Phases in Ulster History, part 2

“The state of the South and West of Ireland, notwithstanding the exaggerations is becoming alarming, and the lawless spirit, if not promptly met, may extend throughout the country ....

All who have the interest of the nation at heart will do well in aiding the Government to pass the Land Bill” — ibid., 10" June, 1881.

In the House of Commons, the Irish Conservative MPs, if they didn’t read the Northern Whig had had similar warnings. Many of them including 14 of their 18 Ulster representatives, voted for it. In the House of Lords, its Conservative (and landlord) majority, led by the Marquess of Salisbury, was less ready to compromise. It amended the Bill so that it was completely ineffective and returned it, in this form, to the Commons. The latter house took measures to restore the losses. The Whig warned:- “If the Conservative Peers wish to hand over all Ireland to the Land League, and promote a general strike against rents, they will reject the Bill as it is now returned to them by the House of Commons. For their own sakes, for the sake of the House of Lords itself, for the sake of the peace and the dearest interests of the Empire, it is to be hoped that they will pass the measure, and without delay” — ibid., 12" August, 1881.

The same sort of argument was now used on Salisbury by the Earl of Carnavon and by the Irish Conservatives, led by Earl Cairns (the former Belfast MP and Lord Chancellor) and Edward Gibson, MP for Trinity College, Dublin. In particular, Gibson warned:- “In addition to being an Irishman and reading the Irish press, my constituents are in every part of Ireland. The loss of the Bill would by almost every rational man in Ireland be regarded as unmixed calamity. It would lead to a saturnalia of outrage. It would be regarded by the government as freeing them from all practical responsibility for the government of Ireland. I could not regard such an alternative as was suggested [loss of the Bill — D.L.O’C.L.] without the deepest and most painful anxiety” — The Ashbourne Papers, Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast, 1974, p.13.

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Such arguments convinced Salisbury in the end. The House of Lords allowed the Land Bill to pass with only minor amendment.

Although the objective conditions for land reform — the decline in the overall flexibility both or rural rack-rent and of increased profits from cattle raising on land cleared of tenants — ensured that such reform was merely a matter of time, it is clear that its actual achievement would not have been possible without the extra-parliamentary, and, at times, illegal agitation of the Irish National Land League. Not only was this fact reflected in the contemporary editorials of the Northern Whig (though it managed to forget it, later) and in the views of the majority of the Irish Conservative leaders, it is proved by subsequent experience. The land reform of the whole United Kingdom, that was claimed as desirable by the Northern Whig and by many British Liberals was not made the subject of agitation on anything like the same scale (or militancy) as was the Irish. Despite many changes in British land law, such a comprehensive alteration has still to be achieved.

Admittedly, the Land Act of 1881 itself was not the end of landlordism. However, along with the passing of the Arrears Act of the following year, it created conditions in which landlordism could no longer function efficiently from day to day, let alone over the longer period of decline which the fall in agricultural prices was making inevitable.

The Act began a system of “joint ownership” of Irish landed estates, other than those where landlord and tenant relationships were governed by lease. The Ulster custom was given new legal force and, trough a system of legal determination of rents, its old customary (and legal) loopholes were stopped. What the new settlement ignored was the fact that the customary nature of Ulster-tenant right had given it a flexibility that it lost when it gained legal status.

The result has been summarised by Professor Joseph Johnston:- “The Land Act of 1881 carried the principle of dual ownership to its ultimate consequences.

It was not yet available to all tenants, but by an Act passed in 1887 leaseholders were admitted to the benefit of it and this added 150,000 to the number of its beneficiaries.

“The dual ownership of Irish and was increasingly felt to be unsatisfactory as a permanent solution. Under it the landlord was a mere rent receiver, and his power for good was destroyed equally with his power for evil. So long as the rent was paid he could not get rid of 102

an unsatisfactory tenant, however much it might be in the public interest that a bad tenant, who was wasting the land should be replaced by a good one.

“The landlord had now no interest in investing capital, by way of long term improvements, in land occupied by his tenants, for he could not count on any return at all, even if he was in a position to make the investment. The tenant, for his part, however much he might expect to gain by ‘better farming’ was reluctant to increase the output from his farm for fear the landlord might get a share of the increase at the next fifteen year judicial revision of the rents.

“Thus ‘the baby was thrown out with the bath water’ and the system established in 1881, though free from the major evils of the previous system, continued to penalise the social virtues and discourage enterprise” — Joseph Johnston, Irish Agriculture in Transition, Hodges Figgis and Co., Dublin 1951, p.7.

The result of this was that both Liberals and Conservatives began to agree on the need to advance the end of rural landlordism. The first important measure towards this was the Land Purchase Act of Edward Gibson (by then Lord Ashbourne) in 1885 which not only provided the basis for a peasant proprietary but made it in practice, more economic for the tenant to buy his holding than to continue paying rent. This was not the end of the Irish land agitation.

The problems that gave it its decisive importance were not resolved in any way for more than half a century after 1881 — if indeed they are resolved yet. Nonetheless, the foundations of what Michael Davitt called “feudalism” had been decisively weakened by the work of the National Land League that he had inspired and helped to found.

THE CONVERGENCE OF LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES IN ULSTER

The Irish land reforms of 1881 — 1882 helped reduce one of the major differences between Irish Conservatives and Irish Liberals whilst reinforcing the barrier between the bulk of the latter and the Parliamentary Nationalists.

This was helped by a more general process. The Liberals’ Whig wing was losing the support of the British finance capitalists to the Conservatives, as both financiers and Conservatives tended to be more enthusiastic about the possibilities of colonial expansion than Gladstone’s party. 103

In Ireland itself from 1882, Liberals and Conservatives alike had to accept the need to replace landlordism. Even before the Arrears Act of 1882 wiped out all rent claims that the Land League had encouraged to accumulate, a leading Conservative, Lord George Hamilton made a similar suggestion. In 1885, Lord Salisbury’s first government’s only major Irish reform would be Lord Ashbourne’s Act.

On the other hand, any remaining sympathy that existed amongst the majority of Irish (now mainly Ulster) Liberals for the Nationalists (or, at least, the Parnellite majority of the [nish Party) declined due to the latter’s support for continuing the land agitation after the Land Act was passed and until the Arrears Act was won.

This encouraged very basically Ulster Protestant Liberal opposition to “Home Rule”. It was not due, as has been suggested, to any traditional Liberal fear of possible tariffs on coal imports by an “Home Rule parliament. Though this existed it was relatively unimportant; the Northern Whig’s Leader column denounced tariffs only about once a year between 1882 and 1885. What was far stronger in Ulster Liberal consciousness was an aversion — typical of European Liberals, though less so of their more confident British contemporaries — of the methods which Irish Nationalists had had, and continued to have, to use to achieve their aims.

The Whig had linked Fenianism and the Paris Commune; it was equally ready to link, in the same disapproving spirit, Chartism and the Land League. In October 1881, it declared after Parnell’s arrest:- “The Land League agitation has sunk into lawless agrarianism and rampant Fenianism....

The Government have now to face the disorder and violence, which must be checked if the rights of property and obedience to the law are to be maintained at all” — Northern Whig, 15" October, 1881. On 224 March 1882, its Leader doubted whether the franchise should be extended fo more voters in Irish counties: “In some parts of Ireland the people suffer from an abuse and not from a deficiency of constitutional powers”.

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And on the 27" of the following June:- “Even the Liberal newspapers which in London have by some machinations become almost avowedly Irish Land League and National organs ought to make no mistake about the attitude of the Ulster population, embracing all the Protestants to a man, and all the respectable Catholics who have anything to lose. Under no circumstances will they allow themselves to be handed over to the tender mercies of an Irish National Government, depending, as it would do, on the lowest. the most ignorant, and the most bitterly prejudiced classes in the South, encouraged by Irish-American Adventurers, who believe in no church and hesitate at no crime”. Again, on the 8" March, 1883:- “Where are the possible leaders of the people under a native Government? They would be taken from the ranks of men who though they secretly disapprove of assassination as a political weapon, are so cowardly as never to utter one word of censure against actual assassins”. A Leader in the issue of 13" October, 1883 attacked “The Irish Nationalists and their schemes of dismemberment and of Communism”.

On 17" April 1884:- “Our Ulster tenant farmers will wisely follow the moderate and constitutional Ulster Liberal representatives. They neither sympathise with Mr. Davitt and Mr. George’s nationalisation of the land, nor with Mr. Parell’s Irish Nationalism. Both movements are really hostile to the rights of the Ulster tenant-farmers so far as they depend on law, order, the security of property, and all that is meant by good government”.

On the 18 December 1884, it wrote:- ‘“**No person wishes to say an unfriendly word of Mr. Davitt, but he will find that he cannot persuade those who have anything to lose in Ulster to cast in their lot with theorists who would destroy all private property in the land, and reduce Ireland to a province in the hope of 105

attaining, after a colonial fashion, something like a Federal Legislature, which could not act with the Parliament at Westminster”.

And, on the 5" February, 1885:- “Ulster with a wealthy Protestant majority would never submit to abject political slavery.

That majority would rather fight than thus tamely surrender. If the sword were drawn they would soon have allies from the sister Kingdom. No Government that would propose to suirender them to the ignorant peasantry of the South and West of Ireland, and the more reckless American — Irish could stand for a day”.

And on 2" September of the same year the Northern Whig Leader denounced:- “The new principles which have become dominant in Irish affairs that we must always do evil for evil, eschew everything like gratitude for political services and strive to conquer by menace rather than conciliation’’.

Faced by a menacing nationalist democracy and without the land question to divide them, the only political divisions between Ulster Tories and Ulster Liberals were on the question of religion and on such matters as the extension of the Belfast municipal franchise. (There was also a difference on law and order, the Conservatives’ Orange supporters not being qualitatively better than the Catholic Irish; however, the riotousness of the former was related to the strengthening of Belfast capitalism). On the first point, the Liberals were decidedly more pro-Catholic than the Tories. For example, the Whig’s Leader of 17" August, 1883 praised the church for doubtfully democratic reasons:- “Probably it might be as well if a considerable portion of Ireland were governed through Rome; this would be better than government by the Invincibles, the Ribbonmen, the old Land League or the new National League. The Pope and his advisers respect law, order and property”. Even this, however was not really in opposition to Conservatism which, whilst having a special relationship with Orangeism, had always had a tendency to try to conciliate the Catholic Church as well, since it recognised the essential Conservatism of that body. Peel 106

had done it in the 1840s, Disraeli in the 1870s and Lord Lieutenant Carnavon would attempt it in 1885. Ali things considered then, it is not surprising that, in July 1883, after Healy had been elected to the former Liberal seat in Co. Monaghan, the Northern Whig made an appeal for a Unionist front to oppose the Nationalists:- “The differences now separating the Liberals and Conservatives of Ulster, if extreme party considerations be forgotten, are comparatively slight. They sink into insignificance before the irreconcilable hostility to which both parties are exposed from the Irish Nationalists, who are the enemies of the Queen, the British connection, the recognised rights of property and all law and order.... The friends of the union in support of the Queen and the Imperial Government on thoroughly constitutional grounds have a common interest, and ought to have a common policy”. — Northern Whig 19" July, 1883.

This offer was rejected and the Ulster Liberal Society resolved grimly to fight every Ulster seat at the next election.

Worse followed. Not only did the Conservatives refuse to unite to defend the Union, they went out of their way to make overtures to those who opposed it. At a bye-election in Co.

Down in November 1884, the Conservative retained the seat by means of a promise to the Nationalists that he would seek an inquiry into the Maamtrasna judgement under which an agitator accused of executing an informer and his family may have been wrongfully murdered by the Court. In May 1885, a Liberal won one of the Co. Antrim seats as a result partly of his stand for coercion against the Conservatives’ lukewarm attitude. This stand alienated the Nationalists; its results in Ulster seem to have been what encouraged a return to Liberalism of many capitalists who had left in the mid-seventies. The following month, the Liberal government resigned and was replaced by the Conservatives who relied openly on Nationalist support. Shortly afterwards new proposals for a Loyal Irish Union were dismissed by the Northern Whig precisely because of Conservative weakness on law and order. Finally, at the end of the same year, the Conservative Lord Lieutenant, The Earl of Carnavon appeared to concede the principle of “Home Rule”, though his colleague, Ashbourne denied the reality of this.

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The Nationalist-Conservative alliance lasted long enough for its purpose : the complete obliteration of the Irish Liberal Party in the general election of November, 1885. The Northern Whig remarked bitterly:- “The Nationalists have gained a larger proportion of representatives in Ulster than they are entitled to even according to numbers [17 out of 33 ~ D.R.O’C.L.], while in all the other qualities which are held to constitute a people-wealth, rank, intelligence and education — they are so very much inferior, as they would themselves acknowledge to the Protestant population generally...” — Northern Whig, 15™ December, 1885.

Yet the Ulster Liberals’ defeat could not be blamed on the Conservative-Nationalist alliance alone. In Belfast, even in South and East Belfast where the Conservative vote was split, comparison of the results with those of the next year’s election where “Home Ruler” and Unionist opposed each other, makes it clear that the Liberals could not have won even with Catholic support. What was more in these constituencies, it was the Conservatives who had the most Orange support who won. In fact, three out of the four Belfast Conservative MPs were Orangemen. Outside Belfast, Liberal strength was more impressive. Its power was centred most clearly in the homogeneous Protestant pale around the town. In Co. Antrim, they were only prevented by internal division from winning the seat. Elsewhere in that county, in three of the four Co.

Down constituencies, in Co. Armagh North and Co. Derry North, there were clear signs that Nationalist support for the Liberal (or, even, in some cases, abstention) might have turned the scale. Had all these seats been won, the Ulster Liberals would have held their 9 seats and the Conservatives would have been in third place in the province with 7.

But this ignores two points. Firstly such an assumption gives the Liberals all the benefits of all the doubts — including the doubts attached to those constituencies where the Conservative was unopposed in either 1885 or 1886. Secondly, any possible alliance of Liberal and Nationalist had been undermined by the former’s coercion policy; in the 1885 election it was fighting, in Ulster, from the right of the Conservatives. That this explains Catholic support for Ulster Conservatism in 1885 has been made clear; it may also help explain any increase in the Liberals’ Protestant support in the same year.

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THE RISE OF A BELFAST WORKERS’ VANGUARD

Besides the overall result of the 1885 general election, in Ulster, it was significant on an ail Irish basis, for the appearance of the island’s first Liberal-Labour candidate.

That he fought in Belfast is even more notable. Though, on the basis of the socialisation of its labour alone, the Belfast working class should have been qualitatively more advanced than its equals elsewhere in Ireland, in fact, it has been shown that the Belfast workers’ weakness and division against class lines was the force that ensured the advancement of Belfast’s industrialisation. What was more, the means by which this was ensured continued to operate for long after its immediate need was at an end.

This could not entirely abort the workers’ organisations. The confidence of the full employment years of the 1860s had stimulated trade union organisation among the linen weavers and its revival in the shipyards. It was strong enough to survive the employers’ offensive during the recession that followed the boom after 1873. In the linen trade, a strike for higher wages occurred in June 1872. Later strikes against wage cuts were organised in 1874, 1879 and 1881. In 1884 and 1885, the workers at Harland and Wolff were locked out for the same reasons. At the height of this militancy Belfast Trades Union Council started from 1881. Its membership was based on the organisations of the mainly Protestant skilled workers: (more Catholic) unskilled workers were not yet organised.

The development of this trend beyond trade union consciousness was blocked by the original sectarian divisions of the working class and, on top of this, by its political formalisation.

The Belfast Liberals had been able to benefit from the militancy of the 1860s only through an alliance with William Johnston and his Orange and Protestant Workingmen’s Association. It was this body, not the Liberals, who sponsored Belfast’s first working-class councillor in 1868. When Johnston deserted his allies and returned to the Conservatives he insisted on the latter’s Belfast organisation being reformed. By 1874 two thirds of its Committee were composed of workers. This satisfied most of Johnson’s support; when he resigned his seal for a government job in 1878 (he was to sit again for South Belfast from 1885), he was succeeded by William Ewart, Belfast’s largest employer. His colleague, J.P. Corry was the town’s biggest shipowner. Neither Ewart nor Corry were Orangemen. Nonetheless, they were retumed over independent Orange and Liberal opposition in 1880. This encouraged the Conservatives’ Orange supporters to be again alienated, without having the means, or, 109

probably, the ability to break with their political background. The rise of Irish Nationalism gave them an excuse for action. Towards the middle of the 1880s sectarian riots returned to Belfast in a smaller but more regular form than in the 1850s and 1860s.

The Ulster Liberals themselves had to recognise their weakness amongst Belfast’s industrial workers. The Northern Whig admitted: “Even the Belfast Orangemen do not care to come forward very prominently against the Franchise Bill which will give them great additional voting power” — Northern Whig, 12" August, 1884. The 1885 election emphasised their strength against the more genuine, if embryo, consciousness of the trade unions. On the one hand, the Orange Lodges produced three Conservative candidates for the new East, South and West Belfast constituencies: in East Belfast against Corry and in South Belfast Johnston himself running against Dr. Seeds, nominee of his old Orange and Protestant Workingmen’s Association.

The advanced trade union consciousness of the trades council leaders tended to encourage them to liberal politics -more genuinely than the businessmen whom coercion was encouraging to return to the fold. Consistent trade unionism did lead, after all, to an opposition to sectarian policies that divided the workers; the trouble was that, in Belfast at any rate, it gave insufficient guidelines as to whether the local employers or the Irish Nationalists were responsible for such sectarianism, but that would become crucial later. At all events, in the first parliamentary contest after the council had been established, following the example of his British comrades, the president of the trades council nominated as candidate for North Belfast, its secretary, Alexander Bowman, a Liberal Party member of long standing. His programme was openly radical, including free education, shorter hours, better working conditions and land reform: as a Liberal he was officially against “Home Rule”, though his Conservative opponent doubted his sincerity in this. Both Parnell and E.S.W. de Cobain (the Orange Conservative candidate for East Belfast) advised their supporters to vote for him.

In the end, whatever about Parnell’s influence (which seems to have been effective enough), the Orange vote in North Belfast was organised openly against de Cobain’s advice and for the 110

non-Orange Conservative, Ewart. Bowman was beaten by 3,915 votes to 1,330, about 600 of the latter being Protestant.

Ewart was the only Conservative MP elected for Belfast in 1885 who was not an Orangeman.

The twice defeated shipyard workers had returned once more to the camp of the established order. Johnston, de Cobain and James Hazlett (in West Belfast) were all lodge members.

Orangeism as a distinct force now dominated Belfast Conservatism as it had not done when that Conservatism had established its hegemony in the town in the 1850s. Outside Belfast, the order’s victory was less dramatic: only 7 out of the 12 rural Ulster Conservative MPs were members. A leading Liberal and Women’s Suffragist, Isabella Tod, summarised the lesson repeated through these results as to the political isolation of Belfast’s trade unionist vanguard, when she admitted in a letter to an anti-Home Rule meeting that Belfast was “a district where the working men are nearly all Conservatives (a thing which, as a Liberal, I much regret)” — Northern Whig, 14" April, 1886.

THE FIRST HOME RULE BILL

That the Ulster Liberal Party could not have allied with the Irish Nationalists — at least openly —is clear. Even if it could have done so, however, prior to uniting in a pro-Union bloc with the Conservatives, it could not, therefore, have altered the essential dynamic of Unionism that propelled its consistent supporters to oppose democratic reforms on many other subjects beside Ireland. Not that the Home Rule Liberals, or their leader, Gladstone were motivated simply by democratic instincts! Gladstone had declared already when he accepted his first premiership, in 1868, “My mission is to pacify Ireland”: a significantly precise choice of words. How close he came to accomplishing this can be seen by comparing his politics to Karl Marx’ three point programme for Irish revolution: Land Reform, Self-determination and Tariffs.

