On this day (28/05/2024) fifty years ago, Brian Faulkner resigned as Chief Executive of Northern Ireland in response to a mass civil disobedience campaign and industrial stoppage organised by the loyalist Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC). Faulkner’s resignation effectively ended a roughly five month long experiment in devolved power-sharing in Northern Ireland. It would be over thirty years before something along these lines was restored—in the wake of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998.
The Northern Ireland Executive was established on 1 January 1974. It is frequently referred to as the “Sunningdale Executive”, because the negotiations that precipitated it took place at the Civil Service Training College in Sunningdale, Berkshire, from 6–9 December 1973. The Sunningdale Conference brought together members of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI), the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), then the main political vehicle for constitutional nationalism in Northern Ireland, and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). The conference was also attended by the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and the Irish Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave.
The aim was to restore devolved government in Northern Ireland. In March 1972 the Northern Ireland Parliament at Stormont, established via the Government of Ireland Act 1920, had been prorogued by the British government, and direct rule from Westminster introduced, owing to the escalation of the so-called “Troubles”. Yet Heath’s Conservative government was reluctant, understandably, to restore devolution based upon simple majority rule, a system that had resulted in a virtual monopoly on power for the Unionist party between 1920 and 1972.
The nationalist SDLP, then led by Gerry Fitt (who was appointed Deputy Chief Executive when the Executive was formed), and the Irish government were likewise adamant that the concept of power-sharing had to be built into any constitutional arrangement in Northern Ireland—i.e. representatives of the Catholic nationalist community simply had to wield significant power in any devolved administration. Crucially, this idea—which entailed introducing something along the lines of proportional representation in Northern Ireland—was rejected by a significant cross-section of the Protestant Unionist community. Many believed that majority rule was appropriate, given the demography of Northern Ireland. What is more, Unionists asserted that power-sharing rendered the region’s political system abnormal in relation to the rest of the United Kingdom and its constitutional history.
Yet enforced power-sharing between Unionists and nationalists was not the only political concept that rendered the Sunningdale package suspect in the eyes of Northern Ireland’s Unionist community. The SDLP and the Irish government also insisted that any agreement had to reflect the so-called “Irish dimension”—the relationship between the two states upon the island and the obvious desire for nationalists to pursue their aspiration towards Irish unity in a democratic manner. During the Sunningdale Conference a good deal of time and debate was therefore taken up by the concept of the Council of Ireland. As the SDLP envisaged it, this all-Ireland body would facilitate co-operation between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on relatively banal issues such as tourism. But, importantly, it would also have “executive and harmonising functions”, and would be capable of “evolution”. Furthermore, this body was to be composed of a Council of Ministers and a Consultative Assembly. Significantly, the latter would be made up of 30 members from the Northern Ireland Executive and 30 from the Dáil (the Irish parliament). Northern Ireland’s Unionist community perceived all of this—all-Ireland bodies and the fact that the Irish government had been involved in the Sunningdale Conference—as a foreign government (the Irish government) interfering in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland. Consequently, on 4 January 1974, the Ulster Unionist Council, the ruling body of the UUP, rejected the proposed Council of Ireland. Faulkner therefore resigned as leader of the UUP, although he still held the position of Chief Executive—an odd and precarious political situation.
Unionist anxieties regarding the Council of Ireland were only exacerbated when Hugh Logue, a member of the SDLP and a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, delivered a speech at Trinity College Dublin. He stated that the Council of Ireland was “the vehicle that would trundle Unionists into a united Ireland”.
Why did the concept of the Council of Ireland prove so decisive? In his study of the rise and fall of the Sunningdale Executive, Michael Kerr neatly summed up the problem posed by this political idea. For the SDLP leadership and their allies within the Irish government, all-Ireland bodies represented “one small step towards unity by consent”.[1] But to opponents, they seemed la “giant leap that locked an otherwise unwilling unionist community into a predetermined constitutional settlement which made Irish unity inevitable”.[2]
Add to this that a general election was looming (28 February 1974). In Northern Ireland, this more or less became a referendum on Sunningdale. Several Unionist parties came together to form the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC)—the Democratic Unionist Party, led by the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley; Ulster Vanguard, led by William Craig; and the Official Unionist Party, led by Harry West. Their slogan was the catchy “Dublin is just a Sunningdale away”.
