wearing Special Constabulary uniforms did murder Catholics. But the battle for the North did not degenerate into a full-scale communal conflict. Indeed, it was the new Southern state that descended into civil war following the IRA split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, which had established the Irish Free State. Both factions, however, remained allies in the North. Brooke, County Commandant of the Fermanagh Special Constabulary, led an unsuccessful amphibious assault on the village of Belleek, which had been occupied by IRA irregulars with the help of pro-Treaty forces at the end of May 1922. Although the Belfast government had to turn to the British army to recover the village for the empire, the IRA’s Northern campaign was ultimately defeated by the resistance of the Special Constabulary. When the new Irish Free State army moved against the anti-Treaty IRA in June 1922, incursions across the border ended and Northern volunteers flocked south to fight.7 The immediate threat to the existence of Northern Ireland faded away.
The Special Constabulary not only guarded against the irredentist South, but also against perfidious Albion. With Britain desperately searching for a way out of the Irish bog, Ulster started to lose its friends. The Special Constabulary reduced the North’s dependence upon its doubtful ally. However, the formation of the force did not make the Protestant community master of its own fate. Self-determination required self-government – something that the Unionist population lacked as the crisis came to a head. During the Anglo- Irish truce, which began in July 1921, the British had the Special Constabulary stand down. The IRA’s observance of the truce was not so strict.8 In Fermanagh, volunteers drilled, enforced the economic boycott of Belfast, carried out kidnappings, and attacked police barracks.9 For the British, securing a deal with Sinn Féin mattered more than the security of Northern Ireland. The Unionists therefore were relieved to assume responsibility for law and order under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act at the end of 1921 – just before the IRA’s spring offensive. The Act established the devolved institutions of government, the division of responsibilities between the British and Northern Irish parliaments, the legal requirement for the regime to exercise its legislative and executive powers free from discrimination, and Westminster’s supreme authority. Despite its beginnings as a movement that defended direct rule from Westminster, Unionism had come to embrace devolution as a defence against being abandoned by London. As Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader at the time, explained in the House of Commons debate on the legislation, ‘you cannot knock Parliaments up and down as you do a ball, and, once you have planted them there, you cannot get rid of them.’10 By the summer of 1922, Northern Ireland had become a political fact.
Northern Ireland’s difficult birth marked the state and its inhabitants. A senior British civil servant who was assigned to Belfast in June 1922 was reminded of a previous posting to the Baltic states: ‘The Protestant community of the North feels that it is an outpost of civilisation set precariously on the frontiers of Bolshevism.’ The victorious but embattled unionists believed that they had been ‘misunderstood’ and ‘betrayed’ by Britain.11 The long-standing alliance between Ulster Unionism and the British Conservative Party had faltered, while the cross-class alliance of Protestants had held firm. In March 1922, under pressure from London and under attack from Dublin, the Northern Irish government had agreed that Belfast’s mixed districts should be policed by a force made up of equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics. As the South turned in on itself and Britain turned away from Ireland, the need to build a non-sectarian state disappeared. Without allies to please and enemies to appease, the Unionist leadership was left only with supporters to indulge. The power compromise between the party elite and its grass-roots was continually being renegotiated. Extreme Protestants successfully pushed for the law to be strictly enforced against Catholic offenders and to be applied with discretion when loyalists were accused of criminal acts.12 Plans to establish a secular public education system fell foul of the Churches. Integration gave way to segregation: Protestants attended state schools while Catholics were catered for by the voluntary sector. Unionist associations campaigned for changes to the structure of local government that would allow them to take control of councils previously held by Irish Nationalists.13 In Fermanagh, the abolition of proportional representation and the redrawing of boundaries ensured that when the 1924 local elections were held a county with a Catholic majority returned a Unionist council. Brooke represented the new ward of Brookeborough.14 The safeguards for minorities contained in the Government of Ireland Act proved no more effective than similar provisions in the treaties of recognition concluded between the Allies and the new states of central Europe. Britain had more pressing concerns than protecting minorities.15
By pandering to Protestants, the Northern Irish government further alienated Catholics from the new state. But peace could never have brought reconciliation. The two communities could not forget the riots, the shipyard expulsions, the burning houses, the bombings, the kidnappings and the assassinations. As the violence receded, the conflict mindset persisted in the form of conspiracy theories. They described a society marked by a binary divide between patriots and a diverse – often incongruous – collection of traitors.16
In Bavaria, the Right portrayed the short-lived Soviet as a Jewish– Bolshevik conspiracy that had stabbed the Germany army in the back and unleashed a reign of red terror. This myth was embraced by a Bohemian corporal serving with the Munich garrison: Adolf Hitler.17
In Northern Ireland the unionist population believed that the global conspiracy was being orchestrated by the Vatican, not the Kremlin. A Catholic civil servant ‘learned’ that his Protestant colleagues were convinced that he was ‘subject to malevolent direction by black-robed priests to whom Rome had entrusted its master plan for world domination’.18
Conspiracy theories disfigured Northern life. They even gripped the mind of the otherwise phlegmatic Brooke. On 12 July 1933, the anniversary of the Protestant William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne, Brooke warned that Northern Ireland was being undermined by its enemies. The new MP for Linaskea explained: ‘There was a definite plot to overpower the vote of unionists in the north. He would appeal to loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ protestant lads and lassies … catholics … had got too many appointments for men who were really out to cut their throats if opportunity arose.’19 Brooke was never allowed to forget these comments. When he claimed that ‘his own view was that a man’s religion was his own affair’ during a 1967 television interview, the Derry Journal reminded its readers that this was the man who had once boasted that ‘he had not a Roman Catholic about his place’.20 But Brooke’s plot was not a figment of a rabidly sectarian imagination. In June 1933, the Unionists had lost the previously safe council ward of Linaskea to an independent farmers’ candidate. Brooke blamed the defeat upon the way that the rural depression was being exploited to weaken Unionism’s cross-class alliance and upon the ‘peaceful penetration’ of Southern workers. There was no doubt in his mind that the new government in Dublin was behind both these threats. Eamon de Valera, one of the leaders of the Irish revolution, and Fianna Fáil, the successor to the Sinn Féin faction that had rejected the Treaty, had taken office in 1932 promising to end partition. A slight increase in Catholic numbers and the defection of part of the Protestant vote to independent candidates would deliver Fermanagh to de Valera. Brooke’s speech was warning the unionist people to stand firm and remain vigilant against Irish nationalism.21
Conspiracy theories, therefore, were not irrational: they constituted the dark reflection of competing visions of the future. Conspiracy theories gave expression to anxieties and reduced them to order. This was implicitly acknowledged by Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, when he declared that the devolved Parliament should contain ‘men who are for the Union on the one hand or who are against it and want to go into a Dublin Parliament on the other’.22 Unionists had no illusions about what the reunification of the island would bring. The Southern state’s 1937 constitution paradoxically reflected a Catholic worldview while purporting to speak for a thirty-two-county Ireland that included two million Protestants.23 ‘One person’s Utopia usually means another person’s hell,’ a former IRA volunteer later observed.24
The unending struggle over the existence of the Northern Irish state deeply affected those charged with running it: the civil servants. When