Gladstone had weakened the explosive potential of the first in his first two ministries: form 1885, he offered as much of the second as Irish national capitalism wanted to smash Ascendancy finally; apart from Parnell himself, none of this class’ leaders wanted tariffs, so 111

they were forgotten. Had “Home Rule” been won in 1886, England would have solved its own Irish question. The future Irish nationalist alliance of artisans, smaller farmers and farm labourers would have lost much of its immediate impetus and the history of all Ireland would have either more effectively reformist or more effectively revolutionary than it has been since 1923. This possibility was destroyed by the new Unionist alliance of north-east Irish Protestantism, British and Irish landlords, and most of British capital.

In this, the British wing was represented politically by the Conservative Party and the Liberal Unionists. These latter were drawn mainly from the Whig section of the Liberal Party; though the Radical, Joseph Chamberlain joined them, relatively late, of other leading Radicals he was followed only by his loyal lieutenant, Jesse Collings, the veteran John Bright and George Trevelyan (who later became a Home Ruler). Even Bright’s brother Jacob supported “Home Rule”. An attempt to maintain a distinct Radical Unionist Association had to be abandoned.

Three quarters of the Liberal Unionist MPs in the first Home Rule Bill debates were Whigs backed by their wing’s traditional base in British finance capital. Their stand reflected British capitalism’s development into imperialism, its need to secure greater investments abroad and to protect them by all possible means. L.P. Curtis, junior, has described this reaction to the original “Home Rule” proposals: “The fact of Home Rule had burst upon a country engaged in one of the greatest inspired ventures in its history: and to the men of means and influence who had committed themselves both financially and emotionally to the acquisition of vast tracts of land and trading rights in Africa and the Far East, the appearance of a disintegrating force in Ireland, not to mention Gladstone’s ‘conversion’ to the cause was calculated to arouse the most profound fears.

What guarantee was there that Gladstone would stop at Home Rule? How safe was private property? Would the empire be dismembered by forces that Gladstone, and Parnell had set in motion? Far more was at stake in the Home Rule debates than just the fate of Ireland” — L.P.

Curtis, junior, Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland, O.U.P., London, 1963, p.102.

Those Liberals who opposed “Home Rule”, then, were concerned with other matters than democracy. They included the most anti-democratic Liberal leaders, such as G.J. Goschen, a former M.P. for the City of London, who had refused office in Gladstone’s second cabinet because he objected to its proposals for extending the franchise, and the Duke of Argyle and 112

the Marquess of Lansdowne, both of whom had resigned posts in protest against Irish Land reforms. The departure of these, of more democratic Whigs under the Marquess of Hartington, and the Chamberlain ~— Bright Radicals put the Liberal party out of power for most of the following twenty years. Though only eighty MPs supported them, they represented a final decisive shift of capitalist support to the Conservatives. Gladstone himself declared during the 1886 general election campaign: “We have lost nearly all, certainly a large proportion of the wealthier men who belong to our party’. That body remained one based mainly on the professional and petty bourgeoisie. It survived as an alternative government for the next thirty years only because the British workers were slow to organise politically for themselves.

The Irish landlords’ opposition to “Home Rule” had more obvious reasons. Most of the class were Conservatives. Even though their interest was now doomed, not all were willing to sell their estates. Some stayed put and waited for compensation for ultimate liquidation; such compensation would be greater from their friends than from their enemies. What was more, “Home Rule” meant Nationalist control of the Irish central government machine which was a useful source of patronage to them. They had no reason not to oppose it.

Undoubtedly such support encouraged the Ulster Protestant community in its opposition to Irish Nationalism. It expressed an objective state of affairs that existed then, that would exist when they established their colonial state three and a half decades later but which today, has changed utterly: that there was a distinct Ulster industrial capitalism which was an outlying part of the capitalism of a thriving British imperial metropolis.

Undoubtedly this encouraged fears that “Home Rule” would mean tariffs, particularly against British goods, and disrupt Ulster’s trade with the empire, but this was no more than a minor consideration. The Home Rule Bill did not allow the “Home Rule” Parliament to impose tariffs. In this every Home Rule Bill put a barrier to Ireland’s development in the Canadian manner desired by the Home Rulers. Accordingly fear of protection was a potential rather than an actual bugbear to Ulster industry. Its most definite expression was presented by the President of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, J. Theodore Patterson:- 113

“With this Bill was introduced the control of the customs and excise was to remain with the English Parliament, and so the Bill provides: but so many parts of the scheme are not now considered to be vital to its existence that one scarcely knows what is vital and what is not.

Should this control be given to the Irish legislature, how will it affect our interests? We know that one of the declared means of resuscitating Irish industries is to levy import duties.

Would this, on the one hand, suit our English and Scotch (sic) manufacturers and the consumers here?” (Cries of “No, no”). “Would it, on the other hand, suit any of the different trades in this town if duties were imposed on the raw materials which they import for manufacture?” (“No”). Quoted in Northem Whig, 23™ April 1886.

This is the most definite statement of the Ulster industrialists’ fear of protection in the campaign against the first Home Rule Bill. What is more, it is the only speech that refers to protection in the whole meeting in which it was made. At other meetings, the subject got even briefer mention: often just one sentence in one of all the speeches.

It is nearer to the truth to say that the Ulster industrialists feared a more direct threat to their enterprises than the effects of a mistaken economic policy. Rather they feared a more direct form of expropriation. It was not because they expected to have to pay the bulk of some £250,000,000 of compensation for Irish land purchase. Parallel with his Home Rule Bill, Gladstone introduced a Land Purchase Bill that was aimed at placing the immediate responsibility for Irish land purchase on the imperial parliament. It was this bill that was the occasion for Joseph Chamberlain’s final defection to Unionism. Moreover, it ensured that one thing that was not mentioned in any reported speech by Ulster campaigners against “Home Rule” was the danger of their community being taxed to pay for land purchase. The threat was an issue neither objectively nor subjectively.

That the Land Purchase Bill caused Chamberlain to join the Unionists gives a clue as to the real cause of Protestant Ulster’s support for their cause. The imperial subsidy for land purchase was to be repaid by the peasants concerned through annuities. Chamberlain could see in this no guarantee for such payments that would satisfy him. He had a point, of course, since eventually the annuities would be withheld from the British exchequer, although this would be done by an Irish government holding far wider powers than those envisaged under 114

“Home Rule”. But this point, though prophetic, in its way, arose from a broader prejudice.

In Chamberlain’s subsequent election address to the electors in his West Birmingham constituency, he made it clear that he considered the Irish nationalist majority as an inferior race unfit for self-government. Such alleged unfitness would prevent a “Home Rule” government being allowed credit on a loan to pay its debts. This view was shared by the majority of Irish Protestants after some sixty years as partners in Ascendancy.

For their Unionist leaders the National League was a revolutionary body. As such, its government would destroy the country’s share of UK credit (on which Ulster industry depended). Having done so, or, even in the process of doing so, it would find it necessary to tax punitively the established industries of Ireland (or what remained of them) to subsidise its policy. This fear was itself the product of a recognition that Ulster industry, unlike that of Britain, was too fragile to have confidence in itself. It was to show this, forty years later, by its swift decline under slump conditions with, effectively, only peripheral pressure from a Nationalist parliament. Beyond this was the fact that, however much the liberal industrialists might dislike it, the weakness of Ulster industry had itself compensated partly by hostility to those who professed the religion of the majority of the Irish. Sectarianism had been maintained as a productive force. At a meeting of Belfast merchants in January 6 1886, the objective fears of Belfast industry (and Irish capitalists elsewhere) were well expressed. (Northern Whig, 16” January, 1886).

McGraw, Theodore Patterson’s predecessor as President of the Chamber of Commerce, declared:- “Unfortunately an organisation of a very extensive character, having under its influence a large number of our misguided countrymen, is in existence in our land. Through its teachings the rights of property are ignored, laws are disregarded, disorder prevails, and a reign of terror exists in many parts. Disguised as it may be, it is our belief that that organisation is based on disloyalty to the throne, and that its ultimate object, although denied for the present, is separation. It is impossible that any country could prosper under the circumstances 115

described. Occasionally a good deal is heard of the underdevelopment of Ireland, but how are the resources to be developed? Where is the capital to come from if Communistic doctrines are now so frequently promulgated, and no man could say where the end would be” (Hear, hear). Thomas Sinclair, head of the family whose political tradition went back to the constitutional wing of the United Irishmen, spoke similarly:- “Now, suppose that it was authoritatively proposed by a Government of the Queen to remit the control of Ulster affairs to a Parliament the majority of which would be returned by men in sympathy with the recent raid on the Bank of Ireland, or with the attempt to put down the Cork Steamship Company” (Hear, hear), “or by men whose ideas of personal liberty and mercantile exchange are expressed by the inhumanities of boycotting, or to a Parliament whose leaders seem to have but one plank — the plank of protection — [the, usual, single, mention of Protection in the whole meeting — D.R. O’C.L.] in their financial platform does any sane man doubt for an instant that, in the event of Ulster submitting to such a measure, which I am certain she would not “(Hear, hear)”, the same results would happen here that have happened in the South and West, that capital, instead of flowing, in, would flow out “Hear, hear)” that men of capital, instead of immigrating, would emigrate; that every man obliged to stay would restrict his operations to the minimum of risk; that the reign of mutual distrust would be universal “(Applause)” that, in short, the commerce and exports of Ulster would dwindle and decay as the commerce and exports of Munster, Leinster and Connaught are dwindling at the present hour?”

Three months later, as the Home Rule Bill approached its Second Reading speakers at another Belfast meeting were equally definite. The Liberal and Suffragist, Isabella Tod declared in the letter quoted already:- “What we dread is the complete dislocation of all society especially in regards to commercial affairs and to organised freedom of action... the conditions of a free democracy do not exist in Ireland. Before they can exist the two great training influences of widespread education and large local government must have room to be fairly brought into operation” — Northern Whig, 14" April 1886. 116

Sir William Ewart, Belfast’s largest linen manufacturer and Tory MP for its Northern Division, agreed:- “T met a London banker a few days before the Bill was introduced. He asked me about the general state of the country, and in return I asked him what the effect upon Belfast mercantile credit would be in London if anything like the foreshadowed measure was to pass. He replied it would be bad for Belfast credit. I said, Why? How would it affect it? And his reply was that there would be a constant fear that if anything like an Irish Parliament with powers of taxation, were granted it would be impossible to tell what measure they might not pass at any time that would confiscate merchants’ property “(Hear, hear)”. — ibid.

Later in the month, at the Chamber of Commerce meeting already quoted (Northern Whig, 29" April 1886), members reinforced these views. A Mr. Thomas Valentine declared:- “If the Bill before Parliament became law, which he believed it would not, he felt satisfied that they would have an increase of boycotting and moonlighting and all the other horrors connected with them far in excess of anything they had yet seen, unless the [Crimes] Act to which he had referred was put in force or some other similar one passed. If such an Act were put in operation, and administered by a strong hand, he believed they would see in comparatively few years peace and quietness, law and order, restored in the South and West, and the people become as law-abiding as they were in the North” (Applause).

Mr. W.J. Hurst quoted the Liberal Unionist Historian, W.E.H. Lecky on the “attacks on the obligations of contract” that were made by Home Rulers. Under Home Rule, he added, “who would found a manufacture in Ireland? Who would invest money in the improvement of land? Who would engage in industrial enterprise which depended for services on the fulfilment of contract?” The same arrangements were repeated by Belfast’s Liberal newspaper on its own account:- “Whatever the Irish Nationalist leader may say, under a native Parliament they would be in the power of the most prejudiced, the most ignorant and the most sordid classes of the community. They would be compelled to obey the forces which they could not control.

Nothing is more certain” — Northern Whig, 12" January, 1886.

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“Burke was never in favour of taking to pieces the Constitution of a country, or, as he said, of putting it into the kettle of the magicians, and a Government independent of property, which this Bill would establish, he denounced as Jacobinism at the time of the French Revolution.

This Bill originates in the same revolutionary sources. All it professes to regard is a majority of the people told by the head” ~ Ibid., 15™ April, 1886.

And, after the Home Rule Bill had been defeated:- “(Under ‘Home Rule’], Leinster, Munster and Connaught can, under a Parnellite Ministry, crush Ulster manufacturers, tax wealthy and industrious Ulster so as to set the other three provinces free from taxation altogether, and make Ulster pay for the impossible (sic) prospects of the other provinces.

“Tt is supported, not to speak of the Parnellites, by only one class — the newly-enfranchised democracy, who are (sic) new to political life and seem to be more concerned about great reforms in English life, which they expect from Mr. Gladstone rather than from other English statesmen. Mr. Gladstone, regarding everybody who opposes him as the victim of class prejudice, regards the ‘masses’ as the wisest, least interested, most virtuous part of the community, and treats with scorn the section of all the other representative classes which go to make up the strength of British society” — Ibid., 5" July, 1886.

This hostility to the democratic nature of “Home Rule” was not the only argument used by the Unionists. Their fear of possible tariff policies has been mentioned already. Another strand in their case was their support for the British Empire whose markets ensured their position. L.P. Curtis’ already quoted passage expressed views held particularly in Protestant Ulster — as an outpost of the imperial metropolis particularly dependent on the colonial markets. The Ulster Liberals were no less imperially minded than the Conservatives. In 1883, the Northern Whig had declared:- “Mr. Sullivan is one of those who would keep all Irishmen in Ireland — though his practice 1s not in accordance with his precept. He wants Ireland only for the Irish, whereas we, like Lord Wolseley, want the whole British Empire for the Irish”. — Northern Whig, 7 August, 1883. Nearly a year later (23 July, 1884), the same paper sneered at the Germans for their “lack of enterprise” in seizing colonies.

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Now, on 15” May, 1886, at a Liberal Convention in St. George’s Hall, Belfast, Sinclair denounced the Irish Party as being “pledged, if need be, to sacrifice the Empire itself to the attainment of their ends”.

More justifiable from the democratic viewpoint was the Unionists’ hostility to Catholicism — even though most of them had hoped at one time or another that the Church of this faith would keep the Irish in check. Now the Whig denounced “the alleged desire the Pope has been led to entertain of forming under a Nationalist Parliament, a Catholic State in Ireland”.

(2" April, 1886; see, also, 23" June, 1886). It rediscovered the undoubted obscurantism of Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (ibid., 3" April, 1886).

However, here, much of the objections to Catholicism was not to its real philosophical and political faults but on racial grounds: it was objectionable as the religion of the nationalist majority of the Irish. On 16" December, 1885, the Whig described this majority as being “led by an almost equally ignorant and tyrannical majority of Catholic priests”.

On 16™ March, 1886, the same paper’s leader warned against any proposed “Home Rule” parliament as leading to a struggle between bigoted Catholic clerics and “Irish-American anarchists’’. On this point, the Orange lodges could still beat their rediscovered allies. On 18" January, at a meeting well attended by artisans Hugh Hanna, a prominent Presbyterian minister sympathetic to Orangeism helped stir up the previously locked-out Protestant shipyard workers by warning that “Home Rule” would result in their unskilled Catholic colleagues taking over the shipyard boardrooms. This rumour bore fruit in the shipyard riots on the eve of the Home Rule Bill’s second reading (and defeat). The Orangeman, the Reverend Dr.

Richard Kane, declared in Derry on 11™ May that “Home Rule” would mean “the ascendancy of the most bigoted Romish hierarchy and priesthood in Europe”.

The whole tenor of such views was clearly anti-democratic. In April, there were revived demands (from Isabella Tod, and in a leader in the Northern Whig) for a separate Parliament 119

for Ulster ~ even under an all-Irish “Home Rule” assembly. These calls were exceptional, however. The Ulster Unionist aim was not one so much of exclusion from “Home Rule” for the rest of Ireland as of the prevention of “Home Rule” for all Ireland. As the Whig’s editor was to remark of the idea of partition, ten years later:- “There is no desire for a separate Ulster, nor part of Ulster [from the rest of Ireland — D.R.

O’C.L.]. The Unionists say “We wish to remain as we are. We cannot be better; we should certainly under an Irish Government and Parliament be much worse’””. — Thomas MacKnight, op. cit., Volume II, p.383.

With this outlook, it was no accident that Unionism had an undemocratic bias built into it from its beginning as an organised political movement, that Ulster Liberal Unionists, however numerous would tend to gravitate towards the positions of Conservative Unionists, and, indeed, that they would become, eventually, far more directly involved with the Orange Order than they had felt it necessary to be up to 1886.

On 15 March of that year at the Liberal Convention in St. George’s Hall, Belfast, Sinclair moved successfully the following motion:- “That this meeting of Ulster Liberals expresses its confidence in the patriotism and statesmanship of Mr. Gladstone and its gratitude to him for his magnificent and untiring services to Ireland; that it respectfully urges him not to risk the fate of his remedial legislation on land by entangling it with the vexed question of Home Rule; that we recognise in the results of the late general election the expression of a widespread desire for more extended powers of local government in Ireland, but we declare our determined opposition to the establishment of a separate Irish Parliament as certain to result in disastrous collision between sections of people holding conflicting views upon social, economic and religious subjects, [One side of this dispute has been examined above — D.R. O’C.L.] and likely to create such a feeling of insecurity as would jeopardise industrial and commercial pursuits; and we are satisfied that the maintenance of the Union with Great Britain is the best safeguard for the peace, prosperity, and liberty of all classes in Ireland.

“As Liberals, without a representative in Parliament we appeal to the Liberals of Great Britain to pursue steadily and patiently the policy of remedial legislation and extension of representative local government, requiring obedience to the law and treating Ireland in all 120

respects as an integral portion of the United Kingdom. We recognise that the majority of the Irish people have been hitherto too much excluded from a share in the administration of Irish affairs, and we urge the abolition of the Viceroyalty, the appointment of an Irish Secretary and a thorough reform of the departments of Irish government and the establishment of an extended system of local self-government”.

At its eleventh hour, Ulster Liberalism had produced a programme that might if implemented destroy Ascendancy within the Union. Its three demands - completion of land purchase, local government reform and central government reorganisation - , if applied immediately, would have removed much of the energy from the National League’s leadership as this represented an emergent urban bourgeoisie whose main political grievance was its exclusion from government patronage. Whether this would have ended the demand for Irish self determination completely, or left it to classes and leaders who would have made it as revolutionary as the Unionists claimed it was, it is impossible to say.

Opposition to Sinclair’s motion came from Catholic Liberals and from the left wing of Ulster Liberalism. Its most prominent leaders were Sir Thomas Dickson ~ former MP for Dungannon and for Co. Tyrone ~ who had always advocated radical land reform and opposed even Liberal Coercion Acts — and Alexander Bowman, the recent Liberal-Labour candidate.

Their speeches (particularly Bowman’s) seem to have been rather garbled in the published report (Northern Whig, 20" March, 1886). Perhaps they did sound rather confused. In particular, as ardent land reformers (Bowman supported Henry George’s single (land) tax campaign), they concentrated on the threat to land reform from the Liberal Unionists’ newfound Conservative allies, whereas the land problem was, by now, only a part of the overall democratic tasks that would be solved finally comparatively easily. Nonetheless, in their stand, they did recognise that the position taken in Sinclair’s motion and affirmed by an overall majority of the delegates present was not ultimately democratic.

Immediately this fact was not apparent. Belfast suffered a major riot, the Home Rule Bill was defeated, a general election followed and a Conservative government was retumed to power, with Liberal Unionist support. In Ulster, alliance with the Conservatives gave the Liberal Unionists two of the five Nationalist-held seats they contested. The Home Rule Liberals suffered further losses with the departure of Dickson to the Irish Party, and Bowman to Britain and the Social Democratic Federation.

