LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

was the political harvest of the seeds sown in 1798. In 1966, the Republican crop competed for light with Unionist flowers. During and after the First World War, poppies grew on the battlefields where Irishmen died in their tens of thousands. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and the sacrifice of the Ulster Division, O’Neill travelled to France. Many of the men who served with the division had previously belonged to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a paramilitary organisation that had been founded in 1913 to resist Home Rule. Half a century later, a small group of militant loyalists decided to resurrect the UVF name. The new UVF saw itself as part of a long tradition of defending Protestant Ulster from its enemies; everyone else saw it as a murder gang that killed Catholics in cold blood. In the early hours of 26 June 1966, three Catholic barmen leaving a pub in a Protestant area of west Belfast were shot by UVF gunmen.132 One of the men, eighteen-year-old Peter Ward, was killed and his companions were wounded.133 O’Neill, who had flown back from France to deal with the crisis, highlighted to the Stormont Parliament the contrast between men who had willingly laid down their lives fighting on the Somme and men who had senselessly taken life in the back streets of Belfast.134

      One of the UVF killers supposedly said in police custody, ‘I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him.’ He later denied in court having made this statement.135 O’Neill – encouraged by reports from the RUC – also believed that the UVF was part of the wider ‘Paisleyite Movement’.136 Paisley himself had immediately condemned the murder and called upon the government to use the full rigour of the law against the guilty men.137 He apparently felt no need to ask himself, ‘Did that sermon of mine send out certain men that shot Peter Ward?’ While there was categorically no direct connection, Paisley’s words and indeed his actions undoubtedly fuelled the fears of militant loyalists. At the beginning of June 1966, Paisley and his Church had marched on the Irish Presbyterian General Assembly along a route that passed close to a Catholic area of Belfast. The Protestant marchers were met by stone-throwing Catholic youths. The Free Presbyterians had provoked the violence, but they were protected by the police. As the RUC battled with the rioters, the marchers continued on to the city centre. Trouble flared up again when they reached the assembly: the Paisleyites shouted anti-ecumenical slogans at the Irish Presbyterian leadership and abused Northern Ireland’s Governor. With moderate opinion outraged at Paisley’s conduct, O’Neill felt confident enough to draw analogies with the 1930s: ‘The contempt for established authority; the crude and unthinking intolerance; the emphasis upon monster processions and rallies; the appeal to a perverted form of patriotism: each and every one of these things has its parallel in the rise of the Nazis’.138 The counter-attack continued with Paisley being charged with public order offences. Having been found guilty, the Protestant preacher decided not to pay his fine but instead embrace the martyrdom of a prison sentence.139 The blood on Belfast’s streets had not made Paisley less sanguine. During late July 1966, the loyalist vigils held outside the city’s Crumlin Road gaol degenerated into riots. The Cabinet accepted the Home Affairs Minister’s proposal to use his powers to impose a three-month-long ban on all marches and meetings within a fifteen-mile radius of city hall.140 The ministerial order transferred the crisis from the streets into the Unionist Party.

      Six years later, O’Neill claimed that the ‘seeds of 1966, germinating in 1968, unfortunately have now bloomed into violence’.141 Throughout the Western world, the radical Right played an important supporting role in the political street theatre of ’68. Comparisons can be made between Northern Ireland and the American South: protests against the half-heartedness of efforts to dismantle the old order and prevent murders motivated by hate.142 But drawing parallels with Continental developments is perhaps more revealing. In 1964, the same year as the riots in the Falls district of Belfast, the extreme right-wing Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands was founded in West Germany. The party’s successes in the 1966 Land elections prompted considerable concern.143 Theodor Adorno, one of the country’s most important philosophers and social critics, warned that many West Germans had not yet let go of the reactionary beliefs of the last century. He feared that ‘so-called national renewal movements in an age in which nationalism is outdated are especially susceptible to forming sadistic practices’.144 Across the border in France, the rabidly nationalist group Occident had already been seduced by violence. From 1964 onwards, drilled commando units armed with iron bars launched a series of attacks in Paris on left-wing students as well as on Jews, Africans, and Arabs.145 When leftists in Western Europe took to the streets to provoke confrontations, they found that the radical Right was only too willing to oblige.

      O’NEILLISM

      In his autobiography, O’Neill ‘face[d] up to the difficulty of saying a word about my predecessor, Lord Brookeborough’:

      A man of limited intelligence, his strong suits were shooting and fishing in Fermanagh and when he came up on Monday night or Tuesday morning it was difficult to shake him from some of his more idiotic ideas. In short, it would have been quite impossible, even with his immense charm, for him to have been a minister in London.146

      What O’Neill failed to grasp was that the qualities needed to run a big Whitehall department were not necessarily those needed to govern Northern Ireland and lead the Unionist Party. When the future viscount began to become involved in politics, he claimed that he knew ‘what is being thought by the people here’.147 As the head of a government and a party that had to be responsive to the popular mood, Brookeborough’s common touch proved invaluable. By contrast, as a senior civil servant later observed, O’Neill ‘liked politics as an art’ and ‘didn’t find it easy to meet the ordinary middle-class people’.148 With the bloody and battered year of 1966 limping into the autumn, this weakness would almost cost him the premiership.

      During September 1966, backbenchers were asked to sign a document calling for O’Neill’s resignation.149 Paisley had weakened the Prime Minister’s position, but the Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church was one concern among many in the party. O’Neill’s modernisation strategy had stripped local authorities of some of their jealously guarded functions. This loss of patronage had damaged the clientelism upon which Northern Irish politics was largely based.150 Unionists from the West of the province were unhappy that development had been concentrated in the greater Belfast region. Liberals were disappointed by the absence of ambitious reform. Traditionalists were dismayed by the North–South summit and the Easter Rising commemorations. What united this disparate discontent was a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with O’Neill’s detached, presidential style.151

      The Prime Minister made clear to the rebels that this would not be a bloodless coup. He counter-attacked in the media as well as in meetings of the parliamentary party and local associations. He disingenuously associated the rebellion with Paisley and exploited internal party divisions. Faulkner calculated that the moment was not right and declined to offer himself as an alternative leader. The revolt subsequently lost all momentum. Having overwhelmingly won a vote of confidence, O’Neill recognised the need to appease his critics. Bill Craig, who headed the Ministry of Development that had removed responsibilities from local government and neglected the West, was demoted to Home Affairs.152 A high-level civil servant maintained: ‘That’s when Craig first got the idea that he could be a rebel himself.’ ‘In fact, [Chief Whip] Jimmy Chichester-Clark … found Bill drunk. And Bill said, “Well, if Faulkner can be a rebel I’ll get to the right of Faulkner, so”.’153 The internal revolt and the loss of a key ally darkened further O’Neill’s pessimistic disposition. Assessing the dying year in a letter to Bloomfield, he observed that at the end of September he could not fully appreciate his supposedly much stronger position after the Stormont election. ‘My forecast for 1967’, he concluded, ‘is that it will be much worse than 1966.’154

      The rebellion persuaded O’Neill to start to base his premiership upon appeals to a public opinion that he believed was substantially more liberal than official Unionism. O’Neill had declared in response to 1966’s loyalist violence and Republican triumphalism that ‘Those who seek by word or deed to incite hatred and widen divisions in the community can be crushed by the universal disapprobation and distaste of decent people’. With his references to ‘the steady ground-swell of moderation’ and the ‘dignified expression of moderate opinion’, O’Neill appeared to embrace Sayers’ contention that there was an expanding middle ground.155 Following

Скачать книгу