Haughey avoided any public confrontation with Lynch's stand on the North after August 1969, as the Taoiseach relied increasingly on the advice he was getting from T.K. Whitaker and also from senior officials in External Affairs. In a letter to Lynch, Whitaker referred disparagingly to the ‘teenage hooliganism and anarchy’ in Derry and Belfast during the worst of the August violence and warned against the ‘terrible temptation to be opportunist – to cash in on political emotionalism – at a time like this’.126 It was Whitaker who provided most of the text of a speech given by Lynch at Tralee on 20 September that firmly restated the most positive aspects of Lemass's conciliatory approach to Northern Ireland, emphasizing that the policy of seeking unity through agreement was of its nature a long-term one.127
This approach was also apparent in a major assessment of the Irish state's Northern Ireland policy produced by the Department of External Affairs in November 1969. It emphasized that the government's basic approach should remain that of seeking reunification ‘by peaceful means through co-operation and consent between Irishmen. The use of force should be dismissed publicly as frequently as may appear necessary’. The fact that the Republic was a ‘confessional society’ was recognized as an obstacle to unity. As a consequence, reforms to take account of the concerns of northern Protestants on such issues as divorce and birth-control and also in education and the role of the Irish language should be considered. Lemass's legacy of functional cooperation with Stormont needed to be maintained and enhanced despite ‘such temporary cooling of relations as has happened recently’. Most significant of all for the subsequent development of Anglo-Irish relations, it advocated the ‘maximum discreet contact with Whitehall’ at both official and ministerial level. 128
By early 1970, as tensions in the North abated, Patrick Hillery, Minister for External Affairs, was being secretly briefed at the Foreign Office in Whitehall that ‘a lot of steam had gone out of the situation’ and that the only troublemakers were ‘professional agitators’ with little popular support.129 Even when the Ballymurphy riots in April challenged this Panglossian view, Eamonn Gallagher, the most senior Irish official liaising directly with northern nationalists, was unsympathetic to those involved, fearing that new disturbances in Ulster might help the Tories in the forthcoming British general election.130 At a time when the British were impressing on Dublin the capacity of the army to ensure that Catholics anywhere in Northern Ireland were safe from the threat of another pogrom, and with the B Specials disbanded and the RUC disarmed, Blaney and Boland's open championing of the possible use of force to bring about unity appeared increasingly extremist. Lynch's moderation would remain unchallenged until the introduction of internment and Bloody Sunday unleashed another wave of irredentist emotion.
The emergence of the Provisional IRA and its offensive in the North did much to tarnish the image of an ‘oppressed people’ awaiting salvation from the South. Fear of contagion from violence ‘up there’ became widespread. Lynch's new Minister for Justice, Desmond O'Malley, soon demonstrated a zeal to repress any subversive spillovers from the North. In December 1970 he announced that the government was considering the introduction of internment to deal with ‘a secret armed conspiracy’ that allegedly planned kidnappings, armed robberies and murders – all activities in which the Provisional IRA was soon to be involved. In May 1971 the Offences against the State Act was activated to create a ‘special criminal court’ of three judges sitting without a jury, and in November a further amendment to the Act allowed the indictment of those suspected of membership of an illegal organization on the word of a senior police officer.131 The response of ‘honest Jack’ to the IRA threat appears to have done him no significant electoral damage, for in the 1973 election Fianna Fáil actually increased its share of the poll, but lost the election because a pre-election pact between Labour and Fine Gael meant an improvement in vote transfers between their supporters, which led to the combined opposition returning more TDs.