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Even so, in Ireland, even in Ulster, the Liberals remained a bad third in their parliamentary strength compared to the Nationalists and the Conservatives. Achievement of their 1886 proposals was slow. The new Conservative government extended the scope of land purchase and (as a result of a Nationalist motion) extended the local franchise in Belfast. Its main Irish policy was one of “twenty years of resolute government” (coercion again). The Liberal Unionists accepted this, albeit with some protest. It was only after a new Liberal government and a new Home Rule Bill had appeared and been defeated, along with a number of other democratic proposals, that the Liberal and Conservative Unionists coalesced permanently, in 1895 and reforms close to those mooted in 1886 began to be passed. Even then, it was only local government reform and land purchase; the Irish central government remained in Ascendancy hands, If the Liberal Unionists were able to imagine that they could advance major democratic changes within, and through, acceptance of, the Union, in alliance with the Conservatives, the vanguard of Belfast labour had no objective reason to expect that such a strategy could advance its own consciousness.

The Belfast Trades Council was the worst-hit victim of the 1886 “Home Rule” crisis.

Bowman, as Secretary of the Council, tried to guide it along, if not a positively democratic, then, at least, a non-Unionist course, first by disavowing members who joined a delegation to Britain of Unionist workers, and, then, by declaring, openly, his own support for “Home Rule”. He was forced to resign his office, although the Council did not actively endorse the said delegation. No candidate upheld, as Bowman had done, the working class banner in Belfast, in the general election of 1886.

From then on, indeed, though the Trades Council did nominate candidates who were, in fact, Unionists, its official line, and that of any independent Labour political vanguard zigzagged between neutrality and Nationalism. It was not until 1914 that a Labour Unionist organisation was founded. Even then, its tradition was that of William Johnston, the Orangeman, rather than of the Liberal Unionists among the founders of the Belfast Trades Council.

(To be continued) 122

CHAPTER 7 : ORANGEISM AND PARTITIONISM

The earlier chapters of this work dealt with the founding and survival of the British Protestant colony in Ulster and its final realisation of its intended role as a colonial garrison in the third century after its foundation. They made clear how this was achieved in very different circumstances from those in which the colony was established: in conditions of nineteenth century industrial capitalism as distinct from the primitive capitalism of the plantations.

This chapter will consider the development of the neo-colon politics of the majority of Ulster Protestants between 1886 and 1914 : how their anti-democratic dynamic led them to accept finally the political hegemony of Orangeism and how, at the same time, they began under Irish Nationalist pressure to consider as a serious option a possible Ulster Protestant colonstate.

UNIONISM, ORANGEISM AND LABOUR

The new developments occurred with the acceptance of the leading interests of British imperialism that were grouped in the alliance that became the Unionist Party. This interest was real and ruthless; its existence tends to be ignored as it did not intervene directly in the actual evolution of Irish or, as an increasingly independent force of Ulster, Unionism.

Nonetheless, by its very existence, it made Unionism something more than the opposition of the Irish Protestant community to its country’s right of self-determination. It gave the said opposition a strength that it could not have enjoyed by itself. At the same time, this strength arose less from the support of the democracy of Britain for the threatened Protestant democracy of Ulster than from the support of most of the capitalist oligarchs of Britain for an opposition to a measure that threatened their interests in several spheres. An empire with colonies throughout the world could not afford to surrender happily control of an island that lay across the old approaches through which contact with all these colonies was to be made.

Though the landlords of Ireland — both Irish and absentee — were selling out increasingly due to land legislation and the objective conditions that had eased the passage of that legislation, the extension of land purchase gave all taxpayers an interest in ensuring the new class of farm owners repaid their annuities. What was more, the ranks of these taxpayers were swelled by the Irish who paid a disproportionate share. Besides these considerations there were other, more sentimental, ones. Thus the British ruling classes felt that to give up Ireland would be to admit failure in ruling a portion of an empire that they could, in fact, manage. In addition, 123

the Irish Ascendancy classes were well represented in the upper ranks of the British armed forces and civil service. Finally, Britain’s rulers allowed traditional anti-Catholicism to dictate their policy — though neither this nor the other sentimental considerations would have affected them had there not been the material grounds for it to do so.

Of the two wings of Unionism the Irish one was the junior partner. Until the new century, it was truly an all-Ireland force although its membership was very definitely stronger in the north-east than elsewhere. Although it had little mass support, outside Ulster, Co. Dublin and a few isolated enclaves, Irish Unionism’s weight in other qualifications was clear. What was more, these qualifications counted for more at this time than they have done since. Unionist interests included most of the shrinking, but, still, strong landlord class, the state bureaucracy and, of course, the industrialists and the farmers and labour aristocrats of the north-east, but also the dominant mercantile interests in the rest of Ireland; the Chambers of Commerce of Dublin and Cork opposed the second Home Rule Bill of 1893.

Against this united front of privilege was the developing national bourgeoisie of Ireland supported by the peasantry and the mainly Catholic workers outside Ulster, allied to the reluctant mainly petty bourgeois rump of the Liberal Party and the developing political vanguard of the British Labour movement. Despite the support of some of the remaining Liberal bourgeoisie, this had a notably poorer material base than its opponents. “Home Rule” was, in fact, an issue that divided classes. Once this is understood, it becomes clear how, while the ignorant Orangemen of Belfast could denounce the Protestant Gladstone as a Catholic, many of his former friends could abuse that most capitalist politician as a communist. In this context, the position of the Ulster Protestant community appears anomalous. Whereas, in Britain and in the rest of Ireland, the political division on Home Rule developed generally along class lines, in Ulster, the division cut across classes on lines of religious sectarianism : Catholic against Protestant. This was a natural result of the fact that Ulster industry had been maintained and expanded precisely by the cultivation of such sectarianism on the Protestant side. The employers of Ulster could not accept the breach in this system that “Home Rule” represented. Their Protestant workers, who had been already encouraged by their position and by propaganda to see their Catholic brethren as their main enemy, were ready enough to follow their employers. The advanced socialisation of the industries where they were 124

employed, was based on sectarianism (sectarianism being, indeed, part of the work process), a fact which prevented their Unionism ever developing more than verbal working-class politics. Finally, the Protestant tenant-farmers, particularly those of Cos. Antrim and Down, who had been, in the end, the mainstay of Ulster Liberalism and who had, according to Michael Davitt, come near to allying formally with their southern Irish Catholic brethren, could not break from their bourgeois leaders who accepted the prejudices that had maintained their class. Despite its base, then, Ulster Unionism shared the rest of that movement’s essential antidemocratic bias. This formal contradiction was shown most clearly in Unionism’s plebeian ally, the Orange Order which dominated Belfast politics by 1886 and which held seven of the 12 Ulster Conservative (Protestant) rural seats. Logically the struggle against “Home Rule” meant that, unless the possibility of the latter was swiftly ended, the Order would have hegemony in any Ulster opposition to it.

This process took longer than might have been expected. On the one hand, despite some accessions to the Order, like the ex-Liberal, Edward Saunderson, a large number, even, of Conservatives preferred to keep it at arm’s length, as a mass body for executing agitations in their support. Secondly, the alliance with the Liberal Unionists despite the latter’s relative weakness, reinforced the non-Orange aspects of the movement.

In the election of 1886, the Liberal Unionists won two seats, whereas the Orangeman Haslett lost West Belfast to the Nationalist, Thomas Sexton.

This limited achievement was not reflected in any liberal Irish policy by the new Salisbury government. Though in British matters — particularly local government — this ministry did make major reforms, partly under Liberal Unionist pressure, its main strategy on Ireland was summarised as one of “twenty years of resolute government”. Nationalist and agrarian agitation was crushed ruthlessly and, for the time being, relatively successfully. The only land reforms were the extension of land purchase and (a measure with a longer term perspective than the twenty years’ resolute government) the Congested Districts Board. The only Irish local government reform was the expansion of the Belfast local franchise — on the initiative of Thomas Sexton. Though this policy, was immediately, effective enough, it left 125

the roots of Irish Nationalism untouched, and it would have done so had it lasted the planned twenty years. Two events occurred towards the end of the Parliament elected in 1886. The most dramatic was the fall of Parnell. The resultant weakening of his movement does not seem to have affected Irish or Ulster Unionism. Though the latter particularly is seen as reacting against the strength or weakness of Irish Nationalism, it does so only insofar as that force represents the aspirations of those it has to treat as its enemy: the Ulster Catholics. In this case, the overall weakening of Irish Nationalism did not stimulate any Unionist response.

Furthermore, both the unctuous clericalism of such anti-Parnellites as Timothy Healy and Parnell’s own courtship of the Fenian artisans that he had ignored in his great days, were objectionable to Conservative and Liberal Unionist alike.

Divisions in Unionism did develop in two ways. The first appeared in the form of Johnson’s old Orange and Protestant Workingmen’s Association. The members of this found themselves deserted by their leader and under attack by anti-Orange Conservatives and Liberals. In 1887, Ewart, the non-Orange MP for North Belfast died and was replaced without a contest by Harland who was also not a member of the Order. Worse still, Edward de Cobain, an even more outspoken Orange leader than Johnston, had to resign his East Belfast seat in 1891. After a bitter struggle, Gustave Wolff, like his partner, Harland, a non- Orange Conservative became the Party’s candidate. Many Orange leaders were expelled in the course of the struggle. Four of them ran as Independents in the local elections the following November, with varying degrees of success.

The same local elections saw a revival of Labour activity. Just as the 1850s and 1860s had seen the emergence of the “New-Model Unionism” of the craft workers, in Britain and Ireland, so the late 1880s saw the growth of the organisation of the unskilled. In 1890, this hit Belfast; in one year, as the membership of unions affiliated to the Trades Council doubled : from 6,000 to 12,000. This growth helped encourage the council’s political confidence. Now it ran candidates in two wards and got one of them, the Liberal Unionist solicitor, Thomas Harrison elected. Its campaign was fought in an effective alliance with the Orange dissidents and gained a certain amount of support from the Conservative Belfast News-Letter.

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This began a period of a three-cornered struggle between the Orange radicals, the trades council (or, eventually, its more conscious wing) and the developing Ulster Unionist front.

Again, too much must not be read into this; the opposition to the latter was rarely more than one of local effectiveness.

Immediately, the Orange-Labour alliance was weakened. The trades council refused to work with the Orange radicals in their attempt to defeat Wolff in the East Belfast bye-election.

Indeed it made known its refusal to support either candidate, despite Sir William Charley, the radical’s candidate’s support for working-class causes. Wolff was returned by 4,748 votes to 2,607. The Trades Council had its own perspective of founding a Belfast Labour Electoral Association (L.E.A). Even this plan had its weakness since the Belfast L.E.A. had to be separate from the national organisation of L.E.A.s which supported Home Rule. In the end, the new confidence of the council was reduced by a major defeat of striking linen lappers.

The shipyards were also hit by depression and the workers there accepted a wage cut of 2/per week. No independent Labour candidate ran in the general election of 1892. In the subsequent municipal election, the trades council gave its support to the Independent Orange candidate, John McCormick.

The process by which the Orange Radicals had been alienated from Unionism reached its climax on the eve of the general election of 1892. In June of that year an Ulster Unionist Convention met in the Botanic Gardens to establish an organisation of political clubs to mobilise the province against any new Home Rule Bill. Though Orangemen participated, the organisation of the Convention and its subsequent club network did not give any conspicuous place for the Order as such. Indeed, the Liberal Unionists were as prominent in the new organisation as the lodges. In the general election of July, 1892, their candidate Hugh Arnold-Forster (foster-son of the unpopular Liberal Irish Chief Secretary W.E. Forster) won West Belfast from Sexton and another Liberal Unionist, John Ross, defeated the Anti- Parnellite Nationalist leader, Justin McCarthy, in Derry City.

The new House of Commons returned an overall “Home Rule” majority of Liberals and Irish Nationalists. Gladstone became Prime Minister for the fourth time and introduced his second Home Rule Bill which was duly defeated in the House of Lords. As before, in 1886, there were riots ~ this time on the approach of the Bill rather than its defeat. These were suppressed by the opposition of the employers — particularly the Conservatives, Harland and Wolff — 127

backed by the unions of which the new-unskilled ones included many Catholics as members.

The Orange Order got its revenge on the latter, if not the former when, just before the House of Lords rejected the Home Rule Bill, the Trade Union Congress of the British Isles met in Belfast. As its host the Belfast Trades Council, held a public meeting which was wrecked by Unionists on the grounds of the Independent Labour MPs (John Burns and James Keir Hardie)’s, support for the Home Rule Bill.

With the defeat of that Bill, the problems faced by a united front opposing it became clearer.

In particular, its Liberal Unionist wing, under Thomas W. Russell, MP for South Tyrone, found itself in dispute with more orthodox Conservative Unionists over the need for further land reform. The organisation resolved this problem by suppressing it. Many rural Unionists began to lapse into apathy. The rump of Irish Home Rule Liberalism began to revive. In the general election of 1895, the Conservative Unionists lost their North Tyrone seat not to an Irish Party candidate, but to Sergeant Charles Hemphill, Solicitor-General for Ireland in the outgoing Liberal government.

Russell’s agrarian reformism was not supported by all Liberal Unionists. In particular, Thomas MacKnight went along with the British leaders of his party in denouncing the proposals of Gladstone’s fourth ministry as being “some of them of a most contentious and revolutionary character”. (Thomas MacKnight, op. cit., pp.315-316). He went further still and expressed regret at his earlier support for the Church of Ireland’s Disestablishment because “It severed bonds for which nothing satisfactory has been substituted, and it was no sooner carried out than it was met with the Nationalist cry that there is no such thing as political gratitude” (Ibid., p.369). Between Russell and MacKnight, it was the latter who was in fact reflecting the inevitable trajectory of Liberal Unionism.

Besides their movement’s internal divisions, the Unionist Clubs were under pressure from the Orange independents in Belfast. There was also the new Independent Labour Party (L.L.P.)

of which a branch had been founded in Belfast after the T.U.C. Annual Meeting there in September, 1893. In the winter of 1895 the two began to come together as a result of a major shipyard strike of members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (A.S.E.) for the restoration of the 2/- per week wage cut as justified by the revival of trade. The two shipbuilding firms — Harland and Wolff and Workman, Clark and Co. had agreed with their opposite numbers on the Clyde to act jointly against this demand. They had 25% of the 128

employed Clydeside A.S.E. members sacked for each week of the Belfast struggle. In the midst of this, Harland died and the Conservatives nominated for his parliamentary seat, the Orangeman, Sir James Haslett. Despite the latter's membership of the Lodge, the independent Orangemen nominated and the I.L.P. supported Adam Tumer, an undertaker who was not an Orangeman in North Belfast’s first election contest since 1886. Haslett won only by 3,595 votes to 3,433. The strike itself ended in a compromise — but one that had to be imposed on its Belfast members by the A.S.E. executive. A year later the new (both Liberal and Conservative) Unionist government reorganised the Belfast city wards into 15 (including two specifically Catholic ones). At the same time, the Unionist Club organisation continued to decline. Helped by both these factors the retumed Bowman and five other trades council members were elected to the reconstituted Corporation. In 1898, again, new riots occurred in the city, formally against the celebration of the centenary of the United Irish Rising — but, perhaps, fuelled by the existence of Labour and Catholic Association Councillors. As in 1893, the rioters were threatened with sackings.

Eighteen months before the Belfast labour victory, young James Connolly founded in Dublin from the remains of the I.L.P.’s unsuccessful branches, a new Irish Socialist Republican Party and became its Secretary. In 1898, it established a branch in Belfast, but this tended to be less enthusiastic for Irish self-determination than its branches in the south. This was partly because it was overshadowed in Belfast by the I.L.P. and the Trades Council Belfast Labour Party which drew much of their strength from avoiding the national question.

The decline of the Ulster Unionist organisation had little further effect. From 1895, the Unionists were in power again with an even larger majority than in 1886 and with a government imposed of an actual coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists. The long-term result of this fusion would be to finally bury Liberal Unionism in Conservatism as Radical Unionism had been buried swiftly in Liberal Unionism. Immediately, the result was to advance the passage of a number of moderate reforms and, now Ireland benefited more than it had from the previous ministry. The earlier policy of “twenty years of resolute government” was discarded in favour of one of “killing ‘Home Rule’ by kindness” - a formula which betrayed the fact that such reforms might well not have been executed without the existence of the national movement. This policy’s most definite achievement before 1900, was the final establishment of an elective system of local authorities on the English basis which aided the election of many trades council - nominated candidates to the local 129

authorities besides Belfast. Such Labour councillors had the class independence of Harrison rather than the Belfast Labour group though they were subservient to the Irish Party rather than to Unionism. (Belfast Labour’s independence was maintained partly in opposition to both capitalist parties). The LS.R.P. failed to get its candidates elected. Nonetheless, on the one hand, the victory of the trades council candidates pointed the way for the Irish Labour Party’s victories in the local elections of 1912, on the other, it ended the anomaly by which, since 1892, Labour-Nationalists had seats in parliament but had not been able to sit in their local councils. While the new councillors did not justify the hopes that many had placed in them, the fact of their election and the existence of the hyper-active (for its size) LS.R.P. stimulated the leaders of the divided Irish Party to prepare for its reunification. From 1898, William O’Brien, a moderate Anti-Parnellite, organised a United Ireland League (U.LL.), as an organisation round which unity could be built. In 1900, his plan was successful. The Parnellite leader, John Redmond, became the leader of a reunited Irish Party. In the general election of the same year, a number of new MPs were returned in place of older representatives. Shortly afterwards, the LS.R.P. began to suffer from internal divisions which climaxed in 1903 in a split, after which Connolly went to the USA.

In itself, Nationalist reunification could not provide the provocation that might compensate Irish Unionists for their declining organisation. This debility was not immediately apparent.

In the 1900 general election, the bulk of Protestant Ulster stood firm, partly because it was a “Khaki election” fought about British imperialism’s war against the Boers. In the result Ulster Unionism held 20 seats all out of the 27 in the present 6 county area: its largest relative strength until the Queen’s University seat was added in 1918. The new independent labour candidate, Thomas Harrison, stood in what was becoming the traditional test seat for such candidates, North Belfast. He was defeated by Haslett, by 4172 votes to 1855.

Yet Ulster Unionist strength was soon to be openly threatened on two fronts. The first threat came as a result of a revival of democratic policies - particularly on the land issue. If Ulster Unionism now held its maximum parliamentary strength, so did Irish Liberal Unionism. The latter held 5 seats: Co. Derry South, Tyrone South, West Belfast and, a Conservative concession, Co. Antrim North, with the historian W.E.H. Lecky sitting for Dublin University.

This increase had been helped partly by the after-efforts of the Convention, but also, partly, 130

by fears of both Unionist wings of democratic pressure within the Ulster Protestant community. Since 1895, the “Home Rule” Liberal, Hemphill had reasserted his party’s existence in North Tyrone. He held the seat in 1900 and was to be reinforced. The Liberal Unionist leader, T.W. Russell, was Under-Secretary to the Local Government Board between 1895 and 1900. In this post he annoyed the Conservative majority of Unionists. In the 1900 election, for South Tyrone, he was opposed unsuccessfully by a Conservative as well as by a Nationalist. In the new government, he was replaced as Irish Liberal Unionist Under- Secretary by Hugh Amnold-Forster. He revived his earlier agrarian radicalism, demanding that the government move more firmly to end landlordism. Finding himself in a minority he left the Liberal Unionist Party. He began a campaign for land reform as a priority over and above the maintenance of the Union. His supporters began to contest bye-elections, and won East Co. Down (in 1902) and North Fermanagh (in 1903).

