Unionism 1921-1972

Henry Patterson

Before the late 1960s writing on unionism was a project

largely indulged by what Gramsci would have termed the

organic intellectuals of the unionist political project.1

It was, to use a helpful distinction, unionist history as

opposed to the history of unionism written by historians.2

Although unionism originated as an all-Ireland movement

to resist home rule, the necessity of constructing a

movement with a mass popular following meant an

Ulsterisation not simply of political strategy but also

of ideology. The result was a narrative of the

‘Ulsterman’ and his historical, regional and

psychological distinctiveness. James Loughlin3 has argued

the development of notions of the ‘Ulsterman’ need to be

seen in terms of theories of racial categorisation which

were current in Victorian times. The Northern Irish

version had the ‘Ulsterman’ as the embodiment of honesty,

1

hard-work, resolution and resourcefulness as compared to

the Catholic Irish who were portrayed as at best dreamy

and impractical and at worst feckless and lazy.

Unionists had also emphasised the progressive impact

of protestant settlements in modernising what was

portrayed as the archaic structures of Gaelic Ulster and

making North-East Ulster the only part of Ireland to

industrialise successfully. Much of the unionist

propaganda during the home rule period had emphasised

those personal and moral characteristics of the

protestant population which had been conducive to

economic development and which any all-Ireland parliament

dominated by Irish catholics would be sure to destroy.

Thus the Trinity historian W Alison Phillips alleged that

the native Irish were incapable of ruling themselves:

‘the Celtic race, by virtue of its inherent qualities is

incapable of developing unaided a high type of

civilisation’.4

This racial theme was not the only or in fact the 2

determinant element in unionist explanations of Irish

economic and social backwardness which more often

featured an emphasis on the institutionalised power of

catholicism and a long-standing political culture of

lawlessness. A key characteristic of unionist thought

and politics which carried over into the new state was a

conviction of the insularity and economic backwardness of

catholic Ireland. Although unionist self-confidence

would decline in the inter-war period as the staple

industries of the North suffered major contraction, it

was reborn in the 1940s along with a continuing concern

to point out the superiority of economic and social

conditions in the north to those in the south. But while

1 Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Formation of Intellectuals’ in his The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 118-125.2 Alvin Jackson, ‘Irish Unionism’ in D George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds) Modern Irish History Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), 121.3 James Loughlin, ‘“Imaging Ulster”: the North of Ireland and Britishnational identity, 1880-1921’ in S.J. Connolly (ed.) Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500: integration and diversity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999). 4 Gillian McIntosh, The Force of Culture Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 21.3

there was a hard substratum of materialism in unionist

arguments against home rule and after 1921 unionists

would continue to defend partition in terms of its

economic benefits, arguments about the economy were often

linked to religious and sectarian themes. Paul Bew has

underlined the central role played by issues of religious

freedom and Ulster protestant concerns about the power of

the catholic church in any Irish legislature in the mass

mobilisation against the third home rule bill: ‘there

really is no denying the specifically religious or

sectarian tone of much of the controversy’. He points

out how fear of the pretensions of the catholic church

and the associated threat to protestants’ civil and

religious liberty in a home rule parliament were not

simply the concern of working class orangemen but an

impelling consideration for many of Belfast’s liberal

presbyterian bourgeoisie.5 After 1923 Ulster unionists

had in the experiences of southern protestants during the

revolutionary period and as a minority in the new Free 4

State a plentiful source of examples of the religious and

cultural travails which partition had saved from

enduring. Dennis Kennedy has demonstrated how unionist

attitudes were seriously affected not only by the

nationalist violence directed against southern

protestants in the period 1920-22 but also by their

subsequent treatment as Dublin moved more explicitly

towards the adoption of a constitution in 1937 which was

heavily influenced by catholic religious and social

teachings.6

The academic study of unionism by those without a

unionist political identity has a relatively recent

history and also one which was deeply affected from its

origins by political events. The expansion of higher

education from the 1960s and the burgeoning Northern

Irish Troubles produced a major expansion of work on

unionist politics, ideology and identity. The first 5 Paul Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912-1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 29-34.6 Dennis Kennedy, The Widening Gulf: Northern Attitudes to the Independent Irish State 1919-1949 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1988).5

serious works, Patrick Buckland’s two volume history of

Irish and Ulster unionism and John Harbinson’s history of

the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), were published in the

early 1970s as Northern Ireland was shattered by

unprecedented levels of terrorist and inter-communal

violence.7 Both Buckland’s study of the Ulster unionist

movement and the formation of the Northern state and

Harbinson’s history of the UUP appeared just five years

after the civil rights movement had organised its first

marches and the attendant irruption of the ‘Ulster

Crisis’ on to British and international television

screens and leader columns. At this stage not only most

labour and liberal opinion, but also a significant sector

of conservatism, sympathised with the critics of what

was seen as a regime which was at best characterised as

somnolent and third rate and at worst actively sectarian

7 Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism: One: The Anglo-Irish and the New Ireland 1882-1922 (Dublin & New York: Gill and Macmillan & Barnes and Noble, 1972)& Ulster Unionism and the Origins of Northern Ireland 1886-1922 (Dublin & New York: Gill and Macmillan & Barnes a& Noble 1973); J.F. Harbinson, The Ulster Unionist Party, 1882-1973 Its Development and Organisation (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1973)6

and discriminatory. The result was a tendency to focus

on unionism as a problem the roots of whose inadequacies

needed to be explored. Unionism was defined by its

failure to measure up to liberal democratic norms and by

what was seen as a spiritual and cultural regression.

