In the short term his iconoclasm was little short of disastrous for the appeal of the party. When it was revealed that Whitelaw had had leading members of the IRA flown to London for secret talks in July 1972, calls for the full integration into the UK appeared both fatuous and positively dangerous. However, after ‘Operation Motorman’ had ended the ‘no-go’ status of the Bogside and the Creggan in July and it became clearer that the objective of British policy was a reformed Northern Ireland and not disengagement, the environment for a DUP take-off became more favourable.
Paisley was assisted by Craig's political ineptitude. In a speech to the right-wing Monday Club in the House of Commons in October 1972, he declared that his supporters were prepared to ‘shoot and shoot to kill’ and added ‘I am prepared to kill and those behind me have my full support.’74 In February 1973 he told an audience in the Ulster Hall that an ‘independent dominion of Ulster’ would be economically viable. This vision might have enthused the largely middle-class activists of Vanguard, but it had little appeal to working-class loyalists, who wondered what would happen to the welfare state and many of their jobs in Craig's utopia. In the same month he identified Vanguard with a one-day general strike called by the UDA and the Loyalist Association of Workers (LAW) in protest at the internment of two loyalists, the first Protestants to be interned at a time when there were already hundreds of Catholics ‘behind the wire’. LAW was composed of Protestant trade unionists in some of the North's key industries, including the main power stations in Belfast and Larne. The strike, which combined limited industrial muscle with paramilitary intimidation, shut down transport and the electricity supply in Belfast and was accompanied by widespread rioting and destruction of property. Five people died, including a fire-fighter shot by a loyalist sniper. The great majority of unionists were appalled by these events, and in their aftermath LAW fell apart and many on the unionist right turned their backs on Craig.
Paisley exploited this weakening of Craig's position and was able to use the border referendum held in March 1973 to bring the DUP back in from the periphery of loyalist politics.75 The British government, relying on the poll to reassure unionists that their constitutional position was secure, pressed ahead with plans for a return to devolved government in Northern Ireland.The White Paper Northern Ireland Constitutional Proposals, published in March, made it clear that any new administration must be based on some form of executive power-sharing between unionists and nationalists and would also have an ‘Irish Dimension’: new institutional arrangements for consultation and cooperation between Dublin and Belfast. The new northern arrangements should be ‘so far as is possible acceptable to and accepted by the Republic of Ireland’.76
At a time when violence, although somewhat lower in intensity than in the previous horrendous year, was claiming around thirty lives a month and with nationalists publicly committed to joint Dublin-London rule over the North as a ‘transition’ to unity, what is surprising is not the Protestant support for the right but rather the continued existence of a considerable constituency that was prepared to back Faulkner's qualified and ambiguous acceptance of the White Paper. A special meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council rejected an anti-White Paper motion, forcing Craig to lead his followers out of the Unionist Party to form a new organization, the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party (VUPP).77 Former allies, including John Taylor, Harry West and Martin Smyth, refused to follow him and resigned from Vanguard. The right was determined not to cede control of the Unionist Party to the Faulknerites and stayed inside to mobilize opinion against ‘capitulation’ to the British government's ‘pro-republican’ stratagems. Here they showed more political sense than those liberal Unionists who left the party to join the new non-sectarian Alliance Party. Established in April 1970, Alliance quickly gained support from middle-class unionists in the greater Belfast area who had supported O'Neill. Their defection denuded the ranks of those within the Unionist Party who could most effectively have resisted the onward march of the right and split the pro-power-sharing constituency in the Protestant community as well.78
Paisley benefited from the confused and disorganized state of the Ulster Unionist Party. Direct rule had at a stroke removed the UUP's control of governmental and administrative power. No longer was the directing centre of Unionism located in the cabinet, with its access to the substantial resources of the Northern Ireland civil service. Within months of the prorogation, Faulkner's old cabinet had collapsed as an effective political force, and he was faced with an increasingly assertive set of officers from the party's ruling Ulster Unionist Council, within which the older and more traditional elements of the party were strongly ensconced.79 Senior civil service officials such as Sir Harold Black and Kenneth Bloomfield, who had been at the core of the Stormont system, were now working within the new Northern Ireland Office, created to service William Whitelaw's ministerial team.80 While Bloomfield was using his sharp political intelligence and considerable drafting skills in the preparation of the British government's constitutional proposals, Faulkner had to rely on the penny-farthing machine that was the Unionist Party's ‘research and publicity’ department, staffed by a few young graduates almost totally lacking in political experience. Given these exiguous resources, Faulkner's political achievements down to the end of 1973 were considerable.