Meanwhile the problems caused by independent Orangeism in Belfast reached a crisis. In 1902, William Johnston died. In the subsequent bye-election the official Conservative candidate was opposed by an Independent, Thomas Sloan. Sloan did not come from the ranks of the Orange and Protestant Workingmen’s Association but from the less classconscious and more sectarian Belfast Protestant Association, headed by the lay preacher, Arthur Trew. As Johnston deserted the plebeian elements in his Workingmen’s Association, Trew had supported him. Now Sloan opposed the full force of Johnston’s Orange machine for reasons that seem to have been as much religious and personal as populist. He found support from the Liberal Unionist, William Pirrie, the Managing Director of Harland and Wolff, who had hoped to follow his firm’s founders into the House of Commons as Johnston’s successor, but had been himself rejected for the Unionist nomination. Sloan won the bye-election at the cost of his membership of the Orange Order. Instead of biding his time until his new parliamentary status enabled him to re-enter, he formed an Independent Orange Order in June 1903. This body grew and moved to the left. In 1905, its Grand Master, Lindsay Crawford issued a Manifesto at Magheramorne, Co. Antrim. In it, he blamed Britain for keeping Catholic and Protestant Irish divided against each other. Sloan himself was less outspoken and repudiated some of the Manifesto’s provisions in the general election the next year. These defections presented the Ulster Unionist party leaders with the need to restore the grass roots organisation that had been established in the middle of the previous decades. The 131

trouble was that a new organisation would have to take a position either to the left or to the right of the old Convention; on the one hand, the Russellites demanded definite moves towards further measures of land reform; on the other, Sloan’s victory was a major achievement in a series of contests that had been caused by Unionism’s failure to integrate the Orange Order fully into its structure.

The Ulster Unionists would have had to be different - indeed, perhaps, more than - people to have avoided making the choice they made now. The fact was that their reason for existence was to defend their local particularist industrial capitalism. This was based on the defeat of the democratic principles upheld now, however distortedly, in their different ways by Russell, Crawford and (though more reluctantly) Sloan. Unionist ideology was upheld substantially, if, perhaps, over-enthusiastically, by the Orange Order, which had established and maintained a social hegemony throughout Ulster to do so. To attack this would have been foolhardy and catastrophic. In any case for the Unionists to try to win back Russell and Sloan as part of a consistent democratic strategy would tend to raise (or, rather, keep in prominence) new questions as to the ideological foundation of Ulster’s industrial prosperity: the myth of the inferiority of the “mere Irish” Catholics in which more than a generation of Protestant employers and workers had by now lived. What was worse still, were it possible, such a change would mean abandoning the Irish and, even more dangerously, the British industrialists, financiers, landlords, soldiers and bureaucrats on which Unionism as a whole depended. This would mean, not simply “Home Rule” but, leaving open the door to the Fenians and communists who would deprive Ulster’s rulers of everything they had.

(To all this phobia, Pirrie was an exception. His Liberal background and continued connections and the fact that Harland and Wolff was now strong enough not to have to worry too much about the possible effects of “Home Rule” helped him maintain liberal positions and even develop more democratic ones.)

A more immediate, practical consideration for the Unionists was the fact that the British Liberal wing of Unionism was declining. In Britain, though Liberal Unionism had strengthened the reforming wing of Conservatism, particularly on the matter of local democracy, it was unable, and, increasing, unwilling to influence it toward further specifically democratic reforms. Of the former Radical Unionists, John Bright was dead and Chamberlain was more interested in imperial expansion than in democratic change. It was, 132

indeed, eventually Chamberlain who split the Unionist government by demanding the reestablishment of protective tariffs on an imperial basis; when he did so, the old Whig, Hartington (now Duke of Devonshire), was the only Liberal Unionist minister to resign in protest against this breach of traditional Liberal economics.

The Irish Liberal Unionists were in a similar state. At no time had their share of Unionist seats come to more than a quarter of the total: a smaller percentage than those held by Orange Unionists. Although in 1903, Arnold-Forster became Secretary of State for War after the Chamberlain-Devonshire split, the party had by then lost Russell’s seat by his defection and Lecky’s by his retirement. Indeed by now there were as many Russellite as Liberal Unionist MPs. In any case, it suffered the same disease as the British party. Of Ulster Liberal Unionism’s 1886 programme, Irish local government reform had been conceded in 1898. In 1903, George Wyndham’s Land Act began six years in which 270,000 of the remaining 500,000 unpurchased tenants (still nearly 5/6ths of old agricultural tenants twenty-five years previously) used its provisions to buy their holdings. Only Irish central government reform remained and few Liberal Unionists were still prepared to fight for this, despite its continuing ’ importance. No newer, major, democratic demand now distinguished Irish, or Ulster Liberal Unionists from their Conservative allies, though some of the formers’ economic proposals could win the support of the Irish co-operative movement’s founder (and former Conservative MP) Horace Plunkett. In 1905, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway, an ex-Assistant Chief Secretary proclaimed the death of Liberal Unionism. It survived long enough for Arnold-Forster’s successor in West Belfast, and William Moore, its MP for North Co. Antrim to be defeated the next year, to leave John Gordon, MP for South Co. Derry as the only surviving Liberal Unionist MP in a House of Commons that included three Ulster Home Rule Liberals. By then Ulster Unionism had been reorganised. In 1905 its leaders accepted the weakness of its Liberal wing as being inevitable. The new body was built around an Ulster Unionist Council on which the Loyal Orange Lodges were guaranteed 10% of all the seats. In the local organisations, their influence was greater, if less direct. The attempt to maintain Ulster Unionism on a broad political and parliamentary basis was ended. Instead it became rightwing Populism. Such younger Unionists as James Craig, son and namesake of the Liberal Unionist Distillery director, became ardent Orangemen. (Craig himself gained his early reputation as a Unionist electoral trouble-shooter against Russellism). Liberal Unionism 133

itself lmgered for some eight years more, mainly as a centre for a small number of Catholic Unionists, like Denis Henry (later to be first Chief Justice of Northern Ireland) and Jewish ones, like Otto Jaffe (the only Jewish Lord Mayor of Belfast) who could not participate fully in what was now the Orange mainstream of Conservative Unionism.

Now, the democratic reforms that had been advocated by the Liberal Unionists were helping weaken Irish Unionism's base outside north-east Ulster. Local government passed into Nationalist hands. Wyndham’s Land Act accelerated decisively the existing tendency of landlords to sell their estates. In addition Nationalist businessmen were becoming a force with which to reckon in the formerly Unionist-controlled Chambers of Commerce. Had Liberal Unionism’s proposal for Irish central government reform been executed it would have diluted the Unionist caste in that central government. As it was, the said caste was, by 1910, the only major homogeneous Unionist interest to the south of Ulster.

For all this, circumstances were still to vindicate formally one of Liberal Unionism’s traditional policies - albeit, perhaps, its least valued one. This was the idea of partition. It had always been more tactical than strategic and more of a threat than a tactic.

The organisation and absorption of mainstream Orangeism by the Unionist Party helped to broaden the gap between the strong Orange Unionist north and the weak Unionism of the south. The idle remark of T.B. Macauley could now be made flesh by an interest that paid no more than at best lip service to contemporabily relatively enlightened Whig politics.

WALKER AND LARKIN IN BELFAST

Ulster Unionism moved to re-organise only just in time. At the end of 1905, Haslett died and, in the subsequent bye-election, Sir Daniel Dixon, the shipowner who, as Lord Mayor of Belfast, had inspired the Ulster Convention, was opposed by Ireland’s first definitely independent working class parliamentary candidate, Councillor William Walker of the Belfast Labour Representation Committee (L.R.C.). Walker came near to defeating Dixon, losing by only 3,966 votes to 4,440. The moral effect of his achievement was weakened by an action that reflected more on what would be revealed as his under-estimation of noneconomic factors than in positive Protestant bigotry. In the campaign, he declared himself opposed to “Home Rule”, in favour of maintaining the existing Catholic disabilities, and willing to put the claims of Protestantism before those of his class. It is an open question 134

whether this lost him more Catholic votes than it gained him Protestant ones. The Catholic voters of Belfast have long been inclined to vote for the devil himself against the Unionist; they knew Dixon well enough.

In January, the next year, a general election gave the Liberals a majority over all other parties. In Ulster, the results justified the need for the new Unionist organisation to its leaders. The trends that had stimulated their move continued to exist though they were checked. The Russellite MPs for East Down and North Fermanagh lost their seats (the former being gained by James Craig). Russell himself held South Tyrone. The Home Rule Liberal, Serjeant William Dodd succeeded Hemphill as MP for North Tyrone, defeating the Liberal Unionist, Henry. Both he and Russell took the government whip in the new parliament. Sloan was returned for South Belfast again. A more democratic Independent Orangeman, Graham Glendenning won North Co. Antrim from Moore, the Liberal Unionist.

In West Belfast, Alexander Carlyle, Pirrie’s brother in law ran as a Liberal against Arnold~- Forster’s Unionist successor. He split his vote and let in the Nationalist, Joseph Devlin. In North Belfast, Walker reduced the distance between himself and Dixon to one of 4,616 votes to 4,907. The new Liberal government had not included “Home Rule” in its election manifesto and it was content, having a majority, independent of the Irish Party to continue limited Insh reforms - when it could get them past the Unionist majority in the House of Lords. It made offers of nominated and semi-nominated assemblies that were unacceptable to the Irish Party.

This produced new splits among the Nationalists. In Dublin, in particular, they were faced by a new, non-Socialist Radical threat. In 1905, Arthur Griffith had founded Sinn Fein; a body centred on two basic demands; the strategic one of establishing an Irish parliament of elected MPs abstaining from Westminster and a national capitalist programme for that parliament that included a definite demand for building industries behind protective tariffs. This was a clear, though, as yet, small threat to Ulster’s Protestant industrialists.

What was more, the Irish Party was narrowing its appeal. The United Irish League began to be run by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. This had been initially a social and friendly society with a base among the Ulster Catholics and as a defence against the hegemony of the Orange Lodges. Under Joseph Devlin, the new MP for West Belfast and Secretary of the 135

U.LL., it became a nation-wide body acting as lowest common denominator for gombeen capitalism. While this did not alienate Unionists as did Connolly or Griffith, it was only quantitatively less unattractive to a community that thought itself superior because a junior partner in British imperialism.

From the point of view of Ulster Unionists, the most attractive - or, more accurately, the least unattractive form-of Irish Nationalism was only developing in 1906. This was a group f MPs around William O’Brien who had initiated the U.I.L. Now, he was alienated from it because of his role in preparing for Wyndham’s Land Act - which was regarded by most Nationalists as truckling to Unionism. This opinion was deepened when on the passing of the Act he expressed the need for new initiatives to unite Catholic and Protestant albeit as preparation for a “Home Rule” settlement. The Hibernian majority of the ULL. objected, mainly because they were inclined to underestimate the effectiveness of Unionist ~ particularly Ulster Unionist opposition to “Home Rule”. Finally, in 1909, O’Brien was to found a separate All for Ireland League, a combination of individuals agreed mainly on hostility to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, including both Labour -Nationalists like D.D. Sheehan and opponents of the unskilled workers’ trade unions, like Timothy Healy and William Martin Murphy, the owner of the Irish Independent. It was, also, despite its formal opposition to sectarianism, the Party supported by the majority of the Catholic Bishops who disliked the Hibernians as their lay Catholicism tended to be more aggressive than they felt practical. Its main demand was the same as the U.LL.’s but with a tendency to hold back to win more Protestants. The League did quite well in the general election of January, 1910 but less well in that the next December, when, under a Liberal government dependent on Irish Nationalist support, “Home Rule” looked more likely than it had been since 1894. From December 1910, the League was limited to O’Brien’s native Co. Cork. His policies might, have won sections of the Unionists to “Home Rule” by instalments, though had it been a policy of mainstream Irish Nationalism, it would have provoked, also, a strong Republican or quasi-Republican alternative. In any case, the appeal of “Home Rule” as such was the demand for Catholic rather than Protestant patronage. Redmond and Devlin knew this, probably, better than O’Brien, hence their opposition to him. The Unionist party as a whole did not need any of these splits either to weaken its opposition to the Irish Nationalists or to persuade it to continue to build its organisation. The first sign of the Unionist revival in Belfast did not come directly from this but from what amounted to 136

a front organisation. The Citizen’s Association, a right-wing body calling for clean and cheap civic administration was headed by Robert McMordie, who would succeed Wolff as Unionist MP for East Belfast. In January 1907, the new Association ran candidates in the Belfast municipal elections and defeated Belfast Labour’s candidates for the Corporation.

Some months later, Dixon died and in the bye-election, Walker was defeated by 4,194 votes to 6,021 for the linen magnate, Sir George Clark.

At this point, Unionism in Belfast found itself under a new attack on the economic front, by the direct action of unskilled labour. The organisation of such labour had existed in Britain consistently since 1889, but had been achieved in Ireland only spasmodically. In Belfast, in particular, the new National Union of Dock Labourers had begun well in 1890 but had split in 1893 because of its Protestant members’ opposition to its Branch Secretary’s support for the second Home Rule Bill. (The Catholic workers were not organised sufficiently as yet to make any similar effective opposition to the many acts of Protestant trade union branch secretaries against “Home Rule”). In January, 1907, the National Union of Dock Labourers (N.U.D.L.) sent its general organiser, young James Larkin to restore the Belfast branch.

Through the following summer, he organised a series of strikes, of dockers, of carters and, as a climax, of the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.LC.), each developing out of, as in sympathy with, the other : the first appearance of the revolutionary Syndicalist tactic of “Larkinism”.

The two relatively democratic Belfast MPs, Sloan and Devlin, were forced for a brief period into supporting the stoppages. Grand Masters of seven Loyal Orange Lodges resigned in support. On the other side, the employers relied on the rural Orange Lodges to supply scabs who were given atms : whal would be later seen to be Fascist bands. The strikes (except that of the police) ended in victory for the workers, but their gains were frittered away in November, when the N.U.D.L. Secretary Mr (later, naturally, Sir) James Sexton ended another strike over Larkin’s head, and on unsatisfactory terms. The N.U.D.L. collapsed in Belfast, after Larkin had been expelled from it in 1909.

Larkin’s triumph tends to conceal the fact that it was temporary. While he made a sizeable breach in Orangeism, helped by what was still, despite Labour’s recent setbacks, Belfast’s relatively democratic atmosphere during the two decades over the turn of the century, his strategy did not provide, by itself, any solution to the political backwardness of the Belfast working-class. Certainly, a lasting answer to this question could probably only have been achieved at a later stage in the struggle for independence when Orange hegemony was 137

obviously doomed. Equally, it could be argued that Larkinism itself could have made more lasting breaches in Belfast’s Unionist hegemony had it come earlier when Unionism was less well organised. This is to ignore the fact that its appearance came as something of a climax to over fifteen years of Labour militancy; it might have been more difficult to operate any earlier without a vanguard revolutionary party to develop that militancy at the correct time and in the correct direction. The absence of such a party was decisive. For all his circumstantial problems, Larkin’s gains could have been more positive had there been something more effective than the weakened I.L.P. to develop political consciousness beyond them. Larkinism was not, in practice, more than a hyper-active strategy that was based on very similar assumptions as to the irrelevance of national democratic issues to those maintained by his Social-Democratic union secretary Sexton and, indeed, by Walker. It was his activism that was to get Larkin, for a brief period, into the Third International (which was, in working-class political terms further than Walker or Sexton ever got); it was his assumptions that caused him to abandon the International for Social Democracy.

Larkin’s isolation and the decline of the N.U.D.L. enabled the Protestant industrialists to regroup and their Party to continue organising. They were helped in this in the long run by the fact that from January 1908, the Papal Bull, Ne Temere (which insists on the children of matriages between Catholics and individuals of other religions to being brought up as Catholics) was extended to apply to the British Isles. However the implications of this were not shown fully until it affected a family dispute after the two general elections of 1910.

A more immediate contribution to the decline of democratic politics in Belfast was made by Sloan who was already retreating from democracy, had the Independent Orange Order split with Lindsay Crawford and acted generally to further the democratic retreat. He had gone too far previously to be forgiven by the new Unionist Party. In January 1910, it ran a candidate for his South Belfast seat and defeated him. His former ally, Glendenning, by now Liberal, did not run again for North Co. Antrim, which was regained by the Unionists.

In the same election, Devlin held West Belfast on a combination of Catholic sectarianism and personal efficiency. In North Belfast, Walker had left to fight Leith Boroughs in Scotland (albeit with no more success than in his previous parliamentary fights). Robert Gageby, a Belfast Labour councillor, fought the seat and was defeated by a larger vote that Walker had ever been. He did not run in the second general election that year. Russell lost South 138

Tyrone; after being defeated there again in the second 1910 general election, he succeeded to the North Tyrone seat. Just over a year later, James Connolly, who had returned from the USA, challenged Walker on his political Unionism - particularly in regard to his opposition to building an Irish Labour Party. Walker brushed aside the attack as being of no importance and claimed for his party the credit for the municipal reforms allowed by the Unionist - controlled Belfast Corporation as a reward for its non-nationalism. Finally he allowed himself the luxury to “affirm that it has now become impossible in Belfast to have religious riots and this is due to the good work done by that much despised body, the L.L.P.” (“Rebel Ireland and its Protestant Leaders,” Forward, 3" July 1911). This was just one year before the religious riot of 1912, that had been made the more catastrophic by the development of the new Orange-dominated Unionism. By the time that occurred, Walker had left politics for a safe job in the new National Insurance Board.

His name has been given to a variety of the Social Democratic illusion (“Walkerism’”) that reduces, as of no consequent, compared to immediate economic gains, the problems facing democrats by imperial and colonial exploitation. It has long existed amongst the more progressive Northern Irish Protestant workers (from whose ranks Walker came). Recently, it has vanquished the politics of Connolly (with the help of Connolly’s son) in the Irish Labour Party. Part of the Walkerite myth was that Belfast labour was, somehow, more advanced than that in other Irish cities, because it was more industrialised and as evidenced by its early initiatives towards independent Labour representation. Certainly the expansion of Belfast industry did provide a basis for an early expansion of trade union consciousness amongst its workers. But as analysed, the industry’s own base slowed the growth of such consciousness, and handicapped its development into Socialism. So it was that, partly because of the fact that Belfast had a lower franchise at an earlier stage than other Irish cities, so it had a labour councillor and, then, organised Labour councillors some years before them. The records of the national elections show the limits of this. Bowman was a Liberal-Labour candidate seven years before Labour Nationalists ran elsewhere in an Irish general election : Walker ten years before Thomas Farren was to run as a Labour candidate in Dublin. But whereas Bowman was defeated, the Labour-Nationalists were elected. And, though neither Walker nor Farren 139

were elected, the first independent parliamentary Labour representation in Ireland was to be in Dail Eireann by the Irish Labour Party in 1922; Northern Ireland Labour were not to win parliamentary seats in Stormont until 1925. Unionist hegemony prevented the Belfast Protestant workers as a whole from overcoming their bourgeois consciousness beyond the limits of Walker’s “gas and water socialism”. The class perspective created by socialisation - of labour existed only for a small, isolated vanguard.

The view of the mass of Belfast Protestant workers was summarised at a ‘Labour Unionist’ meeting at the Ulster Hall in 1914, by a prominent trade unionist, J. Keown:- “With regard to the British Labour party he might say that he was one of the first delegates there to meet Mr Ramsay MacDonald when he came to Belfast for the first time to organise the Labour Party At that time of course they discussed the constitution of the Labour Party, and it was clearly understood that it was to be an organisation formed for the purpose of defending and looking after the interests of trades unionism, purely and simply, and on any question outside trades unionism they were to have a free hand”.

This was, in fact, a far more logical application of Walker’s position (if not necessary of Walkerism per se) than Walker’s membership of a pro - “Home Rule” party.

Similar divisions among workers (including Orangeism) existed elsewhere in the British Isles, most notably Clydeside and Lancashire, where there were sizeable colonies of Irish emigrants, Their importance was diminishing already. In 1906, for example, George Barnes of the Labour Party was able to defeat the future Conservative Party leader, Andrew Bonar Law, in the working-class Glasgow constituency of Blackfriars, whilst Walker, his opposite number in Irish working-class politics failed to achieve such a success in Belfast. More significantly, Barnes’ victory proved to be as irreversible as Walker’s defeat.

