Sir, - Henry Patterson argues ("RUC and Orange Order frequently at odds", July ) that under the Stormont government there was an "often fraught relationship between the government, the RUC and the Orange Order over the right to march" and that "recently released files" of the Ministry of Home Affairs "show a more complex situation than the one sketched" by me in a recent article in this newspaper ("Orangemen out of step with rhetoric on the right to march," June 26th). The evidence marshalled by Prof Patterson in his characteristically meticulous way is, however, restricted to a single event in July 1948, when all that appears to have occurred is that the Minister of Home Affairs and the RUC temporarily prevented a particularly inflammatory Orange band from marching through a strongly nationalist community. Even this concession to nationalist sensitivity, which might be thought by some to be rather less dramatic than Prof Patterson appears to suppose, has to be understood in the context of the political climate of the times, a climate that has some contemporary resonance.
During 1947-48, the Stormont government was under unprecedented pressure from Westminster to mend its ways. A strong commitment to liberty had been a characteristic of the new Labour administration which had been elected in 1945. The prime minister himself, Clement Attlee, had been a founder member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, a body well-known in Northern Ireland for having produced a damning report on the Special Powers Act in 1936.
During an extraordinary second reading debate on a vital Northern Ireland Bill in the Westminster House of Commons on 13 June 1947, nearly 200 Labour MPs had put their names to an amendment calling for the rejection of the measure until the achievement of "democratic liberty and equality" in Northern Ireland. It was only with difficulty and at a certain political cost that Herbert Morrison and the Labour Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, had managed to steer the legislation through a hostile lower House.
In 1948, the way Northern Ireland was being governed continued to be a matter of very great concern to many MPs and a considerable embarrassment to the Cabinet Ministers whose supposed constitutional duty it was to shield the Stormont regime from Westminster scrutiny. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Unionist Government should have made some effort to remove the worst effects of the Special Powers Act, and to seek to apply it in a less apparently discriminatory way, just as in the incident to which Prof Patterson refers. Unfortunately, the pressure for change from Westminster was never supported at Cabinet level and was greatly reduced in any event when Labour left office in 1951. - Yours, etc.,
CONOR GEARTY,
Professor of Law,
King's College, London WC2
Ballsbridge,
Dublin 4.