When the return of de Valera to power in 1951 brought a shift towards a softer line on the North and an attempt to build up practical links in areas such as cross-border cooperation on transport and electricity production, the response from the APL was hostile. McAteer denounced the ‘fraternization’ policy as shoring up partition, and when officials of the South's Electricity Supply Board were invited to meet their northern counterparts at a lunch in Derry the event was boycotted by the APL. A frustrated Conor Cruise O'Brien, charged with liaising with the APL, noted the criticisms but added ‘they did not have any alternative policy to propose… their main interest was in the local situation in Derry and in how it could be exploited for the discomfiture of Unionists rather than in any general strategy on partition.’70
The IRA's 1956 Campaign
McAteer's interest in more militant tactics reflected an awareness that as the sound and fury of southern-sponsored anti-partitionism dissipated in failure, it would leave the APL dangerously vulnerable to republican exploitation of the disenchantment with constitutionalism amongst a younger generation of nationalists. MacBride's presence in government had contributed to a decline in police activity against the IRA in the Republic and enabled it to regroup and be in a better position to benefit from the rise and decline of official anti-partitionist fervour. The IRA calculated that as long as violence was directed at the northern state, popular sympathy for ‘the boys’ would weaken the southern state's capacity to act against them, and a military council was created in 1951 to plan a full-scale campaign.71 Although the Ebrington Territorial Army Base in Derry was raided for arms in 1951, the return of de Valera to power appears to have weakened IRA capacity to operate in the North. The next, and much more spectacular, raid, on Gough Army Barracks in Armagh did not take place until June 1954, when a new inter-party government was in power.
Out of office, MacBride had done his best to encourage republican militancy by going North to speak in favour of the IRA dissident Liam Kelly, who won the Mid Tyrone seat in the 1953 Stormont election. Kelly, who was expelled from the IRA for unauthorized ‘operations’, went on to establish a party, Fianna Uladh (‘Soldiers of Ulster’), and a military organization, Saor Uladh (‘free Ulster’). He followed MacBride in arguing that republicans should accept the legitimacy of the Republic and direct their energies solely against Stormont. This made him popular beyond the republican hard core. Cahir Healy, whose Westminster seat for Fermanagh and South Tyrone was vulnerable to republican challenge, bewailed the support given to Kelly in the South, particularly by the Fianna Fáil-supporting Irish Press, whose editor believed, despite the policy of de Valera, that only force would get rid of the border.72
MacBride, who was supporting the new coalition from the backbenches, managed to get Kelly nominated for the Senate. At a time when the Senator was serving a year's imprisonment for seditious statements during the election, MacBride's action helped to strengthen republican self-confidence, already boosted by the Armagh raid. Although McAteer had been enthusiastic about the effects of the raid in ‘keeping up morale amongst a population which had been cowed and defeated’,73 many of his colleagues in the APL were dismayed by the signs that disillusion with constitutional politics was feeding into increasing sympathy for those prepared to use physical force. Brookeborough's concession on the Flags and Emblems Act gave the republicans a major propaganda victory when, on Kelly's release in August 1954, the RUC's attempt to prevent the flying of the Irish flag by a crowd of 10,000 that had gathered to welcome him in his home village of Pomeroy caused a major riot.74
In an evaluation of opinion in the wake of the Armagh raid, Conor Cruise O'Brien noted that while the event was ‘greeted with universal approbation and even glee by all Nationalists in the Six Counties’, many of those who applauded did so ‘in a more or less “sporting” spirit without reflecting on the consequences of the actions or the logical conclusion of the policy behind them’. Bloodshed would alienate support for the IRA.75 There was bloodshed during the next IRA arms raid, a botched attack on Omagh Army Barracks in October 1955. Five soldiers were wounded, two of them seriously. However, the absence of deaths amongst what even the Taoiseach referred to as ‘forces of occupation’, and the fact that the eight young men arrested, all southerners, were sentenced to long prison terms, ensured that moral and prudential qualms were submerged by waves of sympathy for what was widely perceived to be a group of brave young idealists.76