The fact was bound up with Belfast’ role as an outpost of the British capitalist metropolis. In the first place, the industrialists of Lancashire and west Scotland did not feel the need to encourage Orangeism as their opposite numbers in Ulster did. Secondly, neither to the former nor to their Protestants killed employees were the Catholic novices a threat like the Catholic Irish were to the Protestant employers and the labour aristocracy. In Ireland, after all, the Catholics were the majority. “Home Rule” let alone a Republic would enable them to 140

overturn the Protestants’ privileges in a manner that no equivalent democratic change would enable their opposite numbers to do in Scotland or in England. Hugh Hanna’s warnings in 1886 only slightly exaggerated the dangers of “Home Rule” as seen particularly by the Ulster Labour aristocrats. Thus the Clydeside Protestants could advance to Social Democracy and, even, at times to Communism, while their comrades on the Lagan could accept either only in distorted economist forms such as would not threaten their privileges; even then, most of them preferred to keep their alliance with their class enemies. This was the in-built safeguard against the revolutionary disruption of industrialism - Ulster style. The decline of that industrialism has weakened it but it remains powerful and is likely to be ended only by the fact of successful proletarian revolution.

THE THIRD HOME RULE BILL

Before a new attack on its position was mounted from the Liberal-Nationalist alliance, the Ulster Unionist Party had re-established its organisation and, hence its pre-eminence among the Ulster Protestants. It had to exercise its revived authority almost immediately. Even between the defection of the Liberal Unionists and Gladstone’s retirement in 1894, the Liberal Party had been divided about the cause of Irish “Home Rule”. In a period of imperialist expansion, it tended to adapt to the pressures produced thereby. So, in power after 1905, the party looked to the O’Brienites and the Russellites to help it procrastinate indefinitely, but this aim was defeated, on the one hand, by the opposition of the Irish Party, and finally, though it used this opposition as an argument for inactivity, by the House of Lords. As the Lords rejected many other Liberal Bills, including, finally, the 1909 Budget, the Liberals found it necessary to end their veto. In 1910, they fought two elections on this issue. The result of each was to have them dependent for an overall majority on the Irish Party. This body did not like the Budget as it extended the scope of the indirect taxation which bore more heavily on Ireland than on Britain, but it was ready to vote for it, and for the Parliament Bill that would ensure its automatic passage on the agreement that “Home Rule” (now little more than a provisional assembly) would, then, itself pass under the latter.

But political considerations were merely the opportunity to introduce what had already been made more probable by new economic considerations. From 1905, the Liberals had achieved certain social reforms that transferred the burden of taxation from Ireland to Britain in their 141

sum result. Even the 1909 Budget did not restore this balance. From 1853 to 1909, Ireland had subsidised Britain; now, of the two islands, Britain was over-taxed. The new Home Rule Bill did not end this; the Bill included provisions for “reserved services” including land annuities and pensions. However, the existence of these gave a reason to British capitalist politicians to go beyond “Home Rule” in their treatment of Ireland.

The Liberals’ British supporters in the Labour Party supported “Home Rule”, if anything, more than they supported certain other Liberal proposals. The Labour Party was out of sympathy politically with the Orange and Orange-influenced working-class of Belfast.

Although this latter was militant enough industrially - and sometimes, as in the engineering strike of 1896 and in Larkin’s strikes of 1907, more militant than its British comrades, its political consciousness tended to be handicapped by its colon attitude to the Catholic majority of Irish workers. This prevented it from trying to lead the latter away from “Home Rule”.

But then it did little to explain its case to their British comrades. In 1887, a proposal was placed before the T.U.C. to condemn the Conservatives’ Irish coercion policy and the delegate from Belfast Trades Council had attacked it specifically on the grounds that the policy defended “law and order’. To his fellow-delegates who were struggling for democratic and social rights against precisely the British forces of law and order, such arguments could not carry weight. Except in 1893, when the attempt had taken the form of _mob disruption of the T.U.C.’s Belfast rally, there was little further attempt to explain the Unionist point of view to British organised labour. Although, since then, the vanguard had advanced even beyond Walker, the mass of the Protestant workers were still Unionist. The anti-democratic nature of that point of view was too much of an obvious stumbling block in the task of convincing the latter. It was easier to trust bourgeois leaders and British capitalists and army officers who had no qualms about democracy. In turn the Labour Unionists’ readiness to do this was noted by British Labour and served further to alienate it from Unionism. Of the British parties, that which opposed “Home Rule” was, of course, once more, the united Conservative and Unionist Party. That it did so as decidedly, indeed, hysterically, as it did was for the same reasons that it had opposed the previous Home Rule Bills plus the further consideration that not only could it no longer be blocked by the House of Lords but that other obnoxious Liberal laws could not be stopped thus either. In many ways, “Home Rule” was the least popular of such laws and, hence, the most suitable on which the Conservatives might 142

fight an election - the more so because the claims of the Ulster Protestants could be counterpoised, for the benefit of the British Protestant majority, to the claims of the Irish Catholic majority. Moreover, the British support for the government was becoming increasingly divided, with an increasingly dissatisfied Labour Party splitting the Liberal vote in bye-elections, providing further hope for a Conservative victory. Above all the victory would mean a defeat not only for the government but for other forces behind the Labour supporters of the government, who had been encouraged, so the Conservatives insisted, by the policies of that government which could not oppose them. As F.E. Smith one of their most able younger MPs remarked:- “Ten years ago there were only two parties in the State. The vicissitudes of politics made it certain that, within a period not unduly prolonged, the activities of the Government in power would produce hostility to be followed by reaction, and led in the sequel to decline and defeat. An agreeable alternation of office and opposition was the destiny of the great political parties. The situation today is wholly different. The personal incompetence of the Labour Members, and their entire lack of touch with the great industrial movement in the country, will blind only superficial people to the sinister possibilities which underlie the surface of modern politics, New and deep-seated movements, imperfectly understood, hardly diagnosed at all, are rapidly introducing incalculable elements into English politics” - F.E. Smith, Unionist Policy, Williams and Norgate, London 1913, pp.4-5.

“The evils of which the recent Labour troubles have been the outward sign are too deeprooted in our Industrial, Political and Fiscal system to be excised so easily. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his friends did not make all the trouble; they simply made the most of what they could find. Limehouse blew the embers of discontent to a flame, but the fire will go on crackling long after the bellows are broken” - ibid., p.20.

With this view of affairs, the traditional Conservative opposition to “Home Rule” was magnified by a fear of revolution and a determination to seize power fo beat the workers more effectively than the Liberals. Thanks to the Parliament Act, they could not win their aim of a general election by the means used in 1975 by the Australian Liberal Party.

However, they could encourage the threat of armed opposition to Home Rule from the Ulster Protestants and from their friends in the Army, who were particularly susceptible to the threat to the unity of the Kingdom.

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The Irish Party saw the problem, far too simply, as being posed by the Conservative Party predominantly. To be fair to it (not for wish to be fair but because they had this excuse, unlike future nationalists) the predominance of the Ulster issue was a new factor; it had been relatively unimportant in the previous Home Rule Bill crises. For years until it was defeated finally by Sinn Fein in 1918, the Party sought to avoid the issue, first by looking to the British government to coerce Protestant Ulster and then by conceding the widest possible terms save only the form of “Home Rule”. They were not prepared to fight a Civil War to unite Ireland and, indeed, neither themselves nor any Nationalists other than relatively small groups of physical force Republicans have ever been prepared to do so. At the time, only Connolly saw the class nature of Unionism as a Marxist:- “The things in which Belfast is peculiar are the skilful use by the master class of religious rallying cries which, long since forgotten elsewhere are still potent to limit and weaken Labour here, and the farcical spirit of self-righteousness which enable unscrupulous sweaters of the poor with one hand in the jacket of their workers, to raise the other hand to heaven and thank God that they are not as other men”. - Reconquest of Ireland New Books, Dublin 1972 edition p.31. (Of course, Connolly knew that the bosses of Dublin could be equally as hypocritical in their way - but, in practice, it tended and tends to be a pseudo-egalitarianism as much as a pseudo-piety). He added in an article published just before the article that would go into the Reconquest:- “At one time in the industrial world of Great Britain and Ireland the skilled labourer looked down with contempt upon the unskilled and bitterly resented his attempt to get his children taught any of the skilled trades; the feeling of the Orangemen of Ireland towards the Catholics is but a glorified representation on a big stage of the same passions inspired by the same unworthy motive”. - “North-East Ulster” - Forward 2™ August, 1913.

Then, after the Ulster Unionists under Carson had established their determination to oppose their involvement under a “Home Rule” settlement and were being wooed belatedly by all kind of bourgeois and petty bourgeois Nationalists, Connolly warned:- “The Carsonite position is indeed plain - so plain that nothing but sheer perversity of purpose can misunderstand it or cloak it with a resemblance to Irish patriotism. The Carsonites say 144

that their fathers were planted in this country to assist in keeping the natives down in subjection that this country might be held for England. That this was God’s will because the Catholic Irish were not fit for the responsibilities and powers of free men and that they are not fit for the exercise of these responsibilities and powers till this day. Therefore, say the Carsonites, we have kept our side of the bargain; we have refused to admit the Catholics to power and responsibility; we have manned the government of this country for England, we propose to continue to do so, and rather than admit that these Catholics - these ‘mickies and teagues’ ~ are our equals, we will fight in the hope that our fighting will cause the English people to revolt against their government and re-establish us in our historic position as an English colony in Ireland, superior to, and unhampered by the political institutions of the Irish natives” - “The Carsonite Position” - The Irish Worker, 8" August, 1914, All this was true, but Connolly was alone in seeing it even in his own movement (though his immediate heirs paid lip-service to it). Along with his non-demoninational view of religion, it was to be the most obvious immediate programmatic difference between him and the Republican leaders with whom he was to ally in 1916.

Apart from Connolly, all sections of the Irish national movement were agreed on a policy of, if possible, leaving the Liberal government to enforce “Home Rule” on Protestant Ulster. In 1913, the Irish Volunteers were founded not to fight the Ulster Volunteers but to ensure that they did not act as a vanguard in a British Conservative strategy to stop all “Home Rule”.

That this was a real danger was revealed the next year when the Liberals found the British military officer caste willing to sabotage their attempt to threaten the para-military Unionist forces. Even then, Redmond did not consider trying to use the Volunteers to coerce Protestant Ulster.

Rather, he sought to appease it. He offered to accept the government’s proposal that at least the four mainly Protestant Ulster counties (Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down) might “opt out” of “Home Rule” for a period of five years (within which time another general election might return a Unionist government). This compromise attempt was countered by the Unionist insistence that the exclusion be formally permanent and that it apply to the Catholic counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Nonetheless, Redmond won and continued to hold the loyalty of the Insh Volunteers.

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In this policy is revealed the Nationalist evasion (continuing today) of the fact that, even if Britain fell in the sea, there would still be a community in north-east Ulster that would fight rather than join under one Irish government. (It must be added that it would have fought harder then (backed by a formidable economic power) than it can or will today). In practice the broad agreement between bourgeois and petty bourgeois Nationalists — again, in fact, between all Irish Nationalists except Connolly - that independence and unity were not worth a war between Irishmen was to mean that, eventually, the Irish got both partition and a civil war - and that they may well need another civil war to end the anomalies left by the former.

Against the hesitations of the Irish Nationalists, the Unionists - particularly those in Ulster had an easy political task. Events would reveal the differences that existed between the Irish Unionists as a whole, under the overall leadership of Carson and the Unionists of Ulster under James Craig. The former wanted, above all, to prevent “Home Rule” - the latter to stop Irish Nationalists ending Orange - Protestant hegemony in Ulster. As yet, however, this was merely a difference of emphasis as was shown in the Committee Stage of the Home Rule Bill in June 1912. A Liberal MP, Thomas Agar-Robartes moved an amendment offering the right to opt out of “Home Rule” to the four Ulster counties with Unionist majorities - Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down. The Unionists voted for this proposal against the Liberals and the Irish Party who defeated it. However, Carson made no secret of their position. After raising the demand to exclude the Counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone, he stated:- “We do not accept this amendment as a compromise of the question. There is no compromise possible. We believe that Home Rule would be disastrous for the rest of Ireland, and - because he offers what would be merely a simple act of justice to a portion of Ulster why should we on that ground abandon our position in regard to a policy which we believe harmful to Ireland?” - Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Volume XXXIX, 13" June, 1912, 1068. He could afford his honesty. The Unionists were agreed on the minimum demand, “No Home Rule”, they were backed by the most powerful British and all Ulster industrialists (save only Pirrie). They had support in the officer corps of the British Army - including its most illustrious mass murderer of barbaric races, Earl Roberts of Kandahar. Such 146

considerations were important practical arguments against the claim for self determination for a “lesser breed’’. Nor did the Unionist leadership rest at that. A series of sectarian riots, though caused, immediately by an Hibernian attack on a provocative Sunday school procession - in Belfast, such were more than a children’s affair-, were not discouraged by the new Orange Unionist Party as such riots had been in the 1890s. The party used them as an excuse to institutionalise the Protestant rioters as the Orange lodges could not quite do. A Covenant was drafted:- “Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as of the whole of Ireland, subversive to our civil and religious freedom, destructive to our citizenship and perilous to the unity of the empire, we whose names are under-written, men of Ulster, loyal subjects to His gracious Majesty, King George V, humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant, throughout this our time of threatened calamity to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Treland”. More than 200,000 Ulstermen signed this. Its success led to a further move - the creation of the Ulster Volunteer Force from the nuclei of the armed scab groups that the employers had used against Larkin in 1907.

Such tactics give yet another indication that the whole objective impulse of Unionism was in a direction towards social counter-revolution. Later on, when some of their officer friends refused to agree to discipline Ulster, its leaders were to raise the revolutionary demand for the right of all ranks of soldiers to query orders. This flirtation with democracy died with the outbreak of imperialist war. To refuse to discipline the extreme wing of British imperialism was one thing: to refuse to fight its opponents was quite different.

The leaders of Ulster Unionism were to take further precautions. Though Larkin’s new Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (LT.G.W.U.) had established a branch in Belfast, 147

with James Connolly as its organiser, the 1912 riots had dispelled its strength outside the Catholic dockers of the lower port. The Independent Labour Party in Belfast had split between the Walkerites, who wanted to maintain the British connection, and the Independent Labour Party of Ireland which was under Connolly, but included its own Walkerite tendency.

Despite these weaknesses, the Unionist leaders were not prepared to take any chances. In April, 1914, they announced the formation of an Ulster Unionist Labour Association (U.U.L.A.) “of workers formed to support and maintain the Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland”. Carson was its President : the linen and railway heir, John Millar Andrews, its Chairman. This act paralleled the Unionists’ attitude in the Dublin lock-out against Larkin’s LT.G.W.U.

(and, in fact, all other organised workers) of the previous winter. While the leading spirit in initiating this was the Catholic All-for Ireland magnate, William Martin Murphy, he had the full backing of his Protestant and Unionist peers who dominated Dublin business. The Chairman of the Dublin Employers’ Federation which organised the lock out was Maurice Dockrell, later to be Unionist MP for Rathmines, and other leading figures on that side of the struggle were such Unionist bosses as John Good, William Hewat and the Unionist head of the biscuit firm, George Jacobs. After the Dublin Metropolitan Police rioted against the strikers in August 1913, the Enquiry that whitewashed it was headed by two Unionist lawyers, Denis Henry (a Catholic “Liberal” Unionist) and Samuel Lombard Brown.

The Irish Times, owned, then, by the Unionist Amott family, has been regarded as being, at worst, neutral in this struggle mainly because of its readiness to publish the letter of A.E. (the co-operative organiser George Russell) against the employers. In its editorial, however, it took a pro-employer line second only that of Murphy’s Irish Independent and far more extreme than the Freeman’s Journal, the organ of the Dublin Hibernians, whose strength was based on smaller businesses almost as hostile to the Murphys and the Dockrells as to the unions which did not, as yet, trouble to organise their concerns’ two or three employees.

The Irish Times was supported by its Ulster Unionist allied the Belfast Newsletter and the Northern Whig (See Appendix).

Once more, a de facto alliance was made between these and the religious leaders of the majority. Unionism fought for the unity of the United Kingdom as being a popular issue on 148

which it could turn the flank of what its members regarded as a criminally-weak government and, hence, defeat the left wing forces that it was threatening to unleash. It supported scab pogroms and lock-outs because such methods were necessary to fight those left-wing forces.

By August 1914, the Unionists appeared to be winning. Bargaining had begun over whether six or four Ulster counties should be excluded for five years or forever from the “Home Rule” settlement, despite beliefs on both sides that the exclusion of even four counties would destroy any possibility of such a settlement being successful, and despite the probability that even a five year time limit would enable the exclusionists to rely on a friendly Unionist government. Larkin and the L.T.G.W.U. had been defeated, though not actually crushed.

Indeed, this situation was true of all Unionism’s opponents.

However, because they had not been defeated completely, Unionism’s own triumph was incomplete. (To be concluded) 149

CHAPTER 8 : BIRTH OF NORTHERN IRELAND

The earlier chapters have traced the development of Ulster society from the original plantations (themselves a policy proceeding necessarily from the fact of British colonial occupation), through their development as part of a policy of Protestant Ascendancy, their abortive participation in an Irish national revolution, to their breach with Irish nationalism, due to the form of the development of their industries, and their alliance with the most predatory sections of British capitalism. This lecture will deal with the climax of this process in the political formalising of the partition of Ireland that has separated Ulster from the new Trish national state.

THE IRISH PARTIES IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR

An extended war tends to accelerate tendencies already developing in society. This was the case after 1914. In that year, leaders of groups opposing formally the states involved, from Redmond the Irish nationalist to Ebert the German Social Democrat, swore loyalty to their ruling opponents in the name of the latter’s victory. However the pressures of the continuing struggle restored the pre-war balance and, at least, in Ireland, led to the political destruction of those who had assumed its alteration.

In Ireland, the bulk of the population — nationalist and unionist — supported the British war effort. This pro-imperialist unity was reflected by all Ireland’s MPs bar one — the future Republican Laurence Ginnell. Both the Unionists and, at this time, the All for Ireland League gave unconditional support for the imperial war effort. Redmond did try to maintain a less obviously enthusiastic position ~ promising only that the Irish Volunteers would protect Ireland from a German invasion. However, war hysteria mounted and was augmented by the passing of the Home Rule Act (albeit with a clause suspending it for the duration of the war) against Unionist opposition. To ensure that the Act would allow full “Home Rule” for all Ireland, Redmond became an avowed recruiting-sergeant for Britain in September.

The forces opposed to this tailing of British imperialism, were correspondingly small. The firmest were those headed by Connolly — the LT.G.W.U. and especially the Irish Citizen Army — which denounced the War for a combination of nationalist and proletarian internationalist reasons. Griffith’s Sinn Fein also opposed the War, as did a minority (12,000 out of 180,000) Volunteers which had broken with Redmond after his unconditional 150

adherence to the British cause. A minority of this minority began to prepare plans for a rising of Irish Nationalists. Connolly had plans for a rising also, though it would seem that they were based on the unions (particularly his own union) rather than on armed force alone and perhaps involving a general strike. Besides this, he differed from the militant Republicans not so much by his specific economic proposals (which the Republican leader, Pearse, was already approaching by his own paths) as by his greater realism on the Ulster Protestants (which has been considered already) and by his equivalent clarity on the educational question. Pearse, the Republican leader most concerned with education supported clerical management of schools — openly:- “As to the local organisation of elementary schools, there will always be need of a local manager and personally I see no reason why the local management should be given to a district council rather than left, as it is at present, to individuals in the locality interested in education, but a thousand reasons why it should not” — The Murder Machine”, Political Writings and Speeches, Talbot Press, Dublin, 1924, p.46.

