IT has become fashionable in some unionist and loyalist circles to talk up the need to reboot direct rule. Hmm. Do any of them actually remember direct rule?
I do. I remember it being introduced at the end of March 1972, when the Faulkner government refused to accept the UK government’s proposals on security policy. I remember it being replaced with devolution again in January 1974 and then returning at the end of May, when the UUUC strike led to the collapse of the ‘Sunningdale’ assembly.
Unionist complaints about direct rule
I remember it lasting from then until December 2000, when the first executive of the ‘new’ GFA assembly was elected; only to collapse in 2002 and be replaced with a period of direct rule which lasted until May 2007.
It hasn’t been reintroduced since, even though one crisis has followed another, including the 2017-20 hiatus and the ongoing one from February 2022.
The thing I remember most about direct rule was how much the unionist parties complained about it.
Read more:
- Brian Feeney: There's no plan to deal with the mess the DUP has created
- The route to a border poll goes through Naomi Long - David McCann
- Alex Kane: This is why loyalist paramilitaries still influence mainstream unionist thinking
Fair enough, the UUP, DUP and Bob McCartney’s UKUP flirted with the notion of full-blooded integration (even though every government since 1972 ruled it out), or direct rule in a purer form (by which they meant Westminster servicing and prioritising unionist interests); but deeper down most unionists accepted that their interests would be best protected by a form of devolution which gave them daily input into NI’s governance. Even those poor souls who joined the local Conservatives after 1989 – believing they’d be treated with greater respect than the unionist parties – didn’t take long to realise that Central Office didn’t care about them.
The other thing about direct rule is that neither the UUP nor DUP had any specific influence on how it operated. Successive UK governments had embraced the ‘Irish dimension’ after the autumn of 1972 (input from the Irish government and local nationalism – primarily the SDLP until the mid-1990s) and consulted far beyond unionism. Neither Labour nor Conservatives baulked at the prospect of acting in a way which upset unionism, not least with the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and the ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ doctrine (1993).
Nor were UK governments all that interested in doing anything which could be construed as taking a side. For most of the time NI was just allowed to tick along, with one handout and sticking plaster following another, while attempts to kickstart new initiatives came and went on a regular basis. This approach endeared itself to neither unionist nor nationalist blocs: almost yelling at them, in fact, “Come on, you could do it better yourselves if you got your act together”.
Northern Ireland more trouble than it's worth?
A return to something resembling direct rule – and that’s all it would be, something resembling it – would be confirmation that this latest attempt to get our collective act together had, like every other attempt before it, failed. So, the belief that Westminster would suddenly become a born-again promoter and preserver of NI unionism is fatuous.
Failure is always accompanied by consequences. NI needs stability. It needs to be out of Number 10’s in-tray. Looking like a failure only fuels the narrative that it is a failed state, as well as confirming a widening view across the UK’s political/media establishment that NI is just more trouble than its worth.
It’s that view which lumbered unionism (even the wing that didn’t support Leave) with the NI Protocol and now the framework. It’s that view which delivered the comfortable majority for Johnson’s protocol and the stonking one for Sunak’s framework. It’s that view which prevents key players at Westminster going out on a limb for the DUP.
And it’s that view which explains why direct rule would be calamitous – and I use that word deliberately – for unionism and for NI.
Devolution is certainly not the utopian option (although, with good will and common sense it could be reformed and improved), but it would be immeasurably better than the direct rule alternative.