The research agenda was therefore to explain this

anomalous regime and its purblind followers. The

syndrome was well summed up by Sarah Nelson in a path-

breaking study of some protestant working class

communities in Belfast during the 1970s:

Who are the loyalists of Ulster. To many outsiders they are ‘the voice of unreason, the voice of illogicality’. They are loyal to Britain yet ready to disobey her…they refuse to do the rational, obvious thing.8

Harbinson, a former research officer for the Northern

Ireland Labour Party9, provided the explanation which had

been in the stock-in-trade of Irish socialists and

labourites for decades: 8 Sarah Nelson, Ulster’s Uncertain Defenders: Loyalists and the Northern Ireland Conflict(Belfast: Appletree Press, 1984) , 1.9 Aaron Edwards, A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic socialism and sectarianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 46.7

After 1920 their objective was to maintain the Union. The strategy they employed was simple, short-term and effective. They maintained themselves in power by banging the big drum, waving the flag, and playing uponthe emotions of the Protestant population.10

John Whyte in his survey of the political and academic

debates aroused by Northern Ireland’s conflicted history

pointed out the problem with this approach to unionism

with its emphasis on elite manipulation: its

underestimation of the popular roots of unionism.11 When

Harbinson wrote there was no existing work on popular

unionism. Before the introduction of the 30 year rule he

was also dependent on the Unionist Party for any access

to the organisation’s papers held in the Public Record

Office of Northern Ireland. He was also unable to access

the departmental and cabinet papers of Unionist

administrations. This contributed to the overly

monolithic picture painted and the tendency to identify

the Unionist Party as an orange version of toryism.

10 Harbinson, The Ulster Unionist Party, 166.11 John Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 175-177.8

Patrick Buckland provided a relatively sympathetic

account of the origins of the organised unionist movement

from the 1880s stressing it twin roots in protestantism

and uneven economic development, a theme which would

become central to the first serious marxist analysis of

unionism which was produced by Peter Gibbon in 1975.12

But writing in the early 1970s it was hard not to read

the history of unionism through the prism of armed

insurrection; sectarian assassinations and above all the

peremptory and demoralising humiliation of direct rule.

Thus he concluded

The roots of the Northern Ireland trouble that began in1968-69 thus lay in the origins of Northern Ireland. In the early years, 1921-22, the tenor of the new statewas determined…the Protestant community was defensivelyminded and anti-Catholic…its political leaders who had lively memories of the early years and shared these apprehensions were unable or unwilling to alter this mentality and to broaden Ulster unionist outlooks...The1920s mentality produced a 1920s situation.13

Andrew Gailey noted the problems of writing about

12 P Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975)13 Buckland, Ulster Unionism and the Origins of Northern Ireland, 178.9

unionism’s past from the standpoint of the 1970s: ‘Not

surprisingly, perhaps, our appreciation of the past has

been overwhelmed by the awfulness of the present’. Gailey

was attempting to recapture the post-1945 history of

Northern Ireland and the unprecedented sense of

progressive optimism on the part of mainstream unionism.

This post-war world had, he believed, been almost

obliterated from public memory by the descent into

catastrophe after 1968: ‘The tendency to judge is

instinctive in us all, and after more than twenty years

of Troubles post-war Ulster has been judged harshly’.14

The idea that it was the fraught conditions in which

the state was created that determined an inflexible,

partisan and sectarian mentalite was given a revived marxist

inflection in one of the most influential works of the

Troubles: Michael Farrell’s Northern Ireland: The Orange State.15

The books proclaimed leftism meant that it portrayed

14 Andrew Gailey, Crying in the Wilderness Jack Sayers: Ae Liberal Editor in Ulster 1939-69, (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, 1995), ix.15 Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland The Orange State (London: Pluto, 1976).10

unionism as a counter-revolutionary movement led by the

protestant bourgeoisie and large landowners which used a

mixture of religious sectarianism and appeals to the

‘marginal privileges’ of the protestant proletariat to

enlist mass support. But the student leftism of the 1968

generation also generated a critique of this type of

‘anti-imperialist’ analysis of unionism with its emphasis

on the sectarianism and irrationality of popular

Unionism. Here the publications of a small Marxist sect,

the Irish Communist Organisation, later the British and

Irish Communist Organisation (BICO), were seminal. It

was in their substantial pamphlets, The Two Irish Nations and

The Economics of Partition16 that Ulster unionism’s material

foundations in the uneven development of Irish capitalism

and the hegemonic role in opposition to the demand for

home rule played by the protestant bourgeoisie of Belfast

were established.

16 British and Irish Communist Organisation, The Economics of Partition, Revised and extended edition (Belfast: Athol Books, 1972).11

The BICO were clearly an influence on Peter Gibbon’s

historical sociology of the origins of Ulster unionism.

Published in 1975, it emphasised the dominant role of a

modernising Belfast bourgeoisie within the unionist bloc.

Gibbon’s analysis has been criticised for exaggerating

the role of the Belfast bourgeoisie in hegemonising the

leadership of unionism and Jackson has emphasised the

importance of a shared leadership involving the landed

interest.17 Gibbon was also prone to urban-centrism and a

vision of unionism which had little to say of rural

Ulster. Although he made a serious attempt to

investigate the role of Belfast’s protestant working

class within the unionist bloc, his analysis was too

indebted to the Leninist idea of ‘labour aristocracy’ as

the material basis for conservative and orange sentiments

amongst the protestant proletariat.

Gibbon’s depiction of unionism as a form of Ulster

nationalism was one of the earliest academic forays into 17 Alvin Jackson, The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Common 1884-1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),5-6.12

the analysis of the nature of unionist identity. The

influence of marxism on studies of unionism and

nationalism in the decade or so after 1968 was not

conducive to the exploration of what has subsequently

become a dominant theme in the study of unionism. But

there was one extremely influential work published in

this area in the 1970s, David Miller’s Queen’s Rebels.18

Miller’s work was inspired by one of the most significant

manifestations of popular unionist militancy since the

1880s: the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike of 1974 which

overthrew the recently formed power-sharing government.

How did those who emphasised their loyalty justify their

defiance of the will of the government of the day? The

answer lay, he argued, in the contractarian tradition of

the protestant settlers in Ulster during the seventeenth

century. Ulster protestants’ loyalty was a ‘pre-modern’

one with little in common with modern notions of

18 David Miller, Queen’s Rebels Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1978). Reprinted with an introduction by John Bew (Dublin: University College Press, 2007).13

nationality and nationalism. Its focus was not on the

‘imagined community’ of the British nation but on a

contractual relationship with the Crown which was obliged

to defend its protestant subjects in Ireland. If that

obligation was not fulfilled then protestants would turn

to a centuries-old tradition of the ‘public band’ through

which they would organise to defend and rule themselves.