As against this, as early as 1896, Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party had inserted in its programme a demand for “Public control and management by boards elected by popular ballot for that purpose alone”. Nearly twenty years later, he wrote:~ “Whatever safeguards are necessary to insure that the religious faith of the parents shall be respected in the children will surely be adequately looked after by the representatives of a people to whom religion is a vital thing. Such safeguards are quite compatible with the establishment of popular control of schools, with the building and equipment of schools that shall be a joy to the scholar and an inspiration to the teacher, and with such a radical overhauling of the curriculum as shall ensure that full recognition shall be given to the deeds of the upward climb of the race, as their failures to achieve mark the equally important epochs of its martyrdom” — The Reconquest of Ireland, New Books Publications, Dublin and Belfast, 1972, pp.53-54. Connolly’s overall strategy of using the national rising to initiate a proletarian (and, eventually, a proletarian international) rising, his theoretical clarity on economics, his antisectarianism and his refusal to make the Republican error of compromising with the northern 151

unionists — all these qualities were nullified by the fact that he failed to build — or try to build ~— a revolutionary party to fight for his politics. As a result, after his murder in 1916, the Irish Labour Party withdrew from direct participation in the national struggle rather than threaten the unity of the Irish Trade Union Congress with which it was then identical. Only a few confused left Republicans remained to try to struggle for what they thought to be Connolly’s politics. The 1916 Rising marked the end of a phase. Redmond’s policy had been popular in Nationalist Ireland partly because of the economic war boom, its backing by separation allowances to the families of soldiers serving in the British Army (many of whom had never enjoyed a regular income), and by promises of war contracts and of a future share of German spoils. By 1916, these considerations were losing much of their appeal. Many had expected a quick resolution to the struggle which remained deadlocked. Prices had risen faster than wages and actual war contracts were comparatively few. Politically, the achievement of any form of “Home Rule” was now beginning to be doubted. While the Ulster Volunteers got a special division for themselves, Redmond’s recruits were refused any such corporate recognition. They were shipped over to France whilst the Ulster Division was trained in its province for nearly a year. Meanwhile, in May 1915, the Liberal Government had joined forces with the Unionists — including Carson and Smith. The new Coalition introduced conscription for Britain and the Irish began to fear that it would be extended to them.

The Easter Rising was a warning to the Parliamentary Party that it did not understand. Under pressure from above as well as below, Redmond reacted to the former, believing that he could neutralise the latter as he had in 1914. He sought to do this by achieving immediate “Flome Rule” on the terms offered (but refused by)him in 1914: the exclusion of the present area of Northern Ireland on an indefinite basis. Despite the quiescence of the Republicans after the Easter Rising, he was unable to do this and his attempt rebounded against his credibility. At the same time, his rivals of the All-for-Ireland League were unable to take his place. Ina bye-election in one of the League’s strongholds in Co. Cork, in November 1916, the Redmondite candidate won the seat. The party that had criticised Redmond for insufficient enthusiasm for the British war effort began to turn towards the even less pro-British Republicans, as it saw them winning Redmondite seats. Many of the Catholic bishops (most 152

of whom preferred Healy’s All-For-Ireland friends to the Redmondites) went with them. In 1918, Archbishop Walsh of Dublin cast his first vote in a general election for Sinn Fein.

This was shown in the result of the final attempt made by Britain to pacify Ireland constitutionally: the Irish Convention. In this, Redmond managed to win the southern Unionists to “Home Rule”, only to be deserted by the All for Irelanders (under W.M.

Murphy), the hierarchy and his own lieutenant, the Hibernian, Devlin, who revived the original call for dominion status (including full control of trade). Undoubtedly the latter understood better the feelings of nationalist Ireland.

Even so, after his death, Redmond nearly won his demand from the government. In the ultimate crisis of its arms in the war, it offered immediate “Home Rule” for all Ireland, on condition that it accede to conscription. For the first time, British capitalism considered seriously deserting its loyal Ulster outpost. Even so, its offer came too late; no major section of Irish national opinion — including Irish Labour — could accept conscription by the British government whether on Nationalist (the British government having no right to conscript Irish youth) or, as with the Labour Party, liberal, terms. Conscription was defeated, Home Rule was postponed again, the crisis passed and Britain and its allies won the imperialist war.

In all this, Ulster Unionism played a minor role, except as a loyal support to the British war effort. Significantly, its territory was the only part of the British Isles where a serious antiwar movement did not develop. An attempt by the Belfast Trades Council to organise anticonscription meetings in Belfast in 1918 was defeated by organised coercion by many Protestants. They might well be thought to have had an interest in supporting the council in its cause, until it is remembered that they would have been employed in jobs excluded from the draft. However, wartime conditions acted upon Belfast industry. They encouraged the revival of militancy in its workforce in precisely that sphere on which it had always shown itself most ready to be active; the sphere of industrial action.

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THE HEROIC PERIOD OF BELFAST LABOUR

Although Connolly had opposed the Irish bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists’ tendency to capitulate to Ulster Unionism, he did emphasise that the conditions of the Belfast workers created the potential that a Socialist Republican movement might be able to use to win them from British imperialism. In Chapter 5 The Reconquest of Ireland he showed how although “the homes of the poor are better, house rent is lower, and the city is cleaner and healthier than Dublin” (Ibid., p.31), yet consumption and typhoid were rife and the rate of premature births remained high as did that of industrial accidents. Statistics produced after the war showed that little had changed. In January 1921, Inspector Erant of the United Kingdom Board of Trade reported that, in many Belfast factories the fire-escapes were too rotten to be used. The following September, the Northern Whig revealed that Belfast had had for some years the highest rate of infant mortality in the entire United Kingdom.

Such conditions, being created by one of the most socialised industrial economies in the British Isles (by 1919 employment at Harland and Wolff alone was nearly half the size of that of Petrograd's Putilov plant) should have resulted in Belfast becoming a stronghold of an Irish Bolshevism. It didn’t do so for two reasons: the Orange hegemony in the city’s politics and the part-inability, part-refusal of Irish (and British) Labour to develop a Bolshevik Party out of its industrial militancy.

However, the Belfast workers’ industrial activism could not be thwarted so easily. In December 1917, the Belfast shipyard workers staged a successful strike. They were followed by larger struggles by Belfast druggists and Portadown municipal workers. Farther afield, in Dromore, Co. Tyrone, the striking workers at Brown’s soapworks fought under the Red Flag.

During the Autumn of 1918, major strikes occurred of Belfast women workers and corporation dustmen. The outstanding potential cause of industrial unrest was the hours issue. It was a matter common to the whole United Kingdom. The engineering industry’s prevailing 54 hour week meant that its workers had to go to their jobs before 6.30 am., often missing breakfast (though they had a break for this later). As Connolly had remarked this was not only uncomfortable, it was dangerous: the tired, hungry workers could not handle their machines with the full care needed to ensure the prevention of accidents. The two worst periods for 154

these were the early morning (when the workers were drowsy and hungry) and the evening (when they were tired at the end of the working day), The British workers now claimed reductions in their working week. The most common demand was for a week of 44 hours. This was adopted unanimously at a meeting of Belfast engineering workers, addressed by both Socialists and Labour Unionists at the Ulster Hall on 21" August. On 3 October following, a meeting of Derry shipyard workers passed a similar motion. This became a major issue in the general election campaign, the next month. This was the first fought on a full manhood suffrage : the first in which women voted and the first (and only) time Belfast was voting for nine Westminster seats. (This expansion of the numbers of Irish constituencies was a further proof of the government’s abandonment of the Home Rule Act). Outside Ulster, and such constituencies as Dublin University and Dublin townships (Pembroke and Rathmines), where Irish Unionism was strong, the electoral contests too the form of straight fights between the Parliamentary Party and the Republicans grouped, now, in Sinn Fein. (The All for Irelanders had retired in favour of the latter). However, in the northeast, the Ancient Order of Hibernians was known to be stronger than elsewhere, the Parliamentary Party had defeated Sinn Fein in two bye-elections, and there was a Unionist electorate able to benefit on a large scale from a split Nationalist vote. Under the influence of Cardinal Logue all Nationalist strongholds save two were appointed equally between single candidates of the two bourgeois Nationalist Parties.

There was a further difference between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. Whereas, outside Belfast, the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress did not run candidates, in that city the Trades Council appointed a Labour Representation Committee that nominated four candidates on a “pure” Labour basis, ignoring the national question carefully.

The Ulster Unionists had formalised their embryo “Unionist Labour Association” in July.

Three of their eight candidates in Belfast (apart from Carson himself) were members. Their original programmes were little different from that of their non-Labour allies. However two of them declared for the 44 hour claim, and the whole Unionist campaign which had begun 155

with its only social issue that of education extended before the poll to include demands for better housing and a lower working week. Five of the eight Unionist candidates supported the 44 hour claim unequivocally, though Carson himself limited his support to the employers’ offers of 47 hours as being the “national” one. In the result, the Unionists won every Belfast constituency save Falls, where Devlin defeated Eamon De Valera in a straight fight. In the all-Irish result, they were second to Sinn Fein and larger than the Irish Party. However, in the four Belfast constituencies where Labour ran candidates they came second to the Unionists, beating Sinn Fein, Nationalist and Independent alike.

Encouraged by this victory, the Unionists began to seek to extend their political hegemony into the industrial field. On the 21° January, 1919, Samuel McGuffin, the prosperous draper, who represented “Labour Unionism” in Shankill founded an “Ulster Workers Union” to “organise the unorganised” — in practice to create a reliable industrial organisation for Ulster’s employers. But the time was not yet ripe for a counter-attack. The Ulster workers were on the offensive, and standing out for the 44 hour week. The employers’ 47 hour offer was accepted by only a small majority of a 35% vote of all British and Irish engineering workers. In such areas as ' Humberside and Tyneside the engineers struck for the ‘44’ in the first week of January. On the 15", the Belfast engineers voted to do likewise as did those on Clydeside who were demanding 40 hours, in both cases, despite the opposition of the Central Executive Committee of the Federation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades (F.E.S.T.) which declared such action illegal. The Belfast District Committee of this body gained the support of the corporation workers (including those in the power stations) and began, on Saturday, 25" January, what was, in fact, a general strike in the whole of Belfast.

The struggle lasted three weeks. The workers had some definite advantages. They were helped at first by a snowstorm which added to the difficulties caused by the power stoppage.

In addition, the British government was not prepared to interfere for some time, despite the appeals of the corporation (for a supply of scabs) and of Joseph Devlin (for arbitration). The corporation itself was unprepared for the dispute and was, accordingly, unable to do anything about it. Belfast’s eight Unionist M.P.’s remained silent, being at once opposed to the strike and embarrassed by their election speeches.

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In their own right, the strikers were sustained by the parallel action of their comrades on the Clyde, by the solidarity of workers in many firms in Belfast and Lurgan who came out in sympathy and, to a lesser extent, by the I.T.U.C.’s offer to extend the strike elsewhere.

However, the decisive factor was the spirit of the strikers themselves which enabled the strike to be maintained by mass pickets, often several hundred strong.

Against these advantages, the strikers had a number of weaknesses that were to prove decisive. The Belfast District Committee of the F.E.S.T. was suspended by its Central Executive : The Federation’s two largest affiliates, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Boilermakers’ Union refused to allow strike pay to their members involved, though other unions, most notably the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters did back their striking members. Of more direct importance was the weakness of the Belfast District Committee of the F.E.S.T. which now ruled Belfast as Strike Committee. It had been elected some months before the hours issue had become prominent. Composed mainly of Social Democrats, it was chaired by a Scots Catholic, Charles McKay, but included “Labour Unionists” of whom the best known was William Grant, a founder-member of the U.U.L.A. and a future Northern Ireland cabinet minister. Accordingly, its strategy was limited to what appeared to be the minimum required to achieve its aims. Anything more was suspect. It ignored the LT.U.C.’s support of an all Irish sympathetic strike. It silenced Sean O’Hagan (John Hedley, later to lead the Knocklong Soviet of 1920) after he had demanded that the strike be spread. It refused the railway workers’ offers to withdraw their labour.

As the strike continued, these weaknesses were magnified by new factors. The weather changed for the better. The Grand Orange Lodge spoke out against the strike. Finally the British government moved against the strikers. After two weeks, it arrested the leaders on Clydeside strike leaders. A week later, after the Belfast strikers had voted to defeat an inadequate provisional settlement offer, it sent in troops to re-open the public services.

This was the beginning of the end for the great Belfast general strike. At the same time as the troops were mobilised, Harland and Wolff offered a 47 hour week with a later start and a later ending, pending a national agreement. It was backed by Workman, Clark and Co and by the other engineering firms. This offer solved the problems of the early start only by restoring 157

those of the late departure. Nonetheless, the strike committee recommended their acceptance.

This was done despite vocal opposition. The fight for 44 hours moved from Belfast to the United Kingdom as a whole.

Unionism in Ulster had further set-backs to come. Party propaganda thwarted Ulster Labour’s enjoyment of the May-day strike that the LT.U.C. had called for all Ireland. But during the rest of 1919, major strikes were to occur all over the province. Not only did they occur in the towns, but, in March, the farm labourers in Cos. Donegal and Down struck for wage rises.

Worse still, in the political field, a month after the Belfast strike, official Unionism was defeated in a bye-election in East Antrim. This was less of a break with its tenets than a victory for the contradictory politics of its populist wing. The victor of East Antrim represented both Orange dissatisfaction with a non-Orange candidate, and trade union dissatisfaction with Unionist social politics. Though, within months of his election, he accepted the Unionist whip, he had acted as the symbol of its potential weakness: of conflicting tendencies that its leaders had either to master or be mastered by them.

As the year continued the struggle for Irish independent intensified. It had little immediate effect in the north-east. Working-class Unionists were perturbed by other matters. The linen trade was gripped by slump; unemployment was rising. Unionism was suffering as an accomplice of the imperial government whose election promises were coming home to roost.

In January 1920, municipal elections were held all over Ireland using the system of P.R. The Labour Representation Committee constituted itself the Belfast Labour Party and nominated 20 candidates to contest the 60 seats on the Belfast City Council. In the election campaign, the Unionist candidates veered between renewed promises of better housing and banging the Orange drum. In the result, 13 Labour councillors were returned. Their party was the second largest on the City Council. The Unionists were still the majority with 37 seats, but they suffered moral defeats in a number of wards, most notably the Orange Shankill, where Labour’s Samuel (Sam) Kyle headed the poll and became Alderman. Another Labour councillor, James Baird, infuriated the genteel (particularly the genteel “Labour Unionists”) by continuing the custom begun by the old trades council councillors and wearing his working overalls at corporation 158

meetings. At the first of these, Labour annoyed the Unionists more than ever by nominating their own candidate for Lord Mayor : a simple, but effective, gesture which reminded their opponents that, even allowing for P.R., Labour’s vote had grown since December, 1918.

In these circumstances, the British government prepared to offer Ireland a new settlement. In February, 1920, it published the Better Government of Ireland Bill which included the substance of the Unionist counter-proposals to the Liberals’ and Nationalists’ compromise offer of 1914. All Ireland got “Home Rule” — but with two colonial parliaments: one for the 6 Ulster counties that the Unionists had claimed as their own: the other for the rest. No time limit was placed on this partition, though a “Council of Ireland” based on the two states, was projected to give the Nationalist population a continuing hope of reunification through cooperation At the same time provision was made lest the majority of Irishmen (who had voted, after all, for a thirty-two county Republic) should reject this scheme. The Royal Irish Constabulary was reinforced by the ex~-officers of the Auxiliary “cadets” and by the still more notorious “Black and Tans”. This could not satisfy the Nationalists. Nor could it please the Irish Unionists. The Ulster party was opposed to any “Home Rule” parliament — even its own - on the grounds of economy. They were reluctant to desert the Protestant minorities in Cos. Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan. They feared too, their own labour problems and mistrusted the ability of the Irish gombeenmen (“Shinners” and “Hibernians” alike) to control this. In two years, Ireland had seen two national general strikes and one city-based soviet in Limerick. In April 1920, a further such action for the release of Republican prisoners involved the establishment of workers’ power in several Irish towns; the British released the prisoners in less than two days.

In May, the creamery at Knocklong was seized by the workers: the first of the great Munster creamery “soviets”. A soviet twenty-six counties might be followed quickly by a soviet thirty-two. For north-eastern labour was still as much a threat industrially as it seemed to be becoming politically. In March 1920, the shipyard engineers gained wage awards that increased their weekly earnings to 83/6d (minimum) and 87/10d (maximum): 1/6d more than their comrades on Clydeside. On 28" June, they demanded a £5 per week minimum wage. Furthermore, the 159

hours issue remained. The Belfast building workers gained a 44 hour week at the end of April. In Britain no advance had been made for its achievement by the engineers. How long would the Belfast engineers put up with 47 hours?

On top of this the Belfast industrialists were beginning to suffer the decline from which they have tended to ail ever since the boom of the First World War. Not only was linen in trouble, but Workmen, Clarke and Co. was suffering major business problems and had only just avoided bankruptcy in December 1919.

Thus Unionism, particularly Ulster Unionism faced a double crisis: economic and political.

THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN ULSTER

Connolly’s murder after Easter 1916 was considered by most of the contemporary leaders of Irish Labour to underline the need of their class to stand away from sustained political involvement , to ignore the Citizen Army and to concentrate on building the class’ economic organisations, particularly the LT.G.W.U. and its finances. This would give them the economic power that would eventually break the shell of the political power. The events in Russia in November, 1917 reinforced their belief in the inevitability of victory. Their only contribution to the national struggle was the organisation of one day general strikes for specific aims, starting with the anti-conscription strike of April 1918.

Without a strong labour movement to ally with them (let alone to displace them) the pettybourgeois Volunteers gravitated naturally first to the capitalist economics of Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein and, thus, to the political guidance of the various bourgeois opponents of the Parliamentary Party, most notably the All-for-Ireland League and its episcopal friends.

The first result of this takeover of the national movement by the Irish bourgeoisie appeared in the 1918 general election. Irish Labour realised that it would not defeat Sinn Fein, due to its comparative political passivity during the previous two years. Yet participation on the terms either of Sinn Fein or of the Irish Parliamentary Party carried with it the danger of a split between the industrially organised followers of each (Participation on a unionist basis was simply utopian). When it was proposed to fight four Dublin constituencies in alliance with Sinn Fein, many local trades councils threatened to disaffiliate from Congress. Several of such bodies included workers whom the I.T.G.W.U. sought to recruit and from January 1919 160

the secretary to the Labour Party and T.U.C. was that union’s treasurer, William O’Brien. In any case, the economic struggle had to have priority. Labour united and to abstain from the general election. This was disastrous both generally and in relation to partition for two reasons. Firstly, it left to the Irish national bourgeoisie the task of establishing an alternative state power both against Britain and against its own workers. Secondly, that bourgeoisie was in alliance with the Catholic hierarchy. When the first Dail Eireann met, in January 1919, a Minister for Education was not amongst those appointed by it, nor was one so appointed until the Second Dail had been elected. The effect on the Irish — particularly the Ulster-Protestants - of the second fact was merely to reinforce their suspicions of Irish Republicanism as being Hibernianism plus the gun. The first fact was most important; when it is remembered that the workers of Ulster (particularly the Protestants) have tended to be most radical on the industrial, rather than the political front and are, as such, less likely to be attracted to Irish nationalism on a bourgeois democratic programme, then the difference in their attitudes will be reduced on a proletarian one.

As the Volunteers’ struggle with the R.I.C. developed into full-scale civil war, the Unionist leaders, representing a class that feared that Sinn Fein’s victory would mean the victory of Bolshevism, began to warn that organised Labour would bring about the victory of Sinn Fein.

In October 1919, the “Labour Unionist” MP for Victoria, Thompson Donald fired the first shots in the attack. In a series of speeches, he declared that the unemployment of ex-soldiers had been established by Republicans taking jobs from Unionists, whilst the latter were at the war. In this way, he sought to turn to his party’s advantage one of the arguments of the engineering strikers; they had claimed that the 44 hour week would give more jobs to exservicemen by spreading the work-load. Donald’s speeches had little immediate effect.

However, as the War of Independence became intensified by the intervention of the Black and Tans, it became more apparent in the north-east. At Westminster, the nationalist ramp stressed the continuing differences between even parliamentary nationalists and Unionists by opposing bills to regulate the drink trade and to reform education. In the latter, the 161

nationalists were backed by the Irish Catholic hierarchy. In Co. Galway, the Tuam Urban District Council began a boycott of Belfast goods.

