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Northern Ireland’s ’68. Simon Prince
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isbn 9781788550383
Автор произведения Simon Prince
Издательство Ingram
On the day after he became Prime Minister, O’Neill telephoned his former Private Secretary in America. ‘I want and need you at home,’ he told Ken Bloomfield.83 O’Neill’s patronage speeded Bloomfield’s inexorable rise. But the political master also owed much to his favourite civil servant. Although the term O’Neillism implies a personal leadership style, the Prime Minister heavily relied upon his advisers. Policy emerged not from Cabinet meetings, but from the long discussions that O’Neill regularly had with this reform-minded clique. According to Bloomfield, who served as ‘assistant and later deputy secretary to the cabinet’, this ‘team’ consisted of himself, ‘the cabinet secretary (at first Cecil Bateman and from 1965 Harold Black), [and] the prime minister’s private secretary Jim Malley’. Bloomfield’s ‘role was to be the word-spinner and ideas man’, which entailed ‘preparing the prime minister’s public utterances’. As this was the era of John F. Kennedy, the team were dubbed ‘the presidential aides’.84 It was also the age of Charles de Gaulle. At the beginning of the 1960s, in both France and Northern Ireland, a tiny elite of politicians and bureaucrats was pursuing economic and social modernisation.85
ANNIHILATING THE NORTHERN IRELAND LABOUR PARTY
In June 1963, over a century after his eight great-grandparents had left its shores, President Kennedy came to Ireland. When he arrived in Wexford town, a choir began singing a ballad celebrating the 1798 rebellion. The President joined the schoolboys for the second chorus and reduced even cynical journalists to tears.86 This may well have been sentimental, but Kennedy’s once-removed Irish patriotism had a political impact. As an up-and-coming Senator, he had supported a congressional resolution supporting Irish reunification. Nevertheless, O’Neill had hoped that the leader of the free world would find time to open the Giant’s Causeway Park. The invitation – made through the British government – was politely but firmly turned down.87 Despite this public snub, O’Neill continued to idolise Kennedy. He undertook a pilgrimage to Washington in March 1964 and offered his condolences to Jackie Kennedy – they then went on to discuss eighteenth-century Whig politics.88 O’Neill found inspiration in Kennedy’s teachings. At Yale in 1962, the President had told the students that ‘The fact of the matter is that most of the problems … that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems … that do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.’89 Six years later, the Prime Minister echoed this sentiment: ‘Democracy – let us face the fact – is better attuned to broad simple issues than to complex and highly technical decisions.’90
O’Neill was not the first Northern Irish politician to advocate a technocratic approach to the region’s economic problems. The NILP had been winning over Protestant working-class voters with the claim that it would succeed in cutting unemployment where the gentlemen amateurs of Brookeborough’s Cabinet had failed. On the other side of the Irish Sea, a similar campaign swept Labour into power. Harold Wilson, the Leader of the Opposition, had mocked Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s emergence: ‘In this ruthlessly competitive, scientific, technical, industrial age, a week of intrigues has produced a result based on family and hereditary connections.’91 Wilson, the grammar-school boy who had gone on to lecture at Oxford and to work as Beveridge’s research assistant, portrayed himself as a meritocratic, technocratic manager with a plan to get the country going again. Staking his claim to the political legacy of the martyred President, he called upon ‘the youth of Britain to storm the frontiers of knowledge, to bring back to Britain that surging adventurous self-confidence and sturdy self-respect which the Tories have almost submerged with their apathy and cynicism’. Nineteen sixty-four presented a ‘chance to change the face and future of Britain’.92 Nine months before, O’Neill had declared that his ‘task will be literally to transform the face of Ulster’.93 This Old Etonian’s mastery of the new language of politics rivalled that of Wirral Grammar School’s former head boy. O’Neill had stolen the NILP’s thunder.94
For O’Neill, planning was more about politics than economics. In late 1963, Tom Wilson, who had succeeded Harold Wilson as the economics fellow at University College, Oxford, was invited to prepare an economic plan for Northern Ireland. The Belfast-born professor may actually have invited himself.95 When the Prime Minister belatedly informed his Cabinet that Wilson had started work, economics was far from his thoughts. O’Neill instead stressed that Stormont ‘must not only be active, but be seen to be active’; the likely ‘improvement of confidence [as] had clearly resulted from the Whitaker Plan in the Republic [of Ireland]’; and the importance of ‘the Treasury, in considering the well documented claims of other areas, [taking] into account a similar survey for Northern Ireland’.96 Moreover, when Matthew and Wilson’s blueprint for Ulster’s new face threatened Unionism’s delicate electoral position, sectarianism prevailed over modernisation. Geoffrey Copcutt, an Englishman responsible for implementing part of the Matthew Report, resigned in protest. He told the British press that the ‘situation of the Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland was very similar to that of the Negro in the United States’.97
O’Neill’s economic plans may have been flawed, but his political plans appeared flawless. The Derry Journal grumbled that the 1965 Stormont general election was ‘thrust on a jaded public, in the dead of winter, eighteen months before it is due, and on what grounds is anyone’s guess’.98 It was called on the grounds that O’Neill wanted to exploit communal divisions within the NILP and it succeeded in repulsing the party’s advance into Unionist territory. The NILP lost half its seats and saw its share of the vote fall by a third. ‘The unfortunate Labour Party’, O’Neill gleefully recalled, ‘was in fact practically annihilated.’99 The Prime Minister had not always been such a committed enemy of the NILP. ‘In an interview given to the New Statesman, in 1958,’ the party’s main strategist remembered, ‘[O’Neill] came as close as any Unionist politician could do to welcoming the advent of Northern Ireland Labour as a constitutional opposition’.100 However, as the New Statesman interviewer acknowledged in a later article, the then Deputy Prime Minister’s endorsement of the NILP had ‘got him into serious trouble with his party’.101 It was widely believed that losing working-class votes to the NILP – whose support for the Union was far from certain – was the beginning of a process that would lead to the end of partition. Similarly, the West German Christian Democrats viewed their Social Democratic opponents as the party that would let in the Communists.102 Historians have tended to regard O’Neill’s subsequent attack on the NILP and its gradualist, parliamentary approach to civil rights reform as a ‘classic misjudgement’.103 O’Neill though had recognised that his survival as Unionist leader depended upon driving the NILP to the edge of political extinction.
THE ARCH TRAITOR
O’Neill’s self-appointed task may have been to ‘transform the face of Ulster’, but he later defined this ambition rather narrowly.104 In an October 1963 television interview, which was reported in the Derry Journal, O’Neill ‘explained that “what he really had in mind” in that statement was simply the promotion of better industrial relations and enterprise with a view to economic recovery’. O’Neill, the newspaper regretfully concluded, ‘implied that his objective as Premier had nothing to do at all with … co-operation … between the two sections of the Six County community’.105 Although he was an interventionist when it came to the economy, the new Prime Minister preferred to entrust the problem of community relations to the free play of forces. Protestants should content themselves with playing good neighbours to Catholics until the ecumenical movement, the welfare state, and all the trends associated with modernisation finally delivered communal harmony. Conceiving of the British link as a source of economic benefits and privileged access to the international community, O’Neill hoped that ‘those who are now in opposition’ would be convinced ‘that their own ultimate best interests’ lay with the Union.106
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