Discontented with James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner who come to government after O’Neill’s 1969 fall from power, Boal resigns from the UUP in 1971 and joins Ian Paisley in establishing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in order to provide dissident unionist opinion with a viable political alternative. He works as the first chairman and one of the first public representatives of the DUP and continues to sit in Stormont during the years of 1971–1972. He later resumes his practice as a barrister.
While Boal’s interest in federalism diminishes after the 1970s, the federalist Boal scheme of January 1974 is again put forward by liberal protestants such as John Robb as late as 2007. His friendship with Paisley finally breaks when the DUP agrees to enter government with Sinn Féin in 2007. He tells Paisley, who takes the breach very hard, that he had betrayed everything he ever advocated.
Kilfedder leaves the UUP in 1977 in opposition to the party’s policies tending to integrationism, preferring to advocate the restoration of the Stormont administration. For a time he sits as an “Independent Ulster Unionist.” He contests the 1979 European Parliament election under that label, finishing fourth in the count for the three seats, having overtaken the UUP leader Harry West on transfers.
On March 20, 1995, while traveling by train into London from Gatwick Airport, Kilfedder dies of a heart attack. This is the same day that the Belfast Telegraph carries a front-page story saying that an Ulster MP has been targeted as one of twenty MPs invited by the LGBT rights organisation OutRage! in a letter to come out. He dies unmarried and is survived by two sisters.
Two acts are passed in 1800 with the same long title: An Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. The short title of the act of the British Parliament is Union with Ireland Act 1800, assigned by the Short Titles Act 1896. The short title of the act of the Irish Parliament is Act of Union (Ireland) 1800, assigned by a 1951 act of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and hence not effective in the Republic of Ireland, where it was referred to by its long title when repealed in 1962.
Before these acts, Ireland has been in personal union with England since 1542, when the Irish Parliament passes the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, proclaiming King Henry VIII of England to be King of Ireland. Since the 12th century, the King of England has been technical overlord of the Lordship of Ireland, a papal possession. Both the Kingdoms of Ireland and England later come into personal union with that of Scotland upon the Union of the Crowns in 1603.
In 1707, the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland are united into a single kingdom: the Kingdom of Great Britain. Upon that union, each House of the Parliament of Ireland passes a congratulatory address to Queen Anne, praying her: “May God put it in your royal heart to add greater strength and lustre to your crown, by a still more comprehensive Union.” The Irish Parliament is both before then subject to certain restrictions that made it subordinate to the Parliament of England and after then, to the Parliament of Great Britain; however, Ireland gains effective legislative independence from Great Britain through the Constitution of 1782.
By this time access to institutional power in Ireland is restricted to a small minority: the Anglo-Irish of the Protestant Ascendancy. Frustration at the lack of reform among the Catholic majority eventually leads, along with other reasons, to a rebellion in 1798, involving a French invasion of Ireland and the seeking of complete independence from Great Britain. This rebellion is crushed with much bloodshed, and the motion for union is motivated at least in part by the belief that the union will alleviate the political rancour that led to the rebellion. The rebellion is felt to have been exacerbated as much by brutally reactionary loyalists as by United Irishmen (anti-unionists).
Furthermore, Catholic emancipation is being discussed in Great Britain, and fears that a newly enfranchised Catholic majority will drastically change the character of the Irish government and parliament also contributes to a desire from London to merge the Parliaments.
According to historian James Stafford, an Enlightenment critique of Empire in Ireland lays the intellectual foundations for the Acts of Union. He writes that Enlightenment thinkers connected “the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation.” These critiques are used to justify a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.
Complementary acts are enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland.
The Parliament of Ireland gains a large measure of legislative independence under the Constitution of 1782. Many members of the Irish Parliament jealously guard that autonomy (notably Henry Grattan), and a motion for union is legally rejected in 1799. Only Anglicans are permitted to become members of the Parliament of Ireland though the great majority of the Irish population are Roman Catholic, with many Presbyterians in Ulster. Under the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, Roman Catholics regain the right to vote if they own or rent property worth £2 annually. Wealthy Catholics are strongly in favour of union in the hope for rapid religious emancipation and the right to sit as MPs, which only comes to pass under the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.
