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Northern Ireland’s ’68. Simon Prince
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isbn 9781788550383
Автор произведения Simon Prince
Издательство Ingram
Our work is not a dreary effort of plans and blue-prints and statistics. Forget jargon words like ‘infrastructure’ or ‘community relations’. Rather keep before your eyes a vision of an Ulster which – if we will and work for it – can be … An Ulster in which our economic growth will keep pace with a growing population, providing satisfying and useful work for all … an Ulster in which these material benefits will create such a spirit that our constitutional position will cease to be an issue in politics.158
As well as helping to bridge the gulf between ‘us’, the people, and ‘them’, the government, PEP was seen as a way of providing a space in which the two communities could co-operate to achieve shared goals.159 O’Neill hoped that PEP would encourage ‘youth organisations’, ‘Chambers of Commerce’, ‘Rotary Clubs’, and ‘the Churches’ to ‘consider working together in some field of public benefit’.160 ‘Is it, for instance, too visionary’, he asked the Belfast Irish Association, ‘to look forward to Protestant young people helping to re-decorate a Youth Club in Andersontown, or a young Catholic reading to a bed-ridden old lady on the Shankill Road? The firmest links can only be forged at the basic level of ordinary, warm, human contact.’161 PEP was not, therefore, a complete retreat from O’Neill’s laissez-faire approach to community relations: he was seeking to build a structure that would support pre-existing trends.162
O’Neill offered the most coherent analysis of the thinking behind PEP at a June 1968 conference on community work. In the opening speech, he claimed that the complexity of the modern state ‘accounts for much of the detachment, the “couldn’t care less” approach … which we see here and everywhere else’. ‘Alienation of government from the governed,’ continued the Prime Minister, ‘of town from country, of employer from working people – these are some of the chief ills of our age.’163 This instant analysis of the causes of the global revolt of 1968 bears comparison with those offered by some of Europe’s greatest minds. Within a few short months, however, O’Neill would no longer be in a position to deliver lectures on how the Western world could overcome alienation.
Narrowing his focus to Northern Ireland, O’Neill highlighted the specific difficulties rapid change posed in a society of ‘very fixed sympathies’ and in a political system ‘accustomed to saying “We are attacked; we must defend ourselves.”’ In its ‘modest’ attempt ‘to tackle some of those problems’, PEP based itself in the ‘local community, which people could know and understand’, and ‘sought to involve as many diverse interests as possible in some form of active work in the interests of the community’. For O’Neill, ‘civic spirit’ constituted the ‘building blocks out of which some wider sense of loyalty and involvement might one day be constructed’.164 Catholics would gradually be assimilated, a process that would in turn encourage Protestants to abandon their mistrust. Nationalism, as well as what O’Neill regarded as the coarser aspects of Unionism, would wither away to reveal a society comparable with Britain or Canada. While visiting North America in the spring of 1968, he was surprised to discover that the Grand Master of the Newfoundland Orange Order regularly took sick Catholics to mass. ‘I have often thought,’ O’Neill wrote in his autobiography, ‘that if only the Order in Ulster had developed in the same way as the Order in Newfoundland then today’s troubles might never have taken place.’165
PEP was supplemented by efforts to redress some substantive Catholic grievances. This was a gradual process that never went further than what the parliamentary party and the wider Unionist movement would accept. O’Neill had no intention of provoking another rebellion against his leadership. Indeed, the Prime Minister and key members of the Cabinet agreed in March 1967 that ‘there would be further consultations with representatives of the Orange Institution before final decisions were made’.166
‘Of all the proven injustices that exist in the Six Counties,’ commented the Derry Journal in May 1963, ‘none is more glaring than the manner in which the Mater Hospital is treated by the Stormont Government.’167 At the hospital’s 1966 prize-giving ceremony, the Bishop of Down and Connor noted the O’Neill administration’s professed good intentions towards the Catholic community and suggested that the Mater was ‘the place where it should be easy to begin to do something’.168 Protestant opinion, which was probably more influential with the Prime Minister, similarly favoured state aid for this hospital, which had opted out of the National Health Service. A Belfast Telegraph poll conducted in December 1967 found that 81 per cent of Unionist voters backed such a move. This perhaps reflected the substantial number of Protestants treated by the Mater.169 Progress on the issue was impeded by backbench opposition – championed in the Cabinet by Faulkner – to public funding for a Catholic institution. In January 1967, following much manoeuvring, the party conceded in principle state aid for the hospital. This was conditional upon the government reaching an agreement with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church about protection for the Mater’s religious character.170 Mutual suspicion, however, ensured that almost two years later these negotiations had yet to be concluded.171
The bishops appear to have entertained even greater doubts about the motives underlying Stormont’s October 1967 White Paper on education. The Bill offered Catholic schools ‘maintained’ status: increased grants in exchange for Local Education Authority (LEA) nominees sitting on the management committee. The Bishop of Down and Connor almost immediately accused the government of ‘taking advantage of our grave financial need’ to ‘introduce representatives’ of bodies whose ‘attitude’ to ‘Catholic interests [in many cases] is so notorious that we can only regard with dismay their direct involvement’. At a later stage, ‘a mere alteration in the proportion of representation could turn the position into one of complete control by non-Catholic and indeed anti-Catholic forces’. By contrast, the Nationalist Party and the teaching unions cautiously welcomed the proposals.172 Such feelings proved sufficiently wide-spread within the community to encourage the hierarchy to seek a compromise. In May 1968, the bishops agreed to a model scheme whereby teachers would be appointed by the school committee subject to the requirements of the Ministry. Other staff would be employed by the LEA after consultation.173 During the Bill’s second reading, the Education Minister had reassured the hierarchy that ‘this was not a deep-laid plot to take over the voluntary schools’.174 In the privacy of the Cabinet, however, he described ‘what he proposed … as a useful first step towards breaking clerical control’.175
The government’s response to a paper on citizens’ rights presented by the NILP and the trade unions also confirms the Catholic conspiracy theory. This memorandum stated that ‘the time is overdue … for the Prime Minister … to give an earnest of his liberalism and enlightenment by the acceptance of the basic principle that equal citizenship should confer equal civic rights in every part of the United Kingdom’. In practice, this entailed bringing electoral law into line with Britain, fair representation for minority groups on public bodies, measures to diminish discrimination in employment and in the allocation of public housing, the appointment of an ombudsman, and reform of the existing trade union legislation.176 A few years later, this would have been a moderate reform package. In October 1966, however, the Unionist Cabinet regarded most of the proposed changes as a threat to the party’s dominance.
Attorney-General Teddy Jones, who had long acted as a lobbyist for the interests of Londonderry Unionism, made a comprehensive attack on the Labour memorandum.177 Jones asked rhetorically,
what equity is there for a Government, which represents the majority in Northern Ireland, to be subjected to influence to alter laws which suit the Province and are the basis of, and essential to, its constitutional existence and have been duly passed and accepted by the superior government and which have no way infringed the safeguards laid down in the Government of Ireland Act?
According to the Attorney-General, the constitution had been enacted to avoid a united Ireland – for which the ‘Nationalist opposition’ were still contending. The ‘minority groups’ were therefore ‘seeking, in the name of progress, to force the government here to change to procedures which they feel will suit them better when, in fact, what is sought to be changed is the very basis on which the constitutional structure of Northern