The powersharing project that was to follow was based on the idea of combining the more moderate parties in a new coalition which would run Northern Ireland on a partnership basis. Both republican and Unionist extremes were to be excluded from this centrist idea - in fact they excluded themselves by refusing to take part in it - but as time went by, the theory ran, support for the extremes would dwindle. By November the talks had achieved agreement on most of the major issues but were stalled on the composition of the eleven-man executive (no women were in line for office) and had yet to settle the form of the Irish dimension. Faulkner insisted that his party should have a majority in the executive while the SDLP and Alliance pointed out that he did not command a majority within Unionism and certainly not within the assembly. Whitelaw told Edward Heath that he expected the talks to fail and made plans to return to London to make a statement in the Commons on 22 November. On the day before, however, he piled the pressure on the parties to reach agreement by having his helicopter land, visibly and very noisily, on the lawn outside Stormont Castle where the talks were taking place. Then things went up another gear. A Nationalist MP died in Northern Ireland, and the IRA had the brilliant idea of putting up Bobby Sands as the candidate for the by-election. On 9 April 1981, when he was already losing his sight and was very ill, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Horror piled on horror in July 1972. The restlessness of the mid-1960s had first degenerated into the violent clashes of August 1969 and now descended further into killings at a rate of three a day. That month had many of the features which were to become all too familiar as the troubles went on. Republicans killed Protestants while loyalists claimed Catholic lives, often with particular savagery. On 11 July a number of drunken loyalists broke into the home of a Catholic family, killing a mentally handicapped youth and raping his mother. At the resulting murder trial a lawyer told the court: ‘The restraints of civilisation on evil human passions are in this case totally non-existent. You may well think that in this case we have reached the lowest level of human depravity.’ Really, as civil wars go, it was not much to write home about. The United Nations estimated casualties of the Sri Lankan civil war as somewhere between 80 and 100,000 killed between 1982 and 2009. Now that’s what you call a civil war.

The next step was to assemble the three parties which would form the executive, together with the London and Dublin governments. They met at a civil service training centre at Sunningdale in Berkshire in late 1973, the deal which emerged from it becoming known thereafter as the Sunningdale Agreement. Whitelaw, the principal architect of the new settlement, was promoted to a senior post in London, Heath believing that he needed his talents for his government’s confrontation with trade unions in Britain. He was replaced by the less experienced Francis Pym only four days before the Sunningdale conference took place. By this point Unionism had splintered, with Faulkner prepared to negotiate, Paisley pressing for integration, and Craig apparently bent on confrontation. Prominent Unionist former ministers such as Harry West and John Taylor demanded a return to the old Stormont system, while many other politicians added to the general confusion by changing their minds and their political lines, sometimes several times. Faulkner found it difficult to hold his party together, particularly since he was advancing the problematic policy of negotiating with a British government which had, in the eyes of most Unionists, been guilty of a betrayal in removing the Stormont system. Some liberal Unionists drifted away from politics entirely, depriving Faulkner of potentially useful support. At the beginning of 1973 the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic became members of the European Economic Community (EEC), a development which over time had a major effect on Anglo-Irish relations. Disparity in the wealth of the two countries had added to the historical distance between coloniser and colonised, with Irish dependence on British trade reinforcing this. Their simultaneous entry to the EEC, however, helped alter some of the fundamentals of the relationship and in-creased the south’s international standing. Joining Europe also markedly increased the Republic’s sense of national self-esteem as Irish ministers, and some talented Dublin civil servants, were seen to perform well on the international stage. British and Irish officials also formed useful working relationships which would later be important in developing greater understanding and mutual respect.Where the book is vivid, as it often is, is in its careful use of quotes as emotional as the two authors refuse to be. John Major's strong commitment to solving the seemingly insoluble shines out of one tub-thumping challenge to Gerry Adams delivered after the Canary Wharf bomb of 1995. Compellingly written and very even-handed. By far the clearest account of what happened in the Northern Ireland conflict and more importantly why it happened' Irish News It's worth noting here that the Suffragettes, in the 1910s, also went on prison hungerstrike. They were force-fed. The government decided they would not do that with the Irish prisoners. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher said : A last-minute breakthrough was achieved with the aid of the ingenious device of creating a new category of extra ministers. Faulkner would have a majority within the eleven-strong executive, which was to be made up of six Unionists, four SDLP and one Alliance. But four extra non-voting ministers were to be appointed, so that the full executive would consist of seven Unionists, six SDLP and two Alliance members. This piece of sleight-of-hand meant that Faulkner could claim he had a Unionist majority while non-Unionists could simultaneously claim he had not.