While Irish Republicanism became — for reasons both good and bad — more loathsome than ever before to Unionists, the British trade unions passed mild motions in favourite of Irish self-determination. From the middle of May, too, an unofficial strike of Irish railwaymen was maintained against the carriage of armed British troops and munitions. All these factors helped the Ulster Protestant industrialists by preparing their propaganda ground for the counter-revolution that was already being foreshadowed.

In the weaker Protestant areas of the projected state of Northern Ireland, such landowners as Sir Basil Brooke of Co. Fermanagh and Chichester of Co. Derry were re-organising groups of Ulster Volunteers against the Republicans.

Even before this, from the middle of April, the city of Derry with a population balanced everyday between Nationalist and Unionist, or Catholic and Protestant, was in a state of tension, which exploded spasmodically into religious riot. A particularly bad period occurred in the middle of June. At the end a joint denominational council was established and it agreed to ban all religious processions, including the Orangemen’s. Derry remained quiet for the rest of the year compared to elsewhere in the six counties.

One of the victims of the Derry riots was the son of the Grand Master of the Apprentice Boys. A month later, Carson would describe the effect of his death:- “The other day a respected citizen of Londonderry who was himself originally a Belfast man had a young boy of 23 (sic) home from the War. While he was staying with his father on leave after serving in the war, he was seized on the side of the road by Sinn Feiners, brought into the field and riddled with bullets. That man and that boy were well known in Belfast.

When I got to my home in London that evening after attending here in this House, I got a telegram from certain persons in Queen’s Island, saying: “°We call upon you to call out the Ulster Volunteers and take revenge for the death of young McKay’ 162

“T think that was the name of this young man who had been so brutally murdered. Do you wonder? Are we the only people who are never to have a feeling over these matters?”- Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Volume 132; 700, 22™ July 1920.

How far this was true is unknown, though, if true (in the light of subsequent events), it reflects less credit on Carson than if it weren’t.

At all events, the June riots in Derry encouraged tension elsewhere. On 25™ June, the railwaymen at Portadown and the Midland Railway voted finally against joining the munitions strike. They were only the first to do so in north-east Ireland. Three days later, a Protestant mob attacked a spirit grocer’s shop in Sandy Row, Belfast. The Northern Whig encouraged matters further by publishing an article purporting to reveal a Catholic plot to massacre the Protestants of Derry.

At first, Carson acted as befitted a responsible citizen aware (as he was to proclaim) of the state of Ulster Protestant feelings. On 28" June, he led a deputation to the War Office to ask for troops to patrol Belfast in case of trouble and wrote to Dawson Bates, Secretary to the Unionist Council, urging against violence.

Nine days later, he followed a new line, denouncing “the Bolshevik-Sinn Fein alliance”.

Then, at the Orange rally at Finaghy, Belfast, on the 12 July, he elaborated: “(The Sinn Feiners] have all kinds of insidious methods and organisations at work.

Sometimes it is the Church. That does not make much way in Ulster. The more insidious method is tacking on the Sinn Fein question and the Irish Republican question to the Labour question”. (A voice: “Belfast is the most Labour centre in the United Kingdom”). “I know that. What I say is this, these men who come forward posing as the friends of Labour care no more about Labour than does the man in the moon. Their real object, and the real insidious object of their propaganda is that they may mislead and bring about disunity among our own people, and in the end, before we know where we are we may find ourselves in the same bondage and slavery as in the rest of Ireland in the south and west....”

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To the British government, he declared:- “If having offered you our help you are yourselves unable to protect us from the machinations of Sinn Fein and you won’t take our help, well, then we tell you we will take the matter into our own hands” — Northern Whig, 13™ June 1920.

What he meant was made a bit more clear on his departure from Ulster by his praise for the order that had been kept there during the ten years he had led the Unions. Both he and his listeners knew only too well that this “order” had included a period of riot with Protestant workers driving Catholics from their workplaces in 1912.

On 17" July, Colonel Gerald Smyth was assassinated in Cork. He had been a British officer and World War hero of Ulster Protestant stock who had made a speech to a group of R.LC.

officers at Listowel, Co. Kerry, which had, by its callousness, provoked resignations even from that insensitive body. He was killed by the R.A. though it was suggested at the time that British Intelligence did so, recognising that Smith was now more useful dead than alive.

Certainly, the killing helped Britain and, more especially, its garrison bosses in Ulster, far more than it did Ireland. The Northern Whig which had praised Smyth’s speech, demanded retribution for his death.

On 21* July, a special meeting of the Protestant engineers employed by Workman, Clark and Co. was held on the firm’s premises. (This mean that it had the firm’s full support; trade union meetings there were banned). It was addressed by Alexander McKay, “Unionist Labour” member of Bangor Urban District Council. He incited his listeners to demand that all “Sinn Feiners” (which meant, as far as they were concerned, their Catholic work-mates) leave their workplace as being a physical menace. They proceeded in force to the yard and ordered them to leave. It is said that, as the Catholics were doing so, one shouted “Up the Rebels”. At all events, the threat of violence became a fact; the Catholics were driven from the yards by hails of rivets. Labour solidarity in Belfast was at an end.

The pogroms spread over Belfast and to many towns particularly in Co. Down. They occurred mainly in engineering and transport concerns where labour militancy had been greatest; the textile workers had suffered from unemployment for 18 months with a corresponding reduction in spirit: they were scarcely touched by the pogromites. These 164

latter were not the established militant leaders of the Unionist workers, such as William Grant; rather, they were from the conservative elements of the Protestant rank and file workers, who had not been prominent in, for example, the recent general strike. It was characteristic of Unionism (as it is of Loyalism today) that this element should have been able to exercise such decisive influence at such a time.

Just as the pogroms were run by conservative workers, so they were aimed against the militants. Officially, they were directed against “disloyal organisations”, but what constituted “disloyalty” was decided by the pogromites. At a special meeting of the British T.U.C. on 10" September to discuss this issue, F. Lowe of the Painters Union was able to report that 100 of those who refused to sign the pogromites’ oath of loyalty were ex-servicemen and that 22 of those were members of his union expelled because of their advanced Labour sympathies. Amongst such victims were Charles McKay, Councillor Baird and J.A. Hanna, an Orange leader who had joined Larkin in 1907, Allin all 10,000 workers were victimised.

The pogroms did involve a certain element of risk for the industrialists. The workers operating them had learnt to use the strength they were now abusing against their bosses.

They were not willing to limit their aims. On 11" August, S.C. Davidson appealed to the Protestant workers in his Sirocco Engineering not to operate a pogrom; his appeal was rejected out of hand. On 20" August the platers at Harland and Wolff met to vote down a similar plea from their bosses.

So Sir James Craig moved to control the pogromites. It was the latters’ custom, once an establishment had been cleared of “disloyal” elements, to raise above it the Union Jack, both as a sign of victory and as a threat to opponents. At such an unfurling, at the valve and brassfinishing department at Harland and Wolff’s on 14" October Craig appeared and announced:- “That an Under-Secretary charged with the care of Ulster affairs had been appointed, and that very shortly a scheme of special constabulary, of which he had always been an advocate would be set up” (cheers) — Northern Whig, 15 » October, 1920.

He ended his speech with the question and answer that identified him firmly with the events of the previous three months:- 165

“Do I approve of the action you boys have taken in the past? Yes’. Ibid.

The Special Constabulary was swiftly organised. It incorporated such county bodies as Brooke’s and Chichester’s Volunteers, as well as the pogromites. On 6 December, its crack corps (the A. Specials) passed out of their training course. The next day, at a Unionist ce meeting at Portadown, Colonel Wilfred Spender announced their existence as “a Constabulary of 1,500 men — practically all Protestants” (Northern Whig, 8" December 1920). Recruiting for the B and the less effective C Specials was on the same religious basis.

In defence terms these forces were negligible; within a week of the original pogrom the British Army had been moved to garrison Belfast. The point was that the Protestant community was organised to crush internal opposition under its bourgeois leaders.

The pogroms did not go unopposed by their victims or their victims’ friends. The Catholics of Belfast fought back against their persecutors. Dail Eireann backed them by extending the Belfast boycott over all the territory it controlled: a gesture that said far more for its heart than for its head. (Many radical Republicans, supported it, however, as a base for major economic reforms). The Irish Volunteers gave direct military aid which plunged Belfast into the longest period of “Holy War” it suffered before August 1969.

The Hibernian Irish News tried to use the pogroms to make gains for nationalist capital.

While it deplored them, it put the blame on what it called an “Orange Soviet”. Its sponsors had nothing to gain from either Unionism or Labour militancy but at least Unionist capitalism would let them keep the little they had.

It was not the Hibernians but, specifically, the workers of both denominations who lost from the pogroms. On 18" October, the remaining (i.e. Protestant) workers at Harland and Wolff renounced their claim to a 44 hour week because of Belfast’s unsettled condition. In the building industry, the workers lost their own 44 hour week, albeit after an eight month strike.

From December 1920, the engineering employers of the United Kingdom enforced wage reductions, which the Northern Irish engineers were no longer to the fore in opposing. Worse still, the shipyard joiners of Belfast broke with the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters rather than readmit “disloyalists” to their work and then scabbed throughout that union’s nine month strike against the wage cuts. McGuffin’s Ulster Workers’ Union gained members from 166

its rivals. In linen, the slump rather than the pogroms closed the mills for one month over Christmas 1920. Politically, of course, Labour suffered even worse. As the first Northern Irish general election approached in May, 1921, many Unionists feared that, even with the pogroms, P.R. would allow their party, at most, only a 12 seat majority. In the event it had a majority of 40 to 12.

None of the three Labour candidates were elected: two of them came bottom of the poll.

Devlin was the only non-Unionist elected in all of Belfast’s 16 seats.

The Northern Irish provincial state had been established even before these elections — through its repressive machinery. So, too, had been established what would be Ulster Unionism : an openly reactionary block of four (Protestant) classes: liberal and conservative capitalists, Tory landowners, a semi-fascist petty bourgeoisie and a labour aristocracy whose reactionary politics were ensured by a minimum of privileges vis-a-vis their Catholic fellows. The bulk of the power was, as yet, held by the first of these.

Before Northern Ireland’s position could be ensured, the issue of the thirty-two county Republic had to be resolved. By the nomination date for the election for the Irish Parliaments (which the Republicans fought as elections for a second Dail) it was clear that it would take another 18 months — if at all — before the British could defeat the Irish Volunteers. Despite some willingness to hold out this far, the British government chose to use the King’s speech on the opening of the Northern Irish Parliament to appeal to the Irish for peace negotiations.

The leaders of the Dail were ready enough to open such talks. Not only the Volunteers but the workers in the twenty-six counties were undefeated. Many of the Republic’s bourgeois supporters were under pressure both from their workers for more wages and from the need not to reduce their rate of profit in time of post-war slump. The pathetic good wishes of Constance Markiewicz, the Minister for Labour could not dam indefinitely the onset of class war. To keep this separate from the national struggle, the Dail Cabinet agreed to a truce.

In the negotiations that followed, the question of Northern Ireland did not rank very high. If Redmond had been reluctant to face the threat of civil war on this issue, his Republican heirs were even less ready to do so after two and a half years of actual military conflict. The Irish national bourgeoisie had been prevailed upon to fight for its own government. That 167

government had shown promise (and would show still more, if it could defeat the workers’ movements) of running the twenty-six counties under its control very effectively. In the last resort, the remaining six counties weren’t worth a battle. This view was reinforced by the fact that the Belfast boycott had been the occasion of a revival in the activities of the Irish Citizen Army. Yet the Dail had to show willing, at least, in negotiating towards ending the partition. The facts of life in the north-east, and, particularly, in pogrom—torn Belfast made impossible any permanent cease-fire there. The Dail Cabinet could not abandon openly the claims of those in Northern Ireland that had given it their allegiance. For his part, Craig, who had succeeded Carson as Ulster Unionist leader and was now Prime Minister of Northern Ireland was inclined to be conciliatory. He could not accept, of course, a united Ireland even without the control of customs that Dail Eireann claimed (and that were to be granted under the Treaty) but it was not proposed seriously that he do so. On the other hand, he offered a dominion | status for each of the two Irish states ~ that might set them free of Britain to work out their own destinies. Yet, he could not compromise on his state’s territorial integrity - any more than the Dail could openly surrender to him, in particular, the Catholic counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh. These, within the less homogeneous Catholic community in the six counties were necessary to the peculiar nature of Orange hegemony, which needed a permanent, but ineffective, scapegoat within its state to ensure itself among the Protestants.

These facts were reflected in the Treaty settlement and certain events that accompanied it. In the former (in which no northern Unionist participated) six of the eighteen Articles of Agreement deal with Northern Ireland though four of them were only details of the mechanics of partition and only Articles 12 and 16 make some formal concession to the Dail.

Of these two, the first provided for a future Commission “to determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland”. Article 16 forbade religious discrimination - north and south. This satisfied the Dail on the partition issue (all except for the T.D. for Co. Monaghan, Sean MacEntee, and, interestingly enough, Co. Cork’s Sean Moylan). At the same time, these articles did not satisfy the Catholics of Fermanagh and Tyrone. While the Treaty was being debated their representatives who controlled their country councils 168

declared their allegiance to Dail Eireann and were suspended accordingly by the Northern Irish government. No Dail member, for or against the treaty settlement, did anything to demand action on this. But, though the Irish national bourgeoisie wanted peace it had to fight for it against many of those it had claimed to lead. The Labour Party was prepared to co-operate with the Treatyite regime — though not at first to accept its economic and social perspectives. The new Communist Party of Ireland (C.P.1) called to defend the Republic against the Treatyite Saorstat Eireann, but it had little influence. However, the C.P.J. did reflect a certain recognition that was dawning on the Volunteers that the Treaty settlement was aimed at preventing the development of a more equitable social system, if, indeed, it was not aimed at setting back the social clock to 1913. This recognition developed in an inevitably unsophisticated manner and was expressed in the call to defend the Republic. It was given leadership (and diverted, hence, from possibly more radical ends) by Eamon de Valera the former President of Dail Eireann who objected to the Treaty precisely because it could not fool enough of the Volunteers for long enough to keep them politically neutralised.

On the Treatyite side, Arthur Griffith, now the new President, declared that the matter was simply one of riot and should be suppressed immediately. Richard Mulcahy, the new Dail Eireann Minister for Defence, preferred to wait until he had built up an armed force able to suppress the Anti-Treatyites. Michael Collins feared that civil war would mean a social war and tried to avert it by negotiations (backed by military pressure) with Craig that might give him a diplomatic victory on the border to strengthen the Treatyites’ credibility. However, the relative strengths of the social and political opponents of the new regime were exposed by the general election of June 1922; despite much agitation, the electoral strength of the moderate Labour Party was only slightly less than that of the Anti-Treatyites, some of whose most radical Deputies (such as Liam Mellows) suffered defeat. The Communist Party remained small. Collins aligned himself fully with the other Treatyites and attacked the Anti-Treatyite Executive in the Four Courts in Dublin. In the Civil War that followed the military units that had been in the north east came south to fight on both sides. The pressure (such as it had been) was off Northern Ireland.

While it had existed, it had provided the excuse for new guarantees for that area’s rulers. In April 1922, the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Bill was introduced in the Northern Irish 169

Parliament. With the Sinn Fein and Nationalist MPs boycotting, the bill became law very quickly. So did the Local Government (Northern Ireland) Bill that abolished P.R. for local elections, despite a slight delay when the British government hesitated before ratifying it (its last such hesitation for over forty years). When the Bill became law, the electoral boundaries were gerrymandered swiftly and elections thereunder held in January 1923 with wholly satisfactory results for the Unionists. The Nationalists abstained altogether from contesting the councils of Derry, Downpatrick, Dungannon, Enniskillen and Lurgan. Even better, in Belfast, they were the main opposition party with a firm base in Smithfield and Falls wards.

An attempt by Charles McKay to run Expelled Workers’ candidates against the Hibernians failed dismally. From outside, the Orange state was strengthened further. In the twenty-six counties the Treatyites won the Civil War before crushing ruthlessly the industrial militancy of the workers. Further, they had won with the enthusiastic backing of the Catholic Church. The new state with no major, active, religious (or non-religious) minority opposing it, began to repay the debt. Censorship and a ban on divorce, as well as the maintenance of clerical control of education all reinforced the confessional potential that had long been apparent in Irish Nationalism. The Ulster Protestants — who had opted out of the one opportunity given them to ‘civilise’ the Irish Catholics without despoiling them — remarked on how the 26 county state justified their desertion. Even so, on one basic matter, the Unionists were proven wrong; once it had won The Civil War the new Saorstat Eireann had no difficulty in obtaining public credit. In Britain, meanwhile, in October 1922, the government changed from a coalition headed by anominal Liberal to a Conservative one that included hard-line Unionists. This solved one of Ulster Unionism’s last remaining problems. Under the Government of Ireland Act that had established it, its regime incurred certain major financial duties towards the British exchequer. This embarrassed increasingly a state whose economy was at best, insecure and which had just gone through a long period of disorder. A commission established by the British government saw the force of these facts. From March 1924, Northern Ireland’s “Imperial” contribution became a nominal sum.

But one remaining worry remained to Craig. This was that the Boundary Commission established under the Treaty might remove from him, with British blessing, the Catholic 170

border areas. The Conservatives ignored this clause. However, the British Labour government of 1924 insisted on its implementation, but weighted the Commission with two pro-Unionists (out of three) who took a narrow interpretation of its terms of reference and ended by recommending transfers of territory on both sides of the border. The twenty-six county government agreed, rather than accept this decision, to recognise the whole of Northern Ireland in exchange for a cancellation by Britain of a large part of its financial claims on it. Thus was established the Northern Irish state based on a consistent two-thirds Protestant majority facing and fearing a one third Catholic minority which had alleged (and overestimated) support in the twenty-six counties.

It had been achieved by an industrial bourgeoisie at the height of a prosperity caused by the same sort of division that was to be perpetuated in the new state as it could not be in a united independent Ireland. In turn this division was based on Protestant plantations that Britain had organised to divide opposition to it and which had succeeded beyond all expectation.

And, as a result, all social progress in Ireland (if not, indeed, in the British Isles) was retarded considerably by the Making of Northern Ireiand.

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EPILOGUE: TOWARDS THE UNDOING OF NORTHERN IRELAND

History did not end when Northern Ireland began and as more than fifty years have elapsed since that occurred it is as well to examine whether the record of this period upholds or contradicts the lessons to be drawn from the history unfolded in the chapters that comprised the main part of this book.

HARRY WEST’S UTOPIA

In considering this period it is necessary to deal first with the early — and in many ways the most (damagingly) successful-era of the state of Northern Ireland. This has to be done not only because it begins this survey chronologically but because it is often romanticised by the more plausible of to-day’s Loyalists on the one hand by Harry West, the leader (or, more accurately, in fact, the leading spokesman) of the conservative mass of “Official” Unionists on the other, less effective, hand, by Loyalism’s left covers in the Workers Association.

The period in question is that from 1925 to 1937 in which the Northern Irish state was recognised formally by the twenty-six county Saorstat Eireann. To those defenders of that state who claim that it fulfils the requirements of normal bourgeois democratic practice and that its departure from these norms is justified because of the threat from the twenty-six county state, the history of this period provides an acid test for their excuses.

Of course it is true that, in one sense, Northern Ireland has been governed for most of its life under the form common to west European democracy. The point, is, however, that its communal composition distorts these forms and neutralises the benefits that flow normally from them. As a result the Northern Irish Catholics suffer disadvantages that are less than those of chattel slavery — and even of the American system of “Jim Crow” — but which are expressed quite definitely in economic and social discrimination against them. Meanwhile the advantages held by the poorer Protestants under this system are made significant only by the conditions of capitalist decay in which they exist. However, despite the smallness of the system’s injustices compared to those suffered by the American Negro, they are still strong enough and intractable enough to be the cause already of nearly eight years of armed conflict such as makes it seem likely that they will not be reformed out of existence without a similar struggle. 172

But are these discriminations due to the consistent disloyalty of the Catholic minority? Of course, as was shown in the last lecture they go a great deal further than the maintenance of security. But, in any case, even if Catholic rebelliousness were the justification rather than the excuse for these discriminations, two other considerations should be remarked. In the first place, as has been shown, Northern Irish separation comes not from nationalism but from regional and religious distinctions vis-a-vis the rest of Ireland, so that the Protestants’ claims to their own state cannot be justified under the right of self-determination in those areas where they are a majority, such as Fermanagh, Tyrone, Derry city — and, possibly, south Co Down and today’s “Republic of South Armagh”.

