Protestant and Orange dissatisfaction with the government's education policy was surpassed in intensity by an increasingly hysterical chorus of complaint about ‘soft’ public-order policy. Maginess's attempts to implement a more balanced approach, which culminated in the banning of the Orange march on the Longstone Road in 1952, produced a fierce reaction from the Order and from within the party at all levels. Reaction had intensified as a result of sectarian confrontations over the enthusiastic displays of the Union flag occasioned by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. Some loyalists had insisted on the display of the flag on houses and businesses in the heart of predominantly Catholic and nationalist areas like the Falls Road, and the RUC had been able to prevent riots only by persuading the loyalists to remove the flags.43 For the government's loyalist critics this amounted to a cowardly ceding of public space to nationalism. Their disquiet was magnified when nationalists in the predominantly Catholic village of Dungiven, in County Londonderry, prevented a Coronation Day march by an Orange band.44
The government's alleged ‘appeasement’ policy was the main element in the campaign of the group of Independent Unionists who made substantial inroads into the Unionist Party vote in the 1953 election. Paisley's brand of Protestant fundamentalism was influential during the election that saw Hall-Thompson defeated by Norman Porter, an ally of Paisley who was the editor of the Ulster Protestant, a monthly paper fixated on the government's ‘subsidies to Popery’. Brookeborough's response was a substantial tack to the right. Brian Maginess was shifted from Home Affairs and was never again a substantial figure in the government. In deference to loyalist fundamentalists, and against the advice of the Inspector-General of the RUC, a Flags and Emblems Act was passed in 1954. This obliged the police to protect the display of the Union flag anywhere in Northern Ireland and empowered them to remove any other flag or emblem whose display threatened a breach of the peace. The latter provision would be used by loyalist ultras to demand that the RUC remove the Irish Tricolour even when it was being displayed in a predominantly nationalist area.45
There was increasing evidence of a reluctance on the Prime Minister's part to challenge the demands and prejudices of his more extreme supporters. He was prepared to support a Family Allowances Bill in 1956, which, while increasing allowances in line with Britain, proposed to abolish payments for the fourth and subsequent children. The bill reflected the fear, particularly strong in border areas, that a higher Catholic birth-rate would lead to a Catholic majority by the end of the century. Brookeborough reconsidered only when some of the Unionist MPs at Westminster pointed out that even their Tory allies would criticize what would be seen as a blatant piece of discriminatory legislation.46 Behind the scenes he exerted himself in the interests of those Derry unionists who were afraid that if the government's industrial development policies were successful, the new industries would employ too many ‘disloyalists’.47 The Prime Minister's intervention appears to have been decisive in ensuring that the US multinational DuPont, which was planning a major investment in the city, appointed the secretary of the Derry Unionist Association as its personnel officer.48 Although the appointment did not prevent DuPont becoming a large employer of Catholics, it was an indication of Brookeborough's firm belief that he had to show a continuing responsiveness to the most reactionary voices in the party. These depressing concessions to sectarian pressures were not uninfluenced by increasing signs of a resurgence of republican militarism, which culminated in the launching of a full-scale campaign against the northern state in December 1956.
Even without pressure from Protestant fundamentalists and the IRA, there were strict limits to the more inclusive form of unionism proposed by Brookeborough and Maginess. It did little to address nationalist grievances about discrimination in the employment practices of central and local government. The charge of ‘vicious sectarian discrimination’49 ignored important dimensions of the problem: lower levels of educational attainment and the attitude of suspicious hostility adopted by some Catholics to those of their co-religionists who joined the civil service or the police.50 It also ignored the fact that at manual labour and clerical level Catholics generally received their proportionate share of public employment. Yet there could be no denying the stark under-representation of the minority in the higher ranks of the civil service, local government and the judiciary.
While discrimination was not solely responsible, it undoubtedly played a role. Brookeborough's conception of fairness seems to have entailed a belief that Catholics should have a proportionate share of the total number of public service jobs while leaving Protestant dominance of key positions unchallenged. In 1956, amidst Orange concern about Catholics employed in Belfast law courts, he asked Brian Maginess, the Attorney-General, to get figures that he hoped would soothe his critics: ‘Brian showed that in the higher grades the proportion of Unionists was very high indeed and in the lower grades not worse than three to one. I said we had to be fair in giving employment but we need not go further than that.’51 While he accepted that Catholics had a right to their share of the positions as law clerks, he was determined that there should be no more than one Catholic amongst the senior judiciary. A Catholic had been appointed to the Supreme Court in 1949, giving the minority one out of forty senior positions in the higher courts. When the Lord Chief Justice nominated a Catholic QC for a High Court judgeship in 1956, Brookeborough told him he would oppose it: ‘I did not like the idea of another Nationalist on the bench.’52 The man concerned, Cyril Nicholson, was a prominent opponent of republican violence and a proponent of a more positive engagement by Catholics with the state.
