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August 12 - October 22, 2022
In the wake of the election Faulkner’s group met at Stormont and agreed to oppose a Council of Ireland unless the Republic repealed the claims in Articles 2 and 3 of its constitution to Northern Ireland.
‘the factual position of Northern Ireland is that it is within the United Kingdom and my government accepts this as a fact’.
On 3 April Austin Currie made himself unpopular with a vast swathe of SDLP support by announcing that there was to be no amnesty for those still on the rent and rates strike which he had been instrumental in calling in the first place. He also announced an increase in the amount which was to be deducted from the strikers’ social welfare benefits and introduced a 25p-a-week collection charge by way of repayment.
it was recommending that people whom the British wished to try for offences in the North could be tried in the Republic by ‘extraterritorial courts’
It called for an immediate scrapping of the executive and for an immediate election. The conference also wanted a return of security powers to whatever northern parliament would emerge from that election, and more spending on the UDR and RUC.
Another Loyalist organisation, the Ulster Army Council, which was really a front grouping for Loyalist paramilitaries, backed the UUUC.
The strikers had a number of assets on their side. Apart from their own resolution, organisation and their concentration of influence in the vital electricity sector, they were confronted by a marked lack of resolution on the part of the authorities.
Later, as the years rolled by, it would emerge that there was considerable evidence to suggest that British intelligence agencies, particularly MI5, also supported the Loyalists, to further their own agenda
At the time, however, this was not only unknown but unthinkable.
As the strike gathered momentum the UUUC leaders threw their weight behind it.
A pan-Unionist front was set up. A co-ordinating committee included not only Paisley, Craig and West, and leaders of the UUC, but representatives of no fewer than seven Loyalist paramilitary groups.
In fact the worst single day of the entire twenty-five years occurred in the Republic on 17 May. No-warning car bombs went off in Dublin and in Monaghan, killing thirty-three people and wounding hundreds more.
However, the troops showed no signs of moving against the strikers. Soldiers and RUC patrols were observed talking to masked UDA men at barricades.
However, three days later the executive announced that the Council of Ireland was to be watered down somewhat.
For the UWC and the UUUC it was too little and too late. They rejected the proffered compromise and continued with the stoppage.
All-out war seemed a distinct possibility. People had no light or heat in their homes.
deliberate and calculated attempt to use every undemocratic and unparliamentary means for the purpose of bringing down the whole constitution of Northern Ireland, so as to set up a sectarian and undemocratic state, from which one third of the people would be excluded.
The attempt, he said, was being made by ‘thugs and bullies’.
They see property destroyed by evil violence and are asked to pick up the bill for rebuilding it.
Yet people who benefit from this now viciously defy Westminster, purporting to act as though they were an elected government, spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods. Who do these people think they are?8
The effect of the speech was to stiffen Loyalist resolution.
The party threatened to resign on 27 May if troops were not sent in. The troops did move on that day and some twenty-seven petrol stations were occupied. These supplied petrol to essential services. But the Loyalists threatened that if the army was used at the power stations they would be closed down completely, as would water and sewerage plants.
But Faulkner and his supporters gave in. After Rees still refused to talk to the UWC they resigned on 28 May, the same day as the Department of the Environment statement was issued. The UWC called off the stoppage the next day and once more the word ‘prorogued’ was heard in the Six Counties.
After four months the most important constitutional experiment to take place in Northern Ireland since the setting-up of the state had ended in ignominy.
The generally met-with view in Nationalist circles is that the Sunningdale experiment collapsed simply because of Loyalist intransigence and the refusal of the British to see that the will of Parliament was maintained through the use of their army.
‘For the first time the army decided that it was right and that it knew best and that politicians had better toe the line.’
The effects of the two elections, one in London, one in Dublin; the differing interpretations placed on the meaning of the Council of Ireland by both the SDLP and the Faulknerite Unionists; the impact of the Boland case; the activities of some people within the BBC in Northern Ireland; the weakness of Rees and Wilson’s own rather mysterious policy throughout: all of these had some bearing on the outcome.
