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- Herausgeber: UCD Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Serie: The Life and Times Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Terence O'Neill came to power as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1963 with a bold plan to 'literally transform the face of Ulster'. For the next six years O'Neill proved himself to be Stormont's most controversial leader. Though born of the gentry, he was determined to break from the past. Motorways replaced railways, a New City was planned, and a New University built. By meeting with Taoiseachs of the Irish republic, O'Neill intended no less than to end the long cross-border Cold War. Most audaciously, he worked to end the centuries old political divide between catholic and protestant, even if this meant plunging his own Ulster Unionist Party into crisis. O'Neill stirred up passion and anger. While many saw him as Ireland's great hope, Ian Paisley denounced him as a traitor and Unionist ministers plotted his downfall. When the civil rights movement took to the streets in 1968, O'Neill's response was prophetic: 'it is a short step from the throwing of paving stones to the laying of tombstones.'Confronted by demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, pressure from London and rebellion in his own party, O'Neill gambled all on in a bid to re-cast the very shape of politics in the province. When finally he was 'literally blown from office' in April 1969, in the midst of rioting and loyalist bombs, thirty years of violence had begun. Marc Mulholland's study of O'Neill argues for the centrality of O'Neill to modern Irish history. Based upon exhaustive research, it brings to focus a period when Northern Ireland really did stand at the crossroads.
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Terence O’Neill
MARC MULHOLLAND
Published on behalf of the Historical Association of Irelandby
vi
Dedicated to my Parents, Dominic and Ita
*
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Originally conceived over a decade ago to place the lives of leading figures in Irish history against the background of new research on the problems and conditions of their times and modern assessments of their historical significance, the Historical Association of Ireland Life and Times series enjoyed remarkable popularity and success. A second series has now been planned in association with UCD Press in a new format and with fuller scholarly apparatus. Encouraged by the reception given to the earlier series, the volumes in the new series will be expressly designed to be of particular help to students preparing for the Leaving Certificate, for GCE Advanced Level and for undergraduate history courses as well as appealing to the happily insatiable appetite for new views of Irish history among the general public.
ciaran brady
Historical Association of Ireland
PREFACE
Terence O’Neill was Prime Minister at Stormont when Northern Ireland entered the thirty-year crisis known as the Troubles. He is remembered as a well-meaning if rather timid and ineffectual liberal who blundered into disaster. There was more to him than that, however. O’Neill’s thinking could be extraordinarily ambitious. This was a man who proposed draining Lough Neagh to create a seventh Northern Ireland county, recommended his ‘Programme to Enlist the People’ as an international solution to the youth rebellion of 1968, and considered standing for the post of President of the Irish Republic. O’Neill was not just another of the crusty ‘fur coat brigade’ who had for years dominated Ulster. From a long line of protestant defenders of the Irish link to Britain, he was nonetheless intensely proud of his descent from the ancient Gaelic clan of O Neill. He fought bravely for crown and country in wartime, and led the Ulster Unionist Party in peacetime, but ultimately believed that a united self-governing Ireland was one day inevitable.
In this short book I argue that O’Neill was much more audacious than has generally been depicted. He developed a sophisticated analysis of division within Northern Ireland and set in train ambitious schemes – Civic weeks and PEP – to moderate them. A true believer in greater fairness, O’Neill defied extraordinary pressure from Paisleyites and much of his own party to introduce real if limited reform even before the civil rights movement erupted in 1968. In the last months of his premiership, with extraordinary boldness, he attempted to break the mould of protestant versus catholic politics in Northern Ireland, even at the price of splitting his own party. O’Neill’s ambitions, and their failure, deserve serious re-consideration.ix
This book, of course, concentrates on O’Neill. But it also takes into account three other men committed, each in their own way, to defending the honourable estate of the British in Ulster: Brian Faulkner, William Craig and Ian Paisley. All four were born within twelve years of each other. The landmark decade of the 1960s made them, and they did much to make modern Northern Ireland. Their careers were intertwined in life, and they do so here.
I should like to thank all at UCD Press for taking this project on, particularly Noelle Moran and Ciaran Brady. I have discussed its contents with the 150 or so students who have taken the Northern Ireland Special Subject at the University of Oxford over these past dozen years. I am grateful to them all.
A note on terminology: I use ‘Unionist’ when referring to the Ulster Unionist Party or its members, ‘unionist’ when referring to the wider British protestant community in Northern Ireland. ‘Derry’ and ‘Londonderry’ are used interchangeably for the same city.
marc mulholland
August 2013
CHRONOLOGY OF O’NEILL’S LIFE AND TIMES
1914
10September Terence O’Neill born.
