Ireland. He went to jail and a number of people went to their graves. This was the year which saw the first deaths of the Troubles. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 rising, an event widely commemorated in the Republic, and in some Catholic areas of Northern Ireland also. This gave Paisley a chance to stage further rallies and protests at which he fulminated against celebrations of disloyalty and treachery. It was also the year he founded The Protestant Telegraph; an organisation called the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee which oversaw his supporters’ activities, including those of the UPA; and a grouping called the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV), which was organised throughout the province by one Noel Doherty, a printer who worked on The Protestant Telegraph. Doherty was also the secretary of the UCDC and a member of another Protestant organisation which emerged from the shadows of history in that year, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).
The man who helped to reactivate the UVF was ‘Gusty’ Spence, an associate of Paisley’s in the UPA. Spence came of a strongly Unionist family; his brother was the Unionist election agent for West Belfast. He was a shipyard worker who had some military training, having been in the British Army and served as a military policeman in Cyprus. The new UVF was a long way from the force which in Carson’s day was supported by earl, general and mill-owner. Its predominantly working-class membership consisted, in Michael Farrell’s description, of ‘…a small group of Paisley supporters who, alarmed by his denunciations of the Unionist sell-out, had set up an armed organisation’.44
It was an inefficient, confused, but deadly organisation which, apart from the fears of the sell-out trumpeted by Paisley, wanted to strike in some way at Republicans in the year of the rising’s commemoration. The UVF did this by mounting a series of petrol bomb attacks on Catholic homes, schools and shops throughout the spring of 1966. On 7 May the UVF claimed the first life to be lost in the Troubles, that of an elderly Protestant, a Mrs Gould, who had the misfortune to live beside a Catholic pub which the UVF attacked with petrol bombs. The first fatal shooting occurred that month also, in Clonard Street, an area which was to prove one of the most significant trouble spots in the entire statelet. The attack followed the issuing of a statement on 22 May which said: ‘From this day on we declare war against the IRA, and its splinter groups. Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation.’45
On 27 May a UVF gang set forth after this declaration to find and kill a well-known Belfast Republican, Leo Martin. Failing to find him, they shot the nearest convenient Catholic, John Scullion, who died of his wounds on 11 June. By 23 June stories about both the UVF and the UPV had become so commonplace in Loyalist areas that a Labour MP, Tom Boyd, publicly urged the Government to take action. Three days later, however, Spence and Co. set off again in pursuit of Martin. Again they missed him and retired in disgust to their local pub in Malvern Street, off the Shankill Road. Here they discovered a group of off-duty Catholic barmen having a drink. They ambushed them leaving the pub; one, Peter Ward, died of his wounds.
Ironically, 1966 was also the fiftieth anniversary of the slaughter of the original UVF membership at the Somme. Terence O’Neill attended the commemoration on behalf of the northern Government. He had to interrupt his trip to France to return to Ireland to ban the UVF under the Special Powers Act, a grave shock to the Protestant psyche, which regarded this piece of legislation as being for use against Catholics only. O’Neill also made public the fact of Doherty’s role in Paisley’s UCDC. Doherty was picked up in the police swoop that netted the Malvern Street killers. He subsequently received two years on explosive charges. Spence was one of those who were sentenced to a minimum of twenty years.
On 21 April, Paisley, who was going to Armagh, had dropped Doherty off at Loughall, where Doherty met the local UPV to discuss the procurement of arms and explosives. Paisley collected him on the way back from Armagh (there is nothing to indicate that Paisley was aware of his mission). The following month Doherty introduced the UVF to the Loughall men, who gave them gelignite. Paisley denied knowledge of the UVF, although he had publicly thanked the UVF for taking part in a march on 7 April, four days before he left Doherty in Loughall. He also claimed that he had dismissed Doherty from both the UPV and the UCDC prior to the Malvern Street round-up.