From the perspective of Great Britain’s elites, the union is desirable because of the uncertainty that follows the French Revolution of 1789 and the Irish Rebellion of 1798. If Ireland adopts Catholic emancipation willingly or not, a Roman Catholic Parliament could break away from Britain and ally with the French, but the same measure within the United Kingdom would exclude that possibility. Also, in creating a regency during King George III‘s “madness”, the Irish and British Parliaments give the Prince Regent different powers. These considerations lead Great Britain to decide to attempt the merger of both kingdoms and Parliaments.
The final passage of the Act in the Irish House of Commons turns on an about 16% relative majority, garnering 58% of the votes, and similar in the Irish House of Lords, in part per contemporary accounts through bribery with the awarding of peerages and honours to critics to get votes. The first attempt is defeated in the Irish House of Commons by 109 votes to 104, but the second vote in 1800 passes by 158 to 115.
McGrady enters politics in 1961 as an Independent Nationalist councillor on Downpatrick Urban Council, serving as chairman from 1964 until the council is replaced by Down District Council in 1973.
In 1970, McGrady becomes a founder member of the SDLP, later serving as its first chairman (1971–73). He sits on Down District Council from 1973 to 1989, serving as chairman from 1974–1975 and is also elected to all three regional assemblies in 1973, 1975 and 1982 representing South Down. In the 1973 power-sharing executive he is appointed as Head of the Department of Executive Planning and Co-ordination, serving from January to May 1974.
In Westminster elections McGrady contests South Down unsuccessfully in 1979, 1983 and at the by-election of January 1986, losing on each occasion to Enoch Powell, the sitting MP. He succeeds at the fourth attempt in the 1987 United Kingdom general election and holds the seat until his retirement in 2010. His tenure is briefly threatened in the mid-1990s when the Boundary Commission suggests merging much of his constituency with the neighbouring Newry and Armagh constituency to form a new “Newry and Mourne” constituency. This is overturned during a local review, which preserves his seat and actually removes more Unionist sections such as Dromore. His support holds solid over the years despite talk of a slippage, and this is reinforced in the 2005 United Kingdom general election with his re-election to the House of Commons.
On February 25, 2010, McGrady announces that he will stand down at the 2010 General Election. He continued to be chairperson of the Lecale Branch of the SDLP.
McGrady dies at the age of 78 in Downpatrick on November 11, 2013.
Pirrie is educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution before entering Harland & Wolff shipyard as a gentleman apprentice in 1862. Twelve years later he is made a partner in the firm, and on the death of Sir Edward Harland in 1895, he becomes its chairman, a position he holds until his death. As well as overseeing the world’s largest shipyard, he is elected Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1896, and is re-elected to the office as well as made an Irish Privy Counsellor the following year. He becomes Belfast’s first honorary freeman in 1898, and serves in the same year as High Sheriff of Antrim and subsequently of County Down. In February 1900, he is elected President of the UK Chamber of Shipping, where he had been vice-president the previous year. He helps finance the Liberals in Ulster in the 1906 United Kingdom general election, and that same year, at the height of Harland & Wolff’s success, he is raised to the peerage as Baron Pirrie, of the City of Belfast.
In February 1912, after chairing a famous meeting of the Ulster Liberal Association at which Winston Churchill defends the government’s policy of Home Rule for Ireland, Pirrie is jeered on the streets of Belfast, and assaulted as he boards a steamer in Larne: pelted with rotten eggs, herrings, and bags of flour. In 1910, the Ulster Liberal Association, an overwhelmingly Protestant body, with a weekly newspaper, and branch network throughout Ulster, adopts (in opposition to the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association) an explicitly pro-home rule position.
In the months leading up to the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, Pirrie is questioned about the number of life boats aboard the Olympic-classocean liners. He responds that the great ships are unsinkable and the rafts are to save others. This haunts him for the rest of his life. In April 1912, Pirrie is to travel aboard RMS Titanic, but illness prevents him.
During the war Pirrie is a member of the War Office Supply Board, and in 1918 becomes Comptroller-General of Merchant Shipbuilding, organising British production of merchant ships.
