Dr Martin ManserghMartin Mansergh analyses Britain’s reasons for retaining their hold on Northern Ireland
The price of Irish independence or limited self-government nearly a century ago was partition. While undesirable in any circumstances, partition would have been more tolerable, if there had been only small minorities either side of the border. Instead, Ulster unionists were allowed to incorporate a substantial Catholic and nationalist minority in order to maximise the number of Protestants and unionists within Northern Ireland without destabilising it.
This meant incorporating six Ulster counties, rather than four or nine. The policy of the Northern Ireland (NI) Government in the 1930s, rarely explicit but occasionally blurted out, was not just to keep down the Catholic population at close to a third of the whole, but to discourage it from staying.
When my father, Nicholas Mansergh, a Tipperary Protestant and young political scientist at Oxford, was researching his book The Government of Northern Ireland: A Study in Devolution, he interviewed at the Ulster Club on April 16, 1936 the Minister for Labour, J.M. Andrews, later Prime Minister and the Attorney General, Anthony Babington. His unpublished notes record: “Both regarded diminishing no. of R.Cs with undisguised satisfaction. A. confident that they would be ‘progressively eliminated’ – Babington hopeful, but a trifle anxious.”
The long-term consequence of 50 years unchecked majority rule was 30 years of instability and conflict (with some overlap at the end), till a basis was found in negotiation for conflict to cease and for Northern Ireland within a wider set of relationships to be run on a basis broadly acceptable across the community.
An interesting book recently published, which is not light reading, contains the reflections of some leading British and Northern Ireland civil servants involved in peace negotiations. It is edited by Graham Spencer of Portsmouth University and called The British and Peace in Northern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
It is not to detract from the indispensable role, responsibility and skills of political leaders to say that most of the detailed background work and drafting and much of the strategic vision in any negotiation comes from civil service advisors, mainly non-political, often with long experience of the subject. Some insights from the book may be of interest. Names are given without titles.
Kenneth Bloomfield, later head of the NI Civil Service, worked in the cabinet office at Stormont, and acknowledges his role in drafting Captain Terence O’Neill’s prime ministerial broadcast in April 1969, known as ‘Ulster at the crossroads’, a last-minute plea for restraint amidst rapidly rising tensions.
Bloomfield comments on its weaknesses: “It offered no specific further reform within the existing majoritarian system, and no better deal than greater fairness within a state in which unionism would hold all ultimate power.”
Twenty-one years later, after being furious at the exclusion of NI civil servants from discussions on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the Irish Government an input into NI policy making, he drafted the statement in Peter Brooke’s speech in 1990, where he declared that “Britain had no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”.
Foundation stone
This was to form a foundation stone of the peace process and be incorporated in the key paragraph of the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993. Interestingly, it followed a chance discussion between John Hume and Ken Bloomfield in a shared taxi. According to the late Fr Reid, such a statement had been contemplated earlier.
Self-evidently, given large financial transfers to Northern Ireland, which continue today, Britain has no selfish economic interest in remaining. However, as David Hill, a senior NIO official in the 1990s points out, there has been no economic incentive for unionists to consider Irish unity, and the incapacity of the Irish State to replace British transfers remains a substantial disincentive.
A reduction in NI’s transfer and social welfare dependency and the establishment of a more dynamic social market economy would make for real constitutional choice, but short-term electoral rivalry and social democratic orientation pull nationalist parties in the opposite direction.
This is one of many instances, where those who will the end baulk at the means. Making a stand for the welfare state and the National Health Service comes well ahead of the distant goal of unity.
In the Gorbachev era, and at the end of the cold war, the strategic reasons for Britain holding on to Northern Ireland, independent of what a majority of its inhabitants wanted, as explained in the words of former British cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong “We didn’t want the Irish Government controlling that channel between Belfast and the ports in the North”, became obsolete.
The missing adjective between ‘strategic’ and ‘economic’ was ‘political’, and the British in the Downing Street Declaration declined to renounce any “selfish political interest” in Northern Ireland.
John Holmes, who managed in No.10 the transition between John Major and Tony Blair, drafted much of Blair’s first Belfast speech as Prime Minister in May 2007, in which he stated that he did not expect to see Northern Ireland as anything but part of the UK in the lifetime of even the youngest person.
Holmes comments that Blair “had absolutely no wish or intention to reduce the size of the UK, and what this meant for the country’s role and influence in the world – for example, he hated having to go to Hong Kong a few weeks later to witness the Chinese takeover”.
There has long been a fond illusion in many quarters here that the British would like to be rid of Northern Ireland or that they are neutral about its long-term future or could at least be prevailed on to be persuaders for unity. None of the 14 interviews give any comfort on those scores.
Former NIO Political Director Bill Jeffrey felt that, while British policy was not the policy of the unionist parties, “the NIO owed it to those who profess a British identity to have as good an understanding as possible of where they are coming from”. It is fair to conclude that no British Government is going to do anything unnecessary to hasten Irish unity.