Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland, a province created by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, made up of the six Ulster counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone, and retained within the United Kingdom after the rest of Ireland achieved dominion status by the Anglo‐Irish treaty of 1921. Following the successful resistance of Ulster unionists to home rule in 1911–14, it was only the separation of the predominantly Protestant segment of Ulster in 1920 that made it politically possible for a Conservative‐dominated British coalition government to reach agreement with Sinn Féin on constitutional arrangements for the south. Although the Ulster Unionists sacrificed the remaining three counties of Ulster with their significant Protestant minorities, the new six‐county province included a reluctant Catholic minority amounting to more than one‐third of its population (which by the 1990s was to rise to more than two‐fifths). After some abortive attempts at minority protection through the Craig–Collins pacts, the British government gave the Unionists unequivocal support: in effect those who had objected so strongly to home rule under Dublin in 1914 were given an extended opportunity to run the north's divided society. The Unionists had wanted initially to be governed directly from London, but in 1921 accepted a devolved parliament in Belfast and came quickly to like it.

While Unionist governments delivered stability in Northern Ireland British governments of all parties let them get on with it: when this stability disappeared after 1968 the dissolution of the Northern Ireland parliament quickly followed. After 1972 Northern Ireland retained a devolved administration, but politically it was governed by direct rule from London, until a new form of self‐government was attempted in 1998. Although the constitutional arrangements of 1921–72 failed to achieve lasting or deep‐rooted communal harmony, they do represent the most sustained attempt at devolved regional government ever attempted in the United Kingdom.

The Northern Ireland parliament, created under the 1920 act, was opened by King George V in Belfast city hall on 22 June 1921, following elections to a ‘House of Commons’ on Empire Day, 24 May. It later moved to Assembly's College before occupying the imposing purpose‐built premises at Stormont (which became the standard way of referring to the Northern Ireland parliament or government), on the edge of the city, in November 1932. Partly deriving from the legislation, partly as a result of decisions taken by the first prime minister, Sir James Craig, Stormont followed the Westminster model very closely. The main differences were that the body was in practice part‐time, meeting for only a couple of months each year, and that government ministers were entitled to speak in both the House of Commons and the upper house or ‘Senate’. This consisted of the lord mayors of Belfast and Derry, who sat ex officio, and of 24 other members elected by the House of Commons. Not surprisingly, it failed to establish a reputation as an effective revising chamber. There was also a governor, representing the crown.

Returned to the first House of Commons in 1921 were 40 Unionists, 6 Nationalists, and 6 Sinn Féiners, a government majority of 28. Although the number of Unionists was sometimes reduced by challenges from the Northern Ireland Labour Party and other minor parties, only in 1925 did the party's overall majority fall below 20. Soon after the government replaced proportional representation based on nine multi‐member constituencies with first‐past‐the‐post elections in 48 single seaters; PR was retained in the four‐seat Queen's University constituency, which survived until 1968. No nationalist members took their seats prior to 1925, and organized nationalist abstention occurred frequently between 1932 and 1945. The system of majoritarian democracy, though based closely on the Westminster model, operated in the circumstances of Northern Ireland's divided society to produce a one‐party state, in which the interests of the state and the interests of the Unionist Party became dangerously intertwined. In local government, until 1973, almost 100 separate authorities operated, including an upper tier of six county councils. The local government franchise was restricted to ratepayers, and permitted multiple votes for business voters. After 1946 this was out of line with practice in Britain, where almost all adults were enfranchised compared with less than 80 per cent in Belfast (1966). Universal suffrage in local government elections was a major issue for the civil rights movement, and was attained in 1972; in the following year local government was restructured into a single tier of 26 district councils, now with far more limited powers than was the case in Britain.

The devolved powers of the Northern Ireland parliament included all major aspects of domestic policy except major taxation. By ‘the convention’ operated at Westminster, members of the United Kingdom parliament were effectively precluded from debating the internal affairs of Northern Ireland except on very isolated occasions. Defence matters, however, were reserved to the Westminster parliament (including the decision not to include Northern Ireland in the provision for compulsory military service during the Second World War). Once the British army was called out in aid of the civil power, from August 1969 onwards, it was only a matter of time before Westminster demanded control over the province's internal security policy. The refusal of Brian Faulkner's government to agree to this led to the prorogation of Stormont in March 1972, and its dissolution the following year.

The disentanglement of Northern Ireland's finances after 1921 proved more problematic than the establishment of devolved legislative powers. Revenue was allocated from the British treasury by a joint exchequer board. While the ‘imperial contribution’ soon effectively disappeared, the British government proved distinctly reluctant to make the large injection of funds necessary to raise Northern Ireland's level of welfare provision to the British level. It was agreed by the Colwyn Committee in 1925 that in future per capita welfare spending for the province would be increased ‘step by step’ with improvements in Britain, but Northern Ireland's relatively low base point meant that the great burden of inter‐war unemployment weighed very heavily on the province, while the quality and volume of urban and rural housing stock, school buildings, roads, and public health fell further behind. In effect Colwyn's arbitration of 1925 and the Unemployment Insurance Agreement of 1926, while both making financial concessions to Northern Ireland, implicitly accepted that devolution justified lower levels of provision in the province, on grounds both of historic factors and of higher per capita take‐up of welfare services than in Britain.

Full equalization of public spending provision did not come until 1946, when ‘step by step’ gave way to the principle of ‘parity’ of social services, so that welfare state provisions applied equally in Britain and in Northern Ireland. The impact of this was noticeable both in improved health statistics and in education, where free grammar schooling was available for the first time to those able or fortunate enough to pass the II‐plus examination. In economic policy also, the postwar era offered opportunities for devolved government to demonstrate its worth.

The staple industries of linen and shipbuilding, the major urban employers in the province, which had struggled during the interwar period, went into steep decline—linen from 1953 (due to competition from other materials and cheaper labour markets) and shipbuilding by the end of the same decade (due to over‐conservative management in the face of technological and market changes). Agriculture too, the province's largest employer, shed labour massively in the face of mechanization. These changes constituted a rigorous test for devolved regional government—could its closeness to the problems facilitate more effective responses than could have been offered by a more remote central government? Though the evidence is mixed, the overall answer must be ‘no’. Shipbuilding fared no better than in Britain. The man‐made fibre industry did constitute a major innovation, benefiting many centres in the east of the province, and in Derry City, from the 1950s to the 1970s, an achievement for which regional planning can claim some credit. But in this, the golden era of state planning, the lack of political consensus between nationalist and unionist in the province was an increasingly serious problem. While the economic case for concentrating new developments in the predominantly Protestant east of the province, as argued in the Matthew Plan for Greater Belfast (1962) and the Wilson Report (1964), may have been strong, Stormont's chances of gaining the confidence of the nationalist community were slimmer than those of central government would have been. Equally, the Unionist government and local authorities, most notably in Derry City, were reluctant to risk damaging their electoral position by economic or social policies that might increase the numerical or economic strength of the Catholic community. While it is not easy to control for the effects (negative and perhaps also positive) of the post‐1969 troubles on the regional economy, it seems clear that the suspension of political devolution after 1972 brought more effective public investment and no worse a performance in terms of economic management.

Bibliography

Buckland, Patrick , The Factory of Grievances: Devolved Government in Northern Ireland 1921–39 (1979)

A. C. Hepburn