Elections to the new assembly were held in June 1973. During the campaign the wily Faulkner repeated that his party would not share power with any party ‘whose primary objective was to break the link with Great Britain’. Some Unionists appear to have voted for him on the assumption that this meant he would not share power with the SDLP. Afterwards, when it emerged he was indeed prepared to sit in government with the SDLP, opponents accused him of misleading voters. His reasoning was that ending the Union, while perhaps the ultimate ambition of the SDLP, was not its primary objective. I suppose my only real complaint is that the book spends a lot more time and effort on describing the coming of peace than it does on the coming of violence. I suppose the peace process is more recent and better documented, but i was really hoping for a better understanding of how communal tensions and unease descended into bloody murder. Although London and Dublin were able to reach agreement on most issues, they had to agree to differ on a number of points and especially on one hugely important issue. In the absence of an agreed single statement on the status of Northern Ireland, the governments agreed that separate statements should be printed side by side in the final conference communiqué. This was seen both as an oddity and as a sign of continuing British-Irish differences. The Irish government statement ‘fully accepted and solemnly declared that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland desired a change in their status’. Dublin did not, however, propose to delete or change Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution, which Unionists regarded as an offensive claim to jurisdiction over Northern Ireland. Some in Dublin favoured such a move, but the problem was that the constitution could only be changed by a referendum. If a referendum had been held and lost, the entire initiative would have been undermined. urn:oclc:850193292 Republisher_date 20180111100324 Republisher_operator [email protected] Republisher_time 629 Scandate 20180110211430 Scanner ttscribe5.hongkong.archive.org Scanningcenter hongkong Top_six true Tts_version v1.57-initial-82-g2b8ab4d Worldcat (source edition) The election result was yet another illustration of Unionist divisions. Thirty-nine of the Unionist party candidates gave their allegiance to the Faulkner approach but, in an echo of O’Neill’s 1969 crossroads election, ten others refused to do so. Unionist rejectionists won 27 of the 78 assembly seats with 235,000 votes, while Unionists supporting the initiative won 22 seats with 211,000 votes. Faulkner thus emerged from the election leading a bitterly divided party and without a majority among Unionist voters. His best hope was that, if a working system of government could be set up, its successful functioning would gradually attract more Unionist popular support.

Making sense of the troubles

The Troubles have left behind a terrible legacy, of dead and wounded on all sides, scarring people it affected both directly and indirectly, not only in Northern Ireland but also across the British Isles, in a way that may take generations to heal. At one time many people thought the conflict was simply insoluble." IRA prisoners, hundreds of whom were behind bars in the Maze prison, (more IRA members inside prison than outside!), had long insisted that they were political prisoners and/or prisoners of war, and not criminals. The British government shilly-shallied about the issue. At first, to avoid trouble, they did grant “political status” to these prisoners, but then they changed their mind – by 1976 they could stomach it no more, they craved to stop coddling the murderous scum, so they decided to phase out the special privileges and make the IRA wear ordinary prison uniforms and carry out ordinary prison work. Within the Unionist community, however, many did not believe that Stormont was secure or that the IRA was on the road to defeat. This was put most forcibly by William Craig, who had been roundly beaten by Faulkner for leadership of the Unionist party. He formed an organisation called the Ulster Vanguard movement, and, while remaining a member of the Unionist party, used Vanguard as his own power base, designing it as an umbrella group to enlist as many supporters as possible from the various loyalist groupings which were springing up in response to the mounting tension. All parties had difficulties with Whitelaw’s proposals. For many Unionists, powersharing with nationalists and a Council of Ireland were objectionable, for all Whitelaw’s stress on Northern Ireland’s guaranteed status within the UK. For the SDLP the initiative was in most aspects a huge advance, even though it fell well short of the London-Dublin joint authority the party had advocated. The continuing use of internment also posed a major problem for the SDLP. While this scheme was politically coherent, two sets of statistics, concerning electoral support and the level of violence, help show just how formidable were the forces ranged against it. A majority of Unionist voters were against the proposition, while perhaps 30,000 or more of them were so opposed to accommodation that they joined loyalist paramilitary groups prepared to use force to resist what they saw as any further erosion of Protestant rights. There was a certain overlap of the political and paramilitary within the assembly itself, where half a dozen or more anti-deal Unionists had connections with shadowy loyalist groups. In the political centre only a small number of voters supported cross-community parties, the non-sectarian Alliance party being the most prominent, with 9 per cent of the vote.