The BBC‘s Northern Ireland correspondent says the historic trip is intended as a gesture to reassure the province’s unionists, while at the same time trying not to alienate the nationalist population.
The Queen is invited to Armagh by the authorities to present the royal charter renewing Armagh’s status as a city.
In her speech, the Queen addresses all the people of Northern Ireland. She says, “For many difficult years the people of Northern Ireland have shown courage and compassion of an extraordinary kind. Today as they begin to look towards a more peaceful future, Armagh with its two great cathedrals standing so close together presents a powerful symbol of the strength spirit and hopes of people across Northern Ireland.”
Cardinal Cahal Daly says the Queen’s visit is a tribute to the progress made in the peace process since the IRA ceasefire came into effect on August 31, 1994.
Arbishop Robin Eames says, “Look how far we’ve come in a year. It’s a message of symbolism. Be patient, we’ve a long, long way to go but today is one little part of that jigsaw.”
Hendron says, “Things are different now. People must stand up and be counted. You can’t hide in your home. There are two communities here and I think it’s important to go out and shake hands with people like the Queen and from my point of view, she’s very welcome.”
As the hardline Ulster Unionists express reluctance to support the current stance of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leadership, Trimble is bidding to win over crucial support for his campaign to be re-elected as First Minister.
Although the meeting of the UUP’s executive over the previous weekend endorses Trimble’s return to office in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the re-election bid can be thwarted by a failure to win grassroots support.
At least two Assembly Members express grave reservations about supporting Trimble’s re-election as First Minister, and anti-agreement factions within the UUP call a meeting of the party’s ruling council to be held within the next three weeks.
In order to be returned as First Minister, along with Deputy First Minister Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader-in-waiting Mark Durkan, Trimble must establish a majority amongst both unionist and nationalist Assembly Members.
While it is anticipated that the elections of the First and Deputy First Ministers will be held later in the week, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) calls on its members to prepare for Assembly elections. The anti-Good Friday Agreement DUP anticipate a collapse of the power-sharing Assembly if the re-elections of top ministerial posts fail to return a quorum of support from the Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA). The DUP says that meetings are to be held on October 29 to discuss the party’s strategy.
In January 1969, while a student at the New University of Ulster, she joins a civil rights march from Belfast to Derry, organised by the People’s Democracy. At Burntollet Bridge, a few miles from Derry, the march is attacked by loyalists. She is struck on the head, knocked unconscious, falls into the river, and is brought to hospital suffering from a concussion. The march is echoed in her 1994 play After Easter.
The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) announces a ceasefire on August 31, 1994, after a quarter century of what it calls its “armed struggle” to get the British out of Northern Ireland. The statement comes just after 11:00 a.m. BST and says there will be a “complete cessation of military operations” from midnight and that the organisation is willing to enter into inclusive talks on the political future of the Province.
The statement raises hopes for peace and an end to 25 years of bombing and shooting that led to the deaths of more than 3,000 people. There is scepticism from the loyalist community and celebration in the Catholic areas of Belfast and Derry.
But loyalists are suspicious of the declaration and fear it may lead to a sell-out in which Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom is under threat. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MPJames Molyneaux says no moves towards talks should begin until the IRA has added the word “permanent” to the ceasefire declaration.
The announcement comes 18 months after secret talks began between the British Government and Irish republicans. It leads to the Anglo-Irish Downing Street Declaration in December 1993 which states that any change in the partition of Ireland can only come with the consent of those living north of the border. It also challenges republicans to renounce violence.
Ian Paisley, leader of the hardline Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), rejects the wording of the declaration and says it is an “insult to the people [the IRA] has slaughtered because there was no expression of regret.”
Seven weeks later, on October 13, the loyalist terrorist groups announce their own ceasefire. On December 9, British officials meet Sinn Féin representatives for their first formal talks in 22 years.
The IRA ceasefire ends on February 9, 1996 when it plants a huge bomb in the London Docklands. It kills two, injures more than 100 and causes more than £85m of damage.
