Part 4

1

The Orange apparatus was constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century by industrialists and landowners in north-eastern Ireland in order to capture and keep the loyalty of the Protestant masses. The all-class alliance contained within it was fraught with contradictions and consequently fragile. It has frequently threatened to disintegrate. The motivation of the Orange leaders was and is economic self-interest. At each point of crisis their primary consideration has been the ‘necessity’ not so much to repel Catholic encroachment as to prevent Protestant defection. Historically, Irish Protestant property owners’ attachment to ‘the link with Britain’ has in no way been sentimental. This was clearly demonstrated by their reaction to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland by the British Liberal government elected in 1868.

Disestablishment removed the formal legal basis of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. The instinctive reaction of a major section of the ascendancy was to withdraw its support for the union with Britain. ‘It is hardly surprising’, said the Belfast Newsletter, ‘that with the pages of history open before them, with the mire of their ancient privileges scattered all around, Protestants should care little to maintain a union which for them appears henceforth to have little value’ (16 May 1870). At the same time the two Dublin Protestant papers, the Irish Times and the Evening Mail, flirted with Home Rule. Issac Butt, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, noted that those attending the meeting in May 1870 which founded the Home Rule Association were ‘principally Protestants and Conservatives…all men of some mark and station’. The 61-man committee elected by the meeting contained 28 Conservatives, 10 Liberals, 17 Constitutional Nationalists and 6 Fenians, of whom 36 were Protestants and 25 Catholics. Protestant Conservative control of the HRA lasted only a few months, but the fact that they even attempted to take the leadership of the movement indicates that their primary concern was to preserve their own position in society, not the constitutional status quo. It was when Home Rule leadership eluded them that they turned to other things.

Within a few years the ascendancy was to be threatened by something much more formidable than a reforming Liberal government. In October 1879 the Irish National Land League was established under the effective leadership of the radical Michael Davitt. The League demanded a reduction in rents, state aid for tenants to buy out the land they worked on and an end to evictions. The League’s tactics included the ‘boycott’ of landowners and agents evicting or attempting to evict tenants. It arranged that all evictions were ‘witnessed by gatherings of people’. The witnesses in the nature of things were wont to set about the evictors. The success of the League can be gleaned from the fact that in 1881 there were 4,439 ‘agrarian crimes’ committed in Ireland, an increase of 900 per cent over the 1877 figures (Special Commission, vol. iv, p. 515).

The Land League was based in the south and west of Ireland among Catholic peasants, but its economic demands were also clearly in the interests of the Protestant peasants in the north-east who, although they enjoyed security of tenure, were by no means comfortably off. They had, moreover, been hard hit by a slump in the prices of agricultural produce in the late 1870s, and by the fact that the 1879 harvest was the worst since the famine of 1845‒7. To minimize the chances of the Land League’s gathering Protestant peasant support, northern landowners reverted to a tactic which had worked in the past and which was to prove so reliable in the future. All talk of Home Rule forgotten, they strove to give their tenants to understand that the Land League was a militant Catholic movement intent on the destruction of Protestantism by taking Ireland out of the United Kingdom and creating Rome-rule throughout the land.

One prominent Orange leader appealed to all ‘Protestants and Orangemen’: ‘Are the Protestants of the south and west to be shot down like rotten sheep?’ (N. P. Palmer, The Irish League Crisis, p. 301). ‘Shot down like rotten sheep’ was putting it a bit high, but the speaker’s basic point—that the Land League was attacking Protestants—had some substance.

Most of the Land League’s targets in the south and west were Protestants. But it could not have been otherwise. There were very few Catholic landlords in any part of Ireland available for attack. Impatient of such hair-splitting the Orange Order established the ‘Orange Emergency Committee’ in April 1881 to oppose the League and to support its ‘victims’. Its main activity was the organization of squads of blackleg harvesters to save the crops of boycotted landlords.

The landlords and the Orange leaders appealed to the communal solidarity of Northern tenant-farmers as Protestants, Davitt to their class interests as peasants. And Davitt was not wholly unsuccessful. By the autumn of 1880 branches of the Land League had been established in Armagh, Enniskillen and Belfast. In January 1881 Davitt addressed a meeting in Armagh chaired by the Grand Master of the local Orange lodge. Around the same time an observer recorded that after a Land League meeting in Lurgan ‘Orangemen joined the league in vast numbers’ (private letter in Belfast Public Records Office, D 1481). Somewhat euphorically Davitt claimed that ‘had I had a few more months I would have brought the whole province into the League’.

The nervousness excited by Davitt’s radicalism and by the ‘excesses’ which accompanied the ‘witnessing’ of evictions was not confined to the landlord class or the Protestant religion. Most of the Catholic clergy and almost all the Catholic bishops opposed the campaign. Charles Stuart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was titular leader of the Land League. He was a landowner by birth and a moderate man by resultant nature. His formal leadership of the Land League, however, led to his arrest and detention in Kilmainham prison in October 1881, following which there was much uproar in the Irish countryside. In January 1882 the Vatican intervened. Pope Leo XIII denounced the Land League in a letter to the Irish hierarchy and urged the people ‘not to cast aside the obedience due to their lawful rulers’. The hierarchy endorsed the Pope’s communication and issued a pastoral letter instructing Catholics ‘not to resist the law’ (quoted in The Revolutionaries by Sean Cronin, p. 131). As a result the land campaign weakened, as did Mr Parnell’s resolve.

In the spring of 1882, in accordance with the terms of the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’, Parnell called off the land agitation in return for an Act which gave tenants limited rights in the land and reduced rents by twenty per cent. He was released from prison.

The ending of the land war ruptured the few tenuous links laid down by the Land League between the southern Catholic and the northern Protestant tenant farmers. The concessions gained by Parnell were more meaningful for the former. The Protestant tenants, after all, for the most part already enjoyed in practice the rights in the land conferred by the Act. The ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ thus reduced the differential between the Protestant and Catholic peasants while not significantly benefiting the former. Thereafter the movement which Parnell proceeded to build on the ruins of the League had no appeal at all for the Protestant masses.

In October 1882 Parnell formed the National League, in which, as the name implied, land reform took second place to the demand for Home Rule. In order to combat Davitt’s ideas Parnell and his lieutenants actively sought to recruit the Catholic clergy. An average county convention called to select parliamentary candidates comprised 150 laymen and 50 priests (C. C. O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, p. 130). Davitt and some others bitterly but unsuccessfully opposed the granting of such decisive influence to the clergy, but they did not break formally with Parnell.

The effect of this development on the north was predictable. Protestant tenants had seen a movement which claimed to be fighting for their social and economic emancipation transformed into one which offered them nothing and which was steeped in Catholic clericalism. Those who had broken with their traditional leaders to support the Land League were betrayed. The warnings of those—their landlords, most vociferously—who had claimed all along that it was merely a devious anti-Protestant plot were validated. Not for the first time in Irish history and by no means for the last a ‘moderate’ leadership of a mass national movement had operated in conjunction with the Catholic clergy to defeat an emerging radicalism and thus to shatter any possibility of the movement’s crossing the sectarian barrier in the north to make contact with the Protestant masses. The real beneficiaries were the northern landlords. The all-class Protestant alliance in the countryside was preserved, indeed strengthened.

The Parnellite movement, actively supported by the clergy, gathered strength. In 1885 it won 86 of the 103 parliamentary seats in Ireland and held the balance of power between the Tory and Liberal parties at Westminster. Gladstone bought their support with the promise of a Bill to give Ireland Home Rule. It was in the campaign in Ireland for and against the 1886 Home Rule Bill that the Orange-Unionist machine was built and the future pattern of Irish politics determined. The most passionate opponents of Home Rule were the businessmen and industrialists of the Belfast area. They joined the Orange Order, helped create the Unionist Party and for the first time began to assert themselves, as opposed to the rural squires, as the dominant class in northern Irish politics.

By 1886 the Belfast area was industrialized. This was not true of the rest of Ireland. Northern industry had developed on the basis of the land tenure system—the Ulster Custom—which gave tenant farmers security of tenure, thus encouraging improvement to holdings and modest capital accumulation. The industrial background of some of the Protestant settlers facilitated a turn towards small-scale part-time cotton and linen manufacture. For a time both trades prospered. Competition between individual operators and the development of associated technology led to the gradual elimination of small-holding spinners and weavers and the concentration of manufacture in factory units, mainly in the Lagan Valley. In the early nineteenth century the cotton industry was hit by a slump and cotton manufacturers switched to linen production. Belfast was by 1830 the centre of a prosperous expanding linen industry, and the sons and daughters of tenant farmers were swarming into the city to become wage-earners in the mills. It was on the basis of the profits generated by the linen industry that shipbuilding and engineering became established in the Belfast area. The first iron ship built in Ireland was made in Belfast in the 1840s. The first major shipbuilding company began production at Queen’s Island in 1850. The population of the city increased from less than thirty thousand in 1813 to more than a hundred thousand in 1851. Coal for the industries came from the Scottish mines. British banks supplied credit. The Empire provided both raw materials and secure markets. In 1886 Belfast, for practical economic purposes, was part of industrial Britain.

The economic situation in the rest of Ireland was in stark contrast. The factors making for industrialization in the north—the land tenure system and the presence in large numbers of
‘industrially-oriented’ settlers—had not operated. Attempts in the early eighteenth century artificially to inject linen manufacture into the south had failed.

The Irish Parliamentary Party had no industrial base. What most of the Parnellites wanted was not dramatic change in the economic set-up but the opportunity, under a Dublin parliament, to have a say in the distribution of patronage. It was open to northern industrialists to negotiate and there is no reason to suppose that it would have been difficult to negotiate—an arrangement which, within a Home Rule framework, would have guaranteed them continued free access to the British market. The Home Rule parliament envisaged in Gladstone’s Bill would not, anyway, have had control of customs. There were other factors, however.

Other movements nearer home were causing anxiety in the northern business community. The decade before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill saw the development of effective trade unionism in Belfast. For the previous half-century the owners of industry had been fortunate indeed in this regard. Sectarianism had prevented effective working-class organization. Since the early years of the century Catholics, fleeing from starvation on the land, had poured into Belfast to compete with Protestants for jobs. Grimy ghettoes grew up side by side. By the 1850s sectarian riots were a regular feature of Belfast life. Owenism and Chartism passed Belfast by. In the 1870s, however, the relative industrial peace was disrupted as a labour movement struggled into existence. There were strikes against wage cuts involving both Catholic and Protestant workers in the linen and shipbuilding industries in 1874, 1881, 1883 and 1884. The Belfast Trades Council was formed in 1881. The workers of whom it had been said by Sir Robert Bateson in 1838 that ‘no men had ever conducted themselves better in their very depressed conditions’ (Green, The Lagan Valley) were now flexing their muscles and gingerly testing their strength. In 1885 the Belfast Trades Council nominated the first Irish ‘Lib Lab’ candidate, Alexander Bowman, a Protestant, for North Belfast. The Home Rule issue was heaven-sent to industrialists wishing to discourage such class differentiation. They set about welding Protestants of all classes more firmly together. They were marvellously successful. The instrument for integration was the Orange Order.

Up to then the Order, although useful at times, had not received any sizeable support from the respectable classes. The official history of the Order records that it ‘had been very much a labouring and poorer artisan class Protestant movement’. The respectable classes joined now, however, in great numbers and with great enthusiasm. ‘The introduction of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill gave the Order a membership which was to transform it completely to make it a highly respectable and exceedingly powerful religious, political organization’ (Rev. S. E. Long, Orangeism, 1967).

The political effect of this on the developing workers’ movement was devastating.

The Orange Lodges provided the basis of an effective political machine while their tradition of fraternal equality between members tended to blur class distinctions and helped to reconcile the Protestant proletariat to the leadership of landlords and wealthy business men. (J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1966, p. 399)

Virulent anti-Catholicism had been the ideology of the Orange Order since its foundation as a Protestant peasants’ defence organization in 1795. Hitherto the business classes had been above that sort of thing. Now, however, in one of the biggest mass conversions in Irish history since St Patrick baptized ten thousand clansmen into Christianity in one afternoon on Tara Hill, they rediscovered the Fundamental Truth of the Bible, discerned on the southern horizon the gathering hordes of the Scarlet Women from the banks of the Tiber, and urged the labouring masses to gird themselves for battle to defend their civil and religious liberty. In January 1886 the Irish Unionist Party was formed by a meeting at, suitably enough, the Carlton Club. It was opposed to Home Rule for any part of Ireland, and its leaders were quite explicit about their motives. One of the first establishment figures to join the Order, Colonel Saunderson, an ex-Liberal, had said that he did so because it was the only organization ‘capable of dealing with the condition of anarchy and rebellion’ (T. W. Moody and J. C. Beckett, Ulster Since 1800, 1, p. 91). Lords Londonderry and Hamilton favoured a Protestant alliance on the grounds that the Home Rule movement was ‘menacing to the rights of property and so order’ (quoted in Jeff Bell’s This We Will Maintain). The Belfast Chamber of Commerce was against Home Rule because it believed that ‘commercial prosperity’ would thereby receive ‘lasting injury’ (pamphlet issued by Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union, 1886). The Northern Whig of 21 January 1886 said: ‘Our Commercial and manufacturing classes are devoted to the Union because they know that Trade and Commerce would not flourish without the union.’ More succinctly, a ‘Belfast Merchant’: ‘The birth of a Dublin Parliament would be the death of credit’ (Bell).

British commercial interests had a wider reason to oppose Home Rule: to grant it might set a dangerous headline for the inhabitants of other colonial countries. ‘It [Home Rule] is a Right,’ said Joseph Chamberlain, ‘which must be considered in relation to the security and welfare of other countries in juxtaposition to which Ireland is placed and whose interests are indissolubly linked’ (Home Rule and the Irish, p. 34).

‘If we can stir up the religious feeling’, wrote the Rev. Henry Henderson, ‘we have won.’ They did win. Religious feeling was stirred up so effectively that sectarian war erupted in Belfast, leaving many dead, hundreds injured and many Catholic houses burned out. And what, most importantly, they won was not the guaranteed preservation of the union but the political allegiance of the Protestant masses. The Liberal Party in Ulster collapsed into the Unionist Alliance. The Conservative (and Unionist) Party which had hitherto had little formal existence outside the Belfast area spread into the countryside as the new respectable Orange Lodges created, or in some cases more or less became, branches of the party.

The northern industrialists’ stated reason for mobilizing against Home Rule—that ‘commercial prosperity’ would thereby suffer ‘lasting injury’—was not based on any fear that Parnell and what he represented threatened ‘commercial prosperity’. Parnell did not. Nothing in the Home Rule Bill which he agreed with Gladstone would have interfered with the profitable conduct of business. Nothing in Parnell’s political philosophy would have hampered the reconciliation of any section of the proletariat to the leadership of landlords and wealthy businessmen. His own attitude to class and to organizations tending to emphasize class distinctions was recorded by Davitt.

What is trade-unionism but the landlordism of labour? I would not tolerate, if I were at the head of a government, such bodies as trade unions. They are opposed to individual liberty and should be kept down, as Bismarck keeps them down in Germany…(quoted in Andrew Boyd, The Rise of the Irish Trade Unions, p. 59)

Nothing there to cause the class-conscious nineteenth-century industrialist to lose sleep. A Dublin parliament, as envisaged in the Home Rule Bill and headed by Parnell, would clearly not have been the ‘death of credit’.

But the Unionist fears were not entirely fanciful: because what they really feared was the propertyless masses behind Parnell. Their interests were certainly inimical to ‘commercial prosperity’, and there was no guarantee that Parnell could ‘hold the line’ against them. Indications were that he could not. The Act implemented with Parnell’s support after the Kilmainham Treaty had not solved the land question. Eviction and resistance to eviction continued, although the statistics for ‘agrarian crime’ show a falling-off after the record year of 1882. Davitt himself was enormously popular at grass-roots level. In 1886 a ‘Plan of Campaign’ was launched by John Dillon and William O’Brien against Parnell’s advice. Basically the ‘Plan of Campaign’ involved tenants of a particular estate uniting to prevent the eviction of any of their number whose offer of a ‘fair rent’ had been refused by the landlord. It lacked the scale and intensity of the 1880‒2 land war, but it was enough to convince propertied observers that dangerous radical ideas were still contained within the Home Rule movement.

What the Unionist leaders feared was that within a Home Rule Ireland they, despite Parnell, would not for long be able to preserve their privileged position, the more especially since their ‘own’ masses were chafing at the bit. It was not the policies but the composition of the Home Rule movement which made them nervous.

It was precisely to combat such ideas that Parnell had recruited the Catholic clergy in 1882. In other words the tendency within the Home Rule movement which represented ‘Rome-rule’ was precisely that which did not threaten the interests of property. But the fact that it was the dominant tendency invested the slogan ‘Home Rule is Rome-Rule’ with plausibility. And the fact that the tendency opposed to Rome-rule, that which did threaten propertied interests, was not clearly differentiated from Parnellism in the public mind, and had no separate organizational expression, prevented it from rebutting convincingly Unionist allegations that it too, for all its radical phrase-mongering, was a part of the plot to subjugate the Protestants.

The Catholic ideology introduced into the Home Rule movement was of crucial assistance to the Unionist leaders as they strove to combat radical ideas simultaneously emerging from the Northern Protestant community. Ever since, the two ideologies most powerful in Irish politics, Protestant Unionism and conservative Catholic Nationalism, have been complementary, and have operated together to keep Ireland safe from ‘anarchy and rebellion’.

2

The 1886 Bill was defeated, as was Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill in 1893. After that the immediate threat to Ulster Unionists receded. And as the threat receded the pressure for the maintenance of the Protestant alliance weakened; the alliance still had internal contradictions which sooner or later were bound to come to the surface.

The conditions of the working classes in north-eastern Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were such as to make inevitable some sort of rebellion against the political status quo. However, the conditions of sections of the Protestant working class relative to that of the Catholics placed difficulties in the way of fomenting rebellion among them.

Belfast was a very unhealthy city for workers to live in. Tuberculosis and bronchial diseases were almost epidemic. In 1897, 27,000 people were treated for typhus (Beckett and Glasscock, Belfast, p. 117). The 1901 census showed that there were 17,919 one-room tenement dwellings in Ulster in which 50,000 people lived. In 1906 the Commissioners for National Education in Ireland reported that schools in Belfast were ‘the most backward in the British Isles’. Emigration from Ulster in this period was at 8 per cent per year, as high as that from any other part of Ireland (Thom’s Directory, 1908). There were 90,000 ‘farms’ with a rateable valuation of £10 or less, relatively the highest figure in Ireland with the exception of Connemara.

Agricultural labourers were atrociously paid. The highest rate paid in Ulster (that is, Co. Down, at 12s. 5d. per week) was lower than the lowest rate paid in England, Scotland or Wales (Orkney to Shetlands, 14s.) (J. W. Boyle, The Rise of the Irish Labour Movement, unpublished thesis, p. 34). The situation of urban workers was slightly different. Wage-rates for shipbuilding and engineering workers (35‒38s. per week; J.W. Boyle, p. 48) were in line with those for Britain and higher than those in Dublin. Moreover, Protestant workers were doing better than Catholics. In 1901 Catholics formed 24.3 per cent of the population of Belfast, yet held only 10.1 per cent of jobs in engineering, 15.5 per cent in carpentry, 11.6 per cent in plumbing and 6 per cent in shipyard work (1901 census).

The result was that while there was considerable discontent among the Protestant lower classes this discontent did not automatically link up with the grievances of the Catholic workers, who naturally wanted, among other things, ‘fair’ distribution of whatever jobs were going. Thus the radical challenge to Unionism which arose in the Protestant community in the early years of this century at first spoke not at all to Catholic interests. In 1902 an Independent pro-union candidate won a by-election against a Unionist for the rural East Down seat on a platform of compulsory land purchase. In the same year the Unionists lost South Belfast to Tom Sloan who stood as an Independent Unionist and campaigned for fair rents, higher pensions and trade-union rights.

After the election Sloan was suspended from the Orange Order and in June 1903 he helped form the Independent Orange Order. The first Grand Master of the IOO was Lindsay Crawford, a journalist. On 12 July 1904 the IOO demonstration was 2,000 strong. Its leaders were in no way ‘soft’ on the Home Rule question: they were, if anything, more fierce than the official Order in their denunciations of popery. But in the process of elaborating a political programme in opposition to that of the Unionist leadership gradually and inexorably they were driven to oppose Unionism as such. A speech by Crawford in December 1904 indicated that the IOO was developing a critique of unionism more radical and more broadly based than the platform on which Sloan had stood in 1902:

Not until the Irish Roman Catholic placed the reasonable claims of his country before the impossible demands of his Church, not until the Irish Protestant inscribed in indelible characters ‘Not that I love the Empire less but that I love Ireland more’ would there dawn on the dark horizon of Irish politics a single ray of hope for the cooperation and consolidation of all classes and creeds, for material progress and prosperity of this country…The woes of Ireland are mainly attributed to British misgovernment, to the fact that Ireland is governed not on national but on sectarian lines. (J. W. Boyle, ‘The BPA and the IOO’, Irish Historical Studies, XIII, p. 132)

By July 1905 the IOO had moved further. In the Magheramore Manifesto they remarked:

We consider it is high time that the Irish Protestants should consider their position as Irish citizens and their attitudes towards their Roman Catholic countrymen and that the latter should choose once and for all between nationality and sectarianism. In an Ireland in which Protestant and Catholic stand sullen and discontented it is not too much to hope that they will reconsider their position and in their common trials unite on a basis of nationality.

