Northern Ireland in the Second World War: Politics, economic mobilisation and society, 1939–45

By Philip Ollerenshaw

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111623

Philip Ollerenshaw

Philip Ollerenshaw is Reader in History at the University of the West of England, Bristol

Book preview

Introduction

This book adopts a regional perspective on the economic, political and social impact of the Second World War. It focuses on Northern Ireland, a region in north-west Europe and part of the United Kingdom, and sets the experience of this region in a wider context. Northern Ireland was one element of the UK war economy, and its geographical position gave it a key importance in the battle of the Atlantic and as a bridgehead for large numbers of North American troops prior to the invasion of Europe in 1944. It was the only part of the UK with a devolved government, and this complicated the relationship between the region and decision-making in London. Northern Ireland was also the only part of the UK where there was no military conscription, no general industrial conscription and no policy of concentrating industry to make maximum use of labour and factory space. All this had major consequences for the experience of its workers between 1939 and 1945, particularly the dilution of skilled labour and the employment of women. Devolution and distance from London worked against economic mobilisation and, together with the absence of conscription, meant that Northern Ireland never sustained full employment during the war.

If Northern Ireland was distinctive in the above ways, it was also different from the rest of the UK because of its internal political divisions. Some two-thirds of the population was Protestant and generally supportive of full political union with Britain; a third was Catholic, generally nationalist, in favour of a united Ireland and an end to partition. Unsurprisingly, the divisions within society had profound implications for politics, policing and internal security. Support for the war could not be taken for granted and active, even violent, opposition from republicans was always possible. Of course in Britain there were those who opposed the war from the earliest stages. In Scotland, for example, opposition came from the Independent Labour Party (ILP) under James Maxton, from a majority in the Scottish National Party and (until June 1941) from the Communist Party.¹ Although there was an IRA campaign in Britain (and in Northern Ireland) at the start of the war, this had ended in Britain by 1940. It has been suggested that in Britain there was a growing political consensus about the war as the war progressed.² It would be hard to argue this for Northern Ireland, although after German invasion of the Soviet Union the Communist Party leadership did become strong supporters of economic mobilisation in the struggle against fascism. All this suggests that Northern Ireland was very far from being a typical UK region in the war, but even in Britain the range of wartime experience was so broad that the concept of a ‘typical’ region has little meaning.

The interplay between economic mobilisation, politics and social policy is a major theme in this book. As a region with traditional industries, Northern Ireland had suffered severely during the interwar depression, and the war brought levels of economic activity not seen for a generation. One result of this was a remarkable increase in strike activity which saw Northern Ireland move being from the least strike-prone region in the UK to the most strike-prone.³ Not only was the region slow to mobilise, the economy peaked well before the end of the war, and this in turn brought economic uncertainty and the fear of a return to mass unemployment once again. The pattern of industrial location in Northern Ireland also brought dangers with it during the war. Belfast was the largest city; the centre of government, industry and finance; the major port; and principal location of electrical power generation – an unusually high degree of economic integration which brought benefits in peacetime but correspondingly serious risks of economic, social and political disruption from aerial bombardment.

Central to the UK war experience, and by extension to Northern Ireland, was industrial mobilisation. In the analysis of war economies in Europe between 1939 and 1945, the question of industrial mobilisation is fundamental but remains imperfectly understood. Governments in belligerent countries created frameworks within which industry and labour were encouraged and coerced to maximise output in ways which were modified according to resource availability, changing war plans and the fortunes of military campaigns, including territorial conquest and occupation. As Mark Harrison has suggested, pre-war mobilisation of the Axis powers was based on the expectation of rapid victories and that of the Soviet Union was designed to defend itself against attack from the west, while rapid mobilisation of the western Allies took place only when they regarded war as certain. The UK, United States and Soviet Union ‘mobilized their economies knowing that only quantitative effort could neutralize the qualitative advantage of the Axis powers’ and that, during the conflict, the key was ‘not so much to have detailed economic controls as to be able to maintain economic integration under intense stress’.⁴ For the belligerent powers, this last point implies a need to understand the process of mobilisation in different regions and also how regions were integrated into national war economies. Much of the work on industrial mobilisation, however, concentrates on outcomes and on national aggregates, paying much less attention to regions and to the process of production in a wider social and political context.