The undoubted material improvements of the post-war period – real income per head rose by one third during the 1950s – did not diminish Catholic resentment over actual or alleged discrimination in private employment. Although a largely political explanation of the Catholic economic disadvantage emphasizing the role of the ‘Orange state’ has been disputed by scholars,53 the facts of Catholic disadvantage are undisputed. There was Protestant over-representation in skilled, supervisory and managerial positions and massive predominance in industries like shipbuilding, engineering and aircraft production, which provided well-paid and relatively secure employment. Catholics were over-represented amongst the unskilled and the unemployed and crowded into industries such as construction and transport, where wages were lower and employment more insecure.54 In workplaces such as the shipyard there were strong Orange and loyalist influences on hiring, although they were countered to some degree by trade union organization. Perhaps even more important than overt pressure was the pervasive influence of kin and neighbourhood in a society with high levels of residential segregation on what was a largely informal recruiting mechanism.
Longer-term structural factors disadvantaged Catholics in the indus-trial heartland; they produced a clear east–west gradient in unemployment and living standards as well. The core of the industrial economy of the province remained the greater Belfast area. The government was accused of favouring majority Protestant areas like Belfast and the east of the province in its industrial development policies and neglecting the western periphery where Catholics were in a majority.55 In fact, the Stormont regime did show some concern for high levels of unemployment in Londonderry, Strabane and other largely nationalist towns, particularly after a visiting British Labour Party delegation in 1954 warned of the potential for civil unrest and potential subversion.56 However, the Ministry of Commerce officials involved in the government's programme of advanced factory building had major problems interesting potential investors in what were perceived to be remote areas that, although they had high percentage rates of unemployment, lacked large pools of the skilled and experienced labour that incoming industrialists often demanded. Although Belfast had the lowest rate of unemployment in the North, it also possessed the largest pool of unemployed skilled labour, and this, together with its port, meant that many new industries simply refused to look elsewhere. As the Minister of C
ommerce explained to the cabinet in 1956, ‘we are not in as strong a position as to be able to turn away industry that is prepared to come to Belfast or not at all.’57
Although the charge of malign neglect of the west will not hold up, there was undoubtedly a tendency to pay more attention to the large concentrations of unemployed Protestants in the east, whose dissatisfaction could mean a loss of electoral support. There was also the complacent assumption that unemployed Catholics would remain quiescent because they had a realistic grasp of conditions in the South. When, in 1954, R. A. Butler, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, questioned Stormont about the British Labour Party claim that high unemployment could lead to ‘serious political trouble’ in places like Derry and Newry, Brian Maginess dismissed the idea as ‘complete nonsense… so long as these people continue to enjoy Northern Ireland rates of unemployment benefit or national assistance… we have no fear of any kind of trouble.’58
The fear of senior Derry Unionists that new industries would undermine their control of the city by bringing in an unmanageable influx of Catholic workers had an inhibiting effect on attracting new industries. Teddy Jones, MP for the city of Londonderry constituency, was the main messenger boy for the city's Unionist hierarchy. His lobbying ensured that these fears were discussed at the highest level of the state, where a cabinet subcommittee was set up to try to ensure that indus-trial development was made compatible with continuing Unionist control of the city. Brookeborough exerted himself to ensure that government departments and the Housing Trust did all they could to address the problem.59
Apart from its effect on employment, the local Unionist power structure also impacted on the city's housing. To maintain the situation of 1961, whereby Derry was 67 per cent Catholic but still under Unionist control, it was necessary that new housing for Catholics be concentrated in the south ward, where two thirds of the city's Catholics lived.60 The need to maintain the gerrymandered system meant not simply a reluctance to house Catholics in the other two wards on the part of Derry corporation but also severe restraints on where the Northern Ireland Housing Trust could build. The result was a substantial amount of overcrowding and a long waiting list, largely Catholic, for public housing.61
The Derry situation epitomized the dynamics of the regime's sectarianism, which was more about the central government's complicity in a limited number of flagrantly unjust situations than Stormont being an activist ‘Orange state’. There were limits to Brookeborough's willingness to indulge Jones and his friends in the north-west. When he received a letter from the MP opposing any further industrial development in Derry, the perversity of this caused the Prime Minister to exclaim, ‘No government can stand idly by and allow possible industries not to develop.’62 Derry Unionists did not prevent the Stormont government supporting investment in the city in the late 1950s or Brookeborough's vigorous lobbying of London to prevent the closure of the Navy's anti-submarine training base at Eglinton, near Derry, in 1958.63 But the existence of a local authority with such deep hostility to development had serious effects on the government's industrial development policy. By the beginning of the 1960s Derry had a potentially explosive combination of unemployment and housing shortage, both of which could be given a plausible political explanation in terms of a hard-faced Unionist elite.
‘An Invertebrate Collectivity’: The Dilemmas of Northern Nationalism
The reaction of the leaders of nationalism to Labour's Westminster victory in 1945 was the predictable obverse of loyalist apprehension. Attaching an exaggerated importance to Labour's already frayed tradition of supporting a united Ireland and to the formation of the backbench pressure group ‘The Friends of Ireland’ at Westminster, the ten Nationalist MPs elected to Stormont in 1945 promoted a new organization, the Anti-Partition League (APL), whose purpose was to energize and unify nationalism within Northern Ireland and press London to reopen the partition question. The role of the US as the dominant power in the non-communist world and Britain's economic and strategic dependence on America were seen as giving a new opportunity for Irish-American lobbying of Washington. Expectations of progress from London were soon dashed as the Attlee government's pro-Union sentiment became obvious. By 1947 the APL was denouncing Labour as the enemy and beginning to consider the possibility of attempting to organize the Irish vote in Britain to punish Attlee at the next election.
