Stormont: fifty years of unionist government
The Ulster Unionist Party governs Northern Ireland without a break for half a century, while Catholics face discrimination in jobs, housing and local voting.
- A History of Ulster — Jonathan Bardon, Blackstaff Press (1992)
- Disturbances in Northern Ireland: Report of the Commission appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland — Lord Cameron (chair), HMSO (1969)
- Northern Ireland 1921–2001: Political Forces and Social Classes — Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, Serif (2002)
- A History of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, Pragmatism and Pessimism — Graham Walker, Manchester University Press (2004)
From 1921 until 1972 every Northern Ireland government was formed by the Ulster Unionist Party, closely linked to the Orange Order. Elections, with rare exceptions, were contests within each community rather than between parties that could change the government. In 1932 parliament moved to a grand new building on the Stormont estate in east Belfast, whose name became shorthand for the whole system.
- A History of Ulster — Jonathan Bardon, Blackstaff Press (1992)
- A History of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, Pragmatism and Pessimism — Graham Walker, Manchester University Press (2004)
Unionist leaders were open about what kind of state it was. In 1934 James Craig told the Northern Ireland House of Commons, in reply to a nationalist jibe: “All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.” He framed it as an answer to the South’s description of itself as a Catholic state.
- Discrimination: Quotations (including the Northern Ireland House of Commons debate of 24 April 1934) — CAIN Web Service, Ulster University
- Craig, James, 1st Viscount Craigavon — Dictionary of Irish Biography, Royal Irish Academy
The grievances that exploded in 1968 were real, though historians argue about their scale. The government’s own Cameron Report of 1969 found that local council boundaries, above all in Derry, had been drawn to keep unionist control of Catholic-majority areas; that unionist councils had allocated houses to secure votes; and that local elections were restricted to ratepayers, which shut out many poorer people, disproportionately Catholics. Catholics were under-represented in the civil service and many skilled industries.
- Disturbances in Northern Ireland: Report of the Commission appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland — Lord Cameron (chair), HMSO (1969)
- Politics in the Streets: The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland — Bob Purdie, Blackstaff Press (1990)
- Northern Ireland 1921–2001: Political Forces and Social Classes — Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, Serif (2002)
There was another side. Northern Ireland got the British welfare state after 1945, including free secondary education, from which a new generation of educated Catholics, the generation of John Hume and Seamus Heaney, emerged. Terence O’Neill, prime minister from 1963, tried cautious reform and visited Catholic schools, but met fury from hardliners such as Ian Paisley.
- A History of Ulster — Jonathan Bardon, Blackstaff Press (1992)
- Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction — Marc Mulholland, Oxford University Press (2002)
Stormont was suspended by London in March 1972 and abolished the following year. “Stormont” today means the power-sharing Assembly that sits in the same building, a very different institution.
- Making Sense of the Troubles — David McKittrick and David McVea, Blackstaff Press (2000)
- The Belfast Agreement (Good Friday Agreement) — Governments of the United Kingdom and Ireland, with Northern Ireland parties (1998)
A one-party state that treated Catholics as second-class citizens: gerrymandered councils, discrimination in housing and public jobs, an armed Protestant police reserve and emergency laws used against one community.
- Disturbances in Northern Ireland: Report of the Commission appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland — Lord Cameron (chair), HMSO (1969)
- Politics in the Streets: The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland — Bob Purdie, Blackstaff Press (1990)
- Making Sense of the Troubles — David McKittrick and David McVea, Blackstaff Press (2000)
A small, threatened state that faced IRA campaigns and a southern government claiming its territory, governed by people who were elected again and again. Discrimination existed but has been exaggerated, and working-class Protestants were often poor too.
- A History of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, Pragmatism and Pessimism — Graham Walker, Manchester University Press (2004)
- Northern Ireland 1921–2001: Political Forces and Social Classes — Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, Serif (2002)
Why it matters today
How you remember "the old Stormont" still divides people. For many nationalists it was a "cold house" for Catholics whose unfairness caused the Troubles; many unionists remember a peaceful, decent place that has been unfairly painted as an apartheid state. Today's power-sharing rules exist so that no single community can rule alone again.