In Anglo-Irish Relations in the Early Troubles 1969–1972, using British, Irish, and American archives, Daniel Williamson examines British-Irish relations from the onset of the political crisis of the Northern Irish state in the late 1960s to the British government's decision to impose direct rule on the fractious province in March 1972. During this period, the death toll from political violence rocketed from 19 in 1969 to 497 in 1972. When British troops arrived on the streets of Londonderry and Belfast in August 1969, they were welcomed by Catholics, angry and suspicious of the local state's security forces because of their involvement in recent outbreaks of communal violence. In 1972, however, 108 British soldiers died, largely at the hands of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary force that had its roots in the same Catholic working-class communities that had looked to the Army as its protector three years before.
Williamson argues that spiraling events in Northern Ireland were decisive factors in the evolution of the often-spiky relationship between the British and Irish governments. He tends to attribute key significance to the escalating IRA campaign of bombing and assassinations, though he also recognizes that a heavy-handed response on the part of the security forces, and in particular the Army, did much to radicalize a section of the Catholic working class, particularly its youthful members. He is critical of the initial responses of London and Dublin to the worsening situation in Northern Ireland from late 1968. Harold Wilson's Labor administration, facing its own difficult domestic agenda, was reluctant to be drawn back into Irish politics—it had become a parliamentary convention that matters devolved to the Northern Irish parliament should not be discussed at Westminster. Wilson pressured the Ulster premier, Terence O'Neill, and his successor, James Chichester Clark, to remove the most flagrant examples of discrimination against the Catholic minority, particularly in areas of local government and housing. However, issues of civil rights and democratic reform were inextricably linked in the minds of many Catholics and Protestants with the issue of the very right of the state to exist.
At the core of the Northern Ireland issue in both Irish and British politics were two fundamental questions. First, could the issue of democratic reform be addressed without at the same time affecting the constitutional status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom? It was the belief of liberal unionists at the time and since that this was indeed possible, though Williamson questions that faith. Second, was the continuation of some sort of Northern Ireland state inevitably a recipe for continued violence? Many said yes. This was the argument of leaders of the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s and continued to be their claim up until the IRA cease-fires of 1994 and 1997. The subsequent evolution of republican politics and the “peace process” have demonstrated that while sharp political contention over the constitutional status of Northern Ireland has continued it has not, at least for the vast majority of Irish republicans, meant the continuation of support for “armed struggle.”
One way of approaching the history of the this period, one favored by Williamson, is to argue that the eventual pacification of Northern Ireland had its roots in attitudes and structures prefigured by the more far-seeing members of the Irish and British political elites in the early 1970s. Thus, after expressing a dismissive attitude toward the possible role of Dublin in any settlement in Northern Ireland, both Harold Wilson and his Conservative successor, Edward Heath, accepted that there had to be an “Irish dimension” to any deal, and that the deal would also involve some form of power sharing between Unionists and Nationalists. In Dublin, where the violence in the North had stimulated an upsurge of militant and interventionist opinion within the governing Fianna Fail party, with some party members willing to sponsor and arm Catholic insurrection in Belfast and Londonderry, the saner gradualism of the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, prevented the real danger of an armed incursion into Northern Ireland.
Yet Wilson and Heath were both willing to meet with or allow others to meet on their behalf the leadership of the IRA in quixotic attempts to negotiate with those irreconcilable to any “solution” that did not involve a British withdrawal, blithely ignoring the likely revanchist and bloodthirsty Protestant response. As to Lynch, while ridding himself of ministers whose behavior threatened sectarian civil war, he continued to link reform of the North to the ending of partition, thus stoking fires of unionist reaction and the murderous activities of loyalist terrorists.
This is an excellent book, exhaustive in its use of archival material and on top of the scholarly literature in the field. If there is a weakness it is Williamson's tendency, inherent in the field of diplomatic history, to treat events on the ground as secondary even when, as here, it is clearly recognized that the unfolding of events in Northern Ireland and the Republic played a major role in how Anglo-Irish relations developed. An understanding of the evolution of Irish politics, North and South, demands a more totalized view in which the often negative dialectic between events on the streets and high politics is explored in detail.