But the main focus of attention in that fatal year of 1966 was not what those associated with Paisley were doing, but what he was doing himself. The most lasting TV image of the year was of the Big Man with the blazing eyes, wearing a Roman collar and a white raincoat, leading protestors into various street confrontations. He brought Carson’s son Edward to Belfast in March. Carson said that O’Neill was leading the statelet to the ‘destruction of Ulster’s hard-won constitution and liberties’.46 The following month Paisley forced the Government to mobilise the B-Specials for the whole of April because of the Easter 1916 commemorations. He wanted the commemoration parades banned, but though he failed in this objective he succeeded in having a prohibition issued against allowing trains from the Republic to transport people to the Six Counties for commemoration ceremonies.
Then, on 6 June he led a highly provocative march through the Catholic Cromac Square area of Belfast, which provoked a riot between the RUC and local residents who tried to block his parade. The Paisleyites wound up outside the Presbyterian General Assembly where their behaviour caused the wife of the Governor to collapse and enabled Stentorius Maximus to win his jail sentence. Brian Faulkner supported Paisley’s behaviour in the teeth of demands from the Moderator of the General Assembly, Dr Martin, that his violent demonstrations be stopped. Protestants, said Faulkner, had the right to protest. Dr Martin’s request was ‘an unwarrantable interference with the right of free speech and free assembly’.47 Paisley reciprocated by telling his supporters at a meeting in Castlewellan, Co. Down: ‘Thank God for Brian Faulkner’.48
That year’s Twelfth of July celebration was a Paisley ‘twalfth’. His followers shouted down members of O’Neill’s cabinet, and resolutions were passed at the various gatherings condemning the statelet’s ‘Romeward trend’. Brought to court on 18 July, when marching season fervour was still in full swing, he refused to be bound to the peace for two years and was duly deposited in ‘The Crum’, Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail, in the heart of Loyalist Belfast. It now became a target for rioting. On 22 July vicious clashes occurred outside the jail between Paisleyites and the RUC. The following day there was further rioting as Protestant mobs, several thousand strong, rampaged through the city, smashing windows and trying to damage businesses owned by Catholics. The violence culminated in an orgy of baton-charging and mob thuggery outside the prison that night which precipitated a government crack-down. The RUC were empowered to ban all meetings involving more than three people, and all Belfast meetings and marches were banned for three months.
Not only was O’Neill under attack from Paisleyism in the streets, he was also assailed within the Unionist parliamentary party by Paisley’s ally, Desmond Boal. Boal, a barrister whose victory in a Stormont by-election in 1961 was due to Paisleyite support, took up a petition amongst Unionist backbenchers demanding that O’Neill go. His conspiracy interacted with Faulkner’s ambitions, and a number of prominent Unionists were invited to Faulkner’s house. When this became known, Faulkner refused to back O’Neill, but made the brazen assertion that he had left the room while Boal and the other dissidents were talking!49 However, when the crucial Unionist Party meeting was held on 27 September, Faulkner was in America. He had reckoned, correctly, that O’Neill would survive Boal’s onslaught. Boal himself was one of those who left before the vote was taken.
