What marked Northern Ireland out from the rest of Europe was not the stand-off between a Protestant state and a Catholic counter-society. When Stormont’s Education Minister spoke of ‘breaking clerical control’ and the Bishop of Down and Connor warned of the threat posed by ‘anti-Catholic forces’ to Church schools, they were echoing their counterparts in the Europe of a previous generation.27 Neither did Northern Ireland’s minority problem set it apart. Over the centuries, Europe had developed into a maddening mosaic of religious and ethnic groups. Beginning in 1914, however, the pieces that made up the old Europe were removed and rearranged. Three decades that witnessed total war, brutal occupations, the fall of empires, the emergence of new states, the constant redrawing of borders, the forced relocation of entire peoples, and murder on an industrial scale simplified the patterns on the map.28 Northern Ireland was a product of this process, but it had escaped the final and worst phase. Elsewhere in Europe, Hitler and Stalin had found inhuman solutions to human problems. What therefore marked Northern Ireland out from the rest of Europe was that these problems survived into the post-war era.
WE ARE VERY MUCH ON OUR OWN HERE
In 1936, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) raided the Derry home of the McAteer family. The police officers found weapons hidden in the house and arrested the male members of the family on arms charges. Hugh McAteer, one of the sons, confessed to the crime. He received a heavy prison sentence, but his father and two brothers were set free. Hugh McAteer would subsequently rise to the highest ranks of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Although Eddie McAteer always respected his brother and shared his commitment to Irish unity, he never believed that the armed struggle would end partition.29 Eddie McAteer chose constitutional nationalism over militant nationalism. The many disappointments he endured in the course of his long political career made him cynical, yet he never came to regret this decision.
At the 1968 Nationalist Party conference, McAteer used the leader’s speech to outline his pragmatic Irish nationalism. He implored delegates to ‘be realistic’: ‘try to remember that we are entrapped minority’ and that ‘there is not much good in looking for help from overseas, from America, or indeed, I regret to say, from our own fellow countrymen.’ ‘My feeling’, the leader confided to the party faithful, ‘is that we are very much on our own here in the North of Ireland.’ Consequently, in McAteer’s opinion, ‘the greatest problem that lies before us at the present moment is the problem of ourselves’. Nationalism suffered from ‘too many splits’, which encouraged loose co-operation rather than a disciplined party structure. The party was at times divided and directionless because it had been condemned to permanent opposition. Unionist domination ensured that reforms – if they were to come at all – would have to be conceded by Stormont. McAteer, however, feared that the desired changes would not come. He suspected that ‘the way to power and advancement in the Unionist Party is by kicking the Nationalist people’.30
This lecture on Nationalism’s inherent weaknesses was directed at the ‘impatient ones’ inside the conference hall. McAteer was speaking from personal experience: he, too, had once been a young man in a hurry. On the eve of the D-Day landings, Seán Mac Entee, a leading figure within the de Valera government, had attacked the Nationalist Party for condemning its supporters to ‘political futility for 22 years’.31 As war slowly gave way to peace, Europeans were determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 1920s and, above all, the 1930s. They wanted to build a new and better world in the post-war era. McAteer was among those Nationalists who believed that the moment had come to revitalise the party and reunify Ireland. Labour’s election victory had fuelled these hopes. Nationalists told themselves that the British Labour movement had sympathised with their cause in the past. Indeed, a number of backbench Labour MPs headed by Geoffrey Bing had honoured that tradition, in November 1945, by forming a pressure group called the Friends of Ireland. The ascendancy of America was also regarded as an opportunity. Nationalists deluded themselves that the Irish diaspora could be mobilised and Washington made to right English wrongs.32 With imperialism in retreat, Nationalists became convinced that the world was going their way. McAteer invoked ‘the mighty spirit of the late Mahatma’ when he proposed a ‘new campaign’ of ‘non-cooperation, no violence’. In his Irish Action pamphlet, McAteer sketched out ways to make ‘local misgovernment’ ‘impossible’: these ranged from delaying tax payments to occupying public buildings.33 The Catholic community, however, was not yet ready to embrace civil disobedience.
The ten MPs returned to the Northern Irish Parliament in 1945 decided to set up the Anti-Partition League (APL). It sought to unite all Nationalists around a common platform, fight winnable Stormont and Westminster seats, and make the party more accountable to its supporters. In 1947, the APL co-operated with the Friends of Ireland’s fruitless efforts to stop the passage of legislation that relaxed some of the restrictions imposed upon Stormont by the Government of Ireland Act. The parliamentary debate, however, did provide a rare opportunity to criticise the Unionist regime.34 The APL also publicised perceived injustices through a series of pamphlets. The most notable of these, Mutilation of a Nation, was written by Cahir Healy, who entered politics as a founding member of Sinn Féin and ended up as a Nationalist MP. These efforts to attack partition in print were supported and supplemented by the Southern political parties. In 1949, they came together to create the Mansion House Committee to support Nationalist candidates in the Stormont election.35 Its publications became the raw material for The Indivisible Island. As well as powerfully restating the traditional Irish nationalist reading of history, this book presented exposures of gerrymandering and of discrimination in public employment.36 But all these labours were in vain.
As frustration at the APL’s lack of success mounted, McAteer’s branch chose to march through Derry in defiance of Stormont’s bans. Conflicts over the right to march through areas identified with the other community had marked the region since the nineteenth century. When McAteer had discussed in Irish Action the possibility of marching through Protestant territory, he had maintained that the ‘important thing’ would be to ‘be seen by foreign observers’.37 On St Patrick’s Day 1951, McAteer and a small number of APL members attempted to parade with the Irish tricolour through the walled city. Although the march itself was legal, the organisers had consciously violated the law by publicly displaying the Republican flag. The marchers succeeded in provoking the police, which encouraged the local APL branch to plan a larger protest for the following year. This demonstration was banned and baton-charged. In the opinion of many who were present on both occasions, the violence that ensued was comparable to that unleashed on 5 October 1968. The difference between the two marches was that one was seen by foreign observers on television and the other was not.38
This was one of the last in a sequence of disappointments that fatally undermined the APL. In September 1951, the American House of Representatives voted against a resolution calling for an all-Ireland plebiscite on partition.39 At the height of the Cold War, the American political establishment was reluctant to damage its alliance with Britain. Strategic concerns also superseded Labour’s sympathy with Irish nationalism. The North’s commitment during the Second World War – in sharp contrast to Southern neutrality – had transformed the attitude of many Labour ministers. Herbert Morrison, while limited to influence rather than direct involvement, was the champion of the Unionist cause.40 In 1946, Morrison produced a memorandum for the Cabinet based upon private visits to both Irish states. He recommended that partition should be maintained.41 The Friends of Ireland not only proved impotent when confronted with the opposition of the party leadership, but also disagreed with the APL over the solution to the Irish question. The Friends of Ireland looked at the other island through British eyes. The 1950 Tribune pamphlet, John Bull’s Other Island, assumed that class rather than communal divisions lay behind discrimination in Northern Ireland. The best way of achieving unity, therefore, was for the different Irish Labour parties to take office on both sides of the border.42
Domestic politics similarly dominated the calculations of the Southern parties. Following a long period of Fianna Fáil rule, politics had become more competitive. The parties sought to gain an advantage over their rivals by parading their respective republican credentials. This climaxed in September 1948 when the interparty
