Although Brooke gave no strategic ground to the government's critics, he did make a number of tactical concessions. British schemes were modified for local conditions. The legislation to create a new public housing body, the Northern Ireland Housing Trust, bitterly attacked at the Ulster Unionist Council in 1946, departed from the British pattern by providing subsidies for private builders.16 A Statistics of Trade Bill, similar to one introduced in the rest of the UK to provide government with a range of information from the private sector, including value and ownership of fixed capital, created waves of apoplexy in chambers of commerce and Unionist associations and was watered down.17 Fears of ‘Eirean infiltration’ were assuaged by persuading the British government to accept the replacement of the wartime system of residence permits with a new Safeguarding of Employment Act in 1947. This demanded that anyone who was not born in Northern Ireland or could not fulfil stringent residency requirements had to obtain a work permit from the Ministry of Labour. There was also a residency requirement of five years for eligibility for welfare benefits, something not required in the rest of the UK. The central concerns of the unionists in border areas had been addressed in Stormont's rejection of the British Local Government Franchise Act, which extended the franchise to all citizens over twenty-one. Disenfranchisement of many working-class Protestants was considered a small price to be paid if ruling ‘loyal’ minorities were to be defended against the nationalist majorities. The pressures from sections of unionism most prone to see the post-war world as full of threat damaged Brooke's limited attempts to improve relations with the minority community.
Brookeborough's Regime and Catholics
The conventional wisdom about Sir Basil Brooke's two decades in power is that a major opportunity for change was missed. Sabine Wichert expresses it well: ‘For the first time Unionism was in a position to use the chances of post-war changes to improve life in the province substantially and thereby, however indirectly, make a positive case for Stormont rule.’18 Instead, under the leadership of a rigid and sectarian Prime Minister, it was a period of social and economic change but political stagnation. More recently released archival material shows a more complex picture. It is reflected in a subtle analysis of a major conflict within Unionism in the early 1950s made by an Irish government official:
There is a definite cleavage of opinion between those like Lord Brookeborough and Mr Brian Maginess who believe that the best way of preserving partition… is to pursue ‘moderate’ policies designed to pacify the minority and impress opinion abroad, and those Unionists like Mr Minford, Mr Norman Porter and Mr Harry Midgley who consider that the only sure course lies in an uncompromising adherence to Orange and Protestant principles.19
The analysis had been prompted by the poor performance of the Unionist Party in the 1953 Stormont election: it had lost two seats and been attacked by the Independent Unionists, who had accused the Prime Minister of appeasing Catholics and nationalists. This backlash was a response to an attempt by the Prime Minister, supported by the more liberal elements in his cabinet, to tone down the more stridently sectarian aspects that the Stormont regime had acquired in the 1930s and make a direct appeal to the minority to accept partition for the economic and social benefits it delivered.
The motivation behind this shift was a dual one. The Prime Minister believed that changed national and international circumstances demanded a more emollient public face from Ulster Unionism. As Brookeborough's nationalist critics were aware, not only would future British governments have more leverage with Stormont because of the increased financial dependence attendant on integration into the welfare state, but the new US-dominated ‘Free World’ was ideologically committed to principles of democracy and freedom from discrimination that could easily be integrated into the traditional anti-partitionist repertoire. After 1945 Brooke's diaries reflect his concern to educate an often recalcitrant party in the new realities: ‘I told them that the Convention on Human Rights compelled us to be fair and I insisted that I was not going to be responsible for discrimination.’20 Much had changed from the days when he had boasted of not having a Catholic about the place.
