The second weekend of the Ulster Protestant general strike against power-sharing further exposed the dark underside of the strike.
On Friday 24 May, four people were killed; two were Catholics bar owners murdered for opening their businesses in defiance of the strike and two motorists died when they crashed into a tree felled as part of a barricade. That night a gang in Ballymena also wrecked pubs and a cafe, and minibuses of thugs in Ballymoney ordered customers out of pubs.
Saturday 25 May proved to be a turning point, but not in the way hoped by the Northern Irish power-sharing Executive. It was announced that in the evening, Harold Wilson would make a Prime Ministerial broadcast, followed by Executive chief Brian Faulkner.
A dramatic announcement was predicted. The Ulster Workers’ Council made emergency preparations, fearing that they would be arrested during the broadcast. The paramilitaries decamped to a community centre in a loyalist housing estate, leaving the politicians at Hawthornden Road. If troops barged in, they would be forced into the embarrassing position of seizing elected representatives.
They needn’t have bothered. Different elements of the government were riven by divisions over the plan to use the army to restart oil distribution.
Though Rees returned from the Cabinet with authorisation to proceed, the army was deeply unhappy. It feared that electricity supplies would collapse, transmission lines would be sabotaged, and that a combination of civil disobedience and loyalist terrorism would overwhelm the British army. Faulkner, too, was worried and feared that if army intervention caused a violent confrontation, then the Faulkner Unionists would be finished politically.
That evening, Wilson went on television. The results were disastrous. The Executive was expecting the Prime Minister to announce bold measures to break the strike; instead, Wilson castigated the UWC as “people who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods”, adding: “Who do these people think they are?”
Members of the Executive watched with their heads in their hands. Glenn Barr from the UWC roared that it was “a brilliant speech” and that they “couldn’t have written better ourselves.” The speech, though intended to support the Executive, it had the opposite effect. Many Ulster Protestants interpreted this as an attack on their community as a whole, and took to wearing little sponges on their lapels as a sign of protest.
As Sunday morning came, there was still no sign of the army in filling stations. The SDLP was exasperated and all six of its Executive members signed a letter saying that they would resign with effect from 6am on Monday morning if the British government did not take action against the UWC. Wilson was persuaded.
From 5 a.m., the army moved in. However, it faced numerous technical problems in the refineries and, in the first few hours, less oil was moving than under the UWC’s own plan.
Electricity was the biggest problem, as the Larne power workers walked out, leaving the Ballylumford plant in the hands of technical staff. The UWC demanded that the power system be run at unsustainably low levels, risking a fault. The NIES told Hume that its staff could continue to run the plant for a further 24-hours but that a blackout was imminent.
Now that the army had moved in, the UWC strategy was to load as much work as possible on to the troops. It announced that burying the dead would cease, and would hitherto be the army’s responsibility. The loyalists sensed victory.
Faulkner was despondent, as civil servants told him that farms would run out of livestock by the end of the weak and that they expected the first deaths of the very old and the very young due to the withdrawal of essential services within the next 36-hours.
Now, the Unionists and Alliance insisted that talks must be opened up with the UWC. The SDLP refused but was in a minority on the Executive. When Faulkner relayed the decision, the British government said that it would not negotiate under duress. Faulkner and his colleagues resigned. The Executive had collapsed. On Wednesday 29, the population went back to work and Northern Ireland’s first experiment with power-sharing government had failed.
The experience of the UWC strike has been the subject of much recrimination. It has been argued that if the army had moved in during the first couple of days, it could easily have nipped the strike in the bud before it had the chance to build support and momentum. This is probably true. Either the army would have cleared the roads, allowing people back to work, or it would have provoked violence similar to the failed strike of 1973, undercutting the ability of the UWC to attract support from the wider Protestant population. The army did not do so, not because of conspiracies at the highest level, but because, rightly or wrongly, it feared a bloodbath and a war on two fronts — against loyalists and the IRA.
Fundamentally, the strike succeeded because of the sense of grievance felt by large sections of the population against power-sharing and the Council of Ireland. Loyalist paramilitary force may have been the “midwife” but the eventual degree of support for the strike cannot be explained by force alone. Any attempt to find a military solution once the strike got going was always going to fail, at least without creating widespread bloodshed.
Protestants feared that the Council of Ireland would eventually lead to their inclusion into a united Ireland, which did not recognise their identity. Against power-sharing, they supported “majority rule”, which in Northern Ireland terms could only mean Protestant-rule and a return to the Orange State.
The 1974 general election demonstrated that Protestants were against the Sunningdale Agreement, creating a crisis of representation. The Executive was only ever patched together from fragments of the once monolithic Unionist Party, governing with Alliance and the SDLP. By the end of the strike, the UUUC had more of a claim to voice loyalist opinion, and this was borne out by the dominance of hard-right loyalism in the 1975 Convention.
For nationalists, the Council of Ireland was a symbol that their Irish identity and eventual aspiration towards a United Ireland could be recognised in the new settlement. Ironically, the SDLP eventually secured this bureaucratically through diplomatic initiatives, with the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 granting the Irish government an influence in Northern Ireland, over the heads of the Unionists.
In its basics — power-sharing, north-south co-operation – the Sunningdale Agreement prefigured the eventual Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Many lives were lost in the interim, giving a poignant edge to former SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon's comment that GFA was “Sunningdale for slow learners.”
Arguably, however, power-sharing in the 1970s was little more than a vain hope in such a violently divided society. Northern Ireland is still divided, though the war has gone cold.
If war is politics by other means, then the opposite can also hold true; the sectarian warfare of the Troubles has been transmuted into a less deadly politics of sectarianism in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Intricate balancing mechanisms try and patch over the enduringly deep divisions in many parts of the community, with the result that government careens from crisis to crisis, if it is not stymied in deadlock.
One lesson of the UWC strike is that though the labour movement was economically powerful in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, it was politically ineffectual.
The folly of the trade union leaders in 1974, mostly grouped around the Stalinists, was that they thought they could bring the labour movement into political opposition to the UWC strike, without having done the preparatory educational work amongst the working-class.
Without being accompanied with anti-sectarian socialist education, trade unions in Northern Ireland had severe limitations as instruments of working-class power. As Liam O’Down, Bill Rolston and Mike Tomlinson have written:
“Trade unions in a sectarian society cannot remain insulated from the society of which they are a part. Where sectarian relations prevail, trade unions, like other elements in society, reconstitute and reproduce those relations. Trade unions, as they developed in Northern Ireland were simultaneously about class politics and sectarian politics.”
Yet, the loyalist working-class could wield immense power in 1974. By the end of the strike, large areas of Northern Ireland life were in the control of the UWC and its network of shop stewards and paramilitaries. In the years after the strike, according to Robert Fisk, Harry Murray was even visited by a Spanish student who asked him if he would help organise a general strike against Franco! (Murray politely refused).
This should caution those on the left who tend to stress — beyond all other considerations — the potential social power of the working-class as the fundamental reasons why socialists look to it, above all other social forces, to be the bearer of a new and higher form of society.
Though true in itself, a stress on the working-class’s “negative” ability to stop production and bring the gears of society to a halt fades out the most important point; it is the working-class, thrown together as a result of capitalism, and forced to struggle collectively for better conditions of life, that generates the powerful feelings of solidarity able to shake the foundations of our current society.
Through its experiences, the working-class develops the skills and propensities which make possible not only the “negative” ability to bring capitalist society to its knees, but the “positive” and constructive work of building a new society in its wake.
This idea, of working-class self-emancipation, requires workers to have a conscious conception of what sort of society they are building; to be more than the “muscle” to the “brain” either of a socialist organistion or, for that matter, reactionary bodies such as the UWC.
To make this a reality, we need more than trade unions. We need a socialist organisation in the labour movement, with a programme around which workers can organise.
Ireland requires a consistently democratic settlement, which “prohibits any privileges whatsoever to any one nation and any encroachment whatsoever upon the rights of a national minority.” The aim is to drain the poison from national divisions in order to clear the way for united working-class struggle.
It is clear that power-sharing mechanisms on their own cannot resolve the national question in Ireland, presuming and perpetuating as they do, a static conception of eternally divided communities, within the immutable boundaries of the Six Counties.
Even after the GFA, there are still large parts of Northern Ireland whose Catholic-majority populations would rather join the Republic of Ireland. Our programme should not take the sectarian borders of the Northern Ireland state to be immutable and socialists should assert the rights of communities in border areas to secede if they wish.
The language, culture and identity of Irish minorities in Protestant-majority areas should be recognised and protected; the same applies in reverse, where Protestants are in a minority.
We should also oppose attempts to coerce, through violent or bureaucratic means, the Protestant population of the north-east of Ireland into a unitary state without its consent. Protestant-Unionist identity could be guaranteed in a federal united Ireland, with a degree of autonomy and self-government for the north-east, perhaps in some sort of voluntary confederation with the United Kingdom.
In a perverse and grotesque way, the UWC organised one of the most effective general strikes in history. Forty years later, though the labour movement is still powerful in Northern Ireland, workers are no closer to developing the sort of democratic working-class politics needed to vanquish sectarian division and fundamentally re-make society.