O’Neill staged something of a counteroffensive the following year when he sacked one of his opponents, Harry West, the Minister for Agriculture, over a somewhat malodorous land deal in Co. Fermanagh where West farmed extensively. On 26 April 1967 O’Neill told Stormont that the dismissal had occurred because he did not feel it right that a minister should acquire land in the knowledge that it might ‘in the reasonably near future be acquired for a public purpose’. This unfamiliar intrusion of principle into Unionist politics caused Brian Faulkner to remark on the BBC that the deal was ‘…a situation in which Mr West is certainly absolutely blameless’.50
Apart from the Unionist Party itself there were two other sets of observers vitally concerned with Northern Ireland to whom Faulkner’s machinations and the mounting tide of Paisleyism were matters of great significance. These were the British Government and the opposition parties of the Six Counties. At this stage these could roughly be divided into two groupings, Nationalists and Labour. We shall return to the Nationalists shortly. Let us, however, first examine the British reaction since it was, potentially at least, the more significant, and had implications for the Labour movement in both Britain and Northern Ireland. James Callaghan spelled out the Wilson Government’s attitude, at the Witness Seminar in London on British policy in Northern Ireland to which I have already referred:
…the government very sensibly said we are not going to get involved in this when we are not welcomed by the Northern Ireland government. We would have to override the Northern Ireland government if we did. We’re not going to do that. We want to use them as far as we can – that is what I understood the position was – in order to introduce the reforms. I think that was the attitude and for the very good reason that’s been given. Nobody anticipated… everybody knew what would happen if we did intervene and nobody wanted to get into the situation that if we once got in there we would never get out. That was certainly my policy when I got there, which wasn’t until ’67, to use O’Neill to put the reforms through and not in any circumstances to get our own fingers burned as indeed we have done when we eventually had to go in. And if we had gone in earlier we would have just got our fingers burned two years earlier that’s all.51
In British politics the Unionists of course took the Tory whip. But for historical reasons there was a tradition within the Labour Party of taking an interest in Ireland. Harold Wilson used to boast to Irish prime ministers that he had more Irish in his Liverpool constituency than they had in theirs in Ireland. In 1954, Callaghan, Arthur Bottomley and Alf Robens visited Derry at the instigation of north of Ireland Labour figures like David Bleakley and Sir Charles Brett. They in turn visited London and succeeded in interesting Hugh Gaitskell in the Northern Ireland question. But there were a number of limitations on the efficacy of the Northern Ireland Labour Party’s link with the British Labour Party. On the one hand the party was sufficiently affiliated for a Bleakley or a Brett to be invited to attend British Labour Party conferences and to sit on platforms. However, they could not take part in debates. On the other hand, at least until O’Neill effectively destroyed the party in the 1965 Stormont election, the NILP for a period entertained the hope that it could either one day form the Government of Northern Ireland, or become an effective opposition. Therefore the NILP was not overly keen on promoting measures which might have had the effect of whittling away the powers of the Northern Ireland Government and Parliament.
In fact, the hopes of the NILP were never well grounded in reality. The party was always susceptible to being squeezed between Orange and Green extremism. In 1949 all of its nine candidates were swept away in a tide of Orange fervour after the south declared a republic. It fared little better in 1953, but in 1958 it picked up four seats. To a rising generation of young Catholics, reaping the benefits of the Butler Acts, the NILP seemed to offer a vehicle for change. But mindful of the need to attract fundamentalist support, the party voted with extreme Unionists in 1964 against a proposal that corporation swings should be opened to children on Sundays. Young radicals like Michael Farrell, Bernadette Devlin, and in Derry the socialist Eamonn McCann were given food for thought about the NILP’s commitment to change. The following year O’Neill gave them less to think about. His onslaught on the NILP cost the party two of its four seats, including David Bleakley and a Labour stalwart, William Boyd. Frank Hannah, a prominent lawyer and an independent Labour MP, did not contest the election.
Nevertheless, at Westminster prominent British Labour members like Geoffrey Bing, Lords Longford and Fenner Brockway, Stan Orme, Paul Rose, Kevin McNamara – all of whom had lobbied for reform both before and after Labour came to power in 1964 – continued their activities. After he won the West Belfast seat in 1966, their efforts were considerably added to by Gerry Fitt, a former seaman who had formed his own Republican Labour Party.
In one of his earliest parliamentary skirmishes Fitt asked Harold Wilson the question which successive British governments should have addressed, but did not. His question was to ask Wilson to agree that:
…under Section 75 of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, the ultimate responsibility for everything which happens and good government in Northern Ireland is with the United Kingdom Government? Would he further agree that in the 46 years which have elapsed since this Act was put on the Statute Book it has been made increasingly obvious that democracy does not exist in Northern Ireland?52
Wilson’s reply in turn was a distillation of all the Westminster equivocation and evasion that led to twenty-five bloody years in British–Irish history:
The question raises some very difficult issues because of the division of functions between the United Kingdom parliament and government and the Northern Ireland parliament and government. We are all aware that Hon. Members in more than one part of the House are very disturbed about certain things which go on. I am not taking sides in this because there are allegations and counter-allegations by one side or another within Northern Ireland.