After winning the support of the Ulster Unionist Council to participate in the constitutional experiment outlined in the White Paper, Faulkner applied all his undoubted resources of energy, courage and verbal dexterity to selling a deal based on power-sharing with the SDLP and what he saw as a ‘merely' symbolic concession to nationalist sentiment in agreeing to the setting up of a Council of Ireland. The manifesto on which Faulkner proposed that the party's candidates contest the June 1973 elections for a new Northern Ireland Assembly contained the formula, soaked in ambiguity, ‘we are not prepared to participate in government with those whose primary objective is to break the Union with Great Britain.’81 Preparing to drop his previous opposition to sharing power with constitutional nationalists, he argued that any member of the proposed Executive had to take an oath under the Northern Ireland Constitution Act of 1973 ‘to uphold the laws of Northern Ireland’, which would make them structurally, if not ideologically, Unionist.82 This was a relatively subtle distinction for many Ulster Unionists to appreciate at a time when their predominant emotions were often ones of bewilderment and apprehension at the collapse of the Stormont regime, coupled with bitter resentment at those they considered responsible, amongst whom the leaders of the SDLP ranked almost as high as the Army Council of the Provisional IRA.
Faulkner insisted that all UUP candidates sign a statement committing them to working within the framework of the White Paper. This statement became known as the ‘Pledge’, and the thirty-nine Unionist candidates who signed it became known as ‘Pledged Unionists’, while the ten party candidates who refused to sign the pledge were ‘Unpledged’.83 The results of the election on 28 June were, as Faulkner admitted, ‘mixed’. He had topped the poll in South Down, and two of his main supporters, Roy Bradford and Basil McIvor, had also come first in East and South Belfast. Craig, by contrast, had come third in North Antrim, trailing not just Paisley but the ‘Pledged’ Unionist as well. Overall the ‘Pledged’ UUP candidates won 29.3 per cent of the first-preference vote and twenty-two seats, with the ‘Unpledged’ Unionists at 8.5 per cent and ten seats. Despite Craig's prediction of thirty seats, the VUPP won 10.5 per cent and seven seats, while the DUP took 10.8 per cent and eight seats.84 The UUP retained a strong pull on a substantial sector of the Protestant electorate, and this traditionalist appeal was accentuated by distrust of Paisleyism and Craig's constitutional radicalism. However, the UUP vote was not necessarily a vote for the White Paper, and up to three of the ‘Pledged’ candidates returned had made it clear that they opposed it. As a result Unionist representation in the Assembly was fairly evenly divided, and the risks of pressing on with the constitutional proposals were evident. However,
together with the SDLP, which had won 22 per cent of the vote and nineteen seats, and the Alliance's 9 per cent and eight seats, the parties supporting the proposed new dispensation had a commanding majority in the Assembly. Negotiations began between delegations of the three parties on the formation of an Executive. Faulkner, perhaps because of an exaggerated belief in the effect of the Border poll in generating a sense of constitutional security amongst unionists, seriously overestimated his ability to sell the prospective deal to his party. He astounded the supportive but cautious Ken Bloomfield when, after a visit to his home in October by the Irish Foreign Minister, Garret FitzGerald, he agreed that the proposed Council of Ireland would not simply be a consultative body but would have executive powers.85 Bloomfield's reaction – that it ‘represented the crossing of a significant Rubicon… I wondered if it would not have proved a bridge too far for the unionist community’86 – accurately predicted the role that an overambitious ‘Irish Dimension’ would have in destroying reformist unionism's prospects for two decades.
