Ireland Since 1939 Read online

  The history of the shipyards showed much evidence of a strong class consciousness manifest in industrial militancy, but also of the most brutal sectarianism. In 1919 shipyard and engineering workers had brought the city's economic activity to a halt by a general strike for shorter hours. But the Unionist Party leadership, aghast at the possibilities of a divided Protestant community, was soon able to use the intensifying IRA campaign as an object lesson in the need for communal solidarity. More extreme loyalist voices alleged that the shipyards and engineering plants had suffered a process of ‘peaceful penetration’ by Sinn Féiners and extreme socialists when ‘loyal’ workers had been serving king and country.

  The Unionist Party's linkage with the Orange Order provided it with ready access to the fears and grievances of working-class Protestants. The Order had been founded in 1795 in County Armagh as a sort of primitive trade union of Protestant weavers concerned to exclude Catholic competitors from the developing linen industry. Organized in county and district lodges, it had won the patronage of the landlord class, who saw it as a major resource against a feared Catholic jacquerie. Its annual parades on 12 July to commemorate the victory of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne (1690) were seen by its critics as a prime cause of sectarian conflict. Down to the 1880s it had been based on an alliance between the landlords and clergy of the established Church of Ireland and farmers, labourers and weavers: an institution within which lower-class Protestants could mix with their ‘betters’ in the defence of the Protestant interest in Ireland and ultimately of the Union itself. Politically it acted as an electoral machine for the Conservatives. The province's Presbyterian, Liberal tradition, strongly represented amongst the bourgeoisie of Belfast and the tenant farmer class, had been cool or hostile to the Order because of its links with the Tories and the Church of Ireland. However, the common threat of Home Rule had led to the fusion of Tories and Liberals, and to a Presbyterian influx to the Order, which came to be seen as the best grass-roots defender of the constitutional status quo. When the directing body of Unionism, the Ulster Unionist Council, was set up in 1905, the Orange Order was provided with a substantial representation, and its membership expanded rapidly during the mobilization against Home Rule. Its political importance resided not simply in that it had representation as of right in the party at all levels, or that the overwhelming bulk of Unionist MPs and cabinet members were members, but also in its ability to criticize the party and the government if they were seen to deviate from the defence of Protestant interests.

  During the mobilizations against Home Rule, liberal unionists had been careful to emphasize that the unionist case should be put in secular terms, fearing that too much emphasis on Orange and Protestant themes would undermine support in the rest of the United Kingdom.21 At the core of the secular unionist argument had been the economic success of the north-east of Ireland under the Union, symbolized above all by the shipyards, engineering factories and linen mills of Belfast. After 1921 secular unionism went into recession as depressed economic conditions challenged the Unionist Party's ability to contain the force of plebeian Protestant discontent within its ranks, and this was a major factor in encouraging the stridently anti-Catholic rhetoric that disfigured the speeches of leading unionist politicians in the 1930s.

  The industries that had been at the core of Ulster Unionists' self-confidence before 1914 were to experience major problems in the inter-war period. Although the shipyards had performed creditably in the 1920s given a situation of worldwide overcapacity, the slump in world trade after 1929 hit the two firms hard, with employment in the winter of 1932–3 at only a tenth of its 1929–30 level and an unemployment rate of over 80 per cent. The smaller of the two yards, Workman Clark, closed down in 1935, and, although the Harland and Wolff enterprise absorbed some of its plant and labour force and made serious efforts to diversify production, shipbuilding employment at the outbreak of war was still only 10,000 – an improvement on the mere 2,000 at the depth of the depression but just half of the figure for 1929.22 The engineering sector was given an injection of energy with the establishment of the Short and Harland aircraft factory in 1937, an enterprise that employed over 6,000 by May 1939. Shipbuilding and engineering had begun to pull out of recession by 1939, but the region's largest employer of manufacturing labour, the linen industry, faced the bleaker prospect of changes in fashion and lifestyle that consigned linen to the status of a luxury product. There was a contraction in employment in the industry from 75,000 in 1924 to 57,000 in 1939, and by the latter date 20 per cent of its workers were unemployed.