At this time there were seventy Independent Lodges in the North.

During the same period, and for the same reasons, the Labour movement began to reassert itself. In 1893 a branch of the Independent Labour Party was established in Belfast. In the 1897 municipal elections a reformed (household) franchise enabled six Labour candidates to win seats in Belfast Corporation. In 1905 William Walker, a pro-union Labour candidate, came within 500 votes of winning a by-election in North Belfast against the Unionist nominee.

The 1906 General Election presented the Ulster Unionist leadership with the most formidable electoral challenge it had yet faced. Walker lost again in North Belfast, but Sloan retained South Belfast and the Nationalist Joe Devlin won West Belfast. The IOO supported all three anti-Unionist candidates in the city. Two other candidates supported by the IOO won seats from Unionists in North Tyrone and North Antrim. In Ulster as a whole the Unionists won only 14 of the 33 seats. The Protestant Alliance within Unionism was fragmenting.

It was into this situation that the syndicalist labour organizer Jim Larkin arrived at the beginning of 1907, as Belfast organizer for the National Union of Dock Labourers. The political opposition to Unionism from the Catholics on the one hand and the Protestant masses on the other had been separate oppositions. Ulster Catholics, like Catholics in the rest of the country, voted solidly for the conservative Nationalist Party, Parnell’s party, then led by John Redmond, and although the IOO had supported the Nationalist Devlin against a Unionist in West Belfast it had done so on the principle of the lesser of two evils, rather than in any confidence that Devlin stood for or would defend Protestant working-class interests. Between the politics of Devlin and Sloan there was scarcely any contact, much less common ground. Devlin was closely connected with the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the miserable Catholic mirror-image of the Orange Order. He was as solicitous for the interests of the church as any bishop, and as instinctively conservative as any ascendancy landowner. Neither Sloan nor Devlin, neither the IOO nor the Nationalist Party was offering to the Catholic and Protestant working class in Belfast a political philosophy or a programme of action which invited them to come together against a putative common enemy: although, clearly, the IOO was tending in that direction. Larkin, as a syndicalist, was short on political philosophies but long on programmes for action. What he was to do within a few months of his arrival was, by the application of trade-union tactics more militant than any which Belfast had experienced before, to challenge Protestant working-class radicals and their leaders to break from Unionism, and Catholic working-class conservatives and their leaders to break from Nationalism. The result was, if nothing else, interesting.

Larkin went quickly into action and won the majority of the dockers away from the moderate Carters Association. In June 1907 he led 500 dockers into strike for higher wages. When the employers resisted he introduced them to the sympathetic strike. At the beginning of July the carters struck. The coal merchants, whose supplies were thus frozen, locked out their employees. The next section of the Belfast proletariat to be infected by the militant virus was the police, whose members downed batons for higher pay and better conditions. The strike involved both Catholics and Protestants.

Larkin was a Catholic and was outspokenly opposed to the Union, and this was naturally used against him by employers appealing to Protestant workers for ‘loyalty’. He offered to resign his leadership of the dispute to head off attacks from this direction, but his offer was refused by Protestant trade unionists whose spokesman Alexander Boyd was firm that ‘men of all creeds are determined to stand together in fighting the common enemy’. The IOO backed the strike and Sloan and Crawford spoke at strike meetings, answering the employers’ attacks on Larkin. Crawford wrote in the Ulster Guardian: ‘The best reply to make to the opponents of Mr Larkin is to point to the fact that the employers have been compelled to raise wages and reduce hours all round since Mr Larkin organized the men’ (Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, p. 28). After riots on the Falls Road, leaflets were distributed in both the Falls and the Shankill urging workers not to be ‘misled by the employers’ game of dividing Catholic and Protestant’. Grand Masters of seven Loyal Orange Lodges resigned to join Larkin. On 12 August he led a non-
denominational parade through the city—in memory of both the besieged and the besiegers of Derry (Lysaght, The Making of Northern Ireland, p. 21).

The strike ended messily. The London leadership of the National Union of Dock Labourers, alarmed by reports of what their revolutionary representative in Belfast was up to, denounced Larkin. At the beginning of August troops moved in and the leaders of the police mutiny were arrested. The carters settled for a wage rise in mid-August. The dockers were finally broken in September.

In terms of the development of Northern Irish politics the most significant aspect of the summer’s events was the antics (it is the correct word) of Joe Devlin and the Nationalist Party. Many of the strikers and the families of the strikers were from Mr Devlin’s ‘natural’ constituency—the working-class Catholics of the Falls Road. At the outset he could not afford to be seen to be opposing the strike. He made no comment until 11 August, when he attended a strike meeting addressed by both Larkin and Crawford and explained, plausibly enough, that he had been silent until then lest his intervention give the Unionist Party an opportunity to represent the strike as Nationalist-inspired. Mr Devlin’s party, however, controlled and funded as it was by the Catholic business community and led at local level by the clergy, had as little use as Unionist industrialists for ‘Larkinism’ and soon made it clear that this was the wrong tune to play. Within a few weeks, as the strike collapsed, Mr Devlin insisted, with as much protestation as a Fianna Fail Prime Minister sixty-
six years later explaining that he had never met a Provisional IRA man in his life: ‘Let me say I knew nothing about the strike in its progress, and I do not think I even know at the present moment what the absolute results of the strike were…I have never spoken to Mr Larkin in my life but once…I have never received a communication from Mr Larkin or anyone connected with the strike during its progress, before it commenced or after it ended’ (Emmet Larkin, James Larkin, p. 34). Mr Devlin made it clear that henceforth class antagonisms would not disrupt his struggle for Home Rule.

The effect of Devlin’s desertion on Protestant working-class politics was in line with the effect on the Protestant peasantry of Parnell’s suspension of the Land War. The burgeoning discontent of the Protestant masses having led a section to break from the official Orange machine and to begin to break from Unionism itself to rally to a radical standard—despite the fact that the standard had been raised by a Catholic and a believer in Home Rule—Catholic conservatism in politics operated to repel them and to direct them back into the certainties of the Orange Order from which they had emerged. In his capacity as a trade-union organizer Larkin could win the loyalty of Protestant workers despite the fact that he was a Home Ruler. But he could not break down the Protestant workers’ opposition to Home Rule as such unless he detached, or at least was seen to be striving to detach, the Catholic workers—who were already Home Rulers to a man—from the clerical conservatism represented by Joe Devlin. Once the radical content of ‘Home Rule’ was smothered, the only distinguishing feature remaining was its conservative Catholic Nationalism, a feature which tended not only to be repugnant to Protestants anyway, but, as an added bonus for the Unionist bosses, to validate all prior warnings about the treacherous intent of the Catholics who had been presuming to preach to Protestants. Larkin’s weakness was that as a syndicalist he did not ‘believe in’ politics. Thus he was not involved in any attempt politically to argue against, much less defeat, Devlin in Belfast, and had not consciously set out to build a ‘movement’ at all, except in the vague sense of ultimately capturing power through militant trade unionism. For all that it was a political defeat which Larkin suffered with the collapse of the strike movement. In Belfast ‘Home Rule’ still meant Devlinism, and as long as that situation obtained every day was a field-day for Orange platform orators intent on reminding Protestant workers that to break the link with Britain meant, inevitably, to be put in thrall to Rome. As Devlin resumed his role as unchallenged master of Falls Road politics the sectarian straitjackets were once again wrapped around the ghettoes of the city.

The exit from the Orange machine which the IOO had taken had led them straight up Joe Devlin’s garden path. Those who had supported the IOO began to draw back into the fold. Membership declined sharply. In 1908 it formally condemned Home Rule and expelled Crawford, but it was too late and this did little to revive its fortunes.

The results of the General Election of January 1910 showed how devastating to the fortunes of Labour and Independent Unionism events since 1906 had been. The Ulster Unionist Council directed its main attack not at Nationalists such as Devlin in West Belfast but at the non-Unionist supporters of the link with Britain, such as Sloan in South and Robert Gageby who was representing Labour in North Belfast. The line of attack came over loud and clear in the editorials of the Belfast Newsletter during the campaign:

It is a fight for the maintenance of the union in the South and North divisions as in the West. (3 January 1910)

Of William McClaw, Independent Unionist candidate for South Antrim:

He must be a Home Ruler, no matter what he says or thinks. (6 January 1910)

Orangemen must vote for every supporter of the Government, for it is only by doing so that they can prevent the Nationalists and priests from becoming masters of this country…The Sloanites are prepared to betray their fellow Protestants. (6 January 1910)

Beware of the danger to the cause of the Union that lies in the candidates of Mr Sloan and Mr Gageby. (20 January 1910)

Gageby was beaten in North Belfast. Sloan lost his seat in the South. Two other Independent Unionists lost seats to the official party in the countryside. In all, the official Unionists won 18 of the 33 Ulster seats. The Unionists had been able to present the election as a choice between Catholic Nationalism and Protestant Unionism in which it was necessary for voters decisively to opt for one or the other. They had been able to do this because Larkin had failed to build out of his trade-union activities any movement which could have connected with the consciousness of the Protestant workers who had supported his strikes. Devlin’s victory over Larkin—for that is essentially what happened in 1907—handed the Protestant masses back to the Unionist Party.

The Unionist Party sorely needed the Protestant masses during the next few years. In April 1912, the Liberal Prime Minister Asquith, dependent for his majority on eighty-two Irish Nationalist votes, introduced the third Home Rule Bill at Westminster. The House of Lords used their power to postpone its application for two years. It seemed therefore that Home Rule would be a reality by 1914. The Unionist leaders mobilized to stop it. The ‘Ulster Covenant’, a pledge to resist the Bill, was signed, allegedly by half a million people, in September 1912 and mass anti-Home Rule rallies were held throughout Ulster. The Ulster Volunteer Force was formed as the armed wing of the Orange Order and began drilling and training. Sir George Reilly Richardson, hero of the Boxer affair in China and of similar engagements against the native in Afghanistan, Waziri, Tiri, the Zhod Valley and other points east, was imported with due ceremony to take command of the force. Orange justices of the peace rubber-stamped UVF applications for arms licences. Sir Edward Carson—appointed Unionist leader in 1910—and his lieutenants promised, with the support of the leaders of the British Conservative Party, to go to war to stop Home Rule and, if they failed to stop it, to set up an Ulster parliament of their own. The outbreak of the First World War interrupted developments. Home Rule was, by common consent, postponed for the duration. By 1918 the overall situation had been altered dramatically. Events following the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 had virtually destroyed the Irish Nationalist Party. Leadership of the movement against the Union had passed into other hands. One thing, however, had not changed—the determination of the Unionist Party to have no part of an independent Ireland.

3

In the second decade of this century, the economic profile of Catholic Ireland was significantly different from that existing in the 1880s. The series of Land Acts, culminating in Wyndhams Law in 1903, created a vast new class of peasant proprietors. (In the six years after the 1903 Act, 270,000 tenants bought out their holdings; Lysaght, The Republic of Ireland, p. 31.) This accelerated the growth of the Catholic middle class. In 1905 this class formed a political party, Sinn Fein, which accurately articulated its interests.

It is in the nature of small property-owners to want to become big property-owners. Sinn Fein’s economic policy was designed to create the conditions whereby an independent Irish manufacturing class could come into existence. The keystone of the policy was protection against foreign competition. The official document, ‘Sinn Fein Policy’, put it clearly: ‘Protection means rendering the native manufacturer equal to meeting foreign competition. If a manufacturer cannot produce as cheaply as an English or other foreigner only because his foreign competitor has better resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish Nation to afford protection for that manufacturer.’ As a slightly theatrical expression of its seriousness, Sinn Fein tried to set up its own bank and to print its own stamps. The founder of the Party, Arthur Griffith, was no insularist and by no means unambitious for his class. Noting that the English, the French, the Germans and others were plundering Africa, Asia and Latin America for colonial booty, and refusing as a patriot to believe that Irishmen were inherently incapable of playing a full part in this process, he looked beyond immediate horizons to envisage in the fullness of time an Irish ‘commercial empire’ taking advantage of the links forged with Africa and Latin America by Irish Catholic missionaries. Griffith was opposed to trade unionism and was later to join with the Catholic church and the employers in denouncing it during a 1913 lock-out in Dublin. He summed up his nationalism as follows:

The right of the Irish to political independence never was, is not, and never can be dependent on the admission of equal right in all other peoples. It is based on no theory of, and dependable in no wise for its existence or justification on the ‘Rights of Man’, it is independent of theories of government and doctrines of philanthropy and Universalism. He who holds Ireland a nation and all means lawful to restore her the full and free exercise of national liberties thereby no more commits himself to the theory that black equals white, that kingship is immoral, or that society has a duty to reform its enemies, than he commits himself to the belief that sunshine is extractable from cucumbers. (Introduction to Mitchel’s Jail Journal, quoted in Liam de Paor’s Divided Ulster, pp. 94‒5)

Sinn Fein, inspired by the tactics of the Hungarian Nationalists against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, advocated abstention from Westminster and the establishment of an Irish parliament to challenge the authority of the British government. Its initial impact was negligible. However, the uprush of emotion after the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Rising carried it to the forefront of the movement for independence. In the 1918 General Election it won 75 of the 103 parliamentary seats, and in January 1919 constituted the First Dail (Parliament). Only in the North where the Catholics’ embattlement made them cling more closely to traditional leaders and values was Sinn Fein unable once and for all to break the grip of the Nationalist Party.

From the point of view of the Unionist Party, Sinn Fein’s ‘Home Rule’ was crucially different from Home Rule as envisaged by Parnell or John Redmond. Griffith’s economic policies, unlike theirs, did pose a direct threat to Northern industry. Had the linen, shipbuilding, and engineering industries been cut off from British markets and sources of raw materials by ‘protective’ tariffs they would have gone to the wall. More threatening still, Sinn Fein had within it and around it advocates of wide-ranging social revolution, who were as much interested in the overthrow of economic structures as they were in a Dublin parliament, who saw the latter, indeed, as a step towards the former.

Once again it was the composition of the movement against the link with Britain much more than the stated policies of its leadership, and the fear that the masses might burst through the limits set by the leadership, which most unnerved Northern businessmen and their British allies. In 1907 the Irish Unionist Alliance defined the situation thus:

In Ireland the classes that are inevitably against Home Rule…include the following: the capitalists, the manufacturers, the merchants, the professional men, and indeed all who have anything to lose. (The Case against Home Rule, p. 33)

In 1912 the Marquis of Londonderry bluntly summarized the contrasting class interests involved:

The opposition to Home Rule is the revolt of a business and industrial community against the domination of men who have no aptitude for either. The United Irish League is remarkably lacking in the support of businessmen, merchants, manufacturers, leaders of industry, bankers and men who compose a successful and prosperous community. (Against Home Rule, p. 165)

In 1913 The Times editorialized:

By disciplining the Ulster democracy and by leading it to look up to them as its natural leaders the clergy and the gentry are providing against the spread of revolutionary doctrine and free thought. (9 May 1913)

The Times need not have worried. The revolutionary doctrine and the free thought referred to got short shrift, not from the clergy and the gentry of the North, but from the clergy and the leaders of the movement for Home Rule in the south. Advocacy of wide-ranging social revolution was not to be included in the ideological baggage of the movement for Irish freedom.

One of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, James Connolly, was a Marxist, as much opposed to native as to foreign capitalism. In 1913 he had been an organizer for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and during the lockout which convulsed the city for months he and Larkin had armed the picket lines and created the Irish Citizen Army, ‘the first Red Army in Europe’. It was partly due to Connolly’s and the Citizen Army’s impatience for action in Ireland while Britain was distracted in Europe that the Easter Rising had been launched. Yet Connolly’s ideas left little imprint on the movement which arose in the wake of the rising.

Connolly shared Larkin’s central weakness. He did not understand that revolutionary theory, like revolutionary action, is impotent unless expressed through and guided by a revolutionary party. He did not build such a party. Thus, after his death, there was no organization which was clearly seen as the repository of his thought and it was possible for ‘labour leaders’ of various opinions and dubious intent to present themselves as his heirs. Before the 1918 General Election one of the Sinn Fein leaders, Eamon de Valera, declared that ‘Labour must wait’ in the interests of ‘national unity’, and Connolly’s epigones agreed. As a result the fight for the hearts and minds of Catholic Ireland in 1918 was between constitutional nationalism and aggressive middle-class republicanism. The workers’ role was to vote. All the time the new class of Catholic aspirant-capitalists was increasing in numbers and power. Catholics ran small leather, textile, paper-and-printing, milling and glass industries and two banks, the National and the Hibernian. Between 1910 and 1920 Irish joint stock bank deposits increased from £62 ½ million to £200 million (Lysaght, The Republic of Ireland, p. 64).

The failure of the Labour movement to play any active independent political role in the years after 1916 was a disaster. It need not have happened. Working-class militancy was increasing. In September 1918 Dublin papers were comparing the labour situation with that of 1913. At the beginning of 1919 industrial struggles were more noticeable in Southern Ireland than the guerrilla campaign getting underway in the countryside in the south-west. Between 1916 and 1920 membership of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union went up from 5,000 to 100,000. Despite this, Labour’s only distinctive contribution to the struggle for independence was a series of one-day strikes for short-term obiectives, for example an anti-conscription
strike in April 1918.

The immediate result of this was that middle-class nationalism was unchallenged as it established itself as the dominant ideology of the new struggle against Britain.

Connolly’s ideas on education, for example his demand for popular control of schools and an end to clerical domination—an issue which loomed large in the Protestant mind—were quite forgotten. Moreover Sinn Fein began to attract many who had recently condemned it. The more farsighted supporters of the Nationalist Party realized that a bandwagon was rolling, and as moderate Irish Catholic politicians were ever wont to do—and still are—on such occasions they leapt aboard and, having leapt, contrived to look as if they had been there for years. One of the founders of Sinn Fein was later to write bitterly:

We did not realize it at the time but what had happened was not that Sinn Fein had captured Ireland, but that the politicians in Ireland and those who make them, all the elements which sniffed at Sinn Fein and libelled it, which had upheld corruption and jobbery, had realized that Sinn Fein was going to win, and had come over to it en masse. They gave their votes and their support to a programme, every item of which was anathema to them, but in their hearts they remained corrupt still just politicians. (P. S. O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, 1924, p. 29)

The bishops, too, with scant regard for episcopal dignity, scrambled hurriedly aboard. They had denounced the 1916 Rising. But by the election of December 1918 they were neutral between Sinn Fein and the Nationalist Party. In the North, Bishop MacCrory personally parcelled out candidacies between the two parties, lest a split Catholic vote hand winnable seats to the Unionists. As Labour dutifully waited, Sinn Fein drifted to the right. The clear lines of Griffiths original prospectus for the Irish middle class became blurred and hazy. As the guerrilla war in the countryside developed and increased in savagery through 1919 and 1920 it was clear that Sinn Fein wanted independence. It was now far from clear what it wanted independence for. It is not to be wondered at that to the Protestants in the North Sinn Fein looked like the Nationalist Party with a gun, the more so since in the North there was no contest between the parties.

This was a great pity, because in the years after the First World War the Unionist leaders were again having trouble with ‘their’ working class. There had been a strike of Belfast shipyard workers in December 1917, which the British government, anxious that the war effort should not be disrupted, settled quickly by encouraging management to concede the claim. There were more protracted strikes by druggists and municipal workers in Belfast and Portadown at the beginning of 1918. And as the war came to a close the issue of the forty-four-hour week began to dominate labour relations both in Britain and in the north of Ireland. In the December 1918 General Election the Labour Representation Committee put up four candidates in Belfast (Belfast had nine seats at the time), all of whom were equivocal on Home Rule and tried to confine the campaign to economic issues. The LRC candidate in Shankill declared that ‘there is always a war going on, a war between rich and poor, between capitalist and worker’. They demanded a forty-four-hour week, statutory minimum pay and equal pay for women. This was the first election in which women (over thirty) were able to vote and the first under full manhood suffrage. All four LRC candidates came second in their constituencies, taking perhaps a quarter of the Protestant vote despite passionate appeals from Carson and others for a closing of the Protestant ranks.

In January 1919, the Belfast District Committee of the Federation of Engineering and Ship-building Trades balloted for a strike for a forty-four-hour week. The result was 20,225 to 558 for strike action. The Belfast Committee was denounced by the FEST leadership in London but supported by shipbuilders in the Clyde, Humberside and Tyneside. (Blithely ahead of their time workers on the River Forth were meanwhile demanding a thirty-hour week.) At 4 p.m. on Saturday 25 January the power-stations workers signalled the beginning of the strike. The trams stopped and the street lights did not come on. On Monday the factories and the shipyards were silent. The Orange Order condemned the strike. The Unionist-controlled corporation called on the British government to send in the army. Joe Devlin suggested ‘impartial arbitration’. It snowed heavily on Tuesday, which improved the chaos.

The workers involved were overwhelmingly Protestant, but the chairman of the strike committee, Charles McKay, was a Catholic. Another member of the committee was later to become a cabinet minister in a Unionist government. The committee was ‘non-political’. It did not, even by implication, see the strike as a direct challenge to the political authority of the Unionist Party—or the political influence of the Nationalist Party, which still held sway in the Catholic ghettoes.