The Nationalist MPs returned to Stormont in 1945 were largely drawn from the Catholic rural and small-town middle class – farmers, lawyers, journalists, auctioneers and publicans – from the west and south of the province.64 Belfast nationalism had never recovered from the death of Joe Devlin and his combination of pragmatic nationalism and pro-Labour views. The city returned one Nationalist MP in 1945, the barrister T. J. Campbell, who soon shocked the party by accepting a county court judgeship. The Nationalists were subsequently never to hold a Belfast seat, and their local government base in the city had almost vanished by the early 1950s.They were pushed aside not by the more militant nationalism of Sinn Féin but by organizations labelling themselves socialist republican and, after a split in the NILP in 1949, by Irish Labour. The Nationalists' lack of appeal to the Catholic working class in Belfast was not unrelated to their strong denunciation of the welfare state, which it was proclaimed might be suitable to an industrial nation like Britain but was ‘wholly unsuitable to an area such as the Six Counties which is predominantly agrarian and underpopulated’. Echoing the Unionist right's arguments, they alleged that the ‘extravagant scale’ of benefits provided by the welfare state and the National Health Service would reduce the ‘people’ to bankruptcy.65
The Nationalists' conservatism was a northern manifestation of the Catholic Church's opposition to the welfare state for its allegedly ‘totalitarian’ dangers. It reflected the strong Catholic faith of Nationalist MPs and the central role that the clergy played in their primitive electoral machine. Despite the formation of the APL the Nationalists failed to develop a modern party organization. They concentrated on those areas where Catholics were in a majority. Six of their ten MPs were returned without a contest in 1945. The only real activity was carried on by registration committees dedicated to ensuring that all eligible Catholics were registered to vote and as many as possible of the ‘other side’ had their eligibility challenged. Candidates were chosen at conventions often presided over by a priest and composed of delegates selected at after-mass meetings. As Conor Cruise O'Brien, then an official of the Department of External Affairs, noted, ‘The nature of the structure at parish level plays into the hands of those who regard the nationalists in the Six Counties as a purely sectarian organization.’66
O'Brien acerbically commented that the APL ‘can hardly be called an organization at all; it is an invertebrate collectivity. It has an allegiance but no policy.’ Although Nationalist hopes in radical action from the Labour government were quickly disappointed, they were replaced by what would prove to be an equally empty faith in the new inter-party government in Dublin. Seán MacBride, as Minister for External Affairs, had promised to provide a right of audience in the Dáil for northern Nationalist MPs and to nominate leading northerners to the Senate.67 This seemed to offer Nationalists a form of institutional involvement in the southern state after more than two decades of much resented neglect. However, the proposal was too much for MacBride's colleagues, and it was vetoed by Costello. Nevertheless, before disillusion could set in, the torpid waters of northern nationalism were churned up by the decision to repeal the External Relations Act and declare a republic.
The President of the APL and the leader of the Nationalist MPs at Stormont, James McSparran, a barrister who was MP for Mourne, saw the purpose of attending Stormont and Westminster as highlighting the iniquities of Unionist rule – not to elicit reform but rather to embarrass the British government sufficiently to make it willing to reopen the partition issue. Rather predictably, the adoption of a much more rhetorically republican tone by the Irish government dealt a shattering blow to such
hopes. The Ireland Act, by strengthening the Unionists' constitutional guarantee, produced a strong emotional reaction in the South that served only to underline the futility of constitutional anti-partitionism. The creation of the all-party Anti-Partition Campaign and its raising of funds for Nationalist candidates in the 1949 Stormont election by a collection outside Catholic churches throughout the island helped to ensure that the election was fought in the most viciously sectarian environment since the 1930s.
The inter-party government's rhetorical breach in the wall of northern nationalist isolation had an energizing effect, particularly in border areas like Derry, where Eddie McAteer, the leading APL politician in the city, attempted to give a new activist edge to anti-partitionist politics. In the pamphlet Irish Action he suggested a nationalist campaign of obstruction against Stormont involving a refusal to deal with such bodies as the Inland Revenue and the Post Office.68 More realistic was his determination to exploit Derry Catholics' still-raw resentment over the gerrymandering of the city's government. This resentment was amplified by the determination of Unionists to define the centre of the city, enclosed within its plantation walls, as a loyalist public space. The upsurge of nationalist self-confidence in 1948 led to a proposal for a large anti-partition demonstration in Derry, which was banned under the Special Powers Act. McAteer became active in challenging future bans on nationalist parades within the city centre. The local Catholic bishop, Dr Farren, was opposed to what he regarded as ‘anti-partitionist stunts’, but McAteer saw in the inevitable conflicts with the police a means of maintaining a sharp sense of Catholic grievance and counteracting the integrative effects of the welfare state.69
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