Northern Ireland in the Second World War

Politics, economic mobilisation and society, 1939–45

Philip Ollerenshaw

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719090509
• eBook ISBN: 9781526111623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This original and distinctive book surveys the political, economic and social history of Northern Ireland in the Second World War. Since its creation in 1920, Northern Ireland has been a deeply divided society and the book explores these divisions before and during the war. It examines rearmament, the relatively slow wartime mobilisation, the 1941 Blitz, labour and industrial relations, politics and social policy. Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK with a devolved government and no military conscription during the war. The absence of military conscription made the process of mobilisation, and the experience of men and women, very different from that in Britain. The book's conclusion considers how the government faced the domestic and international challenges of the postwar world. This study draws on a wide range of primary sources and will appeal to those interested in modern Irish and British history and in the Second World War.

1

The background to war

Government and politics before 1939

After the First World War, the key constitutional determinants of Anglo-Irish relations were the 1920 Government of Ireland Act and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. The former partitioned the country and created an international boundary between six counties in the north-east, known as Northern Ireland, and the other twenty-six counties on the island known as Southern Ireland. The Treaty created the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Empire–Commonwealth from which Northern Ireland could and did opt out. Partition took place amid considerable urban and rural violence. Between 1920 and confirmation of the border dividing Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in 1925, both the new states equipped themselves with the necessary powers, police forces and administrative structures to survive. At partition, the population of Northern Ireland was approximately two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic.

Sectarian violence in the early 1920s was widespread, particularly in Belfast, and worse than at any time before the Troubles which began in the later 1960s. The most recent estimate is that between 1920 and 1922 nearly 500 people were killed, 2,000 seriously injured, £3 million worth of damage sustained in the city centre, and perhaps as many as 10,000 people intimidated from their jobs and some 20,000 from their homes.¹ While the great majority of Catholics were nationalist and had no wish to reside in a Protestant-dominated state and separated from their co-religionists in the south, Protestants now had to live with a substantial nationalist minority which they regarded with varying degrees of suspicion and distrust. Mutual antipathy was exacerbated by the nationalist boycott of goods and services from Protestant firms in the north-east which began in 1920, following expulsions of Catholics from their homes and jobs. In addition to the nationalist boycott there was a much less widespread loyalist boycott of goods and services from the south.²

The government of Northern Ireland was subject to significant constraints on its freedom of action, and a range of powers were ‘excepted’ or ‘reserved’ to Westminster. The former category included matters such as the Crown, the making of peace or war, foreign and imperial affairs and the armed forces. The latter reserved to Westminster a range of taxes and services such as customs, most forms of direct and indirect taxation, postal services and land purchase.³ One key area of responsibility for the new government was the ‘power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government’ of Northern Ireland and thus ‘for community relations in a bitterly divided society’.⁴ From the outset, Northern Ireland was subject to internal and external threats to its existence, and the survival of the state took priority over all other considerations. The violence which faced both governments in the early 1920s played a central role in determining the nature of security policy both north and south of the border.

In Northern Ireland, the most significant legal response to violence was the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Acts (Northern Ireland), the first of which was passed in 1922.⁵ The Special Powers Acts gave the civil authority, in this case the Minister of Home Affairs or his nominee, ‘the power to impose curfew, close premises, roads and transportation routes, detain and intern, proscribe organisations, engage in censorship, ban meetings, processions and gatherings, alter the court system, ban uniforms, weapons and the use of cars’. It also bestowed wide-ranging powers of ‘entry, search and seizure’ and enabled the civil authority ‘to take all such steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving peace and maintaining order’.⁶ The Special Powers were based upon the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act of 1920 which in turn drew upon the 1914–15 Defence of the Realm Acts. Renewed annually until 1928, then renewed for five years and made permanent in 1933, the Special Powers Acts were amended between 1922 and 1943 and deployed largely against the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland.⁷ Further, the mainly Protestant police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), was supplemented by the exclusively Protestant Ulster Special Constabulary. Initially comprising three categories, ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’, the A-Specials were disbanded and the C-Specials stood down shortly after the confirmation of the border in December 1925. The B-Specials, mainly part-time but liable to mobilisation in an emergency, would not be abolished until 1969.⁸

At partition, many nationalist-controlled local authorities declared allegiance to Dáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament, and this in turn resulted in the 1921 Local Government Act which inter alia required an oath of allegiance and gave the government the power to redraw local government boundaries, restrict the franchise, abolish proportional representation in local government and suspend and reconstitute local authorities. As with the Special Powers Act, this Act was renewed annually.⁹ Like the Special Powers Acts, policing, gerrymandering and the local government franchise emerged as grievances amongst the nationalist population in Northern Ireland and would be central to the civil rights campaign of the 1960s. The grievances also pointed to the absence of political consensus from the time of partition onwards. This would in turn have important implications in the Second World War.