After a fortnight the Clydeside strike leaders were arrested. A week later troops moved in to reopen public services in Belfast. On the recommendation of the strike committee the workers accepted a forty-seven-hour week as a compromise, and the ‘Belfast General Strike’ was over.

The strike was only partly successful but it did demonstrate that the Protestant workers were by no means imprisoned within the Orange machine, that, on the trade-union level at least, they were as ready as workers in any other part of the British Isles to take on the Establishment and to ignore the advice of the ‘traditional’ leaders of their community. Nor was there any truce after the Belfast strike ended.

There were major strikes throughout the province during the rest of 1919. Even farm labourers struck in Co. Donegal and Co. Down, and despite the strike leaders’ insistence that there was nothing political in what they were doing, political conclusions were inevitably drawn.

On 20 February, as the Belfast strike petered out, the Unionist MP for East Antrim resigned. In the subsequent by-election G. B. Hanna, an Orangeman, went forward as an Independent Unionist. His politics were those of Tom Sloan, highly diluted. At campaign meetings, he attacked the official candidate for the party’s failure to support the strike. He was elected by a majority of more than a thousand in a constituency containing the loyalist strongholds of Larne and Carrickfergus. He was no radical, and after a few months at Westminster he accepted the Unionist whip. At the time, however, his election—and the manner of it—were indicative of the tensions within the Protestant community. Despite the fact that the official candidate was supported by the Unionist press and formally endorsed by Carson, Protestant crowds broke up his meetings, smashed his car and on one occasion pelted his wife with eggs.

In January 1920, the Belfast Labour Party, which had been formed from the trade-union-based Labour Representation Committee, put up twenty candidates in the municipal election. Thirteen were elected. A Labour candidate, Sam Kyle, topped the poll in Shankin and shocked the Unionist psyche. James Baird, one of the local leaders of the Boilermakers’ Union, outraged Unionist burghers by turning up at council meetings in overalls. At the first meeting of the council after the election Labour further infuriated the Unionists by nominating their own candidate for mayor, which showed that not only were they disrespectful enough to get elected; now they were presumptuous with it.

In March 1920, shipyard engineers gained a wage rise which took their earnings to a minimum of 83s. 6d.—substantially
higher than those on Clydeside. This plunged one of the yards, Workman, Clarke and Co., into financial crisis. At the end of April, Northern building workers won the forty-four-hour week. On 28 June the shipyard workers demanded a £5 minimum wage.

When, in February 1920, Lloyd George’s government published the ‘Better Government of Ireland Bill’, offering Home Rule to a partitioned Ireland, the Northern Protestant community was not at all united. It was beginning to tear itself apart along the lines of class cleavage. The significance of the ‘Holy War’ which erupted in Belfast in July 1920 was that it welded the classes within the Protestant community together again.

On 7 July Carson discovered a ‘Bolshevik-Sinn Fein Alliance’ (an alliance which, is still regularly being discovered in such places as the front page of the News of the World). At the demonstration of 12 July he declared: ‘What I say is this, the men who came forward posing as friends of Labour care no more about Labour than does the man in the moon. Their real object, and the real insidious object of their propaganda, is that they may mislead and bring about disunity among our own people, and in the end, before we know where we are, we may find ourselves in the same bondage and slavery as in the rest of Ireland in the south and west.’ In other words, Labour, by tending to fragment the all-class Protestant alliance, was helping to sell the Protestants into a Rome-ruled republic. The argument had an attractive simplicity, and nothing in the content of the developing independence struggle in the South seemed to refute it. Had there been in the south and west, and within the Catholic community in the north, a political tendency believing in national independence but opposed to—and opposing—the degree of ‘bondage and slavery’ which existed, this would have been a much more difficult point for Carson to make. But there was not.

Nine days after Carson’s speech Protestant engineers at Workman, Oarke and Co. met on the company premises and decided to expel all ‘Sinn Feiners’ (i.e. Catholics). As the Catholics were leaving, one defiant spirit shouted ‘Up the Rebels’. That was enough. There was a hail of rivets from the Protestants, and for the next two years Protestant and Catholic workers in the North cut each other to pieces, the Catholics, being in a minority and in an economically inferior position, coming off much the worse. Working-class solidarity shrivelled in the heat of sectarian passion.

A pattern was established. In Belfast and in other towns, once a factory was cleared of ‘disloyal elements’ the Union Jack was raised over it as a sign of victory. At one such flag-raising ceremony, held in company time at the valve and brass-finishing department of Harland and Wolff’s shipyard on 14 October, the future prime minister, Sir James Craig, set the official seal of Orange approval on these activities:

Before he sat down he would like to ask three questions and if they answered as he expected he would take back those answers to Sir Edward Carson when he returned to London (cheers). Would they hang on for ever to the old Union Jack, the emblem of their loyalty to King and Empire? (‘Yes’ and Cheers). Did they still refuse to go under a Sinn Fein parliament in Dublin? (‘Yes’ and Cheers.) Well, as they had answered those questions it was only fair that he should answer one that had not been put to him. ‘Do I approve of the action you boys have taken in the past?’ He said yes. (Cheers.) (Northern Whig, 15 October 1920)

In all, 10,000 workers were driven from their jobs. They were not all Catholics. Protestant radicals were, logically enough, included. Among those victimized were Charles McKay, James Baird and J. A. Hanna, one of the prominent Orangemen who had supported Larkin in 1907.

The effect on trade-union activity was immediate. On 18 October, four days after Craig’s triumph at Harland and Wolff’s, the workers there agreed, in the interests of ‘good order’, to waive the claim for a forty-four-hour week. One imagines that the management considered the wages paid for the afternoon of the meeting was money well spent. In December 1920 engineering wages were actually cut without any opposition from workers who, less than two years previously, had been in the vanguard of the struggle for more pay and fewer hours. The building workers were forced to abandon their own forty-four-hour week. When the Carpenters’ Union launched a national strike throughout Britain against wage-cuts the Protestant joiners in the shipyards (there were no Catholics left), to a man, scabbed.

On the political level the effect of the sectarian war was equally disastrous for the Labour movement. At the election for the first Northern Ireland Parliament held under proportional representation on 24 May 1921, none of the four Independent Labour candidates in Belfast was elected. (The Labour Party did not officially fight the election.) James Baird received 875 first preference votes. His three colleagues mustered a thousand between them.

At no time between 1918 and 1921 did the labour agitation in the North link up with the contemporary struggle for independence. There was no basis on which it could have done so. In the first place, the trade-union leadership in Belfast was insistently ‘non-political’. More important, the tendencies competing for dominance within Sinn Fein were united in one matter—that the class was irrelevant to their struggle, that labour must wait. The struggle for independence had nothing to do with the struggles of Belfast workers. There was no organization meaningfully active in Irish politics in the period after the First World War which offered the Protestant masses a united Ireland, in which they would get a better deal than was likely in a disunited one, no anti-Unionist organization which in the public mind had clearly differentiated itself from the conservative Catholic nationalism which infused the Sinn Fein movement. In that circumstance appeals to the Northern Protestants to join with their Catholic compatriots ‘as Irishmen’ in the fight for independence from Britain were, in the literal sense of the word, impertinent.

Larkin, who had been jailed in the United States while on a lecture tour, issued a call from his cell in Sing-Sing for a ‘war for the workers’ republic’, but one needs soldiers to wage war and there was no socialist army left in Ireland.

Given the strength of the Orange Order and Orange ideology in the Northern Protestant community at the time, the sectarian propaganda of Carson and his colleagues would, anyway, have had an effect. But it would not have been as effective as it was had not the Sinn Fein movement resembled in many respects the ogre described. It was, as Carson said, a Catholic movement, in that it did not object at all to Catholic control of large areas of public life in Ireland. Its protectionist economic policies, had they been applied to all Ireland, would, as Carson said, have precipitated disaster in the North. The loyalist posters which festooned Belfast in 1921 depicting Royal Avenue and the shipyard choked with weeds and inscribed ‘Belfast under Home Rule’ may have been caricatures. But they contained an element of truth as important to the Protestant working class as to the leaders of the Unionist Party. The workers in the Belfast shipyard and in the engineering factories had nothing to gain and their jobs, possibly, to lose in the United Ireland which was on offer. Within an Orange Northern Ireland state they were able to retain a privileged position vis-à-vis Catholic workers, and through their involvement in the Orange Order able to feel that they played a real role in the affairs of the state. Republicanism, steeped in Catholicism, had nothing to offer. The main reason why Protestant workers were easy meat for Orange demagogues was that the Republican movement was not based on the working class.

The absence of a vigorous labour organization within the Republican movement and the resultant success of the Unionist leaders in containing the Protestant masses within Orangeism meant that in 1920‒22 when the future shape of Ireland was being negotiated the only Irish interests being considered were those of Northern capitalism and Southern potential-capitalism. These interests, with the ready agreement of Britain, partitioned the country between them.

Partition was readily accepted by the Unionist Party, and the Northern Parliament opened in June 1921. It was not accepted by any major group in the South until January 1922. Thus Northern Protestants usually date the division of the country from 1921, Northern Catholics from 1922.

4

Partition left the Catholics in the North isolated, confused and afraid of the future. In Derry there were a number of local, complicating factors.

The 1916 Rising had made little impact on Derry Catholics. The Journal said that: ‘It is agreeable to be able to state that despite the many exciting rumours and alarmist reports which have been floating about…the conduct of all classes of the citizens, and of the north-west generally, has been admirably cool and sensible’ (28 April 1916). In an editorial the attitude of the hierarchy and of the Nationalist Party leadership was faithfully reproduced:

(An) official message says that after the building had been shelled troops ‘occupied Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Sinn Fein force’. These phrases tend to show that the originators of the insurgent outbreak were not really the Sinn Feiners as a compact force in themselves, but rather the very considerable body of men who frequented Liberty Hall and who are known in Dublin as the Citizens Army. These are followers of the notorious Syndicalist Larkin. It is to be feared that many of these men have not had sufficient education to gauge correctly the dire consequences that must ensue from a mad-headed endeavour to carry into effect the principles underlying the teachings of Larkin and desperate characters of that type. From the publications which they have issued and the speeches these ‘leaders’ have made it seems evident that they are disciples of men like Proudhon and Bakunine (sic)…The urging of people like the Dublin dockers with little political sagacity and less discriminative capacity to senseless and positively suicidal action is deplorable beyond power of expression.

Three days after the rising was crushed the Journal headlined the ‘Irish people’s disapproval of the wild deeds in Dublin’ (1 May). Two days later it referred to Easter Week as the ‘Red Week’ and informed the populace:

The latest news from Dublin and the few other localities in the country where lawless outbreaks have recently occurred is to the effect that the authorities have succeeded in suppressing disturbance and restoring order. This is highly satisfactory. (3 May)

And two days after that, proof positive of a highly satisfactory outcome:

Valuable machinery nearly all intact. (5 May)

By the end of 1918 Northern Catholic bishops and businessmen, like their Southern counterparts, had shifted towards the Sinn Fein position, which, now that the views of the notorious syndicalists had been put aside, seemed much more reasonable anyway. In the December 1918 General Election Bishop MacCrory allocated the candidacy in the Derry seat to the Sinn Fein nominee, John MacNeill, The Nationalist hopeful, Major William Davey, obediently stood down. However, in Derry itself the Nationalist Party was much stronger than Sinn Fein, and the election campaign was, in effect, a Nationalist Party campaign for a Sinn Fein nominee. It opened with a parade through the Bogside led by the Hibernian band and speeches from the Rev. J. O’Doherty and the Rev. J. McGlinchey. The Journal weighed in with banner headlines urging the electors to ‘Vote early, for MacNeill, for Derry and for Ireland’ (13 December 1918). MacNeill was duly elected and in January 1919 took his seat in the Dail, but it was the Nationalist Party which still held sway in Catholic Derry.

Derry remained peaceful throughout 1919 while the guerrilla war spread like bushfire in the South. Trouble came the following year. One of the reasons for it was that in January 1920 Alderman H. C. O’Doherty became Mayor of the City. The Journal described this as ‘An Historic Victory’, which it was. Alderman O’Doherty was the first Catholic to become First Citizen since Colonel Cormac O’Neill was Chief Magistrate of Derry in 1688.

For a number of years the Unionist Party had been finding it more and more difficult to keep control of Derry Corporation. For one thing, the Catholic majority in the city kept increasing. For another, the municipal franchise had progressively been extended during the second half of the nineteenth century (the Municipal Corporations Act, 1840, the Towns Improvement Act, 1854, the Local Government Act, 1898). In 1896 a Londonderry Improvement Bill, redrawing the ward boundaries in the city, had been rushed through Westminster to prevent a threatened Catholic takeover. (The Londonderry Improvement Bill as originally submitted by Derry Unionists provided for city limits enclosing an area as big as that of contemporary Berlin. This section was amended at Westminster.)

By 1919 the Catholic majority in the city had grown to more than 5,000 and the boundaries were changed again. In that year the Local Government (Ireland) Act was passed instituting proportional representation at municipal elections and requiring ward boundaries to be drawn so as to give ‘equal representation on the basis of population’. The new ward boundaries in Derry did not do that. However, the proportional representation system can flummox even the most experienced electoral fixers, and in the event the Nationalists in January 1920 won seats which had not been intended for them and found themselves with 21 members on the 40-man corporation. ‘HISTORIC TRIUMPH IN DERRY,’ exulted the Journal. ‘NATIONALISTS WIN CORPORATION. “NO SURRENDER” CITADEL CONQUERED AFTER CENTURIES OF OPPRESSION. OVERTHROW OF ASCENDANCY: CELEBRATION OF POPULAR VICTORY’ (21 January 1920). In the Bogside bands paraded late into the night, crowds sang in the streets and bonfires blazed everywhere. There was ‘a wild demonstration of enthusiasm’ (Journal, 21 January 1920) at a victory meeting in St Columb’s Hall in Orchard Street. The first meeting of the new Corporation was held in the Guildhall on 30 January.

When Councillor Logue declared that Alderman Hugh C. O’Doherty had been elected Mayor for the ensuing year there was a scene of wild enthusiasm among the crowd which thronged the Chamber. Cheering continued for a couple of minutes, and broke into a lusty rendering of ‘God Save Ireland’ and ‘The Soldier’s Song’…(Journal, 30 January 1920)

In the late forties and in the fifties when I was running around the Bogside old people would sometimes say to one another when the talk turned to politics: ‘Do you remember the time we won the Corporation?’ And of course they did. After all, we never won it again—not until 1973, when everything was changed anyway.

In the spring of 1920 Derry was still relatively peaceful, although reports from the rest of the country conveyed something of the deepening chaos attending the War of Independence. A single page of an April edition of the Journal contained the following headlines:

Appalling Arklow Affair, Troops run amok, Civilian shot dead, Soldier killed in Limerick, Kerry policeman wounded, More hunger-strikers released unconditionally, Three mighty forces favour Irish freedom, Barracks besieged, Desperate Wexford encounter, Mysterious Cork arrests, Riots in Limerick, Soldiers and civilians in conflict, Belfast joins hunger strike, Derrymen released, Liveliness in Leitrim, Series of outrages, Wholesale slaughter the British method, Tyrone barracks blown up, Police-sergeant disarmed, Secession of Ireland: British Ambassador’s statement.

Such reports generated nervous excitement. The Catholics saw the capture of the Corporation in the context of this wider struggle, as a preliminary to the capture of the whole country. The Protestants made a similar estimation of its significance, but saw it in a different light. The Catholics, locally, were now in control. That made the possibility of the greater outrage, Home Rule, more real, perhaps, to Protestants in Derry than in any other part of the North. Alderman O’Doherty had told them in his inaugural address:

Rest assured mighty changes are coming in Ireland. Do you Protestants wish to play a part in them? The Unionist position is no longer tenable; your leaders are abandoning it…Do you not see that Englishmen are prepared to sacrifice you if they can only secure the goodwill of the rest of Ireland? Is it not time that you reconsidered your position?…Ireland’s right to determine her own destiny will come about whether the Protestants of Ulster like it or not. (Journal, 30 January)

It was hardly reassuring.

The riots began on 18 April. Shots were fired from the city walls into the Bogside. Police bayonet-charged a Catholic crowd in Ferryquay Street in the city centre. Soldiers of the Dorsetshire Regiment fired into an isolated Catholic street, Bridge Street. The Lecky Road police station in the Bogside was besieged by a large crowd. On 1 May shots were fired from the Fountain at Catholic houses in Bishop Street, at the edge of the Bogside. On 15 May fighting—‘the fiercest that has ever been experienced in the history of the city’ (Journal, 17 May 1920)—broke out in Bridge Street. As police bayonet-charged, one of their number was shot dead. A four-hour gun battle between soldiers and a local IRA unit ensued. On 18 May the UVF emerged in strength and took over Carlisle Road near the city centre. Neither the police nor the army interfered. Twenty-one-year-old Bernard Doherty from Ann Street in the Bogside was shot dead. On 18 June Catholic houses in the isolated Prehen area were attacked. Notices were displayed locally warning that ‘Any Sinn Feiner found at Prehen or Prehen Wood will be shot at sight’. On 19 June the UVF took over the Diamond and Guildhall Square and launched an attack on the Long Tower area of the Bogside. Five Catholics were shot dead. On 23 June the Journal reported: ‘Two more Catholic citizens murdered…From the city walls bullets were rained on a portion of the Bogside.’ On 25 June the UVF entered the grounds of St Columb’s College and were dislodged by the IRA. Catholics were driven out of houses in Carlisle Road, Abercom Road and Harding Street and fled into the Bogside. Rioting and shooting continued and attitudes hardened on all sides. ‘To become hewers of wood and drawers of water for Sir Edward Carson,’ said the Catholic bishop, Dr McHugh, ‘Catholic Ulster will never submit’ (Journal, 17 November 1920).

Trouble flickered on in 1921. In the May election—the first Northern Ireland general election—the alliance in the North between Sinn Fein and the Nationalists held. Twelve Home Rulers were elected to Stormont, as were forty Unionists. As far as the Unionists were concerned, that was that. Northern Ireland was established. Catholics did not agree, especially in places like Derry. As far as they were concerned nothing had finally been settled. The war in the South was continuing. Sectarian fighting in Belfast continued unabated (15 killed and 68 wounded on 10 July alone). Matters were still being contested.

Even when the terms of the Treaty recognizing Partition were announced in December 1921 and accepted by a majority in the Dail in January 1922 it did not occur to many Catholics in the North that that was an end to argument. They seized on the provision for a Boundary Commission to determine the line of the border, reasoning that some at least of Northern Ireland’s territory—Derry, for example, with 23,000 Catholics as against 18,000 Protestants—would have to be ceded to the South. The Treaty, taken as a whole, was regarded not as a blue-print for the Ireland of the future, but as further clear evidence of inexorable and accelerating progress towards full independence. Said the Journal: ‘We see the sinister power of a central citadel of the Unionist ascendancy brought down to the dust’ (9 December 1921). At the beginning of 1922 most Northern Catholics, fearful of what the future might bring if they were left to the mercy of an Orange administration, looked to the South with nervous confidence for salvation. They had reason to believe that this was not a forlorn hope. Even those who had signed the Treaty had done so, they said, because they believed it to be a ‘stepping-stone to freedom’. No one in the Sinn Fein leadership was going to tolerate partition for long.

5

This is one of the best-loved Irish modern myths—that the Sinn Fein leaders agreed to partition only with the utmost reluctance and that the Civil War in the South which followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty was fought between those who reluctantly accepted and those who rejected partition. In fact partition was scarcely mentioned in the Dail debates on the articles of the treaty in December 1921 and January 1922. When Mr de Valera, the leader of the anti-treaty faction, did mention it it was to liken the South’s claim to the North to Britain’s lately relinquished claim to the whole of Ireland. The argument between Treatyites and anti-Treatyites was about the precise nature of the future relationship between the 26-County State and Great Britain. It is true that there was a widespread feeling among IRA volunteers in the countryside that the exclusion of the Six Counties was a sell-out, and that this reflected the conservative attitudes of the Treatyites on a wide range of social issues; and this feeling was used by Mr de Valera to give impetus to his anti-Treaty campaign. However, the initial split in the Sinn Fein leadership was not about the border. When the County Councils of Tyrone and Fermanagh declared their allegiance to Dail Eireann and were as a result dissolved by the Unionists, no one, either pro- or anti-Treaty, is on record as suggesting that something might be done about it. When Mr de Valera’s irregular anti-Treaty forces went into action in the Civil War it was never seriously suggested that they direct their military attentions to the North.

The Cumann na nGael Party—the pro-Treaty faction of Sinn Fein which formed the first Independent 26-County government—represented large farmers and commercial businessmen who wished, as far as it was possible, to minimize economic friction with Britain and to obtain for themselves as comfortable a position as they could within a colonial situation. Many, like Kevin O’Higgins, were fearful of the effect of high tariffs on existing Anglo-Irish trade. Mr de Valera’s minority faction (representing small manufacturing capitalists) held to the original Sinn Fein policy of protectionism and represented those who wanted to wage an economic war against British domination and thereby quickly to build their own Irish industrial structure. Being, thus, necessarily more anti-British than the Treatyites, they were able to represent themselves as the heirs of ‘true Republicanism’, and were consequently more popular among Catholics in the North.

