My life with Ian Paisley
Introduction
I have three main reasons for thinking I might be able to say something useful about Ian Paisley:
1. I was involved in what might be called 'constitutional politics' - the debate as to what the constitution of Northern Ireland might be - in the 1970s and 1980s.
2. I was involved in the same period - the period of Paisley's campaign to 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' - with the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association.
3. My University thesis was on a particular aspect of Ulster Presbyterian history. Paisley read it and commented on it favourably, but spotted an error which had been missed by the Cambridge University School of Theology examiners. I later published a general history of Ulster Presbyterianism.
I want in this paper to comment briefly on the first two points and at a little more length on the third.
Constitutional matters
In the 1970s and 80s I was literary secretary of the British and Irish Communist Organisation, and a regular contributor to its weekly commentary on Northern Ireland affairs - Workers' Weekly. The B&ICO - a very independent minded group of individuals, most of them from an Irish Republican background - was known at the time for arguing (against the general consensus on the Left at the time) that the Ulster Protestants constituted a distinct national community and that trying to coerce them into a United Ireland was a futile political project, of no interest to anyone concerned with the cause of Socialism. By the mid seventies we had come to the conclusion that, precisely because of the Catholic/Protestant divide, Northern Ireland was the part of the United Kingdom least suitable for devolved government.
The majority rule devolved government established in 1920 had been a disaster. It was a fake parliament with all the trappings of real power including the excessively impressive building at Stormont, but real power remained with Westminster. On the most important questions the Stormont 'parliament' merely rubber-stamped Westminster legislation, including the Labour Party's welfare state legislation which the Unionists at Stormont, supposedly Conservatives, might have been expected to oppose. Nonetheless it still meant that a permanent Protestant Unionist majority was ruling over a permanent Catholic Nationalist minority with all the opportunities for abuse and grievance that that implied. A power sharing arrangement such as we have at present would certainly be better but the logic remains that each of the national identities has to maximise its strength in the face of the other and in these circumstances the emergence of the sort of class based, Left/Right politics which we wanted to see - and which still, in the 1970s, looked like a viable proposition - was rendered impossible.
After 1974 and the collapse of the powersharing arrangement that had been negotiated at Sunningdale, we argued that direct rule from Westminster should be reformed into a permanent system of government and that the parties able to form governments in Westminster - the Conservative and Labour Parties - should take members and contest elections in Northern Ireland. The fact that these parties refused to take members in Northern Ireland was something that was never mentioned in the mainstream press when the peculiarly vicious sectarian nature of our politics was under discussion.
In the mid to late seventies it looked as though things were going our way. Clearly Westminster could never agree to the establishment of a majority rule devolved government but equally clearly, in the wake of the UWC strike and the collapse of the Sunningdale agreement the Unionists could not agree to the establishment of a powersharing government.
Although it is a slight digression I want to say a word here about the UWC ('Ulster Workers' Council') strike because it has been much misunderstood.
It was not in fact a strike against powersharing; it was a strike against the 'Irish dimension', the involvement of the southern government in Northern Ireland affairs.
During the Sunningdale negotiations John Hume of the Catholic Nationalist SDLP had argued for what he called a 'condominion'. He saw the problem not so much as of relations between Protestants and Catholics within the United Kingdom but of two national identities - Irish and British - each of which should be allowed full political expression. The Nationalists should be able to look to Dublin as their government, the Unionists to Westminster. Dublin and Westminster would have equal sovereignty. If I remember aright the example given to show that such an arrangement might be possible was the Anglo-French condominion established in the nineteenth century over Egypt.
Although this solution was formally rejected in the Sunningdale negotiations, a 'Council of Ireland' was to be established which would give the Republic of Ireland a consultative say in certain fairly minor matters of government. In practise however, in the brief period of the functioning of the powersharing arrangement, the SDLP behaved as if Northern Ireland was under a condominion and treated the Southern government as if they regarded it as their own sovereign government. This was the direction in which Hume saw things developing.
As part of the overall arrangement, however, in order to secure the 'Irish dimension', the Southern government had agreed to waive its claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland. A court case was brought by the Republican TD Kevin Boland arguing that this was in violation of Articles 2 &3 of the Republic's constitution. In its defence the Southern government argued that its waiver of the claim to sovereignty was not binding on future Southern governments. Which made nonsense of it.
The initial demand of the strikers was that under these circumstances the proposed Council of Ireland should not be allowed to go ahead. It was not, under the circumstances, an unreasonable demand. Unfortunately the three governments concerned - Westminster, Dublin and Stormont - decided to treat the strike as if it was a Fascist putsch and this was what eventually mobilised virtually the entire Protestant community into enthusiastic support for it with the result that the position of the Unionists within the powersharing executive became untenable.
Our little group had as it happens written to Paddy Devlin (as the member of the government with the most credible pretensions to being a Socialist) warning him that this would be the consequence of the SDLP's behaviour. I seem to remember that his reply made reference to political groupings that could be fitted into a telephone box ...
