Belfast and Derry in Revolt - Simon Prince

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of the chamber of commerce and the city solicitor were on the committee; so, not everyone in the local elite was prepared to keep placing control above development.93 Inside the parliamentary party, there were backbenchers who were also unhappy that the west of the province was losing out on investment. For other MPs, those who resented how O’Neill was taking power to the centre and taking the hand of Irish nationalism, the second university was just another issue on which they could attack their leader.94 Although the government made the vote on the Lockwood Report into a vote of confidence, four Unionist backbenchers sided with the opposition or abstained.95 One of the rebels, Robert Nixon, would later whisper to the press that ‘nameless, faceless men’ in the local party had conspired to stop the new university being built in a ‘Papist city’.96 But, as the Derry Journal pointed out, ‘apart from the colourful touch which Dr Nixon gave to them, the … same allegations have been going the rounds in the city for a considerable time’.97 In February 1964, for instance, the newspaper had claimed that there was a ‘deep political motive’ behind ‘the grandiose project of a brand new city in North Armagh – planted … where there is the most solid support for the Unionist Government’.98 These suspicions were seemingly confirmed when the Englishman heading up the project resigned on the grounds that Craigavon was ‘basically unwise’ and that Derry should have been developed into ‘the city in the playground’ instead.99 For the Derry Journal, this was ‘both an indictment of and a challenge to [the] glaring indifference to the future of Derry’ shown by ‘the kept Corporation’.100 The controversy over the new university caused this infection to spread. By the end of March 1965, the Londonderry Sentinel was reporting that the ‘cries that the West is being isolated are just as strong from the Government’s supporters as from its enemies’.101 Jones sent a copy of the newspaper to the cabinet office so Stormont could ‘see how the wind blows’: ‘The Editor, as the Prime Minister knows, is a member of the Council of the Londonderry and Foyle Unionist Association, no less’ and he ‘is … urg[ing] that the Unionist Party should select “new blood” – candidates who will oppose Government policy’.102 While Jones was not thrown aside by the local association, he nonetheless faced a serious challenge from the Liberal Claude Wilton in the November 1965 elections. Hume, who was serving as Wilton’s election agent, told a rally that the origin of the ‘plan’ to ‘destroy Derry’ could be traced to ‘fourteen years ago when the Unionist Party met to select … Jones’.103 The Unionists came away from the election with a victory that felt more like a defeat, as Jones’s majority was cut to only 1,014 and he left the count to be greeted by shouts of ‘Lundy’, the name of the man who was remembered as the traitor of the 1689 siege.104 Three centuries later, a sizeable number of Protestants saw Derry beset by socio-economic forces and Jones as someone who was selling out its future.

