LITMIR.BIZ

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League (APL). It sought to unite all Nationalists around a common platform, fight winnable Stormont and Westminster seats, and make the party more accountable to its supporters. In 1947, the APL co-operated with the Friends of Ireland’s fruitless efforts to stop the passage of legislation that relaxed some of the restrictions imposed upon Stormont by the Government of Ireland Act. The parliamentary debate, however, did provide a rare opportunity to criticise the Unionist regime.34 The APL also publicised perceived injustices through a series of pamphlets. The most notable of these, Mutilation of a Nation, was written by Cahir Healy, who entered politics as a founding member of Sinn Féin and ended up as a Nationalist MP. These efforts to attack partition in print were supported and supplemented by the Southern political parties. In 1949, they came together to create the Mansion House Committee to support Nationalist candidates in the Stormont election.35 Its publications became the raw material for The Indivisible Island. As well as powerfully restating the traditional Irish nationalist reading of history, this book presented exposures of gerrymandering and of discrimination in public employment.36 But all these labours were in vain.

      As frustration at the APL’s lack of success mounted, McAteer’s branch chose to march through Derry in defiance of Stormont’s bans. Conflicts over the right to march through areas identified with the other community had marked the region since the nineteenth century. When McAteer had discussed in Irish Action the possibility of marching through Protestant territory, he had maintained that the ‘important thing’ would be to ‘be seen by foreign observers’.37 On St Patrick’s Day 1951, McAteer and a small number of APL members attempted to parade with the Irish tricolour through the walled city. Although the march itself was legal, the organisers had consciously violated the law by publicly displaying the Republican flag. The marchers succeeded in provoking the police, which encouraged the local APL branch to plan a larger protest for the following year. This demonstration was banned and baton-charged. In the opinion of many who were present on both occasions, the violence that ensued was comparable to that unleashed on 5 October 1968. The difference between the two marches was that one was seen by foreign observers on television and the other was not.38

      This was one of the last in a sequence of disappointments that fatally undermined the APL. In September 1951, the American House of Representatives voted against a resolution calling for an all-Ireland plebiscite on partition.39 At the height of the Cold War, the American political establishment was reluctant to damage its alliance with Britain. Strategic concerns also superseded Labour’s sympathy with Irish nationalism. The North’s commitment during the Second World War – in sharp contrast to Southern neutrality – had transformed the attitude of many Labour ministers. Herbert Morrison, while limited to influence rather than direct involvement, was the champion of the Unionist cause.40 In 1946, Morrison produced a memorandum for the Cabinet based upon private visits to both Irish states. He recommended that partition should be maintained.41 The Friends of Ireland not only proved impotent when confronted with the opposition of the party leadership, but also disagreed with the APL over the solution to the Irish question. The Friends of Ireland looked at the other island through British eyes. The 1950 Tribune pamphlet, John Bull’s Other Island, assumed that class rather than communal divisions lay behind discrimination in Northern Ireland. The best way of achieving unity, therefore, was for the different Irish Labour parties to take office on both sides of the border.42

      Domestic politics similarly dominated the calculations of the Southern parties. Following a long period of Fianna Fáil rule, politics had become more competitive. The parties sought to gain an advantage over their rivals by parading their respective republican credentials. This climaxed in September 1948 when the interparty government declared the Republic. The wider consequences of this action were apparently overlooked. It brought an immediate British guarantee that reunification would require the consent of the Stormont Parliament: the Ireland Act of 1949. The Unionists quickly called an election to exploit their stronger constitutional position and the South’s republican rhetoric. For the APL, the South’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth and the passage of the Ireland Act ended the hopes of progress that had inspired the new departure. Support for the APL declined, divisions within Nationalism re-emerged, and Republicans exploited the polarised political climate to reassert themselves.43 McAteer had witnessed at first hand confidence give way to collapse; the experience was to leave its mark upon him.

      THE PROBLEM OF OURSELVES

      In December 1956, the IRA began ‘Operation Harvest’. McAteer lamented the failure of constitutionalism and the pointless waste of life. ‘The present outbreak would be quelled for a time,’ he told the Department of External Affairs, ‘only to recur again in five or ten years.’ McAteer feared that Catholic politics had become trapped in a endlessly repeating cycle: the IRA campaign would be abandoned; a peaceful approach to the Northern Ireland problem would be developed; expectations of change would be raised to unrealistic levels; enthusiasm would fade away as the failure of the strategy became obvious; the resulting disenchantment would be exploited by Republicanism to renew the armed struggle. McAteer, however, found some comfort in rumours that certain leading Unionists had reached the same wearied conclusion. These Unionists had supposedly recognised that IRA violence was a product of the ‘secondary aspects of partition’ – anti-Catholic discrimination. McAteer recommended that the matter should be raised with the British. Instead, the proposal was merely absorbed into Dublin’s wider policy reappraisal.44

      Although McAteer pictured a gloomy future for Nationalism, he was not prepared to give up on the party. He battled against a return to the ineffectiveness that had stamped the period before the APL. As a statement of intent, McAteer attacked Derry’s Nationalist MP – a symbol of the old order. He represented the Catholics of the second city, yet he usually abstained from attending Parliament and remained aloof from his constituents. McAteer challenged for the seat in the 1953 election, promising to use Stormont as a platform to expose Unionist abuses. Fighting alongside McAteer was James Doherty, his electoral agent. The Derry businessmen and Londonderry Corporation councillor had worked closely with McAteer in the APL.45 At an election rally, Doherty urged the crowd to support ‘the vigorous policy carried out by McAteer and his colleagues’.46 Derry duly elected McAteer to represent the Foyle division at Stormont.

      At times, however, McAteer seemed to have joined the old guard of the party. Following the 1956 Stormont election he successfully blocked an attempt to bring together all the Catholic parliamentarians. He would not unite with Belfast’s various Labour groupings, nor would he support this new party becoming the Official Opposition. Three years later, McAteer again rebuffed agitation for Nationalism to adopt this status. He was not ready to recognise the legitimacy of the Northern state. In 1958, McAteer similarly resisted pressure from the Catholic Social Study conference for greater engagement with Stormont.47 McAteer, writing in the Sunday Independent, pleaded with readers to ‘spare a little pity for an uncouth Northern Nationalist so far removed from the genteel tinkling of intellectual coffee cups in the purified air of Garron Tower’.48

      McAteer was himself opposed in the Stormont elections of 1958 and 1962 by a candidate who urged Derry’s Catholics to break with the past. The Independent Labour challenger claimed that the Nationalist MP’s ‘policy throughout his public life had produced nothing in the way of improvement of standards of living’. It was ‘one of negative denunciation without constructive effort’.49 The most glaring example of this was the Nationalist Party’s decision to welcome the closure of the local naval base in 1958: Doherty had announced that ‘any Irishman who said he was sorry to see “occupying forces” leave would be a renegade’. There were many loyal Irishmen, however, who were angry that their representatives were welcoming the loss of almost 4,000 jobs.50 For Northern Catholics, economic and social issues mattered as much as political principles. Nationalism had failed to recognise how aspirations and concerns had changed since 1945.

      West Germany’s Social Democrats found themselves in the same position during the 1950s. In the first years of peace, the party naively believed that the occupying powers would allow a united and neutral Germany to be built on the ruins of the Third Reich. The Social Democrats were confident that they would be the natural party of government in the new Germany. The first Federal Republic elections in 1949 were fought on a platform of nationalisation, unification, and neutrality. The party lost. The years that followed saw the ‘economic miracle’, the start of European

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