But were these discriminations due simply to Catholic disloyalty - backed by the twenty-six counties? The facts of the period when this alleged threat was least in evidence — when the Saorstat recognised Northern Ireland — are rather different. So far from the Unionist Party loosening its grip on its state, it tightened it, if anything.

Even before 1925, in fact from August 1922, as the pogromite war lost its impetus, the rank and file of Unionism began to relax. Many expelled workers (but not the most prominent) began to return to their old jobs without hindrance during the following winter. In May 1923, an Ex-Soldiers candidate defeated the Grand Master of the Orange Order in a bye-election for one of the West Belfast seats in the Northern Irish Parliament. The following December, a Labour candidate was defeated by the Unionist M.P. for West Belfast in the imperial election by only 3,000 votes. (It was a straight fight; Devlin gave up standing for West Belfast at Westminster in 1922). In May, 1925, a new general election was held for the Northern Irish parliament in which the Northern Irish Labour Party (N.I.L.P.) ran 3 candidates, all of whom were returned at the expense of three sitting “Labour Unionists”, one a Parliamentary Under- Secretary. The outgoing Parliament had been strongly Unionist. Not only did the party enjoy an overall majority of 27 seats in a house of 52, but the abstention of all the opposition until the election of the Independent, Woods, had strengthened further the hands of Craig and his colleagues.

They passed accordingly, two laws to resort their authority — the Special Powers Act and the Local Government Act. After these they enacted two reform measures particularly dear to Unionist hearts: The Licensing Act and the Education Act. This last sought initially to impose a uniform non-denominational education system throughout Northern Ireland.

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However, it was changed as a result of opposition both from the Catholic clergy — who were backed by a community frightened of Unionist-controlled education and by many of their Protestant peers. In the end the Catholics got a grant for their schools and the Protestants got the Bible maintained in the public education sector.

The authority of the new Northern Irish Parliament was recognised formally by Saorstat Eireann, just over 6 months after its election. However, it was the results of that election and their effect on Unionist hegemony that influenced Craig. (soon, naturally, to be Viscount Craigavon) in several measures between 1925 and 1929. No Catholic was appointed to the Supreme Court to replace the Catholic Unionist Chief Justice Henry on his death. Craig introduced a special company (businessmen‘s) franchise for local elections. He followed Britain in limiting the right to strike and he acted to abolish Proportional Representation (P.R.) for general elections. As he put it in 1929, in the debate on the Governor’s address: - “My own feelings about P.R. can be summed up in a very few words. It will be difficult for anyone, when we are returned by single member constituencies to humbug the electors. The electors will be able to choose whether they will have one member or another, and they will see the results of their own action. What I have been so aftaid of under the system of Proportional Representation was that certain members might be returned to this house, who, in a crisis upon the one point of vital importance to the Ulster people, might not stand by whichever side it was intended they should stand when they were elected to this House” — Official Report of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons) Volume 10, 28; Debate on the Governor’s Address, 26 February, 1929.

The Bill was passed and in the general election the following May, two of the three Labour M._P.s lost their seats. But Craigavon had been a little too clever. This was partly because in the speech quoted above he prophesised “a great trade push” for the next four years. Instead Northern Ireland got the world slump. With their constitutional Labour Party defeated, the workers turned to the embryo Communist Party. In 1932 the Government cut the dole yet again, the workers of Shankill marched into the streets, and at the cost of three lives, and, more importantly, the promise of solidarity from the Catholics Falls, the cuts were withdrawn. However, the victory could not be maintained. The R.U.C. harassed the unemployed movement. Slump 174

conditions helped inspire the unemployed Protestant workers to turn to ultra-sectarians who promised them jobs if they expelled their Catholic brethren. These promises were not denounced by the Unionist leaders. In 1935 new sectarian riots occurred.

Two years later, Eamon de Valera passed a new “Dictionary-Republican” Constitution, for the twenty-six counties which included clauses re-stating the demand for Irish unity. It also included a number of sectarian provisions (most notably against divorce and protecting religious property) as the climax of fifteen years administration by mainly Catholic gombeenmen representing de Valera (himself renouncing his aim of achieving economic selfsufficiency by peaceful means) was determined to show himself as good a Catholic as the rest. In itself, this did not either broaden the gap between the six counties and the twenty-six, or provoke a turn to reaction by Ulster Unionism. Both these things had been done already in — if not before — that period beloved by Harry West. It is not surprising that the Northern Irish Catholics who see West as merely the most reasonable of the United Ulster Unionist Council (U.U.U..C.) troika of Loyalist leaders, are stubbornly opposed to allowing such people to reassert their authority and have been opposing such for seven years.

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE IRISH ECONOMIES

The ratification of the new twenty-six county Constitution was an act that stood in contradiction to the tendencies that were beginning to reduce the differences between the economies of the six counties and the twenty-six.

In the early years of the Saorstat, the government did little to use its tariff powers. In general its economic policy was little different from that of Northern Ireland. However, one exception had to be made. Under pressure from a section of its supporters, duties were placed on imported textiles. This did not directly affect the Northern Irish linen trade (the Saorstat textile industry was based on wool) but, on top of a slump in a linen trade developed in an anti-Catholic environment, it had its negative effect.

In 1932, the extension of the world depression helped a small farmer agitation to place de Valera’s Fianna Fail in power and forced him to carry out his promises of a high tariff policy to develop Saorstat industry. De Valera’s tariffs made no provision for imports from the six 175

counties that de Valera’s constitution claimed. In themselves they provided a concrete objective reason for Ulster Unionism to continue in power.

A further objective reason — and one that would continue over the next four and a half decades - had already made itself felt. In 1930, Ulster’s “imperial contribution” to the British exchequer could not be paid. The second British Labour government started a policy that would be followed by all its successors of taking responsibility for Northern Irish unemployment benefit. Yet the slump accelerated a decline in the position of the Protestant industrialists on whose prosperity the six county state had been created. This had been foreshadowed in the early twenties when the linen industry had been hit by crisis and when Workman, Clark and Co.

had had to surrender its independence to London. Now, Workman, Clark declined further and was liquidated finally in 1934 after fifty-five years. Other firms managed to survive under the same pressure. But they did no more than survive. In 1938 30% of the insured population was still without work. The economy of Northern Ireland began to look like the gombeen-capitalism of the rest of the country: a few long-established large firms and a mass of struggling unenterprising concerns.

At the same time twenty-six county capitalism was finding it impossible to adopt permanently Sinn Fein economics. A new layer of small industrial capitalists was added to the gombeen-capitalist hierarchy. It became identified promptly with that hierarchy’s interests, including the nearest foreign market: that of Britain. Fianna Fail optimism had resourced that market on several occasions, but they were neither willing nor able to attack the Irish capitalism that maintained itself on it. Accordingly the party had to accept the dictates of many of its leading backers (and of potential new ones). In January 1935, Saorstat Eireann signed with Britain the “Coal-Cattle Agreement” which set tariffs on the said commodities. Negotiations began to eliminate the major points in dispute between the states.

During these discussions, Craigavon addressed the Northern Irish Controller-General of Finance:- ‘Duggan’, he said, “you know that in this island we cannot live always separated from one another. We are too small to be apart or for the border to be there for all time. The change 176

will not be in my time, but it will come”. - G.C. Duggan, Northern Ireland — Success or Failure, 1950, pp. 21-22.

This somewhat ambiguous prophecy (which is definite only on Irish unity ~ not on its terms) was moved a step nearer fulfilment by the Anglo-Irish Agreements of April, 1938. In that, the Coal-Cattle Pact was formalised. Separatist economics had now been found wanting by both parts of capitalist Ireland.

On the other hand, the political Agreements seemed to contradict the economic tendency.

Under them, British forces were withdrawn from the Saorstat (now “Eire”, under the new Constitution) which enabled its Government to claim an independent foreign policy for the next twenty three years, Such independence was, in fact, allowed by Britain only because its forces would compensate for it in the north-east.

Eighteen months afterwards the political differences between the two Irish states was emphasised further and reinforced by economics. In the Second World War, “Eire” stayed neutral; Northern Irish Protestantism was vociferously loyal. A sectarian riot began in Belfast just after the War began but it was suppressed quickly. The demands of the war economy restored that of Northern Ireland. Unemployment declined. Harland and Wolff employed eventually 30,000 - nearly as many as both shipbuilding firms had employed in the First World War. Yet, politically, the Northern Irish state was not so secure. Britain was prepared to offer much to bring “Eire” into the War on its side. De Valera was able to stop the British from conscripting the six county population (though this was in Britain’s own interests; conscription would have divided the population in Northern Ireland itself). Besides this, in 1940, when Britain’s strategic position was critical, “Eire” was offered sovereignty over the Six Counties in exchange for its military alliance (including British use of its ports). As in 1918, nationalist Ireland rejected the offer of unity with strings and it was not repeated. The military situation began to improve for Britain shortly afterwards. Though in 1941, de Valera sent fire engines to help blitzed Belfast, the British and Americans ignored his formal protests and built and maintained the naval base at Ballykelly, Co. Derry, the better to do without the military alliance with the twenty-six counties.

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Despite the economic revival and the failure of Britain to sacrifice the promised position, Northern Irish industry was weaker in the Second World War than in the first. In particular the hegemony of Protestant industrial capital was declining. In 1937 the Finance Minister, H. M. Pollock had died. Craigavon himself died in 1940. J.M. Andrews became British Prime Minister, with the engineering employer, J.M. Barbour, as minister for Finance. In 1943 growing backbench Unionist discontent forced this cabinet to resign. The Co.

Fermanagh landowner, Sir Basil Brooke became Prime Minister. His new Minister of Finance was the banker, J.M. Sinclair In addition the government was strengthened by two Presbyterian ministers and two representatives of labour interests: William Grant and the renegade from the N.LL.P., H.C. Midgely. No industrialist was included. Later on, such individuals would again be appointed to cabinet office. In 1971, Brian Faulkner would become prime minister — but despite the new balance of power not because of it. This political balance reflected the economic reality of the decline of Ulster Protestant-owned industry, as such. It was still not completely eclipsed. Even in 1949, 55% of the Northern Irish labour force was employed in ship-building and textiles. This was survival, not development: in 1954, 60% of all capital invested in the province was still invested in private, rather than in joint stock companies. Such an economy could not continue. By 1968, the proportion of Ulster’s labour force employed in shipbuilding and textiles had fallen to 30%.

The traditional economic foundations of partition were weakening slowly, and, after 1945, would weaken more quickly. The political foundations remained strong. The sectarianism which had nourished and been nourished by the development of large scale industry could not simply disappear as that industry disappeared. Indeed, it was strengthened by the actual establishment of a confessional state in the twenty-six counties. (And this factor has grown still stronger as the hostility of that state to full civil liberty has become apparent in the last two decades). In addition, after 1945, two economic trends strengthened increasingly the economic basis of partition. Already the British government had reduced the Northern Irish contributions to its exchequer and had taken over payment of unemployment benefits for the other. Now, the Unionist policy of keeping “step by step” with Britain in welfare policies (not in trade union legislation: the Northern Irish Trade Disputes Act lasted after the repeal of the British one) 178

meant an increase in British subsidies to the area. These subsidies were granted readily by successive British Governments — Labour and Conservative. The latter was quite prepared to support the regime of its historic affiliates. The former hoped to use them to build a unionism that might be more compatible with the obvious and immediate (Social Democratic) needs of Labour than had been the old Unionist economics. The new welfare reforms at once strengthened Northern Irish loyalty to Britain and seemed to change the basis of that loyalty.

The old, sectarian, foundation of Northern Irish industrial capitalism had depended upon a necessary minimum of insecurity amongst the workers. Not only was this foundation weakening but welfare policies both weakened and seemed to offer a replacement for it. On the one hand, the pressure to hold jobs bore less on Protestants. On the other hand, the Catholics were offered an inducement not to seek to end partition without guarantees of Irish parity with Britain in the social welfare which they needed more than the Protestants.

The second economic factor tended to have similar results. As the old Northern Irish industries declined, they were replaced from outside by foreign industries encouraged to invest by Governmental financial inducements. These new industries were not prepared to adapt themselves to the traditional sectarian conditions of employment. (But this was less important than it seemed: the Protestants maintained a disproportionate share of necessary skills). The money that was used to pay for them (and had to continue to be used; these industries did not breed of their own will) came from the same source as the welfare subsidies. The new basis for Ulster Unionism seemed to be more stable than the old. This view of it was reinforced in 1949, when the twenty-six county Government proclaimed, at last, the formal Republic. In turn, the Unionists beat the Orange drum in a general election that destroyed utterly the N.L.L.P’s largest representation since 1929. (This was not entirely due to the border issue: the world capitalist reaction associated with the Cold War helped, also). At Westminster, the Labour government passed an Act that declared that only the Northern Irish Parliament could vote to end Partition. A campaign by the parties of the Irish Republic to prevail on Britain to reverse this decision came to nothing.

Yet, even before the Republic was proclaimed, the Government that proclaimed it had made a trade agreement with Britain that was weighted even more in favour of the latter than that of 1938. During the next decade the two Irish governments agreed to work together on 179

transport, power and, indeed, law reform. The continuance of the economics of the 1938 settlement into the 1950s, without their intended expansion led to a series of crises that Irish capitalism could end even for the time being only by reducing the tariff barriers and opening the twenty-six county state to foreign investment on similar lines to those used in the six counties. More importantly, the basis for the reconstruction of Ulster Unionism were not in its internal situation (as its original bases had been) but in less stable conditions; those of the world economic boom since 1945. Reorganising Unionism depended on a vast and constant influx of British money to neutralise the contradictions involved in transforming Northern Ireland from a sectarian to a mon-sectarian society. Even when this was done there was, in fact, (though this was less obvious), no guarantee that more money would not be needed. The economics of the new Unionism allied to the collapse of Sinn Fein policies pointed towards the reunification of Ireland as a semi or neo-colony of Britain.

They could do no more than point. The political tasks that were involved in the process were, in fact, too large to have themselves substituted by an economic strategy. Such a strategy was all that was ever executed. The political expectations aroused by it were offered an inadequate satisfaction by its operators both in Britain and in Northern Ireland. The trouble was that the dissatisfaction stimulated by this failure has been itself handicapped in its development by inadequate political leadership.

ORIGINS OF THE CURRENT NATIONAL CRISIS

With the formal establishment of the Republic of Ireland, the attitudes to the whole country of the three Governments concerned in Irish matters (apart from that of the Northern Irish regime) took the forms that persisted until the present national struggle began at the end of the nineteen-sixties. The position of the British Government on Ireland tended to complacency whether Labour or Conservative was in power. Admittedly the economic arguments (particularly those of expenditure) that had justified partition were weakening steadily so that the objective case for re-uniting the island as a single semi-colony was growing correspondingly stronger.

However, political reason provided excuses not to act on the economic facts alone. The system seemed to be working efficiently enough. Re-unification might put at hazard the 180

defence of Britain and of western Europe by handing over an integral part of N.A.T.O. to a neutral power. (But this was not certain: Irish neutrality might yet be ended as the price to be paid for unity by the Irish majority). Above all, it would have been sheer folly for Britain to turn Irish stability into instability by expelling a majority loyal to it in one of its provinces.

To reunite Ireland ~ even to prepare for its unification on the semi-colonial terms later summarised as “the federal solution” — would be a radical step unjustified by the political circumstances. Until 1968, Northern Ireland was a forbidden debating subject to the British Parliament that claimed sovereignty over it.

The contemporary Governments — Coalition and Fianna Fail — of the Irish Republic were ready enough to accept this. Reunification was an aspiration — and no more. If Britain was reluctant to sacrifice 1,000,000 loyal subjects in a strategic position, the Irish Government was by no means ready to act as recipient of the offering. The Irish economy was weak, it could not afford the welfare benefits that Northern Protestants — and, indeed, Northern Catholics — considered theirs by right. It could not afford, either, a serious military war to subdue the Ulster Protestants. Politically the overwhelming Catholic majority existing in the twenty six counties had enabled it to develop a special relationship with the Catholic Church.

This was most notable in 1951 when that Church was able to veto a scheme to provide for health services for mothers and children, but pervasive in other spheres as well and more obviously so in the 1960s. (Though for a time this relationship seemed to become increasingly irrelevant with the 1960s boom, its necessity has been re-established with that boom’s ending). After 1949-1951, the Government dropped its plans to agitate internationally for Irish unity. Britain would have to give a dowry if it wanted to unload Northern Ireland on it, though, after 1958, those who were still interested in the issue hoped that the funds of the E.E.C. would supply the subsidy. The religious problem was ignored by all — more, only, than was the overall problem of reunification.

The Northern Irish Government under Brooke (Viscount Brookeborough from 1953) used the reluctance of the British and of the Irish Governments simply to keep ruling in the same manner as its predecessors. This became obvious as the British governments enacted democratic reforms that were not followed in Northern Ireland. There, the local government vote remained the prerogative of the propertied. The provincial constituency boundaries remained unchanged from 1929 to 1969 (including four seats for Queen’s University).

Cabinet ministers were allowed complete freedom to maintain business interests when in 181

office (in this matter, the political culture of Northern Ireland has been like that of the Republic). Relationships with the trade union movement remained bad; the 1927 Trade Disputes Act was repealed only in 1958, Beneath these, there remained the traditional abuses of Orange power: the local authorities remained gerrymandered, Protestant employers refused to hire Catholics, the Protestant Special Constabulary continued. In 1953, the use of the Irish Tricolour was forbidden. However, the Brookeborough administration could not alter the economic developments in the province. Industry became increasingly dependent on British subsidies. Further, such subsidies had, reluctantly, to be taken to build a welfare state after the British model. These new factors helped to weaken the basis of Orange hegemony, as they weakened objectively the reason for the existence of the state built on it.

Beneath the bourgeois Irish governments were the workers — and, though as a less distinct entity, the small farmers — Catholic and Protestant. The immediate effect of the welfare reforms was to isolate the Catholic working class in Northern Ireland (particularly Belfast) from the Catholic small farmers and workers elsewhere. This was reflected in the support for the military campaign fought by the Republican movement from the mid-fifties. This began with more active support in the Republic than has been offered in the recent struggle. It had mass backing in the Catholic rural areas along the border. It was the most serious military attack on Northern Ireland between the 1920s and 1970s. However, it had little support in Belfast. It failed, finally, in 1962, because its purely military strategy enabled its protagonists to be isolated in the Republic by a Government that seemed to be solving the economic crisis that encouraged them objectively - and by the breakdown of the Labour and constitutional Republican coalitions with the bourgeois Fine Gael which encouraged them subjectively.

The Northern Irish Catholic workers tended, at this time, to accept, if negatively, the sixcounty state. They had been isolated since the 1920s from which time they supported generally the Hibernian candidates who styled themselves “Nationalists” or “Anti- Partitionists”, but who had no state-wide organised political expression. From 1945, in Belfast, constitutional Socialist Republican candidates began to replace the Nationalists and, as the N.I.L.P. became pro-union after 1949, to replace the candidates of that party, too, in mixed areas. Although for a short time in the early 1950s, the Irish Labour Party sought to provide a central focus for all these tendencies, it collapsed outside Newry, due to personal feuds centred on such individuals as John Beattie (the first Belfast non-Unionist M.P. at Westminster since Joseph Devlin) and Harold Diamond). In the late sixties, Belfast Socialist 182