Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  While such sentiments might be music to the ears of Irish republicans, one of the lessons of the period covered in this book is that just as there is no violent way to Irish unity, neither is there an economically determinist one. For all the growing maturity of political debate on Northern Ireland in the Republic, there remains the danger that its economic success story will be used to reinvigorate a traditionalist nationalist narrative. This holds great dangers, as it has been all too easy to represent the history of Northern Ireland since the 1960s as one of Protestant loss. The arch-exponent of this narrative of decline and betrayal has been Ian Paisley. There is much in what follows about the various attempts to modernize both states, but, whereas ‘modernization’ is often associated with the growth of liberalism and the decline of religious sectarianism, the Irish experience, particularly that north of the border, has been more complex and bleaker than this term would suggest.

  1. The Legacy of Partition

  The Dynamics of Unionist Rule

  On the eve of the Second World War, the two states that had emerged out of the conflicts between Irish nationalism and the British state and between nationalism and Ulster Unionism appeared even more deeply antagonistic to each other than they had at the time of their formation. The Ulster Unionist Party had come quickly to embrace the devolved institutions of government created by the Government of Ireland Act (1920). These institutions had been established not in response to a movement for self-government in the north of Ireland but rather as a part of the British government's attempt at a general settlement of the Irish question. The provisions in the Act for a separate parliament and administration in Northern Ireland had been accepted reluctantly by unionists, whose struggle against Irish nationalism was motivated by a desire to maintain the status quo of British governance from Westminster, not by any positive vision of regional self-government. However, even before the Northern Ireland parliament had shifted from its temporary accommodation in a Presbyterian theological college to the overblown grandeur of a new building with a classical façade in the Stormont estate in East Belfast in 1932,1 the attractions of devolution for the Unionist Party had become compelling.

  In part, the change in attitude was a product of their experience during the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921). The Treaty, which provided for a twenty-six-county state with the status of a dominion within the British Empire, split Sinn Féin, the revolutionary nationalist movement that had led the political and military campaign against British rule in the War of Independence (1919–21). Lloyd George had for a time attempted to persuade the unionists to accept Irish unity in order to ensure that what was perceived to be the less anglophobic section of Sinn Féin would triumph over the more militant section of the nationalist movement.2 Fears of ‘betrayal’ by British politicians increased the attractiveness of an institutional buffer between Belfast and London. A related but distinct concern was to be as untrammelled as possible in dealing with what was perceived to be a hostile Catholic minority.

  Although the Government of Ireland Act asserted, in Section 75, the ultimate sovereignty of the Westminster parliament, which also retained all the crucial fiscal powers, it extended to the devolved parliament ‘power to make laws for the peace, order and good government’. Law and order issues were at the centre of the Northern Ireland government's concerns from the inception of the state, for reasons that stemmed from the nature of unionism as an organized movement and also from the specific conditions in which the new state was created.

  From the emergence of the Home Rule threat in the 1880s Ulster Unionists had reserved the right to resist rule from Dublin, seen as both economically and socially regressive and hostile to their Protestant and British identities, by force if necessary. The formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1913 as part of the Ulster Unionist Council's strategy of opposition to the Liberal government's Home Rule Bill was the most substantial manifestation of unionism's conviction that proposals that would alter radically their citizenship of the United Kingdom dissolved normal conditions of loyalty to the constitution.3 The UVF's drilling and subsequent importation of arms had the unintended consequence of assisting radical nationalists in their challenge to the still-dominant constitutionalist tradition of John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party. Although Redmond had maintained control of the paramilitary Irish Volunteers, which had been formed in response to the creation of the UVF, his support for the British war effort led to a radical nationalist scission that was to provide the nucleus for the armed insurrection in Dublin at Easter 1916. The insurrection and the subsequent execution of its leaders did much to strengthen the forces making for the militarization of Irish politics, which, by the time the Government of Ireland Act was passed, had produced in Sinn Féin and the IRA much more implacable opponents for unionists.

  The post-Rising upsurge of revolutionary nationalism had powerful reverberations for the Catholic and nationalist minority in the new state in the North. They had opposed partition not only because it would put them under a Protestant regime but also because of its violation of the unity of the ‘historic Irish nation’. Catholics comprised a third of the population of the new state, although they were a majority in two of the six counties – Tyrone and Fermanagh – and in the second city, Derry. Their political affiliations were divided between the Nationalist Party led by Joe Devlin, a Belfast politician who had been one of Redmond's chief lieutenants before 1914, and Sinn Féin, the party that had displaced it in the rest of Ireland in the 1918 Westminster election. The survival of Redmondism in Northern Ireland reflected the distinctive history of the region's Catholics, which has been well described by Enda Staunton: ‘The hemmed-in situation of northern Catholics, the weakness of their middle class and the consequently disproportionate clerical influence left them strongly insulated from trends in the rest of Ireland.’4 From the inception of the state an important basis for the strength of constitutional nationalism lay in the fear amongst a sizeable sector of Catholics that Sinn Féin's political militancy and the IRA's activities would contribute to sectarian violence from which the Catholic community, particularly in Belfast, would be the main losers.

