it would have been quite impossible, even with his immense charm, for him to have been a minister in London.146
What O’Neill failed to grasp was that the qualities needed to run a big Whitehall department were not necessarily those needed to govern Northern Ireland and lead the Unionist Party. When the future viscount began to become involved in politics, he claimed that he knew ‘what is being thought by the people here’.147 As the head of a government and a party that had to be responsive to the popular mood, Brookeborough’s common touch proved invaluable. By contrast, as a senior civil servant later observed, O’Neill ‘liked politics as an art’ and ‘didn’t find it easy to meet the ordinary middle-class people’.148 With the bloody and battered year of 1966 limping into the autumn, this weakness would almost cost him the premiership.
During September 1966, backbenchers were asked to sign a document calling for O’Neill’s resignation.149 Paisley had weakened the Prime Minister’s position, but the Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church was one concern among many in the party. O’Neill’s modernisation strategy had stripped local authorities of some of their jealously guarded functions. This loss of patronage had damaged the clientelism upon which Northern Irish politics was largely based.150 Unionists from the West of the province were unhappy that development had been concentrated in the greater Belfast region. Liberals were disappointed by the absence of ambitious reform. Traditionalists were dismayed by the North–South summit and the Easter Rising commemorations. What united this disparate discontent was a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with O’Neill’s detached, presidential style.151
The Prime Minister made clear to the rebels that this would not be a bloodless coup. He counter-attacked in the media as well as in meetings of the parliamentary party and local associations. He disingenuously associated the rebellion with Paisley and exploited internal party divisions. Faulkner calculated that the moment was not right and declined to offer himself as an alternative leader. The revolt subsequently lost all momentum. Having overwhelmingly won a vote of confidence, O’Neill recognised the need to appease his critics. Bill Craig, who headed the Ministry of Development that had removed responsibilities from local government and neglected the West, was demoted to Home Affairs.152 A high-level civil servant maintained: ‘That’s when Craig first got the idea that he could be a rebel himself.’ ‘In fact, [Chief Whip] Jimmy Chichester-Clark … found Bill drunk. And Bill said, “Well, if Faulkner can be a rebel I’ll get to the right of Faulkner, so”.’153 The internal revolt and the loss of a key ally darkened further O’Neill’s pessimistic disposition. Assessing the dying year in a letter to Bloomfield, he observed that at the end of September he could not fully appreciate his supposedly much stronger position after the Stormont election. ‘My forecast for 1967’, he concluded, ‘is that it will be much worse than 1966.’154
The rebellion persuaded O’Neill to start to base his premiership upon appeals to a public opinion that he believed was substantially more liberal than official Unionism. O’Neill had declared in response to 1966’s loyalist violence and Republican triumphalism that ‘Those who seek by word or deed to incite hatred and widen divisions in the community can be crushed by the universal disapprobation and distaste of decent people’. With his references to ‘the steady ground-swell of moderation’ and the ‘dignified expression of moderate opinion’, O’Neill appeared to embrace Sayers’ contention that there was an expanding middle ground.155 Following the party revolt, the Prime Minister actively sought to cultivate this emerging moderate consensus.156 This became the ‘Programme to Enlist the People’ (PEP): an attempt to ‘get away from jargon and bureaucratic complications, and to tell the average Ulsterman what “building the new Ulster” actually means’.157 O’Neill outlined his full ambitions for PEP to the North Antrim Unionist Association:
Our work is not a dreary effort of plans and blue-prints and statistics. Forget jargon words like ‘infrastructure’ or ‘community relations’. Rather keep before your eyes a vision of an Ulster which – if we will and work for it – can be … An Ulster in which our economic growth will keep pace with a growing population, providing satisfying and useful work for all … an Ulster in which these material benefits will create such a spirit that our constitutional position will cease to be an issue in politics.158
As well as helping to bridge the gulf between ‘us’, the people, and ‘them’, the government, PEP was seen as a way of providing a space in which the two communities could co-operate to achieve shared goals.159 O’Neill hoped that PEP would encourage ‘youth organisations’, ‘Chambers of Commerce’, ‘Rotary Clubs’, and ‘the Churches’ to ‘consider working together in some field of public benefit’.160 ‘Is it, for instance, too visionary’, he asked the Belfast Irish Association, ‘to look forward to Protestant young people helping to re-decorate a Youth Club in Andersontown, or a young Catholic reading to a bed-ridden old lady on the Shankill Road? The firmest links can only be forged at the basic level of ordinary, warm, human contact.’161 PEP was not, therefore, a complete retreat from O’Neill’s laissez-faire approach to community relations: he was seeking to build a structure that would support pre-existing trends.162
O’Neill offered the most coherent analysis of the thinking behind PEP at a June 1968 conference on community work. In the opening speech, he claimed that the complexity of the modern state ‘accounts for much of the detachment, the “couldn’t care less” approach … which we see here and everywhere else’. ‘Alienation of government from the governed,’ continued the Prime Minister, ‘of town from country, of employer from working people – these are some of the chief ills of our age.’163 This instant analysis of the causes of the global revolt of 1968 bears comparison with those offered by some of Europe’s greatest minds. Within a few short months, however, O’Neill would no longer be in a position to deliver lectures on how the Western world could overcome alienation.
Narrowing his focus to Northern Ireland, O’Neill highlighted the specific difficulties rapid change posed in a society of ‘very fixed sympathies’ and in a political system ‘accustomed to saying “We are attacked; we must defend ourselves.”’ In its ‘modest’ attempt ‘to tackle some of those problems’, PEP based itself in the ‘local community, which people could know and understand’, and ‘sought to involve as many diverse interests as possible in some form of active work in the interests of the community’. For O’Neill, ‘civic spirit’ constituted the ‘building blocks out of which some wider sense of loyalty and involvement might one day be constructed’.164 Catholics would gradually be assimilated, a process that would in turn encourage Protestants to abandon their mistrust. Nationalism, as well as what O’Neill regarded as the coarser aspects of Unionism, would wither away to reveal a society comparable with Britain or Canada. While visiting North America in the spring of 1968, he was surprised to discover that the Grand Master of the Newfoundland Orange Order regularly took sick Catholics to mass. ‘I have often thought,’ O’Neill wrote in his autobiography, ‘that if only the Order in Ulster had developed in the same way as the Order in Newfoundland then today’s troubles might never have taken place.’165
PEP was supplemented by efforts to redress some substantive Catholic grievances. This was a gradual process that never went further than what the parliamentary party and the wider Unionist movement would accept. O’Neill had no intention of provoking another rebellion against his leadership. Indeed, the Prime Minister and key members of the Cabinet agreed in March 1967 that ‘there would be further consultations with representatives of the Orange Institution before final decisions were made’.166
‘Of all the proven injustices that exist in the Six Counties,’ commented the Derry Journal in May 1963, ‘none is more glaring than the manner in which the Mater Hospital is treated by the Stormont Government.’167 At the hospital’s 1966 prize-giving ceremony, the Bishop of Down and Connor noted the O’Neill administration’s professed good intentions towards the Catholic community and suggested that the Mater was ‘the place where it should be easy to begin to do something’.168 Protestant opinion, which was probably more influential with the Prime Minister, similarly favoured state aid for this hospital, which had opted
