BACK PAGES:The stultifying state of the Unionist Party, and politics, in the North was spelled out by an anonymous Northern Correspondent in 1960 as Major James Chichester-Clark – a future prime minister at Stormont in the early years of the Troubles – stepped neatly from the British army into his family's seat in the local parliament.
THE OLD order changeth . . . but not very quickly in Northern Ireland. Earlier this month, Major James Chichester-Clark was selected as Unionist candidate for the South Derry seat at Stormont – and was returned unopposed. He succeeds his grandmother, the aged Dame Debra Parker, whose overdue resignation coincided conveniently with her grandson leaving the army. A family tradition was preserved – the new member’s father also held the seat for a time – and South Derry begins to look like a “rotten borough” of the past.
Major Chichester-Clark’s rival for the nomination, by the way, was chairman of an urban council and a former president of the Ulster Farmers’ Union. It was of no avail. The man who knows the constituency’s problems intimately was passed over: the youngish army officer plans to take up farming in his retirement.
He is not the only Chichester-Clark in Ulster politics. His brother Robin represents Derry city and county at Westminster: that, too, continues a family tradition, for his grandfather also sat at Westminster. The day his brother was returned to Stormont, he celebrated by marching through the streets of Dungiven in a provocative Orange procession that might have produced a riot.
This kind of family tradition is only one factor in the selection of candidates in Ulster politics. There are also the carpetbaggers who supplement their careers in London or their pensions with a seat at Westminster. There are the drum-beaters of both Parliaments, hardly able to string together a grammatical sentence, who represent the worst in rural Orangeism – although they are at least an indigenous growth. (There are urban bigots, too, but they are more articulate and literate.) There are the lawyers at Stormont, more than one-fifth of the Unionist representation, who find a parliamentary salary fits in nicely with their practices; at Westminster, they are one-third of the total.
The point is that the North, while it often gets the MPs it deserves, too seldom gets the MPs it needs. Hence the inconspicuousness of the 12 Ulster Unionists at Westminster, which was underlined in a recent Irish Times Portrait Gallery. Hence the dismal quality of politics at Stormont, and the lack of calibre on the Unionist backbenches.
Hence, too, the general resistance to new thinking among the North’s professional politicians. The old attitudes have served to keep the Unionists in power for 40-odd years, so there is no eagerness to change them. Hence the rebuffs to Mr Lemass’s approaches on trade between the two parts of Ireland. Businessmen in the North can see that the Six Counties have much to gain from an Irish free trade area. But the directive is “not an inch”, and the subject is not discussed any more on political platforms.
The Orange Order and Unionist Party have patched up their alliance following the recent fissures over the issue of admitting Catholics to the party. More accurately, the politicians have allowed themselves to seem wholly subordinate to the Order – which, cynics would say, is merely a recognition of the facts of Northern life.
It is true that many politicians deplore in private the power of the Order, but this is not a solution to the problem. Any change in the face of Unionism must principally be sought, for the moment, in other directions.
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