Those commentators who saw in the victory of the UWC strike the emergence of a new proletarian leadership for unionism had obviously never read Lenin's What is to be Done?, with its powerful dissection of the limits of even the most militant forms of trade union consciousness. After the strike the UWC leadership, faced with decisions about the future, began to fragment. Sarah Nelson has described the various tendencies as follows: ‘hardline Loyalists, more conciliatory socially radical elements and people who had just not thought what constructive alternative they were aiming for’.120 While Glen Barr, together with some leading members of the UVF, saw the UWC as the possible basis for the development of an independent working-class political grouping, the more influential groups were those dominated by support for Craig and Paisley.
Vanguard and the DUP appeared to be equal contenders in the competition to displace an Ulster Unionist Party that, although it was now firmly under the control of the right, remained enervated and demoralized after almost a decade of internecine conflict. Harry West, the bluff Fermanagh farmer whom O'Neill had sacked and Faulkner reinstated, had been elected leader of the party following Faulkner's resignation. After the Westminster general election of October 1974, when he lost his seat for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, West saw his leadership undermined by the increasingly important integrationist lobby led by the leader of the Ulster Unionists at Westminster, the self-effacing but crafty MP for South Antrim, James Molyneaux, and his intellectual guru, the former Conservative MP for Wolverhampton, Enoch Powell, whose record of support for the unionist cause while a Tory got him the UUUC nomination for South Down in the 1974 general election.
In the wake of the collapse of the power-sharing Executive, the Wilson government arranged elections for a Constitutional Convention to consider what provision for the government of Northern Ireland was likely to command the most widespread support. The results, in May 1975, showed for the first time an Ulster Unionist Party that, though remaining the largest single party, with 26 per cent of the vote and nineteen seats, had less support than the combined strength of Vanguard (13 per cent and fourteen seats) and the DUP (15 per cent and twelve seats).121 The UUP was weakened by evidence of increasing tensions between those, like West and the Reverend Martin Smyth, who remained convinced devolutionists, as well as by escalating integrationist pressure from Molyneaux and Powell. The divisions showed up when Craig, to the surprise of many observers, launched a proposal for the formation of an ‘emergency’ coalition government with the SDLP in September 1975. The idea had emerged from discussions between the SDLP and a negotiating team from the UUUC, which had included Craig, William Beattie of the DUP and Austin Ardill of the UUP. It used a section of the proposed UUUC Convention report, which stated that in times of war and similar emergency it was appropriate British practice to form a coalition government. The three had approached the Chairman of the Convention, Sir Robert Lowry, to ask for a report on the idea. Paisley was initially sympathetic,122 but a hostile response from sections of his party, and possibly the realization that Craig could be isolated, led him to denounce the idea once it became public. Craig was, indeed, isolated, and eventually he was expelled from the UUUC.123
During West's leadership of the UUP there were signs that, despite the conflict between its devolutionist and integrationist tendencies, the party had begun to regain some of the self-confidence that had been shattered during the 1968–74 period. In part this reflected the belief that, as the ‘middle ground’ in Ulster politics, it would benefit from the extremism of its loyalist opponents.124 When, as Craig had predicted, the UUUC majority report was ignored at Westminster and the Convention shut down in March 1976, the DUP adopted a militant posture. Here it was influenced by the rhetoric of Craig's opponents in Vanguard. A majority within the organization had opposed the emergency coalition proposal and, led by Ernest Baird, had rechristened themselves the United Ulster Unionist Movement. Baird, who owned a chain of chemist shops, was an uncritical Ulster nationalist, and was beginning to talk of militant resistance to direct rule. He was in the forefront of calls for the formation of a loyalist vigilante force to combat terrorism. In March 1976 he and Paisley took the initiative within the UUUC in forming a United Ulster Action Council to oppose direct rule and press the government for tougher security policies. Within a few weeks the UUP withdrew from the Action Council because of the prominent role of Protestant paramilitaries in it. In contrast to the DUP's dalliance with vigilantism, West's party, with the strong support of the leadership of the Orange Order, urged unionists to join the official security forces.