  Agriculture, which in 1926 employed a third of the male and a quarter of the total labour force, suffered like shipbuilding and linen production from adverse international trends: overcapacity and a sluggish growth in demand. The industry was dominated by small farms (70 per cent were under 30 acres and 86 per cent under 50), and its concentration on dairying and livestock, where prices declined less than cereals, was the main reason for a slight improvement in its position in the inter-war period relative to the industry in the rest of the UK. Per capita output, which was 46 per cent of the British level in 1924–5, had reached 53 per cent by 1939. Nevertheless, rural Ulster remained miserably poor. In 1930 Keynes had described the living standards of the region's small farmers as ‘almost unbelievable’, and the wages of farm labourers in the 1930s were less than the unemployment benefit paid to an unemployed married man.23 Despite migration to the towns, the level of unemployment in agriculture was over 20 per cent in 1939. The economy as a whole experienced persistently high unemployment rates, with on average 19 per cent of the insured labour force unemployed between 1923 and 1930 and 27 per cent between 1931 and 1939. In 1939 the figure was 23 per cent, compared with 10 per cent in Britain.24

  The increasingly sectarian tone of the northern state in the 1930s reflected the internal tensions that unemployment and poverty created for a governing party that was committed to the notion of ‘parity’ in a range of social services with the rest of the UK. As unemployed Protestant and Catholic workers rioted together against Belfast's niggardly system of outdoor relief in 1932, the unionist elite worried that the capacity of the Orange Order to bind together the classes in the Protestant community was weakening. The Order found its membership in decline as the new state firmly established itself and unemployment sapped the commitment of its working-class members.25 This thinning of the ranks in the heartland of working-class loyalism was a major concern to the unionist leadership, although they still looked to the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, created in 1918 to counter socialistic influence on the Protestant working class, to win over the ‘cream’ of the working class.26

  The gravity of the economic situation meant that the appeasement of sectarianism was not sufficient to deal with the threat of working-class disaffection. The ‘anti-populists’ such as Spender and Hugh Pollock, the Minister of Finance, had used the Loans Guarantee Act, by which the government guaranteed loans made to business concerns, as a means of preserving employment in the shipyards. The government also continued to fund public works as a method of relieving unemployment after the Treasury had ceased to do so in the rest of the UK.27 But, despite these economic responses, there was no escaping the sour sectarian edge of unionist politics in the 1930s.

  A weakening of Orange influence was accompanied by the development of the more rabid, and less controllable, form of sectarian demands associated with the Ulster Protestant League (UPL), founded in 1931 to ‘keep Ulster Protestant’ by ensuring that Protestant employers took on only ‘loyalists’. A loose alliance of lower-middle-class evangelicals and the poorest sections of the Protestant working class, it was allowed the use of the Unionist Party headquarters to hold its meetings and was patronized by leading members, most notably the Minister of Agriculture and future Prime Minister, Basil Brooke.28 The UPL had thrived in the more febrile environment created by the victory of Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil in the 1932 elections in the South. De Valera's indulgen
ce in the political theatre of intervention in the Stormont elections in 1933, when he was returned on an abstentionist ticket for South Down (another Fianna Fáiler won West Tyrone), contributed to a unionist obsession with the supposed threat of a large-scale inflow of ‘disloyalists’ across the border.

