British Intervention

The puzzle addressed in this chapter is why one British government intervened in Northern Ireland in 1969 and why another eventually resorted to direct rule in 1972. British conduct in this period stands out in comparison with the inactivity of their predecessors during similar historical junctures when the Ulster Unionist Party had been able to repress Catholic or nationalist discontent. Though the preference of many British officials was to shore up the Stormont regime, the civil-rights movement had corroded the previous normative order protecting the UUP’s control because its marchers demanded British rights for British citizens, in the full glare of modern media. The immediate precipitants of intervention in the loss of control by the RUC and the Specials are examined. They took place against the background of the mobilization of Irish forces and field hospitals and riotous pogroms directed against Catholics in Derry and Belfast. Whether Northern Ireland was reformable is addressed, as are the dynamics of the descent into loyalist violence, British counterinsurgency, and IRA insurgency. The development of Irish government policy toward the North in 1969–70 is treated in a brief appendix.

Conceptual Conspectus

Classical typologies of polities often assumed that the rulers and the ruled are co-ethnics. They focused on whether rulers ruled in their own interests or in that of their subjects. Liberal thinkers, by contrast, focused on how to check or balance rulers, either though the separation of powers, or through representative democracy. Yet neither the separation of powers nor representative democracy necessarily prevents a political monopoly from being exercised by an ethnic group. The tyranny of an ethnic majority was not considered in early liberal thought. Northern Ireland under the hegemony of the Ulster Unionist Party after 1920 illustrated how the Westminster model of democracy can be exploited to secure an apparently permanent ethnic monopoly through the exercise of control. An account of the concept of control is developed in this chapter, and of its manifestation in both democratic and undemocratic political systems. The meanings of hegemony are elaborated before appropriate applications to Northern Ireland are signaled.

Losing Control, 1958–1972

At the start of 1959, when Sean Lemass became Ireland’s prime minister, Northern Ireland’s UUP looked fully in control, having quickly defeated an IRA campaign that had begun in 1956 and sputtered out in 1961. Yet just over a decade later the UUP’s control collapsed under the pressure of a civil-rights movement and its consequences. How this unexpected set of events unfolded and led to renewed British direct rule is explained in this chapter. The consequences of the British welfare state are emphasized. Northern Irish Catholics demanding equal rights with British citizens proved to be the key that unwound the UUP’s system of control. The UK Labour government of 1964–70 proved more sympathetic to Northern Irish Catholics than its predecessors had been in 1945–51 for reasons that are explained in this chapter and the next. Paradoxically, improved relations between the Southern and Northern governments preceded the erosion of the UUP’s control of the North.

The Unexpected Stabilization of Control

This chapter emphasizes how the Second World War unexpectedly stabilized the system of control in Northern Ireland. In the late 1930s the Northern government, like that of Newfoundland, faced possible bankruptcy, and the UUP leadership looked stale and challenged. At the same time, independent Ireland was showing evidence of consolidation of its sovereignty, economic development, and stability. The Second World War, and the eventual US leadership of the United Nations against the Axis powers, reversed the rolling out of these patterns. How and why Ulster Unionists benefited more than Irish nationalists from the Second World War is explained.

Digesting Decolonization

This chapter examines how and when the Irish Free State went from partial to full political decolonization. It argues that Collins’s stepping-stone theory of the Treaty of 1921 would be proved correct, but that de Valéra and Childers and their allies also correctly observed the deficiencies of that treaty. The fate of southern Protestants is examined. The wilder allegations of genocide and ethnic expulsion are demonstrated to be without merit; their twentieth-century story is mostly one of integration and assimilation. Fianna Fáil’s program of constitutional transformation is traced and its significance for Northern Ireland evaluated. The Irish Free State’s state-building and consolidation of its sovereignty were diplomatic accomplishments of both Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fáil governments. The program of Irish state-building clashed with the aspirations behind all-Ireland nation-building. The “economic war” of the 1930s and the Anglo-Irish Agreements of 1938 are surveyed, before the decisions of de Valéra’s cabinet regarding neutrality in the Second World War and the supposed British offer of reunification are interpreted for their long-run significance for Northern Ireland.

Not an Inch

The formation of Northern Ireland is treated in this chapter. Contrary to subsequent misrepresentation, Northern Ireland was not a state, but a devolved government within the UK, with limited powers. Despite Craig’s and the UUP’s pledges of fair and impartial government, Northern Ireland had fiery and partisan beginnings, marked by pogroms and deadly ethnic riots. What follows examines how the UUP improvised amid the constraints of the Government Ireland Act and the 1921 treaty to establish constitutional, policing, territorial, legal, and economic control throughout Northern Ireland. The extensive electoral gerrymandering is explored, as well as its consequences. Cultural Catholics had restricted autonomy in their schooling system, which was not equally or proportionally funded. The chapter addresses what motivated the system of control, and how the British allowed it to develop.