Sinn Féin was quick to exploit this popular mood and the APL's divided and demoralized state by putting up candidates, some of them serving time for the Omagh raid, for all the North's Westminster constituencies in the general election of May 1955. The result was a clear propaganda coup. It won Fermanagh and South Tyrone and Mid Ulster, where two of the imprisoned Omagh raiders were elected, and was able to boast of amassing the largest anti-partitionist vote ever: a total of 152,310 votes. Yet, as its APL critics bitterly but justly pointed out, this was a hollow victory. The size of the vote reflected the fact that the majority of seats had previously not been contested. As a result of Sinn Féin's intervention, Jack Beattie of the Irish Labour Party lost West Belfast to a Unionist and the other two Nationalist seats at Westminster were lost to Unionists after the disqualification of the two Sinn Féin MPs. Nor could Sinn Féin use its vote as a popular sanction for future IRA violence, as its candidates had insisted that they were not asking people to vote for the use of force.77
Nevertheless, the apparent surge in republican political fortunes did quicken the pace of IRA preparations for a northern offensive. The IRA leadership was also anxious to pre-empt a rival campaign by Kelly after Saor Uladh attacked a police barracks in Roslea in Fermanagh in November 1955. ‘Operation Harvest’ was launched in December 1956. From the start its focus was on the border counties where, it was hoped, local IRA units assisted by ‘flying columns’ from the South would destroy communications links with the rest of the province, destroy RUC barracks and, with the at least tacit support of local nationalists, create ‘liberated zones’ free of Stormont control. Whether this was envisaged as a prelude to a general nationalist uprising, perhaps provoked by a heavy-handed government response, or simply as a dramatic event that would force Britain to re-open the partition question is not clear.
The largely southern leadership of the IRA had a weak grasp of northern realities. Seán Cronin, the ex-Irish soldier who was IRA Chief of Staff and the strategist behind Operation Harvest, had some awareness of the dangers of IRA actions triggering the sort of sectarian violence that had occurred in the 1920s and in 1935. For this reason, and despite the complaints of northern IRA men, there were to be no attacks on the part-time and locally based B Specials.78 Although the RUC was defined as a legitimate target, initially IRA attacks took the form of frontal assaults on police barracks by IRA members wearing surplus US and British Army uniforms. The most famous attack of the campaign, on Brookeborough RUC station in January 1957, in which the IRA's main martyrs of the campaign, Sean South and Feargal O'Hanlon, were killed, typified this approach. Whatever the military futility and political obtuseness of this type of attack, its capacity to ignite sectarian animosities was less than the more classically terrorist attacks on police personnel by booby-traps and ambushes carried out by local IRA men in civilian dress. Although the RUC death toll was comparatively light at six, as the campaign failed to maintain its initial momentum and relied increasingly on local resources, it shifted to tactics more likely to provoke a violent loyalist response.79
That such attacks did not provoke a loyalist backlash was in large part owing to the fact that the campaign was clearly a failure and had not affected Belfast. Although Cronin has claimed that Belfast was excluded from his plan in order to avoid sectarian confrontation,80 it does not appear that this was known by the Belfast IRA, which had drawn up plans for attacks on targets ranging from RUC stations and the homes of policemen to contractors who did work for the security forces.81 RUC intelligence on the Belfast IRA was good,