6November Capt. Hon. Arthur O’Neill, Terence’s father, first MP to be killed in the War.
1921
June Northern Ireland comes into existence; Ireland partitioned.
1922
9 February Terence’s mother remarries.
20 May Shane’s Castle, O’Neill family ‘Big House’, burnt by IRA.
1936
O’Neill spends a year in France and Austria.
1939
Second World War breaks out. O’Neill joins the Irish Guards.
1940
14 May Capt. Hon. Brian O’Neill killed in action.
1944
4 February Terence marries Jean Whitaker.
September Terence injured near Nijmegan in Holland.
24 October Lt. Col. Shane O’Neill killed in action.xi
1945
8 May German surrender.
Terence O’Neill and family move to Ahoghill, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland.
1946
7 November O’Neill elected unopposed as Ulster Unionist Party MP for Bannside, Co. Antrim.
1947
O’Neill makes maiden speech in Stormont on the Education Act.
1948–53
O’Neill Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health.
1949
19 February ‘Chapel Gate Election’ in Northern Ireland. Brian Faulkner elected for East Down.
18 April Southern Ireland becomes a republic.
2 June Ireland Act receives Royal Assent. Stipulates no unification of Ireland without the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland.
1953–56
O’Neill Deputy Speaker at Stormont.
1956
O’Neill joins cabinet as Minister of Home Affairs.
12 December IRA launches ‘Operation Harvest’, better known as the ‘Border Campaign’.
1956–63
O’Neill Minister of Finance. xii
1962
26 February IRA calls off ‘Operation Harvest’ for lack of support.
23 October Publication of ‘Hall Report’ marks bankruptcy of Unionist economic strategy.
29 November O’Neill delivers ‘Pottinger Speech’.
1963
26 February ‘Matthew report’ proposes modernisation of Northern Ireland’s infrastructure.
23 March O’Neill invited to replace Lord Brookeborough as Prime Minister.
25 March William Craig, Chief Whip, organises poll of Unionist MPs approving O’Neill as leader.
5 April O’Neill announces intention to literally ‘transform the face of Ulster’.
23 October O’Neill presents ‘Wilson Plan’ on Economic Development.
1964
24 April O’Neill visits a Roman Catholic school; first Unionist leader to do so.
13 May O’Neill secretly briefs Unionist MPs on plans to make County Armagh ‘New City’ securely protestant and Unionist.
30 June Government recognises Northern Ireland Committee of Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
28 September ‘Divis street riots’ over flying of Irish tri-colour flag in west Belfast.
1 October O’Neill announces that he is in favour of ‘bridge-building’ between the two communities.
1965
1 January New Ministry of Development and Ministry of Health and Social Services come into effect.
14 January O’Neill meets Sean Lemass, Taoiseach of Ireland, at Stormont.
15 January Paisley launches ‘O’Neill Must Go’ campaign. xiii
8 May Unionist ‘faceless men’ exposed as lobbying against investment in majority-catholic Londonderry.
6 July Controversial name of ‘Craigavon’ chosen for New City.
25 November General election a major defeat for the Northern Ireland Labour Party and increases Unionist majority by four.
1966
April Illegal nationalist commemorations of Easter 1916 Rising pass off peacefully.
9 April O’Neill addresses Corrymeela Conference on ‘The Ulster Community’.
6 June Paisleyites picket Presbyterian General Assembly in Belfast.
28 June Following murders, O’Neill bans loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force under the Special Powers Act.
4 July Queen Elizabeth II visits Belfast, fails to support O’Neill’s ‘bridge-building’.
18 July Paisley imprisoned. Riots follow.
3 August At a 10 Downing Street summit, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson puts pressure on O’Neill to speed up reform.
