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Northern Ireland’s ’68. Simon Prince
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isbn 9781788550383
Автор произведения Simon Prince
Издательство Ingram
This focus upon symbolism rather than substantive reform climaxed the following year with the invitation of Seán Lemass, the Southern Prime Minister, to Stormont. Lemass was a veteran of the Easter Rising, but economic modernisation mattered more to him than traditional Irish nationalist concerns. Like O’Neill, he was confident that economic and social change would bring an end to the island’s ancient animosities. Unlike O’Neill, he believed that a modernised Ireland would be a united Ireland.111 The Northern Prime Minister was effectively forced into responding to the overtures from the South: Lemass was planning to speak at Queen’s University, the media were calling for a meeting, liberal Unionist pressure was growing, and Faulkner was apparently considering a similar initiative.112 Nevertheless, when Lemass arrived in Belfast on 14 January 1965, it came as a surprise to politicians as well as to the general public.113 O’Neill’s Cabinet was informed only on the morning of the meeting – just a few hours before the news was released to the press. Standing in ‘the rather spacious loo at Stormont’, the Southern Prime Minister confided to his Northern counterpart that he was going to ‘get into terrible trouble for this’. ‘No, Mr Lemass,’ came the reply, ‘it is I who will get into trouble for this.’114 O’Neill was right.
The blaze of publicity surrounding O’Neill’s bridge-building gestures was soon to be eclipsed by the dark fears that they raised. Lemass’s invitation to Stormont brought an unwelcome guest to the seat of government: Ian Paisley. The Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church, an evangelical Protestant sect that he had helped to found, came to accuse O’Neill of treachery.115 For Paisley, there was no halfway house between truth and error, good and evil, Christ and Antichrist. The Protestant conspiracy theory had undoubtedly found its most eloquent and most inventive spokesman. Paisley invoked an IRA–Vatican plot marked by darkness, secrecy, violence, and sexual perversity. The Protestant Telegraph, Paisley’s weekly newspaper, contained articles with headlines such as ‘Love Affairs of the Vatican’, ‘Jesuit Plots Unmasked’, and ‘Papal Conspiracy’.116
Paisley believed that Christ had sent him forth as a sheep in the midst of these black-robed wolves. As a gifted Bible scholar, he understood that God’s instruments were expected to be as wise as serpents. For the Unionist leadership at least, however, Paisley was not as harmless as a dove. When, in June 1963, Belfast City Hall flew the Union flag at half-mast to mark the death of Pope John XXIII, Paisley explained that he would not tolerate such actions because he ‘remembered … men like [the sixteenth-century Reformers] Calvin, Knox, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer broke rather than bent for the Gospel and liberty’.117 The post-war ecumenical movement was attempting to forge closer links between the world’s Churches. But Paisley and other Protestant fundamentalists, such as the American Baptist preacher Bob Jones Jr., remained at war with Rome.118 Since the 1950s, Paisley had been at the forefront of protests against the Protestant Churches and the Unionist government’s supposed appeasement of Catholics. As religious and political ministers started to build bridges in the 1960s, Paisley stepped up his campaign against those he saw as the ‘Iscariots of Ulster’ crossing over to the other side.119
Although his language echoed seventeenth-century sermons, Paisley’s message still resonated with a twentieth-century audience. During a period of rapid change, he reaffirmed unionism’s traditional values. But Paisleyism was not simply a regressive phenomenon, retarding O’Neill’s efforts to modernise Northern Ireland. Like the New Catholicism of the late nineteenth century, the Protestant preacher criticised liberalism while embracing many contemporary developments.120 He set up a newspaper, founded voluntary associations, organised mass demonstrations, travelled regularly to Continental Europe and North America, and forged links with like- minded foreigners. These were the means that Paisley used to reach those unionists who had benefited from post-war social and economic reforms but nevertheless wanted Northern Ireland to remain a Protestant state. This was a small but growing constituency. Beginning in 1965, the Orange Order and frontier Unionists came together to oppose further concessions being made to Catholics.121 At a rally held that year to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne, the Grand Master of the Orange Order was heckled into silence for supporting O’Neill.122 In 1966, the Order passed resolutions condemning ecumenism and calling for a return to the fundamental principles of the Protestant faith. By pandering to Paisley’s views, the Orange leadership was hoping to isolate Paisley the man. Indeed, the Grand Master urged the Order to bar Paisley from speaking at its events.123
The Unionist government also followed the risky strategy of co-option and condemnation. When Paisley threatened to march into the heart of Catholic Belfast in September 1964 to remove the Irish tricolour from Sinn Féin’s election headquarters, the police were sent in before he could act. Home Affairs Minister Faulkner vainly tried to balance out this decision by banning Paisley from entering the Catholic Falls Road district. Paisley instead held a meeting in the city centre, but a hostile crowd gathered in the Falls in case he defied the ban. These protesters clashed with the police, thus provoking the worst rioting that Belfast had witnessed in decades.
The Irish flag was again placed in the window of the Sinn Féin office and was again removed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Barricades were built, petrol bombs were thrown, police Land Rovers were sent in, and water cannons were used.124 O’Neill blamed Paisley for the disturbances and warned against a return to the sectarian violence of the past.125 However, the heightened tensions helped to deliver to the Unionists the marginal Westminster seat for West Belfast. As one Nationalist politician observed, the party leaders believed that they had exploited Paisley for their own ends and, in turn, he was certain that he had used them to score a notable victory.126
The political calculations upon which O’Neill’s triangulation strategy rested were upset by the events of 1966. The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising presented the Unionist government once again with a choice between keeping public order and maintaining party unity. On this occasion, fears that the IRA intended to renew the armed struggle led O’Neill and his ministers to prioritise security over sectarianism. Stormont warned Westminster that the Republicans were planning to provoke sectarian violence and bring the army onto the streets. Harold Wilson was told that the ‘IRA campaign would then be publicised as a people’s uprising against the excesses of the Crown forces’.127 The Northern Ireland government therefore decided – with a few exceptions to appease loyalists – to allow the parades to go ahead and the Irish tricolour to be flown. The Derry Journal praised Stormont’s restraint, which had ‘paid off handsomely in the unruffled peace and calm throughout the community that has prevailed at this commemoration’.128 Although Northern Ireland escaped serious disturbance, the government would have been prepared for it. In the week running up to the anniversary, the press were briefed that ‘police and other security forces have been placed on a footing of instant readiness to meet any unlawful activity which may be mounted by the IRA’.129 The Nationalist Party accused Stormont of indulging in ‘scaremanship of the worst type’. Indeed, O’Neill appears to have hoped that the massive display of state power would placate Protestant extremists. It did not. At a huge Ulster Hall rally, O’Neill was denounced as an ‘arch traitor’.130
The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising was celebrated in stanzas as well as in the streets. Seamus Heaney’s Requiem for the Croppies linked the risings of 1916 and 1798. The poem’s theme is resurrection. The eighteenth-century rebels, the ‘Croppies’, marched with ‘pockets … full of barley’. The Croppies were defeated by the British army, vainly ‘shaking scythes