A new ceasefire is finally announced in July 1997.
(Pictured: (L to R) Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and Social Democratic and Labour Party leader John Hume)
In Bangor, County Down, a group of loyalist protesters put up a Union Flag outside the offices of Sinn Féin education minister Martin McGuinness at his department’s Rathgael House headquarters. Another group of PUP protesters demonstrate at government buildings in Adelaide Street in Belfast city centre, where the Union Flag is flying above two of the government buildings in the street.
The PUP’s Billy Hutchinson criticises Sinn Féin ministers over their refusal to fly the Union Flag. “These people cannot even recognise that we have a monarch who’s 100 years old and they can’t even fly the flag, just because they think that everything that is British is no good,” he says. “These people forget that they have lived in Britain all their lives, most of them. They weren’t even born at Partition (of Ireland).” He adds that Sinn Féin’s ministers should accept that they are “British ministers in a British state.”
However, Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey condemns the protests as “intimidating and sectarian.” He says Sinn Féin’s position on the flying of flags is designed not to cause offence. “Where British cultural and political symbols are invoked in public life, equivalent Irish cultural and political symbols should be given equal prominence. Where this cannot be agreed, no such symbols should fly,” he says.
The issue of flags has been emotive and divisive in Northern Ireland. The Sinn Féin ministers anger unionists on May 2 by ordering their civil servants not to fly the flag as part of the Coronation Day celebrations. The row reaches a head when the anti-agreement Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) attempts to guarantee the flying of the Union Flag with an assembly motion in June. However, the party fails to win enough support for their motion to be passed.
There are about 13 days in the year when the Union Flag is flown on designated government offices in the United Kingdom. Government buildings across the UK – from Whitehall ministries to town council offices are expected to raise the Union Flag on these days.
It is the second time in a week that the health minister has run into controversy. On Wednesday, August 2, she is confronted by angry loyalist protesters during an official visit to a County Antrim hospital. Around 20 demonstrators picket the Lagan Valley Hospital in Lisburn, while she is on a visit to see a GP scheme as part of a programme to learn about aspects of the health service. The tyres on the minister’s car are let down and an egg is thrown. De Brun is forced to leave the complex by another door.
(From: “Trimble joins Union Flag row,” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk, Friday, August 4, 2000 | Pictured: Protesters picket the Department of Health)
David Trimble becomes the first Ulster Unionist leader to meet a Pope when his historic meeting with John Paul II takes place in Rome on April 21, 1999. The meeting is widely welcomed as a sign that old prejudices are ending but Trimble is hotly criticised by both Protestants and Catholics in his Upper Bann constituency.
The First Minister is one of 54 Nobel Peace Prizelaureates who meets Pope John Paul II briefly at the Vatican, as part of a two-day trip organised by former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Nobel Prize winners meet the Pope as a group and are then introduced and shake hands individually. There is a group photograph but no filming of the event. Careful stage-management ensures there are no public photographs of the two men close together.
A spokesman for Trimble says the UUP leader told the Pope he hopes this will be the year when peace will be secured in Northern Ireland. The Pope recalls his visit to Ireland and says murder cannot be condoned or called by another name.
Although the meeting is welcomed on both sides of the North divide, it does little to enhance Trimble’s standing in Upper Bann, particularly in troubled Portadown. In Portadown’s loyalist estates, there is open hostility toward Trimble. Many residents accusing their MP of “putting his personal status above the interests of his constituents.” The response is typified by one angry woman who says, “The loyalist people of this town and Drumcree, put David Trimble into office. Now he has turned his back on us. That’s a fatal mistake, this town and Drumcree will now destroy Trimble.”
“It’s unbelievable that this meeting is actually taking place,” says Orangeman Ivor Young. “It totally contradicts the oath that David Trimble took when he joined the Orange Order. We all knew Trimble was a traitor, this latest escapade puts the final nail in his political coffin here in Upper Bann. There is no way that he will ever be elected here again.”