  In 1918 Sinn Féin had not asked for a mandate for the use of force against British rule, but its identification with the 1916 insurrection allowed its military wing, the IRA, to initiate its armed struggle in 1919 with a substantial degree of popular acquiescence, if not active support. But in Ulster the IRA's armed campaign, based on the simplistic assumption that the only substantial obstacle to Irish self-determination was British rule, ignited a sectarian conflagration, which, beginning with the mass expulsion of Catholics from the shipyards and engineering plants in Belfast in July 1920, would over the next two years result in 453 deaths, 7,500 expulsions from workplaces and 5,000 evictions from homes.5 The majority of victims were Catholics.

  The shipyard expulsions and much of the subsequent Protestant violence were the work of unofficial ‘vigilance’ groups and armed gangs. However, the decision of the fledgling government to control and discipline Protestant reaction to the IRA through the integration of such groups and the recently reconstituted UVF into a Special Constabulary would colour Catholic attitudes to the security apparatus of the state for decades to come. Although unionist leaders would at times accept that there was no necessary connection between being a Catholic and being ‘disloyal’, the three-tier Special Constabulary was from formation to dissolution an almost totally Protestant force. At its high point of mobilization against the IRA in 1922–3, its three sections had a total of 14,200 Specials mobilized, while the RUC was only 1,200 strong.6 Even when any substantial IRA threat had disappeared in the later 1920s, the part-time ‘B Specials’ had a membership of 12,000. This dwarfed the RUC, which, when it reached its full complement, had 3,000 members.7

  A departmental committee established by the Minister of Home Affairs had recommended that the full complement for the RUC should be 3,000 and that one third of the force should be Catholic.
This led to almost a third of the force's NCO/junior-officer level being Catholic. Catholic representation at rank-and-file level was considerably less at 13.7 per cent. Overall, the Catholic share of the police would stagnate in the inter-war period and begin to decline from the 1950s when the RIC generation began to retire.8 This, in part, reflected the partisan flavour given to the state's security apparatus by the Specials and the sanctioning by the government of a request by some members of the RUC to be allowed to form an Orange lodge.

  The populist and sectarian dimensions of the new regime must be related to the violent and threatening conditions of its early years. A British government official sent to Belfast in 1922 described the dominant unionist mentality: ‘The Protestant community of the North feels that it is an outpost of civilisation set precariously on the frontiers of Bolshevism. It believes that the British government has betrayed it and at best that its cause is misunderstood in England.’9

  Sir James Craig, the Ulster Unionist Prime Minister, had met Michael Collins, the IRA leader and head of the new provisional government in Dublin, in January 1922, in an attempt to establish a modus vivendi between the two states. The first Craig–Collins pact exchanged Collins's calling off of a southern economic boycott of Belfast for Craig's commitment to have expelled Catholic workers reinstated in the shipyards. However, Collins continued to support Catholic schoolteachers and nationalist-controlled local authorities who refused to recognize the new Northern Irish state. He also secretly approved a series of IRA raids across the border into Fermanagh and Tyrone, which led to the kidnapping of forty-two prominent loyalists who were to be used as bargaining counters to secure the release of IRA prisoners. IRA killings of B Specials and violent loyalist reprisals in Belfast, including a bomb attack that killed six children, were part of a deteriorating situation in the North, which in March claimed the lives of thirty-five Catholics and eighteen Protestants.10

  In a desperate effort to halt the escalation of violence, the two leaders met at the end of March and agreed a second and more far-reaching pact. At its core was a proposal that police patrols in religiously mixed areas of Belfast would be composed of equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics and that all Specials not needed for this force should be stood down. There was also provision for an Advisory Committee of Catholics to assist in the recruitment of their co-religionists for the Specials. The British government was to provide £500,000 for relief works to employ expelled workers. Here there was the outline of a non-sectarian Northern Ireland as far as security and employment policy was concerned. It was in line with a declaration by Craig in February 1921 that ‘The rights of the minority must be sacred to the majority… it will only be by broad views, tolerant ideas and real desire for liberty of conscience that we here can make an ideal of the parliament and executive.’11 As J. J. Lee has pointed out, Craig ‘could at times show physical and even moral courage well above the ordinary’.12 He had chosen a liberal unionist, Lord Londonderry, as his first Minister of Education, and the Londonderry Education Act of 1923 had attempted to provide for a secular, integrated system of primary education. Although it failed, largely because of the united and bitter opposition of Catholic and Protestant Churches, it had reflected a genuine desire on the Prime Minister's part for reconciliation of the two religious traditions.

