Flashback, April 1966: Ulster Unionist Bigot Ian Paisley Starts Political Ascent

Within a week of his 40^th birthday, Rev. Ian Paisley moved decisively from fire-and-brimstone pulpit pounding in Northern Ireland to incendiary political partisanship in April 1966.

The ostensible cause of his agitation was Ulster Prime Minister Terence O’Neill’s commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a well-meaning but toothless gesture that Paisley interpreted as a dangerous concession to the province’s Roman Catholic minority.

Protests planned by Paisley led O’Neill to restrict the Easter rising commemoration parades on April 17^th. Those security measures, without equal countervailing measures against Protestant marchers, reduced Catholic support for a Prime Minister perceived as timorous and condescending while emboldening Paisley and his associates.

Through size and the passion of a true believer, Paisley dominated the groups he founded or transformed in adulthood. In 1951, at age 25—only five years after ordination—he set up his own fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

By 1966 he organized opposition more aggressively against O’Neill, by:

*founding the Ulster Constitutional Defence Committee;

*establishing the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, who would use the motto “For God and Ulster,” formerly associated with the notorious Ulster Defence Force;

*co-founding The Protestant Telegraph, an answer to the more mainstream unionist newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph (sample headline from late October 1966: “Were the Reformers Right in Separating From the Church of Rome at Reformation?”; and

*street protests and rallies, often proceeding through Catholic neighborhoods as provocative gestures.

What came to be known as “The Troubles”—the three-decade sectarian conflict that cost 3,000 lives in Ulster—did not arise in a vacuum, nor even solely through social, economic, or political differences. Their destructive heat derived from rhetorical tropes that gave currency to ancient grievances and prejudices.

Paisley was not the sole purveyor of this bombast, but as an increasingly visible minister—and, ultimately, the politician with the most formidable base—he bore the heaviest responsibility for its use.

In journalist Tim Pat Coogan’s memorable summary from The I.R.A., Paisley possessed “a doctorate from Bob Jones’s Bible Belt University, lungs like the Bull of Bashan and a theology from the Apocalypse…In terms of bigotry he would stand, were he a Muslim, 359 degrees to the right of the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Belfast includes a brief scene with a screaming Protestant minister who is more than a little reminiscent of Paisley. Many YouTube viewers reacted with amusement at the over-the-top deliver y of this bilious rhetoric, but there was nothing remotely humorous about it at the time.

Denunciations of Vatican II’s ecumenical statements, including on an October 1962 visit to Rome where he intended to distribute pamphlets, led to him being detained for questioning when he and other clerics arrived at the Eternal City. 

He viewed O’Neill’s outreach to the Catholic minority as a political counterpart to this, even having gone so far as to lead a 1965 march by 1,000 loyalists to Ulster’s government seat, Stormont, to protest the historic first official visit to Northern Ireland by an Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Sean Lemass.

(Two years later, when Lemass’s successor Jack Lynch arrived in Ulster, Paisley pelted his car with snowballs.)

With pressure groups that could quickly be turned into mobs at his disposal, Paisley ramped up his anti-O’Neill, anti-Catholic campaign. In June 1966, he led members of his Free Presbyterian Church to picket and harass delegates to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland for its openness to ecumenism.

Instead of curtailing his fanaticism, his arrest and subsequent three-month imprisonment only conferred martyrdom status on him within the loyalist movement. 

His vehement opposition to the Catholic civil-rights marches of 1968 and early 1969 lifted his visibility, and when he finally plunged into the political arena in the latter year, his better-than-expected polling results in O’Neill’s own Bannside constituency helped trigger the Prime Minister’s resignation.

At this point, he began the modus operandi to which he would adhere for most of the rest of his life: whip followers up into a murderous frenzy, while vanishing before violence inevitably occurred.

In 1971, Paisley formed the Democratic Unionist Party, with considerable overlap from adherents to his own Free Presbyterian church. He now held a seat in Westminster as a Member of Parliament and by decade’s end would also start a quarter-century stint in the European Parliament. 

Many of his colleagues may have grown chary of his antics (e.g., denouncing Pope John Paul II as the Antichrist when the pontiff visited the European Parliament in 1988). But there was seemingly little they could, or would, do about them.

Paisley continued to obstruct the peace process, including by opposing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that effectively ended 30 years of The Troubles. When he assumed power in 2007, it was as part of a power-sharing agreement with Sinn Fein –the same kind of pace he had denounced and torpedoed in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement.

Longtime Ulster observers couldn’t get over the jovial relationship he now enjoyed with the Deputy First Minister in the government, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness. But the realities of power can only be denied for so long.

In the same sense that only Cold Warrior Richard Nixon could have gone to Red China, only an incendiary bigot like Paisley could have agreed to peace negotiations with the IRA.

Upon his death, many Paisley admirers hailed what he had done for peace. They overlooked the irony that he had, in effect, engaged in the same reconciliation process with Catholics that provoked his outrage against Captain O’Neill—and that he had to detoxify the very environment he had inflamed with his rhetoric three decades earlier.

Paisley’s damage to the province was not only heinous but also injurious to the Unionist cause he espoused.

When he took umbrage at Captain O’Neill’s tentative attempt to ameliorate tensions between Ulster’s two faith communities, the Irish Republican Army stood at its lowest point since the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster were partitioned from the 26 counties of the republic to the south. Its 1956-62 offensive was so disastrous that the paramilitary organization’s acronym was spelled out to spawn a derisive nickname: “I Ran Away.”

Though gerrymandering and discrimination raged on, growing educational opportunities and the generous social welfare programs of Great Britain led many Catholics to accept control by the crown.

This month’s centenary of Paisley’s birth should lead to reflection, but hardly celebration, about his legacy. His career holds implications beyond the British Isles, to an entire political world with similar personalities.

