Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  But it was the Minister of Finance, Terence O'Neill, who succeeded Brookeborough as Prime Minister on 25 March 1963. Following the Conservative Party tradition, the new leader ‘emerged’ after consultations between the Governor, Lord Wakehurst, Brookeborough and the Unionist Chief Whip, William Craig. A straw poll carried out by Craig amongst the Unionist MPs at Stormont gave O'Neill a comfortable lead over his two main rivals, Faulkner and J. L. O.Andrews, son of the former premier and a genial and affable Minister of Commerce.28 However, it was widely believed in the party that O'Neill's ‘superior’ social standing weighed heavily in the Governor's decision.

  He was the son of the Conservative MP and Orangeman Arthur Bruce O'Neil, the first Westminster MP to die at the front in the First World War. His mother was the daughter of Lord Crewe, a member of Asquith's cabinet, and he was brought up in London in his mother's liberal circle. Educated at Eton, he drifted through several stock-exchange jobs before military service in the Irish. Guards during the Second World War. Although he was not a landowner himself, his family's secure membership of the social elite in County Antrim, where his uncle was a Westminster MP, had made it relatively easy to acquire the nomination for the Stormont constituency of Bannside in 1946. From his earliest days at Stormont he felt that his social standing, military credentials and metropolitan upbringing made him worthy of a place in Brookeborough's inner circle.29 He first entered the government as a junior minister in 1948 and became Minister of Finance in 1956. Beneath the languid demeanour and the aristocratic drawl was what one of his closest civil service allies called a ‘constructive ruthlessness’.30 He made little attempt to disguise his low opinion of the quality of the average Unionist MP and of many of his cabinet colleagues. His aloof style, Brookeborough's failure to recommend him as his successor and the lack of any direct role for members of the parliamentary party in his selection gave his critics a powerful argument about the new premier's lack of popular legitimacy.

  ‘Stealing Labour's Thunder’

  For the first two years of his premiership O'Neill's priority was to respond to the NILP's charge that the regime was incapable of dealing with the problem of unemployment because of its reactionary ideology and its antiquated and amateurish style of government. Here he was able to make a distinctive break with the approach of his predecessor. As Minister of Finance, his difficult relationship with his permanent secretary, Sir Douglas Harkness, stemmed in part from a belief that Harkness was too compliant with the demands of the Treasury and not robust enough in pressing the province's case for extra resources.31 He had as a result got more directly involved in relations with Treasury officials than had been the case previously. Part of his approach involved dining with them at the London St James's Club; but there was also an increasingly clear line on financial relations with London to support his charm offensive. In essence it involved a shift away from Brookeborough's emphasis on the North's special circumstances and ad hoc responses to short-term crises of the local economy, and towards portraying Northern Ireland as a relatively backward region of the UK whose modernization would contribute to the economic health of the kingdom as a whole.

  Depression in many of Britain's heavy industries at the end of the 1950s had increased unemployment in the regions at the same time as there was evidence of ‘over-heating’ in the south-east, which was pushing up wages and threatening the balance of payments. The result was an increasing interest in developing a regional policy that would direct investment to those parts of Britain where resources were underemployed. Regional expansion could thus be seen as a contribution to a higher rate of national economic growth and became part of the 1960s vogue for national planning. Regional planning initiatives in Scotland and Wales were associated with new investments in ‘growth centres’, new towns and motorways.32

  A long-standing conflict between the Stormont government and the Belfast Corporation over the latter's desire to have the city's boundary extended provided the basis for a largely civil service-based initiative that allowed the province to plug profitably into these national initiatives. Brookeborough's cabinet had resisted the boundary extension because of a fear that it might increase the number of Nationalist seats, but eventually had to concede a request from the Corporation for a survey of the Belfast area by an independent consultant. Sir Robert Matthew, an eminent planner, was engaged, and his report, published just before Brookeborough's resignation, was a much more ambitious document than its title implied. By dealing with the question of Belfast's boundary within the context of the future development of infrastructure in the province as a whole, it was a blueprint for a massive increase in public investment. It suggested the creation of a new town between Lurgan and Portadown, the development of a number of ‘growth centres’, and a major improvement in the transport system with a new motorway and road network.33

  The Matthew Report would be the basis for O'Neill's subsequent success in extracting significantly more resources from the Treasury than his predecessor. However, at the time of Brookeborough's resignation the full implications of the report were far from apparent, and O'Neill's succession was not linked to the promulgation of a distinctive philosophy on either the economy or community relations. At the same time there were some hints of what was to come. As Minister of Finance he had spoken of the need for the province to be more proactive in developing solutions to its economic problems, and this might have been interpreted as an implicit criticism of Brookeborough's importuning London for more subsidies for local industry. Given that the challenge from the NILP had been in part based on the criticism of the government for being too ready to feather-bed local industrialists, O'Neill had a distinct advantage over Faulkner, who was a strident defender of the local bourgeoisie.

