THE beginning of a new year, an unpopular government hell bent on provoking a showdown with the trade unions and preparing for a snap general election, and a power sharing agreement in the north of Ireland that the Loyalists are determined to destroy.

But this is thirty years ago, the government is that of the Tories led by Ted Heath and the power sharing agreement was known as the Sunningdale Agreement, doomed to be destroyed by a Loyalist strike enforced by paramilitaries, carried out under the name Ulster Workers’ Council.

Internal government documents released under the thirty year rule by The National Archive, provide us with a glimpse of what took place inside the Labour government of Harold Wilson that came to power after the miners had brought down Heath. The documents show the speed with which Wilson and his cabinet collapsed in the face of Loyalist intransigence.

The immediate background to the strike was the abolition of the old Stormont parliament in 1972 by the Heath government. By then it was clear to the Heath government that Stormont was such an open affront to even the most elastic definition of bourgeois ‘democracy’ that it could not be maintained and it was duly disbanded and direct rule from Westminster was imposed on the north of Ireland as a ‘temporary’ measure.

In 1973, Heath proposed a power sharing agreement, a new government or Executive for the north, composed of pro-power sharing parties drawn from the loyalist and nationalist communities that would take control on January 1st 1974. In addition there was to be an all Ireland body – a Council of Ireland – that would give the government of the Republic an input to the new Executive.

Immediately the new Assembly was in trouble with Stormont’s Unionist First Minister Brian Faulkner, finding it impossible to sell the concept of ‘power-sharing’ to members of his Unionist party.

The released documents cover a flurry of correspondence between London, Dublin and Belfast in an attempt to make the Sunningdale agreement more palatable to the Unionists.

In particular the newly released documents make it clear that the historic position of the Republic was considered the major stumbling block. A draft note from Heath to the Irish Taoiseach reads: ‘If I may in this situation be perfectly frank, some of the remarks attributed by the press to you and some of your colleagues have been interpreted as meaning that the Republic is maintaining its claim that Northern Ireland is now part of the Republic and that there is no prospect of a change in the law on extradition which is still a burning issue in the North. This has seriously reduced the value to Mr Faulkner of the Sunningdale agreement.’

At the same time, Heath had his own problems at home in his war against the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and in February 1974 he called a snap general election on the question of ‘who rules the country’ to which the electorate replied by sending the Tories packing and electing a Labour government headed by Harold Wilson and with Merlyn Rees as the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

The same election that brought Wilson to power also saw the anti-agreement Unionists (grouped under the banner United Ulster Unionist Council) win 11 out of the 12 seats at Westminster dealing a decisive blow to Faulkner.
The released documents contain a note of a meeting that took place between Rees and Faulkner in which the latter spelt out the situation: ‘Mr Faulkner said that if he went ahead and “ratified” Sunningdale now, he would have no political following left; there would be a strong possibility of civil war.’

The threat of ‘civil war’ should power sharing collapse was repeated back to the Unionist side by Wilson at a meeting that took place between the Prime Minister and the Northern Ireland Executive held on the 18th April 1974.

A note of this meeting reads: ‘The Prime Minister said that it was basic to Government policy that the future of Northern Ireland was a matter for the people of Northern Ireland. The British Government had been consistent on this since the post-war Atlee declaration and in spite of British public opinion. . . . There was no chance that anyone would bomb the British Army out.’

The note goes on with Wilson stressing that it was vital that power sharing be made a success, stating: ‘In discussions about the consequences of its possible failure the words civil war had been used, he feared with reason. Hence there was an absolute determination on the part of the British Government not to give in, or pull out.’

Wilson’s resolve not to ‘give in’ would, however, prove to be an empty boast when the Labour government faced the next stage in the Unionist campaign to derail the Sunningdale Agreement, the ‘strike’ organised by the Ulster Workers’ Council.

The Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC), despite its name, had nothing to do with the organised working class, it existed as a loose coalition of anti-Sunningdale Unionists and various Loyalist para-military groups, its sole aim was to wreck the power sharing deal.