23 September Rumours emerge of Unionist petition, signed by at least 12 of 36MPs, in favour of O’Neill stepping down.
27 September O’Neill wins vote of confidence from the Parliamentary Unionist party.
8 October In cabinet reshuffle, William Craig demoted to Minister of Home Affairs.
13 December O’Neill announces reform to increase funding for Roman Catholic Mater Hospital.
16 December Westminster constituency boundaries for Belfast re-drawn, with no pro-Unionist gerrymander.
1967
23 January O’Neill announces cross-community ‘Civic weeks’ and ‘Programme to Enlist the People’ (PEP).
29 January Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) established.
26 April Harry West dismissed from the cabinet over the St. Angelo affair.xiv
1968
20 February O’Neill defends strategy of ‘action in words’.
23 May State funding increased for Voluntary (Roman Catholic) Schools.
5 October Civil Rights demonstration attacked by RUC police in Derry.
9 October 2000 students march from University to City Hall. Sit-down protest as Paisleyites block route.
16 October Sit-down demonstration in Derry for civil rights.
16 November 15,000march for civil rights in Derry.
22 November Government announces Five Point Reform Programme.
30 November Paisleyites occupy cathedral city of Armagh.
9 December O’Neill broadcasts to the province – ‘Ulster is at a Crossroads’.
11 December O’Neill sacks William Craig, Minister of Home affairs. Receives vote of confidence from Ulster Unionist MPs.
1969
4 January People’s Democracy march attacked by loyalists at Burntollet Bridge. Rioting in Derry.
13 January Civil rights marchers turn violent in Newry.
15 January Government announces a Commission of Inquiry, to be headed up by Lord Cameron.
24 January Brian Faulkner resigns from cabinet.
3 February ‘Portadown Parliament’ of dissident Unionist MPs call for O’Neill’s resignation.
4 February O’Neill calls a General election.
24 February General Election fails to bolster O’Neill’s position.
18 April People’s Democracy candidate Bernadette Devlin wins Mid-Ulster seat with nationalist and republican support.
21 April Loyalists bomb Belfast water supplies.
23 April Unionist MPs accept ‘one man one vote’ in local government elections. James Chichester-Clarke resigns from cabinet.
28 April O’Neill announces resignation as leader of Ulster Unionist Party and Prime Minister.
1 May James Chichester-Clarke succeeds O’Neill, defeating Brian Faulkner.
14 August Following serious rioting in Derry and Belfast, British army xvdeploys to streets of Northern Ireland.
October Ulster at the Crossroads, a collection of O’Neill’s speeches, published.
1970
1 January O’Neill made life peer. Ultimately takes title, Lord O’Neill of the Maine.
16 April Paisley wins Bannside seat vacated by O’Neill.
1971–2
O’Neill advertises willingness to stand for presidency of the Irish republic.
1972
23 April O’Neill appointed to the Board of Guardians of the National Gallery of Ireland.
7 November O’Neill’s autobiography published.
22 November O’Neill leaves the Orange order.
1973–4
Sunningdale Agreement on power-sharing and ‘Irish dimension’ negotiated and collapses. O’Neill concludes that middle-class leadership has failed.
1990
13 June O’Neill dies.
CHAPTER 1
The Making of the Politician
O’Neill’s lineage can be reliably traced back to a Gaelic Prince killed in battle in 1283, and Dod’s peerage whimsically went further back to Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Ireland from c. 379 to c. 409 AD, and far beyond. O’Neill was not a direct descendant of these Ulster kings, however. His family indirectly descended from the O’Neills of Clanaboy, a branch founded by a nominee of the English after the ‘Flight of the Earls’ (1607), when ‘Red’ Hugh Ó Néill fled to the continent with his compatriots following a failed rebellion against the Crown. Terence was actually descended from Edward Chichester, an immigrant to Ulster from Devonshire in England, whose brother, Sir Arthur Chichester, had been Lord Deputy since 1604 and as such Red Hugh’s chief opponent.
From his residence in Carrickfergus, Sir Arthur Chichester oversaw the Planation of Ulster scheme, which founded the protest ant bulwark in Ulster on immigrants from Scotland and England. His niece, Mary, married Sir Henry O’Neill at Randalstown, and they had a daughter, Rose. Father and daughter spent much of their years at Whitehall in London and there they struck up friend ships with the Royal Family. The O’Neills of Clanaboy were granted a Baronetcy by Charles I for gallantry at Edgehill in 1642, the first pitched battle of the Civil War between crown and parliament. When Princess Mary of England married the prince of 2Orange in 1641, Rose O’Neill went to the Dutch Republic as companion and lady-in-waiting. She helped to raise the man attributed with securing the protestant succession in Britain and Ireland when he seized the British throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688: William III.
