Politics: Nationalist Politics in Northern Ireland

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Politics: Nationalist Politics in Northern Ireland

From 1900 until the 1916 Easter Rising, Ulster Catholics, in common with their coreligionists in the rest of Ireland, gave their allegiance to the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and its goal of a united, self-governing Ireland. In the north the party was controlled by the West Belfast MP Joseph Devlin (1872–1934). A captivating orator and superb organizer, Devlin's iron grip on Ulster Catholics was closely associated with his revival in 1904 of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), a sectarian fraternal society formed to counteract Orangeism.

Northern nationalist hopes of inclusion in a Home Rule Ireland were dashed by unionist resistance after 1912 and by the IPP's acceptance of British prime minister Lloyd George's scheme for the exclusion of the six Ulster counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh, and Tyrone in June 1916. This split northern nationalism along east–west lines and paved the way for the rise of Sinn Féin in the nationalist-majority counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh and in Derry city. Only in Devlin's power base of east Ulster did the IPP retain a substantial following.

Partition

Northern nationalists saw partition, rather than "Home Rule versus Republic," as the critical issue between 1918 and 1921, and fears of unionist domination resulted in a Sinn Féin–IPP pact in Ulster in the 1918 election. Despite the Sinn Féin landslide, Devlin's invincibility in the northern constituency of the Belfast Falls enabled him to defeat the Sinn Féin leader Eamon de Valera. Rejecting the First Dáil, the native parliament established by the victorious Sinn Féin MPs in January 1919, Devlin attended the British parliament in London, opposing partition and demanding minority safeguards in the new Northern Irish (N.I.) state created in 1921. Catholic hostility to partition was intensified by vicious sectarian violence in northeast Ulster between 1920 and 1922 and by the aggressively sectarian Ulster Special Constabulary (1920), though the IRA enjoyed only limited support in the north.

Because of an electoral pact Devlin's party and Sinn Féin each won six seats in the first N.I. elections of May 1921 on a platform of abstaining from attending the new Northern Ireland parliament. Northern nationalists looked to Sinn Féin to undo partition, but the 1921 treaty (which ended the Anglo-Irish War) contained only an ambiguous Boundary Commission to redraw the 1920 border. This merely deepened internal nationalist divisions, with the border section—mainly supporters of Sinn Féin—campaigning for the transfer of large areas to the Irish Free State and the East Ulster nationalists who feared fearing permanent minority status. During 1922 the nationalist position was further eroded by the treaty split between a protreaty majority led by Michael Collins and a Republican faction identified with de Valera, and Michael Collins's confusing blend of "nonrecognition" diplomacy and IRA violence toward Northern Ireland. His two pacts with Craig dissolved in violence, but the abortive March Agreement was the only serious attempt between 1922 and 1968 to involve the minority in the workings of the state.

The Irish Civil War (1922–1923), Collins's death, and Craig's use of internment shattered nationalist morale, while the Cosgrave government abandoned Collins's aggressive policy in favor of accelerating the Boundary Commission. Meanwhile, the minority's boycott of the N.I. parliament during 1922 to 1925 ensured that the basic framework of the state was laid without any constructive nationalist input. The abolition of proportional representation (PR) for local elections in 1922, which had the effect of consolidating unionist domination, together with the 1923 Education Act (which penalized voluntary/Catholic schools), underlined the indifference of the unionist administration to minority interests. Under pressure from the Catholic hierarchy Devlin took his seat in April 1925.

The Boundary Commission's collapse in November 1925, leaving the border unaltered, dealt a major blow to the border nationalists, and, by 1928 their MPs, led by the Sinn Féin leader Cahir Healy of County Fermanagh, had joined Devlin in a new united party, the National League, dedicated to Irish unity by constitutional means. Devlin now led a party of ten in the regional parliament, but his appeals for redress were repeatedly rejected by the unionist majority, and his hopes of a new political alignment along class lines were destroyed by the total abolition of PR in 1929. Devlin's death in 1934 marked the effective end of the National League, as abstentionism again set in and nationalists enlisted de Valera's aid, most dramatically to prevent the extension of conscription with the advent of World War II to Northern Ireland in 1939.