Their Republicanism was expressed in their opposition to the office of the Governor-General and to the Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown which, under the Treaty terms, members of the Dail were required to take. Mr de Valera stumped the country promising to ‘wade knee-deep through Irish blood’ before he would accept ‘this heinous document’. Which thing he then proceeded to do. He waded knee-deep through Irish blood and then he accepted the Treaty. Those of the IRA who still had stomach for a fight rallied to him. They believed, and were encouraged by Mr de Valera to believe, that they were fighting against the border, against the Governor-General and the Oath. (Most of them were also against the ‘law and order’ which the new government was imposing on the countryside. Peasants in some areas, assuming that since the revolution had happened they might properly make some revolutionary changes in their own lives, had taken over large estates. Mr Cosgrave explained to them that this was a misinterpretation of the situation and sent the army to clear them off the land. Workers who took over creameries and created ‘soviets’ were similarly disillusioned. Mr de Valera tended to be reticent on this aspect of the Cumann na nGael sellout.)

It was a very bloody war. Anti-Treaty prisoners, untried, were shot by their former comrades-in-arms. More Irishmen (approximately 650) died than had been killed in the war against the British. It can still excite fierce passions. A verse of the song ‘Take it down from the Mast’ tells of four of Mr de Valera’s followers who were shot without trial by the Treatyites in 1922:

They have murdered our young Liam and Rory,
They have butchered young Risteard and Joe,
Their hands with their blood are still gory,
Fulfilling the work of the foe.

‘Joe’ was Joe McKelvey from Belfast. In August 1969 on the gable wall at the corner of Cyprus Street in the Lower Falls area someone wrote in foot-high letters ‘Remember Joe McKelvey’. In Letterkenny in 1970 I heard Mr Neal Blaney rouse an election crowd to fever-pitch with the cry: ‘Remember Drumbo.’ (The Treatyites had shot two anti-Treaty volunteers there.) ‘REMEMBER DRUMBO’ they roared back, clenched fists raised in the air, believing now with the same honest passion which had excited the two martyrs that it had been another noble sacrifice for the Republican ideal. Which in a sense it was. It all depends on what one means by ‘Republican’. Because really, objectively, in terms of the politics of the leaders of the two sides, the Irish Civil War was a faction fight between gombeen-men and tiny capitalists trying to grow up, between those who wanted to retain a role as middle-men for British business in Ireland and those who wanted to lay their own hands on the profits accruing to British business, between the grubbers and the grabbers.

The pro-Treaty forces won the Civil War. They were supported by the majority of the people not so much because there was widespread enthusiasm for the Treaty but because the people were weary of war and the Treatyites offered them peace. Cumann na nGael held office until 1932. Under it, land consolidation continued and most industries were not protected.

The Cosgrave government had, by any standards, a fairly difficult task. With the loss of the North through partition it was deprived of 29 per cent of the population and 40 per cent of Ireland’s taxable capacity. Belfast alone had handled a third of Irish trade. Still, within the limit of its own ambitions it was not without achievement. Roads and railways were rebuilt. Fisheries were improved and an afforestation programme begun. A sugar-beet factory was set up in Carlow, the Barrow was drained, and a hydro-electric plant was built on the Shannon, all by direct state enterprise. In 1927, an Electricity Supply Board was set up to distribute the power produced by the Shannon scheme. The number of jobs in industry began to increase, but slowly, from 103,600 in 1926 to 111,000 in 1931 (J. Bowyer Bell, IRA: The Secret Army, p. 119). Working-class organizations were, however, thoroughly demoralized. The failure of Independence to effect any dramatic economic change in their conditions and the failure of the Labour Party and of ‘left-Republicans’ within Mr de Valera’s party to suggest what concretely should be done about it weakened the impulse to maintain organization. Between 1923 and 1929 trade-union membership declined from 130,000 to 85,000 (Lysaght, The Republic of Ireland, p. 89). The lack of any clear perspective was reflected in the fissiparous nature of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Of 17 Labour TDs elected in 1922, three were Independents by August 1923. Of 14 elected then, one was an Independent by June 1927. Of 13 elected in June 1927, four were Independents by 1932.

Agricultural labourers were badly off. By the early thirties wages had fallen to 21 shillings per week. When unemployed, which was often, they were eligible for no state benefits. By 1932 unemployment had reached 130,000. The economy was totally dependent on Britain, which took 92 per cent of exports. A quarter of a million people emigrated in the first decade of independence.

Until 1927, Mr de Valera’s followers refused to take their seats in the Dail—which they regarded as a ‘puppet-parliament’
—and the Taoiseach William Cosgrave and his government, facing only the small, permanently disintegrating idea-impoverished
Labour Party, had a comparatively easy ride considering the economic mess over which they presided.

Mr de Valera, ‘excruciatingly articulate and precisely vague’ (Bowyer Bell, p. 69), made as much as he could of the abounding discontent. He gave the populace to understand that in some inexplicable or at least unexplained way their economic problems resulted in great measure from the government’s insufficiently anti-British attitudes. There was truth in this, but, as was to be shown, it was a tiny truth. His most important achievement during the years of Cumann na nGael government was to keep the Republican anti-Treaty coalition together.

By the late twenties the fragments of Radicalism, scattered during the 1916‒22 débâcle, were beginning to coalesce. The 1929 slump encouraged a more radical analysis of the Irish malaise than that offered by de Valera. The IRA sprouted a rich crop of radical fronts (Saor Eire, Friends of Soviet Russia, Irish Labour Defence League, Workers’ Revolutionary Party, Irish Working Farmers’ Committee, Women Prisoners’ Defence League, etc.). By September 1931 the Minister of Justice was voicing fears that ‘a Republic of Soviet nature’ would be imposed on the country (Irish Independent, September 1931). Mr de Valera had, of course, no intention of imposing a Republic of Soviet nature on anyone. But his rhetoric was occasionally radical enough to encourage those who were that way inclined to regard him as a lesser evil than Cosgrave, and he went into the 1932 election with the fairly enthusiastic support of the Republican left. By then one section of the population at least had had their minds wonderfully clarified about the nature of the ‘Free State’.

The establishment of the new state enabled Protestants in the North to discover whether, in action, Home Rule was Rome-rule. They discovered that it was. The power of the Church was consolidated. It was, of course, already great, and even under the British the influence of the hierarchy and of the priests had often been decisive in forming public opinion. It was only with the establishment of an independent government, however, that it became possible actually to write Catholic teaching into the Statute Book.

By the end of the Civil War the hierarchy was thoroughly disturbed by the ‘low level of degeneracy’ (Bishop Hoare of Ardagh, Irish Catholic Directory, 3 August 1924, p. 589, quoted in J. H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, p. 24). Traditional mores had apparently come to be observed with something less than proper piety during the upheavals of recent years. Now, given its head, the church set about putting all that to rights. The clergy spread out across the countryside, like beaters at a pheasant-shoot, flushing out sin. Sex took a terrible hammering. Pastoral letters foamed over with warnings against mixed dancing and similar occasions of sin. The Archbishop of Tuam observed with alarm that ‘company-keeping under the stars at night has succeeded in too many places to the good old Irish custom of visiting, chatting and story-telling from one house to another, with the Rosary to bring all home in good time’ (Irish Catholic Directory, 1928, p. 557). The Archbishop also noted that ‘bad books, papers and pictures were finding their way into remote country places’ (ibid.). The Bishop of Galway said in a sermon: ‘It had been suggested that the present-day attraction for dancing was physical exercise. He did not believe it. If physical exercise were needed why did not the devotees of dancing go out and skip with a rope?’ (Irish Independent, 9 April 1924). Nor did the clergy confine itself to exhortation. Many a courting couple was rooted out of a comfortable Irish hedgerow by a curate with a blackthorn-stick. (It is important to understand that none of this was regarded as being in any way eccentric.)

Such things were reported in the press and noted in the North, but much more crucial to the development of Northern Protestant attitudes to the South was the reaction of the Dublin government to the hierarchic aspiration for these attitudes to be incorporated in the law. The first example of Holy Writ being substituted for secular law was the Censorship of Films Act in 1923, which empowered a censor to ban films or passages of films deemed ‘subversive of public morality’. The Intoxicating Liquor Act, 1924, reinforced by a further Act in 1927, reduced the opening hours and the number of pubs in the land, to the general approbation of the church. In 1925, the government moved to prevent the presentation of private divorce Bills to the Dail—the only way, under a system inherited from pre-Treaty days, that people in Ireland could obtain a divorce. Urging support for the measure, Mr Cosgrave made it clear that as far as the government was concerned the Catholic moral code had the effective status of enacted law: ‘I have no doubt but that I am right in saying that the majority of people of this country regard the bond of marriage as a sacramental bond which is incapable of being dissolved…Anything that tends to weaken the binding efficacy of that bond to that extent strikes at the root of our social life’ (Dail debates, 11 February 1925). Four years later Mr Cosgrave’s government removed two other daggers aimed at ‘the root of our social life’. The Censorship of Publications Act provided for the banning of any book which ‘in its general tendency’ was considered ‘indecent or obscene’ or any newspaper or magazine which had ‘usually or frequently been indecent or obscene’. The first censorship board consisted of one Protestant and four Catholics. One of the Catholics, a priest, was chairman. The act also made illegal advocacy of birth control.

By so institutionalizing Catholic teaching Mr Cosgrave hoped to establish Cumann na nGael not just as the party of Law and Order, but as the party of God’s Law and Order. If he could do that he would be in a very strong electoral position. The church had branches in every constituency. Announcing the banning of a number of the IRA’s radical outcrops in 1931, Mr Cosgrave explained that: ‘Drastic laws are made only for the evil-doer, and there need be no fear of punishment in the minds of those misguided young men and women if they seize this opportunity to recognize that the observance of the laws of God and of the State is the only sure means of achieving the ultimate happiness and prosperity of the people. The authority of the State comes from God, and every organization that seeks to destroy the State is subversive of morality and religion.’

However, Mr de Valera had no intention of allowing Mr Cosgrave sole title to the franchise for pushing God’s line in Irish politics. By 1929 he had led the majority of anti-Treatyites out of Sinn Fein and the IRA and into the new Fianna Fail Party. Dropping the abstention policy, they took their seats in the Dail. Many of Mr de Valera’s followers had been excommunicated from the church during the Civil War, but once they entered Parliament it became clear that they did not hold this against the hierarchy. They facilitated the passage of the Censorship Act. One of the Fianna Fail leaders, the future President Sean T. O’Kelly, scotched any suggestion that Fianna Fail was less sound than Cumann na nGael on questions of faith and morals: ‘We of the Fianna Fail party believe that we speak for the big body of Catholic opinion. I think I could say, without qualification of any kind, that we represent the big element of Catholicism.’

Indeed Mr de Valera’s party began to ‘play the Catholic card’ with considerable adroitness, attacking Cumann na nGael for neglecting to consult with the bishops when arranging an exchange of diplomatic representatives with the Holy See, and vigorously defending Mayo County Council’s refusal to sanction the appointment of a Protestant librarian. Around the same time Mr de Valera went on record as being against Protestant doctors being allowed to cure sick Catholics (Dail Debates, 17 June 1931). Through all this Fianna Fail retained the effective support of the fringe ‘Red’ republicans.

6

Fianna Fail came to power in 1932, capitalizing on widespread disillusion with the economic effects of the ‘Revolution’, and except for two short periods of coalition government it stayed in office until February 1973. One of the first acts of the new 1932 government was to stop the payment of land annuities, monies due, under provisions of the Treaty, from Irish farmers in payment for land granted under the pre-Treaty Land Acts. (Mr de Valera, be it noted, did not stop completely the collection of the annuities. He merely halved them and stopped paying the collected half over to Britain.) Britain retaliated by imposing special tariffs on Irish imports, calculated so as to make good the loss to the British Treasury. Thus commenced the ‘economic war’ with Britain.

The one consistent policy motivating Mr de Valera throughout his political life was that Irishmen ought not to be exploited by foreigners while there were Irish exploiters available for the task. Thus the basis of Fianna Fail economic policy was protection and import substitution—in its broad outlines the 1905 Sinn Fein policy. The government consulted the import lists to discover which of the goods being imported could be manufactured at home. Tanning, boots and shoes, wholesale clothing, woollen and non-woollen textiles were the five categories first selected. It was estimated that the home market for these would provide 45,000 jobs. Production licences were issued to applicant manufacturers. A law was passed requiring that 51 per cent of the capital of new industries be in Irish hands.

In this hot-house atmosphere Irish capital tried to claw its way to self-sufficiency. Between 1932 and 1936 there was a 30 per cent increase in manufacturing output and a 40 per cent increase in industrial employment. An index of the increased governmental activity was that in 1935 alone the number of statutory rules and orders issued exceeded the total for 1922‒32 (Lysaght, The Republic of Ireland, p. 132). However, the limits of this growth, based as it was on a relatively tiny home market, were soon reached. The economic war was launched on the slogan ‘Burn everything British but their coal’. Coal, however, was a resource lacking in the 26 Counties, and by 1935 Fianna Fail had signed an agreement to import no coal but British, in return for increased cattle exports to her neighbour. A more extensive trade agreement in 1938, permitting the import of iron, steel, metal goods, machinery and chemicals, signalled the effective end of economic hostilities, the end of the only period in Irish history when national capital tried to assert real independence.

It had not, in truth, been a very determined effort. British capital in Ireland itself had remained untouched, not least because to take it over might have suggested to malcontented elements that Irish capital, too, might usefully be expropriated. Nor was there any ban on profits ‘earned’ in the 26 Counties being invested abroad. The proportion of the Irish national product invested abroad and the per-capita income from that investment is and has been one of the highest in the world. To facilitate this; Fianna Fail did not disrupt the link between Irish currency and sterling. Irish interest rates are still coordinated with British bank rate no matter what the state of the domestic Irish economy.

The attempted drive against British economic domination and towards self-sufficiency encouraged an ‘anti-imperialist’ stance abroad, and necessitated internal repression and reaction. Irish capital, fighting for its existence, could not permit militant opposition. Sinn Fein and the IRA—that is, those who refused to follow Fianna Fail into the Dail in 1927—were first given fairly free rein to smash the crypto-fascist ‘Blue Shirt’ movement. That done, Mr de Valera turned on them.

He found it the more easy to do so since the radicalization which had bubbled up in the ranks of the IRA in the late twenties and early thirties had found no clear organizational expression. IRA leaders had continued to regard Fianna Fail as much less evil than Cumann na nGael. Many retained close personal relations with the Fianna Fail hierarchy. Peadar O’Donnell, one of the IRA’s most incisive and Marxist-inclined thinkers who, in 1931, had been urging ‘workers and working farmers to seize control of production, distribution and credit’ (An Phoblacht, 28 February 1931), was, in 1932, urging the same people to ‘give Fianna Fail a chance’ (An Phoblacht, 2 April 1932). When Mr de Valera called a General Election early in 1933 to consolidate his position, an IRA manifesto demanded ‘the scrapping of the Treaty, the abolition of partition and complete severance from the British Empire…public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange…We ask the people of the 26 Counties to return the Fianna Fail government on these terms’ (An Phoblacht, 14 January 1933). What exactly was meant by voting for Mr de Valera ‘on these terms’ was not explained.

The IRA’s problem was that it had never emerged from the misty nationalism which had shrouded the movement since its inception. That is, it had never really detached itself from the politics of national capitalism, just as Davitt had never really detached himself from Parnellism. As it urged revolutionary socialist change it was simultaneously in the vanguard of an ultra-chauvinist campaign against the importation of foreign, and especially British, items of all descriptions: ‘If Irish cannot be bought, then let American, French or German, or any other product except British be bought…Why should [British firms] be allowed to foist their chocolates on Irish people? Why should Bass, made from British barley, be distributed here? Have we not Irish sweets and Irish ales?’ (An Phoblacht, 29 October 1932). We had, indeed; they were being churned out in great quantities by Irish capitalist enterprise.

Cinemas where newsreels containing items about the British royal family were on show were attacked, as was ‘the wave of jazz which is sweeping the country’ (An Phoblacht, 7 January 1934). The reason why the banks ought to be nationalized was not, or at least not primarily, that they were capitalist institutions, but that ‘the power of the banks will, in all probability, be exercised in England’s interest’ (An Phoblacht, 23 July 1932).

As Mr de Valera in office began actually to develop national capitalism and as this began to involve the smashing of strikes and the holding-down of wages, the contradiction within the IRA between its nationalism and its socialism became acute. The most prominent left-wingers—O’Donnell, George Gilmore, Mick Price—were forced out. They formed the ‘Republican Congress’, but it too advocated support for Fianna Fail in certain circumstances, hoping to win over the Fianna Fail rank-and-file. However, there was little it could win them to, since Gilmore and others were arguing that ‘the congress is not a party but a coordinating centre for anti-imperialist activities by people who may or may not be members of various parties and organizations’.

In the end de Valera broke definitively with the IRA and its offshoots on a straightforward class issue. Dublin transport workers struck in March 1935 for the restoration of wage-cuts and against the arbitrary dismissal of a bus driver. The strike lasted eleven weeks. The government sent in army lorries to ferry people to work. The IRA then called for a general strike, arguing that the strike had now gone beyond the bounds of a normal trade dispute and that the government was clearly not neutral.

The IRA’s offer of help to the strikers created something akin to hysteria in the ranks of the state and church establishment. There was already much nervousness abroad. Unemployment was rising towards 130,000, despite the new industries. In January there had been street-fighting in Dublin in the course of a struggle for union recognition by shop workers. Now, with the city paralysed, the awful possibility loomed of the IRA, with the methods and the weapons appropriate to its tradition, being grafted on to an aggressive mass movement of workers. On 28 March all copies of An Phoblacht were seized, not for the first or the last time. De Valera entered the lists, drumming up anti-IRA feeling: ‘Those who remember the old IRA know that it always regarded itself as the army of the nation, pledged to defend the rights and liberties of the whole people. It stood for the maintenance of order. No one could conceive it as an instigator of sectional strife or as lending itself out as if it were some racketeering organization.’ In pastoral letters the bishops denounced the strike and ‘the specious arguments of the unCatholic people’ (Archbishop Byrne). Forty-three members of the IRA and of the Republican Congress were arrested.

Despite this the strikers soldiered on until late May, when they won substantial wage increases. But the inability of the IRA to capitalize on the situation was evident within a few weeks, when, at the annual Bodenstown demonstration, Sean McBride—the present-day international, all-purpose Liberal
—detailed IRA units to tear down Congress banners on the grounds that they were offensively leftwing. Meanwhile the Congress itself was beginning to fall apart in a welter of argument and recrimination about the precise organizational form it should adopt. De Valera weathered the storm.

Surveying the débâcle and searching around for an explanation, with ninety-six of its militants in Irish gaols, its newspaper being seized by the man it had hoisted into office, and its best thinkers peeling off to search in a leftwing wilderness for a new way forward, the IRA finally came up with: ‘FIANNA FAIL ELECTED IN ERROR’ (An Phoblacht, 27 April 1935).

In repressing disruptive communistic elements Fianna Fail had a powerful ally in the church. In fact relations between church and state were never better. On taking office Mr de Valera dispatched a note to the Pope expressing the government’s ‘respectful homage’ and its intention to ‘maintain with the Holy See that intimate and cordial relationship which has become the tradition of the Irish people’. (By ‘the Irish people’ Mr de Valera clearly meant ‘the Catholics of Ireland’, relationships between the Northern Protestants and the Holy See being neither intimate nor cordial.) In 1933 a tax was placed on imported newspapers, which helped to stem the tide of alien porn, please the bishops and, as a quite useful bonus, raise revenue. In 1935 in an effort to rid the country once and for all of family-planners Mr de Valera took time off from suppressing the IRA and breaking strikes to ban the import and sale of contraceptives. In the same year the problem of mixed dancing was faced up to, with the Public Dance Halls Act, which required persons intending to organize dancing activity to apply for a licence to the district court. But it is on none of these acts that Mr de Valera’s and the Fianna Fail Party’s reputation as the most willing hierarchic stooges in recent Irish history will rest. It is the 1937 Constitution which will ensure that that verdict is passed upon them.

The 1937 Constitution is crucial to any understanding of the political attitudes of both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: because, unlike the 1922 Constitution operated by Cumann na nGael, the 1937 document claims to be the Constitution of all Ireland, containing a blunt assertion of the Dublin government’s right to legislate for the whole national territory. It provided for the abolition of the office of Governor-
General and the election of a President of all Ireland. The 1937 Constitution also spelled out for Northern Protestants the social content of the united Ireland which was being wished upon them.

The Irish Catholic described the constitution as ‘a noble document in harmony with Papal Teaching’, and went on: ‘There is substantial evidence of a sincere desire on the part of the drafter to be guided by the principles laid down in such encyclicals as “Immortale Dei” and “Rerum Novarum” of Leo XIII, and “Quadragesimo Anno” of the present pontiff. No sincere Catholic can fail to be impressed’ (quoted in ‘Article 44’, pamphlet of the BICO, November 1972, p. 5). (The Irish Catholic did not speculate about what sincere Protestants might have thought.) The Derry Journal described it as a ‘magnificent confession of Faith…an inspiring enthronement of our tradition in the Faith…’ (ibid., p. 4). The Archbishop of Tuam praised the Constitution as ‘founded on the rock of Christian and Catholic principle’, and ingeniously, as a tourist attraction:

Ireland was always an interesting country to visit, but when it is realized that our new Constitution will put it before the world with its own distinctive characteristics, outsiders will be more interested then, and eager to see on what lines we develop…they will come to see for themselves what kind of people we are…(ibid., p. 4).