Given the degree of opposition in the Protestant community it is impossible to say if the powersharing executive could have survived in the long term, but with a less arrogant attitude on the part of its supporters it is reasonable to believe it could have survived the UWC strike.
In the wake of the strike all the mainstream political groupings remained formally committed to the re-establishment of a devolved government. We took the view that this was of itself a major source of the instability of Northern Ireland. In particular the obvious anxiety of Westminster to divest itself of responsibility for the province could only act as an incentive to the IRA to continue its campaign. Westminster wanted out of Northern Ireland because it was a nuisance. Under those circumstances it was clearly in the interests of the Republican cause to ensure that Northern Ireland continued to be a nuisance. Previous IRA campaigns had been called off when it was clear there was no prospect of success. Now that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland was in the melting pot there was no reason for them to think they might not succeed.
In 1974 Enoch Powell joined what was now referred to as the Official Unionist Party. Although he never took on board the crucial argument on the need for the UK political parties to organise in Northern Ireland he did understand the argument against the establishment of a devolved government and he was closely allied in this respect with James Molyneaux, leader of the Unionists at Westminster who took over leadership of the party as a whole in 1979. Although still formally committed to the re-establishment of a majority rule devolved government, the party under Molyneaux made it clear that it was in fact indifferent to the matter. Its principle achievement tended in the opposite direction. As part of a price extracted for keeping James Callaghan's Labour government in power Molyneaux secured an increase in the number of MPs in Westminster, from 12 to 17. This implied recognition of the elementary fact that Westminster was indeed and would continue to be the seat of power. It was in protest against this increase in Northern Ireland's representation at Westminster that Gerry Fitt, another member of the SDLP with Socialist credentials, abstained in the crucial vote of confidence that brought down Callaghan's government (by one vote) and inaugurated the reign of Margaret Thatcher.
The Conservative Party election manifesto of 1979 promised the establishment not of a new legislature in Northern Ireland but of an upper tier of local government. It was an accident of history that at the time Stormont was 'prorogued' in 1972, Northern Ireland was in the middle of a radical re-organisation of local government. The new arrangements presupposed that Stormont would act both as a legislature and as a co-ordinating centre for the new local government bodies that were being established. The upper tier of local government promised in the Conservative manifesto would have provided all that was needed to give Northern Ireland an adequate system of administration, accepting Westminster as the legislature. It should be said that throughout Northern Ireland powersharing, even, if my memory serves me right, involving Sinn Fein, was already being practised at the purely administrative local government level and the Official Unionists, still the most substantial part of 'the Unionist family', would have had no problem with powersharing in the new administrative arrangement apparently being proposed by the Tories.
The architect of the Conservative policy was Airey Neave who had managed Margaret Thatcher's campaign to take over leadership of the party and had, or appeared to have, considerable influence over her. The assassination of Airey Neave by the Irish National Liberation Army in 1979 is a strong argument against those who think assassination can never be an effective political weapon. The last Labour Secretary of State of Northern Ireland, Roy Mason, had made no efforts to establish a devolved legislature and this had had a demoralising effect on the IRA (hence the slogan 'Stone Mason will not break us'). But as soon as the Conservatives took power the policy of Airey Neave was abandoned and under Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins a convention was established to discuss new constitutional arrangements and, despite its utterly predictable failure, under Atkin's successor James Prior an 'assembly' was elected with all the appearance of a real Parliament but none of the power. The theory was that under a process of 'rolling devolution' it would acquire power gradually as bit by bit its members learned to behave themselves (and presumably developed the habit of enjoying the salaries and perks with which they were generously provided).
What was Ian Paisley's role in all this? Throughout the whole period he was stumping the country noisily demanding a majority rule devolved government, a demand the Westminster government obviously could not concede. In opposition to Roy Mason - clearly from a Unionist point of view the best Secretary of State Northern Ireland had through the whole period of the 'troubles' - Paisley held a poor imitation of the UWC strike and mounted a fake paramilitary 'third force' (as Steve Bruce shows in his book on Paisley, the 'real' - really vicious - paramilitaries, the UDA and the UVF, tended to despise Paisley as all talk and no action. We will come back to this). While the Official Unionists said 'No' to the Convention and boycotted it, Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party said 'Yes'. And while the SDLP - and, later, the Official Unionists - said 'No' to the Assembly, the DUP again said 'Yes'. Two occasions on which Ian Paisley said 'Yes' when according to the argument we were advancing at the time and which I still think is valid, he should have said 'No'. In terms of keeping Northern Ireland in a destabilised constitutional position suitable for the continuation of the IRA campaign, Paisley, John Hume and the Northern Ireland Office may be regarded as allies. All this of course was before Hume pulled his masterstroke with the Anglo Irish Agreement which, for reasons I won't go into here, changed everything. It eventually (though not, as it happens, immediately) blew our political project out of the water.
I could say much more about all that but want to move on to other things.