The official histories of the war contain vast amounts of detail not readily available elsewhere and are not always read as much as they should be. However, not surprisingly given their origins and dates of publication, they have disappointed many economic historians by the questions they do not satisfactorily address. Amongst the most important of these are the problems of resource allocation and the means by which, and the extent to which, these were resolved.⁵ For the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the official History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Civil Series was published in more than fifty volumes from 1949 onwards. Unfortunately, very few if any of the volumes take an explicitly UK-wide view, and they are dominated by the view from London, making the series title essentially a misnomer. In fact, since the official histories were written, relatively few works of secondary literature have taken a UK-wide perspective. Sonya Rose’s important and influential work on national identity and citizenship largely excludes Northern Ireland ‘because of its incredible complexity relative to Wales, Scotland and England’.⁶ In terms of recent general surveys, Juliet Gardiner’s Wartime: Britain, 1939–1945 does, however, have a valuable chapter on Ireland which includes both Eire and Northern Ireland.⁷

The aim of much of the more recent economic history of the war has been to move beyond the official histories and to ask new questions especially in a comparative context. In the 1970s, Alan Milward declared himself ‘infuriated’ by those works of military history ‘in which armies and navies come and go commanded by greater or lesser figures deciding momentous historical issues’, but which said nothing ‘of the real productive forces which alone give such events meaning, or indeed, make them possible’.⁸ His War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945 was a bold and highly successful work of comparative economic history based largely on published sources. Since then other works, by Richard Overy, Mark Harrison and Talbot Imlay, for example, have pursued both national and comparative themes and added a great deal to our knowledge of the war.⁹ In the UK, some of the most impressive works have focussed on women workers, but as Peter Howlett and David Edgerton have emphasised, the business history of the war, including the role of businessmen in government, remains seriously underresearched and there are very few studies of the regional experience of mobilisation.¹⁰ Imlay’s recent comparative study of Britain and France between 1938 and 1940, influenced by the work of Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert on the First World War, has argued for an approach which incorporates strategic, domestic–political and political–economic dimensions. Such an approach is most appropriate for work at the level of nation states. Regional studies, while not neglecting the strategic context, have to take the national and international strategy as given, but they can focus more on Imlay’s second and third areas, integrating economic, social and political history in order to address themes which do not figure largely in the official histories.

This book, of course, is by no means the first to focus on Northern Ireland in the Second World War. John Blake’s history, published in 1956 and largely unreferenced, is the longest and oldest work on the subject. It is, however, a government-sponsored history and was commissioned partly because of concerns felt by the Government of Northern Ireland that the British Government’s official history may leave the wartime role of Northern Ireland ‘discredited or belittled’.¹¹ It has become clear that government intervention in determining the shape and content of Blake’s book was very extensive. Blake had at least seven civil servants who researched and wrote their own departments’ histories. Officials in Belfast and London reviewed, and sometimes objected to, draft sections, and this contributed to the slow rate of progress with the project. So extensive was the official contribution that, ‘[a]part from the opening chapter, Blake’s voice is almost entirely stifled’.¹² As Gillian McIntosh has observed of Blake’s history, ‘Clearly, the unionist government were taking no risks in the representation of their departments’ and the state’s war record’.¹³ In his first chapter, Blake stresses the differences between Northern Ireland and Eire in terms of ‘geography, history, tradition and religion’ and constructs an image of the loyal Ulsterman which largely derives from the characteristics of the ‘Anglo-Scottish planter stock’. The latter were portrayed as ‘dour, fervent, conscious of high destiny and taught self-reliance by many a grim experience’.¹⁴ In addition to this, Blake and his government sponsors were keen to demonstrate how much the Allies owed to Northern Ireland in the Battle of the Atlantic. This contribution should not only be recorded, it also placed Britain under an obligation to Northern Ireland after the war.¹⁵

