LITMIR.BIZ

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flag in all circumstances and to remove the Irish tricolour when it threatened a breach of the peace.52

      The Act has frequently been cited as evidence that Northern Ireland was a police state.53 However, an almost identical law had been added to West Germany’s penal code a few years earlier.54 Indeed, the Federal Republic shared many of Stormont’s supposedly undemocratic features – justified by the threat posed by the other half of the country.55 The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) remained in sole power from the creation of West Germany until 1966; Unionism’s political hegemony lasted from partition until 1972.56 To their enemies, Northern Ireland was the ‘Orange state’ and the Federal Republic was the ‘CDU state’.57 Admittedly, the Christian Democratic stranglehold on the Bundestag was tempered by West Germany’s federal structure. With the Social Democratic Party holding office in several Länder, their voters did not feel the same estrangement from the state that Northern Ireland’s Catholics did. Nevertheless, at a federal level, the CDU’s position appeared impregnable: in 1957, more than half of all the votes cast went to the party.58 Such ‘dominant party systems’ were so common in Western Europe at this time that Raymond Aron lectured on the phenomenon at the University of Paris. ‘It is not a one-party system,’ he explained. ‘Opposition parties exist, and intellectual and personal freedoms are respected. But one party has an overwhelming majority, and the opposition parties are so divided that no-one can see any possibility of the majority party being replaced in power.’59 Following the advent of the Cold War, the French Communist Party, which enjoyed the allegiance of nearly one-quarter of the electorate, had been actively excluded from government. This was hardly surprising as the Communists were committed to the revolutionary transformation of France – albeit after taking power through the ballot box instead of armed insurrection.60 Moreover, as the veteran Socialist Léon Blum recognised, the Communists were a ‘foreign nationalist party’.61 Their ultimate allegiance was to the Soviet Union, not France. Northern Ireland’s Catholic parties occupied a comparable position: effectively barred from power, supported by a substantial minority of the population, pledged to overthrow the constitution, and loyal to a political entity beyond the territorial boundaries of the state.62

      CHANGING THE FACE OF ULSTER

      In August 1962, more than 10,000 workers marched through the streets of Belfast in protest at plans to shut down the city’s aircraft factory. At the head of the march were Stormont MPs from the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) and the Nationalist Party. Unionism’s fears had seemingly been made flesh: part of the Protestant proletariat had made common cause with its Catholic counterpart.63 Previously, when the problem of unemployment had started to undermine Unionist control, Stormont had turned to Westminster for aid. As Northern Ireland’s strategic importance and the IRA threat diminished, however, such appeals lost their potency. By the beginning of the 1960s, Whitehall civil servants had come to regard the septuagenarian Brookeborough as an anachronism.64 In October 1962, a working party of Northern Irish and British officials published a report that favoured a different economic policy.65 The Derry Journal delighted in outlining the political implications of this assessment: ‘the report amounts to a total rejection by the British Government of the requests for assistance made by Lord Brookeborough on his many futile visits to London’. ‘In any other democracy,’ the editorial concluded, ‘the Government’s resignation would already have been tendered.’66 Within six months, Brookeborough had indeed left office – diplomatically citing ill health rather than the personal humiliation of the working party’s findings. According to Lord Wakehurst, Northern Ireland’s Governor, Brookeborough said that ‘he could step down without loss of face’.67 During the final years of the Brookeborough premiership, the Northern Irish civil service became frustrated at the failure to build upon the success of post-war reconstruction. When a protracted dispute with Belfast Corporation over whether or not to extend the city’s boundary offered an opportunity to regain lost momentum, the Stormont administration eagerly grasped its chance. In March 1960, the Ministry of Health and Local Government invited Sir Robert Matthew, Edinburgh University’s first Professor of Architecture, to select a few sites outside the city on which housing estates could be built. Matthew instead agreed to draw up a development plan – originally for the greater Belfast region, but ultimately for the whole of Northern Ireland. His report recommended that suburban sprawl should be halted by surrounding Belfast with ‘Greenscape’, creating a ‘substantial new Regional Centre’, designating a number of ‘centres for development’, and improving the transport network.68 The Belfast Regional Plan was published four months after the working party on unemployment had rejected Brookeborough’s policies. The Matthew Report mapped out a different road for Northern Ireland: what a senior official at the ministry later described as ‘the path of a positive, activist approach to the physical and economic problems of the province’.69 Britain was already travelling along the road of regional planning – away from the over-heating south-east of England to the North, Scotland, and Wales. By adopting and adapting the new Whitehall vogue, the Stormont civil service hoped that this road and the resources it would bring would come to Northern Ireland.70

      The political benefits of Stormont’s conversion to planning were reaped by Brookeborough’s successor, Terence O’Neill. As Finance Minister since 1956, he had stressed that Northern Ireland’s future prosperity should be based upon the people’s own resourcefulness. In May 1962, O’Neill lamented that ‘Northern Ireland has become too sorry for itself’. He proposed that the country should take as its motto ‘similar responsibilities for similar opportunities’.71 The rhetoric of self-help was the ideal language in which to present the new economic policy devised by the administration. Matthew himself had called for ‘a replacement of the general attitude that the best thing that can be done is not to get too far behind the rest of Britain, by a determination to go straight ahead’.72 O’Neill had already cultivated close relations with a group of rising civil servants in Belfast and with the mandarins at the Treasury. This was partly the result of his rift with the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, which had encouraged the Minister to seek out the advice of other officials and to deal directly with Whitehall. O’Neill persuaded the Treasury to include him in the United Kingdom delegation to World Bank conferences – allowing him to network and come into contact with the latest ideas.73 He was therefore well placed to negotiate the planning world. O’Neill would secure resources from London by framing requests in the new language of economic modernisation rather than by repeating traditional calls for stopgap subsidies.74

      Northern Ireland’s new Prime Minister was not elected; he ‘emerged’ in the fashion of Conservative leaders until Ted Heath. Brookeborough and Wakehurst discussed ‘the best man for The Governor to send for’. ‘Two or three possibilities were mentioned,’ London was told, ‘but it was clear that The Governor and Lord Brookeborough were of one mind.’ O’Neill’s standing in Parliament and with the public had been on ‘the increase for some time’. However, it was only in the immediate aftermath of the Matthew Report’s publication that he had become ‘the obvious choice’.75 O’Neill therefore was not an elegant anachronism, but his aristocratic and military background may still have made a crucial difference. The O’Neill family were substantial landowners and descendants of the High Kings of Ireland. O’Neill’s father was the first Westminster MP to die on the Western Front, while his maternal grandfather was a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. After leaving Eton, O’Neill eventually joined the Irish Guards and was wounded during Operation Market Garden.76 These impeccable credentials probably account for why the Governor contacted O’Neill ahead of his rivals. This gave O’Neill and the Chief Whip, his close ally Bill Craig, the chance to develop an irresistible momentum for his candidacy.77 Craig had served in the Royal Air Force as a Lancaster bomber rear-gunner and had risen rapidly through the ranks of the Unionist Party. However, his boyish charm and youthful enthusiasm barely masked his inexperience, impatience, and irritability. Craig shared O’Neill’s technocratic approach, but he preferred to steamroller through reform rather than secure it through more subtle arts.78

      Brian Faulkner was the opposite: an inveterate intriguer and – in 1963 at least – a traditional Unionist. In July 1960, as Minister of Home Affairs, Faulkner had allowed 10,000 Orangemen to parade through the Catholic village of Dungiven. Two days of rioting had, predictably, followed.79 With a background in the region’s shirt-making industry, Faulkner became the spokesman for the interests of local factory owners. This

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