In his address to Fianna Fáil's Ard-Fheis in January 1970, Jack Lynch provided a convincing and passionate rebuttal of Blaney's claim in a famous tirade at Letterkenny in December 1969 that Fianna Fáil had never taken a decision to rule out the use of force to bring about unity. Echoing Lemass's Tralee speech of 1963, he informed the delegates that ‘like it or not, we have to acknowledge that two-thirds of the one and a half million people who make up the population of the six counties wish to be associated with the United Kingdom.’ The ‘plain truth’ was that the southern state did not have the capacity to impose a solution by force, and, even if it had, ‘would we want to adopt the role of an occupying conqueror over the million or so six county citizens who at present support partition?’132
Around the same time Lynch had met three leading northern nationalists, including Paddy Doherty, who was playing a key role in running the Bogside behind the barricades, and Seán Keenan, the founder of the Provisionals in Derry. Lynch not only refused Keenan's request for weapons but made it clear that ‘if we were given a gift of Northern Ireland tomorrow we could not accept it.’ This was primarily because the Republic could not afford to support the level of social services enjoyed by the province's citizens and at the same time bring up standards in the South to the same level. The three left convinced that ‘that man has no interest in getting involved in Northern Ireland.’133
Lynch had defeated the republican hawks within the party because their activities were perceived to threaten the security of the southern state. While Boland, who left Fianna Fáil to found a pure republican party, and Blaney, who was expelled, would remain marginalized as one-issue politicians, Haughey stayed in the party, sure of the support of its traditionalist wing, but by now well educated in the limited power of anti-partitionism in southern politics. Anti-partitionism would remain a largely unquestioned element of the national consensus and a powerful component of the internal political culture of Fianna Fáil. Yet, throughout the 1970s, opinion polls would not rank it high on the list of voters' priorities. The violence and intractability of the northern conflict ensured that unity remained a low-intensity aspiration. Haughey would be able to use the ‘whiff of cordite’ associated with the Arms Crisis as a valuable resource in his ultimate displacement of Lynch, but it was the failure of the latter's economic policies, not his Northern Ireland policy, that would prove decisive.
7. Terence O'Neill and the Crisis of the Unionist State
Liberal Unionism: Opportunities and Enemies
The problems facing those who wanted a more accommodating unionism had been made clear in 1959 in a much publicized row over the question of whether Catholics could become members of the Unionist Party. The slump in Sinn Féin's vote in the 1959 general election – it dropped by almost 60 per cent, from 152,000 in 1955 to 63,000 – was accompanied by an increase in the Unionist Party vote in the eight constituencies where there was a straight fight with Sinn Féin, and there was evidence that this was a product of some Catholics voting Unionist.1 The previous year at a Catholic social study conference at Garron Tower in north Antrim a number of the participants had argued that the way to obtain social justice for their community was to become more positively engaged in public life. The former Minister of Home Affairs and bête noire of loyalist militants, Brian Maginess, who was now Attorney-General, saw in these developments a good reason to go public with a plea for a more inclusive unionism. At a Young Unionist weekend school in Portstewart he spoke of the need to treat political opponents ‘not as enemies but as fellow members of the community’ and attacked those who made abusive references to the religious beliefs of others, a reference not simply to the increasing public profile of Ian Paisley but to the sectarian utterances of some members of his own party.2
However, it was the response of Sir Clarence Graham, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Ulster Unionist Council, to a question about possible Catholic membership of the party that produced most reaction. His support for Catholics becoming parliamentary candidates enraged a substantial sec
tion of the government and party.3 Brookeborough privately recognized that Catholic membership might indeed come about but was critical of Graham and Maginess for raising it in public, as this would ‘only delay matters’.4 His bruising experience with Protestant populism in the early 1950s had left him determined to give no further hostages to the right. The result was a government immobilized by fear of schism and unable to respond to a real opportunity to develop a better relationship with the minority community. Sir George Clark, Grand Master of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, proclaimed that the Order would never accept Catholics as members of the Unionist Party.5 Privately he apologized to the Prime Minister for the hardline tone but explained it by the need to placate Orangemen annoyed by Graham's remarks and by a government ban on a proposed Orange march through Dungiven. He was also concerned about the growing influence of Paisley in the Order.6