  In his first speech to the Ulster Unionist Council, O'Neill defined his government's task as being ‘to transform the face of Ulster’.34 This transformation would be based not on directly addressing Catholic demands for reform but on a new approach to the economic and social modernization of the province. He referred to the Matthew Report as a way in which ‘Northern Ireland could capture the imagination of the world’.35 This would be as a region that had turned its back on its historic conflicts and united in the pursuit of full employment and higher living standards. His view of the modernization proposals in the Matthew Report and in the subsequent Wilson plan for economic development was that they would make such issues as discrimination and gerrymandering redundant: ‘As for the divisions in our society, I sometimes wonder whether we do much good by so frequently talking about them. There are so many things which should unite all Ulster people. If we emphasize these things, the divisions will seem less significant.’36

  Such an approach seemed dangerously superficial to liberal Unionists like Sayers, but they in their turn ignored the major political imperative under which any leader of the Unionist Party had to labour. This was to maximize support for the party in the Protestant electorate, given that very few Catholics would vote Unionist in the foreseeable future. Brookeborough had lost support in the party because he appeared to be unable to stem losses to the NILP in the greater Belfast area. Winning back this support was the immediate priority for O'Neill. The consolidation of the Unionist bloc in the east of the province was a prerequisite for the pursuit of reforms in community relations, as these, if they were to address some of the major complaints of the minority community, would inevitably lead to serious internal party conflict in Tyrone, Fermanagh and Londonderry. The problem for O'Neil was that, although this approach was successful in dealing with the NILP, it unintentionally sharpened community antagonisms.

  Plans for economic expansion inevitably had sectarian implications, given the religious and political geography of the region. The fact that the Matthew Report's designated ‘growth centres’ were concentrated in the east of the region did little to discourage the traditional nationalist complaint about discrimination against Catholic-majority areas in the west and south of Northern Ireland. When O'Neill announce
d the creation of an inter-departmental inquiry into the possible scope of economic planning in October 1963, the economic consultant chosen was the Oxford-trained Ulsterman Thomas Wilson, a committed unionist who was Professor of Economics at Glasgow University. Wilson's report, with an accompanying White Paper, was published in February 1965. It set out an ambitious target of 65,000 new jobs and 64,000 new houses by 1970 and proved decisive in O'Neill's campaign against the NILP.37 However, Wilson's view on where new industries should locate followed Matthew's suggestions and emphasized the difficulties of getting British and foreign industrialists interested in the peripheral parts of what seemed to them ‘a discouragingly remote area on the very fringe of Europe’.38 This was a bleak message for towns such as Derry, Strabane and Enniskillen, and intensified the perception amongst nationalists that the focus of O'Neill's development plans was on the unionist communities in the east, symbolized above all by the location of the new town between the predominantly Protestant towns of Lurgan and Portadown.

  Although there was no suggestion that Wilson was influenced by political or sectarian considerations, this was not to be the case with the report of the Lockwood Committee on Higher Education, which had been considering the case for a second university in the province. There was a potential base for this in Magee College in Derry, but the report suggested that the best choice would be the largely Protestant town of Coleraine in County Londonderry. While many Derry Protestants participated in the protest campaign against the proposal, it was the fixation of the hierarchy of the city's Unionist Party on avoiding any significant economic and social development that would upset the sectarian balance that proved determinant.39 Even the ‘liberal’ O'Neil was not immune to the corrosive influence of the sectarian myopia of some Derry Unionists, wondering how, if such a development took place, it would be ‘possible to insure against a radical increase in R.C. Pages?’40 The triumph of parochial sectarianism did much to disillusion those Catholics and liberal nationalists who had looked to O'Neil for change. It came on top of the resignation of Geoffery Copcutt, the Englishman who had been appointed head of the design team for the new town that Matthew had recommended. Copcutt embarrassed the government with a public statement urging a special development plan for Derry and supporting its case for the new university. He also described the administration as a ‘crisis-ridden regime, too busy looking over its shoulder to look outwards’.41 The government's subsequent decision to name the town ‘Craigavon’ appeared to vindicate this judgement and seemed a world away from O'Neill's optimistic rhetoric about transforming the face of Ulster.

  For O'Neill, these decisions were the price to be paid for the maintenance of party unity at a time when he was modernizing not only economic and social policies but also the style and structure of his government. Initially the necessity for continuity and party unity meant that his rivals for the leadership had key positions in his government, with Jack Andrews at Finance and Faulkner at Commerce. However, he sought to bypass the cabinet and centralize the initiative in policy-making in a small group of senior and trusted official advisers centred on his Private Secretary, Jim Malley, and two key Northern Ireland civil service allies: the cabinet secretary, Cecil Bateman, and his private secretary, Ken Bloomfield.

