Ireland Since 1939 Read online

Class Conflict and Sectarianism

  An important factor in Unionist Party dissatisfaction with Andrews was his perceived weakness in dealing with the increasing industrial militancy that had affected Belfast from 1941. During the war Northern Ireland provided 10 per cent of the British total of working days lost through strikes while accounting for only 2 per cent of the UK's workforce.69 Although some unionists were prepared to blame this on subversive immigrants from the South, who allegedly flooded the North to get jobs in the expanding war industries, there is more solid evidence that roots it in the recent industrial history of the region. Andrews's willingness to adopt a conciliatory approach to the workers reflected clear evidence of rigid, authoritarian and obstructive managerial attitudes, particularly in the shipyards and the aircraft factories. These stimulated the resurgence of a tradition of militancy that had lain dormant for two decades.

  During the Great War a powerful unofficial shop stewards' movement had developed in Belfast's shipbuilding and engineering industries, and in the immediate post-war period the city had been convulsed by indus-trial militancy, culminating in a three-week general strike that shut down the city in January 1919. Deepening unemployment and the sectarian tensions associated with the intensifying conflict between the IRA and the British state had allowed loyalist militants to refocus Protestant working-class anger from employers to Catholics, who were said to have ‘infiltrated’ the North's industries, taking the jobs of loyalists who had enlisted. The result was the mass workplace expulsions of Catholics and socialists in July 1920 that severely weakened trade union organization in the city. Two subsequent decades of heavy unemployment had resulted in a situation of cowed workers and employers used to the exercise of unchallenged power. By the end of 1941 the war had produced a radical shift in the industrial balance of power. Employers and the official trade union movement had to come to terms with a new shop stewards' movement that used the alliance with the Soviet Union and the demands of industrial mobilization to carve out a role for itself in joint production committees, which the government encouraged as a way of maximizing production.70

  For many workers, attitudes to the domestic war effort were coloured by memories of inter-war insecurity and hostility and distrust towards foremen and management. Ministers and officials in London complained of a lack of cooperation and goodwill, which seemed endemic in Northern Ireland's industrial relations. Harland and Wolff's productivity was lower than that of any British yard, and absenteeism was twice as high as that in the worst yards in the UK. A British official who visited Short and Harland's plants in late 1942 estimated that the firm was working at a mere 65 per cent efficiency and complained that ‘any amount of people are drawing pay for loafing about’. The firm had an unenviable record for strikes, and it has been suggested that there and elsewhere industrial relations problems stemmed from the rapid recruitment ‘from all and sundry’.71 Despite tight RUC surveillance of industrial militants, it was none the less difficult to find suitable subversives. As a senior Stormont official explained to London about one major strike at Short and Harland, ‘It is led by agitators whose motivation is sometimes doubtful though we cannot obtain proof of their subversive intention.’72

  Part of the government's problem in finding scapegoats for the strikes was that many of those who would traditionally have been seen as subversives were members of the Communist Party. After the invasion of the USSR the party shifted from an anti-war position that had led to the jailing of some of its leading members to become the most vociferous champion of the subordination of sectional interests to the war effort. By 1943 the party had 1,000 members, the vast majority Protestant workers in key industries.73 Andrews, who had helped found the Ulster Unionist Labour Association in 1918 to attack ‘Bolshevist’ influence in the Belfast labour movement, now publicly praised ‘our gallant Russian allies who are fighting with such wonderful bravery in the common cause of freedom’.74 Communists, who were active in the shop stewards' movement, did all they could in order to prevent strikes and denounced those that did take place.75