Trimble also comes in for further criticism from Portadown Orange District, whose Drumcree protest has continued for the past 288 days. David Jones, the District’s press officer says that the people of Portadown once again see their local MP on “a world stage,” instead of being involved locally. “There are a lot of people around Portadown who aren’t very impressed that David Trimble has gone off to meet the Pope and hasn’t got more involved in trying to get the situation here solved,” says Jones.
On Portadown’s Garvaghy Road, Catholics are also critical of Trimble’s visit to Rome. “It’s amazing how he can travel to Rome to meet and talk to strangers,” says one nationalist resident, “yet he can’t be bothered to travel less than 30 miles to meet us, to talk about the serious issues that confront this community. After all we are as much his constituents as are the loyalists in this town.”
The meeting is the first time that the First Minister of Northern Ireland or the head of the Ulster Unionist Party has met the Pope in Rome. It also represents a rare appearance by an Orangeman at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. Trimble and his entourage meet the Pope in the sumptuous surroundings of the Consistory Hall, the same room where the Cardinals of the Church gather to advise the Pope.
Earlier in the morning Trimble says in an interview with the Vatican radio that besides giving an update on developments in Northern Ireland, he wishes to “express to his Holiness the Pope that he and the Church will do what it can to persuade the paramilitaries to commit themselves irrevocably to peaceful means.”
Faulkner is the elder of two sons of James, owner of the Belfast Collar Company, and Nora Faulkner. His younger brother is Colonel Sir Dennis Faulkner. He is educated initially at Elm Park preparatory school, Killylea, County Armagh, but at 14, preferring to stay in Ireland, is sent to the Church of Ireland-affiliated St. Columba’s College at Whitechurch, County Dublin, although he is Presbyterian. His best friend at the school is Michael Yeats, son of W. B. Yeats. He enters Queen’s University Belfast in 1939 to study law, but, with the advent of World War II, he quits his studies to work full-time in the family shirt-making business. He is the only Prime Minister of Northern Ireland to have been educated in the Irish Free State and one of only two to have been educated in Ireland.
Faulkner becomes involved in unionist politics, the first of his family to do so, and is elected to the Parliament of Northern Ireland as the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of East Down in 1949. His vociferous traditional unionist approach to politics ensures him a prominent backbench position. He is, at the time, the youngest ever MP in the Northern Irish Parliament. He is also the first Chairman of the Ulster Young Unionist Council in 1949. In 1956 he is offered and accepts the job of Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Finance, or Government Chief Whip.
When Terence O’Neill becomes Prime Minister in 1963 he appoints Faulkner, his chief rival for the job, as Minister of Commerce. He resigns in 1969 over the technicalities of how and when to bring in the local government reforms which the British Labour government is pushing for. This is a factor in the resignation of O’Neill, who resigns as Prime Minister in the aftermath of his failure to achieve a good enough result in the 1969 Northern Ireland general election.
In the ensuing leadership contest, Faulkner loses out again when O’Neill gives his casting vote to his cousin, James Chichester-Clark. In 1970, he becomes the Father of the House. He comes back into government as Minister of Development under Chichester-Clark and in a sharp turn-around, begins the implementation of the political reforms that were the main cause of his resignation from O’Neill’s cabinet. Chichester-Clark himself resigns in 1971 as the political and security situation and the more intensive British interest proves difficult.
Faulkner is elected leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and Prime Minister. In his initial innovative approach to government, he gives a non-unionist, David Bleakley, a former Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) MP, a position in his cabinet as Minister for Community Relations. In June 1971, he proposes three new powerful committees at Stormont which would give the opposition salaried chairmanships of two of them.
However, this initiative (radical at the time) is overtaken by events. A shooting by soldiers of two nationalist youths in Derry causes the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), the main opposition, to boycott the Stormont parliament. The political climate deteriorates further when, in answer to a worsening security situation, Faulkner introduces internment on August 9, 1971. This is a disaster and causes the situation to worsen.
