discriminate against Roman Catholics they could do so [but] I would not take on the job’.49 Brooke pointed to the European Convention on Human Rights: minorities would now be better protected. The post- war trend towards internationalism would expose Stormont to much greater scrutiny. When Unionists thought of the defence of Northern Ireland, they had to think about Strasbourg and New York as well as the borderlands of Fermanagh and Tyrone.
The Unionist leadership was not merely seeking to present a positive image of Northern Ireland. Brooke and his liberal allies believed that the welfare state could serve as the foundation for a rapprochement with the Catholic community. Given that social and economic conditions were far superior to those in the South, the assumption grew that the minority population was starting to accept partition. By softening Stormont’s sectarianism, liberal Unionists hoped to aid this process. The dominant position of Protestants in Northern Ireland would be left untouched by this strategy. Catholics would receive a fairer share of public appointments, but the important posts would still be reserved for Protestants.50 Nevertheless, key features of the regime that had developed during the inter-war years would have been dismantled. Home Affairs Minister Brian Maginess, the most prominent moderniser, recommended the repeal of the Special Powers Act.51
The Brooke government’s liberal policies towards the minority made many Protestants uneasy. The complexities of the leadership’s stance had proved too sophisticated; the simplicity of the claim made by its critics that this was appeasement had won the argument. The rebellion over this issue proved much more difficult to contain than the earlier one over building the welfare state. With Northern Ireland threatened by a reinvigorated Irish nationalism and the election of the Labour government in Britain, Brooke had been able to emphasise the need for unity. In the intervening years, the danger to the state’s continued existence had receded. Following the South’s unilateral decision to leave the Commonwealth, Westminster had made reunification conditional upon the consent of Stormont. After this crisis, a more prudent government had taken office in Dublin and the Conservatives had returned to power in London. Protestants felt free to vote against official Unionist candidates without weakening partition. Eight Independent Unionists contested the 1953 parliamentary election on an anti-appeasement platform. Maginess’ less partisan approach to law-and-order matters came under the fiercest attack. During the celebrations to mark Elizabeth II’s coronation, the Home Affairs Minister and the police had clamped down on provocative displays of the Union flag. The Independents portrayed this sensible desire to keep the peace as a capitulation to Republicanism. Their campaign helped to reduce the official Unionist vote by about 37,000 in contested constituencies. At the beginning of 1954, the Independents pressed home their advantage by organising a massive loyalist meeting. This gathering passed a symbolic vote of no confidence in the government and its appeasement policies. Showing his customary pragmatism, the Prime Minister, who had been made Viscount Brookeborough in 1952, opted to regain his lost support and to retreat from a more inclusive Unionism. The government passed the 1954 Flags and Emblems Act, requiring the police to protect the display of the Union flag in all circumstances and to remove the Irish tricolour when it threatened a breach of the peace.52
The Act has frequently been cited as evidence that Northern Ireland was a police state.53 However, an almost identical law had been added to West Germany’s penal code a few years earlier.54 Indeed, the Federal Republic shared many of Stormont’s supposedly undemocratic features – justified by the threat posed by the other half of the country.55 The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) remained in sole power from the creation of West Germany until 1966; Unionism’s political hegemony lasted from partition until 1972.56 To their enemies, Northern Ireland was the ‘Orange state’ and the Federal Republic was the ‘CDU state’.57 Admittedly, the Christian Democratic stranglehold on the Bundestag was tempered by West Germany’s federal structure. With the Social Democratic Party holding office in several Länder, their voters did not feel the same estrangement from the state that Northern Ireland’s Catholics did. Nevertheless, at a federal level, the CDU’s position appeared impregnable: in 1957, more than half of all the votes cast went to the party.58 Such ‘dominant party systems’ were so common in Western Europe at this time that Raymond Aron lectured on the phenomenon at the University of Paris. ‘It is not a one-party system,’ he explained. ‘Opposition parties exist, and intellectual and personal freedoms are respected. But one party has an overwhelming majority, and the opposition parties are so divided that no-one can see any possibility of the majority party being replaced in power.’59 Following the advent of the Cold War, the French Communist Party, which enjoyed the allegiance of nearly one-quarter of the electorate, had been actively excluded from government. This was hardly surprising as the Communists were committed to the revolutionary transformation of France – albeit after taking power through the ballot box instead of armed insurrection.60 Moreover, as the veteran Socialist Léon Blum recognised, the Communists were a ‘foreign nationalist party’.61 Their ultimate allegiance was to the Soviet Union, not France. Northern Ireland’s Catholic parties occupied a comparable position: effectively barred from power, supported by a substantial minority of the population, pledged to overthrow the constitution, and loyal to a political entity beyond the territorial boundaries of the state.62
CHANGING THE FACE OF ULSTER
In August 1962, more than 10,000 workers marched through the streets of Belfast in protest at plans to shut down the city’s aircraft factory. At the head of the march were Stormont MPs from the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) and the Nationalist Party. Unionism’s fears had seemingly been made flesh: part of the Protestant proletariat had made common cause with its Catholic counterpart.63 Previously, when the problem of unemployment had started to undermine Unionist control, Stormont had turned to Westminster for aid. As Northern Ireland’s strategic importance and the IRA threat diminished, however, such appeals lost their potency. By the beginning of the 1960s, Whitehall civil servants had come to regard the septuagenarian Brookeborough as an anachronism.64 In October 1962, a working party of Northern Irish and British officials published a report that favoured a different economic policy.65 The Derry Journal delighted in outlining the political implications of this assessment: ‘the report amounts to a total rejection by the British Government of the requests for assistance made by Lord Brookeborough on his many futile visits to London’. ‘In any other democracy,’ the editorial concluded, ‘the Government’s resignation would already have been tendered.’66 Within six months, Brookeborough had indeed left office – diplomatically citing ill health rather than the personal humiliation of the working party’s findings. According to Lord Wakehurst, Northern Ireland’s Governor, Brookeborough said that ‘he could step down without loss of face’.67 During the final years of the Brookeborough premiership, the Northern Irish civil service became frustrated at the failure to build upon the success of post-war reconstruction. When a protracted dispute with Belfast Corporation over whether or not to extend the city’s boundary offered an opportunity to regain lost momentum, the Stormont administration eagerly grasped its chance. In March 1960, the Ministry of Health and Local Government invited Sir Robert Matthew, Edinburgh University’s first Professor of Architecture, to select a few sites outside the city on which housing estates could be built. Matthew instead agreed to draw up a development plan – originally for the greater Belfast region, but ultimately for the whole of Northern Ireland. His report recommended that suburban sprawl should be halted by surrounding Belfast with ‘Greenscape’, creating a ‘substantial new Regional Centre’, designating a number of ‘centres for development’, and improving the transport network.68 The Belfast Regional Plan was published four months after the working party on unemployment had rejected Brookeborough’s policies. The Matthew Report mapped out a different road for Northern Ireland: what a senior official at the ministry later described as ‘the path of a positive, activist approach to the physical and economic problems of the province’.69 Britain was already travelling along the road of regional planning – away from the over-heating south-east of England to the North, Scotland, and Wales. By adopting and adapting the new Whitehall vogue, the Stormont civil service hoped that this road and the resources it would bring would come to Northern Ireland.70
The political benefits of Stormont’s conversion to planning were reaped by Brookeborough’s successor, Terence O’Neill. As Finance Minister since 1956, he had