and the arrest, just before the campaign started, of one of their leading members in possession of important Belfast battalion documents was followed by a series of arrests that put the city's organization out of business for the rest of the campaign.82
Although the campaign was not called off until February 1962, its failure had been evident much earlier. Republicans had overestimated the degree of nationalist alienation from the Stormont regime and failed to understand that initial sympathy for what were often seen as brave but misguided idealists would not extend to the killing of policemen along with the attendant risks of loyalist retaliation. Condemnations of the campaign by Cardinal D'Alton, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and by the Taoiseach did not impress the members of the RUC Special Branch, who thought they would not have the slightest effect on the IRA.83 It was also the case that some of the local clergy in Fermanagh and Tyrone had strong republican sympathies. The defeated APL MP for Mid Ulster was bitterly critical of the clergy of the constituency, some of whom had openly supported Sinn Féin, while others had instructed local convents not to vote and refused the APL the use of parochial halls during the 1955 campaign.84 Liam Kelly's closest advisers were two local priests.85 However, as the campaign continued, denunciations of IRA membership or support made by the local bishop and the clergy in Tyrone and Fermanagh were seen as having more effect.86 Much more important in determining the attitude of the vast bulk of nationalists to the campaign was the evidence from its earliest days that it was little more than a series of pinpricks against the formidable security apparatus of the northern state. The RUC, with the aid of 13,000 Specials, the British Army and the introduction of internment, had little problem in ensuring that the idea of ‘liberated zones’ proved as illusory as the IRA appeal to the Protestants of Ulster to support Irish unity.87 MacBride's support for the inter-party government did not prevent the coalition taking immediate action against the IRA, and when de Valera returned to power he did not hesitate to introduce internment. The result was clear from the RUC's figures for major incidents, which fell from 138 in 1957 to eighty in 1958 and nineteen in 1959.88
Sinn Féin's vote in the 1959 Westminster election slumped by over a half compared with 1955, but there was little sign that the setback to militant republicanism would do anything to lift the APL out of its organizational and intellectual torpor. The success of the NILP in the 1958 elections served to underline the ineffectuality of the Nationalist MPs at Stormont. An attempt by some of the less inert MPs, together with Irish Labour and Republican MPs to dissolve the party and replace it with a new formation, was only narrowly defeated.89 The apparent collapse of the physical-force tradition and the growing dissatisfaction of a section of the Catholic middle class with the ineffectual negativism of the APL opened up the possibility of a more engaged and participationist type of nationalism. Unfortunately for the future of the North, the Unionist Party's increasing problems with its core support group, the Protestant working class, prevented a more positive engagement with these changes.
Economic Change and Unionist Politics
Despite the Brookeborough government's aggressively optimistic view of the economy in public, it had a much darker private assessment. For most of the period from 1945 to the early 1960s the major political foe of the regime was seen to be Irish nationalism. In its response to the anti-partitionist campaign it was easy for the government to point out the economic and social advantages that the Union brought to all the citizens of Northern Ireland. The British and American journalists who had arrived in Ireland to cover the IRA campaign were given the following riposte to nationalist tales of a northern minority thirsting for unity: ‘In agriculture, in the social services, in education, in industrial development and in our standard of living, we are streets ahead of Eire and are strengthening our lead every day.’90 The government's problem was that precisely because the majority of the electorate did not expect or desire to be part of an all-Ireland state, their frame of reference was British, not Irish. Wages and unemployment levels in the rest of the UK were the standards against which Stormont's economic record would be judged.