Baird and the DUP gave much credence to the common belief of the period that Britain was disengaging from Northern Ireland, which provoked a clear sympathy for the idea of loyalists going it alone in some sort of independent state. In the interim Baird and Paisley focused on the ‘disastrous security policies’ being followed by the Northern Ireland Office and in May 1977 attempted a repeat of the UWC strike. The Action Council launched a general strike to force the British government to concede a return to majority rule and tougher security policies. Both the UUP and the Orange Order opposed the strike, as did the crucial group of power workers who had been central to the success of the UWC strike. In September 1976 the ineffectual Merlyn Rees had been replaced as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland by Roy Mason, an altogether blunter and more robust figure. Mason ably exploited the contradiction between the strikers’ demand for increased security and their launching of a major disruption of public order. The strike collapsed ignominiously after a few days.125 In its aftermath the UUUC broke up, and in the local government elections later that year the UUP won 34 per cent of the vote, down on its 1973 share but an improvement on the Convention election. Nevertheless, despite the débâcle of the Action Council strike, the DUP saw a significant increase in support, demonstrating the existence of a growing constituency for its perceived militancy.126
The DUP's hard core of Free Presbyterian activists in its rural and small-town base areas was increasingly augmented by a group of youngish Belfast members, some of them graduates, who were extending the party's influence in the Protestant working class through involvement in community politics and local government. Lean and hungry for power, they took as their model Peter Robinson's expanding fiefdom in the Castlereagh area of East Belfast. Robinson, who was twenty-nine when he won his first elected office for the DUP (as a councillor in Castlereagh in 1977), had been a Paisleyite activist since leaving grammar school in 1966, and his intellectual and organizational abilities had led Paisley to make him his secretary at Westminster in 1970. He became the DUP's general secretary in 1975 and played a central role in making it the most coherent and well-organized party in the North.127 Robinson did not share the scruples of some of the Free Presbyterian members about associating with paramilitaries. While his cultivation of the UDA failed to force a change of British policy in 1977, it contributed significantly to the DUP's winning of its first Belfast constituencies in the Westminster general election of 1979, when Robinson defeated William Craig for East Belfast and his party colleague Johnny McQuade won North Belfast.128 The tensions between the original hard core of Paisleyism, the conservative fundamentalists of areas such as North Antrim and Robinson's more pragmatic, left-of-centre populism were easily enough contained through a combination of the integrating force of Paisley's personality and the healing balm of electoral success.
The success was certainly spectacular. Between the local government elections of 1973 and 1981 the DUP expanded its number of councillors from twenty-one (4 per cent of the vote) to 142 (26.6 per cent), fractionally ahead of the UUP. From a narrow base, with representation in only seven of the North's twenty-six local authorities, the party was now represented on every council in Northern Ireland. Most spectacular of all was its advance in Belfast: from two seats to fifteen, making it the largest party on the Council.129 But it was the first direct election to the European Parliament, in 1979, that did most to support Paisley's claim to be
the leader of Protestant Ulster. With Northern Ireland treated as one constituency, his own gargantuan appetite for electioneering – he claimed to have covered 122 miles on foot and 4,000 miles by car130 – and the DUP's polished election machine, he delivered a devastating blow to the UUP, which had put up two candidates, John Taylor and Harry West. Taking 170,688 votes, 29.8 per cent of the total, Paisley topped the poll and claimed that he now spoke for a majority of the Unionist population. Between them the two UUP candidates obtained 125,169 votes, 22 per cent. West's particularly weak performance, which reflected his marked disinclination to pursue an active canvass, led to his resignation as leader of the UUP. His replacement by Molyneaux marked another stage in the increasingly integrationist tone of the party.
Padraig O'Malley, at this time of DUP ascendancy, wrote of Paisley:
he is the personification of the ‘fearful Protestant’, the embodiment of the Scots-Presbyterian tradition of uncompromising Calvinism that has always been the bedrock of militant Protestant opposition to a united Ireland. It is a tradition shaped by a siege mentality, and the almost obsessive compulsion to confirm the need for unyielding vigilance.131
This overplays the religious and irrational component in Paisleyism's success, important though it was, at the expense of those elements of the political conjuncture that were favourable to the DUP. The return of the Tories in 1979 had replaced a period of ‘positive direct rule’ under the Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason with another search for a devolutionary settlement under his successor, Humphrey Atkins. Molyneaux's integrationist agenda – which his friendship with Margaret Thatcher's Northern Ireland spokesman, Airey Neave, had encouraged him to believe would be indulged when the Tories returned to power – had been pointedly ignored. When Atkins's initiative failed, in part because Molyneaux had cold-shouldered it, a resentful Thatcher turned towards an Anglo-Irish framework with a summit in Dublin with Charles Haughey in December 1980, in which she agreed to new institutional structures to reflect the ‘unique relationship’ between the two islands and to further meetings to give ‘special consideration to the totality of relations within these islands’. While Molyneaux continued to reassure his followers that he had the ear of the British Prime Minister, Paisley scented betrayal and launched the ‘Carson Trail’, a series of paramilitary-style rallies in which he vowed to go to any lengths to resist Thatcherite ‘treachery’.
Fighting the Long War: British Policy 1974–1985
Although by the time of direct rule a number of senior Conservative politicians such as Peter Carrington and William Whitelaw had come to agree with Harold Wilson that the only ultimate solution was Irish unity, it was recognized that this would be a long-term process. Power-sharing devolution and an ‘Irish Dimension’ would, it was hoped, provide interim structures that, while providing stability, could be open to constitutional change. However, when Wilson returned to power in 1974 he asked one of his advisers, Bernard Donoghue, to put forward suggestions for a new initiative. This occurred before the UWC strike and illustrates Wilson's belief that the Sunningdale project was doomed. Donoghue's paper suggested granting Northern Ireland dominion status, with the UK, the US and Ireland acting as guarantors of Catholic rights within the now autonomous Ulster state. By the time of the strike, Wilson had established a small and secret committee in the Cabinet Office to develop new ideas on the North. After the strike, Wilson wrote a memorandum arguing that, as power-sharing was now ruled out, the UK government was in a position of ‘responsibility without power’ and proposing that his ‘Doomsday Scenario’ of withdrawal be seriously considered. He proposed dominion status and a tapering off of financial support to the province over five years.132 Nothing came of these proposals, in part because of the horrified reaction of the SDLP when Wilson put forward the idea of Ulster independence to a delegation in June 1974.133 The UK Ambassador to the United States also warned that the US ‘would most likely follow the lead of the Irish Republic in castigating withdrawal as a loss of will and a betrayal.’134 Although little hope was vested in the Constitutional Convention and the British government prepared for direct rule for the foreseeable future, Wilson's withdrawal plans had contributed to an air of fevered speculation in the province about the possibility of British disengagement.