The eighteenth-century O’Neills were amongst the wealthiest landed families in County Antrim. In 1761, John O’Neill was returned to the Irish Parliament for the family seat of Randalstown. He was a ‘patriot’, an opponent of the anti-catholic Penal Laws, and a prominent member of the paramilitary Irish Volunteers. Though associated with separatist United Irishmen through the Whig Club, he was loyal to the Crown and in 1793 was raised to the peerage. Upon hearing of the United Irishmen rising in the north in June 1798, he raised troops and rushed to Antrim town, where he fell before rebel pikes. Though lifted bodily with his horse into Antrim Castle, he died of his wounds eleven days later. John’s heir, Charles, refused ever after to set foot in Antrim town. Unlike his father, Charles was a strong supporter of the parliamentary Union between Great Britain and Ireland, and was one of the first peers to sit in the United Kingdom House of Lords formed in 1801. An enthusiastic Orangeman, he rose to become Grand Master of this protestant Order. His son in turn, Charles Henry, as an MP opposed both Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Union. Charles Henry never married and so he willed his estates to William Chichester, his second cousin twice removed and a fifth-generation Church of Ireland clergyman, who in 1855 by royal licence took the name O’Neill. William was married into the Torrens family, whose luminaries included an Anglican Archdeacon of Dublin and Sir Henry Torrens, Adjutant General to Forces, a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, and military secretary to King William IV. William was raised to the peerage as Baron O’Neill in 1968.3
William’s son, Robert Torrens O’Neill, sat as a Conservative MP for Mid-Antrim from 1885 to 1910. His nephew, Arthur O’Neill, succeeded to the seat in 1910, now effectively as an Ulster Unionist MP vehemently opposed to the nationalist campaign for a devolved Home Rule parliament in Ireland. He was unusual in having married across the wide divide that had opened up between Unionists and nationalist Home Rulers. In 1902, Robert married Lady Annabel, daughter of the 1st Marquess of Crewe. Crewe had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland when the Liberal administration of 1892 to 1895 had tried to put Home Rule on the statue book. Arthur participated in the Ulster Unionist campaign against the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912, which promised an all-Ireland devolution parliament, and (as a military veteran of the Boer War) he helped organise the anti-nationalist Ulster Volunteer Force in the Ballymena area. Still, he was a rather unwilling politician, and when the First World War broke out was quick to join his 2nd Life Guards regiment.
In 1966, when restive Unionist MPs were challenging Terence O’Neill’s right to lead as Prime Minister, the conservative Unionist newspaper ran an article on ‘The O’Neill’s of Antrim’ to assert his loyalist bona fides:
On both sides of his family the Prime Minister can prove an unbroken protestant descent for 360 years. The O’Neills resisted the 1978 rebellion, voted for the Act of Union, and were leaders of the Orange Order. The Chichesters came over from England and served both Queen Elizabeth and King James I – the man who planted Ulster with protestants, while in later generations they provided an almost unparalleled line of protestant clergymen. The Prime Minister’s father drilled the Ulster Volunteers in 1912 and was the first Member of Parliament to be killed in the service of his county in 1914. Both the Prime Minister’s brothers were killed in the last war and he himself was 4wounded in Holland. It would be hard to prove a greater loyalty for a greater length of time in many other families.1
Terence O’Neill certainly took pride in his protestant genealogy, but he also made much of his ‘Gaelic’ inheritance to indicate his acceptability to catholics. The most exaggerated claim features on the dust-cover of his autobiography: ‘O’Neill bore an Irish name, not one of English or Scottish inheritance, and could claim direct descent from the kings of Ireland. Thus to catholics, he was more than just a Prime Minister.’ But really, his loyalty was to a tradition close to its last legs in Ireland even as his life began. It was no doubt with a mischievous smile when, in 1972, he identified himself with two radical-left pro-Irish nationalist ornaments of the aristocracy: ‘[T]he rebel Countess, Countess Markievicz, was, like the noble Earl, Lord Longford, and myself, of impeccable Anglo-Irish descent.’2 O’Neill was intensely proud of the ‘Red Hand of Ulster’, a symbol found on Northern Ireland’s provincial flag, but was always quick to remind listeners that it was a symbol of the O’Neill clan, Europe’s oldest traceable aristocratic family. When in 1982, Jorge O’Neill, a Portuguese noble and distant scion of the Gaelic earls, was inaugurated chieftain of all the O’Neills, Terence was in proud attendance.