Indeed. With a characteristic mixture of historical inaccuracy and supernatural fantasy, Mr de Valera expressed the thinking behind the Constitution in a radio broadcast to America.

The historical phenomenon which turned Europe into Christendom, and barbarism into civilization, the historical phenomenon which made Christendom the leader of the world and centre of the world order, was the recognition by that continent of the simple but fundamental fact that man is created for a supernatural end. Our people are a conservative people. For fifteen hundred years they have preserved the tradition and practised the Rule of Christian life. We stand in the world for the public worship of God in the way in which He has shown to be His will. (ibid., p. 5)

And ‘the way in which He has shown to be His will’ was, as the detailed provisions of the Constitution made clear, the Catholic way.

Article 41 begins with a brief statement of Catholic teaching on the family:

The state recognizes the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit of Society, as a moral institution possessing…rights antecedent and superior to all positive law.

Therefore:

No law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of marriage.

Articles on Education (42) and Private Property (43) paraphrased the relevant encyclicals. Article 44 recognized the ‘special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens’, although, in truth, the special position of the Catholic Church was already clear from the previous articles.

It has been argued since, especially in November 1972 when a Referendum on the section giving a ‘special position’ to the Catholic Church was being held, that the 1937 Constitution merely reflected the statistical fact that within the 26-Counties area the great majority of people were Catholics, that it was never intended that such a Constitution could or should apply to the whole of Ireland. This is not so. At the time Mr de Valera was quite explicit that this was the Constitution under which Northern Protestants would be expected to live in the event of a united Ireland:

There are 75 per cent of the people of Ireland as a whole who belong to the Catholic Church, who believe in its teachings, and whose whole philosophy of life is the philosophy that comes from its teachings…If we are going to have a democratic state, if we are going to be ruled by the representatives of the people, it is clear their whole philosophy of life is going to affect that, and that has to be borne in mind and the recognition of it is important. (Dail Debates, 4 June 1937)

Both Cumann na nGael (now after some changes renamed Fine Gael) and the Labour Party supported the Constitution.

The Fianna Fail regime was, as Dr Whyte put it, ‘from the hierarchy’s point of view in many ways a model administration’ (op. cit., p. 88); and from the same point of view, Labour and Fine Gael formed a model opposition.

The years 1923‒37 reveal, so far as religious values are concerned, a remarkable consensus in Irish society. There was overwhelming agreement that traditional Catholic values should be maintained, if necessary by legislation…The two major parties, bitterly though they differed on constitutional and economic issues, were at one in this. Mr Cosgrave refused to legalize divorce; Mr de Valera made it unconstitutional. Mr Cosgrave’s government regulated films and books; Mr de Valera’s regulated dance-halls. Mr Cosgrave’s government forbade propaganda for the use of contraceptives; Mr de Valera’s banned their sale or import. In all this they had the support of the third party in Irish politics, the Labour Party. The Catholic populace gave no hint at protest. The Protestant minority acquiesced. (Whyte, op. cit., p. 60)

By the end of the 1930s it was difficult to see what there was or could be in common between the Northern Protestants and the Southern state—except that both were in the business of hammering the IRA.

7

Once the Northern state was established the Unionists set about organizing affairs in such a way as to guarantee, they hoped, that their power could not be broken. They did this by disenfranchising Catholics as far as was possible and by taking measures to deny political expression to any discontent coming from the Protestant lower classes; by building the Orange machine into the structure of the state.

Orange power was already a reality in many parts of Northern Ireland. Through the Unionist Party the Order controlled local government authorities in Protestant areas and was in a position to dispense patronage to its supporters in those districts. The Order, as we have seen, was also influential in many sectors of industry. In October 1920 the Order’s armed wing, the Ulster Volunteer Force, was constituted by Westminster as a Special Constabulary. Thus, when the Government of Ireland Act was passed, setting up the Six Counties state, the immediate concern of the Orange leaders was not to create an administrative apparatus but, thus freed from direct and occasionally inhibiting Westminster control, to tighten the grip they had already taken on the existing apparatus. They showed fair determination. They were supported by the majority of the British Conservative Party.

The UVF, now the Specials, and other supporters of the Order went into action during the election campaign leading to the first Northern Ireland Parliament. Sinn Fein, Nationalist and other anti-Unionist candidates were arrested, gaoled, beaten up or otherwise intimidated. The Manchester Guardian commented: ‘No sooner had it been discovered that a man was Sinn Fein election agent for a district than he has disappeared’ (21 May 1921). A projected Labour rally in the Ulster Hall on 17 May was broken up by Specials, who thereupon cabled Sir James Craig: ‘…have captured Ulster Hall from the Bolsheviks’ (F. Gallagher, The Indivisible Island, p. 258). Observing the election campaign, one British journalist wrote:

The Unionists have one important ally—they have a coercive police force of their own…Some of them [the Specials], the A class, become Regular RIC; the rest, the B and C classes, parade their districts at night with arms, harassing, threatening, beating and occasionally killing their Catholic neighbours and burning their homes. (‘Special Correspondent’, Manchester Guardian, 19 May 1921)

Almost the first legislative activity of the new Parliament was the drafting and passage of the Civil Authority (Special Powers) Act, introduced in April 1922 to give unusual powers to the government and the police force (which, when they were mobilized, included the Specials). Its second major Act was the Local Government (Northern Ireland) Bill, passed in October 1922. It abolished proportional representation for local government elections and gave the Minister of Home Affairs power to alter electoral boundaries. The purpose of the two Acts was to make Northern Ireland safe for the economic ascendancy.

In the first few years of its existence the most immediate threat to Northern Ireland and the source of greatest hope to the Catholics within it was the possibility that the Boundary Commission might cede some of its territory to the South. Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty the Boundary Commission was charged with determining ‘in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economics and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland’. The areas where Catholics were in a majority and where anti-Unionists held local government power lay precisely along the border. Tyrone had 79,000 Catholics to 63,000 Protestants, Fermanagh 35,000 Catholics to 27,000 Protestants. The biggest border towns, Derry, Armagh, Newry, were in Catholic hands. Had the Boundary Commission taken as its criterion the wishes of the inhabitants area by area as expressed in local government elections—and that, on the face of it, would have been the logical way to proceed—Northern Ireland would have lost almost all the border areas, practically half its territory. One of the few things about which all parties in Ireland were agreed was that if that happened the remaining Unionist-controlled territory would not have found it easy to maintain itself as a viable entity.

For three years the Unionists refused to appoint a representative to the Boundary Commission, thus preventing it from starting work. What they did appoint was a Commissioner with the power of judge to visit various areas and to recommend changes in local government electoral boundaries. The Commissioner, Mr John Leech K.C., was a characteristically clear-minded Unionist functionary. With regard to Strabane Rural Council, for example, he accepted without amendment a scheme submitted by Mr William T. Millar. Mr Millar was the local Unionist MP and stalwart of the local Orange Lodge. In Clogher boundaries drawn up by the Unionist MP for the area, William Coote, were similarly accepted. The Unionist Party in Cookstown had its suggestion duly rubber-stamped. And so on. The effect of the boundary changes, coupled with the abolition of proportional representation, was dramatic. In Co. Tyrone, for example, every rural council hitherto controlled by Catholics became Unionist. The councils of Castlederg, Clogher, Cookstown, Dungannon, Omagh and Strabane (rural)—in the areas of each of which Catholics predominated—were Unionist by 1924. Fermanagh county council passed into Unionist hands, as did the Enniskillen, Lisnaskea and Irvinestown Rural Councils, despite a Catholic majority in each. The figures for Omagh Rural Council illustrate the process. The electorate broke down: 61.5 per cent Catholic, 39.5 per cent Protestant. Before the changes the Council comprised 26 Nationalists and 13 Unionists. After Mr Leech had finished his task this changed to 18 Nationalists and 21 Unionists. William Millar summed it up well: ‘The chance that we had been waiting for for so long arrived. We took advantage. We divided the country in the way we thought best’ (12 July 1923). Only those areas with such a massive Catholic majority as to make effective gerrymandering impossible—for example Newry, Keady and Strabane Urban District—were left in Nationalist hands.

Derry City was, of course, the area which the Unionists were most anxious to deal with. Not only was it the second largest city in the Six Counties, it was a sort of Orangeman’s Mecca. Catholic control of its corporation was intolerable. Sure enough, the boundaries were redrawn—for the second time in three years—and this time, the abolition of proportional representation making the necessary calculations much simpler, there was no mistake made. The Catholics’ brief moment of municipal power was over. Their reaction was understandable. They refused to contest elections, opted out of public life and banked on the Boundary Commission to see that fair play would be done. A meeting in St Columb’s Hall in November 1922 resolved not to contest a forthcoming election on the grounds that

In Derry City alone, where Catholics are an overwhelming majority of the population, they are, owing to the system of gerrymandering and other mean devices, being disenfranchised, permanently excluded in future from all share in the management of the city and placed at the mercy of a privileged, intolerant minority…We rely on the provision of the Anglo-Irish Treaty to save us from an intolerable bondage and religious, political and economic servitude which would be unbearable, and we hereby resolve to press our claims before the Boundary Commission to be set up under the Treaty. (Derry Journal, 3 November 1922)

It was to be August 1924, when the British government acted over the head of Stormont, appointed a representative to the Commission and set it in motion, before anyone was able to press a claim. But that time the ‘wishes of the inhabitants’ of the border areas, as expressed in local government elections, were as much in line with Unionist thinking as it was possible for electoral ingenuity to make them. Still the Catholics did not bring themselves to believe that the Commission could possibly confirm the existing frontier. ‘The wishes of the inhabitants’, the Treaty had said. Surely there could be no argument about that, in places like Derry. ‘They cannot deny that almost half the area of the Six Counties is held within the North by force; said the Journal (26 August 1925) as the release of the Commission’s report became imminent. In the Bogside optimism abounded as it was reported that, ‘while the political barometer rises to the point of optimism in Dublin, the spirit of Belfast becomes correspondingly depressed’ (Journal, 28 August). Ernest Blythe, a minister in the Cosgrave administration, ‘had no doubt that the result would be satisfactory to the Free State’ (Irish Independent, 28 August 1925). The Sunday Pictorial reported: ‘It is understood that, though the Boundary Commission has not yet completed its report, the British Government is already in touch with the Free State on the matter. It is even stated that the Free State is preparing to take over certain of the disputed territories’ (30 August 1925). Journal editorials became positively lyrical ‘The Boundary Commission is about to give an early and inevitable decision…It is not the Shamrock but the Orange Lily which is withering on Irish soil today’—and reported that customs officials in Co. Donegal had made arrangements to move over the border into Derry to man the new frontier at two hours’ notice (2 September 1925).

It was not to be. Catholic political leaders had reacted to the activation of the Boundary Commission by presenting detailed statistics about the religious make-up and voting patterns of various areas. But it was brute force, not statistics, which was to decide the matter. The Unionist Party greeted the arrival of the Commission by mobilizing the Specials. There were 35,000 Specials at the time. In villages and towns along the border at weekends the Specials would parade in arms to be reviewed by cabinet ministers down from Belfast for the purpose. On 2 September 1924, for example, 1,000 Specials paraded in East Fermanagh (Irish Times, 3 September 1924). Two days later another 1,000 strong parade was reviewed by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Home Affairs in the adjoining and equally disputed area of South Tyrone (Belfast Newsletter, 5 September 1924). In Derry there were numerous parades and open-air ‘training sessions’. The intention was to impress on the Commission and on the British government that all hell would break loose if the border were tampered with and on local Catholics that it would be they who would experience this hell. In the Catholic village of Garrison in Fermanagh Sir James Craig assured an audience of ‘Protestants and Loyalists’ that ‘they had their platoons and their system of defence and he could assure them that if necessary they would have twelve platoons of Specials’ (quoted in F. Gallagher, The Indivisible Island, p. 188). That the mobilization of the Specials was designed specifically to ensure the unwilling inclusion of Catholic areas within Northern Ireland was made clear later by Winston Churchill: ‘While the Boundary question was in suspense Sir James Craig and his Government felt it necessary to maintain between 30,000 and 40,000 armed special constables in various degrees of mobilization…but so soon as this settlement was reached Sir James Craig informed me that he would be able to proceed immediately with the winding up of the Special Constabulary’ (Hansard, 8 December 1925).

The British government had no intention of taking on the Unionists for the sake of democracy or to fulfil the provisions of a Treaty. The Unionist Party was the most direct representative of the British establishment in Ireland.

At the beginning of October 1925 Irish papers reported ‘an astonishing rumour’ (Journal, 2 October 1925). The rumour was to the effect that, far from there being a recommendation for the secession of Northern areas to the South, some Southern territory was to be handed over to the North. Nationalist Party representatives hurried to Dublin to confer with the government as the press reported: ‘Alarm in Donegal’ (Journal, 20 November 1925). The Journal’s shamrock withered quickly enough as Derry Catholics, bemused by the sudden blight that had afflicted their hopes, joined now in demanding: ‘HANDS OFF DONEGAL. NOT A SOD: NOT A SLATE’ (Journal, 30 November 1925). The Dublin government was not going to go to war about the North either. To pre-empt any loss of its territory it pushed through a measure confirming the existing boundary. In the Bogside there was bitterness, bewilderment and apprehension, and a mind-numbing understanding of its own impotence. ‘Gerrymandered, gagged and throttled, the harassed Catholics of the Six Counties are left in bondage.’

Preserving the original boundaries of the state was vital for the Unionists. It was just as vital that they keep the Protestant bloc intact. And in order to do that the Unionist Party had to be in a position to deliver some sense of privilege to the Protestant masses. After the seizure of the local government machinery there was no real problem. Jobs and houses are what working-class people need more than anything else, and local authorities have jobs and houses to distribute. The success of the Unionist Party over a period of time in staffing key local governmental positions with their own supporters was shown by a 1957 study of County Council administrative officers:

Tyrone (55.3% Catholic) had 60 Protestant and 6 Catholic officers.

Antrim (22% Catholic) had 93 Protestant and 4 Catholic officers.

Armagh (46.5% Catholic) had 47 Protestant and 3 Catholic officers.

Derry (43.1% Catholic) had 48 Protestant and 4 Catholic officers.

Down (30.1% Catholic) had 71 Protestant and 7 Catholic officers.

Fermanagh (54.3% Catholic) had 60 Protestant and 6 Catholic officers.

(Figures from Gallagher, op. cit., p. 210.)

Thus the Unionist majorities elected to Councils on the basis of the 1922 Act, by appointing safe men to key positions, ensured that there would be little high-minded reluctance to operate their policies. Local government jobs and publicly-financed houses were allocated not according to need but according to the politics/religion of applicants. It is unnecessary to give figures. No one now denies this. Private enterprise played its part too, which was but natural, the owners of local industry being almost to a man prominent Unionists.

Other state institutions were drawn into the mesh. One third of the membership of the RUC was recruited directly from the Specials, who in turn were recruited exclusively from the Protestant community and almost exclusively from the ranks of the Orange Order. The Specials’ chain of command linked directly into that of the RUC. Appointments to the Bench and to the magistracy were decided on a sectarian-political basis. The magistrate who sentenced Bernadette Devlin for her part in the events of August 1969 in Bogside was a former Unionist candidate for the constituency of which she was a sitting member. Of the three judges who heard and refused her appeal, two were members of the Orange Order and one a former Unionist cabinet minister.

There is a theory, currently fashionable in ‘liberal’ circles in Ireland, that gerrymandering, discrimination, and so on were unfortunate but natural reflections of the sectarianism of both communities in Northern Ireland, that, given the Protestants’ understandable fears of Home Rule, it was simply inevitable that such things would happen, and that no one essentially was to blame for it. A pity, but it was the way things had to be. (For a more long-winded exposition of this point see Garret Fitzgerald, Towards a New Ireland.) This was not the way things had to be. It was the way things had to be if the Northern state was to continue to exist and that, pace Dr Fitzgerald, is a very different thing. The classic statement of the Orange position was made by Sir Basil Brooke (later Lord Brookeborough) on the Twelfth in 1933 in words which thousands of Catholic schoolchildren in Northern Ireland know by heart:

There were a great number of Protestants and Orangemen who employed Roman Catholics. He felt he could speak freely on this subject as he had not a Roman Catholic about his own place. He appreciated the great difficulty experienced by some of them in procuring suitable Protestant labour, but he would point out that Roman Catholics were endeavouring to get in everywhere. He would appeal to Loyalists, therefore, wherever possible to employ good Protestant lads and lassies. (Fermanagh Times, 13 July 1933)

A few months later Sir Basil was equally explicit about the reasons why Catholics should not be allowed to work:

You people who are employers have the ball at your feet. If you don’t act properly now, before we know where we are we shall find ourselves in the minority instead of the majority. (Londonderry Sentinel, 20 March 1934)

In other words: the Catholics will outbreed us unless we force them to emigrate. Catholics by that time had already got the point. They were not wanted.

Discrimination was, for obvious reasons, most acutely felt in the western border areas where Catholics were in a majority—in Tyrone, Fermanagh and around Derry City. These were, by neat coincidence, the areas which were, anyway, most vulnerable to economic trends. The staple industries—linen, shipbuilding, and engineering—were largely concentrated in the Lagan Valley around Belfast and, as capital attracted capital, the economic disparity between the eastern and western parts of Northern Ireland increased, a natural tendency which the Unionists were not at pains to reverse. The situation round Derry went from bad in 1920 to worse. The border cut off part of the natural hinterland. The city was never more isolated. In 1920 the Strabane Canal Company had closed. In 1921 a large distillery in William Street went out of business. In 1922 a tailoring industry collapsed. In April 1923 a ‘Derry Employment Committee’ suggested that the local unemployed might be ‘placed in colonies’. In 1924 the Derry shipyard, which had employed 2,000 men during the war, went out of business. In 1925, a flag, bunting and lingerie factory closed, as did a hosiery factory. The shirt industry marked time. In 1926, the male unemployment figure for the city was 28 per cent. Given widespread discrimination, it can safely be assumed that almost all of these were Catholic men and that the figure for male unemployment in the Bogside was nearer 40 per cent. Parts of the Bogside were still unsewered. The population density of the district was 106.2 per acre. In the next ten years three thousand men emigrated. Lord Brookeborough, no doubt, was relieved that whatever virility was left in them would not be exercised in Protestant Ulster.

The Unionist leaders as pragmatic men were not against Catholics because of Catholic dogma, the Virgin Mary or the transubstantiation of bread and wine. They encouraged anti-
Catholicism because they wanted to stay in power and thereby to preserve the economic position of their class. The Catholics had to be browbeaten into submission in order that the state could exist. The Protestant lower orders had to be bought off by the marginal privileges accruing from Catholic second-class citizenship.

Many Protestant workers, however, remained stubbornly unbought, which was not really surprising. Northern Ireland came into existence with an overall unemployment rate of 22.9 per cent and by no means all the jobless were Catholics. Sir James Craig’s seven-man government included one industrialist, one titled landowner, one prosperous solicitor and three past presidents of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce. It was to be expected that Protestant working-class opposition to such a regime would reassert itself once the jingo-religious hysteria which accompanied the foundation of the state diminished. It reasserted itself fairly quickly. In a Stormont by-election in May 1923 an Independent Unionist in the tradition of Sloan defeated the County Grand Master of the Belfast Orange Lodge for the Protestant seat of West Belfast. In the next two years passions continued to cool, and many of the workers expelled from their jobs in 1920‒2 began to drift back to work. The Labour Party was reorganized in Belfast.

The second Northern Ireland General Election was held in 1925, while the Boundary Commission was deliberating and the Specials were showing the Catholics the flag. The Unionist Party, as always, tried to fight on the sole issue of ‘The Constitution’. But the results showed that the trick was not working nearly as well as it had done in the rather special conditions of 1921. In Belfast there were four four-member constituencies. Eight candidates appealed for a Protestant anti-Unionist vote. Only one failed to get elected. There were three Labour and four Independent Unionist MPs in the new Parliament. Unionist representation went down from 40 to 32.

Sir James Craig and his cabinet colleagues were not prepared to stand idly by while a trend such as that gathered momentum. Within two years they had determined to alter the rules of the game. Proportional representation was abolished. Explaining why this was necessary, Craig told a Twelfth Rally in 1927: ‘Mr Devlin and his party are the natural opposition. Why then should any loyalist constituency add strength to it and weaken the influence of my colleagues and myself?’ (Belfast Newsletter, 13 July 1927). Introducing the bill to abolish proportional representation early in 1929 he went on: ‘What I have been afraid of under the proportional representation system was that certain members might be returned to the house who in a crisis on the one point of vital importance to the Ulster people might not stand on whichever side it was intended they should stand when they were elected to this house. Therefore, I personally will welcome this opportunity to get down to simple issues instead of the complicated ones that are inevitably brought before us under the old plan’ (Hansard (N.I.), Vol. 10, 28.29). The ‘simple issues’ were the border, whether Catholics should be allowed to sweep the floor in the City Hall, and so on. The ‘complicated ones’ were unemployment, houses, rents, wages and such things, irritatingly being ‘brought before us under the old plan’.