Such rumours had their origins also in secret negotiations between British officials and the leadership of the Provisional IRA, which resulted in an IRA ceasefire that lasted for most of 1975. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and his allies in the leadership of the Provisionals had seen the UWC strike as a watershed that ‘threw British policy totally into the melting pot… The word coming through was that every solution was up for consideration.’135 The ‘word’ was conveyed by various officials from the Foreign Office and the security services, working out of Laneside, a nineteenth-century mansion on the shores of Belfast Lough where the Political Affairs section of the Northern Ireland Office preferred to have its meetings with paramilitaries away from possible media intrusion. The British officials did not discourage the Provisional belief that the Constitutional Convention had been set up in the expectation that it would fail through loyalist intransigence, thus providing the British government with the justification for extrication. There is some evidence that the officials involved may have gone as far as talking about the ‘structures of disengagement’.136
The British had hoped that a successful political initiative would enable the SDLP to marginalize the republicans politically and make their military defeat easier. Since Operation Motorman the Provisionals' campaign in Belfast and Derry had been curtailed radically, and the political developments of 1973 put the IRA on the defensive. The level of violence had reduced considerably. With 470 deaths and over 10,000 recorded shootings, 1972 was by far the worst year in three decades of the ‘Troubles’. By 1974 the number of deaths had fallen to 220 and shootings were down by two thirds. In 1972, 105 British soldiers had been killed, while by 1974 the figure was thirty.137 However, the IRA compensated for setbacks in its urban strongholds by intensifying its campaign in rural areas such as mid Ulster and south Armagh. It had also initiated a bombing campaign in England in 1973 to compensate for being forced on the defensive in the North and to attempt to galvanize the undoubtedly strong ‘troops out’ sentiment in British public opinion. The first deaths occurred when a bomb on a coach carrying British soldiers killed twelve people in February 1974. Bombings of pubs that were claimed to be ‘military targets’ because they were used by soldiers followed, with deaths and dozens of injured at Guildford and Woolwich. The culmination of this first Provisional campaign was the bombing of the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town pubs in Birmingham on 21 November 1974 in which nineteen people were killed and 182 injured.138
Although the republicans were contained militarily, their continued capacity for violence and the resultant communal polarization made the possibility of a ceasefire very attractive for the British. The ceasefire allowed the political embarrassment of internment to be ended. The murder and intimidation of witnesses and jurors had already resulted in the introduction of so-called Diplock courts (named after Lord Diplock who, in 1973, had chaired a commission to investigate alternatives to internment), where persons accused of ‘scheduled offences’, that is those of a terrorist nature, could be tried in the absence of a jury. The Emergency Provisions Act of 1973, which introduced these courts, also repealed the Special Powers Act while re-enacting many of its provisions. Like the Prevention of Terrorism Act introduced after the Birmingham bombs, which allowed for detention for up to seven days and provided for the exclusion from the rest of the UK of ‘undesirables’ from the North, it was to apply for one year but was renewable annually. Both pieces of legislation became key components of the state's anti-terrorist strategy. Although they had a real effect in weakening paramilitary structures, they inevitably generated resentment in those Catholic working-class areas where they were often implemented in a heavy-handed and indiscriminate manner.139
The cease
fire also allowed the shift to a security strategy of ‘Ulsterization’ under which the role of the British Army was diminished in favour of the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment. While this avoided the possibility of a Vietnam syndrome in British politics, its effect in deepening sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland cannot be overemphasized. In the early 1970s there were over 23,000 British soldiers in Northern Ireland, compared with 7,000 full-time and part-time police officers and 7,500 in the locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment. By the end of the 1980s the number of British soldiers had declined to around 10,000, while the RUC had increased to 11,500, with the UDR maintaining its size at 7,500.140 After 1976, while the IRA was still capable of dealing the British Army occasional major blows – most spectacularly at Narrow Water near Warrenpoint in County Down in 1979, when its bombs kiled eighteen soldiers – its most relentless campaign was aimed at local members of the security forces. These were largely Protestant and often, when part-timers, easy targets as they carried out their jobs as bus drivers, milkmen and farm labourers. As the ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ increasingly killed Protestant members of the Irish working class, its effects on community relations began to concern even some members of the IRA's leadership, who were repulsed by the brutal and casual sectarianism of many of their northern comrades.141
Along with Ulsterization went a policy of ending the granting of political status to paramilitary prisoners. Since 1972 political status had allowed prisoners to organize their day-to-day existence in prison, including wearing their own clothes and running education classes instead of performing the prison work required of ‘ordinary decent criminals’. During the ceasefire Merlyn Rees announced that political status would be ended for all newly convicted paramilitary prisoners. With the IRA leadership confident that all its prisoners would soon be released as part of the process of British withdrawal, there were only the most formal of protests from republicans.142
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