What If... The Army Had Never Gone to Northern Ireland?

Today marked the start of a new phase of the Leveson Inquiry. It's still an odd image, that of the Metropolitan Police having their good name dragged in the mud; for a long time we had viewed them as the most professional police force anywhere in the world.


One person who agreed with this was the former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. In the summer of 1969, years of simmering tension in Northern Ireland between the ruling Unionist community and the vociferous Nationalist minority boiled over into civil disorder. Confronted with  riots on the streets, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, James Chichester-Clark, asked Westminster to send in the army to restore order. James Callaghan, the Home Secretary, was all for the move. But Wilson wasn't so sure. Upon hearing Army estimates that the troops might have to stay for months, Wilson mused it would probably be years before any army operation would be over. So he gave new orders to Callaghan; he was to reinforce the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) with officers from the Met, and the RUC was to be disarmed.


History has thought long and hard about this issue. It has been argued that using the army would have lanced the boil of terrorism, which caused so much of a petty nuisance to the British people over the years. However, others also claim that troops used to counter-insurgency in more distant parts of the world would have reacted badly to the presence of the media spotlight, and that the problems would have been much worse. What we do know is that the initially warm response to the Met from both nationalists and unionists soon faded, as the RUC failed to make much headway in reforming itself and Chichester-Clark refused to budge on political reform. 


The crunch point came on January 30th 1972, when an RUC patrol fired on a civil rights march in Derry, leading to the deaths of thirteen marchers. The new UK Prime Minister, Edward Heath, angrily called in Chichester-Clark and abolished the Stormont parliament. All the police forces in the mainland of the UK diverted their reserves over to Ulster, and the army once again was put on standby.


But the crisis never came. The presence of a pan-UK unarmed police force keeping law and order, plus the assumption of direct control from Westminster of Northern Irish affairs, pulled the rug from under the struggling IRA, which folded soon afterwards. The Ulster Unionist Party, realising it could not afford to block political reforms any longer, elected Brian Faulkner as leader, a moderate. He was able to compose a deal with Heath and the leader of the nationalist SDLP, Gerry Fitt, which set up an elected assembly, with a First Minister and a deputy First Minister drawn from the largest of the two unionist and nationalist parties respectively The first elections to the 'Sunningdale Assembly' took place in 1974, and were a landslide victory for Faulkner, Fitt and the moderates. After a further series of violent spates in the late 1970s, especially in South Armagh, life in Northern Ireland pretty much returned to normal. In 1980, the UK police force which had helped to stabilise the streets withdrew, widely considered the best police service anywhere in the world (well, here at least!); it was replaced by the unfortunately named Northern Irish Police Service (NIPS).


And this is how the province has been ever since. Long periods of joint UUP-SDLP rule set in, and as these were allied to the two main Westminster parties (Conservatives and Labour respectively) the elections to the Assembly came largely to be seen as a from of advanced local government. The normalisation of politics in the province also allowed politicians from the area to take key government roles at Westminster: Josias Cunningham proved a safe pair of hands as Mrs Thatcher's Agriculture Minister, using his farming expertise to curtail a little known but dangerous practice whereby farmers fed meat to their cows, while Joe Hendron of the SDLP helped Tony Blair to implement devolution in both Scotland and Wales. The 1990 elections did produce a slight blip, when the deep unpopularity of the Conservative government at Westminster led to the election by a knife's edge of the strident Ian Paisley as First Minister; in 1994, he was quickly removed from office.


But these decades of two party rule created a bubbling resentment amongst voters, until in 2006 the UUP and SDLP were overtaken by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein as the largest parties in the Assembly. Initial fears that the province would slide back into chaos were defied as the DUP's Peter Robinson proved more than able to work with the former terrorist Martin McGuinness; such is the legacy of healed wounds.


P.S. Prime Ministers/First Ministers of Northern Ireland, 1969-2012

1969-1972- James Chichester-Clark (UUP)
1974-1977- Brian Faulkner (UUP)
1977-1990- James Molyneaux (UUP)
1990-1994- Iain Paisley (DUP)
1994-2006- David Trimble (UUP)
2006-2012- Peter Robinson (DUP)


P.P.S. deputy First Ministers of Northern Ireland, 1974-2012


1974-1980- Gerry Fitt (SDLP)
1980-1998- John Hume (SDLP)
1998-2006- Mark Durkan (SDLP)
2006-2012- Martin McGuinness (Sinn Fein)