  Basil Brooke, in the 1930s the only rising star in the unionist firmament, identified himself intimately with these concerns. Educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, he was a scion of the ‘fighting Brookes’, a County Fermanagh landowning family with a record of military service and, since the 1880s, of providing militant leadership against the advances of nationalism. Although his own service in India and the Boer War had confirmed his imperialism, action during the First World War had led him to consider the possibility of Irish unity as the price for wholehearted Irish support against Germany; but his return to the role of local landlord and to the unionist and Orange leadership in Fermanagh found him adopting an increasingly parochial and sectarian tone in his politics. The organizational and leadership capacity that he had displayed in the establishment of the Special Constabulary in his area had brought him to Craig's attention and, combined with his relative youth, personal charm and strong family connections with the English military and landed elite, marked him out in a party whose leadership was ageing and suffering from a severe lack of ability. Entering parliament in 1929, he became Minister of Agriculture in 1933, providing the government with one of its few examples of policy activism and earning the reluctant admiration of Spender as one of the two competent members of the cabinet.

  However, Brooke did not allow the regular visits to the cabinet room at Stormont to dilute his public commitment to the more fevered expressions of unionism in Fermanagh. The county was typical of those parts of Northern Ireland where Protestants were in a minority but still dominated local government through the creative drawing of constituency boundaries. In Fermanagh 25,000 unionists had seventeen seats on the county council, while 35,000 nationalists had only seven. Like other leading figures in border-county unionism, Brooke was fixated on the twin threats of ‘infiltration’ from the South and any potential weakening of Protestant unity by those who put economic grievances before communal solidarity. These included Protestant farmers encouraged by speculation that de Valera's government would abolish land annuity payments to demand that Stormont do likewise. Fear of possible independent farmers' candidates splitting the unionist vote led Brooke to denounce ‘semi-Protestants and semi-loyalists’.29 His subsequent political career would be dogged by the reputation for pugnacious sectarianism that he had acquired in the 1930s. Speaking to Fermanagh Orangemen in 1933, he urged Protestant employers to employ ‘Protestant lads and lassies’ and boasted of his own Catholic-free estate. He gave dire warnings of a plot to overturn the unionist majority in the North through ‘infiltration’ and ‘peaceful penetration’ from the South and of Catholics ‘getting in everywhere’ because of laxity and complacency amongst Protestant employers.30

  This exclusivist tone was reflected at the centre of provincial government where Sir James Craig declared in a parliamentary debate in 1934 that Northern Ireland was a ‘Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State’. The declaration was part of a response to a Nationalist MP who had raised the issue of discrimination against Catholics in state employment. Craig asked him to ‘remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.’31 Perhaps conscious of giving a potent propaganda weapon to critics of his government, he claimed that he was not opposed to the employment of Catholics as long as they were loyal to the state. But the distinction between Catholic and ‘disloyalist’ was subverted by his own communal definition of the state and by the public pronouncements of senior ministers like J. M. Andrews, Minister of Labour, who assured ultra-Protestants, kept awake at night by the allegation that twenty-eight of the thirty-one porters at Stormont were Catholics, that he had investigated and found there to be only one Catholic, there on a temporary basis.32

  The increasingly Catholic and nationalist tone of the Free State intensified sectarian animosities in the North. Events like the state-sponsored celebration of the centenary of Catholic Emancipation in 1929, the appointment of a minister at the Vatican in the same year and the holding of the international Eucharistic Congress in 1932 in Dublin were given heavy coverage in unionist newspapers and Orange platforms, as was the declaration by the Bishop of Down and Connor, Joseph MacRory, in December 1931 that it was doubtful if the Protestant Churches were part of the Church of Christ.33 There was no shortage of Protestant clerics to respond in kind, and 1931 had already seen anti-Catholic riots in Portadown, Armagh and Lisburn.34

  The intensifying sectarian tone was accompanied by concern at de Valera's continuing links with those who still insisted they had the right to wage war against the northern state. The IRA's support for Fianna Fail during the 1932 election, the mass release of IRA prisoners as soon as de Valera took power, the organization's open drilling and recruiting, and the expression of violently anti-partitionist sentiments by some of de Valera's senior colleagues35 all contributed to the perception of the South as having entered into a new and aggressive posture.

