History of England 1-6

Characteristically, Heath appealed to the country. Appearing on television, he conceded none of his adversaries’ claims. No one had won, he stated. All had lost. Without naming the unions directly, he made clear his view that the world had changed, and for the worse, and that if the spirit of unity were abandoned, there would be further trouble. For his part, Arthur Scargill had learned that the ‘unions united can never be defeated’. Perhaps he had not heard of the error of Stoicism: the fallacy that you have only to succeed once to succeed always.

46

The first shot

It was the fate of the Heath administration to know no respite. The strongest city will fall when attacked from all sides and ‘Heathco’ faced a ceaseless barrage. Principal among its vicissitudes was the unrest in Northern Ireland. For years, the Province had been held in fief by the Protestant majority. The Catholic minority was disadvantaged in most ways that free citizens might be expected to resent, in matters such as housing, employment and even the electoral register. Thus far Martin McGuinness was correct in calling the Province ‘a unionist state for a unionist people’ – its borders had been fixed to ensure that an otherwise narrow Protestant majority would be a decisive one.

The Unionists had their own resentments. When they looked south of the border, they saw not the benign nation recognized by the English, but a predatory theocracy determined to lash them to the mast of Rome. Their chief spokesman in the Seventies was the Reverend Ian Paisley MP. He was feared by many in the north as a fanatical and bigoted zealot, but in truth he was neither. Though he detested the papacy and feared the Republic, he won warm plaudits from his Catholic constituents as a fair-minded and considerate MP. Similarly, he never lent his name or support to the Protestant paramilitaries, and he was to oppose the policy of internment. Those who knew him best were wont to ascribe his public stance less to fanaticism than to irresponsibility. He was a show-off rather than a demagogue, and in this he resembled another staunch defender of the Province’s integrity, Enoch Powell.

The ‘Troubles’ began in the late Sixties. Unionist wrath had been aroused by a series of incidents and, as a result, Catholics now stood in fear of their lives. Hundreds of families were driven from their burning homes until it seemed that little less than a pogrom was under way. In 1969, frantic appeals to the government both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland at last bore fruit when Callaghan agreed that troops must be sent in. The army was greeted with tea, cakes and chips in a carnival of relieved gratitude, but the honeymoon soon waned. Loyalists had drawn first blood, although this was soon forgotten. The Ulster Volunteer Force killed a barman, for no better reason than that they were drunk and he was Catholic. Although IRA atrocities were more frequent and larger in scale, Loyalists showed from the first a penchant for elaborate sadism. The IRA justified its deeds as acts of war, the Loyalists as demonstrations of ‘loyalty’. Both sides proclaimed that they were protecting their own communities, and neither respected sex, age, or civilian status. The innocent were killed on the basis of supposed complicity with the foe, and dead civilians were passed off as combatants. Indeed the conflict in Northern Ireland was above all one in which the civilian was placed in the front line.

The IRA always maintained that the English were at fault; in a sense they were, for one Englishman can certainly be blamed for much of the havoc and misery that blighted the Province during the Heath years. Sean Macstiofain’s life was a tragicomedy of self-reinvention. He was baptized John Stephenson; his father was an English solicitor and his mother was born in Bethnal Green, rendering their son rather less Irish than most of his enemies. Nonetheless, his mother early imbued him with a keen sense of his supposed Irishness, and in this certainty was incubated a fierce nationalism. Those who adopt a cause are often far more zealous than those born to it, and so it proved here.