Table 1.1 Members elected and general elections to the Northern Ireland Parliament, 1921–45

From the first general election in May 1921 until the collapse of the devolved parliament in 1972, politics in Northern Ireland was dominated by the Ulster Unionist Party. The extent of that dominance between 1921 and 1945 is outlined in Table 1.1. Unionist politicians also tended to stay in office for many years, normally until retirement or death removed them. Sir James Craig, the first Prime Minister, was in office from 1921 until his death in 1940; some ministers likewise were in office for more than ten or even twenty years.

The first two elections were held under a system of proportional representation, the other three to 1939 under a first-past-the-post single-member constituency system. The only exception to the single-member pattern was Queen’s University of Belfast, which, until the abolition of this constituency in 1968, returned four members. In addition to the fifty-two-seat Northern Ireland House of Commons, there was a Senate of twenty-six, mostly elected by the Commons, and also thirteen MPs who represented Northern Ireland’s interests in the British House of Commons. Of these normally eleven were unionists and the other two abstentionist nationalists. Table 1.2 outlines the distribution of electors and parliamentary seats for both the Belfast and Westminster parliaments in 1937. In most areas in the later 1930s, and in Northern Ireland as a whole, women formed the majority of voters. Apart from the Queen’s University constituency, the only counties which had a majority of male voters, Fermanagh and Tyrone, were also the only two which had a Catholic majority.

Table 1.2 Electoral register for parliamentary elections, 15 December 1937

Ulster unionism was based upon a class alliance of mainly Protestant voters and, while certainly successful in electoral terms, was subject to tensions within the Unionist Party itself and also to opposition from Independent Unionists, from those nationalists who chose to take their seats and also from Labour members. The Independents were not numerous but they were vocal and persistent and in the main represented working-class Protestants.¹⁰ The Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), established in 1924, had to tread the difficult line between unionism and nationalism, and it was subject to debilitating internal divisions and personality clashes from the 1920s to the end of the Second World War.¹¹ Despite the dominance of the Ulster Unionist Party, in a parliament with a maximum of fifty-two members, some of whom were abstentionist, it was relatively easy to make a dissident voice heard.

While the Belfast government argued that emergency powers were necessary to protect the state, critics argued that, whatever their original justification, the emergency had passed and they were no longer required. They also generated unwelcome publicity not only in Britain and the Free State but overseas as well. One important instance where this occurred related to the 1935 Belfast riots, the most serious public disorder the city witnessed between 1923 and 1968. High unemployment in Northern Ireland and the ‘increasingly Catholic and nationalist tone’¹² of the Free State had contributed to rising sectarian tension. In June 1932, there were widespread sectarian disturbances which occurred around the time of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, to and from which many thousands of Catholics had travelled through Northern Ireland.¹³ The ethnic violence of July 1935, including the role of the Orange Order and the serious shortcomings in the administration of law and order in several areas of the city, has been analysed in some detail by A. C. Hepburn.¹⁴ The Ulster Unionist Council, however, declared that the immediate trigger for the violence was a ‘premeditated, wanton and unprovoked attack on a peaceable procession of Orangemen, returning from their “Twelfth” celebrations. But for this attack, so carefully planned, the peace of the city would not have been disturbed’.¹⁵

Although repeated requests for an official inquiry into the riots were rejected by both the Belfast and London governments, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) did produce a report in the context of an investigation into the Special Powers legislation since 1922. The NCCL had been established in 1934 and a major factor leading to its formation had been the allegations of police brutality when confronting the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement march in London in 1932. As a cross-party group, the NCCL developed a broader range of civil rights subjects for scrutiny, and one of these was the Special Powers legislation in Northern Ireland.¹⁶ The secretary of the NCCL, Ronald Kidd, had obtained RUC permission to be in the curfew area ‘day and night’ during the riots. As he noted, ‘I have no liking for political Catholicism – indeed I view it with the utmost distrust – and I have no party ties whatsoever’.¹⁷ Kidd did stress that both sides had to share the blame for the ‘violence and bloodshed’ but also that it was imperative to examine ‘th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Map of Northern Ireland
• Introduction
• 1 The background to war
• 2 Problems of economic mobilisation, 1939–41
• 3 The war economy, 1941–45
• 4 Early wartime politics and society
• 5 Later wartime politics and society
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index