  But while these factors may help explain the responsiveness of Craig's government to ultra-pressures throughout the 1930s, they do little to excuse it. After attacks on pilgrims travelling from Northern Ireland to the Eucharistic Congress, Dawson Bates arranged with the Attorney-General that the Protestant offenders should be treated leniently.36 In Belfast, where discontent on issues of unemployment and housing could be exploited by both loyalist and labour critics, the attractions of assuaging such discontent through the patronage of ethnic militancy were obvious, but so were the dangers. The first sectarian killing of a Catholic since the 1920–22 period occurred in Belfast in 1933, and there was sectarian rioting in 1934 and during the celebrations of George V's Silver Jubilee in the spring of 1935. The febrile atmosphere had produced an unprecedented decision by Dawson Bates to ban all processions in the city, but, after the threat of open defiance from the Orange Order and the intervention of the Prime Minister, the ban was rescinded in time for the July processions. The parades sparked off the only prolonged and serious outbreak of violence in the city between 1922 and 1969: ten days of riots in which seven Protestants and three Catholics were killed. Apart from the deaths, the Catholic community bore the brunt of the violence, with 430 Catholic families being evicted compared to sixty-four Protestant families.37 The result was the sort of press coverage in the Free State and the UK that the few critics of Craig's populism within the regime feared would spur Westminster to investigate the way devolved power was being exercised. When it did produce precisely this result, defenders of the government would turn the focus of discussion southward, attempting to explain away the blemishes of unionist rule through a lurid depiction of developments in the other Irish state.

  Conservatism in Power: The Irish Free State 1922–1932

  The ‘Irish Revolution’, as a number of scholars have pointed out, was a solely political one. Ireland's chance of a social revolution had been undermined by the land reforms sponsored by the British state, which created an increasingly conservative peasant proprietorship in the four decades before independence. An estimated two thirds to three quarters of Irish farmers had become owners of their land by the outbreak of the First World War. A leading member of the pro-Treaty section of Sinn Féin described the dynamics of this conservative revolution: ‘Getting rid of foreign control rather than vast social and economic changes was our aim.’38 The result is summed up by John M. Regan:

  ‘The revolutionary and civil wars were fought over constitutional forms and symbols, fundamentally the republic versus the Crown, and ultimately on the source of sovereignty. Though there was undoubtedly a class component to both conflicts it did not come to dominate the issue of national sovereignty.’39

  The fundamental priority that Sinn Féin attached to social consen
sus, with its conservative implications, goes far towards explaining the speed with which a stable society, complete with the structures of a democratic political system, was achieved after a decade of insurrection and civil war. The Irish Free State was governed, like its northern counterpart, by a bicameral parliament whose procedures were loosely modelled on those of Westminster. Its Constitution, negotiated with Britain after the Treaty in 1922, had created a form of parliamentary democracy. The lower house, named Dáil Éireann in order to maintain continuity with the revolutionary first Dáil composed of the Sinn Féiners victorious in the 1918 general election, was elected by proportional representation. The Constitution provided for a system of cabinet government: an Executive Council bound by collective responsibility and headed by a President.

  The Constitution was able to come into effect only after the Civil War (1922–3), in which there were between 4,000 and 5,000 deaths (compared with 1,200 in the War of Independence).40 The pro-Treaty victors had to create a new party from the top down using elements of existing political and politico-military organizations. From its inception Cumann na nGaedheal (from 1933 Fine Gael) defined itself as the party of the Treaty, law and order, and Commonwealth status. Its focus on the defence and consolidation of the state was understandable: the prosecution of the war had cost the state £17 million, and material destruction was estimated at about £30 million. Demilitarization was essential both to consolidate the fledgling democracy and to cut the large defence budget. A key decision had already been made during the Civil War: the new police force, the Garda Síochána, was to be unarmed. The decision to create a new army, breaking with ambiguities that had characterized civil–military relations between the Dáil and the IRA during the War of Independence, was a source of considerable resentment amongst sections of the pro-Treaty military, and the rapid demobilization and reduction in the army's size announced in 1923 produced a failed ‘army mutiny’ in 1924.