Despite this, Faulkner continues his radical approach to Northern Irish politics and, following Bleakley’s resignation in September 1971 over the internment issue, appointes Dr. G. B. Newe, a prominent lay Catholic, as Minister of State in the Cabinet Office. His administration staggers on through the rest of 1971, insisting that security is the paramount issue.
In January 1972, an incident occurs during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march in Derry, during which paratroopers shoot and killed thirteen unarmed civilians. A fourteenth civilian dies later. What history has come to know as Bloody Sunday is, in essence, the end of Faulkner’s government. In March 1972, he refuses to maintain a government without security powers which the British government under Edward Heath decides to take back. The Stormont parliament is subsequently prorogued, initially for a period of one year, and following the appointment of a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, direct rule is introduced.
In June 1973, elections are held to a new devolved parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly. The elections split the UUP. Faulkner becomes chief executive in a power-sharing executive with the SDLP and the centre-ground Alliance Party, a political alliance cemented at the Sunningdale Conference that year. The power-sharing Executive lasts only six months and is brought down by a loyalistUlster Workers’ Council strike in May 1974. In 1974, he loses the leadership of the UUP to anti-Sunningdale elements led by Harry West. He subsequently resigns from the Ulster Unionist Party and forms the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI).
The UPNI fares badly in the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention elections of 1975, winning only five out of the 78 seats contested. Faulkner wins the final seat. In 1976 he announces that he is quitting active politics. He is elevated to the House of Lords in the 1977 New Year Honours list, being created Baron Faulkner of Downpatrick on February 7, 1977.
Faulkner, a keen huntsman, dies on March 3, 1977 following a riding accident while hunting with the County Down Staghounds at the Ballyagherty/Station Road junction near Saintfield, County Down. He is riding at full gallop along a narrow country road when his horse slips, throwing him off and killing him instantly. He is laid to rest at Magherahamlet Presbyterian Church near Spa, County Down where he had been a regular member of the congregation. His twenty-four-day life peerage is thus the shortest-lived until the death of Lord Heywood of Whitehall in 2018 just nine days after ennoblement.
The Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention is an elected body set up in 1975 by the United KingdomLabour government of Harold Wilson as an attempt to deal with constitutional issues surrounding the status of Northern Ireland.
The idea for a constitutional convention is first mooted by the Northern Ireland Office in its white paperThe Northern Ireland Constitution, published on July 4, 1974. The paper lays out plans for elections to a body which would seek agreement on a political settlement for Northern Ireland. The proposals become law with the enactment of the Northern Ireland Act 1974 later that month. With Lord Chief Justice of Northern IrelandRobert Lowry appointed to chair the new body, elections are announced for May 1, 1975.
The elections are held for the 78-member body using the single transferable vote system of proportional representation in each of Northern Ireland’s twelve Westminster constituencies. Initially the body is intended to be purely consultative, although it is hoped that executive and legislative functions can be devolved to the NICC once a cross-community agreement has been reached. Unionists opposed to the NICC once again band together under the umbrella of the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) and this coalition proves the most successful, taking 46 seats.
A number of leading Northern Ireland politicians are elected to the NICC, increasing hope that the body might achieve some of its aims. Also elected are some younger figures who go on to become leading figures in the future of Northern Ireland politics.
The elections leave the body fundamentally weakened from its inception as an overall majority has been obtained by those Unionists who oppose power sharing as a concept. As a result, the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention Report published on November 20, 1975 recommends only a return to majority rule as had previously existed under the old Parliament of Northern Ireland government. As such a solution is completely unacceptable to the nationalist parties, the NICC is placed on hiatus.
Hoping to gain something from the exercise, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees announces that the NICC would be reconvened on February 3, 1976. However, a series of meetings held between the UUUC and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) fail to reach any agreement about SDLP participation in government, and so the reconvened NICC once again fails to achieve a solution with cross-community support. As a result, Rees announces the dissolution of the body on March 5, 1976 and Northern Ireland remains under direct rule.