The first election under the new system was held on 21 May 1929. Craig’s party faced ten Independent Unionists, eight Labour candidates, and six Liberals as well as tenants’, unemployed and ratepayers’ nominees. There were also twelve representatives of the natural opposition. The abolition of multi-member constituencies enabled the Unionists to pose their simple issue in starkly simple terms: for or against the maintenance of the state and no messing about the condition of the working classes. On polling day the Belfast Newsletter carried the final Unionist message in banner headlines: ‘BEWARE OF INDEPENDENTS: UP ULSTER: SCATTER YOUR ENEMIES: HONOUR YOUR FRIENDS’. The Unionists increased their representation to 37. The Independent Unionists lost one and the Labour Party two seats. The sole Liberal MP was also defeated. It was a highly successful exercise from the Unionist point of view. For the moment they had checked the disintegration of the Protestant alliance. The abolition of proportional representation, Nationalist mythology notwithstanding, was not aimed against the Catholic population. It was designed to destroy Protestant working-class political organizations and it almost did.

However, the continuing fragility of the Protestant alliance was to be demonstrated dramatically three years later, when Protestants and Catholics in Belfast joined together to fight the police. The issues were unemployment and the pay for outdoor relief workers.

Northern Ireland, a depressed area at the best, so to speak, of times, was hard hit by the economic collapse at the beginning of the thirties. In 1932 a third of the total workforce was unemployed. There were 45,000 out of work in Belfast alone, including thousands of Protestant shipbuilders and engineers. Relief rates were farcical. A man and his wife received 8s. per week. This was increased to 12s. for couples with one or two children and to a maximum of 16s. for larger families. Most single men and women got nothing. Some unemployed were given outdoor relief work—digging roads and drains—for which labour they received their payments in cash. The idle unemployed were paid in kind. In these circumstances it was difficult for many Protestants to feel as privileged as Craig assured them they were.

On 30 September 1932 an Independent Unionist at Stormont demanded an immediate debate on the unemployment situation. The Speaker refused, and a Labour member threw the mace at him. On Monday 3 October the outdoor relief workers struck. Fifteen thousand marched to a mass rally and endorsed a demand for a minimum of 18s. 3d. a week for a single person, 23s. 3d. for a married couple, and 2s. extra for each child. On Tuesday men lay on the tramlines and halted the traffic. On Wednesday they hijacked the trams. Three hundred men demanded entrance to the Poor House as paupers. The next morning they asked for eggs for breakfast and were thrown out. At the week-end food was collected and food parcels given out to the most needy cases. There was rioting in Sandy Row (Protestant) and in Divis Street (Catholic). The unemployed appealed for a general strike and were ignored by the local trades councils. They called a rent strike and a school strike to begin on Monday 10 October and for a mass rally on the eleventh.

The strikers were to march to the rally from five points in the city in both Catholic and Protestant areas. The government used the Special Powers Act to ban the marches. The Falls Road contingent tried to defy the ban and were attacked by the RUC. What happened in the Shankill as a result was described by a journalist on the spot:

On the Shankill Road crowds of growling men lounged about waiting…Suddenly a big red-faced woman with a black shawl thrown over her shoulders, wisps of hair hanging over her eyes, appeared almost from nowhere. Wild-eyed and panting from exertion she ran to the crowds of men and in quick tense language told them that the unemployed and the police were in conflict in the Falls Road—one man was killed and others were wounded—and the fighting was still going on.

‘Are you going to let them down?’ she shrieked…A cheer went up.

‘No, by heavens, we are not,’ they roared back and in a twinkling a veritable orgy of destruction had begun. (J. J. Kelly, A Journalist’s Diary, Capuchin Annual, 1944)

This lady was obviously a mischief-maker of the type referred to in a Belfast Telegraph report:

There was an exchange of mischief-makers all over the city so as to confuse the police force. (Quoted in An Phoblacht, 22 October 1932)

A few days later the government and the Poor Law Guardians announced increases in relief payments—20s. for a man and wife plus 4s. for each two children up to a maximum of 32s. a week. At a mass meeting on Saturday, the strikers accepted the terms. The chairman of the strike committee, Tommy Geehan, said:

What we have achieved is in direct contradiction to the statements of those who said that the workers could not unite and could not fight and the past fortnight will be recorded as a glorious two weeks in the history of the working-class struggle. We saw Roman Catholic and Protestant workers marching together and on Tuesday last we saw them fighting together. (Quoted in Workers’ Fight, No. 19, p. 8)

The 1932 riots were described in the Unionist press as ‘the worst rioting the city had experienced in fifty years’ (quoted in Jeff Bell’s This We Will Maintain, p. 7). They were not the biggest riots or the most destructive (only two dead). What the Unionists may have meant was that these were a more pernicious class of riot than the city was used to. Certainly the Unionist leaders were shaken if not by the extent of Protestant defection then certainly by the intensity with which it was expressed. The digging of trenches on the Shankill Road to draw police off from the Falls did not fit into the expected pattern of Northern politics. Sir James Craig was quickly on the job, warning ‘the mischief makers’ that ‘if they have any designs by the trouble they have created in our city…that this is one step towards securing a Republic for all Ireland, then I say they are doomed to bitter disappointment’ (Belfast Newsletter, 13 October 1932). For the next few months the local press was filled with dire warnings from government spokesmen to Protestants that persistence in such foolish agitations might well lead to the annexation of Northern Ireland by the Vatican, Dublin, Moscow or all three. It was on the next 12 July that Sir Basil Brooke publicly congratulated himself on not having a Catholic around the house and urged others to seek the same purity. And significantly, the main Resolution on that Twelfth dealt with the newly apprehended danger of communism: ‘We desire to impress upon all the loyal subjects of the King the vital necessity of standing on guard against communism, whose aim and object is to overthrow authority, the will of the people and everything we hold sacred in our domestic and public lives’ (Belfast Newsletter, 13 July 1933). The Unionist Party held its vote in the 1933 General Election.

As had happened in 1907 and in 1919, there had been no effort by anyone involved to give political direction to the 1932 strike. The Labour Party had equivocated, the natural opposition was silent and the Republican movement was politically confused and more concerned with ‘giving Fianna Fail a chance’ in the South. Against all the odds a few Protestant workers did draw political conclusions and turned up with socialist banners at the 1934 Republican march to Bodenstown to commemorate the death of Wolfe Tone. But the IRA was in the process of expelling its left wing and the Northern contingent, like the Congress group, was beaten up by Mr MacBride’s ‘pure Republicans’, who objected to their disruptive left-wing slogans. They went back to Belfast and there is no record of their ever appearing again at Bodenstown.

In 1932 the unemployment situation in Derry had been, as always, much worse than that in Belfast. But the trouble did not spread. In the summer of that year there were happier things on the Bogside’s mind. There was a carnival atmosphere about. Brightly painted, intricately constructed arches spanned the narrow streets and flags and bunting fluttered. A ‘Eucharistic Congress’ was to be held in Dublin. Every school and parish was organizing a contingent to attend, to hear the masses, join in the prayers and listen to Count John MacCormack singing ‘Panis Angelicus’, the highlight. The streets were decorated so that those who stayed at home could make a ‘spiritual pilgrimage’. ‘The Holy Father loves Ireland,’ alleged the Journal (22 June 1932).

On 10 October there was a march of unemployed to the Guildhall, but no violence attended. A deputation was received by the Corporation and demanded an end to the means test, and submitted fourteen suggested schemes for relief work. The Corporation was non-committal. The Journal was pleased by the dignified bearing of the Derry destitute and, correcting any impression that it was only the Unionist Party which disapproved of the unruliness in Belfast, declared that: ‘Every right-minded person, and especially every friend of the unemployed and sympathizer with the plight of the vast army of hungry men and women, will deplore the happenings in Belfast yesterday’ (12 October 1932). The Journal was then owned by Mr J. J. McCarroll, the Nationalist MP for the Foyle constituency.

One of the reasons for the lesser reaction to unemployment in Derry was that Derrymen were used to it. It was natural. Moreover the unemployed in Derry were almost all Catholic and tended as a body to look, not for changes within Northern Ireland, but for an end to Northern Ireland, as a solution. They had turned their backs on Belfast and looked to Dublin, although by this time it was beginning to dawn on some that perhaps Dublin was not terribly interested. ‘It seems that we get nothing more from Southern parties,’ said local Republican Neil Gillespie uneasily, ‘than a pious wish that at some time or other Ireland will be united’, (An Phoblacht, 15 January 1933).

In the 1933 Stormont General Election Mr McCarroll was opposed by a Sinn Fein candidate, Sean McCool, from Ballybofey, Co. Donegal. It was typical of the times that the election campaigns had very little to do with Derry. There was little mention of an unemployment problem, much less recent agitation on that score. Mr McCarroll advocated support for Fianna Fail as the best way of ensuring that at some time or other the country would be united. The IRA had not yet got rid of its most left-wing members, a fact to which Mr McCarroll was not slow to draw attention. Leaflets, printed by the Derry Journal Ltd, were distributed under such headlines as; ‘The truth at last!’, ‘Communists backing McCool’ and ‘The Communists want McCool to win; do you?’

McCool’s organization countered with declarations of traditional republican defiance which, if they lacked solid content, were frequently splendid in their expression:

Give the answer from the North,
O’er the border send it forth,
Let them shout for all their worth,
‘Keep to law and order.’
Craig and Devlin save your face,
Now, McCarroll, leave your place,
Here’s a man that’s no disgrace,
McCool is on the border.

But it was a defiance increasingly overlaid with romance, as Northern Republicans, trapped in the Six Counties and lacking any adequate analysis of why that situation seemed yearly to be solidifying, warded off despair with nostalgia and sentimentalized their hopelessness.

And here were the young boys and girls of Derry hurling revolution at the very gates of Empire. Och, a Dhia! What a long hunger has been on them all these days. (An Phoblacht, 2 December 1933).

Mr McCarroll, with the solid support of the clergy, had a comfortable victory.

In the North the rest of the thirties followed now-
established patterns. The July Twelfth demonstration in Belfast in 1935 sparked off sectarian fighting. Nine people were killed and hundreds of Catholic families burned out. The city coroner commented: ‘The poor people who commit these riots are easily led and influenced almost entirely by the public speeches of men in high and responsible positions. There would be less bigotry if there were less public speech-making of a kind by the so-called leaders of public opinion’ (Irish News, 21 July 1935). Things were back to normal.

Derry remained fairly peaceful in 1935. In the Bogside people read of what was happening and raged about the terrible wrong of it, but there was nothing anybody could do.

15 July: Five dead and seventy-three wounded in Belfast.

Catholic districts again invaded.

Police use machine-guns.

Dastardly shooting of Catholic girl.

17 July: Brutal treatment of Catholics.

New areas attacked by mobs.

Catholic houses marked with crosses.

19 July: Heart-rending scenes.

Hundreds of Catholic refugees.

Catholics ordered to clear out.

Twenty-four hours to leave or homes wrecked.

22 July: New phase of Belfast pogrom.

Catholic girl workers attacked.

Two more deaths in Belfast.

21 July: Belfast Orange mobs active.

(Journal)

At least there were some things worse than being a Catholic in Derry: being a Catholic in Belfast for one.

1936 saw a further turn of the screw in Derry, but the reaction was resignation rather than revolt. The problem was that despite emigration the Catholic population kept increasing. In one of the wards carved out in 1922, the North Ward, the Protestant majority had steadily decreased, from 618 in 1922 to 406 in 1928 and, in a by-election in May 1936, to 352. It was time for another change in the boundaries. Local Unionists drew up a scheme reducing the number of wards from five to three and the number of corporators from forty to twenty. At a public inquiry Mr A. Halliday, a prominent local Unionist, explained: ‘There is a fear that the Unionist majority in the North Ward will in the course of a year or two be wiped out.’

Counsel for the Nationalist Party: ‘And this is the purpose of the scheme?’

Mr Halliday: ‘Oh yes.’ (Quoted in F. Curran, Ireland’s Fascist City, p. 23.)

Conveying the decision of the inquiry to the Corporation the Ministry of Home Affairs wrote:

Very considerable opposition was offered to the scheme at the Inquiry, while the evidence put forward in support of it was of a most unsatisfactory character. The new line proposed as a boundary…followed in some places a course very difficult to define and no evidence was given in justification of the complication. (Quoted in Ireland’s Fascist City, p. 21)

The letter went on to say that despite these reservations the plan was acceptable. In the municipal election of 1938 (the Nationalist Party having by now dropped the abstention policy) the scheme proved its worth. Two Protestant wards returned twelve Unionist corporators. The Catholic South Ward returned eight Nationalists. In all there were 7,444 Protestant and 9,691 Catholic electors.

However, not all the news was depressing. The Journal reported that events in Spain were more encouraging: ‘Bilbao’s fall: Joybells greet Nationalist triumph. Franco pushing on to Santander.’

In 1938, Craig called a General Election, saying: ‘We are asking for the return of the Government on the paramount issue of partition. I would appeal with all the earnestness at my command for a closing of ranks against the common enemy’ (Belfast Newsletter, 21 January 1938). The Unionist Party won 39 seats, its best performance since 1921. The unemployment rate for the province as a whole was 28 per cent.

On the eve of the Second World War the rulers of Ireland, North and South, had reason to be pleased with their performances to date. The industrialists and landowners who ran the Unionist Party had successfully corralled the Catholics outside the political process and the Protestant masses inside their own party. The small-time capitalists of Fianna Fail had, by a short, sharp burst of protectionism, managed to build some sort of industrial structure while isolating the Republicans and making peace with the Catholic church. Both governments were firmly in control of their respective territories.

They had reached these positions by moving steadily apart. In the South industry had been developed by the application of economic policies which would have been catastrophic for the North, while year by year Catholic doctrine had been allowed to seep into the criminal code until the statute book was sodden with it. In the North Protestant power was steadily strengthened. Northern and Southern capitalism had needed to develop separately. Each had to hand an ideology which simultaneously mystified its ‘own’ community and repelled the other. Those who refused to be mystified were brutalized.

It can seriously be doubted whether the Northern state could have survived the first two decades of its existence had not the ‘Free State’ become increasingly repellent to Protestants. The Unionist Party had to fight unceasingly and at times desperately to hold the support of the majority of Protestants. That it succeeded was mainly due to the fact that the only alternative to the Union with Britain appeared to be sectarian Catholic Rule from Dublin.

No one consistently canvassed a third alternative. No one was with equal vigour fighting sectarianism North and South, no one was actively supporting and attempting to politicize the economic militancy of Protestant trade unionists and, at the same time, seeking to destroy clerical conservatism in the South. There was no anti-partitionist organization which the Protestant rioters of 1932, for example, could have turned to, because there was no antipartitionist organization which had put up even a token fight against the lengthening list of objectively anti-Protestant laws in the South, none which had clearly detached itself from bourgeois-Nationalist politics.

The 1929 Northern Ireland General Election coincided with Mr Cosgrave’s Censorship of Publications Act in the South. The 1932 unemployment riots took place eight months after Mr de Valera’s election and his tendering of ‘respectful homage’ to the papacy. The 1938 election came in the wake of Fianna Fail’s theocratic constitution. And all the time Cumann na nGael and Fianna Fail sprouted anti-partitionism, unceasingly declared their firm intention some day to take the North. Neither party in power made a single move to do any such thing. Once again the tendencies within Catholic Irish politics which were most sectarian and therefore more repellent to Protestants, and which yielded to no one in their verbal anti-Unionism, were precisely those which had no intention of, and no interest in, subverting the North. Their Catholicism and their anti-partitionism were the twin components of an ideology designed not to oust the Unionists but to mystify the Southern Catholic masses. The only effect on the Unionist Party was repeatedly to strengthen it.

W. T. Cosgrave and Eamon de Valera were the crutches on which the Unionist Party staggered through the twenties and thirties. The people who really lost out in all this were the Northern Catholics. Condemned to second-class citizenship within the Northern state, they were encouraged, during election campaigns, at commemorative functions for dead heroes and by the regular speeches of Dublin politicians, to believe that if they held fast a little longer succour would come. The actions of Southern governments simultaneously ensured that nothing actually would or could be done. So in places like the Bogside, enclaves of muffled unrest, people suffered on, and waited.

8

The Second World War interrupted developments. Both North and South did fairly well out of the war. In the South, which was neutral, the value of bank deposits more than doubled during the hostilities (Lysaght, p. 169). In the North, war production and an influx of allied troops generated a minor boom. After the war the weakness of both economies was exposed.

In 1947 Southern Ireland had a trade deficit of £91,823,000 (Lysaght, p. 170), four times the largest pre-war deficit. Employment in agriculture continued to decline, while stagnant industry provided no alternative jobs. To develop further, Irish industry needed access to international markets. But the very conditions of its initial formation and growth made this impossible. Protection had had the disastrous side effect of cosseting inefficiency and technological backwardness. (At the levels of productivity obtaining in the thirties the goods in the five categories first selected for protection and produced in Ireland by 45,000 workers could have been produced in Britain by 27,000 workers.) By the 1950s the number of industrial workers was falling. Between 1951 and 1961 the total employment in the South decreased from 1,217,000 to 1,053,000. The number of industrial workers fell from 664,000 to 637,000 (Garret Fitzgerald, Towards a New Ireland, p. 69).

There was an actual drop in output in 1957. In the first half of the fifties an average of 39,353 people were emigrating per year. In the second half the figure rose to 42,400. Successive post-war governments—two periods of interparty government, from 1948 to 1951 and 1954 to 1957, interrupted Fianna Fail rule—reacted with a series of halfhearted development acts. In 1949 an Industrial Development Authority was set up. In 1952 grants were offered to investors in depressed areas. In 1966 industrial grants were extended to all areas. To little avail. The real problem was that industries built on the relatively tiny home market could not take off from the base constructed in the thirties. Access to international markets was a necessity; access to the Free State for international capital a necessity if that was to be achieved. Economic isolationism was redundant. With the cheerful pragmatism characteristic of the party Fianna Fail promptly abandoned the Sinn Fein economics on which it had first come to power. The Protection of Manufacturers Act was repealed in 1958 and, within a decade, the industrial infrastructure of the South was radically changed. Far from discouraging foreign investment Fianna Fail now went in search of it. Investment came in, attracted by tax concessions, low wages and unrestricted freedom to take profits out of the country. By March 1965, 234 new foreign projects had commenced operation in the state. Almost half of them were British. Between 1960 and 1966 profits increased by 54 per cent. Between 1961 and 1966 agricultural employment declined by 45,000, while employment in manufacturing industries other than textiles, clothing and footwear went up from 143,000 to 163,000. The new projects stimulated a boom in the construction and service industries. In the same period employment in the former increased by 14,000, in the latter by 22,000. The percentage of the population living on the land decreased steadily from 46 per cent in 1946 to 38 per cent in 1956 to 34 per cent in 1966 (Lysaght, p. 201). At the time it was all known as ‘the Lemass miracle’, being named after the new Taoiseach Sean Lemass, who symbolically had replaced Eamon de Valera as Fianna Fail leader in June 1969. (The Lemass miracle resembled most other Irish miracles in one crucial respect—that is, it never really happened. What had happened was that Fianna Fail offered foreign investors the chance to make a quick buck. The fact that there were those ready to accept the invitation cannot properly be regarded as miraculous.) The trend was formalized in 1965 when Lemass travelled to London to sign the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement with Harold Wilson—one of the few recorded cases in history of one bankrupt managing to pawn his assets to another. The Free Trade Agreement provided for the dismantling of all economic barriers between the two countries over a period of ten years. It thus increased the dependence of the Southern economy on British capital. Not that that upset the nouveaux semi-riches who, barnacle-like, were beginning to encrust Irish parliamentary politics. As output continued to grow the whoops of delight in select lounge bars around St Stephen’s Green in Dublin would have given the uninformed passer-by to understand that the Free State middle class had at last shrugged off its sexual inhibitions. But no. It was just that the talk had changed from horses to economics, from cross-doubles and Prendergast’s chances at Ascot to unit costs, cash-flow and growth potential. Happy is the Tory with investment coming in and underpaid workers to boot.

While increased investment seemed to begin to solve the problems of the economy it would be a fundamental misunderstanding of economics to conclude that the economic problems of the people were thereby solved. For example: in 1965 there were an estimated 3,000 girls between 14 and 18 years old working full-time on the land. They worked an average 41 hours a week and earned £4 2s. 6d. Their male contemporaries were slightly better off, receiving £4 9s. 3d. for 41.9 hours. 24 per cent of men and 93 per cent of women workers were taking home less than £10 per week. In 1967, when Southern Irish manufacturing wages were the lowest in Europe, the state achieved the possibly unique distinction of simultaneously reaching the bottom of the European housing league. Comparative figures were: Austria 7, Denmark 9, Finland 7.9, France 8.5, Britain 7.6, Sweden 12.7, Norway 8.1, Holland 10.2, West Germany 10.0 houses built per thousand citizens. The Republic of Ireland: 4.2; and this despite one of the highest densities of persons per room (.9) and easily the lowest population increase. The seriousness with which the government of the day took the situation was indicated by the percentage of the Gross National Product spent on housing—4.1, the third lowest in the Continent. In 1966 the number of houses built went down. In 1969, there were 20,000 people on the housing list in Dublin alone, even though it was far from easy to get on to it: one had to establish five years’ residence in the city and have two or three children. There were a thousand vagrants sleeping rough in Dublin, and more than a thousand Dublin vagrants sleeping rough in London. Itinerant children died of exposure in rag tents in winter along the roadside. This is the decade on which Southern Irish politicians look back nostalgically, through the smoke and sulphur of the more recent Troubles, as a period of peaceful progress, the full flowering of the Lemass miracle. Some miracle.

