that reunification would require the consent of the Stormont Parliament: the Ireland Act of 1949. The Unionists quickly called an election to exploit their stronger constitutional position and the South’s republican rhetoric. For the APL, the South’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth and the passage of the Ireland Act ended the hopes of progress that had inspired the new departure. Support for the APL declined, divisions within Nationalism re-emerged, and Republicans exploited the polarised political climate to reassert themselves.43 McAteer had witnessed at first hand confidence give way to collapse; the experience was to leave its mark upon him.
THE PROBLEM OF OURSELVES
In December 1956, the IRA began ‘Operation Harvest’. McAteer lamented the failure of constitutionalism and the pointless waste of life. ‘The present outbreak would be quelled for a time,’ he told the Department of External Affairs, ‘only to recur again in five or ten years.’ McAteer feared that Catholic politics had become trapped in a endlessly repeating cycle: the IRA campaign would be abandoned; a peaceful approach to the Northern Ireland problem would be developed; expectations of change would be raised to unrealistic levels; enthusiasm would fade away as the failure of the strategy became obvious; the resulting disenchantment would be exploited by Republicanism to renew the armed struggle. McAteer, however, found some comfort in rumours that certain leading Unionists had reached the same wearied conclusion. These Unionists had supposedly recognised that IRA violence was a product of the ‘secondary aspects of partition’ – anti-Catholic discrimination. McAteer recommended that the matter should be raised with the British. Instead, the proposal was merely absorbed into Dublin’s wider policy reappraisal.44
Although McAteer pictured a gloomy future for Nationalism, he was not prepared to give up on the party. He battled against a return to the ineffectiveness that had stamped the period before the APL. As a statement of intent, McAteer attacked Derry’s Nationalist MP – a symbol of the old order. He represented the Catholics of the second city, yet he usually abstained from attending Parliament and remained aloof from his constituents. McAteer challenged for the seat in the 1953 election, promising to use Stormont as a platform to expose Unionist abuses. Fighting alongside McAteer was James Doherty, his electoral agent. The Derry businessmen and Londonderry Corporation councillor had worked closely with McAteer in the APL.45 At an election rally, Doherty urged the crowd to support ‘the vigorous policy carried out by McAteer and his colleagues’.46 Derry duly elected McAteer to represent the Foyle division at Stormont.
At times, however, McAteer seemed to have joined the old guard of the party. Following the 1956 Stormont election he successfully blocked an attempt to bring together all the Catholic parliamentarians. He would not unite with Belfast’s various Labour groupings, nor would he support this new party becoming the Official Opposition. Three years later, McAteer again rebuffed agitation for Nationalism to adopt this status. He was not ready to recognise the legitimacy of the Northern state. In 1958, McAteer similarly resisted pressure from the Catholic Social Study conference for greater engagement with Stormont.47 McAteer, writing in the Sunday Independent, pleaded with readers to ‘spare a little pity for an uncouth Northern Nationalist so far removed from the genteel tinkling of intellectual coffee cups in the purified air of Garron Tower’.48
McAteer was himself opposed in the Stormont elections of 1958 and 1962 by a candidate who urged Derry’s Catholics to break with the past. The Independent Labour challenger claimed that the Nationalist MP’s ‘policy throughout his public life had produced nothing in the way of improvement of standards of living’. It was ‘one of negative denunciation without constructive effort’.49 The most glaring example of this was the Nationalist Party’s decision to welcome the closure of the local naval base in 1958: Doherty had announced that ‘any Irishman who said he was sorry to see “occupying forces” leave would be a renegade’. There were many loyal Irishmen, however, who were angry that their representatives were welcoming the loss of almost 4,000 jobs.50 For Northern Catholics, economic and social issues mattered as much as political principles. Nationalism had failed to recognise how aspirations and concerns had changed since 1945.
West Germany’s Social Democrats found themselves in the same position during the 1950s. In the first years of peace, the party naively believed that the occupying powers would allow a united and neutral Germany to be built on the ruins of the Third Reich. The Social Democrats were confident that they would be the natural party of government in the new Germany. The first Federal Republic elections in 1949 were fought on a platform of nationalisation, unification, and neutrality. The party lost. The years that followed saw the ‘economic miracle’, the start of European integration, and West Germany joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). While everything around them had changed, the Social Democrats had stayed the same – with predictable results in the elections of 1953 and 1957. At the Bad Godesberg congress of 1959, the party finally accepted that it would be forever condemned to opposition unless it accommodated itself to the post-war world. Henceforth, the Social Democratic Party would be a Volkspartei – a ‘people’s party’ – rather than an exclusively working-class party. Dropping the formal commitment to Marxism was the symbol of this transformation.51
Nationalists, however, could only follow the Social Democrats part way along this road. Social Democrats could win West German voters away from the Christian Democrats; Nationalists could not win Protestant voters away from the Unionists. Each election in Northern Ireland was effectively two parallel elections. Nationalists campaigned to increase their share of the Catholic vote while Unionists campaigned to increase their share of the Protestant vote. Nationalists needed to adapt to the post-war era not to defeat the Unionists, but to remain the political leaders of the Catholic community.
During the same year that West German socialists recognised the new political realities, similar voices were heard within Northern Ireland’s Catholic community. Michael McKeown wrote a Hibernia article in 1959 suggesting that ‘nationally-minded people’ should organise themselves into a more professional and pragmatic political party. They then ‘might hope to secure some reforms within the Northern system’. Among those intrigued by what McKeown called this ‘appallingly ingenuous’ appeal was James Scott, a lecturer at Queen’s University. As a convert, Scott understood Catholicism and Irish nationalism differently from people ‘nurtured in those cradles’. He felt that Northern Catholics needed to get involved in public life as a first step towards persuading Protestants that their future lay with a united Ireland. Scott’s house became the meeting place for a wide array of politically active individuals. This circle developed into National Unity, which can probably be best described as a part-time Irish nationalist think-tank.52 The Special Branch investigation into the new organisation highlighted National Unity’s commitment to achieving unity through consent, to co-operating with ‘all elected representatives of the National people’, to reassuring Protestants, and to non-violent methods. The RUC concluded that ‘there would not appear to be anything of a subversive nature attached to it’.53
From a Nationalist perspective, however, the group was subversive. Scott attempted to reassure McAteer that it merely wished to serve ‘as a link between all people who believe in a united Ireland’. But the Nationalist MP paid rather more attention to National Unity’s attacks on his party made at a meeting in Derry and its move into electoral politics.54 Fears that the group intended to assume the political leadership of the minority community were to reach their peak in April 1964. National Unity invited all Catholic politicians and other interested parties to a convention in Maghery to discuss forming an umbrella body to co-ordinate future political activity. The result was the National Political Front. A spokesman for the independent candidates in the Dungannon local elections described it as the ‘something new’ that was ‘needed’ to take the ‘place’ of the ‘dying’ Nationalist Party.55 McAteer was therefore not too disappointed when splits – a familiar problem for Irish nationalist organisations – led to the Front’s rapid demise.56 He told the press that Nationalist MPs had ‘found it impossible to abdicate our position as elected representatives in favour of people who have no claim to representation whatsoever’.57
McAteer was undermining attempts to unite all