  The government was also aware that workers had genuine grievances. Andrews explained, to the Cabinet Committee on Manpower that the trade unions in Harland and Wolff had pointed out that the best way to deal with absenteeism at the shipyards was to do something about the primitive welfare facilities, particularly the lack of workers' canteens.76 Management dismissal of any role for unions in schemes for improving productivity was common. The main cause of militancy was the use made by management of the wartime legal framework outlawing strikes. The Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order, introduced throughout the UK in August 1940, prohibited strikes and lockouts and created a National Arbitration Tribunal to deal with disputes. Workers and unions found the arbitration machinery excessively slow, and the result was a temptation to unilateral action. However, in Northern Ireland, employers, the police and the judiciary showed a markedly more repressive response to such action than their counterparts in the rest of the UK. Thus during the first two years the Order was in place 2,068 workers were prosecuted in Britain, while in Northern Ireland the figure was 2,271.77

  As the war increased the power of labour, with trade union membership rising from 114,000 in 1941 to 147,000 in 1945,78 tensions developed within unionism between the need to maintain harmonious relations among the main social classes in the Protestant community and the complaints of an industrial bourgeoisie and provincial middle class that was increasingly obsessed with the government's alleged capitulation to ‘socialistic’ trends imported from Britain. These tensions contributed powerfully to the dissatisfaction with Andrews. Brooke was dismayed at Andrews's approach to industrial unrest. The Prime Minister intervened to have fines imposed on workers for strike action reduced, despite the opposition of Brooke and Dawson Bates.79 When the management of Short and Harland provoked a mass strike in October 1942 by sacking two shop stewards, Brooke was in favour of a hardline response, but Andrews chose a more emollient approach by setting up a court of inquiry, which, although it criticized the shop stewards, supported their reinstatement.80 Churchill and Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, were critical of what they saw as a dangerous concession to an illegal strike,81 but Andrews continued to exasperate London and infuriate Ulster's business class by refusing to use troops to move goods and raw materials from the Belfast docks during a carters' strike in March 1943.82

  Within a month Andrews had gone, but if the middle class hoped for a hardening of approach from his successor they were to be disappointed. Brooke, who came to the premiership as a champion of industrial discipline, was soon forced to take a broader and more politicized view of industrial relations. In March 1944 a strike of engineers at Harland and Wolff for increased pay was supported by a sympathy action at Short and Harland. Despite instructions from union leaders in London to return to work, over 14,000 workers remained out for three weeks, severely disrupting essential war production; eventually the government had five leading shop stewards arrested. When the stewards were sentenced to three months' imprisonment, the industrial action spread to include dockers, who closed the port of Belfast.83 Brooke had tried to persuade Churchill to treat the dispute exceptionally by having the wage claim dealt with quickly but had received no support from London.84 Only Brooke's direct intervention to persuade the shop stewards that if they accepted bail an appeal would be assured of a sympathetic hearing, together with employers' offer of a pay rise, succeeded in getting the men back to work.85

  The strike provided evidence of the way in which the government attempted to dissipate class tensions within the Protestant community by blaming unrest on those who wanted to exploit grievances to advance anti-partitionism. During the strike the RUC had visited the homes of leading shop stewards to find out, according to William Lowry, the Minister of Home Affairs, whether the shop stewards' movement ‘was made up almost exclusively of Roman Catholics who were natives of Eire’.86 Here Brooke's administration carried on with one of the most ingl
orious aspects of Andrews's legacy of Protestant populism. ‘Éirean infiltration’ had been a major concern of Andrews's government since the beginning of 1942, when some of its loyalist critics accused it of importing southern workers when northerners were still unemployed. The expansion of the North's industries in 1941 had acted as a magnet for the 7,000 Irish citizens who crossed the border that year. Of these, about 900 had been brought north by the Ministry of Labour to fill skilled jobs in engineering, shipbuilding and the construction industry for which there were no suitable local workers. Accused by the Independent Unionist MP for Shankill that his government was ‘importing Fifth Columnists’, Andrews immediately created a cabinet subcommittee to investigate the problem of ‘infiltration’ from Éire.87

  The investigation concluded that there was no economic threat to northern workers, as most of the imported workers did work for which there was no adequate supply of local labour, and also that the temporary nature of their employment meant that they would be unable to qualify for unemployment benefit, which required residence for five years. It also dismissed security concerns as ‘greatly exaggerated’ and concluded that no special measures were necessary.88 Despite this, Andrews's desire to deflect ultra-loyalist criticisms and Dawson Bates's obsession with republican threats to the war effort ensured that this was not the last word on the matter.

