On 9 December 1968, Terence O’Neill, the Northern Ireland prime minister, declared that “Ulster stands at the crossroads” in a famous televised address.

O’Neill delivered the address with relations between the majority unionist/Protestant and minority nationalist/Catholic communities having deteriorated sharply in recent times. His government stood between the growing demands of the civil rights movement and the intransigence of hardline Unionist opposition.

***

Since partition in the 1920s, discrimination at the expense of the Catholic minority community – notably in housing, policing, employment and electoral practices (gerrymandering) – was embedded in Northern Ireland’s governance and public life. These practices helped sustain unionism’s near-hegemonic status, and the UUP’s position as the sole and effectively unchallenged party of government in Northern Ireland.

O’Neill first took office in 1963, succeeding Basil Brooke, 1st Viscount Brookeborough, as prime minister of Northern Ireland and leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). He aimed to transform Northern Ireland’s economy and social structure with a programme of modernisation. In 1965, O’Neill established the Ministry of Development to this end. He sought new sources of investment and to encourage industrialisation.

O’Neill initiated cross-border talks with the Republic of Ireland, culminating in his historic meetings with Irish Taoiseach Seán Lemass in January 1965. Two years later, O’Neill travelled to Dublin to meet Lemass’ successor, Jack Lynch. These marked the first official meetings between leaders from both parts of Ireland since the 1920s. 

O’Neill signalled his new approach to community relations with a series of symbolic gestures. He met cardinal William Conway, the archbishop of Armagh and leading figure in the Catholic hierarchy; he conveyed the government’s official condolences upon the death of Pope John XXIII in June 1963; and he began visiting Catholic schools and hospitals.

O’Neill’s programme of reform and gestures provoked a backlash within unionism from figures like Ian Paisley, the leader of the Free Presbyterian Church. In 1967, O’Neillite unionist MP George Forrest was pulled from a Twelfth of July platform in Coagh and kicked unconscious by members of the Orange Order.

O’Neill’s reforms also coincided with and responded to an increasingly assertive civil rights movement, which demanded the dismantling of longstanding discrimination.

On 5 October 1968, a civil rights demonstration organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) marched through Derry. The march, which had been banned by William Craig, the minister of home affairs, was violently suppressed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Footage of the baton charges was broadcast worldwide.

The British prime minister, Harold Wilson, summoned O’Neill to Downing Street. He applied pressure on O’Neill to go further in his reforms, threatening to introduce direct rule from Westminster if order could not be restored.

O’Neill responded with his five-point reform programme on 22 November 1968. This included concessions such as an independent ombudsman to investigate complaints against government departments, a new ‘development corporation’ to replace the Londonderry corporation (which was known for gerrymandering), and new guidelines for housing allocations based on need. However, it notably failed to include “one man, one vote” for local government elections – a key demand of the civil rights movement.

***

O’Neill’s “Ulster stands at the crossroads” followed – a message to moderate, especially unionist, opinion.

In aristocratic tones, the prime minister began: “Ulster stands at the crossroads. I believe you know me well enough by now to appreciate that I am not a man given to extravagant language. But I must say to you this evening that our conduct over the coming days and weeks will decide our future.”

O’Neill said the issues at hand were far “too serious to be determined behind closed doors, or left to noisy minorities”. He pointed to his attempts to “heal some of the deep divisions in our community”.

The prime minister added: “I did so because I could not see how an Ulster divided against itself could hope to stand. I made it clear that a Northern Ireland based upon the interests of any one section rather than upon the interests of all could have no long-term future.”

Clip.

O’Neill spoke of his approach to “ally firmness with fairness” and address the “underlying causes of dissension which were troubling decent and moderate people”. He vowed to press on with a “programme of change to secure a united and harmonious community.”

O’Neill warned unionists: “If we adopt an attitude of stubborn defiance we will not have a friend left at Westminster.”

He said that Wilson had made it plain that “if we did not face up to our problems the Westminster parliament might well decide to act over our heads.” Moreover, he maintained that a Conservative government would be just as insistent on progress and reform as Wilson’s Labour government, holding up in front of the television cameras a letter from Edward Heath to prove it.

He declared: “We must be able to say to the moderate on both sides: come with us into a new era of co-operation, and leave the extremists to the law. But this I also say to all, Protestant or Roman Catholic, Unionist or Nationalist: disorder must now cease.”

O’Neill addressed both the minority and majority communities directly. Appealing to the civil rights movement, he said his government had introduced “genuine and far-reaching changes”.

He continued: “You are Ulstermen yourselves. You know we are all of us stubborn people, who will not be pushed too far. I believe that most of you want change, not revolution.”

Turning to the majority community, he said that unionism “armed with justice” would be stronger than unionism “armed merely with strength”.

O’Neill warned that Northern Ireland stood on the “brink of chaos, where neighbour could be set against neighbour”.