Social Democrats versus Provos: Nationalist Politics 1969–1973
While the dynamic behind the Provisionals was found in the Catholic working class of North and West Belfast and Derry's Creggan and Bogside, the modernized constitutional nationalism of the Social Democratic and Labour Party had its social roots in the post-war educational revolution. Francis Mulhern, who as a teenager from a Catholic working-class background in County Fermanagh took part in the civil rights movement, provides an acute summation of the local effects of the Butler Education Act:
The local leaderships of the civil rights movement were to a striking degree highly educated, with teachers, present, past or future, most prominent in them. These people enjoyed a conventional authority, but unlike an earlier generation of their kind they were not a rarity and unlike the Nationalist notables they now displaced they wore their class differences lightly.87
The dominant intellectual influence in the SDLP came from the revisionist nationalist thinking associated first with the National Unity project in the early 1960s and then with the more politicized challenge to the Nationalist Party that emerged with the formation of the National Democratic Party (NDP) in 1965. The NDP's arguments for a participationist strategy that maintained a commitment to unity but only with the consent of a majority in the North, and for a modern democratic party structure, were central to the SDLP at its formation; of the almost 400 people who joined the new party, nearly 80 per cent had been NDP members.88 The NDP had made little progress because it confined its activities to those areas where the Nationalist Party did not have seats, and it was left to the civil rights movement to create that unprecedented mobilization of northern Catholics that made a frontal challenge to the party possible. In the February 1969 Stormont election the Nationalists lost three of their nine seats to independents, all of whom had played a prominent part in the civil rights movement. Most shattering was the defeat of the Nationalist leader, Eddie McAteer, by John Hume in the Foyle constituency. Over the next decade Hume would establish himself as the predominant strategic intelligence in non-violent Irish nationalism on the island. This would also be a period in which constitutional nationalism adopted a more implacable position.
In his early thirties when elected to Stormont, Hume had already established a reputation for incisive criticism of the negativity and conservatism of the Nationalist Party combined with a moderate and ‘responsible’ role in Derry's increasingly disturbed situation after 5 October 1968. From working-class origins, he had been empowered by the Education Act of 1947 to follow the traditional route of many middle-class Derry Catholics through the strict religious and nationalist environment of St Columb's Grammar School to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth. A loss of vocation led him into teaching in his home town and an increasingly prominent role in community politics through his active promotion of ‘self-help’ schemes such as the Credit Union movement and local housing associations. Hume's politics, while professedly left of centre, had little association with the city's labour tradition, which by the end of the 1960s had become heavily influenced by Eamonn McCann's Trotskyism and leftist republicans. Derry's Catholic middle class of teachers, shopkeepers and publicans looked to Hume and other members of the Citizens’ Action Committee to curb the excesses and extremism of the leftists and republicans, who were seen as dangerously influential, particularly on the rioting activities of the young.
During his campaign against McAteer, Hume had committed himself to working for a new political movement based on social democratic principles, which would be ‘completely non-sectarian’ and animated by the ideal that the future of Northern Ireland should be decided by its people.89 However, the insurrection in the Bogside in August 1969 and the impetus it gave to the rebirth of physical-force republicanism would put increasing pressure on this project. At Stormont, Hume attempted to unite the divergent elements of anti-unionism into a coherent force. Nationalist Party hostility to this dangerous upstart meant that the focus of his activities was a group of five MPs, comprising former civil rights leaders and two Belfast labourists, Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin.