I do not believe that this is a matter to be dealt with in the manner suggested [setting up a Royal Commission to enquire into the workings of the Government of Ireland Act]. I think that the right thing would be for my Hon. friend the Home Secretary and myself to have informal talks with the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland to see whether some of the difficulties which all of us recognise exist might be overcome in an informal way.
The admission that it was realised that ‘difficulties’ – i.e. injustices – existed did not mean they would be rectified. The ginger group within the Labour Party which came to form the vehicle for those seeking Northern Ireland reform was the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster. It had the support of perhaps a hundred Labour MPs. But Callaghan has summed up the influence of the CDU dismissively and accurately: ‘That group was always interested just as there is always a group interested in relations with Namibia, or with South Africa or with any other part of the Commonwealth at the time. That was the basis of it and I think there was as much interest and as much detachment as that.’53 As Callaghan was the Home Secretary who Wilson intimated would be joining in the ‘informal’ tête à trois with the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, that ‘detachment’ has a significant ring to it. It was that same ‘detachment’ which, as we shall see, resulted in a historic decision being taken to bring the civil rights issue on to the streets of Northern Ireland.
But before the situation matured to the point where this could happen, a great number of organised Nationalists had had to be convinced that the issue was civil rights and not the border and the existence of the northern state. This process may be said to have begun in October 1959 after Lemass made a speech to the Oxford Union which proposed a non-violent, federal solution to partition. Although unacceptable to Unionists it represented something new to northern Nationalists, who at this stage almost invariably took their cue from the ‘Free State’, as it was still spoken of, indicating that the south contained a degree of flexibility they did not possess in Northern Ireland. In December of that year a group of Catholic graduates, styling themselves National Unity, set up as a kind of Nationalist think-tank to work for unification through ‘the consent of the people of Northern Ireland’. The principle of consent was important because there was a de facto arrangement within the ranks of nationalism whereby constitutional-minded Nationalists colluded to a certain degree with Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein was left unchallenged to contest Westminster elections, whereas the Nationalists contested Stormont.
The impulse towards new thinking continued in Nationalist circles, although National Unity itself had little impact on the Nationalist MPs at Stormont, half of whom were unconvinced that they should give the place legitimacy by remaining there and continuously toyed with the idea of abstention. The Nationalist Party was in reality a largely uncoordinated protest grouping of rural representatives and some businessmen, few of them of outstanding calibre. Dissatisfaction with this set-up led to the holding of an important Nationalist conference in Maghery, Co. Armagh, on 18 April 1964, attended by Nationalist supporters and representatives. A Nationalist representative, James O’Reilly, had been outclassed on a TV programme by Brian Faulkner on what should have been the unassailable ground of discrimination. But in those days inexperienced countrymen, with little formal education and unused to the type of statistical approach which the McCluskeys were pioneering, could still be overawed, in the daunting confines of a TV studio, by opponents armed with nothing more than the weapons of condescension and imitation British upper-class accents.
There was much vehement criticism of old-guard attitudes which could be summed up as: ‘Go home, learn Irish and the Catholic birth rate will eventually take care of the problem.’ A Nationalist Political Front was formed, involving National Unity, rural Nationalists and Belfast representatives such as Harry Diamond, Frank Hannah and Gerry Fitt. The Front only survived for some months before a split developed over lack of consultation on the issue of contesting a seat in Fermanagh–South Tyrone. From this split there evolved the National Democratic Party. This consisted largely of teachers and helped to contribute ideas and organisational talent to the Nationalist movement, but had little success in its own right. On 2 June a new leader of the Nationalist Party was chosen: Eddie McAteer, who represented Derry at Stormont and whose brother Hugh was a former chief of staff of the IRA. The Front had its mandatory split shortly afterwards but the Nationalists published a policy document in November 1964.
