Fearful of similar turmoil taking root, Unionist politicians elected to the newly established Northern Ireland Parliament in 1921 attempted to erect bulwarks against what they saw as the ‘twin evils’ of communism and republicanism, marshalling all available resources at their disposal to quell dissent among the working classes.² The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) saw this as the perfect opportunity to strengthen its control over the local administration. Representing the majority Ulster Protestant tradition in the north-east counties of Ireland, the Unionists had won the first elections to the local parliament by a comfortable majority. In British eyes partition was an effective way of managing a conflict many in London viewed as a curiosity; in this instance it would copper-fasten the Union while staving off any further complications in Ireland.

The Northern Ireland state was a unique construct in that it reinforced the power of Ulster Protestants, who held a majority share of the population in the six counties in the north-east of Ireland, but who were a minority community in the island of Ireland, with their demographic roots in the Plantation migrants who had crossed to Ireland in the seventeenth century. The Ulster Protestants became dominant in this area. What made the north-east counties so different from the rest of Ireland was their close proximity to Great Britain, a heavy industrial base concentrated in the Lagan Valley in Belfast, and unfettered access to the financial markets of the British Empire. As the Unionist leader Edward Carson proclaimed in 1916: ‘it was an “utter fallacy” for the economically incompetent south and west of Ireland to wish to rule the North’.³ Arguably, there was an economic logic to partition and, when combined with the uneven development of capitalism in Ireland, it was bound to have an effect on the type of society built up in the region.

Northern nationalists, who comprised about a third of the population of the newly formed state, desired an end to partition, and remained highly ambivalent about participating in the state’s social and political structures. In fact, the architecture of the political structures guaranteed nationalist disquiet: the initial proportional electoral system was replaced in 1925 by a majoritarian, first-past-the-post arrangement meaning that nationalists could hope for no more than ten to twelve of the fifty-two Stormont Parliament seats at any election. This situation was exacerbated by the re-drawing of electoral boundaries – particularly at the local government level – to ensure Unionist majorities. Gerrymandering, as this practice is known, had a profound effect on Nationalist politics in Northern Ireland. In 1920, for example, there existed twenty-five Nationalist-controlled councils; however, by 1925 – due to the abolition of proportional representation and the rigging of electoral wards – these had been reduced to four. Crucially, Derry City, despite its large Nationalist majority, comprising around sixty-five per cent of the population, was run by a Unionist-dominated corporation until 1968.⁴ From the 1930s onwards, nationalists instead looked to the Irish Free State in the south to improve their situation and formed what effectively became ‘a state within a state’.⁵

In many respects state-building was a protracted process in Northern Ireland and relied heavily on the professionalism of the local civil service, an organisation equally divided in its bureaucratic tendencies between populist and anti-populist interest groups centred round Unionism’s principal leaders.⁶ Populists tended to use patronage at their disposal to curry favour among their supporters, many of whom held positions of social rank in the Protestant community. Conversely, anti-populists resisted the temptation to place loyalty above a commitment to a more meritocratic ethos commonly found in Great Britain. Populists complained bitterly about the appointment of Catholics to government posts and preferred to fill gaps in the province’s bureaucratic system through a dual-edged process of cronyism and discrimination. Extraneous factors such as socio-economic upheaval played havoc with the local economy, which was already reeling from the stress placed upon it by war-time demands. Unemployment in the province rocketed in the 1920s and reached an incredible twenty per cent by the middle of the decade. This severely affected the local workforce, who exercised their right to protest by downing tools and balloting for strikes, a tactic which serve to cripple the economy still further. The Unionist government appealed to ethnic unity as a means of offsetting the labourist sympathies of a hungry working class. Yet nothing could stymie the challenges now evident within the Protestant community, from both Independent Unionists and, after 1924, the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP).

Unionist resilience in the face of such challenges soon proved resurgent. The local regime was greatly aided in its strategy of divide and rule by the upsurge in sectarian tensions and political violence across Belfast. In 1920–2 between 452 and 463 people were killed and 1100 injured as the province became subject to the brinkmanship of rival paramilitary gangs.⁷ Several clandestine organisations emerged amidst the calamity of armed conflict precipitated by state formation and included the Irish Republican Army (IRA), supported by the newly established government in Dublin, and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which was soon to be absorbed into the local security force apparatus. Despite most Protestants being unionist in their political viewpoint not all were convinced that the state’s new political masters were competent in their handling of social and economic affairs. On the other hand, there were others who thought that the new regime was too weak-kneed in the face of socialist and republican opposition. The Unionist government was to remain, until its eventual collapse in March 1972, a hostage to these conflicting tendencies.

The split in the Unionist government between populists and anti-populists persisted throughout the 1930s, Unionist prime ministers frequently acting on the basis of what they thought was best for their Protestant working-class supporters. For example, both Sir James Craig and his successor John Miller Andrews were populist in their outlook, while Sir Basil Brooke and his successor Terence O’Neill added a distinctly anti-populist flavour to their style of government in later years. Such division reinforced the disagreement over the exact political strategy to be adhered to by Unionists during these years, an internal dispute that would persist through later generations.

Despite these religious and political divisions, the ‘outdoor relief riots’ of 1932 brought together Protestants and Catholics to protest against the inequitable treatment handed out to them by the Belfast Poor Law Guardians – the body that was appointed to administer relief to unemployed workers and their families. By 1934, the working classes marched the streets of Belfast in radical unison, with a mainly Protestant Shankill Road contingent making the annual pilgrimage to Bodenstown cemetery in County Kildare for rousing anti-British speeches at the graveside of the eighteenth-century republican martyr Wolfe Tone. However, within a matter of months the potential for cross-sectarian harmony was undermined when a murder campaign by loyalist paramilitaries threatened to shatter the brittle rigidity of solidarity fostered among Protestant and Catholic workers. Predictably, sectarian rioting followed the annual Orange Order parades in Belfast in July 1935. Catholics soon came to view themselves as a besieged minority in a hostile society.⁸

The death of James Craig (Lord Craigavon), Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, in November 1940, sent shock-waves throughout the Unionist community. He was succeeded by John Miller Andrews – brother of renowned Titanic architect Thomas Andrews – who preferred to take a more conciliatory attitude towards industrial militancy after 1941. At a time when British politicians increasingly questioned the province’s contribution to the war effort, Andrews’ policies left many of his colleagues uneasy and soon proved politically fatal. Northern Ireland alone accounted for ten per cent of the total number of days lost to strikes in the UK, while accounting for only two per cent of industrial output.⁹ Andrews resigned as prime minister in 1943, allowing his Minister of Commerce Sir Basil Brooke, the nephew of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke, to take his place. As a former British Army officer himself, Brooke took a more military approach to prime ministerial matters in Belfast. In his later years there was much criticism that he spent more time on his private estate in Fermanagh than behind his desk or in the parliamentary debating chamber. Northern Ireland politics remained something of an amateurish affair as the Belfast Parliament met infrequently, with many politicians attending on an ad hoc basis.