The extent of foreign economic control of Southern Ireland is indicated by the fact that of more than five hundred industrial projects started since the change in Fianna Fail’s economic strategy fewer than one hundred and fifty were Irish-controlled. Of the rest, almost half were British. Government propaganda in such organs as the Financial Times continued to assure foreign capitalists that Ireland was a nation ‘wedded to the free enterprise system. Taxation, legislation and social climate are all so shaped as to offer the private entrepreneur unimpeded scope for development…Companies in Ireland may be wholly owned by non-nationals…There is a degree of freedom from Government interference that is not matched in most other Western democracies’ (quoted in the Sunday Independent, 11 March 1973). It can be doubted whether the ‘degree of freedom from Government interference’ is matched anywhere. Foreign companies have complete freedom to take profits out of the country. There is no check on how much profit they make and repatriate since they are not required to publish accounts—any accounts. However the US Department of Commerce estimates that in 1969 American companies in Ireland ‘earned more than the total net profits of the biggest fifty Irish companies’. And the American stake was little more than half the British (Sunday Independent, 11 March 1973). Overall, foreign enterprise in Southern Ireland had been highly profitable. Estimates of profit-rate on foreign capital in 1970 are around 20 per cent. (See J. Palmer, ‘The Gombeen Republic’ in International Socialism, 51). The average profit-rate in Britain in 1970 was 13.4 per cent.

Meanwhile trade with Britain prospered as the Wilson-Lemass agreement of 1965 was implemented. More than half of all 26-Counties imports came from Britain. More than two thirds of exports went to Britain. In 1970 Southern Ireland became Britain’s third biggest trading partner.

Economically, Southern Ireland by the end of the 1960s was a province of the United Kingdom with significant investment from other metropolitan countries. It had no independent existence.

Meanwhile in the North things were changing in a not dissimilar way. In the immediate post-war period agriculture, textiles and heavy industry including shipbuilding remained the staple industries. There had been little diversification. In 1951, 40 per cent of Northern employment was in such declining sectors. They continued to decline, and, as had happened in the South, there was a net drop in total employment within the state during the fifties, from 546,000 to 539,000. The Belfast like the Dublin government went in search of new industry. Potential investors were offered much the same inducements—capital grants, tax concessions, a large pool of unemployed and low wage structure. ‘Advance factories’ were built by the government in anticipation of overseas firms taking up tenancies. By 1966 217 new industries had been established, 117 of these in advance factories. By 1961, the proportion of people employed in the declining sectors of the economy had fallen to 30 per cent. It continued to fall, reaching 18 per cent in 1971. The most dramatic example of the changing shape of Northern economy during the sixties was the textile trade. Linen and cotton on which Northern industry was historically based declined rapidly (65,000 workers in 1951, 42,000 in 1961, 23,000 in 1971; Fitzgerald, p. 69). Simultaneously, the introduction of new synthetic textile plants helped to take up the slack. Between 1961 and 1967 the proportion of Northern Irish textile output represented by synthetics increased from 14 to 47 per cent and increased in value sevenfold. Between 1951 and 1971 the numbers employed in shipbuilding decreased from 23,000 to around 10,000, a loss of jobs offset exactly by the expansion of employment in construction from 40,000 to 53,000. Agricultural employment dropped from 98,000 to about 43,000 while the workforce in the service industries went up from 214,000 to 280,000 (Fitzgerald, p. 69). Over three quarters of the outside capital involved was British. 80 per cent of the new production was for the British market. Locally owned distributors and retailers were hit by the operations of British Home Stores (from 1965), Boots (from 1966), Marks and Spencer (from 1967), and the expanded activities of the Mace and Spar chains (since 1968).

By the middle of the 1960s the expanding sections of Northern industry were no longer in the hands of local businessmen. The tough-minded, self-made Northern Protestant businessman who had been ‘the backbone of Ulster’ and who controlled the Unionist Party and the Orange Order no longer wielded decisive economic influence. Both Northern and Southern native capitalism, which had developed in different periods and under very different conditions, were together drawn inexorably into the mesh of a changing British industrial complex. The contradictions between them which had underlain partition were fading away. The interests of each now lay in closer integration with Britain, as Britain herself moved into the EEC. In January 1965 Sean Lemass travelled to Belfast and took tea with the new Unionist leader, Terence O’Neill, an event which was interpreted by all but cynics as resulting from sudden, simultaneous upsurges of Christian charity in both their hearts. ‘Economics and reason will end the border,’ boomed the Irish Press (4 March 1968). And indeed, if economics and reason had been the sole political determinants the border would have begun to fade away. The real reason for its existence was disappearing. There were bourgeois visionaries—some such exist—in the early sixties who dreamed of the Six and the 26 Counties peacefully coming together, eventually to form some sort of Federal Ireland, under the benign gaze, not to mention the economic stranglehold, of Great Britain. It was not to work out like that. There is more to Irish politics than economics and reason.

9

The Unionist Party had retained the support of the majority of Protestants by constantly drawing attention to the alleged threat posed by the Rome-ruled Republic to the South. As has been shown, the social forces in the South responsible for the degree of Rome-rule which there was were precisely those which had least intention of subverting Ulster. There was nothing subversive about them.

No matter: the propaganda worked. The ideology was transmitted to the masses via the remarkable political machine which the Unionist leaders had built, which carried the message and put it into effect in almost every town and townland in the state and which reached into the cabinet room to influence the selection of prime ministers as easily as it reached into the offices of an obscure rural district council in Fermanagh or Tyrone to influence allocation of houses. It was a machine which had been running fairly smoothly for more than half a century, grinding and crushing all opposition, siphoning into itself the spoils of the discrimination and automatically disgorging them to those who had to be bought. It was to prove damnably difficult to modernize it.

The changed pattern of British investment in Ireland and the changed relationship between the North and the South demanded reforms in Northern Ireland. If, as economics demanded, there was to be a rapprochement between Protestant business in the North and Catholic business in the South something would have to be done about the way Northern Catholics were being treated by their Protestant rulers.

Very little of note had happened in the Northern Catholic community in the decade after the Second World War. One year followed another and differed little from it. In Derry the male unemployment rate hovered around twenty per cent. Over a fifth of the population of the South Ward lived in houses where there were two or more persons per room (1951 census). The Nationalist Party maintained its grip, while the Republican movement began to wither away. Some may have taken vicarious pleasure from the Journal’s eager recording of further British reverses in international affairs (‘British bluff called on Argentine meat’—27 April 1951) or raged against the successful (allegedly British) plot to stop the Catholic General Douglas MacArthur dropping atom bombs on the Chinese Communists (‘MacArthur takes hero’s leave of Japan. Emperor Hirohito’s precedent-breaking gesture’—16 April 1951). There were minor riots after Nationalist parades in 1951 and 1952, but the local event which raised the Bogside’s spirits highest was, necessarily, symbolic. Late on Easter Saturday, 24 April 1951, a local Republican, Manus Canning, climbed to the top of Walker’s Pillar, which was set on the city walls and towers over the Bogside, and fixed an Irish Tricolour to the flagpost. The Journal report conveys the effect perfectly:

NATIONAL FLAG FLIES FROM WALKER’S PILLAR

…Small groups of people assembled in adjacent streets approaching midnight and stared in amazement at the unique spectacle…Our reporter says that by the time the sky had cleared and in the light of the full moon the Tricolour could be quite clearly seen. It had been perfectly raised to the top of the tall vertical flag-pole and fanned by a slight breeze from the south-west it floated fully spread out and presented an impressive sight. It was right over the head of the Orangemen’s hero, Rev. George Walker.

(In August 1973 the Provisional IRA blew the pillar up.)

Within a few years the external factors compelling a change in official attitudes North and South were operating to encourage Catholics in Derry and elsewhere to seek cause for more immediate and substantial satisfaction.

The industries which came in to replace declining, locally owned firms presented a new attitude. They had no intimate ties with any section of the local community. They were not dependent on the goodwill of Orangeism. The owners of Dupont (UK) for example, unlike the owners of many an old-established linen mill, had little interest in what religion, if any, a worker professed, as long as he laboured efficiently to create surplus value. Although unemployment remained high and Catholics continued to suffer disproportionately from it, within the new industries a section of the Catholic working class had access to skilled jobs and even lower managerial positions hitherto denied them, which tended to emphasize continued discrimination in the public sector. Equally important was the effect of the Butler Education Act and the Welfare State.

The Butler Act, passed in Britain in 1944, came into effect in Northern Ireland in 1947. It gave Catholic working-class children access to grammar-school and university education and thus, for some of those who wished it, access to the middle class. As the effect of the Act began to work its way through the age groups, the number of pupils at Catholic grammar schools and of Catholics at Queen’s University, Belfast, steadily increased. St Columb’s in Derry had 725 students on the roll in 1959, 1,125 by 1967. For them the contrast between aspiration and local reality was stark. In the early sixties a person like myself could easily get a place at university but would have been ineligible for a job as a lavatory-cleaner at Derry Guildhall, and that rankled.

The development of the Welfare State under the British Labour government in the immediate post-war period reinforced the effect. Compulsory national insurance, increased family allowances and the Health Service all helped to shield Catholics from the worst effects of unemployment and poverty. Pressure to emigrate was reduced. It was economically possible to stay at home and strive for better things. Census figures showed that the Catholic population had risen by 0.9 per cent between 1926 and 1951, but by 0.5 per cent between 1951 and 1961, a 66 per cent increase in the rate of growth. And since such benefits were not available south of the border the tendency to regard the achievement of a united Ireland as the only possible way to make things better began to weaken.

The overall effect on the Northern Catholics of post-war change was a lessening urgency about the border coupled with growing impatience about discrimination. At the end of 1956 the IRA launched a guerrilla campaign against the border. With the nonchalant disregard for reality which was, by now, typical of the movement, they proclaimed:

REVOLT IN THE NORTH

NEW DAY DAWNING

Spearheaded by Ireland’s freedom fighters our people in the six counties have carried the fight to the enemy. (United Irishman, January 1957)

‘Our people’ were doing no such thing. The campaign evoked no deep response. It petered out by 1962. ‘They mean well,’ it was said in the Bogside, ‘but aren’t they living in the past?’

In 1963 the leaders of the Orange Order and of the Ancient Order of Hibernians held a widely-publicized series of secret talks about ‘community relations’. The Journal’s editorial attitude to Unionist institutions softened: ‘Nationalists readily recognize the extreme efficiency of the RUC in carrying out the normal duties of a police-force.’ The Nationalist Senator Patrick O’Hare described the RUC as ‘a fine body of men who are doing a good job’ (Journal, 18 January 1963).

Shortly after the Lemass-O’Neill meeting in 1965 the Nationalist Parliamentary Party at Stormont agreed to accept the role of Official Opposition. Our Derry MP, Eddie McAteer, became Leader of the Opposition. They even appointed a Shadow Cabinet. (There were only eight government ministries, but nine Nationalist MPs. The matter was resolved by the expedient of appointing Eddie Richardson, a former athlete from South Armagh, Shadow Minister of Sport, even though there was no real Minister of Sport to be shadowed.)

Dogmatic economic rationalists might have issued very cheerful prognoses. Many people did. Every Belfast and Dublin newspaper welcomed the new spirit in Northern politics. From Westminster Mr Harold Wilson tossed in a congratulatory bouquet. No one in the parliaments in Belfast, Dublin and London is on record as believing that anything but good could come from the warm relationship now being established between the warring tribes; or, to be more accurate, between the leaders of the warring tribes. Only on the far, Paisleyite right and the far Trotskyist left did there emerge shrill voices insisting that it couldn’t and wouldn’t work.

On the face of it there were grounds for optimism. In demanding an end to discrimination the Catholic leaders were not asking for anything which the more far-sighted section of the Unionist leadership was not willing to concede. The problem was: how to go about making the concessions without destroying the political machine which had served them so well.

From 1943 to 1963 the leader of the Unionist Party was Lord Brookeborough, formerly Sir Basil Brooke, a political antique. He had been the youngest member of the cabinet, a mere 59, when he became prime minister and was the type of man—not at all uncommon in Irish politics—who, if anyone had called him progressive, would have issued a writ for libel. He wasn’t a very active prime minister because he judged that he did not have to be. O’Neill records that he would often spend no more than an hour a week dealing with affairs of state, and that for longish periods he would not emerge at all from the fastness of Fermanagh where he and his son John managed a large estate and rode to hounds at the weekends. (He was a sprightly man in some respects.) It is really a misnomer to talk of Unionist ‘leadership’ in the forties and fifties. There was no need for leadership because there was no debate about where the party should go. For almost two decades the machine was on automatic pilot. There were a few bumps on the road, but nothing serious. Most of the Independent Unionists had been absorbed into the party. Tommy Henderson, the maverick populist who ran, rather than represented, the Shankill was the only substantial figure to stay outside the machine and he was not opposed by the official Unionists after Brookeborough took over as leader.

Brookeborough did not do very well in the first post-war Stormont election. In 1945 the determination of British workers not to return to pre-war conditions—which carried the Attlee government into power in a British election was reflected in Northern Ireland and particularly in industrial Belfast. Labour took Dock and Oldpark from the Unionists. Brookeborough could muster only 33 seats, the lowest total since 1929. Despite that, conditions were generally much more stable than they had been in the twenties and thirties. There was little of the passion and almost none of the physical violence which had accompanied, or followed, earlier threats to the party’s hegemony, not least because Unionist Party managers, after more than two decades of practice, were immeasurably more confident of their organization’s ability to reimpose itself in the Protestant community almost at will. That their confidence was not misplaced was demonstrated in 1949, when Unionist candidates succeeded in every constituency in which they challenged Labour or Independent Unionist opponents. They were helped, again, by the events in the South. The coalition government elected there in 1948 finally took the 26 Counties out of the British Commonwealth and, following a Fianna Fail initiative, set up an all-party committee to disseminate anti-Unionist propaganda throughout the world. The world had its own problems and paid very little attention. Neither of the moves posed any threat to Northern Ireland, but the fact that they had been made at all was grist to the Unionist propaganda mill and sufficient to rekindle the Protestants’ sense of embattlement.

It was not until 1958 that Unionist complacency was really shaken. The continuing high unemployment (between 1946 and 1959 male unemployment averaged 8.5 per cent) and the decline, now clearly apparent, of the staple industries generated unease and fear for the future not only among workers but also in business circles. This was reflected in the loss of four Unionist seats in Belfast to the Northern Ireland Labour Party. The soul-searching which followed concerned not only the loss of the seats (the Party still held thirty-seven) but the increasingly urgent need for a reappraisal of the Party’s whole outlook—on industry, on community relations, on relations with the South—in the light of the vaguely apprehended and ongoing alterations in the overall situation. There was another election in 1962. The IRA campaign had just been defeated, and it was difficult for Lord Brookeborough and his colleagues to find a plausible threat to the state with which to beat the faithful into line. The NILP held its four seats in Belfast and the Unionists lost another three to an assortment of challengers. The next year Brookeborough was ditched and Terence O’Neill took over.

O’Neill wanted to lead the Unionist Party in a new direction. However, if he was going to lead it anywhere he had to remain leader. And if he was going to do that he had to show respect for the old symbols and the old traditions. He had to march on the Twelfth and, indeed, as an ex-Guards Officer he was able to strut, besashed, with the best of them. Apart from his visits to convents and Catholic schools he would hint occasionally that discrimination might be a bad thing and that gerrymandering might not be democratic. But he never actually did anything about them. If he had tried, the machine would either have turned on him and destroyed him or it would have fallen apart. Either eventuality would have meant the end of O’Neill. The machine existed to discriminate and arrange gerrymanders. It had been created in order to guarantee the continued ascendancy of Protestant business and landed interests, and that was the only way in which the guarantee could have been delivered. If it could not deliver minor privilege to the Protestant masses it could not deliver the Protestant masses on polling day. The Orange machine, in a real sense, was Northern Ireland. To attack it or to attempt to take away its power was to weaken the state itself. The very boundaries of the state had, after all, been determined by calculating what area the machine could effectively control. If the machine had not been clamped on to Catholic areas the state might never have existed. When in 1964 Paisley began to say loudly and Unionist back-benchers to mutter that O’Neill was ‘betraying Ulster’ they were right. He was betraying what the overwhelming majority of Protestants had been led to understand by ‘Ulster’.

Moreover, the machine itself, over the years, had developed interests of its own. It had been created to serve a single class, but the people who operated it at local level had a vested interest in it for its own sake. They derived social prestige, local power and, in many cases, a degree of economic prosperity from being involved with it. They were not ready to give that up for vague reasons to do with trade figures.

In the sixties the Unionist Party found it difficult to adapt itself to a new situation because the institutions which it had created in different circumstances had developed an autonomy and set of interests of their own and did not automatically, or necessarily at all, adapt to the challenging overall needs of the business community.

10

The establishment in the South was better placed. There was no equivalent of the Orange Order, resistant to change and controlling central and local governmental apparatus. There was an official ideology, of course, Catholic Nationalism, which, like the Orange ideology, had become entrenched in a different period and which was now losing its relevance. But the Catholic Church was not in any practical way involved in day-to-day politics to the extent that the Order was. Its power was based on control of education not on direct involvement in detailed decision-making. It was not connected to any one political party, there being no need. All major parties paid it homage. The Nationalist component of the official ideology had long been a matter of platform rhetoric rather than practical politics. All parties were against partition and for a United Ireland. Passionately. But there was not—and still has not been—any government in the South of Ireland which has reacted to actual attacks on Northern Ireland other than by harassing, imprisoning and hanging those responsible.

The difference between the anti-Catholicism inherent in the official ideology of the North and the anti-partitionism inherent in the official ideology of the South was that, in the North, when a Unionist politician said on a platform that Catholic influence in a particular area would have to be ended, it was confidently expected that arrangements would speedily be made for this to be done; in the South, on the other hand, when a representative of any of the major parties said on a platform that partition would have to be ended, it was generally understood that anyone attempting to make arrangements to achieve this would be locked up. For that reason the renunciation of ideology was easier in the South. Which is not to say that there was danger of anyone being hurt in the rush to renounce. Far from it, as the Minister of Health in the 1948‒51 coalition government was to discover.

In 1951 the Mother and Child Bill was introduced in Dail Eireann by Dr Noel Browne. The controversy surrounding it has since been dismissed as unimportant by the new mythologists of Irish history. But it was, and remains, very important indeed. The direct interventions of the Catholic hierarchy into Southern Irish politics in the twenties and thirties were almost invariably on matters of ‘faith and morals’. That the hierarchy could have its attitudes on faith and morals framed as statutes was offensive to Protestants—and to others besides. But now it went one further. Dr Browne’s Bill provided that ‘each Health Authority shall make arrangements for the safeguarding of the health of women in respect of motherhood and for their education in that respect’ and should give ‘attendance to the health of children up to sixteen years’. On 4 April 1951 the Irish hierarchy met and concluded that the idea that the state should look after its children was ‘opposed to Catholic social teaching’ (letter from Archbishop McQuaid to Taoiseach John Costello, dated 5 April 1951). At the entry of the hierarchy into the debate the right hands of the leaders of all the coalition parties twitched instinctively towards their forelocks. The leader of Dr Browne’s party, Sean McBride (the hero of Bodenstown, ’34), wrote to him instructing him to resign from the government. Dr Browne resigned from both the government and the Party. The Bill fell.

In the subsequent Dail debate government ministers took turns to express their willingness to do what they were told. Mr Costello, the Taoiseach (Fine Gael): ‘I, as a Catholic, obey my church authorities and will continue to do so’ (Dail Debates, CXV, 784). The Minister for Social Welfare, Mr Norton (Labour): ‘There will be no flouting of the authority of the Bishops in the matter of Catholic social or Catholic moral teaching’ (ibid., 951‒2). The Minister for External Affairs, Mr McBride (Clann na Poblachta): ‘Those of us in this house who are Catholics, all of us in the government who are Catholics, are, as such of course, bound to give obedience to the rulings of our church and of our hierarchy’ (ibid., 789). The Minister for Finance, Mr McGilligan (Fine Gael), told a party meeting that he personally was not the type of man to break the moral law and went on to make the interesting point that one had, on occasion, to rely on the hierarchy to interpret the moral law since one could not always be absolutely sure what the moral law was (Irish Times, 1 May 1951). Archbishop McQuaid wrote to the Taoiseach conveying the bishops’ ‘deep appreciation of the generous loyalty shown by you and your colleagues’.

The Unionist view, understandably, was different. The Ulster Unionist Council in a pamphlet, ‘Southern Ireland Church or State’, commented that ‘in any matter where the Roman Catholic Church decides to intervene the Eire Government must accept the Church’s policy and decision irrespective of all other consideration’ (quoted in Whyte, p. 232).

The coalition government fell (as a result of a dispute over milk prices) a few weeks after Dr Browne’s resignation, and a General Election brought Mr de Valera and Fianna Fail back to power. Fianna Fail once again showed that it was no less punctilious in its observance of hierarchic diktat than was its predecessor.