This pledged the party to working within the constitution to achieve various goals, including a democratisation of party structures, action on unemployment, an end to discrimination and gerrymandering, and the initiation of training schemes. It was in effect a recognition of the state, and a move away from concentration on the partition issue and towards civil rights. The demand now was basically that of the McCluskeys and their Campaign for Social Justice. Northern Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom, therefore it should have United Kingdom standards. This was a major shift within Nationalism; no longer was the problem seen as inextricably bound up with the necessity of removing the border. After Lemass met O’Neill he advised McAteer to accept the role of official opposition leader at Stormont, which he did on 2 February 1965. The following year I found the position on the ground amongst the Northern Ireland Catholics to be as follows:
The plain truth about the North today is that the secret wish of most Northern Catholics is not for union with the South (entailing a fall-off in social benefits) but for an end to discrimination and for a fairer share of the Northern spoils. This truth may be unpalatable to us in the South, but it has to be faced.54
I researched two books consecutively in the years 1964–7055 and for most of that time was assured on all sides that a new day was dawning throughout Northern Ireland. As we know now it was, but not in the sense that people spoke of. However, one area definitely did appear to have taken a turn for the better: there was no IRA activity. And for a very good reason: there was no IRA. The IRA’s last border campaign had officially concluded in 1962. In fact it had been virtually finished since 1957. It was, as I have described it, largely a border campaign. Groups of young southern Republicans attacked targets along the border. They were motivated by the old tradition of ‘a rising in every generation’ which had inspired the men of 1916.
Like the 1916 insurgents they were execrated on all sides. Unlike the Easter rebellion, however, no dragon’s teeth were sown by their martyrdom. Internment was introduced north and south of the border, by de Valera in the Republic and by Brian Faulkner as Minister for Home Affairs in the Six Counties. There was very little protest at this and no mass movement of support. The campaign was subsequently referred to in the north as ‘the incidents’. That is what it was, a series of incidents along the border which aroused no significant supportive chord either in Nationalist rural areas or in major centres like Belfast and Derry. In fact the IRA had in a sense recognised their lack of support in one vital area, the Republic, as far back as 1954. In that year the organisation introduced Standing Order Number Eight as official IRA policy. It said:
Volunteers are strictly forbidden to take any militant action against 26-Co. Forces under any circumstances whatsoever. The importance of this Order in present circumstances, especially in Border areas, cannot be overemphasized… Volunteers arrested during training or in possession of arms will point out that the arms were for use against the British Forces of Occupation only.56
This order had been prompted by a recognition of the fact that the years since the civil war, particularly those of World War II, when de Valera ruthlessly made use of emergency powers to cripple the organisation, had demonstrated that the south would not tolerate a physical force policy against the state. Partition had worked in that part of Ireland anyhow. The failure of the ‘incidents’ seemed to indicate that it had worked north of the border also. After the inevitable splits and internal upheavals – occupying more of the movement’s time and energy than the occasional raid on a customs post or RUC barracks, which was about all the visible activity that occurred between 1957 and 1962 – the then IRA leadership decided to recognise the inevitable. On 26 February 1962 the Irish Republican Publicity Bureau announced that:
The leadership of the Resistance Movement has ordered the termination of ‘The Campaign of Resistance to British Occupation’… all arms and other materials have been dumped and all full-time active service volunteers have been withdrawn.57
From that date onward, Republican militarism ceased, except for a series of some seventeen funding bank robberies carried out in the name of front organisations, such as Saor Eire.58 The movement began to devote itself increasingly to political activities. The then chief of staff, Cathal Goulding, was influenced by two Trinity College lecturers of left-wing inclination, Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan. Sit-ins to further housing protests, agitations over mineral or riparian rights, the gaining of influence within trade unions – these became the targets of the former physical force movement. The Wolfe Tone Society, a Republican-minded debating club, which attracted a membership outside the ranks of the IRA, became an increasingly favoured vehicle for IRA activity in both Dublin and Belfast. The Dublin Housing Action Committee, which campaigned on behalf of Dublin’s homeless, was also commended to Republican activists. Generally speaking, it would be true to say that, despite the evidence before their eyes of what had befallen Labour in Northern Ireland, the Marxist theoreticians who now influenced republicanism steered towards the grail of a brotherhood of the Orange and Green proletariat. The 1916 rising anniversary in 1966 helped Sinn Fein to pick up membership in the Republic. It did so also in the north, but less openly, under the guise of republican clubs.