On the face of it, the NICC is a total failure as it does not achieve its aims of agreement between the two sides or of introducing ‘rolling devolution’ (gradual introduction of devolution as and when the parties involved see fit to accept it). Nevertheless, coming as it does not long after the Conservative-sponsored Sunningdale Agreement, the NICC indicates that no British government will be prepared to re-introduce majority rule in Northern Ireland. During the debates William Craig accepts the possibility of power-sharing with the SDLP, a move that splits the UUUC and precipitates the eventual collapse of the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party (VUPP).
The idea of electing a consultative body to thrash out a deal for devolution is also retained and in 1996 it is revived when the Northern Ireland Forum is elected on largely the same lines and with the same overall purpose. The Forum forms part of a process that leads to the Good Friday Agreement and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Stronge (86) and his son, James (48), are watching television in the library of Tynan Abbey when members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, armed with machine guns, use grenades to break down the locked heavy doors to the home.
The Stronge family home is then burned to the ground as a result of two bomb explosions. On seeing the explosions at the house, as well as a flare Stronge lit in an attempt to alert the authorities, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British Army troops arrive at the scene and establish a roadblock at the gate lodge. They encounter at least eight fleeing gunmen. A twenty-minute gunfight ensues in which at least two hundred shots are fired. There are no casualties among the security forces but the gunmen escape. The bodies of the father and son are later discovered in the library of their burning home, each with gunshot wounds in the head. It is not known who died first, Norman or James. Under the legal fiction known as the doctrine of survival, James is still listed as succeeding to the baronetcy.
The village of Tynan is crowded for the joint funeral of Stronge and his son. Mourners come from throughout the province and from England, including lords, politicians, policemen, judges and church leaders. The coffin is carried by the 5th Battalion the Royal Irish Rangers, the successors to his old regiment. The sword and cap of the Lord Lieutenant of Tyrone, Major John Hamilton-Stubber, are placed on his coffin in lieu of his own, which had been destroyed with his other possessions in the fire. During the service, a telegram sent from Queen Elizabeth II to one of Sir Norman’s daughters, is read. After the service, the chief mourners move out into the churchyard where the “Last Post” is sounded and a Royal British Legion farewell is given. The two coffins are laid in the family plot, where Lady Stronge, Sir Norman’s wife and mother of James, was buried a year previously.
The IRA releases a statement in Belfast, quoted in The Times, claiming that “This deliberate attack on the symbols of hated unionism was a direct reprisal for a whole series of loyalist assassinations and murder attacks on nationalist peoples and nationalist activities.” This follows the loyalist attempted murder of Bernadette McAliskey and her husband Michael McAliskey on January 16, and the loyalist assassinations of four republican activists (Miriam Daly, John Turnley, Noel Lyttle and Ronnie Bunting) which had taken place since May 1980.
Stronge is described at the time of his death by Social Democratic and Labour Party politician Austin Currie as having been “even at 86 years of age … still incomparably more of a man than the cowardly dregs of humanity who ended his life in this barbaric way.”
The ruins of Tynan Abbey are demolished in 1998, having stood for 249 years.
The province’s institutions are suspended on October 14 following a row over allegations of Irish Republican Army (IRA) activity, including alleged spying within the Northern Ireland Office (NIO).
Speaking after a 40-minute meeting with Trimble, Adams says they had had a “useful exchange of views.” But he adds, as expected, “there were very few conclusions in terms of the big picture….I asked Mr. Trimble how he thought things could be sorted out and Mr. Trimble had no particular suggestion to offer. But it was a good meeting.”
The Sinn Féin president says he had suggested to Trimble that each leader could address the executive of the opposite’s party. “He declined. But I hope he will think about the suggestion.”
Trimble says no significant developments came out of the meeting. He adds that the onus is on the republican movement to move the process forward. He dismisses Adams’s suggestion that they should address each others’ parties as a “stunt.”
seamus dubhghaill 