Labour, Northern Ireland and the Decision to Send in the Troops

The unexpected announcement in 1948 that Ireland was leaving the Commonwealth and becoming a republic caused a crisis in Anglo-Irish relations which was to have profound implications for Labour’s policy on Northern Ireland for the next twenty years. Labour Ministers were appalled by Dublin’s decision, but after briefly considering retaliatory action realised that this would be futile. Commonwealth premiers brokered a deal which in effect ensured that the new republic would not be treated as a foreign country. The Cabinet’s main preoccupation now was to reassure Northern Ireland that Ireland’s secession did not threaten the border. Between September 1948 and March 1949 London’s response to Dublin was discussed at great length at a series of Cabinet meetings. Harold Wilson, the young President of the Board of Trade, attended most of them. Other Ministers attending who were to be in Wilson’s Cabinet fifteen years later included Sir Frank Soskice, then Solicitor General. When Soskice became Wilson’s Home Secretary with responsibility for Northern Ireland in 1964 he was so pro-unionist that he would have qualified to be an honorary member of the Orange Order. For example, on a visit to Northern Ireland in April 1965 he said of Ulster Unionism: ‘From England we watch it, we admire it and we rejoice in it’. 1 At a seminar held by the Institute of Contemporary British History (ICBH), Lord Callaghan 2 described Soskice as an odd bird. ‘Frank’, he said, ‘had only two ambitions: the abolition of supertax and the restoration of the Tsar of Russia’. 3 Others who attended the Irish crisis meetings included Patrick Gordon Walker, Undersecretary at the Commonwealth Office, who was to be Wilson’s first Foreign Secretary. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Archaeology · Cabinet (room) · Commonwealth · Economic history · Ethnology · Irish · Northern ireland · Political science · The Republic · Theology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law

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