  His modernization project also resulted in a major change in the structure of government: the creation of a new Ministry of Development. Such a ministry had been recommended in the Matthew Report, but the fact that it would involve the removal of planning powers from local authorities had ensured opposition from within party and cabinet. In response, O'Neil reshuffled his cabinet in July 1964, when most of his colleagues were on holiday. Although the shifts in personnel were not radical, the most significant being Jack Andrews's departure from the government, there was a realignment of cabinet responsibilities, with the concentration of power over planning, transport, roads, local government and housing in the Ministry of Health and Local Government. William Craig, who as Chief Whip at the time of Brookeborough's resignation had been an important supporter of O'Neil, moved from Home Affairs to be the new Minister of Health and Local Government.42 Finally, in January 1965, O'Neil was able to boast to Harold Wilson of the first important alteration to the structure of devolved government since its inception, with the creation of a Ministry of Development and the transformation of Health and Local Government into Health and Social Services.43

  The new ministry had as its task the development of a ‘master plan’ for Northern Ireland and was the centrepiece of O'Neill's strategy for dealing with the challenge from the NILP. As such it would prove extremely effective. However, the disruptive effects of these reforms on local Unionist structures of power and patronage, together with his increasingly presidential style of government, produced a reaction within the party. This was manifest as early as the annual Ulster Unionist Council meeting in April 1965, where a resolution attacking the ‘dictatorial manner’ of recent government planning proposals was passed, as was one attacking encroachments upon the powers of county councils.Worryingly for the Prime Minister, the fissure that had opened up between central government and local Unionist power structures was complemented by evidence of geographical and political contentions as well.

  The debate on the Lockwood Report had produced unprecedented alliances at Stormont, with only two Unionist MPs speaking in favour. The government was able to ensure victory only by making the vote on the report an issue of confidence.44 Many Unionist MPs, and not only those in the west of the province, felt that O'Neill was prepared to allow the peripheral areas to stagnate and decline in pursuit of the defence of Unionism in the greater Belfast area. As Minister of Finance, O'Neill had set up a committee to investigate the loss-making railways run by the Ulster Transport Authority, and when the Benson Report was published in July 1963 it recommended substantial line closures, including Derry's two rail links to Belfast. Although one line was eventually reprieved, the Benson Report was a major factor in the formation of a ‘Unionist Council of the West’ by prominent Unionists in Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh to campaign against neglect by the centre.45 There was also increasing evidence that those who attacked O'Neill's aloof style, his centralizing of power and his neglect of the outlying parts of the province saw him as too willing to accommodate the traditional enemies of Ulster.

  O'Neill's decision to end decades of the cold war with Dublin by inviting Seán Lemass to meet him in Belfast in January 1965 was not revealed to his cabinet colleagues until the Taoiseach had arrived at Stormont. Driven by a desire to placate pressure from London for improved relations with the South, O'Neill did not even bother to call a meeting of the Unionist MPs to explain his thinking on the issue.46 The focus of the meeting was on low-key areas of possible common interest such as tourism and trade promotion, and the joint statement issued afterwards declared that the talks had not touched on ‘constitutional or political questions’.47 However, Lemass's inability to resist the temptation to portray it as a portent of more substantial constitutional changes48 helped those, still in a minority in the parliamentary Unionist Party, who attacked O'Neill for weakening the union by talking to the Prime Minister of a hostile state.49

  The increasing evidence of divisions in the party meant that O'Neill's success in what he termed ‘stealing Labour's thunder’50 paid fewer political dividends than he had hoped. The Unionist Party fought the 1965 Stormont election with a manifesto entitled ‘Forward Ulster to Target 1970!’ Labour's advance was firmly reversed, with a 7 per cent swing to the Unionist Party in the contested constituencies and the loss of two Labour seats in Woodvale and Victoria. David Bleakley, the defeated Labour MP for Victoria, put his defeat down to the success of O'Neill's rhetoric of planning and job creation: ‘for my voters Labour appeared to have lost its raison d'être.’51 But if O'Neill's determination to defeat the NILP had been largely successful, the price was the opening up of divisions in his party that made it even more difficult to deal with reforms demanded by the minority.

  O'Neillism
and Discrimination

  An unintended effect of O'Neill's commitment to the modernization of the North was a new mood of increasingly impatient expectation on the part of Catholics that the regime would address the issue of discrimination. Yet the dismal truth about O'Neill was that he displayed not the slightest inclination to do anything on this issue. Even his major ally in the press, Jack Sayers, was forced to deliver a critical review of O'Neill's first year in office: ‘It is indicative of government reluctance to admit that grievances exist and to forestall political attack that the National Assistance Board, the Housing Trust and the newly appointed Lockwood committee are without Catholic members.’52 Already there were signs of disillusionment amongst those middle-class Catholics who wanted a more positive relationship with the state. J.J. Campbell, a lecturer at St Joseph's Teacher Training College, and Brian McGuigan, a prominent Catholic lawyer, published three letters they sent to O'Neill between August 1963 and March 1964, after the Prime Minister failed to reply to any of them. They had expressed some disappointment that he had not responded to increasing evidence of goodwill from the Catholic community with appointments to bodies such as the Economic Council and the Lockwood Committee.53 For O'Neill the blame for the maintenance of sectarian divisions lay with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and its insistence on segregated education. He also claimed that attempts to appoint Catholics had been turned down by those approached.54 In fact, there is little evidence of any serious effort to attract suitable Catholic candidates. Despite the post-war expansion in the size of the Catholic middle class, appointments to public bodies reflected the existence of what an NILP critic called ‘the old boy network: since influential Protestants usually have never met their opposite numbers and indeed do not even know their names, the network to which ministers and senior officials belong fails to come up with the right answer.’55