The ‘conditional loyalty’ of Ulster protestants has

produced one of the most important debates in academic

studies of unionism in and it rightly highlighted the

importance of taking the ideological dimension of

unionism seriously. However, it was also prone to an

essentialism which did not sufficiently register the

diversity of unionist ideology and of exaggerating the

unionist capacity to go its own way in defiance of

critical material and security dependences on the British

state.

Buckland’s most important work on Unionism had to await

the availability of the archives of the Northern Ireland 14

state which were made available for the first time in

January 1977. Although under the 30 year rule this

documentary treasure trove was available up to 1947,

Buckland chose to terminate his study in 1939 on the

basis that ‘During these years the pattern of government

and politics was so firmly established that by the late

1930s it was unlikely to be fundamentally altered except

by political or economic revolution.’ The picture of

unionist government and administration painted by

Buckland is a powerful indictment not of partition but of

legislative devolution which he argued produced a

government which, whatever Sir James Craig’s declaration

in 1921 that his government would be ‘absolutely honest

and fair in administering the law’ turned out to be

disfigured by its protestant populism and ethnic

partisanship.19 This book was one of two published in

1979 which used official sources to investigate the

19 Patrick Buckland, The Factory of Grievances: Devolved Government in Northern Ireland 1921-39 (Dublin: Gill & McMillan, 1979),1.15

political and administrative practises of unionism in

power. The State in Northern Ireland like Buckland’s gave a

central emphasis to divisions and fractures within

unionism as the overriding concern of successive

administrations who, in their relationship with the

catholic population were more impelled by fears of intra-

unionist schism than by an active sectarian animus.20 In

its analysis of the governmental records for the inter-

war period it claimed to have discovered ‘an unexpected

picture of the politics of the ruling class in Ulster’.

This involved a departure from the Farrellite view of a

monolithic ‘Orange state’ and instead a view of intra-

state conflict between two identifiable groups:

One group centred around Sir James Craig; the Minister of labour, John Andrews and the Minister of Home Affairs, Dawson bates. Broadly speaking, this group sought to generalise to the state as a whole the relation between Protestant classes epitomised in the BSpecials…characterised by a combination of sectarian and ‘democratic’ practises, and by a high consumption

20 P Bew, P Gibbon & H Patterson, The State in Northern Ireland 1921-1972: Political Forces and Social Classes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979). 16

of public funds...Another group, centred on two the regime’s Ministers of Finance, Hugh Pollock and John Milne Barbour, and the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Sir Wilfred Spender, opposed this tendency. They strove instead to press the state alonga via Britannica of a pre-Keynesian kind.21

The ‘populist/anti-populist’ division was traced over a

set of issues including the employment of catholics in

the Northern Ireland civil service and strongly

conflicting views of the financial relations with the

Treasury where populists were undeterred by Treasury

rebuffs over demands for more generous treatment, seen as

‘spongeing’ while anti-populists believed firmly that

Northern Ireland should adopt the prudent house-keeping

rules that would allow it to live within the constraints

of the revenue generated within the province. At the

root of the division was the populists’ acute awareness

of the fissiparous nature of unionism as a political

alliance of divergent classes and interest groups and the

perceived danger this represented to unionist control of

21 Ibid., 76.17

the province. The emphasis on intra-unionist conflict,

particularly stemming from class antagonisms has proved

to be one of the most fruitful foci of recent scholarship

with important work on Harry Midgley and the Northern

Ireland Labour Party by Graham Walker22, on the

unemployment issue by Christopher Norton and on

independent unionism by Colin Reid.

After partition, the new government was from the start

seriously concerned by the threats to unionist unity

posed by the independent tradition whether in the secular

form of the NILP or the muscular protestant populism of

independents like Tommy Henderson MP for Shankill and

John Nixon, the former District Inspector of the RUC who

was sacked by the Minister of Home Affairs in 1924 after

22 Graham Walker, The Politics of Frustration: Harry Midgley and the NILP (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) and ‘The Northern Ireland Labour Party 1924-45’ in Fintan Lane & Donal O Drisceoil (eds) Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830-1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), Christopher Norton, ‘Creating jobs, manufacturing unity: Ulster unionism and mass unemployment, 1922-34’, Contemporary British History, 15 (2001); Colin Reid , ‘Protestant Challenges to the “Protestant State”: Ulster Unionism and Independent Unionism in Northern Ireland, 1921-1939’, in Twentieth Century British History, 19 : 4, 2008.18

he had made a series of militant speeches at Orange Order

meetings. He became MP for Woodvale, a Belfast

constituency which like its neighbouring constituency of

the Shankill was a heartland of working class

protestants.23 Reid points out the broader political

significance of the independent unionists and their

impassioned attacks on the government and UUP in the

inter-war period:

Lord Craigavon headed a government which was guided by Protestant populism and was extremely sensitive to unrest within the unionist bloc. In the 1930s in particular, his rhetoric was more ‘Protestant’ than ‘unionist’, partly cultivated by the UUP’s reliance electioneering on loyalist principles. This was fostered by the need to confront independent unionism and to provide an agenda behind which all unionists could fall.24

These intra-bloc tensions are crucial for resolving a

central question in the historiography of unionism. If

the stridently protestant tone of the Northern state in

the inter-war period can in substantial part be explained

23 Reid, ‘Protestant challenges’, 431.24 Ibid., 445.19

by the vivid memories and resentments that stemmed from

the violent conditions in which the state was created why

were the constitutionally more secure conditions of the

post-war years and the much improved material position of

the North, particularly in comparison with the Republic,

not the basis for a serious attempt to reform the state?