  The non-fulfilment of both Craig–Collins pacts and Craig's failure to deliver on his early non-sectarian rhetoric were largely a product of two factors. One was the regime's fear of divisions in the Protestant community and a resultant propensity to indulge grass-roots loyalism. As the British official sent to investigate nationalist allegations of police involvement in murderous reprisals for IRA attacks noted, ‘Ministers are too close to their community and cannot treat their ministries as from a distance.’ The other factor was reflected in his conclusion that the basic reason for the collapse of the second pact was the failure of the IRA to abide by Clause 6 of the Craig–Collins pact, which provided for a cessation of armed activity in the North.13 Instead the IRA had killed one Unionist MP and burnt the houses of others, and the Irish Army had added its contribution by an ‘invasion’ of Fermanagh in May 1922.

  The period of state formation established a negative and long-lasting dialectic between the sectarian and populist aspects of the northern regime and an aggressive and threatening approach from Dublin, both of which undermined conciliatory tendencies within northern nationalism. Key Ulster Catholic leaders, particularly in Belfast, had initially favoured some form of recognition of Craig's regime, but support for such a strategy was weakened by IRA attacks and unofficial Protestant reprisals. The tone of nationalist politics was increasingly set by the more militant and rejectionist voices from the border areas where Catholics were in a majority. The result was disastrous for the Catholic community. They did not contest the gerrymandering of the local government election boundaries by the electoral commission set up in 1922 under the control of the Minister of Home Affairs' nominee, Sir John Leech. The 1924 election revealed the vital importance of the commission's work. As Michael Farrell notes, ‘Some of the results were bizarre. In the Omagh Rural Council area with a 61.5 per cent Catholic majority, the nationalists had won the council in 1920 with twenty-six seats to thirteen. After Leech's endeavours the Unionists held it with twenty-one seats to eighteen.’14 The nationalist boycott of the Leech commission gave the Unionists a ready-made excuse. Thus when the British Council of Jews asked the British Home Secretary how it was that 59,000 Protestants in Tyrone elected sixteen representatives to the county council, while 74,000 Catholics elected only eleven, a senior official in the Ministry of Home Affairs explained: ‘When electoral areas were being fixed the Nationalists absolutely refused to take any part in the inquiries or to come and state their case and it was completely impossible for the persons who were holding the inquiry to look after their interests in these areas.’15 The gerrymandering naturally increased opportunities for discrimination in local government employment. As one official admitted, ‘There can be little doubt that in those areas where there was a Protestant majority in the councils, in practice posts do not often go to Catholics.’16 The unionist leadership was not totally united on this issue. The head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS), Sir Wilfrid Spender, hoped that it would be possible to induce some of the councils to use their powers of co-option to secure a better representation of minorities (and claimed that Craig did too). He also opposed discrimination against Catholics by local government agencies.17 Such doubts and reservations within the unionist leadership were to prove of little significance in the absence of Catholic attempts to exploit them.

  While discriminatory practices were most developed in unionist-controlled local authorities in the west of the province, central government was also affected. Although a number of Catholics were appointed to senior posts in the NICS, there were instances of discrimination from the beginning, and over sixty appointments were made without normal selection procedures being observed at all. At the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Minister, Robert Dawson Bates, refused to allow Catholic appointments. In 1926 the Minister of Labour and future Prime Minister, John Andrews, found two ‘Free Staters’ in his ministry when he returned from holiday and immediately initiated a tightening of regulations to disqualify such candidates. In 1927 the Minister of Agriculture boasted that there were only four Catholics in his ministry.18 Spender and successive Ministers of Finance, perhaps because of their annual negotiations with the Treasury, were concerned that such ostentatious sectarianism could produce a destabilizing intervention from London. They were also strongly pre-Keynesian and critical of the regime's propensity to make ‘extravagant’ public expenditure commitments to solidify communal solidarity.

  But Craig's populist policy of ‘distributing bones’ to Ulster Unionism's supporters, while it was the despair of the officials at the Ministry of Finance,19 reflected the fact that his political life, particularly in his later and least impressive years, had been dominated by the fear of P
rotestant schism. From its inception his government was attacked for not being sufficiently ‘Protestant’ and for its failure to shield its working-class supporters from the depressed economic conditions of the inter-war years. Divisions along class and intra-sectarian fissures were most threatening in the heartlands of proletarian unionism in Belfast.

  The city, with a population of 437,000 in 193720 – nearly one third of the total for the province – had from the beginning of the previous century suffered periodic outbursts of sectarian violence. While these were often sparked by political developments in the broader conflict between unionism and Irish nationalism, they also reflected competition over employment and housing amongst Protestant and Catholic workers. The development from the mid nineteenth century of shipbuilding and engineering industries with a workforce dominated by skilled Protestant artisans contributed strongly to a less open labour market than in the older linen industry where Catholics had been represented more equally. Together with the city's increasingly unenviable record for sectarian violence, which acted as a deterrent for Catholic migrants from the Ulster countryside, Belfast's emergence as a major centre of heavy industry helped to explain the decline of the Catholic proportion of Belfast's population from 34 per cent in 1861 to 23 per cent in 1911.