In 1921, Pirrie is elected to the Senate of Northern Ireland, and that same year is created ViscountPirrie of the City of Belfast, in the honours for the opening of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in July 1921, for his war work and charity work. In Belfast he is, on other grounds, already a controversial figure: a Protestant employer associated as a leading Liberal with a policy of Home Rule for Ireland.
Pirrie dies at sea off Cuba on June 7, 1924. His body is embalmed. On June 13, Ebro reaches Pier 42 on the North River in New York City, where Pirrie’s friend Andrew Weir, 1st Baron Inverforth and his wife meet Viscountess Pirrie and her sister. UK ships in the port of New York lower their flags to half-mast, and Pirrie’s body is transferred to Pier 59, where it is embarked on White Star Line‘s RMS Olympic, one of the largest ships Pirrie ever built, to be repatriated to the UK. He is buried in Belfast City Cemetery. The barony and viscountcy die with him. Lady Pirrie dies on June 19, 1935. A memorial to Pirrie in the grounds of Belfast City Hall is unveiled in 2006.
Perceval-Maxwell is born in 1870, the only son of John Perceval-Maxwell, eldest son of Robert Perceval-Maxwell DL (1813–1905), of Finnebrogue House, Downpatrick, County Down.
Perceval-Maxwell is educated at Eton College. He plays a significant part in the raising of the 36th (Ulster) Division on the outbreak of World War I. He is commissioned Major in the 13th (County Down) Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, which he had raised, in September 1914, and is appointed second-in-command in December 1914. He is promoted to the temporary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and commands a battalion from November 1916 and commands a battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers from May 1918. He is seriously wounded during the war. He resigns his commission in January 1919.
He is appointed to the Privy Council of Ireland in the honours for the opening of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in July 1921, entitling him to the style “The Right Honourable.” He serves in the Northern Ireland Senate from 1921 to 1925.
In 1895, Perceval-Maxwell marries Edith Grace Head. They have five sons: John Robert Perceval-Maxwell (born 1896), Richard Henry (born 1897, killed in action in 1916), Patrick Edward (born 1900), Brian Stephen (born 1908), and David (born 1911).
Perceval-Maxwell dies at the age of 62 on May 24, 1932, in a Belfast nursing home. He is buried in Inch Parish Churchyard, Downpatrick.
Barnhill, a right‐wing member of the Protestant‐based Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which rules the British province, is the first member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland to die in two years of violence that have resulted in 196 deaths up to this point.
Barnhill’s wife says that the senator had gone to answer the door at their home, close to the border with the Republic of Ireland. She says she heard two shots and found her husband lying near the door with a gunman kneeling at his side. Then, she says, a second man helps drag him into the main room, where the attackers plant a gelignite bomb beside his body.
Barnhill, 63 years old, has been a Senator for ten years. He often is outspoken in public denunciations of the outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA) for its terrorist campaign to overthrow the provincial government. He is an officer in the Orange Order, the powerful Freemasonry of Northern Ireland Protestants, and a director of a Londonderry seed company.
The police say that Mrs. Barnhill ran for help from the ruins of her home and is admitted to a hospital under treatment for shock.
At least 28 people die in the violence of the previous nine days, fifteen of them in an explosion on December 4 that wrecks a bar in a Roman Catholic area.
The leadership of the Irish Republican Army disclaims responsibility for the bombs and charges that they were set off as acts of provocation by the British Army. The British dismiss the charge as ludicrous.
The IRA, fighting for the separation of predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland from Britain and its merger with the Republic of Ireland to the south, has threatened to destroy Belfast‘s center by Christmas. Mass arrests fail to halt the latest wave of violence.
Preaching in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh, Ireland’s ecclesiastical capital, the Belfast‐born Cardinal delivers his toughest attack yet on the latest incidents, which include the fatal shooting of a parttime soldier in his home in front of his five children, and the bombing the previous day of a Protestant‐owned Belfast furniture showroom, in which four people are killed and nineteen are injured.
A plaque commemorating Barnhill’s murder is unveiled at Stormont on the 30th anniversary of his death on December 12, 2001.
(From: “Rightist Ulster Senator Slain by Gunmen in Home,” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com, December 13, 1971)
Living in the nationalist Beechmount neighbourhood of the Falls, he stands for the Falls as a candidate for the Dock Labour Party in a city council by-election in 1956, but loses to Paddy Devlin of the Irish Labour Party, who later becomes his close ally. In 1958, he is elected to Belfast City Council as a member of the Irish Labour Party.