In this context, the role of Basil Brooke, later

Lord Brookeborough, has been subject to much critical

comment. Leading members of Sinn Fein still refer back

to his 1933 speech at an orange order demonstration in

Newtownbutler when he had boasted that ‘he had not a

Roman Catholic about his own place’ because ‘the Roman

Catholics were endeavouring to get in everywhere and were

out with all their force and might to destroy the power

and constitution of Ulster’.25 Condemned as the

‘Colebrooke Hitler’ by another Fermanagh landowner,

Brooke would later try to justify the speech and several

25 Brian Barton, Brookeborough: The Making of a Prime Minister (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1988), 78.20

more in which he had defended it, as a reflection of the

intense strain which he, as a founding member of the

Ulster Special Constabulary in 1921/22 had been under

living in one of the parts of Fermanagh most vulnerable

to IRA attacks in the early 1920s: ‘What they forget is

that I lived through one of the most terrible times in

this country. Therefore I am not as ecumenical as the

others’.26 As MP for Lisnaskea at Stormont, he was

representing a constituency where the protestant

population co-existed with a catholic community which

contained a militant republican element which, in the

disturbed conditions of the early 1920s was reinforced by

IRA flying squads from the border counties of the Free

State, Cavan and Monaghan. In order to understand many

of those aspects of Brooke’s period as prime minister

which infuriated his more liberal colleagues, the

importance of the distinctive features of unionism in

border areas of Northern Ireland need to be taken into

26 Ibid., 87.21

account in any attempt to grasp the dilemmas of post-war

unionism.

It is also important to register the fact that

Brooke began his prime ministerial career tasked with

reinvigorating a government which, under a decrepit

Craigavon and the short-lived successor regime of John

Andrews, had singularly failed to mobilise Northern

Ireland’s economy and society for the challenge of war.

A number of high profile by-election defeats for official

Unionist Party candidates from 1940 generated a crisis in

the parliamentary party and forced Andrews’ resignation.

Brooke cleared out some of the most aged and incompetent

members of the government and succeeded in giving his

government a clear sense of purpose and in generating

tangible results in terms of economic mobilisation.27

Politically he was acutely atuned to the threat from the

discontent amongst working class Protestants which had 27 The most authoritative work on Northern Ireland during the war is Philip Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War: Politics, Economic Mobilisation and Society 1939-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,2013)22

been manifest in the by-election defeats. This meant

making it clear that, despite the opposition of much of

the party, he would implement the recommendations of the

Beveridge Report in Northern Ireland. The challenge from

the Left was a real one particularly as by the end of the

War the North’s war economy has been losing momentum for

more than a year. The Unionist Party fought the Stormont

elections on a strong anti-socialist and private

enterprise platform although it also stated that it would

introduce whatever social reforms were introduced in

Britain. Labour parties of various shades won 32 per cent

of the vote in Northern Ireland and 5 Stormont

constituencies, while in Belfast the ‘non-nationalist

Left’ which included the NILP , the Commonwealth Labour

Party and the Communist Party won 40 per cent of the

vote.28 The labourist upsurge convinced Brooke that his

government had to embrace the welfare state no matter how

much this enraged Unionism’s middle class supporters. 28 H Patterson & E Kaufmann, Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) 19-20.23

However, the money to support the welfare state and

attract new industries to replace the declining staples

of shipbuilding, textiles and agriculture could only come

from London and that would mean intensifying dependence

on the British Treasury in the post-war period. Here,

Unionist leaders made much of the debt of gratitude which

they claimed Britain owed the Province because of its

role in fight against Hitler.

The Ireland Act of 1949 reflected the moral capital

accumulated by Northern Ireland’s involvement in the war

in contrast to the Free State’s policy of neutrality and

its subsequent refusal to join NATO because of

Partition. For a period at least, stalwarts of the new

labour government like Herbert Morrison were enthusiastic

defenders of partition. One indication of pro-Stormont

attitudes in London was the fact that Hugh Massingham, an

Observer journalist, whose father had founded the Nation and

been an ardent home ruler, was now writing to

Brookeborough urging him to appoint a press officer in 24

London to respond to attacks from Hugh Delanty, Eire’s

High Commissioner.29 The more sympathetic attitude

towards Stormont in Westminster and Whitehall encouraged

unionist self-confidence and the belief that the

government, secure constitutionally and strengthened

materially by the arrival of the welfare state in the

North could expect more ‘sensible’ catholics to see that

the anti-partitionist project was dead and that they

should make their peace with the regime. At the same

time Brookeborough and some of the more perceptive of his

ministers, were concerned that in the new international

context and its themes of decolonisation and the defence

of human rights would be exploited Irish state and Irish

nationalism. This meant a desire that, as far as

possible, the state should avoid policies or actions

which enabled its opponents to label it sectarian and

intolerant. Thus when a unionist candidate in the 1950

29 Letter from Hugh Massingham, The Observer, to Basil Brooke, 12 February 1949, in Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), Cabinet Publicity Committee, 2 March 1949, CAB4A/26/3325

Westminster general election finished his oration by

declaring ‘To hell with the Pope!’ he was quickly

repudiated by the government and the party.30 Similarly,

when resolutions came before the executive of the UUP

for possible debate at the annual conference, those

demanding that government and public bodies favour

loyalists in their appointments, were returned noting

that such discussion would provide fertile ground for

propaganda by ‘the enemies of Ulster’.31 The prime

minister’s bruising encounters with opponents of alleged

‘romanising’ and ‘appeasement’ policies over education

and public order policies seem to have convinced him that

glacial change was all that was compatible with the

maintenance of unionist unity. This immobilism was

encouraged by the upsurge in militant anti-partitionism

that culminated in the IRA’s campaign from 1956-62. This

served to emphasise the differences between unionists in

30 Henry Patterson, ‘Party versus Order: Ulster Unionism and the Flagsand Emblems Act’, Contemporary British History, 13: 4, 1999, 31 Patterson & Kaufmann, Unionism and Orangeism , 49.26

border areas which were seriously affected by the

campaign and those East of the Bann who enjoyed largely

tranquil conditions. It was here and in the greater

Belfast area in particular where dissatisfaction with

what was seen as the somnolent conservatism of

Brookeborough’s regime was most threatening. It ranged

from the electorally significant threat of a resurgent

Northern Ireland Labour Party to the populist

Protestantism of the emerging scourge of the ‘appeasing’

unionist establishment, Ian Paisley, but it also

included younger members of the Unionist Parliamentary

Party, like William Craig, MP for Larne, who as Chief

Whip made regular visits to the home of the Westminster

MP for Londonderry, Robin Chichester Clark, to ask advice

on how to get rid of Brooke borough ‘with his anti-

deluvian views’ and replace him with the Minister of

Finance, Terence O’Neill.32

32 Notes on Sir Edward Heath’s Autobiography by Sir Robin Chichester Clark, courtesy of the author.27

However, it is important to realise that those like

O’Neill and Craig and those in the top ranks of the civil

service, who may have despaired of the regime’s

conservative and reactive style of government, were not

proponents of significant reforms in the relationship

between the state and its catholic population. Jack

Sayers who, as editor of the Belfast Telegraph, would be an

enthusiastic supporter of liberalisation, sketched out

the choice facing unionism in the mid-1950s. He pointed

to Brookeborough’s support for the Education Act of 1948

which had outraged significant sections of protestant and

orange opinion due to the substantial increase in

financial support for catholic schools:

The measure stands as an example of liberal policy, butit remains to be decided whether the Unionist Party is prepared to make it a precedent for appeals to the minority on an even broader front.33

Yet if Brookeborough’s government failed the challenge,

then it needs to be recognised that very few senior

33 Thomas Wilson ed , Ulster under Home Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 75.28

figures in the government, even of the most modernising

variety, were thinking of the sort of reforms which might

have forestalled the crisis of the 1960s. The most

advanced liberal and someone who paid a high price for

his views was Brian Maginess who as Minister of Home

Affairs in the early 1950s had blighted a promising

political career by banning an orange parade. But at

the core of Maginess’s reformism the desire for the

incorporation of influential sections of the catholic

population into a redefined unionist project which

emphasised a common regional identity built around shared

material interests in the continuation of the British

connection.34 This would involve certainly a playing down

of the more muscularly protestant inflections of

government and party; respect for ‘traditional’ i.e.

non-republican, manifestations of Irish national

identity; accommodation of the interests of the catholic

church in the fields of education and health and most 34 Henry Patterson, ‘Brian Maginess and the Limits of Liberal Unionism’, The Irish Review, 25, 1999/2000, 95-112.29

immediately controversial, the encouragement of catholics

to become members of the Unionist Party. Although

Maginess’s travails were evidence of the powerful

pressures from traditional protestant and orange sources,

it is important to register the degree that much post-war

public policy in the fields of economic development,

social policy and education transcended communal criteria

in helping to improve the welfare and opportunities for

all citizens of the state but particularly for the

working class. The period from 1945 to the mid-1960s was

defined by the degree to which concerns about issues of

economic development, industrial diversification and the

potentialities of economic planning dominated not simply

the agenda of government departments but much of the most

significant political debate.

The arrival of the welfare state in the province

while an unmitigated benefit for the unionist cause

providing as it did a qualitative leap in the material

advantages of partition, it opened up potential fissures 30

in unionism as a cross-class alliance. Many MPs,

councillors and constituency chairmen were instinctive

conservatives on economic and social issues and

castigated the government and Stormont administration for

acting as a conveyor belt for legislation passed by the

Labour government at Westminster and adopted with only

minor modifications by Stormont. There was considerable

support for the idea of dominion status through which

Northern Ireland would become effectively independent and

thus be able to resist the implementation of ‘socialistic

legislation’. The Unionist Party had fought the Stormont

1945 elections on a strongly anti-Socialist and pro-

private enterprise manifesto, although being careful to

qualify this by stating that it would introduce whatever

social reforms which were brought in the rest of the UK.

The election witnessed the defection of a substantial

minority of the protestant working class to the NILP and

convinced the prime minister that, no matter how

repugnant the welfare state might be to bourgeois members31

of the party, the government had no choice but to embrace

it fully. The shift towards welfarism and a substantial

increase in size and role of government was the basis for

an under-researched aspect of Northern Ireland in the

post-war period: the increase in the weight of an

increasingly self-confident ‘banal’ unionism which took

the unquestioned superiority of northern standards of

well being and life chances to those in the South for

granted. While it is customary to decry the supposed

‘supremacist’ aspects of the unionist mentalite it is

necessary to register the degree to which a northern

sense of superiority to the ‘backward’, priest-ridden and

insular Irish Republic was shared by many in the rest of

the UK where the Republic’s refusal to countenance

membership of NATO because of partition was coolly

received. Thus it was not difficult for unionists to

find useful ammunition even in unexpected quarters. The

Catholic Herald denounced Dublin for its refusal to see that

in the light of the need to defend the West against the 32

‘anti-God East’, ‘the old issue of separation and

conflicting loyalties had largely lost their raison

d’etre’. Whilst deploring discrimination against

catholics in Northern Ireland it added that ‘It is only

fair to point out that the Northern Ireland majority can

hardly fail to see the minority as a menace to itself.

Indeed the whole catholic Irish attitude to Partition

obviously constitute an avowed menace to the present

popularly supported regime in the Six Counties’.35

Although unionist concern with the anti-partition

threat would not recede in the post-war period the idiom

of its response did register an important shift away from

the strident tones of the 1949 election and its emphasis

in what a critical review of unionist strategy called

‘the Big Drum’. There was an increasing awareness the

fact that the economic and social benefits of the British

link were more obvious than at any time since unionists

had boasted of Belfast being the ‘industrial capital of

35 Cabinet Publicity Committee, 24 May 1949, CAB 4A/26/34.33

Ireland’ during the struggle against home rule. As the

government’s director of publicity set out the case to be

made against the raising of partition at the United

Nations by the recently admitted Irish delegation:

What we should always remember is that, to quote Nicolas Mansergh ‘In 1921 the romance of Irish independence was over, its history had begun’. That history has considerably tarnished the romance, particularly in comparison with our progress in Ulster.In agriculture, the social services, education, industrial development, in our standard of living and in many other ways, we are streets ahead of Eire, and our strengthening our lead every day.36

This sort of argument allowed those unionists interested

in expanding the state’s appeal beyond the protestant

population, to develop a new version of the ‘constructive

unionism’ which had at the beginning of the twentieth

century attempted to undermine the appeal of Irish

nationalism through policies of land reform and

industrial development. To its critics it appeared a

strategy of avoidance of dealing with those features of

36 Memorandum on publicity in US by Eric Montgomery, Director of Information, Cabinet Publicity Committee, CAB4A/26/75, 7 April 1976.34

unionist political culture and practise which most

alienated Northern catholics. Yet its most important

proponent did push the agenda beyond lauding the economic

and social case for the Union.