Despite its overriding responsibility for Northern Ireland, the British government rebuffed nationalist appeals to intervene, and by the 1930s the minority had formed a "state within a state," equipped with its own social and political infrastructure. During World War II only the two Belfast nationalist MPs attended Stormont (the seat of the N.I. parliament near Belfast) which regarded the minority as "a fifth column," in Northern Ireland Prime Minister Lord Brookeborough's phrase.

In 1945 the return of a British Labour government signaled a major upsurge of antipartitionist activity as the nationalists launched a new mass movement, the Anti-Partition League (APL), adopting a policy of active opposition at Stormont and Westminster, and coordinating a worldwide campaign against partition. However, its single focus on the constitutional issue, rather than on well-founded grievances, alienated the British Labour government of Clement Atlee, while the Irish government rejected its demand for representation in the Dáil. The subsequent Ireland Act (1949), reinforcing partition, undermined the APL, which rapidly declined, challenged as it was by a revived IRA.

The Opposition

The postwar years saw "change without change" in Northern Ireland despite the introduction of the British welfare state after 1945. By the 1950s the Nationalist Party had lost its former Belfast base to the socialistinclined Republican Labour Party under Harry Diamond and Gerry Fitt, who seemed more attuned to the needs of urban Catholics. The Nationalist Party remained a loose, rural "association of local notables," lacking even a formal party organization.

Mounting nationalist frustration was reflected in 1955 when Sinn Féin—the political wing of the IRA—secured 152,000 votes, though the IRA's subsequent border campaign (1956–1962) lacked sizable Catholic support. By the early 1960s, nationalist politics were being transformed by the more liberal policies of the new unionist prime minister, Terence O'Neill (1963–1969), the conciliatory policy toward the Northern Ireland of Séan Lemass (taoiseach, 1959–1966) and the demand for equality from the growing Catholic middle classes, products of the 1947 N.I. Education Act, some of whom formed the progressive National Democratic Party in 1965.

Following the groundbreaking O'Neill-Lemass meeting of January 1965 (the first north–south summit since 1925) the nationalists under Edward McAteer assumed "official opposition" status for the first time. However, O'Neill's failure to introduce much-needed reform angered nationalists, whereas the old Nationalist Party's "rigid immobility" was being assailed by the rising young Derry schoolteacher, John Hume, the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ), a middle-class pressure group, and radical MPs such as Gerry Fitt. A Republican Labour MP at Westminster from 1966, Fitt effectively raised civil-rights demands with the new Labour government of Harold Wilson.

The Nationalist Party's belated efforts to modernize its image were soon overtaken in 1967 to 1968 by the mobilization of Catholic protest in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) with its inclusive slogan, "British rights for British subjects." Worldwide reaction to the batoning of a civil-rights march in Derry on 5 October 1968 ended Westminster's indifference to N.I. affairs. As the unionist government hurriedly introduced reforms, it seemed that NICRA had achieved more in forty days of agitation than the nationalists had in forty years of constitutionalism. The N.I. general election of February 1969 saw the nationalists' eclipsed by civil-rights candidates, who included Hume, and which reflected Catholic support for the new style of politics.

The scene was set for the formation of left-of-center Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) under Fitt's leadership in August 1970. The new party was wedded to political participation and constructive reform, and as such it helped to negotiate the Sunningdale Agreement (1973) and participated in the short-lived power-sharing executive of 1974. For the next twenty-five years the SDLP would be the voice of moderate nationalist opinion in Northern Ireland.

SEE ALSO Irish Republican Army (IRA); Northern Ireland: Policy of the Dublin Government from 1922 to 1969; Ulster Unionist Party in Office; Primary Documents: On Community Relations in Northern Ireland (28 April 1967); Irish Republican Army (IRA) Cease-Fire Statement (31 August 1994); Text of the IRA Cease-Fire Statement (19 July 1997)