The Historical Background to the Belfast Agreement

Abstract

With justification, Terence O’Neill observed, in 1972, that ‘[recent] British policy has been determined by a desire to avoid direct rule’.¹ In August 1966, he had advised London that it was time to ‘call a halt’ to his modernization programme, owing to a furious Protestant ‘backlash’, with Ian Paisley’s ‘movement … its main manifestation’.² Both then and as the political crisis deepened, however, the Labour government pressed for continued reform, threatening otherwise legislative action by Westminster, and a ‘fundamental reappraisal’ of Northern Ireland–British relations. Labour ministers considered that the minority had legitimate grievances, that street demonstrations were justified, but that through the adoption of British standards, nationalist alienation could be mollified and British intervention avoided.³ Chichester-Clark, O’Neill’s successor, was similarly advised to ‘keep up the momentum of reform’. In 1969, as the violence escalated, he was warned not to rely on the armed forces to keep order as this was ‘bound to have … constitutional consequences’; it would ‘make political intervention inevitable’.⁴