The Irish Times by Terence Brown

Author:Terence Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472919076
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Among things such politicians had done to dissuade Northern unionists from even considering unity were, the Irish Times averred: secession from the Commonwealth, the intention to create a Gaelic-speaking republic (dubbed ‘a crazy plan’) and the habit of ‘pouring abuse on the heads of those whom they profess to have been wooing’. Crucially, however, the editorial focused on the unionists of Northern Ireland as the real impediment to Irish unity, and not the British: ‘To blame the British is to ignore the outstanding fact – namely, that the majority in the North does not want to join the Republic and that, if the British should try to compel it, matters would become infinitely worse even than they are to-day.’ In April the paper reinforced this point when it asked ‘does Mr MacBride, or any other Minister, believe that the majority of the Six Counties would submit quietly to coercion by the South, or even by Britain?’ (Irish Times, 20 April 1949). By the summer of 1949 the paper was convinced that the ‘cold war’ the Irish government had declared against the British ‘and a slightly warmer propaganda war against the “puppet junta” in the North’ (Irish Times, 7 July 1949) had failed miserably: ‘The unhappy truth about the whole business is that, as a result of almost incredible bungling, a solution of the border problem is farther away than ever it was.’

These editorials of 1949 probably reflected the mind of Robert Smyllie on the matter of partition. Alec Newman’s accession to Smyllie’s chair in 1954 did not alter the paper’s fundamental view that partition could not be ended without the agreement of Northern unionists, and in this way its ideological position on a key issue of Irish policy remained a minority one in the 1950s. When in 1956 a conciliatory speech by Seán Lemass (who in the 1960s would seek to break the ideological logjam between north and south) at Queen’s University Belfast was immediately followed by IRA attacks in five of the six Northern counties (among the first shots over two nights of a long-planned border campaign against partition to be waged by that body between 1956 and 1962), the paper declared it an act of national sabotage. It predicted that these actions could have only one outcome: ‘the net effect … is only to harden the Unionist heart – and there are 900,000 Unionists to be persuaded – in favour of the present constitutional position and against Irish reunification’ (Irish Times, 13 December 1956). The editorial concluded that the worst and most damaging result of such futile militarism ‘is the long-term one of alienating more and more the solid and steady mass of Six County Unionists whose loyal adherence will be the sine qua non of our nation’s eventual reunion’. For, like Smyllie’s before him, Newman’s newspaper took seriously the ‘outstanding fact’ of unionist opposition to any change, in a post-war world undergoing rapid change, that would rob them of their political patrimony as subjects of the Crown and citizens of the United Kingdom.

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