the possibility of new investment from Europe and from the US were opening up.
For all the hostile reception and the variety of opposition Sunningdale provoked among disparate political groups, North and South, it marked a glimpse of a new political era. The Catholic minority, which had been dispossessed for half a century since the foundation of the State, finally had achieved parity of esteem in a power-sharing Executive. The degree of the shift which occurred could be seen in this succinct summation by Austin Currie: ‘I became the Minister for Housing and Planning. The person who had been squatting in a discrimination case in a house in Caledon in 1968 was, by 1974, in charge of housing and planning. It was quite a remarkable achievement and it was done by non-violent political activity.’ Hume’s wife, Pat, remembers that Hume, as Minister for Commerce in the power-sharing Executive, had scarcely ever worked so hard in his life: he was convinced that the path to securing political stability lay through economic growth.
In advance of a trip to the US by Hume in April 1974, to promote industrial investment in Northern Ireland, an official of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office forearmed himself with briefing material for Hume, but decided that given Hume’s experience in the US, his command of Irish history, and the historic significance of the power-sharing Executive, it would have been ‘otiose’ to hand Hume the briefing material. In the US, Hume spoke to the media regarding Northern Ireland as a prime destination for investment. Hume was due to meet Senator Ted Kennedy, which he had confided to the FCO in strict confidence (as he was already conscious of the SDLP members’ sensitivities that the media was putting a preponderant emphasis on Hume’s personality). Nevertheless, there was wide coverage of his visit in print and television media in Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. The US State Department report of his visit in print and television media in Washington, New York, and Boston, asserts:
Hume proved to be effective spokesperson for moderates in Northern Ireland before key Congressmen who until hearing Hume had evidently had more exposure to IRA views than those of hitherto unknown SDLP. SDLP case, however, proved convincing and further visits to Washington by Catholic leaders like Hume could very well result in recognition of SDLP as legitimate spokesman for Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.11
Hume’s visit resulted in a letter of thanks and encouragement from the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, James Callaghan, on 13 May 1974.
The Collapse of Sunningdale
The Executive’s problems continued to multiply exponentially, primarily because it was built on unstable foundations. The Sunningdale Agreement was technically a Joint Communiqué, intended as a prelude to an international agreement to be registered at the United Nations for full ratification. However, animosity to it from all sides intensified. In the South, Kevin Boland, who led a splinter from the Fianna Fáil party and held extreme nationalist views, challenged Sunningdale’s constitutionality but failed; during his challenge, Southern politicians were prohibited sub judice from defending it. Yet while the Council of Ireland is often cited as the determinative element that finally brought Sunningdale down, there were other factors that weighed heavily in its demise.
The Heath government faced an election in February 1974, and so the UK had to pass a judgement on Sunningdale almost immediately after it came into existence. If the Council of Ireland were to have already been in existence for a year, it might have gained more traction, but Kevin Boland’s constitutional challenge meant that the Irish government was obliged to sell the Agreement merely as a Joint Communiqué (it was in limbo until the Irish judiciary declared on its status). It may have been legally expedient, but it was politically unwise, to undersell the Agreement. When Harold Wilson succeeded Ted Heath as British Prime Minister, neither he nor Merlyn Rees, whom Wilson appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1974–6), were genuinely committed to the Agreement. Thus when a general strike was called by the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) it posed an existential risk for the Agreement.
The Ulster Workers’ Council Strike
The UWC strike, supported by the wider Unionist community, had the sole objective of sabotaging the Sunningdale Executive. Countering Unionist opposition would have required an enormous feat of courage and dedication by Unionist politicians, and that was lacking. To counter the strike, the British had to deploy the army to man the electric and sewage works as described in Robert Fisk’s book, Point of No Return: The Strike Which Broke the British in Ulster.12 On 23 May 1974, Gerry Fitt urged the British army to deploy men to the power stations; by 27 May, the army was running petrol stations across the North to combat the UWC’s shadow government coup. The British government did not immediately surrender to the mob; it did so after thirteen days. That capitulation was fatal to the prospects of a functioning democratic Assembly in Northern Ireland for another generation. As Seamus Heaney stated in his Nobel Lecture, ‘until the British government caved in to the strong-arm tactics of the Ulster loyalist workers after the Sunningdale Conference in 1974, a well-disposed mind could still hope to make sense of the circumstances … After 1974, however, for the twenty long years between then and the ceasefires of August 1994, such a hope proved impossible’.13
Continuing Republican paramilitary activity throughout the time of the Sunningdale Executive provided Unionists with the argument that any form of diminution of the British administration in Northern Ireland (which they believed was implicit within a full power-sharing arrangement) would result in a state of anarchy. Briefly, both hardline Unionists and Republicans rallied to the same cause, albeit spurred on by opposing political motives. Fear of any encroachment by Dublin on Northern Irish affairs convinced Unionists that negotiations involving the Southern government, of which they were instinctively suspicious, would not serve their interests. So they sabotaged the Sunningdale Agreement and its institutions, which did not sustain their majority prerogatives. The Provisional IRA portrayed the UWC strike, which brought the Sunningdale Executive down, as a fascist victory: an irony of ironies, since the IRA intensified its terror campaign for the same purpose, hastening the collapse of the Executive. Republicans believed that by continuing to destabilise the state they could legitimise their claim that only a United Ireland was a viable resolution. As Brendan O’Leary observes:
[Sunningdale was] rejected by the Unionist community, and they came to the negotiation table in the 90s partly because they believed that things would only get worse for them. It is true that Republicans also rejected the settlement of 1973–74. They had just got rid of the Stormont Parliament, so they believed it would be easy to pursue getting the British out of Ireland completely, which turned out to be a fantasy.
The hue and cry unleashed by Unionist leaders over the Council of Ireland proposal served to cloak the more fundamental point: their unwillingness to concede to any power-sharing arrangement. Brian Faulkner’s admission that the Council of Ireland controversy was a useful diversion says a great deal: ‘Certainly I was convinced all along that the outcry against Council of Ireland was only a useful [author’s emphasis] red herring – the real opposition was to sharing of power.’14 Unionist opposition was bolstered by a small but growing constituency in Dublin that sympathised with the Unionist paranoia of being encircled, and in some cases that support was animated by historical naiveté and an intellectually capricious espousal of ‘liberalism’. In the case of Conor Cruise O’Brien, it was a convenient argument to covertly advance the cause of Unionism in the South, a cause which in later life he openly embraced by running as a UK Unionist candidate in the 1996 Forum Elections.
There was certainly a depressing aspect to the failure of Sunningdale, and as Seamus Deane, responding to the unwillingness of the British Government to face down Unionist resistance in 1974, put it:
The failure of Sunningdale was sinister because it showed that a certain kind of refusal, a certain kind of recalcitrance, was very much political war. It was partly the lack of backbone that [British Prime Minister] Harold Wilson displayed, but it was also a sinister indication that you could be rewarded for bigotry. I’m not really sure if the British government formed a policy in relation to Northern Ireland until about ten years after that, a policy that it felt it could actually pursue without being pulled to the side by its own army or its own officer corps. The Sunningdale Agreement was a very clever agreement, very cleverly designed. What we have been seeing is a version of Sunningdale, and a series of extensions from Sunningdale, actually