Unionism in Ireland
Following the 1998 Belfast Agreement, under which both republican and loyalist paramilitaries committed to permanent ceasefires, unionists accepted principles of joint office and parallel consent in a new Northern Ireland legislature and executive.
[1][2] In the north-east, combinations of Presbyterian tradesmen, merchants, and tenant farmers protested against the unrepresentative parliament and against an executive in Dublin Castle still appointed, through the office of the Lord Lieutenant, by English ministers.
Headed by the former Unionist MP for South Dublin, Horace Plunkett,[52] a new Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction broke with the traditions of Irish Boards by announcing that its aim was to "be in touch with public opinion of the classes whom its work concerns, and to rely largely for its success upon their active assistance and cooperation".
In 1906, Thomas Russell, MP, the son of an evicted Scottish crofter, broke with the Conservatives in the Irish Unionist Alliance to be returned to Westminster from South Tyrone as the champion of the Ulster Farmers and Labourers Union.
Determined lobbying by her North of Ireland Women's Suffrage Society ensured the 1887 Act creating a new city-status municipal franchise for Belfast (piloted through the Commons by William Johnston)[67] conferred the vote on persons rather than men.
[83][84] In a subsequent trial, WPSU organiser Dorothy Evans created an uproar by demanding to know why James Craig, then arming Ulster Volunteers with German rifles, was not appearing on the same weapons and explosives charges.
[87] In response to the First Home rule Bill in 1886, Radical Unionists (Liberals who proposed federalising the relationship between all countries of the United Kingdom) likewise argued that "the Protestant part of Ulster should receive special treatment .
This bound signatories "to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland".
[96][97] In the Coupon Election of December 1918, the first Westminster poll since 1910 and the first with all adult males, and women from age thirty, eligible to vote (the electorate tripled), the IPP was almost wholly replaced in nationalist constituencies by Sinn Féin.
It was not only that twenty-six of thirty-two Irish counties were lost to the Union, but that within the six retained unionists were "unable to make the British government in London fully acknowledge their full and unequivocal membership of the United Kingdom".
Speaking to Labour MPs in London, John Hume suggested that "the plan" was "to develop the strongly Unionist-Belfast-Coleraine-Portadown triangle and to cause a migration from West to East Ulster, redistributing and scattering the minority to that the Unionist Party will not only maintain but strengthen its position".
With this and other conciliatory gestures (unprecedented visits to a Catholic hospitals and schools, flying the Union flag at half mast for the death of Pope John XXIII) O'Neill incurred the wrath of those he understood as "self-styled 'loyalists' who see moderation as treason, and decency as weakness",[122]: 123 among these the Reverend Ian Paisley.
There was to be a needs-based points system for public housing; an ombudsman to investigate citizen grievances; the abolition of the rates-based franchise in council elections (One man, one vote); and The Londonderry Corporation (through which unionists had administered a predominately nationalist city) was replaced by an independent development commission.
[133] At a Downing Street summit on 4 November, Prime Minister Harold Wilson warned O'Neill that if Stormont backtracked on reform, the British government would reconsider its financial support for Northern Ireland.
[126]: 102–107 On 4 January 1969 People's Democracy marchers en route from Belfast to Derry were ambushed and beaten by loyalists, including off-duty Specials, at Burntollet Bridge[135] That night, there was renewed street fighting in the Bogside.
[143][144] But this had been preceded in the weeks before by a ceasefire in the course of which Provisional IRA leaders, including Chief of Staff Seán Mac Stíofáin and his lieutenants Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, were flown to London for what proved to be unsuccessful negotiations with Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw, acting on behalf of the UK Prime Minister, Edward Heath.
When, as might have been anticipated, Faulkner resigned rather than comply, Heath in an instant shattered, for unionists, "the theory that the Army was simply in Northern Ireland for the purpose of offering aid to the civil power, of defending legally established institutions against terrorist attack".
[127]: 141 The new Health and Social Service Minister, Paddy Devlin, conceded that "all other issues were governed" by a drive to "get all-Ireland institutions established" that would "produce the dynamic that would lead ultimately to an agreed united Ireland".
In retrospect, Devlin regretted the SDLP had not "adopted a two stage approach, by allowing power sharing at Stormont to establish itself", but by the time he and his colleagues recognised the damage they had caused to Faulkner's position by prioritising the Irish Dimension it was too late.
With no obvious political leverage, and possibly to prevent initiative passing to the loyalist paramilitaries, in November 1986 Paisley announced his own "third force":[175] The Ulster Resistance Movement (URM) would "take direct action as and when required".
[173] In their submission to the inter-party talks in 1992, the Ulster Unionists said they could envisage a range of cross-border bodies so long as these were under the control of the Northern Assembly, did not involve an overarching all-Ireland Council, and were not designed to be developed in the direction of joint authority.
[204] In October 2002, at a time the IRA had finally agreed but not yet complied with a process for decommissioning their arms, a police raid on Sinn Féin's offices at Stormont suggested that the organisation was still active and collecting intelligence.
Asked to account for the 2019 loss to Sinn Féin's John Finucane of North Belfast, a seat her deputy Nigel Dodds had held for nineteen years and which never previously returned a nationalist MP, Arlene Foster replied "The demography just wasn't there.
On Good Friday, 10 April 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair was surprised by a last minute demand for recognition of a "Scottish dialect spoken in some parts of Northern Ireland" that Unionists regarded their "equivalent to the Irish language".
[236] His decision, and that of his party colleagues, to resist Sinn Féin's demand for a stand-alone Irish Language Act, in part by insisting on compensating provisions for Ulster Scots, became one of the principal, publicly acknowledged, sticking points in the three years of on and off again negotiations required to restore the power-sharing executive in 2020.
[241] In 2022, over the objections of unionists who in protest against the Northern Ireland Protocol continued to veto a return to devolved power-sharing, the legislation foreseen in New Decade New Approach was enacted by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
[246] At a time when Sinn Féin was citing the cross-border, all-island, economic activity facilitated and supported by the EU as a further argument for Irish unity,[247][248] there was a sense that, among other benefits, Brexit would restore a measure of "distance" from Dublin.
To avoid the "step backwards" that would be represented, "symbolically and psychologically", by a "hardening" of the Irish border, Northern Ireland should remain in regulatory alignment with the European Single Market and behind the Customs Union frontier.
[266] Two years later, on the strength of the government's assurances that the Protocol (and the ancillary 2022 Windsor Framework) would be implemented without routine checks on "internal" trade with Great Britain and would be accompanied by measures to promote East-West (i.e. UK) as opposed to North-South (EU/Irish) movements of goods and services, the DUP agreed to a restoration of the Assembly.
[267] On 3 February, Michelle O'Neill (Sinn Féin) and Emma Little-Pengelly (DUP) were sworn in as First, and Deputy First, Ministers of a Northern Ireland executive in which, with 3 of 8 ministerial departments, unionists are for the first time a minority.