Many sympathetic British Members of Parliament (MPs) are present at a civil rights march in Derry on October 5, 1968, when Fitt and others are beaten by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Fitt also supports the 1969 candidacy of Bernadette Devlin in the Mid Ulster by-election who runs as an anti-abstentionist ‘Unity‘ candidate. Devlin’s success greatly increases the authority of Fitt in the eyes of many British commentators, particularly as it produces a second voice on the floor of the British House of Commons who challenge the Unionist viewpoint at a time when Harold Wilson and other British ministers are beginning to take notice.
In August 1970, Fitt becomes the first leader of a coalition of civil rights and nationalist leaders who create the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). By this time Northern Ireland is charging headlong towards near-civil war and the majority of unionists remain hostile.
After the collapse of Stormont in 1972 and the establishment of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 Fitt becomes deputy chief executive of the short-lived Power-Sharing Executive created by the Sunningdale Agreement.
Fitt becomes increasingly detached from both his own party and also becomes more outspoken in his condemnation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He becomes a target for republican sympathisers in 1976 when they attack his home. He becomes disillusioned with the handling of Northern Ireland by the British government. In 1979, he abstains from a crucial vote in the House of Commons which brings down the Labour government, citing the way that the government had failed to help the nationalist population and tried to form a deal with the Ulster Unionist Party.
In 1979, Fitt is replaced by John Hume as leader of the SDLP and he leaves the party altogether after he agrees to constitutional talks with British Secretary of StateHumphrey Atkins without any provision for an ‘Irish dimension’ and then sees his decision overturned by the SDLP party conference. Like Paddy Devlin before him, he claims the SDLP has ceased to be a socialist force.
In 1981, he opposes the hunger strikes in the Maze prison in Belfast. His seat in Westminster is targeted by Sinn Féin as well as by the SDLP. In June 1983, he loses his seat in Belfast West to Gerry Adams, in part due to competition from an SDLP candidate. The following month, on October 14, 1983, he is created a UK life peer as Baron Fitt, of Bell’s Hill in County Down. His Belfast home is firebombed a month later and he moves to London.
Gerry Fitt dies in London on August 26, 2005, at the age of 79, after a long history of heart disease.
Brooke is born on June 9, 1888, at Colebrooke Park, his family’s neo-Classicalancestral seat on what is then the several-thousand-acre Colebrooke Estate, just outside Brookeborough, a village near Lisnaskea in County Fermanagh. He is the eldest son of Sir Arthur Douglas Brooke, 4th Baronet, whom he succeeds as 5th Baronet when his father dies in 1907. His mother is Gertrude Isabella Batson. He is a nephew of Field MarshalAlan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) during World War II, who is only five years his senior. His sister Sheelah marries Sir Henry Mulholland, Speaker of the Stormont House of Commons and son of Lord Dunleath. He is educated for five years at St. George’s School in Pau, France, and then at Winchester College (1901–05).
Brooke is a very active Ulster Unionist Party member and ally of Edward Carson. He founds his own paramilitary group, Brooke’s Fermanagh Vigilance, from men returning from the war front in 1918. Although the umbrella Ulster Volunteers had been quiescent during the war, it is not defunct. It re-emerges strongly in 1920, subsuming groups like Brooke’s.
In 1920, having reached the rank of captain, Brooke leaves the British Army to farm the Colebrooke Estate, the family estate in west Ulster, at which point he turns toward a career in politics.
Brooke has a very long political career. When he resigns the Premiership of Northern Ireland in March 1963, he is Northern Ireland’s longest-serving prime minister, having held office for two months short of 20 years. He also establishes a United Kingdom record by holding government office continuously for 33 years.
On May 2, 1943, Brooke succeeds John M. Andrews as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. In 1952, while Prime Minister, was raised to the peerage as Viscount Brookeborough, the title taken from the village named after the Brookes. Although a peer, he retained his seat in the House of Commons at Stormont and remained Prime Minister for another decade.