Since Blake wrote, many historians have added a great deal to our knowledge of Northern Ireland during the Second World War. Amongst general treatments, the work of Brian Barton is the most valuable. Writers such as Fisk, Bowman, Bew, Gibbon, Patterson, McIntosh, Urquhart, Walker, Donohue, McGarry, O’Halpin, Girvin and several others have all made important contributions to various aspects of this history. The present work builds on this body of scholarship. Chapter 1 considers Northern Ireland before the war, its political structures and parties, loyalist and republican commemorative activity, policing, rearmament, the outbreak of the IRA campaign and preparations for war. The chapter also examines how the region saw itself within the Empire–Commonwealth. The next two chapters discuss economic mobilisation. The demarcation lines in economic history are rarely as clear as in political history, and there is inevitably some chronological overlap between the two chapters. Chapter 2 looks at the war economy in the first two years or so after 1939, including the impact of distance from London on the pace of mobilisation and how some of the region’s industries were affected by the conflict. The most important manufacturing industry in the region, linen, was more dependent on Europe for its raw material than virtually any other UK industry. Accordingly, the period 1939–40 was disastrous from this point of view and led to unemployment levels of about 37 per cent by the summer of 1940. The region was predominantly one of small and medium-sized firms which were not always well placed to secure government contracts, either directly or on a subcontract basis. In terms of manufacturing, Harland and Wolff was historically more self-sufficient than most UK shipbuilders, and this meant it had relatively weak links with other firms in the region. The implications of this are explored in this chapter, as are the experiences of some other industries in the Belfast and Derry areas.

Chapter 3 focuses on the war economy from about 1941 to 1945 and is the central chapter of the book. Here, the experience of agriculture and key industries including textiles and clothing, shipbuilding and aircraft manufacture is considered, as are labour and industrial relations and how the government began to plan for the post-war world. Feeding the nation was a key priority for the government in London, and agriculture in Northern Ireland not only expanded during war, it also underwent considerable mechanisation. However, the experience of the rural economy, along with the 1941 blitz on Belfast, helped to focus on issues such as rural and urban housing and the provision of social services which would have considerable political consequences in the later stages of the war and in the years afterwards.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on politics and society during the war, when Northern Ireland had three prime ministers: Craigavon until his death in November 1940 and John Andrews from November 1940 until May 1943, followed by Sir Basil Brooke for twenty years thereafter. Chapter 4 considers the government response to the outbreak of war, including the internment of republicans, the Home Guard controversy, how the government handled republican and loyalist commemoration and demonstrations, the political impact of the blitz, military recruitment and the debate on conscription, and the role of women and young unionists in politics. The chapter concludes with a number of by-election defeats for the Unionist Party which contributed to the political crisis of 1943 that forced John Andrews out of office. The final chapter examines the later war years and the political agenda running up to the 1945 elections, including the concerns of border unionists. These elections were unusual in the critical importance the electorate attached to social policy, especially after the publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942. Social security, employment, housing, crime, youth welfare and a range of other questions were all debated across the political spectrum. The consequences of the war are considered in the Conclusion. Although there was considerable improvement in the unemployment figures, the regional economy lagged behind Britain. However, the post-war social reforms brought major benefits to the population. Relations between the Unionist Government and the Labour Government were much better than had been feared. When Eire finally left the Commonwealth and became a republic in 1949, London responded with the Ireland Act which seemed to copper-fasten Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. If unionists took heart from many economic, social and political developments in the post-war years, it remained the case that the grievances of the minority population remained unaddressed. Anti-partition activity increased after the war in Britain, Ireland and the United States and, together with minority grievances, would lead to the civil rights campaign and the Troubles from the 1960s.

Notes

1   J. Foster, ‘The Twentieth Century, 1914–1979’, in R. A. Houston and W. W. Knox (eds), The New Penguin History of Scotland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 453.

2   T. Imlay, Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics and Economics in Britain and France, 1938–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. Ch. 6.

3   B. Black, ‘Collaboration or Conflict?, Strike Activity in Northern Ireland’, Industrial Relations Journal, 18:1 (1987), 16.

4   M. Harrison, ‘The Economics of World War II: An Overview’, in M. Harrison (ed.), Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 23–4.

5   P. Howlett, ‘New Light Through Old Windows: A New Perspective on the British Economy in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28:3 (1993), 361. Two valuable recent essays on Britain are S. Broadberry and P. Howlett, ‘The United Kingdom: Victory at All costs’, in Harrison (ed.), Economics of World War II, and P. Howlett, ‘The War Economy, 1939–45’, in R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume III, Structural Change and Growth, 1939–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–26.

6   S. O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 28.

7   J. Gardiner, Wartime: Britain, 1939–1945 (London: Headline, 2004), pp. 375–96.

8   A. S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939–45 (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. xii.

9   See especially R. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Harrison (ed.), Economics of World War II; Imlay, Facing the Second World War.

10   On women workers, see especially P. Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War (London: Croom Helm, 1982) and M. A. Williams, A Forgotten Army: Female Munitions Workers of South Wales, 1939–45 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002). The neglect of business history is emphasised in D. E. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 63–5, 145–6, and P. Howlett, ‘The Thin End of the Wedge? Nationalisation and Industrial Structure during the Second World War’, in R. Millward and J. Singleton (eds), The Political Economy of Nationalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). A rare essay in regional wartime history is D. Thoms, War, Industry and Society: The Midlands, 1939–45 (London: Routledge, 1989).

