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August 12 - October 22, 2022
‘Most members of Parliament knew less about it than we knew about our distant colonies on the far side of the earth.’
the first riots and car burnings of the era had occurred in Belfast, in 1964, and the re-created UVF had been responsible for sectarian murders in 1966.
Election literature of the period spoke of the Labour Party being more of a threat to ‘Ulster’ than the IRA, the communists, or all the parties in the Republic put together.
The growth of a broad-based Labour movement, embodying a commitment to civil rights and, remarkably, embracing both Catholic and Protestant, came to an abrupt stop with a swing to the Unionists of some 7 per cent.
Nevertheless, O’Neill was widely regarded as a reformer.
while O’Neill was no seminal intellect, he was an open, fair-minded man who, within the limits of his conditioning, genuinely sought to move his state forward.
any drift of Protestants to more exotic shores such as the NILP could speedily be checked, as we have seen, by a rattle on the Orange drum.
‘I have always said that I am an Orangeman first and politician afterwards, all I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant State.’16
With very few exceptions, Unionist local government representatives, such as county councillors, were also members of the Order, which had the right to nominate some 130 members to the Ulster Unionist Council.
So long as the Crown, or Parliament, did as one wished then one was unswervingly loyal. If not, one reserved the right to take action as one saw fit in defence of the state or constitution.
The concept of being British did and does not imply a fidelity to British standards of parity of esteem, respect for Parliament or civil and religious liberties.
From an enlightened wing of Unionism there had come a proposal that Catholics should be admitted to the Unionist Party. It was even suggested that some day they might stand for Parliament.18 The Orange Order was outraged.
This liberty, as we know it, is the liberty of the Protestant religion, fought for and given to us by King William who at the time secured the Protestant succession to the Throne and gave us our watchword: The Protestant religion and liberties of the nation I will maintain.
that because Roman Catholics were disloyal they should not be employed.
‘Weren’t you the foolish man. That pound did a lot more than give you the clear run. Two and six went to the lads on the patrol, two and six went to the sergeant, five bob went to the DI and ten shillings went to the Lord.’
Loyalty to the half-crown, rather than the Crown, has long been a Nationalist taunt hurled at Unionists.
This left O’Neill, who was Minister for Finance and who, it is alleged, Brookeborough reckoned would inevitably make a mess of things and be forced into resignation, thereby perhaps giving John his opportunity.
Secondly, O’Neill came to the premiership not only with no following amongst the working-class and evangelical elements within the party, but with the undying enmity of Brian Faulkner.
Unionism was not about reform. It was, and is, about control.
a community that had then been abandoned or misled by the natural leaders of society…
if they feel their leaders are taking them down a road they do not wish to go or are in any way abandoning them then they are prepared to act themselves… the banding together element has always been present within rural Ulster at times of unrest…
O’Neill’s career epitomised the twilight of the Big House, as the homes which formed the centrepieces of the great Anglo-Irish estates were known.
Prior to O’Neill’s taking over, unemployment had risen at a steady rate which traditional
In 1963 unemployment was running at 9.5 per cent of the workforce (45, 000).
In the deep heart of militant loyalism, the Belfast shipyards, it was nearer to 60 per cent.
it should also be noted that the quality of the housing which the captains and the majors – who of course lived in the Big Houses – had made available to the ‘other ranks’ was a further source of discontent, and one which bore heavily on Protestants. Some 32 per cent of all the houses in the statelet either had no piped water or no flush toilets. The rate of house building, some 6, 000 a year, was woefully inadequate either to deal with new demand or improve existing conditions.
The Unionist Party should make it quite clear that the Loyalists have the first choice of jobs.
He set out to introduce such modern theories as economic planning, and co-operation with trade unions, to the Six Counties, and achieved a measure of success.
Following the Wilsonian prescription really meant no more than attracting multinationals to the Six Counties, with the consequential drawback of profit repatriation elsewhere. However, while they led to the successes outlined above, they also led O’Neill to espouse policy initiatives involving both Northern Ireland and the Republic which would eventually bring him down.
His drive for new outside investment meant that the economic and political dominance of the old Unionist industrialists diminished, albeit very slightly.
The workers found that the tradition of the discreet word in Orange or Freemason lodge was not given its customary due by young personnel managers in Courtauld’s or Du Pont. The latter were not greatly concerned whether fingers were Catholic or Protestant. All they asked was that they be deft.
the strengthening of the Protestant east as against the Catholic west of the province.
The triangle formed by the eastern countries Antrim (which contains Belfast), Armagh and Down contained the bulk of the rest of the Six Counties’ industry and population.
In the Republic of Ireland to the south there was, and is, a constant complaint against the imbalance of the power and wealth of Dublin and its environs in the east compared with that of the west. But in the Republic no one thought the imbalance was based on religious grounds; everyone believed the problem to be political and economic.
The severance left most of the county, and those of Fermanagh and Tyrone, with no railways. The strongly Catholic Newry was also affected by a rail closure and in addition Derry suffered the loss of a shipping link with Glasgow.
Its recommendation, Coleraine, in the east, was accepted by the Government. Derry, which had hoped to be the beneficiary of any extension of university facilities, was outraged.
The resultant protest movement was unprecedented. The same sort of liberal Unionist sentiment which had prompted the suggestion that Catholics be admitted to the party surfaced and made common cause with the Catholics of Derry and with the opposition parties at Stormont.
On 18 February 1965 the city of Derry virtually closed down; shops, schools, businesses of all kinds. A motorised cavalcade containing 1, 500 vehicles drove the ninety miles to Stormont to protest the Coleraine decision.
It was to no avail. The Government carried the proposal by a majority of 32–20. This, though substantial, was one of the smallest in the history of the state.
More educated Catholics were the last thing the Unionist hierarchy wished to see coming out of Derry.
It was a meeting of seismic importance in Irish terms, the first time in the history of the two states that there had been a prime ministerial meeting.
The Republic, which, unlike the Six Counties, had no subsidies, had almost collapsed economically by the time he did so in 1959.
As the fifties drew to a close, income in the Republic overall was only some 55 per cent of that in the UK.
But as it was nearer 65 per cent in the eastern province of Leinster where Dublin is situated, the sort of imbalances we have seen in the Six Counties were if anything worse in the impoverished western province of Connacht.
who understood clearly the co-relation between the growth, or demise, of democracy and economic prosperity.
as Taoiseach he cut through the old dogmas of protection, tariffs, self-sufficiency and sloganising about the fourth lost green field which had passed for policy.
As a new generation took over, new ideas began to permeate the Catholic Republic from a variety of sources: the liberalising influence of Pope John XXIII and his Vatican Council; the coming of television; increased travel; and the relaxation of literary and cinema censorship.
The visits had the effect of both adding to the forces ranging against O’Neill, and bringing to centre stage in the swelling northern drama an actor who had hitherto played relatively minor roles: Ian Kyle Paisley.
He seemed an aberration from the Thirty Years War who had somehow survived in a theological version of Plato’s cave, only to appear, appalling and bawling, into the light of an ecumenical setting in which he was totally miscast.
He stated that: ‘If the Crown in Parliament decreed to put Ulster into a United Ireland, we would be disloyal to her Majesty if we did not resist such a surrender to her enemies.’35 His anti-Catholicism was the purest and most virulent available: ‘Through Popery the Devil has shut up the way to our inheritance. Priestcraft, superstition and papalism with all their attendant voices of murder, theft, immorality, lust and incest blocked the way to the land of gospel liberty.’