Fitt and Devlin were essential to Hume's project of a serious political challenge to unionism, for without them any new party would continue to replicate the largely rural and border-counties orientation of the Nationalist Party. Without a base in Belfast the party would also be absent from the cockpit of the struggle with resurgent republicanism. But both men, with their powerful personalities and strong labour and socialist sentiments, fitted uneasily into the new formation. Fitt, an ex-merchant seaman who had done convoy duty to the USSR during the war, had built a political base in his native dock ward through a combination of republican socialist rhetoric and clientelism. A councillor from 1958, he had entered Stormont in 1962. But it was his victorious return as Republican Labour MP for West Belfast in the 1966 Westminster general election that allowed him to capture the attention of the British and Irish media as he gave powerful and eloquent expression to the emerging civil rights critique of the Unionist regime. Fitt's seniority, his growing influence in the House of Commons and his friendly relations, not only with members of Wilson's cabinet but also with leading Tories, helped to ensure that this arch-individualist who had little interest in questions of long-term strategy or party management became leader of the new party.90
From the start there were tensions. Fitt's predominant orientation towards Westminster-inspired reform of the North was at odds with Hume's increasingly close connections with the southern state. Fitt's almost instinctive class politics led him to be suspicious of Hume's social democratic philosophy and the school teachers and other middle-class Catholics whom he believed dominated the SDLP. This suspicion was shared by Paddy Devlin, a more cerebral socialist but also a fiercely individualist and prickly individual. A republican internee during the Second World War, Devlin had educated himself out of both nationalism and Catholicism to become a dogged and courageous exponent of socialism and secularism. He had won the Falls constituency for the NILP in the 1969 election. Fitt and Devlin insisted that any new organization should make clear its distance from traditional forms of Catholic nationalism by including in its name an identification with the North's Labour tradition, which both saw as the basis for a cross-sectarian appeal. Hume had to explain to an Irish official that the new formation would include the word ‘Labour’ in deference to Fitt and Devlin but asked him to assure Jack Lynch that there would be no connection between the new party and the British, Irish or Northern Irish Labour Parties.91 Fianna Fáil was not to be embarrassed by any outbreak of class politics in the North.
When the SDLP was launched in August 1970, Fitt emphasized its left-of-centre, non-sectarian philosophy. Its nationalism was expressed in a moderate and democratic form: ‘To promote co-operation, friendship and understanding between North and South with a view to the eventual reunification of Ireland through the consent of the majority of the people in the North and South.’92 One of the party's fir
st policy-makers has subsequently outlined the ‘dream’ of many members in 1970: ‘to participate in a coalition government with the NILP and some liberal Unionists. Agreement within Northern Ireland might destroy many Unionists' fears [and] be a preliminary to agreement in Ireland.’93
However, just as the violence of August 1969 had pushed Devlin into rushing to Dublin to call for the defensive arming of northern Catholics, internment and Bloody Sunday forced a radicalization of the SDLP's attitudes to the state. In the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Hume gave an interview on Irish radio in which he said that, for many people in the Bogside, ‘it's a united Ireland or nothing. Alienation is pretty total.’94 In a subsequent interview he claimed that reunification was ‘a lot nearer than many people believed’.95 Radicalization was obvious in the party's policy statement, Towards a New Ireland, published in September 1972, which called on Britain to make a formal declaration of intent in favour of a united Ireland and in the interim proposed that Northern Ireland be jointly ruled by Dublin and London. The document reflected the fear that the Provisional IRA could challenge the party for the leadership of the Catholic community.96
Although the Provisionals had declared that 1972 would be their ‘Year of Victory’,97 direct rule and the possibility of British-sponsored reforms created major problems for them. Many Catholics saw direct rule as a victory and as an antechamber to more radical changes, thus making further republican violence unjustifiable. Even areas with strong support for the IRA, such as Andersonstown in West Belfast, developed local peace groups often linked to the Catholic Church. Such attitudes affected the IRA, and there were reports that rank-and-file Provos in Belfast and Derry favoured a truce.98 Pressure for a Provisional ceasefire was intensified when the Official IRA announced one in May. The Officials had been involved in a militarist competition with the Provisionals since internment. The results had been difficult to reconcile with their pretensions to non-sectarianism and the defence of working-class interests. The Derry Officials shot dead a prominent Unionist Senator, Jack Barnhill, in December 1971. Then, in retaliation for Bloody Sunday, the Officials bombed the officers’ mess of the Parachute Regiment in Aldershot, killing seven people, including five female canteen workers and a Catholic chaplain. Finally, in April 1972, the Derry Officials ‘executed’ Ranger William Best, a young Derry Catholic who had joined the British Army and was home on leave. Convinced that such actions made political progress in the South impossible and could even allow the southern state to introduce internment, Goulding and a majority on the Army Council declared a ceasefire in May.99
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