There was more to this than concern with the province's image in the rest of the UK. Like his few liberal colleagues, he appears to have accepted that a combination of circumstances made a more inclusive form of unionism a possibility. The modernizers believed that the benefits of the welfare state had encouraged a pragmatic acceptance within the Catholic community that partition, now a quarter of a century old, was the inescapable framework within which they must work out their future. Such pragmatism was increasingly encouraged by the travails of the southern economy. Brian Maginess, the Minister of Home Affairs and the most optimistic interpreter of post-war trends, told the Prime Minister that ‘the number of Roman Catholics who are gradually coming to have faith in us, our permanent constitutional position and our fair administration, would appear to be increasing considerably.’21 Brooke publicly echoed the analysis, proclaiming during the 1951 general election campaign that ‘even in Nationalist areas electors are beginning to realise that life in British Ulster is to be preferred to existence in a Gaelic republic.’22
The sharp disparity between social conditions North and South created by Northern Ireland's integration into the British welfare state was undeniable, and while Unionists made much of it in their propaganda war with Dublin, there was a genuine, if myopic, hope that such material advantages would lessen Catholic alienation from the state. At the first post-war Orange Order celebrations Brooke referred to the new system of family allowances as one indication of the government's ‘progressive policy’, which he claimed was aimed at benefiting ‘all sections of the community’.23 From family allowances, where five shillings a week was provided for each child after the first, in comparison to two shillings and sixpence for each child after the first two in the South, to unemployment benefit, where a single man got twenty-four shillings in the North and fifteen shillings in the South and a married couple forty shillings in the North and twenty-two shillings in the South, and with equally significant differences in sickness benefits and pensions, the welfare advantages of northern citizenship were clear.24 Within three years of the end of the war the North was also enjoying a comprehensive health service, free at the point of delivery, which, as F.S.L. Lyons pointed out, was so much better than what existed in the South that little comparison was possible.25 The Education Act of 1947 began the process of developing mass secondary education in the province, which resulted in the number of secondary school students increasing from less than 20,000 in 1945 to 104,000 by the time Brookeborough resigned.26 It increased the capital grants for voluntary (i.e., Catholic) schools from 50 per cent to 65 per cent. It was complemented by the provision of grants for university students, which contributed to a more than doubling of the number of students at Queen's University in the twenty years after 1945.27
Housing was another area where there was substantial progress. According to a government survey carried out in 1943, 100,000 of the province's houses, almost a third, had to be replaced rapidly and, in order to deal fully with substandard and overcrowded dwellings, another 100,000 new houses would be needed.28 The Housing Act of 1945 provided for the first time for a large expansion of subsidized local authority housing, breaking with the pre-war policies that had relied on private enterprise for the bulk of new housing. Aware of the obstacles that a combination of sectarianism and a concern for minimizing rate bills might have on a housing drive based solely on local authorities, the government had created the Northern Ireland Housing Trust with powers to clear slums and build and let houses throughout Northern Ireland. There was a substantial increase in the provision of housing after 1945: by 1961, 95,326 new houses had been built, compared with 50,000 in the whole inter-war period.29 More than half, 56,000, were provided by either local authorities or the Housing Trust. From the outset, to the chagrin of many Unionist councillors, Housing Trust allocations were based on a points system and the
system was free of allegations of discriminatory intent. Even in the much more contentious area of local authority housing, the record of a small number of Unionist-controlled authorities west of the River Bann has, because of their role in sparking the civil rights movement in the 1960s, been allowed to convey an overly black picture of the housing situation in the post-war period. Councils such as those of Dungannon, Omagh and Armagh, which built few houses for Catholics, were not typical. Recent academic studies of the question have tended to emphasize that there were no complaints against the majority of local authorities, and the veteran Nationalist MP, Cahir Healy, actually praised local authorities in Belfast, Antrim and Down for their fairness in allocating houses.30 On the eve of the dissolution of the Stormont parliament, Catholics, who comprised 26 per cent of households in Northern Ireland, occupied 31 per cent of local authority households.31 However, any improvements in the provision of public housing, and in access to such housing by Catholics, have to be set against the widespread charges of discrimination that dominated local government politics. These flowed from two features of Northern Ireland's system of local government. The first was that in twelve of the seventy-three local authorities, including the city of Derry and the county councils of Fermanagh and Tyrone, the Unionist Party controlled the councils, despite Catholics being a majority of the population. This was brought about by electoral gerrymandering, which had been a grievance since the local government boundaries were redrawn in the early 1920s. The second related to the local government franchise. This emerged as a major political issue after the 1945 Labour government abolished the householder franchise in the rest of the UK, while the Unionists retained it in Northern Ireland. The business vote, which allowed owners of business premises more than one vote in local elections, was also retained in Northern Ireland. Although this was fundamentally a piece of class discrimination – the largest group disenfranchised were working-class Protestants – it had clear sectarian implications, given that Catholics were generally less prosperous than Protestants. The franchise issue would eventually destroy all attempts to modernize and ameliorate the regime.
