A Bad Day for the Irish

Down at Paddy McClure's betting shop in Belfast on election morning, the odds were 50 to 1 against the defeat of Northern Ireland's Prime Minister Captain Terence O'Neill. Even though the infighting within his Unionist Party had been severe and Catholic-Protestant hatreds were as vitriolic as ever, the odds makers--and a host of other experts as well--were certain that the electorate would come out firmly in favor of O'Neill and his policies of reconciliation. They were wrong. Most of O'Neill's hand-picked candidates had been trounced, and at week's end, the betting around town was heavily against O'Neill's staying in power until the next elections. The Prime Minister summed up the results: "I hope it is the dawn of a new Ulster, but it has not broken as fully as we had hoped."

Divided Party. O'Neill himself only narrowly carried the race for a Parliament seat in his own constituency over his opponent, the Catholic-baiting Rev. Ian Paisley. The Unionist Party clung to its lopsided majority in Northern Ireland's House of Commons, but at least twelve of the 36 official Unionist M.P.s are steadfastly against O'Neill, and his efforts to replace a substantial number of them with his own supporters failed completely. Nor did O'Neill succeed in attracting a significant share of the votes of Northern Ireland's Catholic minority. Fed up with the ineffectiveness of their own Nationalist Party, some Catholics turned instead to the new People's Democracy Party, which has taken on the job of battling for civil rights. Most of the rest refused the chance to vote for a pro-O'Neill Protestant and stuck with Catholic candidates of whatever party label.

The Prime Minister had called the sudden general elections in the hope of uniting his party and consolidating his power. His failure to accomplish either aim reflected the fact that Northern Ireland's politics are still ruled by prejudice and personalities. The patrician Prime Minister is a cautious and moderate man who talks about issues; his opponents stir their followers with appeals to passion. Extremist Paisley, for instance, calls O'Neill a "traitor and a tyrant," and his followers delight in scrawling "F--k the Pope" on boardings. Only the extremist factions received any real psychological lift from the elections, an ill omen for the troubled country.

Troubled Future. For O'Neill, increasingly isolated within his own party, the future is bleak. There is at least a fair chance that he may lose his post as party chief in the next few weeks. If he retains power, he risks more Catholic civil rights demonstrations unless he pushes for reforms, and action on those reforms almost certainly would bring extremist Protestant rioters to the streets. Continuing unrest might well spur British intervention, which in turn would produce a violent response from a goodly number of Northern Ireland's 1,500,000 people. Indeed, the Marquess of Hamilton, a Unionist who sits in London's House of Commons, may not have been overstating the case when he warned on election eve that "if O'Neill is overthrown, then civil war would stare us right in the eye."

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