YOUTH
Terence was born on 10 September 1914. The youngest of five children, he was given the second name ‘Marne’ to commemorate the contemporary World War One battle. He was only three months old when his father became the first MP of the Great War to be killed in action, aged 38.3 Terence’s uncle, later Lord Rathcavan, took his father’s place at Westminster and sat as an MP for a record 35 years continuous service, becoming Father of the House in 51951. From 1921 Rathcavan served simultaneously in the Northern Ireland House of Commons, set up to administer the internal affairs of the six United Kingdom counties of Northern Ireland following partition.4 O’Neill’s mother was often abroad and his aunt, Sylvia, did much to raise him.5 Later, Terence O’Neill’s colleagues would attribute his aloof and lonely manner to his lack of a father figure in youth.
O’Neill spent the first seven years of his life in London in the grand house of his liberal grandfather, Lord Crewe, run by ten servants including a nanny and a Swiss governess. Summer holidays were spent in Ulster, at the O’Neill residence of Shane’s Castle.6 This brought the young boy dangerously close to the IRA’s campaign of arson against Ireland’s ‘Big Houses’, targeted as political and potentially military bases of reaction against the Irish revolution. Ulster was not immune, though support for the Union there had a democratic basis extending far beyond the landed ‘ascendancy’. In 1922, raiders arrived at Shane’s Castle from Tyrone by boat in the dead of night. Lord O’Neill, in his eighty-third year, had to be carried from his home by stretcher. He wept as the flames consumed much of the mansion and its artistic treasures. It was believed by the family that the head forester on the estate, a catholic, had refused to raise the alarm. Lady O’Neill would often say to Terence, ‘After all that kindness they burnt down my home.’7
Also in 1922, Terence’s mother remarried to Hugh Dodds, the British consul in Addis Ababa. Terence’s attitude towards him appears ambivalent. In his autobiography he never gave his name, introducing him only as ‘a certain gentleman’. Still, when aged seven he travelled with his stepfather to Abyssinia it was ‘undoubtedly the happiest year of my life.’8 Here he lived in the faded grandeur of the ex-Imperial Russian Legation. An audience with the Regent, the future Emperor Haile Selassie, was organised for the young boy. Eating black bread and honey, the two chatted in 6French. When velvet curtains were drawn back to introduce two lion cubs into the room, a startled Terence pulled his feet off the floor, and for this was slapped by his governess for behaving in an ‘un-British’ manner. Another time, whilst riding a pony and wearing a pith helmet, he was fired on by bandits who mistook his water jar for a weapon.9
O’Neill returned to England to attend school at West Downs in Winchester, then Eton.10 To improve his French and acquire German, he spent 1936 in France and then Austria where he stayed with a determinedly anti-Nazi family. This experience turned him into a convinced opponent of appeasement back in Britain, a position which disturbed Lord Crewe and his family who were partisans of Neville Chamberlain.11 ‘I … tended to go the other way,’ O’Neill recalled ‘I always wanted to go into politics.’12 Perhaps to curtail his political ambitions, in 1939 his aunt secured Terence a job as civilian aide-de-camp to the Governor of South Australia. Within a few weeks, however, war broke out and he returned to join the prestigious Irish Guards. In May 1940 he received his commission at Sandhurst and joined the Second Battalion of Irish Guards, known within the forces as ‘The Micks’. Most of his fellow-soldiers were southern Irish, Liverpool Irish, or from Glasgow. Few were from Northern Ireland. In 1941 the Guards Armoured Division was formed. Whilst waiting for the invasion of Europe, Terence married Jean Whitaker. Jean, a devout Christian, had been born in 1915 to a wealthy and long established family owning the substantial Lisle Court estate near Lymington, Hampshire. Educated at home, Jean had developed impressively expert knowledge of gardening and horticulture. She was an outdoors sort who enjoyed sailing and who travelled by motorcycle to her war-work at the Royal Naval Hospital in Gospar. The wedding, on 4 February 1944, was in the Irish Guards chapel and the pair honeymooned at Cleggan Lodge, home of his aunt and uncle, in 7Northern Ireland. They were met from the train by a horse-drawn jaunting cart.
WAR-TIME
Once in Europe O’Neill served as the Intelligence Officer of the 2nd battalion. He was noted by his fellow soldiers as ‘the most tolerant of men and quite a Francophile’.13 O’Neill was engaged in intense action and suffered tragedy, losing a good friend, David Peel, who had been his best man at his marriage, as well as both his brothers, the Hon. Brian O’Neill aged 29 with the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards in Norway, 1940, and Lord (Shane) O’Neill aged 37 with the North Irish Horse in Italy in 1944. (Lord O’Neill’s widow, Ann, went on to marry Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, and then Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond).