Even in the most contentious area of policing and public order there were signs of an attempt to soften the harder edges of the regime. Brian Maginess began to withdraw many of the regulations made under the Special Powers Act and in 1950 came to cabinet with a proposal to repeal the Act in its entirety.32 Both he and Brooke supported the policy of the Inspector-General of the RUC that, unless there was a substantial threat to public order, nationalist parades should not be interfered with. Worse from the point of view of more traditionalist unionists, Maginess supported the police when they put limits on Orange parades, most dramatically in his ban of an Orange march along the predominantly nationalist Longstone Road in County Down in 1952.33
The universalistic implications of British welfarism and the more liberal and inclusive type of unionism associated with it brought an inevitable reaction. For many unionists, particularly in the border areas, they flew in the face of the post-war resurgence of anti-partitionist politics within the North, supported as it was by a much more aggressive international campaign by the inter-party government in the South after 1948. Despite the province's less than sterling contribution on the volunteering and industrial fronts during the war, nationalist resistance to conscription and the South's neutrality fed a strong current of resentful indignation that the minority should receive any benefits from the post-war settlement. The sentiments expressed by the Unionist MP Dehra Parker in an address to County Derry Orangemen were commonplace: ‘These people who are protected under our laws are turning around and biting the hand that feeds them and are trying to blacken Ulster's good name at home and abroad.’34
The Orange Order, whose membership had declined during the depressed conditions of the inter-war period and that had forgone its traditional parades during the war, reasserted itself as a major force within unionism after 1945. The post-war expansion in state services and expenditures provided the Order with a whole range of new opportunities to pressurize party and government to ensure the proper defence of Orange and Protestant interests. The 1947 Education Act was seen by many Orangemen as a major concession to the Catholic Church, and the Order waged a rearguard action against the implementation of the Act and for the replacement of the Minister of Education, Colonel Samuel Hall-Thompson. When the Minister further enraged the unionist right and the Order by proposing in 1949 that the state should pay the employer's portion of Catholic teachers' National Insurance contributions, Orange pressure was so great that the Prime Minister had to attend a meeting of its supreme authority, the Grand Lodge of Ireland, to explain the government's position. He attempted to convince the leaders of the Order that the government had to be fair to all sections of the people and that ‘they would still have a large minority in Northern Ireland and if they were treated unfairly as an “oppressed people” it would create a bad impression in England.’ His listeners were reluctant to accept such conciliatory ideas, for, as one reverend gentleman from County Antrim put it, ‘Not a single Roman Catholic was dissatisfied with the bill. They were getting butter on their bread and they wanted more butter.’35 Brooke was able to save the bill only by sacrificing Hall-Thompson, whom he persuaded to resign and be replaced by the Labour renegade Harry Midgley, who had joined the Unionist Party in 1947. Midgley, embittered by the role the Catholic Church had played in his election defeat in the 1930s when he had been a champion of the Spanish Republic against the Church's hero Francisco Franco, had become evangelical in his opposition to ‘concessions’ to the Catholic school system.
The resignation of Hall-Thompson is illustrative of the need for a more nuanced reading of the relationship between the Order and the Unionist regime. The conventional view is one of an ‘Orange state’ in which the Order had direct representation at the party's ruling Ulster Unionist Council, and the vast bulk of Unionist activists and almost all MPs and cabinet members were members. This, it is assumed, had a determining effect on a range of government policies. In fact, while Orange pressure almost always evoked a government response, it was not always one that satisfied Orange militants.
The Prime Minister expected the leadership of the Order to take heed of the imperative of maintaining unionist unity and of not giving nationalists easy propaganda material. Thus, although he lost his Minister of Education, the legislation was unaffected, and Midgley's desire to claw back the increase in grants to Catholic schools in the 1947 Act was frustrated. It has been argued that Midgley's prejudices did have significant effects in ensuring that the Catholic sector got fewer resources than it might have from the large increase in government expenditure on education in the 1950s.36 His ministry's estimates rose from less than £4 million in 1946 to more than £12 million in 1957. In the new sector of secondary intermediate schools, by 1957–8 there were 28,000 places in state (Protestant) schools and only 5,000 places in the voluntary (Catholic) sector. There were places for more than half the Protestant primary-school leavers but for less than a fifth of the potential demand from Catholic primary schools, although these contained 44 per cent of the primary-school population.37 This was, in part at least, the price that Catholics paid for their Church's determination to maintain untrammelled control of its schools. Yet, as Unionists pointed out, the 65 per cent capital grant was higher than what was available in the rest of the UK, and a recent history of Ulster Catholics by a Jesuit referred to the provisions as generous.38 Nevertheless, a yet more generous policy might have paid political dividends.
Where Midgley's views did seriously affect policy and provide the Catholic Church with justifiable cause for complaint was in the concession to the governing committees of schools within the wholly funded sector of the right to supervise denominational religious instruction and to assess teachers on ‘faith and morals’. This substantially increased the influence of the Protestant clergy in the state sector. It was also the case that the often protracted process of getting planning approval
for the building of new Catholic schools at times reflected strong grass-roots Orange pressure against what one Belfast lodge referred to as ‘this subsidy of Popery and Nationalism which are the enemies of our Ulster heritage’.39
The strongest pressure against any ‘appeasement’ policies came not from the Orange Order, which was internally divided on the issue, but from an upsurge of Protestant fundamentalism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This was the period when a young evangelical preacher, Ian Paisley, first emerged as a scourge of those in government and the leadership of the Orange Order, who were allegedly making concessions to ‘Popery’ and Irish nationalism. The initial focus of attack was the 1947 Education Act, which Paisley denounced for ‘subsidising Romanism’.40 This was linked to claims that Brooke's government was acquiescing in an invasion of southern Catholics getting jobs and buying up land in border areas. Sectarian animosities were intensified by developments in the South, where the influence of the Catholic Church on public policy was highlighted by the Mother and Child Affair in 1951, and by the preliminary report of the Irish census of 1946, which showed a decline of 13 per cent in the Protestant population in the 1936–46 period.41 In Northern Ireland the Bishop of Derry, Dr Neil Farren, made his own contribution to community relations when he referred to Catholics being ‘contaminated’ by going into non-Catholic halls for dances.42
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