He concluded: “And now a further word to you all. What kind of Ulster do you want? A happy and respected Province, in good standing with the rest of the United Kingdom? Or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations, and regarded by the rest of Britain as a political outcast?…

“If you should want a separate, inward-looking, selfish and divided Ulster, then you must seek for others to lead you along that road. For I cannot and will not do it.”

***

O’Neill’s address attracted 125,000 letters of support, and the Derry Citizen’s Action Committee briefly postponed marches.

But this appeal to moderate opinion failed to resolve the political deadlock or arrest Northern Ireland’s descent into social unrest.

Two days later, on 11 December 1968, Craig was sacked as minister of home affairs over his known opposition to O’Neill’s programme. “Your idea of an Ulster which can go it alone is a delusion”, O’Neill wrote in a letter to Craig, echoing his recent broadcast address.

Craig responded: “If Harold Wilson or anyone else should threaten to interfere in the exercise of our proper jurisdiction, it is your duty and that of every Unionist to resist.”

The Northern Ireland civil rights movement remained active.

On 1 January 1969, a group named People’s Democracy, associated with the activism of Bernadette Devlin, began a four-day march from Belfast to Derry. People’s Democracy, a student-led movement which grew out of Queen’s University Belfast, was founded on 9 October 1968, in response to the RUC attack on the Derry civil rights march.

On the fourth day of its January 1969 march, the group was attacked by a loyalist mob at Burntollet Bridge. The RUC officers failed to intervene.

O’Neill responded that People’s Democracy was “from the outset, a foolhardy and irresponsible undertaking.”

He added: “Clearly Ulster has now had enough, We are all sick of marchers and counter-marchers… Enough is enough. We have heard sufficient for now about civil rights, let us hear a little about civic responsibility.”

On 15 January, O’Neill announced the creation of an inquiry (the Cameron commission) to investigate the causes of “the violence and civil disturbance in Northern Ireland on and since 5 October 1968”.

Brian Faulkner resigned as Northern Ireland minister of commerce on 24 January 1969 in protest. Faulkner referred to the inquiry as “a political manoeuvre and to some extent an abdication of authority”. He believed the commission was bound to recommend franchise reform and “one man, one vote” for local government elections.

O’Neill, faced with collapsing support in his own party, made a final gamble, calling a surprise general election in February 1969. 27 pro-O’Neill unionists were elected, versus 12 who were either undecided or considered anti-O’Neill unionists.

The result meant O’Neill had failed to secure a clear majority to pass his reforms.

Paisley, standing in O’Neill’s Bannside seat, came within 1,414 votes of defeating the prime minister. It marked the first time the seat had been contested since 1945. O’Neill, who was first elected to the Northern Ireland House of Commons in 1946, had never before faced a challenge.

O’Neill had denounced Paisley as a “dinosaur”.

On 23 April, the proposal to introduce universal adult suffrage in local government elections in Northern Ireland was passed by 28 votes to 22, accepting the demand for “one man, one vote”. James Chichester-Clark, the minister of agriculture, resigned in protest.

On 28 April 1969, O’Neill resigned as prime minister. It came after a series of bomb explosions carried out by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

O’Neill was succeeded by Chichester-Clark, who defeated Faulkner in the 1969 UUP leadership election.

In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph, published on 10 May 1969, O’Neill argued that unionists needed to give Catholics “a good job and a good house” so that they could “live like Protestants”.

He said: “It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets; they will refuse to have eighteen children.

“But if a Roman Catholic is jobless, and lives in the most ghastly hovel, he will rear eighteen children on National Assistance. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness they will live like Protestants in spite of the authoritative nature of their Church.”

O’Neill retired from Stormont in January 1970, and was elevated to the House of Lords shortly thereafter as Baron O’Neill of the Maine.

***

The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI), established in April 1970, grew out of the New Ulster Movement – which had supported O’Neill’s moderate unionism and inclusive, cross-community reforms. The New Ulster Movement was formed specifically to support O’Neillite candidates at the February 1969 Northern Ireland general election.

O’Neill clashed with Enoch Powell, in his Ulster unionist era, during the BBC’s Election Night programme in October 1974. The former prime minister remarked that he was “gratified” to see that the unionist majority in South Down, where Powell was standing for the first time, had decreased.

Powell replied sharply: “I should have thought that what Lord O’Neill has said is evidence of his own bitter and frustrated state of mind… for a former Ulster prime minister to regret the signs of Ulster unionism being reunited does seem to me to be the ultimate in self-contradiction.”

O’Neill responded that during his premiership “the Ulster Unionist Party was a very much more moderate party than the members with whom Mr Powell is now associated.”

Powell retorted: “Look what happened.”

O’Neill said: “If we’re not going to have moderation, then we risk going to have civil war and I at least will not be responsible for that”.

O’Neill said he was very “depressed” at the October 1974 election result, the latest demonstration of unionist opposition to the Sunningdale Agreement, as he could not see how “you can have peace in Northern Ireland unless you have something like power-sharing.”