Candidates standing on behalf of the UUUC won 11 of the 12 Northern Ireland seats in the election, gaining 51.1% of the vote.[3] This did not spell the end of the Executive, but it provided those opposed to it with a powerful mandate. Add to this that the Labour Party, then led by Harold Wilson, came to power in Britain following the election. This meant that the key British architects of Sunningdale, such as Heath, were no longer in a position to support the ongoing experiment in devolution.
On 14 May a loyalist umbrella organisation calling itself the Ulster Workers Council announced a general strike in opposition to the whole Sunningdale experiment. A network of barricades was erected and many roads were blocked, particularly in the east of Northern Ireland. Electricity supplies were seriously disrupted as workers at the Ballylumford power station in Co. Antrim went on strike. All of this, combined with intimidation tactics, meant that the distribution of food supplies, particularly milk, was soon affected, as was the postal system. By day six of the strike, the electricity supply across Northern Ireland had dropped to roughly one-third of normal levels. The UWC also began taking over petrol stations and rationing petrol supplies. In response, the Northern Ireland Executive agreed to scale down the Council of Ireland, but this was rejected by the UWC.
On day 11 of the strike, Harold Wilson made a badly judged broadcast, in which he referred to the strikers as “spongers”—supporters of the strike took to wearing pieces of sponge on their lapels. On 28 May, the fourteenth day of the strike, Faulkner and his Unionist colleagues resigned.
The Sunningdale Agreement and the devolved power-sharing Executive that it generated continue to be a rich source of intrigue and debate within Irish historiography and politics. Key figures within the Executive, such as the SDLP member, Paddy Devlin, maintained that the British government could and should have done more to support the Executive and to stifle the UWC strike—for instance, the British government maintained that the army could not operate the power stations independently.[4] Thus, the Sunningdale Agreement has been perceived, particularly by those within or associated with the SDLP, as one of the great, missed opportunities in Irish history. Indeed, Seamus Mallon, the SDLP’s long-serving deputy leader, and who became Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, described this accord as “Sunningdale for slow learners”.
Those of a Unionist persuasion tend to maintain that the SDLP’s insistence upon the “Irish Dimension” and the need for a Council of Ireland hobbled Sunningdale, rendering it completely unsellable to their community. David Trimble, the former leader of the UUP, and who was appointed First Minister of Northern Ireland following the Good Friday Agreement, frequently drew attention to the summation of Sunningdale advanced by William Whitelaw, who attended the conference in his capacity as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. “We did drive Faulkner too far at Sunningdale,” Whitelaw recalled, “but, goodness, wasn’t he foolish to allow himself to be driven”.[5] In fact, Trimble—who at that time was an influential member of Ulster Vanguard—played a backroom role in orchestrating the UWC strike. In later years, he derived much pleasure in pointing out that he helped organise the “only successful general political strike in British history”.[6]
*The University of Ulster’s excellent CAIN Archive supplies chronologies of the Sunningdale Executive and the UWC strike, as well as a range of supplementary materials on this significant phase of the history of Northern Ireland. The card image for this article is an election posted produced by the UUP in 1974. This particular poster forms part of the Troubled Images Exhibition curated by the Linen Hall Library, Belfast. The image is available here.
[1] Michael Kerr, The Destructors: The Story of Northern Ireland’s Lost Peace Process (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), 9.
[2] Ibid.
[3] University of Ulster, CAIN Archive, “Ulster Workers' Council Strike - Chronology of the Strike,”, available at https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/uwc/chr.htm#2.
[4] See Paddy Devlin,
[5] ICSR, “Lord David Trimble on Lessons from Northern Ireland Part 3,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmy73FXB0rc.
[6] Ibid.