As the Northern Ireland economy begins to de-industrialise in the mid-1950s, leading to high unemployment amongst the Protestant working classes, Brooke faces increasing disenchantment amongst UUP backbenchers for what is regarded as his indifferent and ineffectual approach to mounting economic problems. As this disenchantment grows, British civil servants and some members of the UUP combine to exert discreet and ultimately effective pressure on Brooke to resign to make way for Captain Terence O’Neill, who is Minister of Finance.
Brooke is noted for his casual style toward his ministerial duties. Terence O’Neill later writes of him, “he was good company and a good raconteur, and those who met him imagined that he was relaxing away from his desk. However, they did not realise that there was no desk.”
In his retirement Brooke develops commercial interests as chairman of Carreras (Northern Ireland), a director of Devenish Trade, and president of the Northern Ireland Institute of Directors. He is also made an honorary LL.D. of Queen’s University Belfast.
From 1970 to 1973, years in which the Stormont institution comes under its greatest strain and eventually crumbles, Brooke makes only occasional forays into political life. In 1972, he appears next to William Craig MP on the balcony of Parliament Buildings at Stormont, a diminutive figure beside the leader of the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party (VUPP) who is rallying right-wing Unionists against the Government of Northern Ireland. He opposes the Westminsterwhite paper on the future of Northern Ireland and causes some embarrassment to his son, Captain John Brooke, the UUP Chief Whip and an ally of Brian Faulkner, by speaking against the Faulkner ministry‘s proposals.
Brooke dies at his home, Colebrooke Park, on the Colebrooke Estate, on August 18, 1973. His remains are cremated at Roselawn Cemetery, East Belfast, three days later, and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes are scattered on the demesne surrounding his beloved Colebrooke Park.
Hume does not complete his clerical studies but does obtain an M.A. degree in French and history from the college in 1958. He then returns home to his native Derry, where he becomes a teacher at his alma mater, St. Columb’s College. He is a founding member of the Credit Union movement in the city and is chair of the University for Derry Committee in 1965, an unsuccessful fight to have Northern Ireland’s second university established in Derry in the mid-1960s.
Hume becomes the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions at age 27. He serves in the role from 1964 to 1968. He once says that “all the things I’ve been doing, it’s the thing I’m proudest of because no movement has done more good for the people of Ireland, north and south, than the credit union movement.”
Hume becomes a leading figure in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s along with people such as Hugh Logue. He is a prominent figure in the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee. The DCAC is set up in the wake of the October 5, 1968, march through Derry which had caused much attention to be drawn towards the situation in Northern Ireland. The purpose of the DCAC is to make use of the publicity surrounding recent events to bring to light grievances in Derry that had been suppressed by the Unionist Government for years. The DCAC, unlike the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), is aimed specifically at a local campaign, improving the situation in Derry for everyone, and maintaining a peaceful stance. The committee also has a Stewards Association that is there to prevent any violence at marches or sit-downs.
In October 1971, Hume joins four Westminster MPs in a 48-hour hunger strike to protest at the internment without trial of hundreds of suspected Irish republicans. State papers that have been released under the 30-year rule that an Irish diplomat eight years later in 1979 believes Hume supported the return of internment.
Hume is directly involved in secret talks with the British government and Sinn Féin, in an effort to bring Sinn Féin to the discussion table openly. The talks are speculated to lead directly to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.
The vast majority of unionists reject the agreement and stage a massive and peaceful public rally in Belfast City Centre to demonstrate their distaste. Many Republicans and nationalists also reject it, as they see it as not going far enough. Hume, however, continues dialogue with both governments and Sinn Féin. The “Hume–Adams process” eventually delivers the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire which ultimately provides the relatively peaceful backdrop against which the Good Friday agreement is brokered.
In 2015, Hume is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, of which he had first displayed symptoms in the late 1990s. He dies in the early hours of August 3, 2020, at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83. On his death, former Labour Party leader and prime ministerTony Blair says, “John Hume was a political titan; a visionary who refused to believe the future had to be the same as the past.” The Dalai Lama says on Twitter, “John Hume’s deep conviction in the power of dialogue and negotiations to resolve conflict was unwavering… It was his leadership and his faith in the power of negotiations that enabled the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to be reached. His steady persistence set an example for us all to follow.”
(Pictured: John Hume with U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1995)
seamus dubhghaill 