take as its motto ‘similar responsibilities for similar opportunities’.71 The rhetoric of self-help was the ideal language in which to present the new economic policy devised by the administration. Matthew himself had called for ‘a replacement of the general attitude that the best thing that can be done is not to get too far behind the rest of Britain, by a determination to go straight ahead’.72 O’Neill had already cultivated close relations with a group of rising civil servants in Belfast and with the mandarins at the Treasury. This was partly the result of his rift with the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, which had encouraged the Minister to seek out the advice of other officials and to deal directly with Whitehall. O’Neill persuaded the Treasury to include him in the United Kingdom delegation to World Bank conferences – allowing him to network and come into contact with the latest ideas.73 He was therefore well placed to negotiate the planning world. O’Neill would secure resources from London by framing requests in the new language of economic modernisation rather than by repeating traditional calls for stopgap subsidies.74
Northern Ireland’s new Prime Minister was not elected; he ‘emerged’ in the fashion of Conservative leaders until Ted Heath. Brookeborough and Wakehurst discussed ‘the best man for The Governor to send for’. ‘Two or three possibilities were mentioned,’ London was told, ‘but it was clear that The Governor and Lord Brookeborough were of one mind.’ O’Neill’s standing in Parliament and with the public had been on ‘the increase for some time’. However, it was only in the immediate aftermath of the Matthew Report’s publication that he had become ‘the obvious choice’.75 O’Neill therefore was not an elegant anachronism, but his aristocratic and military background may still have made a crucial difference. The O’Neill family were substantial landowners and descendants of the High Kings of Ireland. O’Neill’s father was the first Westminster MP to die on the Western Front, while his maternal grandfather was a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. After leaving Eton, O’Neill eventually joined the Irish Guards and was wounded during Operation Market Garden.76 These impeccable credentials probably account for why the Governor contacted O’Neill ahead of his rivals. This gave O’Neill and the Chief Whip, his close ally Bill Craig, the chance to develop an irresistible momentum for his candidacy.77 Craig had served in the Royal Air Force as a Lancaster bomber rear-gunner and had risen rapidly through the ranks of the Unionist Party. However, his boyish charm and youthful enthusiasm barely masked his inexperience, impatience, and irritability. Craig shared O’Neill’s technocratic approach, but he preferred to steamroller through reform rather than secure it through more subtle arts.78
Brian Faulkner was the opposite: an inveterate intriguer and – in 1963 at least – a traditional Unionist. In July 1960, as Minister of Home Affairs, Faulkner had allowed 10,000 Orangemen to parade through the Catholic village of Dungiven. Two days of rioting had, predictably, followed.79 With a background in the region’s shirt-making industry, Faulkner became the spokesman for the interests of local factory owners. This put him at a disadvantage in the struggle to succeed Brookeborough: he was identified with the old man’s failed economic policy. A further obstacle was that he had spent the Second World War running his father’s factory in Northern Ireland, not fighting in Europe.80 John Andrews, O’Neill’s principal challenger and the son of Northern Ireland’s second Prime Minister, did possess the necessary qualifications of status and service. The difference between the contenders was O’Neill’s ‘constructive ruthlessness’.81 The new premier displayed this characteristic again a year later when dispatching Andrews to the safety of the Senate. O’Neill also benefited from the premature deaths of Maynard Sinclair and William Morrison May – both potential successors to Brookeborough.82
On the day after he became Prime Minister, O’Neill telephoned his former Private Secretary in America. ‘I want and need you at home,’ he told Ken Bloomfield.83 O’Neill’s patronage speeded Bloomfield’s inexorable rise. But the political master also owed much to his favourite civil servant. Although the term O’Neillism implies a personal leadership style, the Prime Minister heavily relied upon his advisers. Policy emerged not from Cabinet meetings, but from the long discussions that O’Neill regularly had with this reform-minded clique. According to Bloomfield, who served as ‘assistant and later deputy secretary to the cabinet’, this ‘team’ consisted of himself, ‘the cabinet secretary (at first Cecil Bateman and from 1965 Harold Black), [and] the prime minister’s private secretary Jim Malley’. Bloomfield’s ‘role was to be the word-spinner and ideas man’, which entailed ‘preparing the prime minister’s public utterances’. As this was the era of John F. Kennedy, the team were dubbed ‘the presidential aides’.84 It was also the age of Charles de Gaulle. At the beginning of the 1960s, in both France and Northern Ireland, a tiny elite of politicians and bureaucrats was pursuing economic and social modernisation.85
ANNIHILATING THE NORTHERN IRELAND LABOUR PARTY
In June 1963, over a century after his eight great-grandparents had left its shores, President Kennedy came to Ireland. When he arrived in Wexford town, a choir began singing a ballad celebrating the 1798 rebellion. The President joined the schoolboys for the second chorus and reduced even cynical journalists to tears.86 This may well have been sentimental, but Kennedy’s once-removed Irish patriotism had a political impact. As an up-and-coming Senator, he had supported a congressional resolution supporting Irish reunification. Nevertheless, O’Neill had hoped that the leader of the free world would find time to open the Giant’s Causeway Park. The invitation – made through the British government – was politely but firmly turned down.87 Despite this public snub, O’Neill continued to idolise Kennedy. He undertook a pilgrimage to Washington in March 1964 and offered his condolences to Jackie Kennedy – they then went on to discuss eighteenth-century Whig politics.88 O’Neill found inspiration in Kennedy’s teachings. At Yale in 1962, the President had told the students that ‘The fact of the matter is that most of the problems … that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems … that do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.’89 Six years later, the Prime Minister echoed this sentiment: ‘Democracy – let us face the fact – is better attuned to broad simple issues than to complex and highly technical decisions.’90
O’Neill was not the first Northern Irish politician to advocate a technocratic approach to the region’s economic problems. The NILP had been winning over Protestant working-class voters with the claim that it would succeed in cutting unemployment where the gentlemen amateurs of Brookeborough’s Cabinet had failed. On the other side of the Irish Sea, a similar campaign swept Labour into power. Harold Wilson, the Leader of the Opposition, had mocked Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s emergence: ‘In this ruthlessly competitive, scientific, technical, industrial age, a week of intrigues has produced a result based on family and hereditary connections.’91 Wilson, the grammar-school boy who had gone on to lecture at Oxford and to work as Beveridge’s research assistant, portrayed himself as a meritocratic, technocratic manager with a plan to get the country going again. Staking his claim to the political legacy of the martyred President, he called upon ‘the youth of Britain to storm the frontiers of knowledge, to bring back to Britain that surging adventurous self-confidence and sturdy self-respect which the Tories have almost submerged with their apathy and cynicism’. Nineteen sixty-four presented a ‘chance to change the face and future of Britain’.92 Nine months before, O’Neill had declared that his ‘task will be literally to transform the face of Ulster’.93 This Old Etonian’s mastery of the new language of politics rivalled that of Wirral Grammar School’s former head boy. O’Neill had stolen the NILP’s thunder.94
For O’Neill, planning was more about politics than economics. In late 1963, Tom Wilson, who had succeeded Harold Wilson as the economics fellow at University College, Oxford, was invited to prepare an economic plan for Northern Ireland. The Belfast-born professor may actually have invited himself.95 When the Prime Minister belatedly informed his Cabinet that Wilson had started work, economics was far from his thoughts. O’Neill instead stressed that Stormont ‘must not only be active, but be seen to be active’; the likely ‘improvement of confidence [as] had clearly resulted from the Whitaker Plan in the Republic [of Ireland]’; and the importance of ‘the Treasury, in considering