The army chief of staff of the period, H. E. M. L. Garrett, told the conference that had the army gone in early and broken down the barricades, ‘people would have said we had exacerbated the situation, that we had gone in too early with too much and had made the situation far worse’.
and there were members of the security forces standing about doing nothing about it.
Taken in conjunction with Garrett’s frank admission that the army saw itself in a counterterrorism role, not as strike-breakers, that is a pretty damning indictment. In plain language, ‘counterterrorism’ decoded means ‘taking on the Catholics only’.
I can only say that it seems an extraordinary dereliction of duty of a government taking over direct rule in Northern Ireland to leave the power stations in the hands of extremists and do nothing about it.
FitzGerald told the conference that: ‘The BBC was very much in support of the strike,
‘They were running basically a rebel radio station. Day after day propaganda was being turned out and we [Dublin] found that very odd also.’
but it is significant that no one at the conference either had anything to say in favour of the BBC or attempted to dispute the fact that there was bias in its broadcasts at the time of the strike.
At the time Donoughoe, who provided papers to the review body on issues such as dominion status, was appalled at the amount of discussion on Ireland which went on without any consideration of the Republic. When he went to the Foreign Office about this he found that David Owen was particularly helpful, and planning took place along the lines of involving the Republic, Europe and the United States in the situation. This type of approach, which presaged what actually occurred in the 1993–4 period preceding the IRA ceasefire, was of course the way forward and had it been followed up a great deal
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But the policy that the Six County area was ‘domestic to the UK’, and hence heavily subject to the influence of the Tory backbenches (to say nothing of a reluctant officer and gentleman class in the army) and that of the Ulster Unionists, continued to predominate, with disastrous results.
General Garrett argued convincingly that if the political will and desire had been made clear, ‘the MOD would have provided the extra troops and the army would have acted in the way that people are saying it should have acted’.
For me that was the biggest development in Irish politics, certainly in Northern Irish politics, that had happened within my lifetime. I never believed that you would ever have a power sharing executive. As far as I was concerned this was it.
There was thus an irony at the heart of the debate about Sunningdale. The two leaders of the executive who were supposed to be upholding the Council of Ireland idea – Faulkner, a Unionist, and Fitt, nominally a Nationalist, but certainly the leader of a Catholic SDLP party – had grave reservations about the centrepiece arrangement – the Council of Ireland itself.
it was not reluctance on either Fitt or Faulkner’s part to process the Council of Ireland which created the most outrage; it was the use Ian Paisley was able to make out of the Kevin Boland case.
Bradford says that he found on the doorsteps that the pro arguments for the Council of Ireland had turned to ashes while the contra ones had all been strengthened, and he subsequently lost his seat.
By that time, he said, it appeared likely that sewage would start flooding parts of east Belfast and the Falls and that there would be dangers to hospitals and the life and health of the province generally if the more gloomy engineers’ predictions were borne out.
So far as I am aware, even at the height of the arms crisis, no known leader of a paramilitary organisation was able to visit a minister of the Republic openly.
I have never found any affection for Unionists in decision-taking London. There is a vague strength of feeling for the idea of the Union, but the Unionists themselves are, I found, disliked generally by both Labour and Tories.
Some readers may feel I have laboured the point about Faulkner’s efforts. But I feel that it is worth making, if for no other reason than that at the time of writing no one has yet come forward in the ranks of Unionism to adopt the role of the South African leader of the former white supremacists.
CONSTITUTIONALLY SPEAKING, the period 1974–94 was largely one of activity without movement.
These included the rise of Sinn Fein; a growth in Loyalist paramilitary violence to a point where it eventually exceeded that of the IRA; some very ‘dirty tricks’, carried out by the British and the various Irish paramilitaries in a very dirty war; and some often bewilderingly rapid Irish governmental changes.
The answer in a nutshell was that it helped to take the bare look off things in Washington, where the Irish-Americans had done something to ensure that Sunningdale did not die unnoticed.
The Unionists wanted the old Stormont back; the SDLP wanted power-sharing.
William Craig emerged as an unlikely peacemaker between the two wings, with a suggestion that a voluntary coalition should be formed along the lines of Westminster’s wartime coalition government. This had little effect other than to split his own Vanguard movement.