The most important landfall in the charting of this new course occurred in August 1966 when a meeting was held in Maghera, Co. Derry, at the home of a prominent Derry Republican, Kevin Agnew, a solicitor. It was decided to take advantage of the new currents stirring in Ireland, north and south, by setting up a broad-based north of Ireland civil rights movement. Goulding is on record as stating unequivocally that: ‘The IRA set up NICRA [Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association]. The Army Council of the IRA set up NICRA, it and the Communist Party together.’ This is an oversimplification, however. The meeting was treated to a lecture by one Eoghan Harris on the desirability of infiltrating the northern trade unions – a lecture which was in fact written by Roy Johnston. This, it was argued, would bring Protestants and Catholics together. The reaction to this suggestion on the part of the northerners at the meeting was that it showed very little understanding of Northern Ireland. A senior academic present, Professor Michael Dolley, of Queen’s University, found the paper ‘embarrassing’.59 Ciaran Mac an Ali, a prominent Dublin solicitor well versed in Republican history, was aware that this ‘new departure’ had in fact already been tried and abandoned as a failure by the IRA of the 1930s.
Mac an Ali suggested on the second day of the think-in that a better approach would be to launch a broad-based civil rights movement. The National Democratic Party, mentioned earlier, had also been advocating this course, but the Maghera meeting decided to go it alone without the NDP because it was deemed too Catholic. Mac an Ali’s suggestion bore fruit the following January in Belfast when the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed publicly. Its constitution was based on that of the British National Council for Civil Liberties, and NICRA’s inaugural meeting was attended by the NCCL’s secretary, Tony Smythe.
Only two of those who had taken part in the meeting at Agnew’s house were on the first NICRA committee: Agnew himself, and Professor Dolley, who was a civil libertarian, not a Republican. Noel Harris, a prominent trade unionist, was elected chairman, Dr Con McCluskey was the vice-chairman. Two prominent Wolfe Tone Society members, Fred Heatley and Jack Bennett, became treasurer and information officer respectively (Bennett was a prominent journalist with the Belfast Telegraph). The other members of the committee were: Ken Banks, a member of Harris’s union, the Draughtsmen and Allied Trades Association; Betty Sinclair, a communist and member of the Belfast Trades Council; Joe Sherry, of the Republican Labour Party; Paddy Devlin, of the NILP; John Quinn, of the Ulster Liberal Party; Terence O’Brien, unattached; and Robin Cole, who was co-opted because of his position as chairman of the Queen’s Young Unionist Group.
The standing of the foregoing in the Six County community lent weight to NICRA’s demands, which were: the ending of the plural voting system in council elections, simplified into a call for ‘one man, one vote’; an end to discrimination and gerrymandering; machinery to deal with complaints against public authorities; the disbandment of the B-Specials; fair play in public housing allocation; and an end to the Special Powers Act, which basically permitted the Stormont authorities to do whatever they wished in opposing dissent. However, in view of what has already been written, it is not necessary to labour the point that the NICRA shopping list was like a red rag to a bull in the eyes of Unionist fundamentalists, constituting a root-and-branch attack on the whole idea of a Unionist state. Rumours that NICRA had a hidden agenda began to spread almost as soon as the organisation was formed. And not merely within the Unionist community: in Derry the cautious John Hume refused to join, fearing a left-wing hand in the puppet’s glove of civil rights.