On 15th May 1974 the UWC called a general strike. This call attracted little support amongst the protestant working class, the giant Harland and Wolff shipyard which employed exclusively Protestant workers, at first ignored this call.

It was heeded, however, at the Ballylumford power station near Larne, where a walk out soon led to power cuts. Despite the initial lack of enthusiasm the ‘strike’ soon took hold as Loyalist para-militaries swung into action to enforce a blockade of places like the shipyards.

Initially the action was dismissed by the government, a note records Merlyn Rees in a phone call to Wilson urging him not to worry and describing the strike as the ‘last fling by the Protestants’ and declaring that the Sunningdale Agreement was ‘closer to success than ever’. This optimism did not last more than a few days as power cuts bit in the north of Ireland.

What is revealed in these documents is an extremely laid back attitude on the part of the Labour government towards increasing information that Loyalist gangs were enforcing the strike through violence and intimidation.

A note of a meeting held on 17 May 1974 records: ‘It was considered that there could be a need to look into the question of intimidation in greater depth and possibly set up another committee. Representatives were asked to consider the intimidation aspects in their papers.’

The British Army were adamant that they did not want to get involved in breaking the Loyalist action, this is revealed in notes of a Ministerial meeting attended by army chiefs held on 23rd May 1974.

This records the army top brass stating: ‘If the Army intervened to break the strike and appeared to be succeeding, confrontation and violence would probably follow. The army would be sucked into an endless situation and greatly increased numbers of soldiers would be required to run the territory.’

The resolve that Wilson had proclaimed to save the power sharing agreement at all costs, lest its demise led to civil war, was clearly absent in these discussions between Ministers and the Army High Command.

Indeed the reluctance of the Army to become involved in strike breaking and risk violence is clearly at odds with the strike breaking role it has historically played, while its distaste for violence against loyalist gangs stands in marked contrast to enthusiasm for shooting down unarmed demonstrators at ‘Bloody Sunday’ just a few years before.

With power cuts bringing the north of Ireland to a standstill and the Army virtually refusing to intervene, the released documents reveal that Wilson came up with the bizarre idea of sending a nuclear submarine to Belfast. He thought its generators could be plugged into the electricity grid and supply the power needed. This was not surprisingly rejected as unworkable.

As for the power-sharing Executive they were clearly desperate for Wilson to take action. At a meeting with Wilson and Rees at Chequers, Brian Faulkner delivered a dire warning stating that the administration of the country was now in the hands of the UWC, but that he believed that this could be ‘put right quickly by the assertion of authority on the ground.’

Faulkner went on to state that the situation ‘was now out of the control of Mr West and Mr Paisley’ and that ‘The outcome which the Protestant extremists sought was without question an independent, neo-fascist Northern Ireland.’

This plea fell on deaf ears, as a note circulated to the Cabinet on 24th May made clear: ‘….if we do nothing, the Executive will collapse over the weekend. On the other hand an attempt by the British Army in effect to run the country would require the commitment of unacceptable forces and would probably fail.’ In fact the idea of letting the Executive collapse was now seen by Rees as the preferable option.

In a Top Secret message from him to Wilson he outlines the ‘short term possibilities’. He concludes: ‘While the Northern Ireland Executive remains in being, there can be no real movement. But the situation changes if they go. From our point of view the most desirable situation now is that they should go of their own accord.’

In the space of a few weeks Wilson and the Labour government had gone from defending power sharing to the death, as the only alternative to civil war, to fervently hoping that the Executive would quietly resign and save them the embarrassment of sacking them.

In the end the Executive did resign on the 28th May 1974, direct rule was re-established over the north of Ireland and the strike called off.

These documents reveal quite clearly that Wilson, for all his bluster, collapsed the power-sharing agreement without a struggle, and that the British Army was determined not to interfere to break the strike.

What, of course, is not revealed in these released documents is to what extent the secret British state was involved in the Ulster Workers Council strike. Given the mountains of evidence that exists today about the running of the Loyalist paramilitaries by the state, we can confidently predict that this is the real story that has yet to be revealed.