This was not a record of unadulterated failure. The government had to deal with an economy that suffered from remoteness, higher transport costs, and a lack of domestic supplies of raw materials and fuel for industry. Its narrow range of staple industries had overcome these disadvantages, but all of them faced major problems in the post-war period. In 1950 the province's economic structure was dominated by three industries: shipbuilding and engineering, linen and agriculture. By the beginning of the 1960s agriculture still employed 14 per cent of the province's labour force, compared with 4 per cent in the rest of the UK. It was the area's largest employer of labour, although its workforce had declined from 101,000 in 1945 to 73,000 in 1960. This was the inevitable result of mechanization (there were 850 tractors in 1939 and 30,000 in 1960) and the elimination of smaller, uneconomic holdings, which the government encouraged. The result was an 80 per cent increase in output by 1960.91 There were also improvements in productivity in linen as it faced competition from low-cost, ex-colonial producers and the expansion of the synthetic fibre industry. Substantial amounts of state support for modernization were given through a Re-equipment of Industry Act introduced in 1950. Such modernization entailed a substantial amount of rationalization and concentration of production and the inevitable closing of plants and shedding of labour. Between 1954 and 1964 the number of jobs in plants employing twenty-five workers or more (the bulk of the industry) fell from 56,414 to 33,957.92
Unlike linen, shipbuilding had maintained its role as the region's preeminent employer of skilled male labour up to the end of the 1950s. In 1950 more than one tenth of the North's manufacturing jobs and one fifth of those in Belfast were in Harland and Wolff. Employing 21,000 in four yards on the Queen's Island, it was the largest single shipbuilding complex in the world. Until 1955 its major problem was a steel shortage due to the rearmament programme. Subsequently, as with the rest of British shipbuilding, it came under increasing pressure from more productive continental and Japanese yards. By 1960 the yard was still employing over 22,000 workers and the unemployment rate amongst shipyard workers was just 2.5 per cent, a third of what it was in British centres such as Tyneside and the Clyde. But, at a time when world shipbuilding capacity was double what was required, the cabinet's employment committee was anticipating between 5,000 and 8,000 redundancies.93 The crisis in shipbuilding turned out to be much worse: employment was slashed by 40 per cent, or 11,500 jobs, between 1961 and 1964. It would coincide with fears of job losses in aircraft production at Short and Harland, whose workforce had fluctuated significantly in the post-war period and stood at 6,900 in 1962.94 It was not part of either of the two main groups into which the British government planned to rationalize aircraft production, and its future appeared increasingly precarious. The problems created for Brookeborough's government by the decline of the staple industries were intensified by the province's demography. A birth-rate that was much higher than anywhere else in the UK fed through into a natural increase of 15,000 per annum throughout the 1950s.95
Pressure on the job-creating capacity of the economy was to an extent relieved by the direct and indirect effects of government policy. Although its contemporary critics and some later commentators have criticized Brookeborough's administration for passivity, there is considerable evidence of a long-standing concern to counter the anticipated decline of traditional industries by a strategy of diversification based on the attraction of external investment. In 1944 the government had decided that inter-war legislation aimed at attracting new industry was inadequate and replaced it with the Industries Development Act, which aimed to attract British, American and European firms by providing desirable packages, including advance factories, newly built factory premises at low rents, the necessary infrastructure and grants of up to one third of capital cost, which could be exceeded for ‘desirable’ projects.96 This legislation put the North in a favourable p
osition compared to British regions suffering similar problems, which, under the 1945 Distribution of Industry Act, were subject to rigorous Treasury control. No advance factories were built in Britain between 1947 and 1959.97
By 1961 almost 48,000 new jobs had been created, an average of 2,500 per annum for the 1950s. New employment was also created by the substantial expansion of the public sector, particularly in the areas of health and education. Higher incomes were reflected in an expansion in the distributive trades. The total number of insured employees in the province increased from 438,000 in 1950 to 449,000 in 1960, broadly in line with the trend in the rest of the UK.98 However, despite these positive developments, unemployment in the province never fell below 5 per cent and averaged 7.4 per cent for the decade, four times the UK average and, more significantly, higher than the figures for other regional black spots such as Merseyside and Scotland.99 The position would have been even worse had it not been that net migration was running at 9,000 per annum.100
Brookeborough, although already sixty-two in 1950 and subject to recurrent bouts of illness after an operation for a stomach ulcer in 1955, was initially quite effective in extracting extra resources from Westminster to mitigate the problem. He mercilessly exploited metropolitan gratitude for the North's wartime role and the more fundamental consideration that it was still of strategic value to the UK, given Irish neutrality. British annoyance at Dublin's anti-partition campaign also helped. In 1949, when unemployment in Northern Ireland was at 6.5 per cent, Attlee had written to his Home Secretary noting how much worse the situation was there in comparison with the rest of the UK and adding, ‘It is, of course, of considerable political importance that we should do all we can to ensure full employment in Northern Ireland.’101
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