Diarmaid Ferriter: Currie always doubted South’s commitment to the North

The career of Austin Currie, who died on Tuesday, was a potent reminder of the disputed legacy of partition, the optimism of the late 1960s, contested nationalist strategies relating to Northern Ireland and fractious north-south relations.

Currie secured his profile as a civil rights leader in June 1968 after squatting in a council house in Caledon, Tyrone, allocated to a 19-year-old single Protestant woman, secretary to a local unionist politician.

“If we cannot obtain justice through normal channels”, he said at that stage, “then we should do so through the only other effective means at our disposal. There was no danger of violence. Indeed, civil disobedience was a safety valve”.

During the post-Sunningdale powersharing drift, those fissures [within the SDLP] deepened, as did resentment at Dublin

Currie’s actions that day, in the company of his fellow squatters Patsy Gildernew and Joe Campbell, came after advice from British Labour MP Paul Rose who told Currie the British government “would not take action unless forced to do so”. Television coverage of these events generated an essential pressure.

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For Currie, the civil rights campaign was “one of the most successful political action movements we’ve had in Ireland”, but even as a number of its demands were met, the movement was overshadowed by increasing violence.

When he declared in 1969 that “the people are getting off their knees” in what he called “an uprising”, the former minister for home affairs William Craig responded menacingly: “We shall defeat and put down this uprising. We have the capacity to do it, and the government to do it.”

Currie regarded the failure to suspend the Stormont Parliament in 1969 as a great missed opportunity: “Had that happened in 1969, I believe a lot of the trouble, and a lot of the deaths that occurred after that, could have been avoided”.

Eclipsed in the history books by John Hume and Séamus Mallon, Currie nonetheless displayed a similar stubbornness and independence of mind. As a nationalist MP later in 1969 he suggested Catholic nationalists should join the Ulster Defence Regiment and reserve police force. The subsequent disarray led him to reverse this position.

He remained optimistic in early January 1972 that the momentum generated by mobilisations against internment was defeating British government strategy before the horrors of Bloody Sunday changed all.

The SDLP, of which he was a founding member, was a divided party and during the post-Sunningdale powersharing drift, those fissures deepened, as did resentment at Dublin.

Diplomat Seán Donlon regularly compiled reports for the Irish government about the SDLP’s internal woes and frustrations with Dublin. Donlon acknowledged in his 1974 reports that his information was “based exclusively” on conversations with the SDLP, during which he witnessed “depression, frustration, despair” and “much bickering” with Hume and Currie beginning “to feel that the SDLP is finished as a political force”.

The same year, Currie addressed ministers in Dublin to impress on them that the SDLP felt “let down by the Irish government . . . in his view there was an air almost of inevitability about the development of a doomsday scenario”.

The SDLP infighting was clearly evident at the party’s 1976 annual conference with disagreements about demands for British withdrawal; at the same conference Mallon attacked the Irish government for erecting “a Berlin wall of indifference between North and South”.

The great pity is that the challenge at the start of Currie's career – trying to get the British government to take Northern Ireland seriously – remains

That contention had a profound relevance for Currie. While he noted that his decision to join Fine Gael in 1989 was partly because there could be no “meaningful devolution” while unionists Ian Paisley and Jim Molyneaux “adopt the attitude they do”, he also had long-standing doubts about the southern commitment to the northern nationalists’ plight. As far back as 1970, Currie had maintained that most southern politicians, including taoiseach Jack Lynch, “had shown little interest in the North”.

Even when he was unveiled as Fine Gael’s candidate for the presidency 20 years later, he felt hostility.

In his autobiography All Hell will Break Loose he recalled: “What annoyed, indeed angered me most was the suggestion that because I came from the North, I was not a real Irishman . . . what I called the partitionist mentality . . .The [FF] minister for justice said Fine Gael leader Alan Dukes ‘had to go to Tyrone to find a candidate for the presidency’ . . . it was hard to take, particularly from so-called republicans”.

Currie made a success of his Fine Gael political career, becoming a junior minister and remaining a TD until 2002, but the what ifs, apparent from the late 1960s, always remained, Currie lamenting that the 1973 powersharing agreement was never allowed to breathe.

While he referred to “the SDLP allowing its clothes to be stolen” in order to secure peace, he also maintained in 2018 that “the best tribute to us is that the people who were [our] implacable opponents are now trying to take credit for what we did”.

The great pity is that the challenge at the start of Currie’s career – trying to get the British government to take Northern Ireland seriously – remains.