Paisley had been able to increase his support amongst loyalists worried by the IRA campaign and concerned about looming redundancies in the shipyards and the aircraft factories. An organization called Ulster Protestant Action had some limited success in recruiting in workplaces by demanding that any redundancies were not suffered by loyalists.7 Such sectarian pressures had echoes in mainstream unionism. During the 1961 Belfast municipal elections the St George's ward Unionist Association produced a leaflet stating that its three candidates ‘employ over 70 people, and have never employed a Roman Catholic’. In the same year a prominent Unionist, Robert Babington, told the Ulster Unionist Labour Association that the party should keep registers of unemployed loyalists from which employers would be invited to pick workers.8
Yet closet liberals in the cabinet might have taken some encouragement from a number of developments in the early 1960s. There was evidence of a more pragmatic and democratic nationalism taking root in sections of the Catholic middle class, particularly the expanding numbers of university graduates who had benefited from the 1947 Education Act. National Unity had been set up in Belfast at the end of 1959 to give voice to those dissatisfied with the ineffectuality of traditional forms of nationalist and republican politics and to argue that any move towards unity had to have the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland.9 The ecumenical movement and the pontificate of John XXIII helped to smooth the edges of inter-Church conflict. There was also some evidence that, in the greater Belfast area at least, there was a thawing in the communal cold war.
In their pioneering study of community relations published in 1962, Barritt and Carter noted that Catholics would now venture into the Protestant heartland of Sandy Row in search of work and had no fears about shopping on the Shankill Road, a judgement later confirmed in Gerry Adams's autobiograpical account of growing up in Belfast in the early 1960s.10 The Belfast correspondent of the Irish Times commented on the growing moderation of ordinary people: ‘It is something composed of simple human feeling, a wish to live in peace, an unwillingness to hate irrationally, a recognition that Ireland's conflicts are small ones in today's world.’11 This was evident in politics. Despite the advocacy of a sectarian approach to dealing with unemployment by Ulster Protestant Action and some Unionist politicians, even William Douglas, the crusty apparatchik who was Secretary of the Unionist Party, recognized that the challenge from the NILP in the 1962 election would have to be met on economic and social issues and that banging the tribal drum was no longer sufficient.12
Attitudinal change was in part a reflection of important social developments. The post-war improvement in living standards meant that the arrival of the ‘consumer society’, while not displacing traditional fixations, drained them of some of their emotional centrality. The move of significant numbers of Belfast's traditional working-class communities into new housing estates or to surrounding towns and villages such as Newtownabbey, Castlereagh, Dunmurry and Lisburn, where many of the new industries were established on green-field sites, weakened traditional allegiances to the Unionist Party.13 The arrival of television helped to expand the horizons of a still intensely parochial society. The BBC had brought television to Northern Ireland in 1953, broadcasting from a small temporary transmitter in Belfast. A powerful new transmitter was built in Belfast in 1955, and the number of television sets in the North rose from 3,000 in 1953 to over 38,000 by 1956. The arrival of independent television provided a major stimulus to the market for sets.14
Traditionally the senior officials of the BBC in Belfast had been close to the viewpoint of the government, but in the 1950s the Director-General, Sir William Haley, had encouraged the local Controller to extend the areas for discussion and to bring differing viewpoints into civilized contention.15 One result was Your Questions, a local version of the popular radio series Any Questions. First broadcast in 1954, it was produced by the Protestant socialist John Boyd and its regular contributers included Jack Sayers, editor of the Belfast Telegraph, the liberal nationalist J. J. Campbell, the Oxford-educated NILP activist Charles Brett and the Queen's University historian J. C. Beckett, all of whom were proponents of the need for the political renovation of the North through a more constructive engagement between nationalism and unionism.16 However, the response of some leading members of the government to even such mild innovation was one of suspicious hostility. The up-and-coming Unionist politician Brian Faulkner was at the forefront, with his condemnations of the BBC for its alleged anti-government bias. For Faulkner, as for a sizeable section of the cabinet and parliamentary party, someone like Sayers was too liberal to be an acceptable unionist representative and Beckett's links with southern historians made his supposed neutrality suspect.17
When the Tonight programme sent Alan Whicker to Belfast in 1958, there was an outpouring of unionist rage when Whicker informed viewers in the rest of the UK that in Northern Ireland policemen carried revolvers, pubs were open from morning to night, and betting shops had been legalized and carried on a brisk business. The Regional Controller apologized to the Northern Ireland public, and Tonight did not show any of the remaining films.18 Making allowance for some understandable annoyance at the programme's failure to deal with the ongoing, if declining, IRA campaign, there remained something disproportionate in the response. This brittle defensiveness that affected a substantial section of the unionist community was a warning to those who would make too much of the first signs of the blunting of traditional antagonisms.
