LITMIR.BIZ

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was reminded of a previous posting to the Baltic states: ‘The Protestant community of the North feels that it is an outpost of civilisation set precariously on the frontiers of Bolshevism.’ The victorious but embattled unionists believed that they had been ‘misunderstood’ and ‘betrayed’ by Britain.11 The long-standing alliance between Ulster Unionism and the British Conservative Party had faltered, while the cross-class alliance of Protestants had held firm. In March 1922, under pressure from London and under attack from Dublin, the Northern Irish government had agreed that Belfast’s mixed districts should be policed by a force made up of equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics. As the South turned in on itself and Britain turned away from Ireland, the need to build a non-sectarian state disappeared. Without allies to please and enemies to appease, the Unionist leadership was left only with supporters to indulge. The power compromise between the party elite and its grass-roots was continually being renegotiated. Extreme Protestants successfully pushed for the law to be strictly enforced against Catholic offenders and to be applied with discretion when loyalists were accused of criminal acts.12 Plans to establish a secular public education system fell foul of the Churches. Integration gave way to segregation: Protestants attended state schools while Catholics were catered for by the voluntary sector. Unionist associations campaigned for changes to the structure of local government that would allow them to take control of councils previously held by Irish Nationalists.13 In Fermanagh, the abolition of proportional representation and the redrawing of boundaries ensured that when the 1924 local elections were held a county with a Catholic majority returned a Unionist council. Brooke represented the new ward of Brookeborough.14 The safeguards for minorities contained in the Government of Ireland Act proved no more effective than similar provisions in the treaties of recognition concluded between the Allies and the new states of central Europe. Britain had more pressing concerns than protecting minorities.15

      By pandering to Protestants, the Northern Irish government further alienated Catholics from the new state. But peace could never have brought reconciliation. The two communities could not forget the riots, the shipyard expulsions, the burning houses, the bombings, the kidnappings and the assassinations. As the violence receded, the conflict mindset persisted in the form of conspiracy theories. They described a society marked by a binary divide between patriots and a diverse – often incongruous – collection of traitors.16

      In Bavaria, the Right portrayed the short-lived Soviet as a Jewish– Bolshevik conspiracy that had stabbed the Germany army in the back and unleashed a reign of red terror. This myth was embraced by a Bohemian corporal serving with the Munich garrison: Adolf Hitler.17

      In Northern Ireland the unionist population believed that the global conspiracy was being orchestrated by the Vatican, not the Kremlin. A Catholic civil servant ‘learned’ that his Protestant colleagues were convinced that he was ‘subject to malevolent direction by black-robed priests to whom Rome had entrusted its master plan for world domination’.18

      Conspiracy theories disfigured Northern life. They even gripped the mind of the otherwise phlegmatic Brooke. On 12 July 1933, the anniversary of the Protestant William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne, Brooke warned that Northern Ireland was being undermined by its enemies. The new MP for Linaskea explained: ‘There was a definite plot to overpower the vote of unionists in the north. He would appeal to loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ protestant lads and lassies … catholics … had got too many appointments for men who were really out to cut their throats if opportunity arose.’19 Brooke was never allowed to forget these comments. When he claimed that ‘his own view was that a man’s religion was his own affair’ during a 1967 television interview, the Derry Journal reminded its readers that this was the man who had once boasted that ‘he had not a Roman Catholic about his place’.20 But Brooke’s plot was not a figment of a rabidly sectarian imagination. In June 1933, the Unionists had lost the previously safe council ward of Linaskea to an independent farmers’ candidate. Brooke blamed the defeat upon the way that the rural depression was being exploited to weaken Unionism’s cross-class alliance and upon the ‘peaceful penetration’ of Southern workers. There was no doubt in his mind that the new government in Dublin was behind both these threats. Eamon de Valera, one of the leaders of the Irish revolution, and Fianna Fáil, the successor to the Sinn Féin faction that had rejected the Treaty, had taken office in 1932 promising to end partition. A slight increase in Catholic numbers and the defection of part of the Protestant vote to independent candidates would deliver Fermanagh to de Valera. Brooke’s speech was warning the unionist people to stand firm and remain vigilant against Irish nationalism.21

      Conspiracy theories, therefore, were not irrational: they constituted the dark reflection of competing visions of the future. Conspiracy theories gave expression to anxieties and reduced them to order. This was implicitly acknowledged by Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, when he declared that the devolved Parliament should contain ‘men who are for the Union on the one hand or who are against it and want to go into a Dublin Parliament on the other’.22 Unionists had no illusions about what the reunification of the island would bring. The Southern state’s 1937 constitution paradoxically reflected a Catholic worldview while purporting to speak for a thirty-two-county Ireland that included two million Protestants.23 ‘One person’s Utopia usually means another person’s hell,’ a former IRA volunteer later observed.24

      The unending struggle over the existence of the Northern Irish state deeply affected those charged with running it: the civil servants. When Sir Earnest Clark, a former tax inspector, arrived in Belfast in September 1920 to set up the new administration, the city had nightly gunfights but no institutions of government. There was no parliament, no high court, no departments, no senior officials, and no plan. Displaying the discipline, diligence, and determination upon which bureaucrats pride themselves, Clark helped to conjure a state out of thin air. He organised the elections to the new devolved Parliament; he devised a comprehensive scheme setting out the new Ministries and the staff needed to operate them; he ensured that the four British principles of anonymity, confidentiality, impartiality, and incorruptibility were adopted; and he found – mainly in London and in Dublin – the experienced personnel required to work the new machinery of government.25 In 1924, Clark told the first annual dinner of the new civil service that the ‘Government of Ulster is the child of its people, and if the Ministers and their Parliamentary Secretaries are its Godfathers and Godmothers, we are certainly its nurses’.26 As Northern Ireland grew into adolescence, the civil service nursed its ward through the Great Depression. In the words of one official, it carried on ‘an administration as good, as liberal, and as humane as political conditions allowed’.27 Those final four words are telling – the Unionist godfathers never allowed their civil servants to do anything that could jeopardise their party’s control.

      Clark’s successor as head of the Northern Ireland civil service was a man whose many enthusiasms included the German constitution.28 This attempt to reconcile liberal parliamentarianism with mass democracy excited people across Europe. The keenest student of the new Weimar order was the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Liberal constitutionalism, he argued, was trying to hide the fact that politics lies behind the law. As the chaos that followed the First World War demonstrated, it was impossible to write a constitution that could foresee and foreclose every crisis. ‘In the exception,’ Schmitt contended, ‘the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.’29 The strong rule that Schmitt advocated could no longer be justified by the divine right of kings, so he turned instead to the people as a source of legitimacy. For Schmitt, ‘the political’ was the most intense and extreme antagonism between friend and enemy.30 An authoritarian state was justified by the need to preserve the political unity of the people and defend them against the enemy within and without.

      The development of Northern Ireland seemed to support Schmitt’s ideas: the liberalism of the Government of Ireland Act had given way to a ‘Protestant state’.31 At the start of the Anglo-Irish truce, Brooke hoped that ‘within the next few days the healing process will begin whereby all Irishmen can unite for the good of their country’.32 By the early 1930s, at the very latest, he had concluded that the hostility that existed between the two communities could not be overcome. As Brooke explained to Parliament, ‘There is a catholic political party which … ranges from benevolent nationalism to the extreme of the

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