O'Neill vs. Paisley: A familiar political paradigm

Terence O'Neill, Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, 1963-'69, photographed by Victor Patterson

A divisive and bigoted media personality who everyone originally took as a joke plays on the fears of the populace in order to foment violence and secure political victory over a well-meaning and conciliatory centrist whose somewhat arch personality turns people off and inspires mistrust from both sides. Sound familiar?

But the above paragraph is not intended to be about the American general presidential election of 2016. It is about the infighting between two Unionist politicians in 1960's Northern Ireland: Terence O'Neill, the centrist Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland who tried to make concessions to the Nationalist side, and Ian Paisley, the fiery preacher of hardline Unionism who made sure O'Neill's experiment would fail.

Looking at the rivalry between these two men brings up a lot of the nuances about the three sides in this conflict--Nationalist, Unionist and British--and what they each wanted and were willing to accept and not accept. It also provides a good illustration about how an uncomfortable situation in the early 1960's became an incendiary one by the end of that decade. The Troubles may have been inevitable, but it seems that O'Neill sensed this and tried to be proactive. He apparently never really gained the Nationalist/Catholic's trust (about whom he was somewhat condescending) and he certainly alienated many on his own side, but he did try.

Meanwhile, Presbyterian Minister and MP Ian Paisley saw the paranoia and mistrust that O'Neill was starting to inspire in their fellow Unionists, and he milked that vein to his own political advantage, effectively destroying any chance for reconciliation that may have been possible. Paisley's extremists saw the Catholic Civil Rights movement as a premise to overthrow their world, and their violent reaction against it--just like England's violent reaction against the Easter Uprising leaders over fifty years earlier--led to the explosion of violence that was soon branded as the Troubles. A fairly dormant IRA, made the bogeyman by Paisley, soon became a very real threat rejuvenated by the violence with which a certain section of Unionism met the Civil Rights marchers. Like US violence in the Middle East leading to the birth of ISIS and new branches of Al Qaeda, Unionist reaction to a perceived threat spawned a very real one from the Nationalist side.

All of this Unionist in-fighting and rising violence between them and the Nationalists was taking place at a time when the Labour government with anti-Union Harold Wilson as Prime Minister had taken hold in London in 1964. The Unionists felt more imperiled than ever before, and O'Neill's outreach to the Nationalist side and to the Republic came at exactly the wrong time for many of them. Paisley, in contrast, must have seemed to some like the protector of the world they knew against the new world that threatened their sense of their nation. He had, according to McKittrick and McVea's Making Sense of the Troubles,  "substantial support within a section of rural and working-class Protestants. His mix of religious fundamentalism, personal charisma and talent for self-publicity was a potent one" (p. 35). Again, the comparison to contemporary American politics begs to be made.

A recent conversation I had with some of our students--the transcript of which I will soon publish in this blog--has made me realize that we may need to get into these sorts of nuances in our course, to keep things from being too dangerously black and white. Unionism comes in several different colors, just as Nationalism does as well. This is a deeply complicated history, and I suspect we may need to devote more time to it, within our 10th grade Facing History course, in order to really do it justice.

Ian Paisley: the Donald Trump of the Troubles?