      As Protestants were fighting each other behind the old walls on that November night, resources were already starting to flow towards Derry to relieve this new siege.105 A month before, the Minister of Development, Bill Craig, had informed the corporation that he was ‘anxious for the creation of a “masterplan” for the development of the north west’ and that he intended to ‘get rid of the idea that the Government … is neglecting Derry’.106 Professor Tom Wilson’s 1965 economic programme for Northern Ireland, which was published at a time when over 400 urban renewal schemes were underway across the United Kingdom, had also concluded that ‘a development plan [for Derry] is needed, and should be put in hand’; but, the civil service had cautioned that ‘the attitude of the City [i.e. the corporation] to modern planning [is] so completely obstructive that one cannot conscientiously advise this course at present’.107 The crisis, however, had made the problem urgent and had forced Stormont to change its position. O’Neillism was now going to be extended to the western borders: jobs and houses would be provided, with the short-term aim of buying off discontent and with the ultimate goal of helping Irish nationalism and the coarser aspects of unionism to wither away.108 Out of office, O’Neill put this latter idea in a particularly patronizing way when he explained to a journalist that ‘cars and television sets’ would lead ‘Roman Catholics’ to ‘live like Protestants’.109 Nonetheless, northern Europe’s ruling classes had long believed in ‘the civilizing effect of things’ – that things would guide the poor away from ‘superstition and sloth’ towards a (Protestant) regime of ‘domestic economy and self-improvement’.110 Border Unionists, in contrast, remained ‘sure that the Nationalists here with us who would prefer the butter on their bread in this world are very few compared to those who would prefer it in the next’.111 The clash over the different approaches to retaining control was at its most raw when the leading Londonderry Unionist, Gerald Glover, met Junior Development Minister Brian McConnell at the end of 1966 to discuss housing. Glover was fixated upon holding on to a rural district council ward, paranoid about what the NIHT was doing, doubtful that any houses were needed at all and unwilling to address the wider questions. ‘What really mattered,’ McConnell countered, ‘was the preservation of Londonderry itself.’ The Minister insisted that at least 7,000 new homes were on the way over the next fifteen years and that the ‘sensible thing appeared to be that we should build up our majority in electoral divisions that we were likely to win rather than create large minorities in ones that we were going to lose’. The former Mayor was reminded that Craig had ‘asked for an all-over plan from the Londonderry Unionists but this had never been received’ – and now it was too late. Despite threatening to walk out, Glover eventually accepted that Stormont was in control.112

      The Belfast-based James Munce Partnership, which had been awarded the contract to produce the area plan, also had to put up with the tantrums of Londonderry’s grandees. When the planners were introduced to the steering committee in February 1966, Anderson reproached them for trying to involve the wider public in the process and claimed that ‘WE are the people’. While the Unionists on the steering committee were working to hold the planners back, the Nationalist councillors were working with them to push things forward. James Doherty, McAteer’s closest political ally, believed that here was his city’s last, best hope and he therefore devoted himself to the project.113 His faith was rewarded. At the launch of the approved plan in March 1968, Doherty praised ‘this vital programme’, especially the ‘scientific analysis of our besetting problems of employment and housing’.114 He had embraced the language of post-war British planning, which spoke of ‘seemingly logical and unambiguous solutions to previously intractable urban problems’; Derry had become a problem to be solved rather than a place of history, memory and identity.115 The plan promised an ‘expanded Londonderry Urban Area … at the heart of a Crescent of population growth and industrial expansion’ that was to be linked up to the ‘Belfast Region’ by ‘improved road communications’. Vacant factories were to be used again, existing businesses were to recruit more workers, new industrial estates were to be occupied – and, as result, ‘the minimum manufacturing employment needs of the Area will be met’.116 Just over a year before the launch, Glover had told McConnell that the ‘figure of 7,000 houses by 1981 was quite fanciful and unrealistic’, but the plan now set a ‘conservative’ target of 9,600 new homes.117 Within the expanded urban area, a population of close to 100,000 were going to live, work and play (the plan provided for new restaurants and cafes, more parkland, a regional sports complex and a marina on the Foyle) in a city that was ‘landscaped’ and ‘open’. The old walls were to be ‘cleared of adjacent buildings’ and ‘floodlit’; the socio-economic forces that had been kept at bay were to be welcomed by them into a city that nonetheless was to remain Unionist.118

      The Londonderry Area Plan was a major victory in the city’s struggle against poverty. However, while the plan was being given atriumphant reception in London’s Guildhall, the man who had led the campaign that had manoeuvred Stormont into changing its strategy was fighting against this very settlement. Hume’s Housing Association had appealed against the corporation refusing planning permission for a residential development on a site that the James Munce Partnership had instead zoned for industry. In his evidence at the hearing, Hume maintained that the housing situation was not ‘a problem’ but rather ‘an emergency that requires immediate attention’; how much longer would the ‘29 families where husband and wife lived apart, usually with their parents, their children divided between them or, in a few cases, in children’s homes’ be asked to wait?119

      This was a question that divided those people in Derry who were opposed to Unionism. After

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