There was a geographical dimension to unionist divisions. Barritt and Carter noted that, while more tolerant feelings had become manifest in Belfast, the situation in rural areas, especially those near the border, was different. Here the IRA campaign had polarized the communities: ‘the political and national issues have become more prominent and have brought a new hardness to attitudes.’19 Unionists in border areas were also dealing with a nationalism that showed fewer signs of the questioning and flexibility that had begun to appear in the east of the province. The Belfast Newsletter, a traditionalist counterweight to Sayers's Telegraph, warned of the dangers of mellowing unionist attitudes:
For Unionists in Belfast and its hinterland the border issue is at a discount, and many there think that they can forget about it altogether. But it is the one thing that matters in Nationalist held areas and is probably the big issue that matters among Nationalists of all persuasions throughout Ulster. Forgetting about the border is something that is expected of Unionists but not of Nationalists.20
It was to Brian Faulkner that those unionists who were most unsettled by the vision of men like Maginess turned for leadership. Faulkner, who had entered Stormont as MP for East Down in 1949, became the dominant voice of the right in the government when Brookeborough promoted him from ChiefWhip to Minister of Home Affairs in 1959. He had worked in his father's shirt-manufacturing concern during the war and, worried that his lack of war service might hurt his progress in the Unionist Party, cultivated an activist pro-Orange image as compensation.21 He demanded an inquiry when Brian Maginess banned the Orange parade along the predominantly nationalist Longstone Road in 1952, and when the ban was lifted i
n 1955 led a march of 15,000 Orangemen along the road, guarded by hundreds of RUC men in full riot gear.22 Faulkner had also criticized the government for not defending the right of an Orange band to march in the largely Catholic village of Dungiven in 1953. After the same band provoked a riot and a subsequent Catholic boycott of Protestant shops in July 1958, the following year's march was banned by Colonel Ken Topping, Maginess's successor at Home Affairs. Although previously identified as one of the cabinet's more reactionary figures,23 Topping was now execrated by the Orange lodges and was replaced by Faulkner, who allowed the band and 10,000 Orangemen to march through Dungiven in July 1960, sparking off two nights of rioting.24
Ambitious, energetic and very able, Faulkner was positioning himself to succeed Brookeborough. His assault on liberalism in the party endeared him to many grass-roots unionists, particularly outside Belfast. His industrial experience also led him to believe that the modernizers in the party were out of touch with working-class loyalists. As early as 1959 he warned those who saw the fall in support for Sinn Féin as indicative of a shift in the minority's attitude to the state that traditional nationalism was not a spent force but a ‘volcano smoking harmlessly enough until the day when it flares up to engulf all those who live unsuspecting on its slopes’.25 In the cabinet he was in the vanguard of those who saw Lemass's proposals for practical cooperation between North and South as simply a more insidious form of anti-partitionism. Even the harmless Irish Association, composed of the great and the good and aimed at improved understanding between the citizens of the two states, was denounced by him as having an Irish nationalist agenda.26 Connolly Gage, a former Unionist Party MP at Westminster, put the common liberal view of Faulkner when he argued that his succession to Brookeborough would be a ‘disaster’: ‘it might put us in the South African category with knobs on.’27
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