Born: April 15th 1931
Died: May 30th 2025
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, who has died aged 94, had a ringside seat at much of recent modern Northern Irish history, going back to the years of unionist domination, through the time of the civil rights movement and the Troubles and into the period of the peace process and relative political stability.
Over those several decades he survived an IRA bomb attack and went on to become, as one of his successors described him, Northern Ireland’s “public servant extraordinaire”.
My friend finally has a diagnosis of lipoedema, but she still feels judged when she explains it
We used to vilify unwed mothers. Now we criticise women who don’t want to be mothers
Persecution of Irish Catholics led to foundation of Irish Francisan landmark in Rome
The housing crisis could erode Ireland’s middle class to a point of collapse
One of the greatest disappointments of his long career was the collapse of the first powersharing Sunningdale executive in 1974 but he was still active in public life a quarter of a century later when the Belfast Agreement was achieved and a new Northern Executive established.
He retired as head of the North’s civil service in 1991, when he took on a number of new positions including working for victims and assisting in locating the bodies of the Disappeared.
An IRA bomb attack did not deter him from public service. That Semtex bomb explosion damaged his home near Crawfordsburn in Co Down in September 1988. He, his wife and one of his two children were in the house but escaped uninjured.
At the time the IRA instructed civil servants to “resign or face the consequences”. His reply was, “Neither they nor I will be deterred from the duty we owe to our fellow citizens and democratic government.”
Sir Nigel Hamilton, who later served as head of the Northern Ireland civil service, recalled how he responded to the attack. “Within an hour [of the bombing] he had put out a statement and within a couple of hours he was back in the office, working again,” he told the BBC.
“He wanted to show leadership. He wanted to show that we were all resilient and he wasn’t going to be deflected from his public sector service because of what had happened,” he added.
Sir Nigel described him as a “public servant extraordinaire” and the “most important, the pre-eminent public servant of his time and of his generation”.
Bloomfield was born in 1931 to English parents and was raised in east Belfast. He attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, known as Inst, in central Belfast and later read modern history at St Peter’s College, Oxford.
He joined the Northern Ireland civil service in 1952 and four years later was appointed private secretary to the then unionist finance minister Capt Terence O’Neill and continued in that role when O’Neill became Stormont prime minister in 1963. He was a key adviser to O’Neill, and also a speech-writer, as the prime minister in the face of uncompromising unionist opposition tried and failed to pursue a reformist agenda to address discrimination against the minority Catholic population.
Bloomfield also served as private secretary to his successor, James Chichester-Clark, after O’Neill resigned in April 1969. With violence escalating and the British army brought into the North to try to maintain some form of order Chichester-Clark stood down in March 1971 to be succeeded by Brian Faulkner, whom Bloomfield also served as private secretary.
With the dissolution of Stormont in 1972 and the introduction of direct rule from London, Bloomfield remained a central and influential backroom figure as political negotiations took place the following year in Sunningdale in England. That led to the first Northern Executive where power was shared between the Ulster Unionist Party, the nationalist SDLP and the cross-community Alliance party.
That experiment began in January 1974 but was toppled in May that year by hardline unionist opposition backed by loyalist agitation that brought Northern Ireland to a virtual standstill.
Bloomfield served as permanent secretary to the Sunningdale executive. The collapse of that administration left him with a deep feeling of “depression”, he remembered. “It was the worst day of my official career of nearly 40 years; it was the worst single day. I could foresee that we were going to be plunged for further decades into a situation when there would be no local hand on the tiller.”
It took another 24 years before powersharing was restored. From 1974 to the Good Friday accord in 1998 2,500 people were killed, many thousands more were maimed and seriously injured, and thousands more suffered bereavement and post traumatic anguish. Bloomfield’s view was that if Sunningdale had succeeded, much of that death and suffering could have been avoided.
Bloomfield worked with several British direct-rule secretaries of state such as William Whitelaw, Merlyn Rees, Roy Mason, James Prior, Douglas Hurd and Peter Brooke until his retirement from the civil service in 1991, the year the first tentative positive steps were taken to persuade the IRA end its campaign of violence.
Thereafter he served in a number of public and private roles such as the BBC’s governor for Northern Ireland, chairman of the Northern Ireland Legal Services Commission, and advising on issues relating to Jersey, Israel, Austria, Bangladesh and the Netherlands. He also was a senator at Queen’s University Belfast and was awarded honorary doctorates from Queen’s, Ulster University and the Open University.
In 1997 the late Northern secretary Mo Mowlam appointed him the North’s first victims’ commissioner leading to the publication of We Shall Remember Them, the initial significant attempt to address the problems facing victims and survivors of the conflict.
With the late Irish politician John Wilson he was the first joint head of the North-South Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR). In a statement the current joint heads, Rosalie Flanagan and Tim Dalton, said they were “deeply saddened” by his death. “The work of the ICLVR in seeing the recovery of 13 of the 17 Disappeared is one of the success stories of the peace process and Sir Ken’s contribution to that as a founding commissioner was huge,” they said.
In Belfast in 2009 Bloomfield praised the efforts of the former taoiseach Bertie Ahern and former British prime minister Tony Blair in achieving the Belfast Agreement but said the earlier “remarkable” groundwork of the former taoiseach Albert Reynolds and former prime minister John Major was not properly recognised. He lauded Reynolds for putting “the healing of the wounds in our society” as his highest priority.
Two years earlier he annoyed unionists when, at the Merriman Summer School in Co Clare, he said that some form of Irish unity was not unthinkable. It should be thought of, he said, as a process with “a modest beginning and no predetermined end”, and “not a single dramatic step”.
He was careful to counsel: “Please do not suppose that if, in some future poll, 50.1 per cent of the electorate were to vote for Irish unity, the outvoted 49.9 per cent would tramp into the new jurisdiction like a defeated army.”
Offering a “very personal perspective”, he said: “As I grow older, I care less and less which flag is flown and which anthem played where I live.” He was comfortable with a situation where in an “indefinitely prolonged situation” local politicians continued to run Northern Ireland with a British government financial subsidy.
And he warned that while successive Stormont governments were far too slow to acknowledge the sense of Irishness felt by an “extensive minority” in Northern Ireland, any triumphalism “when the boot could be on the other foot” would not work.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield is survived by his wife, Lady Elizabeth, whom he married in 1960, and children Caroline and Tanya.