  Bates, with Andrews's support, approached Herbert Morrison in March 1942 asking for new powers to control movement from the South. He focused on recent police raids that had produced evidence of IRA preparations for a renewed campaign.89 The IRA's ambush of an RUC patrol in West Belfast, in which Constable Patrick Murphy was shot dead, may have lessened any doubts harboured at Westminster about the proposed legislation. Under the Residence in Northern Ireland Restriction Order introduced at Westminster in October 1942, all British subjects (a category into which, despite de Valera's new constitution, the Irish still fitted) not normally resident in Northern Ireland on 1 January 1940 were required to obtain a permit from the Ministry of Home Affairs if they wished to stay in Northern Ireland for longer than six weeks. Permits were to be issued where the person was needed to fill a job vacancy for which there was no suitable local candidate.90

  The existence of the new legislation simply intensified pressure on the government to be seen to defend the employment prospects of Protestants. Even Andrews's administration was prepared, on occasion, to withstand this pressure in the interests of the war effort. The cabinet supported the Minister of Labour when he permitted the importation of skilled quarry workers from the South who were urgently needed to produce the stone for building bases and air fields. But, as he pointed out, ‘there will be protests against bringing men from Eire while there are still unemployed men on our register, no matter how unfit or unsuitable such unemployed men might be’. The cabinet decided that in this case the needs of the war effort should come before the defence of Protestant interests, particularly when it was pointed out to them that the local representatives of the British and American armed forces might inform their superiors that the government was putting narrow political interests before the anti-fascist struggle.91

  Brooke, for all his criticisms of Andrews's failure to respond effectively to the demands of total war, showed himself only too willing to bring the most parochial sectarian grievances to the cabinet table. A complaint to the Prime Minister from a County Fermanagh Unionist about a Ministry of Agriculture veterinary inspector who was a southerner was brought to cabinet despite the fact the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture had defended the appointment, pointing out that the man was a distinguished graduate of University College Cork with exceptionally good qualifications in dairy science, which were much superior to those of northern candidates.92

  Between the introduction of the legislation and September 1946, work permits were granted to 36,447 Eire citizens and to 21,881 workers from Britain. Permits were refused to 18 per cent of Eire applicants, compared to only 2 per cent of non-Eire applicants.93 Brooke's strategy was to manipulate grass-roots pressure by its controlled indulgence. Thus the champions of a loyalist labour policy were apparently indulged while the demand of Protestant employers and farmers for badly needed labour from the South were largely satisfied, and the female members of the Protestant middle class were not denied access to their traditional source of maids and kitchen staff.

  By 1944 the problem of unemployment had disappeared, but the cabinet was increasingly concerned with the spectre of a post-war crisis brought about by economic readjustment, the return of Protestants from the forces and an influx of southerners attracted by the new benefits of the welfare state. Ironically, the minister most perturbed by apocalyptic visions of a post-war invasion was Harry Midgley, the ex-NILP firebrand. He had resigned from the Labour Party in 1942 because he claimed it was increasingly dominated by anti-partitionists; he and his supporters set up a Commonwealth Labour Party. When Brooke formed his first government, he attempted to give it a more progressive tone by bringing in Midgley as Minister of Public Security. However, the deep reservations that many members of the Unionist Party had about the Beveridge Report were also reflected in substantial opposition to Midgley's role in government. His increasing fixation with the imminent deluge of southerners was an attempt to establish his loyalist credentials. By his exaggerated focus on the magnetic influence that the Beveridge proposals would have on citizens of Éire, he unintentionally stiffened the resistance of a substantial sector of the party to Stormont adopting the welfare state. The rejection of Beveridge on a class basis was amplified by fears of loss of ethnic dominance. The result was that the government fought the 1945 election on a strong anti-socialist platform, although it also stated that it would introduce whatever social reforms were made in the rest of the UK. This contradictory message contributed to a substantial Protestant working-class vote for the NILP and other left-of-centre parties. Labour parties of various shades won 32 per cent of the total Northern Ireland vote and five seats, while in the Belfast constituencies the ‘non-Nationalist left’, which included the NILP, the Commonwealth Labour Party and the Communist Party, won 40 per cent of the vote to the Unionists' 50 per cent.94 While the electoral system ensured that the NILP won only two seats, the vote for the left helped to convince Brooke that his government would have to embrace the welfare state.