The failure of unionism in power to develop a more

inclusive philosophy of government cannot be discussed

adequately without acknowledging the profound obstacle

represented by the official ideology of the Irish state,

the suspicious hostility of the northern nationalism and

continued appeal of physical force republicanism,

especially in the border counties. It was therefore

unsurprising that dominant modernising agenda focussed

more on the development of the North’s economic and

social conditions which was seen as a means of shifting

popular horizons away from zero-sum conflicts over issues

of political power and identity towards a common project

of material betterment and increased opportunities for

economic and social advance independent of

religious/political affiliation. Although some 35

politicians and civil servants would decry the post-war

‘degeneration’ of devolution into the marginal amendments

of policies decided in Westminster and Whitehall, the

senior ranks of the Northern Ireland civil service

contained a number of senior officials who seized the

opportunities of the post-war social democratic consensus

to develop a range of progressive policies in a range of

fields from education, industrial diversification,

health, housing and transport. The NICS remains largely

under-researched and we are indebted to a retired senior

official in the Department of Education, the late Arthur

Green, for a powerful and eloquent registering of the

importance of this group, a substantial number of who

were English recruited through Whitehall’s competitive

examinations. Though not immune to the local parochial,

sectarian pressures, the leadership of the NICS was far

from acting as the representatives of the ‘orange

state’.37 These officials had to be aware of broader UK

developments in their policy areas and of the increasing 36

complexities of policy formation and implementation.

Unlike many unionist MPs and ministers who regarded

politics and administration as part-time duties, they

were impatient with the constraints of a provincial

political culture and it was to some of them that

Brookeborough’s successor would look for his main support

his self-proclaimed modernisation project.

The period ushered in by Terence O’Neill’s unelected

succession to Brookeborough was characterised by an

accelerating pace of political change and increasing

unease and instability in the unionist party. It

continues to be understood in the terms within which its

tensions and conflicts were framed at the time by critics

of the regime. As much of the impetus for change came

from actual or feared ‘interference’ from Westminster,

this early understanding of the dialectic between what

were seen as the twin poles of ‘reform’ and ‘reaction’ 37 Arthur Green, ‘Bureaucracy for Belfast: A Historiography’, a paperpresented to the Belfast Literary Society, January 10 2005. Availableon web-site of The Cadogan Group: www.cadogan.org/articles/bureaucracy.htm37

was unsympathetic or even hostile to unionism. An early

example was Robert Kee’s programme on Northern Ireland

shown on ITV’s This Week in December 1964. Although

impressed by the government’s advanced factory provision

he noted the contrast between ‘the highly impressive

industrial developments now taking place under government

inspiration all over Northern Ireland’ and ‘the backward

forces on both sides’.38 Interviewing Brian Faulkner, who

as Minister of Commerce had responsibility for the

industrial development drive, Kee raised the awkward

issue of ‘a certain contradiction’ between ‘the wish to

create a modern industrial society...and some of the

political and social features of Ulster’ amongst which he

mentioned the restriction of local council voting to

ratepayers, the gerrymandering of electoral wards in

Derry and discrimination in the allocation of council

housing. Faulkner, visibly uncomfortable during this

38 John Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics (London: British Film Institute, 2006) , 138.38

part of the interview, would have been less than pleased

with the broadcast version where as the camera focussed

on his face the soundtrack featured the orange anthem

‘The Sash my Father wore’.39

Anti-catholic discrimination and the massed ranks of

orangemen decked out in exotic regalia would become the

staple of much UK and international media ‘analysis’ of

the Northern Irish crisis as it unfolded over the next

decade. Faulkner’s embarrassment on television was an

early example of the difficulty which even the most

intelligent and accomplished defenders of the government

would have in persuading an uncomprehending external

audience that they were not running a supremacist state.

The party’s relationship with the orange order which

was structurally inscribed in the constitution of the

Ulster Unionist Council from its origins was a rich mine

for anti-regime propaganda and academic coverage of the

order. Despite this the order’s role in unionism has,

39 Ibid., 139.39

until recently, lacked serious analysis. There has been

a tendency to portray it in crudely instrumentalist

terms: the unionist elite using the order’s links with

working class protestants to maintain its electoral

hegemony. The price of this Faustian pact was seen to be

the imposition of a sectarian flavour to many aspects of

public policy from recruitment to public employment to

public order policy. The recent availability of the

internal records of both the Unionist Party and the

orange order has shown a more complex picture. There are

certainly more than enough examples of orange pressure

against the employment of ‘disloyalists’, for the

Northern Ireland Housing Trust to allocate housing on a

sectarian basis and against any attempt to regulate

orange marches which interfered with their customary

routes. However, what the records demonstrate is that

the order in the post-war period became riven by the

broader tensions within the unionist bloc and that in

particular it was increasingly marked by a contest 40

between the ‘traditional’ elite group of landlords and

clergymen, who saw the order’s role as the maintenance of

the existing unionist regime taking into account

unwelcome but un-ignorable pressures for change and an

‘independent’ populist opposition with strong roots in

the orange rank and file particularly the urban working

class members, that increasingly criticised the elite for

a willingness to compromise with ‘romanism’ and

‘ecumenism’.40

The earlier academic analyses of O’Neillism tended to

echo the dismissive approach to his reformist programme

adopted by the more radical elements of the civil rights

movement. Bew, Gibbbon and Patterson emphasised that in

the initial years of his regime his main aim was to

promote a modernisation strategy to ‘steal the thunder of

the NILP’. His professed commitment to improving

community relations and building bridges to the catholic

40 Eric P Kaufmann, The Orange Order A Contemporary Northern Ireland History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 38.41

community were dismissed as largely cosmetic, raising

expectations of change that he was incapable of

fulfilling. However, since the publication of Marc

Mulholland’s impressive analysis of the O’Neill years the

discussion of O’Neillism has become more nuanced.

