The collapse of the Sunningdale powersharing agreement 50 years ago holds lessons for today, a conference marking the anniversary of the event heard.
The stories people are told, and the stories that they believe matter, says 70-year-old Eileen Weir as she remembers the days 50 years ago when she and thousands of other Protestants marched against the Sunningdale Agreement.
Viewing a film of one of those marches showing tens of thousands closing on Stormont, Weir, now a respected community activist on The Shankill, said: “I think I went up and down every hill then with Ian Paisley at the time.”
And she regrets having done so. Back then, family and neighbours on The Shankill, she said, had been left fearful by the warnings of Paisley and the Vanguard leader, Bill Craig that the Sunningdale powersharing executive threatened doom for their community.
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During a gathering in the University of Ulster to mark the anniversary of the powersharing executive’s collapse, Weir recalled the times, along with Irish diplomats, Noel Dorr and Sean Donlon, figures such as Brid Rodgers and Hugh Logue from the SDLP and others such as Paddy Devlin’s daughter, Anne.
However, the lessons of Sunningdale are not just history in an era when street opinion is now directed as much by online social media agitators, as by politicians, believes Weir: “It was only in later years that I actually found out what the Sunningdale Agreement. We’re weren’t told about what it meant.”
“We were told that it was Rome Rule, that we weren’t going to be British any more. It was all propaganda – not just then, but right through the whole conflict, right up until the Good Friday Agreement,” she said at the gathering brought together by the John and Pat Hume Foundation: “.
The lessons learned, however, remained. Unwilling to accept the word of others in 1998, Weir and others on The Shankill made sure to organise their own briefings on the content of the Good Friday Agreement: “We were not taking anybody’s word on it.”
Today, Irish unity increasingly features in debate, though some are seeking to “stir things up”, she said, but informed conversations are needed: “The grassroots, the heart and soul of this country, need to be kept informed.
“We needed to make sure in 1998 that easy information got out, we had classes, we had everything we could. Not to tell them how to vote, we wanted to give them the truth so that they could decide if they wanted the Good Friday Agreement, or not,” she said.
Eileen Weir, who got an education through the trade union movement in the years after Sunningdale, agrees: “There was a thing, and there still is a thing of doing what unionist politicians told us to do, that they going to look after us.
“You can see how well they looked after us. Fifty years on, we are still struggling, still with the highest rate of poverty. It was working class people who suffered the most throughout the conflict,” she said, “I want to see the poor get richer, and the rich not get any richer”.
For Donlon and Dorr, both of whom were deeply involved in Sunningdale, the memories of the agreement’s collapse remains a source of deep regret five decades on, given the lost opportunities and the suffering endured by so many afterwards.
Donlon remembered going to the Europa Hotel – often described as the most bombed hotel in Europe – on the day the Executive collapsed for breakfast, where he was met by the hotel’s legendary manager, Harper Brown.
“He offered me steak and creme de menthe, he had no milk and he had no water. The only reason that he had steak was that the electricity had been cut and everything in his deep freeze had thawed,” said Donlon.
Remembering the months before and after the Executive’s collapse as the “most exciting” of his career, Donlon said the relationship between Conservative prime minister Edward Heath and Fianna Fáil taoiseach Jack Lynch has not been properly recognised.
Until then, London had refused to accept that Dublin had any role in the affairs of Northern Ireland, but during two meetings with Lynch the Conservative leader came to accept that Dublin’s co-operation was necessary.
The relationship between the Ulster Unionist leader and Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner and Lynch’s successor-in-office, Fine Gael’s Liam Cosgrave was crucial, too, one founded on their interest in horses.
“The first time they met, they could talk about nothing else than about how difficult it was to get a good farrier to shoe their horses,” said Donlon, “They both also felt that they led political parties that included difficult people.”
Throughout 1973 and before the collapse on May 28th, 1984, the SDLP leader, John Hume acted as “a circus ringmaster”, successfully encouraging people into negotiations “when no one else thought it was possible”, he said.
Equally, the “guile and charm” of the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Willie Whitelaw during 1972 and 1973, where he acted as chair of the Sunningdale, was crucial: “There were times when he pretty much kept the negotiations going single-handed.”
The Irish Government had confidence in Whitelaw, but less so in his top official, Frank Cooper, said Donlon, who remembered a dinner with the latter which ended with Cooper declaring that he would seek to have him withdrawn from Belfast.
“‘You are a menace, you are interfering in our internal affairs’, Cooper told me,” recalled Donlon, who acted as one of the Department of Foreign Affairs’ ‘travellers’ between 1971 and 1978, who were based in the North without official sanction.
Looking back, Noel Dorr, who, like Donlon, later was the top official in the Department of Foreign Affairs, said Sunningdale changed the nature of the relationship between Dublin and London because of London’s past refusal to give Dublin any voice.
In 1969, the Foreign Office minister, Lord Chalfont told later Irish president, Paddy Hillery that it would be “improper” to listen to Dublin’s concerns about an Apprentice Boys’ march because “Irish citizens were not involved”.
Yet by 1973, prime minister Edward Heath had agreed to a Council of Ireland that was to be run by Stormont and the Irish Government without any involvement of the British government, though it might have better in hindsight if they had heeded some of Faulkner’s warnings about the council’s toxicity for unionism.
Dublin’s hopes for Sunningdale were high, he said, since it was seen there as an opportunity to reopen matters that had not dealt with satisfactorily in the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence: “They were probably too high,” he said.