By now Hume was emerging as a figure of some stature in the Nationalist community. His instinctive caution had made him resist strong pressure to go forward as a Nationalist candidate in opposition to McAteer in the 1965 election. Yet he was also showing a contradictory aptitude for new thinking. Apart from his work in the Credit Union movement, he had written two noteworthy articles for the Irish Times in May 1964 which had aroused discussion north and south of the border. In one of these he had argued, after criticising both Nationalists and Unionists, that:
One of the greatest contributions, therefore, that the Catholic in Northern Ireland can make to a liberalising of the political atmosphere would be the removal of the equation between nationalist and Catholic.60
He had also been one of the moving spirits behind efforts to bring new ideas to bear on the housing problem in Derry. For example, the Derry Housing Association’s innovations included buying large premises which were then converted into flats and let to young couples at a high rent. At the end of two years or so, half the rent was returned to the couple as a deposit for a mortgage. A former Maynooth seminarian, Hume was at this stage married, and was a French teacher in Derry’s St Columb’s School, respected both for the exam results he achieved and for his skill in public debate with the Columcille Debating Society.
One of those he debated with was another rising star from Derry’s working-class Bogside district, Eamonn McCann, who would become the author of one of the best books of the coming conflict, War and an Irish Town.61 Humorous, with a passionate compassion for the underdog, the mercurial McCann, like his supporters, was the antithesis of the dour, cautious Hume and the forces he attracted. McCann was the political exemplar of the slogan on the portraits of the Sacred Heart which once hung in every Irish Catholic home: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there will I also be.’ McCann’s creed seemed to be: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in the name of revolutionary socialism, therein lies the possibility of a split.’ In 1968, McCann, who would have been a psychology graduate had he not been expelled from Queen’s three years earlier, was a leading light in the Derry Housing Action Committee. The HAC was to be the motor force in one of the seminal events in Northern Ireland, the 5 October 1968 civil rights march in Derry. McCann himself has accurately described, in terms of both mood and historical fact, who and what organised the march:
The march had been organised by a loose group of radicals who had been trying for months, with some success, to create general political mayhem in the city. Those involved were drawn mainly from the local Labour Party and James Connolly Republican Club. In March they and others had organised themselves, if that is not too strong a word, into the Derry Housing Action Committee, which set out with the conscious intention of disrupting public life in the city to draw attention to the housing problem.62
However, though the HAC did organise the march, the idea of taking to the streets to protest Catholic grievances did not originate with the Derry group. Once again the catalyst for this type of protest was Austin Currie – or probably more accurately, British indifference to the need for reform in Northern Ireland and/or the impossibility of Terence O’Neill’s being able to bring it about. O’Neill himself has said of this period:
As the Party would never stand for change, I was really reduced to trying to improve relations between North and South; and in the North itself between the two sections of the community. In this regard I think I can truthfully say that I succeeded. During this period between 1965 and 1968 the Catholics came to realise that I was interested in their welfare.63
The real point was that while some Catholics, not all, accepted O’Neill’s interest, very few were confident that he could translate it into action against the wishes of his party. The only hope was vigorous action from London. And by the summer of 1968 Austin Currie for one did not believe that this would be forthcoming. He had spent the years since his election deploying the arguments provided by the McCluskeys’ pamphlets at Stormont, on TV, to sympathetic Labour audiences in England, all to no avail. Stormont was hostile, resistant, Westminster took refuge behind the Speaker’s ruling which batted the ball back to Stormont. An incident at Westminster made up Currie’s mind.64 A Gerry Fitt initiative about discrimination had run into the customary brick wall. Currie happened to be in the House at the time, in the company of Paul Rose, one of the staunchest supporters of the Campaign for Social Justice. Rose turned to Currie and said: ‘You’re making no impact. You’ll never get anywhere over here until you force this government to take action.’ Over a quarter of a century later Currie told me: ‘That was a significant occasion. I went back home and started organising. The first civil rights march took place the following August.’65