11   See B. Barton, Foreword to J. W. Blake, Northern Ireland in the Second World War (Belfast: HMSO, 1956; reprinted Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000), p. xiii.

12   G. McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 156.

13   Ibid., p. 163.

14   Blake, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, p. 34; McIntosh, Force of Culture, p. 157.

15   McIntosh, Force of Culture, pp. 158–9.

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 ‘the chain of events’ that had caused the riots in the first place.

The NCCL Report was published in 1936 and was severely critical of the Special Powers Acts. Summing up, the report concluded: ‘It is sad that in the guise of temporary and emergency legislation there should have been created under the shadow of the British Constitution a permanent machine of dictatorship – a standing temptation to whatever intolerant and bigoted section may attain power to abuse its authority at the expense of the people it rules’.¹⁸ Although the staunchly loyalist Belfast News Letter dismissed the NCCL Report as ‘impudent’,¹⁹ many newspapers in Ireland, Britain and overseas saw it as a damning indictment of the Special Powers legislation and the administration of law and order in Northern Ireland. The nationalist Irish News had a field day; the Daily Chronicle in London was severely critical, as were newspapers as far afield as the Johannesburg Star and the Sydney Morning Herald. The torrent of criticism drowned out the Belfast government’s attempts to state its case, but unionist politicians at Orange parades the following year criticised the NCCL and bracketed it together with other enemies. Captain Herbert Dixon MP, at the Orange demonstration in Belfast, declared ‘they were faced with an unholy alliance of reds, Roman Catholics and rebel intellectuals, banded together for the disruption of the British Empire’.²⁰ Indeed, it pinpointed the urgency with which the government needed to rethink its publicity and propaganda strategy.²¹ The need for such a rethink was felt increasingly strongly after 1935. Just as important as the riots themselves in focussing attention on the Northern Ireland government was the refusal to hold an inquiry. Demands for an inquiry were not only made soon after the riots but continued for years afterwards. As early as July 1935, the leader of the Labour Party George Lansbury (who was also a Vice President of the NCCL), and James Maxton MP of the Independent Labour Party, raised at Westminster the issue of deaths during the riots, while Dr Daniel Mageean, Bishop of Down and Connor, pressed British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to set up an inquiry in August 1935. At Westminster, a large number of MPs – Labour, Conservative and Liberal – attended a meeting chaired by J. R. Clynes in 1936 to hear evidence about the riots and to support demands for an inquiry. Winston Churchill in 1940 was similarly urged by a lawyer to establish an inquiry.²²

If the 1935 Belfast riots generated negative publicity for Northern Ireland in many parts of the world, it was also the case that developments in Europe could have a direct impact on local politics in Northern Ireland. A good example of such impact was the Spanish Civil War which began in July 1936. While in general the Unionist Party supported the British government’s policy of non-intervention in Spain, it was certainly not supportive of the second Spanish Republic. Catholics in the north, however, followed the Catholic Church and were strong supporters of General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, not least because of their anti-communism. Both of the leading nationalist papers in Northern Ireland, the Derry Journal edited by J. J. McCarroll MP and the Irish News edited by T. J. Campbell MP, were stridently against the Spanish Republic. In Ireland more generally, pro-Franco support was organised by the Irish Christian Front, although its meetings were not as large in the north as many in Eire.²³

Within Northern Irish politics, those groups on the left were generally damaged by the war, which ‘sharpened the religious and political differences both within the left and between Catholics and Labour’.²⁴ The highest profile casualty of this, Harry Midgley, was also one of the most vocal opponents of Franco’s Nationalists. Midgley was leader of NILP between 1933 and 1938 and Stormont MP for the Dock constituency in Belfast where 40 per cent of voters were Catholic. In the 1938 election campaign, called by Craigavon to rally unionist support against the new Eire Constitution of 1937 which lay formal constitutional claim to the six counties of Northern Ireland, Midgley increasingly alienated his Catholic constituents, especially by his criticism of the Catholic Church’s support for Franco. At the election, this was a major factor in his defeat.²⁵ The anti-unionist vote split between Labour and Nationalist and gave the seat to the Unionists. This contributed considerably to Midgley’s bitterness against the Catholic Church, and