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devolution had been reflected in Northern Ireland’s reduced Westminster representation. If ‘full rights of debate and voting’ were to be withdrawn, then ‘a larger number’ of MPs – proportionate to the area’s population – would be required. While acknowledging that he was ‘aware of this’, Wilson nevertheless cautioned that ‘if the Westminster Parliament reverted to a marginal balance of the Parties, the position of the Ulster members could create a first class political crisis’.217 This showed the extent to which British party political concerns shaped Wilson’s thinking on Northern Ireland. Given that Labour and the Conservatives were neck and neck in the opinion polls, the Prime Minister’s primary objective was to retain his parliamentary majority beyond the next general election.218

      When Bacon’s successor, Lord Stonham, visited the province in June 1968, he declared that the British government had ‘no wish to meddle’. With relations between the two governments ‘so harmonious’ and the ‘old differences in Ulster … being put aside’, Stonham had ‘faith in the future of Northern Ireland’.219 The civil service briefed their Minister to convey Westminster’s desire for reform of the Special Powers Act and the local government franchise – but not to exert any significant pressure. The Home Office offered no objections to Stormont’s plan to complete the restructuring of local government before studying the suitability of universal adult suffrage. Indeed, London was still more concerned with Northern Ireland’s economic problems than with civil rights.220 O’Neill had successfully persuaded Westminster to work through him rather than impose reform upon Stormont. In the process, however, right-wing Unionists had increasingly come to regard him as compromised. A report on discussions with grassroots members in September 1968 found that the ‘ordinary loyalist no longer believes that the Unionist Party is an effective influence on the course of events’.221

      REFORMING A PROTESTANT STATE

      O’Neill was a reformer. His conception of reform, however, differed from that of the British government and the various groups campaigning for civil rights. Stormont was not trying to meet the minority population half-way but pursuing a Catholic capitulation. O’Neill was adamant ‘that the constitutional position of Northern Ireland is not a matter on which there can be any compromise, now or in the future, and I must say, too, that I believe we have a right to call upon all our citizens to support the Constitution’.222 Economic and social modernisation, he assumed, would strengthen the Union and weaken its opponents. Catholics would eventually recognise that their material interests were best served by accepting partition.223 As Irish nationalism headed towards the dustbin of history, Protestant extremism would lose its justification and also fade away. With the expansion of the political centre ground, Stormont could finish dismantling the sectarian and authoritarian aspects of the regime.224 Partition would no longer need to be protected by discrimination and oppression. In stark contrast, the overwhelming majority of Stormont’s opponents saw civil rights reform as a stepping stone to reunification, not something to be delivered in full only after partition became permanent. Differences over reform, rather than its absence, brought politics into the streets at the end of the 1960s.

CHAPTER TWO

      Nationalism and its Discontents

      CATHOLIC LOYALTIES

      Eamonn McCann and Kevin Boyle went on a month-long holiday to Donegal at the end of the 1950s. The schoolboys had travelled over the border to the Gaeltacht to learn Irish under the watchful eye of Catholic priests. This was what generations of Irish nationalists had been struggling to achieve: the youth of Ireland leaving behind the corruption of the towns and cities to seek their true language and culture among simple rural folk. McCann and Boyle, however, were Western teenagers as well as Irish Catholic schoolboys; they had no intention of devoting their leisure to things of the spirit. Late one night, McCann and Boyle went swimming with some girls. The party was discovered by the priests, who forgave the girls and punished the boys. For their sins, McCann and Boyle were cast out of the Irish nationalist paradise of the Gaeltacht. Fearing what his mother would do if she found out, Boyle took up McCann’s offer to stay with him in Derry rather than head straight home to Newry. The two teenagers enjoyed a carefree couple of days in the city. They ran around shouting their heads off and leaping up aiming to hit street signs with their hands. When a policeman put a stop to their antics, Boyle followed McCann’s lead and gave a false name. The highlight of Boyle’s visit was a trip to the cinema to see Victor Mature in a ‘sword and sandal’ movie – a genre that was at the peak of its international popularity.1

      McCann and Boyle were far from the only members of Northern Ireland’s Catholic community to possess complicated and contradictory identities. An attitude survey conducted on the eve of the Troubles found that three-quarters of Catholics described their nationality as ‘Irish’. This did not mean, however, that they embraced a Dublin-designed identity and abandoned all others.2 The minority population was made up of Republicans, citizens of Derry, members of the working class, Roman Catholics, and so on.3 Moreover, what was understood by ‘Irish’ might differ for each individual. For the dominant figure of twentieth-century nationalism, Eamon de Valera, God had ordained that the island of Ireland should be one nation. This sacred land must once again be filled by a frugal, Gaelic, Catholic peasantry. De Valera’s 1937 constitution committed the Southern state to this goal. In turn, many Northern nationalists committed themselves to Dublin. Londonderry Corporation’s Nationalist councillors refused to attend a Battle of Britain commemoration service because ‘Our Government in Dublin declared its neutrality’.4 De Valera, however, was a consummate politician. By presenting Fianna Fáil as a national movement that transcended social divisions, he pushed mere political parties to the margins of public life. But when de Valera said Ireland, he meant only the South. Indeed, almost all politicians did.5 The Nationalist Party repeatedly asked for the right to be seated in the Dáil and the major parties repeatedly refused.6 Such experiences provoked a prominent Nationalist to remark that Northern Catholics were ‘the bastard children of the Republic … sometimes they needs must acknowledge us, but generally speaking they try to keep their distance’.7 By the end of 1967, opinion polls were finding that the great majority of these children were hoping that London and Dublin would finally agree to share custody: a united Ireland with a link ‘of some sort’ with Britain. In the space of four decades, ‘Ourselves Alone’ had become Ireland should not be ‘going it alone’.8

      Léon Gambetta, the nineteenth-century French republican leader who had escaped from Paris by balloon during the Franco-Prussian War, said of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire, ‘Let us think of it always; let us speak of it never’. Instead, the recovery of the lost provinces became something for French nationalism to rally behind and something that no government ever thought of fighting a war to achieve. A wit reversed Gambetta’s maxim: ‘speak of it always, think of it never’.9 In post-war Europe, Southern Irish parties were not alone in following this injunction. The idea that Germany would one day be reunified was the Lebenslüge, ‘life-lie’, of the Federal Republic. Almost half of the West German population during the 1950s and 1960s felt that reunification was the most important political issue, while almost all of West Germany’s politicians felt that reunification was neither possible nor desirable.10 Dublin and Bonn were not prepared to risk the hard-won political and social stability of their states by embarking upon foolhardy nationalist adventures.

      An independent Dungannon councillor sadly concluded in 1964 that ‘the official attitude down South is … that they no longer want us’.11 Rejected by Dublin as well as Belfast, Northern Ireland’s Catholics were given a home by Rome. The Church hierarchy had been convinced during the early 1920s that either the new Northern state would collapse, London and Dublin would force Belfast to treat the minority fairly or Catholic territory would be transferred to the South. When all these hopes had failed, the Church set about providing the faithful with a state within a state.12 Since the 1850s, Rome had battled against the Kingdom of Italy, the French Republic, and the German Empire. The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church had no intention of capitulating to the Northern Ireland statelet.

      The nineteenth-century ‘culture wars’ had not been fought in Ireland. British governments had accepted the dominant position of the Irish Catholic Church and had tried to avoid provoking a conflict with it.13 Readers of The Tablet, however, were able to follow in detail the struggles

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