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 becoming part of an agreed policy between Dublin and London, which is the crucial thing: the Dublin and London axis. That that has been formed and that that’s well greased.15
The enormous opposition Prime Minister Harold Wilson faced to his predecessor’s Agreement undermined, in his eyes, the case for continued commitment. Merlyn Rees, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, intimated that Wilson was even considering a full British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, including the cutting off of the financial subvention which effectively sustained Northern Ireland, in the hope that that would encourage Unionists to be more conciliatory with Dublin. However, John Hume believed that the Sunningdale provisions – all parties working together across the divide, cross-border political and economic cooperation, including the British and Irish governments – had great validity. Gerry Adams disagreed:
I see a validity. But I see the Sunningdale Agreement as a bad deal. It was not a good deal. It did not get to the root of the problems. We did not get to the root until we got round to the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. Whether it was the Anglo-Irish Agreement, whether it was Sunningdale or the Downing Street Declaration; all of them improved as things went on.
When the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, Seamus Mallon, ever ready with a stinging formulation, stated that it was ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’. How so?
The Good Friday Agreement in my view (and I was one of the people very much involved in creating it) was not as good a deal [for Nationalists] in many ways as the Sunningdale Agreement, which had much stronger North-South structures. The irony of it all is that those who claimed to be defending the Nationalist community in the North of Ireland in 1974 – the IRA and Sinn Féin – were the very same people who bombed the Sunningdale Agreement out of existence.
That campaign, in combination with the withdrawal of support by some Unionists and the British government’s failure to stand up to the striking Loyalist organisations, preventing travel and the delivery of food and other basic services, spelled the end of the Executive. In Seamus Mallon’s opinion:
They buckled. It is the most you can say about it. That opportunity, had it been taken, would have saved many lives. The tragedy was Unionism did not see the opportunity for a revitalisation within their community; Sinn Féin–IRA made the destruction of Sunningdale their priority. How contradictory can you get? The Good Friday Agreement is Sunningdale for slow learners. That is how I described it at the time.
Seán Donlon corroborates: ‘The subsequent agreements, whether the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, [or] the Good Friday agreement of 1998, are all based on the Sunningdale principles, or the John Hume principles: unite the two communities in Northern Ireland; create North–South structures for cooperation. Essentially what we have today is what was agreed at Sunningdale.’ What effect did the collapse of the Sunningdale Executive – that represented so much of Hume’s thinking – have on him? In Seán Donlon’s opinion:
