The year the Brits lost their heads

James Kelly, Irish News

January 5, 2003

When the history of 1972 is written there is only one conclusion that the record can show and that is that this is the year the Brits lost their heads. It’s all there in the secret files released under the thirty year’s rule. Downing Street in turmoil as the world looks in at its oldest colony, the six counties of Ulster, in chaos with a gung-ho prime minister, Edward Heath, and a befuddled cabinet, at its wit’s end wondering what to do, it was the endgame for the Protestant parliament for a Protestant people whose bigoted and scurvy treatment of its Catholic minority was covered up by don’t-want-to-know successive Tory and Labour governments for 50 years.

The lid was blowing off the boiling kettle as the Stormont besashed bully boys tried to smash the civil rights movement’s campaign for equal rights with the people in the rest of the so-called United Kingdom. Instead of moving quickly to right the manifest injustice of the denial of these rights and the scandals of discrimination on religious grounds, the Faulkner cabinet, taking a leaf out of the book of Craigavon and Brookeborough, tried to smash it down with repressive measures, police batons, internment and even prison ships.

Paratroopers and colonial fire-eaters, like General Ford, were brought in to help the police and the result was the disaster of Bloody Sunday in Derry, the brutal killing and wounding of civil rights marchers. The appalling scenes were pictured on television producing worldwide horror and at home wild scenes in Dublin as the British embassy was attacked by angry mobs.

The Stormont cabinet which had been agitating for tougher action against the demonstrators, stupidly impervious to the disgrace which Britain was evoking in the US and throughout the civilised world, met within days of the Derry massacre and appeared undisturbed by the brutal killing of its Catholic citizens.

But it was a different story at Downing Street as reports from embassies abroad came in and the Dublin government withdrew its ambassador from London and sought the help of friendly countries against what it described as the British government’s attempts to bolster up a repressive one-party unionist dictatorship at Stormont. Heath, who was seeking entry into the European Community, was aghast. His ministers too were unanimous that drastic measures were necessary to bring the Orange cabal at Stormont to its senses. Britain’s reputation was at stake and there was no longer any sympathy for the Ulster bunglers who had fomented the crisis. Heath ordered a series of options to be produced secretly by Sir Burke Trend and his plainly shocked top civil servants.

Nothing was ruled out except the surprise advice of former premier Sir Alec Douglas Home, that Stormont should be pushed towards a united Ireland! Nothing was too drastic or too daft to be considered to rid Britain of its embarrassing problem across the Irish Sea. This was all deeply secretive as any leakage would cause a political uproar. An ‘Independent Ulster’ left on its loneo was one. Another was ‘shut down Stormont’ and install ‘direct rule’ from Westminster. But then came the unbelievable and incredible. Wait for it ‘repartition’! When the cabinet papers were published this is the one that caused the biggest sensation. The Daily Mail gave a two-page article on ‘how Ulster faced ethnic cleansing’ with the label ‘revealed health officials astonishing plan to kick out thousands of Catholics and hand the province to Protestants’.

Ex-taoiseach Garrett Fitzgerald has since pointed out that these were options not proposals, but the fact remains that this option was not ruled out and since then there have been reports that later on Mrs Thatcher too was seriously considering such a move!

I have been examining a map in the Irish Independent of the suggested cut-up and repartitioned map of Northern Ireland reduced by about a third of its area with the southern tip of Lough Neagh as a new international boundary! The six counties used to be described as a ‘headless chicken’ minus its Co Donegal head. The new map looks more a chicken’s entrails. The mind boggles at the picture of 500,000 Catholics and Protestants being moved from their homes like the scenes when India and Pakistan were partitioned by the scuttling British.

Has Britain partition on the brain? A terrible warning to Trimble, Donaldson and the other backward politicians inside and outside Stormont that when hardy comes to hardy there are no more ruthless fixers than the powers that be in London Town. That’s how they kept the ramshackle British Empire together for centuries. Brian Faulkner, educated in Dublin, learnt the lesson quickly at Sunningdale and as Seamus Mallon famously laid it down for all the muddled dissidents the Good Friday Agreement is ‘Sunningdale for late developers...’