In 1952 a Bill to legalize adoption was passed. To ensure that nothing in the Bill was contrary to Catholic teaching the archbishop of Dublin was allowed to go over every clause while it was being drafted (Whyte, p. 276). In July 1952 a White Paper on Health was issued, foreshadowing legislation which was to include some, by no means all, the provisions of Dr Browne’s 1951 Bill. Still the hierarchy was not satisfied. A three-bishop committee was set up to deal with the matter. In late 1952 government ministers, including Mr de Valera and his Minister of Health, Dr Ryan, appeared before this committee on a number of occasions to discuss what changes the bishops thought necessary. The Bill, published in February 1953, contained one significant alteration from that outlined in the White Paper—the introduction of a means test. The bishops met on 13 April and decided that even this was not enough. On 17 April they sent a letter to all the national papers except the Irish Times (the Irish Times is owned by Protestants) setting out their objections. Before the letter appeared in the press Mr de Valera and Dr Ryan rushed to Drogheda in Co. Louth, where Cardinal D’Alton was presiding over a confirmation ceremony, and asked him to delay publication pending further consultation. On 21 April, at the residence of the President in Phoenix Park, Dublin, Mr de Valera and Dr Ryan met the hierarchy’s health committee. As a result of the meeting seven amendments were made to the Bill, which finally became law in October 53.

In its final form the Bill was an eviscerated version of Dr Browne’s proposals, attending to the health of children up to the age of, not 16 years, but 6 weeks. The importance of the issue, however, especially from the point of view of Protestant attitudes to the South, lies not in the extent of the changes made but in the manner of their being made. A minister had had to resign from a government because he refused to accept completely the bishops’ instructions as to what type of law should be enacted. The drafting procedure of the next government—the only alternative government available—involved, apparently, appearances by government ministers before episcopal committees and comic-opera dashes to confirmation ceremonies. It was, if not ‘Rome-rule’ in the literal sense of the phrase, then rule by courtesy of and within the limits set by the representatives of Rome. And there was almost no one, seemingly, in Southern politics who thought there was anything wrong with this state of affairs. The episode was, and is, constantly referred to on Unionist platforms.

During the fifties, through another change of government (a further coalition held office from 1954 to 1957) and as the economic situation went from bad to disastrous, there was little or no direct challenge to the social power of the church. In 1955 the Bishop of Cork, Dr Lucey, said bluntly that the bishops were ‘the final arbiters of right and wrong even in political matters’ (Irish Times, 13 April 1955). There was only one (anonymous) objection from an Irish politician in the form of a letter to the press (Whyte, p. 313).

Then there was the case of the communist footballers. In 1955 the Southern Irish football team had arranged a match against their Yugoslav counterparts to be played at Dalymount Park, Dublin, on Wednesday 19 October. On the fourteenth a representative of the Archbishop of Dublin phoned the Football Association, complained that the archbishop had not been consulted about the fixture, and asked whether it could not be cancelled, the objection being that the Yugoslav players were communists. The match went ahead and the Yugoslavs were welcomed by a front-bench member of Fianna Fail who happened to be President of the Football Association at that time. 21,000 people attended the game, their enjoyment marred only by the fact that the visitors won 4‒1. It has been argued by Dr Whyte and others that the fact that a politician welcomed the Yugoslav team and that the public did not boycott the match indicates that even in 1955 attitudes were changing.

But much more significant was the reaction of the government and of state institutions to the archbishop’s intervention. Radio Eireann decided not to broadcast a commentary on the game. The army band, which had been scheduled to entertain the spectators at half-time, was withdrawn by the Ministry of Defence. The President, who had accepted an invitation to attend the game, changed his mind. In other words one phone call from the archbishop’s palace was sufficient to stop the state broadcasting service, the army and the elected President of the land from going to a football match. (The refusal of the Football Association of Ireland to cancel the game at the eleventh hour may well have resulted, not from a willingness to flout the archbishop’s authority, but from genuine bewilderment at his request. Quite possibly it had not, until then, occurred to them that the arrangement of their fixture lists was a matter of faith and morals.)

In 1956 the hierarchy made it a mortal sin for Catholic youth to ‘frequent’ the traditionally Protestant university, Trinity College, a decree which pedants could and did interpret as threatening Dublin errand boys with eternal perdition.

It was not until Sean Lemass took over from Mr de Valera as Taoiseach and instituted the new economic policy that the Irish Parliament passed a law against the express wishes of the Catholic church authorities. This was the Intoxicating Liquor Bill, which legalized Sunday opening of pubs in rural areas. (They were already legally open in urban areas.) The Bill was not important in itself but, in Dr Whyte’s words, ‘in the history of Church-State relations it marks a significant landmark. For it provides the only example so far recorded of a recommendation from the hierarchy being simply rejected by an Irish Government.’

As the policy of economic nationalism was abandoned, the ideological superstructure associated with it began slowly to be adjusted. The next decade was to see more and more open demands for liberalization of the laws on censorship, contraception, divorce, and so on. At the same time, in coordination with the change in the attitude of the Nationalist Party in the North, the Republican rhetoric of the major Southern parties became much more muted. Many an ancient hatchet was buried beneath the flow of British investment.

Speaking for the Ancient Order of Hibernians on St Patrick’s Day 1963, Mr P. S. Donegan, TD, said: ‘The Stormont Government could be assured of the full cooperation of all true Hibernians towards the aim of peaceful co-existence’ (Derry Journal, 2 March 1963).

There were many harbingers of change. Dr Garret Fitzgerald mused in a Jesuit magazine that ‘One cannot resist the conclusion that in the 1930s and ’40s the Irish Church took a wrong turning…’ (Studies, winter 1964, p. 345). Declan Costello, son of the leader of the coalition which had ditched Dr Browne and his Bill and now Attorney-General in the new coalition, told a meeting in Dublin that: ‘In the name of Catholic social principles movements towards social reform had been criticized and whilst condemning the reformer the conditions which he sought to reform are condoned’ (quoted in Whyte, p. 34). In 1964 the Minister for Justice, Brian Lenihan, appointed a number of liberals (liberal by Southern Irish standards, that is) to the Appeals Board dealing with censorship of films. The following year 37 appeals were wholly or partly successful. (The 1964 figure was 6.) In 1966 a Bill was passed allowing the ban on outlawed books to lapse after twelve years unless specifically renewed. The banning rate—600 books a year in the fifties began to fall. The prohibition of contraceptives remained, but it became possible for newspapers to carry articles on family planning, even articles advocating it, without fear of legal reprisal. A plan outlined by the Ministry of Education in April 1967 to amalgamate Trinity College with the Catholic University College Dublin did not call forth denunciatory statements from the bishops.

Not all Bishops approved of such changes and there were frequent fundamentalist outbursts, notably from Dr Lucey of Cork and Dr Browne of Galway. (Dr Browne’s place in a footnote in history is ensured by his delightful remark during the Second Vatican Council debate on freedom of conscience that there is a great difference between freedom for a conscience which is right and freedom for a conscience which is wrong.) But the majority of the hierarchy adapted themselves to the changed situation, the more easily because the basis of their real power was in no way being undermined. Catholic power in Southern Ireland derives from the church’s iron grip on education. The expansion of manufacturing industry necessitated changes in the educational set-up. The technologists, managers and economists now needed could not be produced by a system which was designed to turn out a small number of civil servants and priests at the top of the scale, and boat loads of emigrants at the bottom. The state had to intervene with a series of measures to group tiny rural schools into larger units, expand and reform the curricula of post-primary schools and rationalize higher education (the proposed Trinity-UCO merger being one example). The fierce jealousy with which the church has traditionally defended its sole right to control education made it inevitable that at some points there would be conflict between it and the state, and indeed, there were a number of skirmishes between the church and the Department of Education. But at no time was there a set-piece political battle.

The majority of the hierarchy came quickly to understand that it was possible for the system to absorb the required reforms while they retained control, that the changes were necessary and that to oppose them blindly would inevitably result in a confrontation which they might not win. Cardinal Conway, whose sensitive political talents have recently been accorded wide recognition, said of educational reform in 1966: ‘The national aim of providing the best possible post-primary education is not merely welcome, but has the enthusiastic support of the church’ (Irish Times, 27 January 1966).

Thus, with much talk of a ‘new spirit’ being abroad in the land, Fianna Fail and the church moved together serenely towards the seventies, with only occasional jockeying for position between them. They were never really challenged. The differences in economic strategy which had divided Fine Gael from Fianna Fail in past decades no longer existed. There was general agreement between them about what ought to be done, and the civil war was now dismissed as a ‘purgative of blood’ (Irish Press, 23 June 1968).

The church retained an important political role in the sixties which was not drastically different from that which it played in the thirties. Relatively rapid economic change coupled with widespread continued impoverishment gave rise to a potentially disturbed political situation characterized by a rapid increase in strike action and the first stirrings of mass radicalization. In such circumstances the establishment has need of a powerful institution disseminating propaganda hostile to class differentiation. It needed bishops to tell the faithful that ‘no matter what type of society you have there will always be an upper class’ (Bishop of Achony, Irish Times, 1 September 1970). It needed professors of ethics at Maynooth College to explain that ‘strikes are a breakdown of humanity, a kind of disintegration, a descent into the sub-human’ (Professor Father O’Donnell, ‘Christus Rex’, December 1967). It needed pastoral letters plugging peace on the factory floor. Ideally the more enlightened members of the Southern establishment in the sixties—for example Garret Fitzgerald, Declan Costello, Donagh O’Malley—would have preferred more quickly to discard antiquated aspects of Catholic social philosophy. But in the situation which obtained that would have added to the dangers already apparent. They still needed the church. It is probably for that reason, rather than intellectual inertia, that ideological change, while proceeding, lagged well behind economic innovation.

In the North the Unionists moved with more trepidation. But in one respect at least the establishment in each part of the country was singularly, and similarly, blessed—neither found any determined challengers from the left. Indeed the most remarkable thing about Irish politics in the sixties is not that at the end of the decade the existing structures began visibly to weaken, but that they had such a relatively trouble-free passage until then. By now the Republicans were, by general consent, irrelevant. It was from the labour movement that any challenge to the twin establishments would have to come.

In the North, the Northern Ireland Labour Party, having retained in 1962 the four seats won in the 1958 General Election from the Unionists, devoted itself to what its leaders used to call ‘consolidating our position’. Basically, this meant advancing cautiously, taking due care not to alienate any pockets of potential support. Fairly exhaustive research reveals no single occasion when the Party mounted a concerted attack on the Unionists. The Party frequently congratulated itself on the fact that ‘the abilities of our four MPs as parliamentary strategists are known’ (Erskine Holmes in Impact, March 1965, p. 32). In 1963 the Party almost tore itself apart over the bizarre issue of whether children’s play parks ought to be open on Sundays.

In the Stormont General Election campaign of November 1965 one of the parliamentary strategists demonstrated his ability and the extent of the Party’s willingness to confront Orange ideology by marching through the constituency at the head of a band playing Orange songs. His intention was to show Protestant electors that he was not ‘soft’ on the border. The Protestant electors reacted by throwing him out, reasoning, perhaps, that if they had to choose between two Unionists they might as well opt for the real one. The Party also lost the Victoria seat to the former disc-jockey and future cabinet minister Roy Bradford, reducing its parliamentary strength to two. Around the same time the Party supported, and Party members served on, a government-sponsored ‘Economic Council’. (Members of the Communist Party also participated.)

The fact was that in the sixties the Labour leadership had no alternative to offer to the Unionist strategy for halting the decline in the economy. They supported it. On the political level Labour thus had very little to attack the Unionists about.

Labour in the South was a little more active. In November 1963 a group around Noel Browne, the National Progressive Democrats, dissolved into the Party. Increased urbanization and a growing militancy on the part of workers, resulting in part from the reduction in pressure to emigrate, gave the Party a firmer urban base. (In the mid-sixties Southern Ireland had the highest strike record in the world.) The second largest union in the state, the Workers’ Union of Ireland, affiliated in 1964, and the largest union, the Irish Transport and General, followed in 1967. Membership increased rapidly, ‘paper’ branches came to life, and commentators wrote of ‘a growing sense of purpose and urgency’ (Rory Quinn in Impact, 1966, p. 21). In the 1965 General Election the Party increased its number of seats from 13 to 22, its best performance since 1927. Trade-union militants, disillusioned Republicans and ‘left-wing’ academics joined in impressive numbers. The Party voted to reinstate in its constitution a commitment to strive for a ‘workers’ Republic’ and rejected the idea of ever again forming a coalition government with Fine Gael. The Party’s self-confidence was expressed by Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien, now Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in the coalition government with Fine Gael, at the 1968 Conference: ‘No coalition with Fine Gael! No coalition with Fianna Fail! No support for a Fianna Fail or Fine Gael minority government!’

Yet in a sense none of these developments was of Labour’s own making. It was thrust forward, almost despite itself, by developments over which it had no control. It, after all, had had little to do with the growth of the urban working class or of its militancy. That it was not going to strike out decisively to challenge the political set-up was demonstrated by its failure to enter a candidate against Mr de Valera and Mr O’Higgins of Fine Gael in the Presidential Election of June 1966. Nor, at any cost, did it intend to fight against the ideological hegemony of the Catholic church. Indeed it still contained within it parliamentarians such as Mr Coughlan of Limerick and Mr Murphy of Co. Kerry who believed that, if anything, the church was not a powerful enough force in the land. After the retirement of Mr Norton in March 1960 the Party was led by Mr Brendan Corish, whose own attitude to the Church in politics had been expressed some years previously: ‘I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first…If the hierarchy gives me any direction with regard to Catholic social teaching or Catholic moral teaching, I accept without qualifications and in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy’ (Dail Debates, 1953, Vol. 138).

Mr Corish’s expressions of subservience to the church, like everybody else’s, became progressively less crude during the sixties. But there was never any doubt that he was a sound man, and Labour a sound Party.

11

Freedom from any threat of disruption from the left smoothed the way for the ascendant classes, North and South, finally to settle their differences.

The shifting set of relationships between them, and between the parties and interest groups associated with them, ought in the end to have produced a situation of which the Northern Catholics would be immediate beneficiaries. Discrimination ought to have ended. ‘Normal’ democracy ought to have been instituted. And these benefits ought to have accrued most substantially to Catholics in the western part of Northern Ireland. Not only was it economically the worst-off part of the state, but the Catholics’ majority position therein had required a more obtrusive presence and a more ingenious operation of the Orange machine than was needed elsewhere. If Protestant hegemony was to end and the Northern Catholics’ situation thus to improve, it was in places like Derry that the improvement would most sharply be experienced, and it was there, as a result, that it was most eagerly anticipated.

In 1951 Birmingham Sound Reproducers, the family firm of Dr Robert McDonald, received 175,000 square feet of free factory to set up a branch in Derry. BSR was the sixty-eighth business to be attracted to Northern Ireland by the post-war Development Acts, but the first to come to Derry, despite the fact that we had the biggest unemployment problem in the land. Derry’s second factory arrived in 1953, the third in 1960.

The BSR factory was in the Bogside, and most of the men who worked there—over a thousand at the height of the operation—were men from our area. In 1957 an industrial estate was opened at Maydown, four miles outside the city. In 1900 Du Pont (UK) Ltd began production of neoprene on the estate. Du Pont was followed by the British Oxygen Company and Molins Machines Ltd. By 1965 £20m. had been invested in Maydown and an industrial training centre established on the site. The new industries did not end unemployment; the rate never dipped below 10 per cent. But those who did get work in the new plants did not experience the pinpricking humiliations and the barriers to promotion which would have attended work in the ‘traditional’ industries.

By March 1966 there were seven new factories in the Derry district. But smaller Protestant towns to the east, all of whose unemployment figures were derisory by Derry standards, had done better. Coleraine had nine, Bangor ten and Lurgan thirteen post-war projects. It was the job of Stormont ministers and their civil servants to process applications from manufacturers for factory facilities and to help direct investment to particular areas. Derry being disadvantaged anyway by its geographic position, Stormont would have had to intervene decisively to offset the inequality. Obviously that was not happening. The unemployment figures were a little better, certainly, and some people in the Bogside were better-off than they could have hoped to be in the past; but it was still not fair.

In the early sixties the Stormont government had commissioned a series of reports on future development to ensure that the modification of the economy proceeded in orderly fashion. When the reports began to appear after 1964 it was clear that, taken together, their effect would not be to redress the imbalance between the western and eastern parts of the state but actually to increase it. Almost certainly it was no part of the authors’ conscious intention to discriminate against Catholic areas; what they had done was to accept, codify and make recommendations for the efficient organization of tendencies already inherent in the economy. Ministers’ and civil servants’ ready acceptance of the reports may have been based as much on aversion to direct state intervention against the free flow of capital as on determination to perpetuate Catholic privation. But no matter. What gradually came through to the Bogside was that Catholic Derry was being done down again.

In 1964 the Benson Report on the railways recommended the closure of the city’s two rail links with Belfast by September 1966. Once there had been four rail termini in the city. Now there was to be none. Protest from Derry and from other towns along the line forced the government to retain the Midland line through Coleraine and Ballymena temporarily at least. But the Great Northern, through Strabane and Omagh, closed down.

Around the same time the Matthew Plan selected the Lurgan-Portadown area in Co. Armagh as the major centre for new urban development. A new city of 100,000 people—‘Craigavon’—was to be built, thus creating another powerful economic magnet pulling investment away from the west and towards the Lagan Valley.

The Lockwood Committee on Higher Education in Northern Ireland recommended the building of a second university—in Coleraine. Not only was Derry the second largest city in Northern Ireland, it already had, in Magee University College, the nucleus of a new university. There were protest meetings and a car-cavalcade to Stormont, but the plan went ahead. Inch by inch Derry was being pushed beyond the pale, while politicians grew passionate about the new era which was at hand.

Suspicion that the Orange machine was controlling events was reinforced—proven absolutely as far as the Bogside was concerned—when it was revealed later that a seven-man deputation from the local Unionist hierarchy had travelled to Belfast to plead that the new university be established anywhere but Derry.

At the beginning of 1967 the unemployment problem suddenly became worse. Under the terms of the Development Acts, when BSR set up shop in 1951 it had been given seven years to establish itself, during which it was substantially free from tax and rate commitments. At the end of seven years Dr McDonald closed the factory. He then reopened it as ‘Monarch Electric Ltd’. Monarch Electric began its period of financial support. Just before Christmas 1966 half the workers were paid off because of ‘trading difficulties’. It was generally believed that the difficulties were temporary. One morning in January 1967 the remaining workers were told not to come back in the afternoon. Monarch Electric was closed. There were some who wanted to smash the machinery up, but calmer councils and full-time officialdom prevailed.

In March 1966 the unemployment figure in Derry had been 10.1 per cent, the lowest since the war. Comparative figures for March 1967 were:

Great Britain 2.6%

North of England 3.9%

Scotland 4.1%

Wales 4.2%

Northern Ireland 8.1%

Derry City 20.1%

Normality once again.

And the housing situation was getting no better. The Corporation had run out of land in the Catholic South Ward. The Unionists could not afford to house Catholics in any other ward. So they stopped building houses. In 1967 Derry Corporation built no houses at all. In the same year it refused to extend the city boundary to take in new building land lest this disrupt the delicately-drawn ward boundaries. And it refused a local housing association permission to build an estate in the North Ward in case this upset the sectarian arithmetic. Government planning consultants estimated that in 1967 there were five thousand houses in Derry ‘in one way or another sub-standard’—that is, two fifths of the dwellings of the city.

To change this we would have had to change the Corporation. But that was impossible. The 1966 revision of electoral rolls showed that there were 20,102 Catholic voters and 10,274 Protestant voters in the city. At the May 1967 Municipal Election there were eight Nationalists and twelve Unionists returned.

There was still not a single Catholic working in Derry Guildhall. The new Corporation proceeded to elect its committees and sub-committees, on each of which there was, again, a Unionist majority. Four Unionists and two Nationalists were elected to the Derry Port and Sanitary Board. The Derry Port and Sanitary Board had not met for fifteen years. If the ‘new spirit’ which was alleged to be abroad meant anything it would have been safe enough, surely, to toss that one to the Nationalists. But: ‘We are the frontline Unionists’ proclaimed Councillor Albert Anderson.

Thus, stalemate. Post-war factors had not enabled the Bogside to break down local Orange power. What they had done was to make the Bogside more articulate and self-confident, more sensitive to the existence of discrimination and less willing to accept it any longer. Captain O’Neill could mince around and drawl about democracy and shake nuns’ hands to his heart’s content; and so what?

St Columb’s made contact with its local Protestant equivalent, Foyle College, by inviting the President of the Foyle College Old Boys’ association to the annual dinner of the St Columb’s Past Pupils’ Union. The Mayor of Belfast visited the Mayor of Galway and was accorded ‘a warm reception’. Ulsterbus tours were extended into the Republic. Captain O’Neill and Mr Faulkner were invited to the Swilly (Co. Donegal) Sea Angling Club’s annual festival. Etc.

Those were the ‘changes’. As far as we could see, those were all. By the time Captain O’Neill’s never-ending non-sectarian gestures had led many Protestants to regard him as a potential traitor he was seen in the Bogside as a proven trickster. At the beginning of 1968 Mr McAteer issued a New Year message to his constituents. ‘The sky’, he began, ‘is still heavily shadowed by perplexities…’ And in McClenaghan’s house at the bottom of Wellington Street Dermie was saying that we would have to get the people out on the bloody street.