Mulholland argues that the modernisation strategy had

implicit in it ‘an entire reconfiguration of politics in

Northern Ireland. A reformed Ulster Unionist Party would

slough off its bigoted ultra-Protestant wing and attract

a substantial Catholic vote on the basis of technocratic

modernity.’ 41 But even if the genuineness of O’Neill’s

commitment to transforming the state’s relationship to

catholics is accepted, there remains the fact,

acknowledged by his strongest supporters like Jack Sayers

of the Belfast Telegraph, that he lacked a political strategy

for achieving his reformist objectives. Some of

O’Neill’s critics tend to assume that his failure was one

41 Marc Mulholland, ‘Modernising Conservatives: The Northern Ireland Young Unionist Movement in the 1960s’, Irish Political Studies, 25: 1, 2010,72.42

of will and personal inadequacies – his patrician and

aloof political style in contrast with the common touch

and easy charm of Brookeborough or his failure to grasp

that catholic alienation was ‘structural’ rather than

‘behavioural’.42 However, the core problem for him and

his successors went deeper than this and reflected the

fact that woolly expressions of the need for change and

transforming the face of Ulster were inevitably seen as

highly suspect by a much broader section of the unionist

community than the strident minority who supported

Paisley. It is best summed up in Andrew Gailey’s

perceptive comment on the limitations of the vision of

one of O’Neill’s most important supporters, Jack Sayers:

Sayers’s liberal constituency was in spirit too professional middle class, too suburban, and too east of the Bann…he failed to appreciate the fears of ordinary Protestants…his sharp retort during the West affair that the Unionist Party should not be run at thebehest of Fermanagh starkly reflected the contempt shown by those for whom ‘civilisation ended at the

42 Fergal Cochrane, ‘Meddling at the Crossroads: The Decline and Fallof Terence O’Neill within the Unionist Community’, in Richard English & Graham Walker, Unionism in Modern Ireland (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), 148.43

Finaghy crossroads’.43

O’Neill largely ignored his party seeing it a force of

conservatism and devoting no thought or effort to how to

win the case for reform within it. This would not have

been an easy task but the fact that he did little to hide

his low opinion of his backbenchers and most of his

cabinet colleagues did not help.44 His failure to consult

his cabinet before his historic meeting with the Irish

Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, in January 1965 was symptomatic

and did much to build up grass-roots suspicion of his

leadership.

His plans for reorganising and centralising the planning

system and the decision to build the new city of

Craigavon just 30 miles from Belfast stoked the fears of

border unionists that they were being neglected by

Stormont45. In April 1967 O’Neill fired Harry West, his 43 Gailey, 164-165.44 Andrew Gailey, ‘The destructiveness of constructive unionism: theories and practise, 1890s-1960s’, in D. George Boyce & Alan O’Day (eds.) Defenders of the Union (London:Routledge, 2001) ,238.44

Minister of Agriculture and MP for Enniskillen, over a

land deal which he claimed broke the ministerial code he

had introduced to govern minister’s business interests.

In Fermanagh many party members saw the sacking as the

victimisation of a politician whose real crime was to

defend their interests from O’Neill’s reformist agenda

and in particular from the feared reform of local

government which as one prominent Fermanagh unionist put

it: ‘if this (one-man one-vote) is granted, Tyrone,

Fermanagh and Londonderry will fall to our opponents’.46

In 1970 the then Minister of Development, Brian Faulkner,

charged with introducing local government reform made a

spirited defence of its necessity for placating an

implacable British government but also of its

unthreatening nature as even if nationalists controlled

Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry, the ’sheet-anchor’ of the

Union would remain in unionist control of Stormont. Of

course this was not an argument that Faulkner recognised

as a rising star of the unionist right in the late 1950s 45

when he was happy to argue that loss of these counties

would be a major blow to unionist control of the province

and would embolden nationalism to press on for more

radical political changes.47 In 1959 when he opposed

franchise reform the IRA’s assault on Northern Ireland

had clearly failed and in the Westminster elections the

Sinn Fein vote slumped dramatically. At the time

revisionist voices were beginning to demand a more

positive engagement of catholics with the state and there

were some signs of a mellowing of communal relations, at

least east of the Bann. By 1968 with a new mass catholic

militancy manifested in the civil rights marches and an

impatient British prime minister demanding serious

reforms unionist leaders would struggle to convince their

followers that concessions would lead to pacification and

not radicalisation of the catholic population.

The profound difficulty of unionist reformism has

not been adequately registered in existing accounts which

have tended, like British policy-makers at the time, to 46

ignore the profundity of popular fears and resentments.

At the centre of mobilising these forces was the Reverend

Ian Paisley. He has too often been understood in terms

of his religious fundamentalism and the Manichean world

view which has been seen as appealing to grassroots

unionism unnerved and disorientated by the acceleration

of political changes.48 Christopher Farrington has

suggested that such an approach fails to register

Paisley’s active role as an agent of political

transformation, arguing that the religious dimension of

his appeal has been exaggerated and that it was his

ability to portray events like the widespread catholic

participation in the 1916 commemoration parades in 1966

as evidence of a mass republican threat to protestant

ethnic interests that put him in a position to mobilise

45 Henry Patterson, ‘In the Land of King Canute: the Influence of Border Unionism on Unionist Politics 1945-63’ , Contemporary British History, 20: 4, December 2006, 511- 532 & Martin Joseph McCleery, ‘TheCreation of the “New City” of Craigavon: A Case Study of Politics, Planning and Modernisation in Northern Ireland in the Early 1960s’, Irish Political Studies, 27: 1, 2011, 89-109.46 Patterson & Kaufmann, Unionism and Orangeism , 78.47 Ibid., 57.47

grassroots unionist resentment with the trend of

political events particularly when the civil rights

movement took to the streets in the late summer of 1968.49

A new generation of scholars are beginning to think about

the period from O’Neill’s accession to the imposition of

direct rule in terms which emphasise the importance of

specifically political triggers of crisis and a more

state-centric analysis. This approach challenges

notions of inevitably of the descent into violence

whether based on republican or cruder marxist analyses.