  3. ‘Minding Our Own Business’: Èire during the Emergency

  Defending Neutrality

  De Valera, combining the positions of Taoiseach and Minister for External Affairs, proved skilled in exploiting the domestic political opportunities produced by international developments. During the 1930s, he used Irish membership of the League of Nations to portray Ireland as the vanguard of small nations threatened by the rapacious designs of bigger states and to provide a moral justification for Irish neutrality in any future world conflict. Neutrality during a major conflict in which Great Britain was involved was also a resounding statement of Irish independence and sovereignty, albeit in a truncated twenty-six-county form. Even before the return of the Treaty ports de Valera made it clear that neutrality would be his government's policy and that this would be the case even in the event of an end of partition. He also tried to reassure the British by asserting that he would resist any attempt by Germany to use Irish territory as a base for attacking Britain.1

  The favourable terms of the 1938 Agreement and, above all, the return of the ports, which made neutrality feasible, were major ingredients in Fianna Fáil's electoral victory in 1938, with 52 per cent of the vote and seventy-two seats. Increasingly the party portrayed itself as the only effective guarantee of Éire's insulation from the horrors of war. Fine Gael was disorientated by de Valera's success in ending the economic war and in persuading the British to respect neutrality. Its support, which had picked up as the economic war began to bite, slumped seriously after the 1938 Agreement from 33 per cent and forty-three seats in that year's election to 23 per cent and thirty-two seats in 1944.2

  De Va
lera was well aware of the formidable pressures that he would be under in the event of war and had been a strong supporter of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policies, praising the Munich Agreement as ‘the highest peak of human greatness’.3 However, Hitler's occupation of Prague in March 1939 finally dispatched any lingering illusions that appeasement could contain Berlin's expansionist appetites and posed an unprecedented challenge to the very existence of the southern state. Although the return of the ports made neutrality possible, it by no means ensured that it could be successfully maintained. Dr Eduard Hempel, the German minister in Dublin, reported to Berlin in June 1939 that it was improbable that neutrality could survive an Anglo-German war, and that there was at least one cabinet minister who privately doubted the possibility of a continuing policy of neutrality.4 De Valera had admitted the fragility of the policy when he had accepted that Ireland's role as an important supplier of food to the British market could lead, in the event of war between Britain and Germany, to attacks on Irish ports to destroy this trade and that ‘if we were attacked our forces would be combined with the British forces for the defence of Ireland.’5

  The decision to return the Treaty ports had reflected Chamberlain's belief that, whatever their strategic value to Britain in wartime, this would be negated by the southern state's lack of goodwill. Although the chiefs of staff supported the decision to return the ports, they pointed out that, in the event of a war with Germany, the non-availability of the Irish ports would seriously hamper naval operations.6 They were also aware that the Irish state simply lacked the military capacity to defend its neutrality. When the war broke out, the country was almost defenceless, with an army of just 7,000 poorly equipped regulars, which, with reserves, provided a force of 20,000 upon mobilization.7 The new Irish Marine Service, established in November 1939 to defend Irish territorial waters, consisted of two ex-fisheries patrol boats with six motor torpedo boats on order from Britain,8 while the Air Corps was incapable of policing the skies over Dublin, let alone the country as a whole.9