Our understanding of the enveloping crisis post-1968

has also suffered from lack of serious studies of either

of O’Neill’s successors which could rank with Marc

Mulholland’s substantial political biography of Terence

O’Neill.50 James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner

still await serious attention and their role has suffered

from the partisan and journalistic accounts which have

dealt with them.51 Chichester-Clark’s premiership in

particular demands more attention than it has received.52 48

It is true that while he had a much better relation with

his Cabinet than O’Neill his public performances were

‘shaky’ and that his television appearances could appear

‘bumbling’.53 This may have hindered his effectiveness in

selling a deepening process of reform to the unionist

grassroots. However, the main problems of his

premiership were so profound that deficiencies in

projecting the reform project was at most a secondary

issue. The eruption of violence in Derry and Belfast in

August 1969 produced a fundamental shift in power to

Westminster as Harold Wilson and his Home Secretary,

James Callaghan, used Stormont’s request for British

troops to impose a set of major reforms which included

the disarming of the RUC and the disbandment of the ‘B’

Specials. A new UK representative, a senior Foreign

Office official sent to ensure Chichester-Clark’s

48 Steve Bruce, For God and Ulster The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)49 Christopher Farrington, ‘Mobilisation, State Crisis and Counter-Mobilisation: Ulster Unionist Politics and the Outbreak of the Troubles’, Irish Political Studies, 23: 4, December 2008, 524-529.49

government pressed on with reforms, made clear he did not

want to be sullied by physical location at Stormont

choosing instead an hotel on outskirts of west Belfast so

as he could be an effective channel for nationalist

grievances and demands, a incitement to radicalisation of

nationalist perspectives on the possibilities of change.54

Too much focus has been given to the failures of unionist

leaders and the reactionary pressures of unionist grass

roots and not enough attention paid to the increasing

radicalisation of the opposition’s demands and the ham-

fisted nature of many of the new policies introduced at

Westminster’s behest. Graham Walker praises Chichester-

Clark for ‘a series of courageous declarations of a

civic-minded unionism…and a raft of reforms the

commendable and forward-looking character of which was in

effect neutered by the mayhem in the streets’.55 With

‘no-go’ areas controlled by paramilitaries, an IRA

offensive gathering pace and a new policing chief, Sir

Arthur Young, surplus to requirements in Britain but 50

thought good enough for the challenging tasks of policing

Northern Ireland’s riot and murder-spattered streets,56

the burdens on Chichester-Clark were soon to prove

overwhelming.

Although the arrival of a conservative government in

June 1970 was claimed by nationalists to herald a pro-

unionist shift in London’s policies recent research has

undermined this57 and points to a continuity of British

pressure for reform and impatience with Chichester-

Clark’s increasing emphasis on the need to deal with

intensifying levels of IRA violence. Even the Ardoyne

IRA’s brutal killing of 3 young British soldiers lured to

their deaths during an evening’s drinking, was not

thought sufficient cause to heed the demand for a

substantial increase in troop numbers and a more activist

set of security policies. The resultant resignation

brought Brian Faulkner to office but although he had long

desired the job and had a not unjustified belief in his

superior capacities to those of his two predecessors, his51

premiership was destroyed by the twin incubi of

apparently uncontainable IRA violence and a British

government that was advised by its representative in

Belfast that Faulkner ‘does not well understand that

there is no military solution. There must be the

prospect of progress which dispels the sense of

hopelessness amongst the Roman Catholics upon which the

IRA depends’.58 This criticism came less than a month

after leading opposition politicians had welcomed

enthusiastically a package of proposals to enable the 50 Marc Mulholland, Northern Ireland at the Crossroads: Ulster Unionism in the O’Neill Years (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000).51 A recent and fairer assessment can be found in Graham Walker, A history of the Ulster Unionist Party (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).52 See, Clive Scoular, James Chichester Clark Prime Minister of Northern Ireland (Antrim, W G Baird, 2000) and C.D.C. Armstrong, ‘James Dawson Chichester-Clark’, Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxford.dnb.com/view/article/76880 53 Robert Ramsay, Ringside Seats An Insider’s View of the Crisis in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 60.54 Henry Patterson, ‘The British State and the Rise of the IRA 1969-1971: The View from the Conway Hotel’, Irish Political Studies, 23 : 4, December 2008, 496-498.55 Walker, A history of the Ulster Unionist Party, 189.56 ‘It was only after he was long gone that the officials in the Home Office admitted to us the background story: in the planning of seniorappointments in GB Young had been considered, inconveniently “surplusto requirements” and it had been Callaghan’s personal brainwave to offload him on the RUC.’ Ramsay, Ringside Seats, 61-62.52

opposition to play a more meaningful role at Stormont

through a committee system half of which would have been

chaired by opposition MPs. The package was not seen by

Faulkner as a final offer but rather the initiation of a

process of what the political scientist Robin Wilson has

called, following Gramsci, transformismo – the formation of

an ever more extensive ruling class.59 That within a

month the SDLP had withdrawn from Stormont to set up an

alternative assembly reflected not the inadequacies of

Faulkner’s reformism but the shooting dead of two

catholics in Derry by the Army, something which was the

responsibility of the Ministry of Defence and the British

government not Stormont. The SDLP’s radicalisation was a

direct product of IRA strategic calculations as they

intensified a bombing campaign aimed at enraging the

unionist community and forcing the introduction of

internment, an eventuality which republicans correctly

calculated would usher in the final crisis of the

Northern Ireland state.53

Unionism would be politically expropriated by Direct

Rule and suffer a deepening process of fractionalisation.

It would also continue to be pilloried for its

‘supremacist’ past and its incoherent and conservative

resistance to change after 1972. Ignored within this

conventional wisdom was one fundamental fact: by the time

Chichester-Clark became prime minister the civil rights

phase of catholic mobilisation had begun to be

transformed into a more traditional agenda which, after

August 1969 when Stormont lost the capacity to police and

secure its rule and the new British presence prioritised

reform over security, left substantial parts of the

North’s territory near to a state of nature. In 1921

Ulster unionism had the capacity to form a state and

force a reluctant British government to recognise and

support it, by the 1960s in a context of economic

dependence and an international context where repression

by what was perceived as a right wing regime was ruled 57 Thomas Hennessey, The Evolution of the Troubles 1970-72 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 343.54

out, unionism appeared to have lost any effective

autonomy apart from that of implementing or frustrating

the initiatives of other more powerful forces.

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