Like demagogues across the globe and ages, he stirred atavistic prejudices into current socioeconomic grievances to advance his political interests. With such people, decades of peace and civil rights advances are provisional, always vulnerable to bigotry and backlash.

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on How Ireland Affected ‘The Vital Strings of British Life and Politics’)

“Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That says a lot for the persistency with which Irish men on the one side or the other are able to pursue their controversies. It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange, to lay their hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics, and to hold, dominate, and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country.” —Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), then Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, “House of Commons Speech on the Ireland Situation,” Feb. 16, 1922

For those of us of Irish descent, St. Patrick’s Day should be not only for celebration but for remembrance of trauma, struggle, and resilience.  

With all due respect to the poet W.H. Auden when writing his great tribute to William Butler Yeats, it wasn’t simply the case that “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” It was Great Britain that had made Ireland mad in the first place. Among others who forgot this was Winston Churchill.

As long as freedom exists, he will be remembered for rallying Britain against the Nazi menace. His skill as a wordsmith is evident even in this short passage above.

But his not inconsiderable blind spot was arch-imperialism, and it shows here by what he doesn’t mention. British politics and government had been affected through much of his lifetime not so much by quarreling Nationalist and Orange factions in Ireland, as he suggests, but by that government’s fatal decision in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to sponsor plantations on the island, through land confiscated from Catholics and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland.

The most enduring of those plantations was in Ulster, the center of “Orange” opposition not just of independence but of home rule.

Moreover, for all the future Prime Minister’s worship of his father, it was Lord Randolph Churchill who had encouraged longstanding tensions between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland for blatantly political reasons.

When Prime Minister William Gladstone came out in the 1880s for Home Rule, Lord Churchill told a friend that long before he had decided if that came to pass, “the Orange card would be the one to play.” The prospect of armed Orange agreement to any grant of self-determination bothered him little as well: “Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.”

Arguing for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Churchill may have felt he was removing the Irish question from British politics once and for all.

It turned out to be anything but, because of issues related to gerrymandering and systematic discrimination of the Catholic minority in Ulster that neither the Liberal nor Conservative governments in which Churchill served as minister moved to alleviate them. 

Those issues lay at the heart of the civil-rights movement launched by Catholics in the late 1960s, sparking a predictable reaction from the descendants of Orange opponents of the prior centuries—and now (with the toxic presence of British troops added to the mix) the nearly three-decades “Troubles” were launched.

Quote of the Day (Jesse Jackson, on Using American Influence in Northern Ireland)

“If legislation were passed supporting the MacBride Principles, as President I would sign it into law. Any President should.”—Democratic Presidential candidate and civil-rights advocate Jesse Jackson (1941-2026), quoted in “Simon-Jackson on Ireland,” The Irish People, Mar. 19, 1988

The many obituaries and career assessments of Jesse Jackson since the announcement of his death earlier this week have understandably focused on his impact as the most important African-American leader between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama.

But more broadly, he may have been the most radical major party candidate in American history since William Jennings Bryan. His concerns touched on not just the problems faced by this nation’s working class but those abroad.

Over the last decade, in writing (with Rob Polner) a biography of Paul O’Dwyer, An Irish Passion for Justice, I became fascinated with why this Irish-born New York radical lawyer, politician, and activist supported Jackson’s insurgent Presidential bids in 1984 and 1988.

Particularly since 1969, with the start of the sectarian “Troubles” that convulsed Northern Ireland, O’Dwyer had sought Democratic politicians aiming for national office who would aggressively press Great Britain for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.

Rather than George McGovern, an antiwar liberal who might have normally won his endorsement, he ended up supporting Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 Presidential primaries because, unlike the Senator from South Dakota, she took an unequivocal stance favoring Irish unification.

Additionally, in the U.S. at large as well as in New York State, O’Dwyer had long felt uncomfortable with the party’s lack of Black leadership. With Jackson’s ringing oratory on behalf of a “Rainbow Coalition” of white and Black voters motivated by economic unrest in the Reagan era, O’Dwyer saw a charismatic candidate who could break through.

To an extent not always understood by many who focus on particular countries, the struggle for civil rights has taken inspiration from around the world. Henry David Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience profoundly shaped Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of passive resistance to British rule in India, which in turn influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the segregated American South.

In the late 1960s, civil-rights marches staged by Ulster Catholics drew on the non-violent protests of African-Americans under the leadership of Dr. King. 

And, as civil rights activism moved to a different spot on the globe in the Seventies and Eighties—South Africa—many Ulster nationalists and their American supporters glimpsed another, economic model with potential for exerting pressure on a recalcitrant regime: the Sullivan Principles.

In 1977, as a tool against apartheid, the Rev. Louis Sullivan of Philadelphia conceived non-discrimination guidelines that companies investing in South Africa should follow to ensure fair employment. 

Seven years later, the Irish National Caucus fashioned a similar cudgel against the “the systematic practice and endemic nature of anti-Catholic discrimination” in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland since partition in 1921, naming the MacBride Principles after Sean MacBride, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and co-founder of Amnesty International.

These nondiscrimination and corporate codes appealed to O’Dwyer. Peter King, a conservative Long Island Republican who made common cause with the progressive Democrat on Ulster, remembered about his ally, in an interview with Rob and myself for our biography:

“Paul was really a lawyer at heart, and saw things through the vision of a lawyer. Even though he was in politics, and ran for office a number of times, he had that legal direction— how can this be done, how can the law be changed, how can we put certain protections in. Even in the frenzy of a political or nationalist moment, he was at his core a lawyer.”

Jackson, along with another 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Paul Simon, responded to a questionnaire from the Ad Hoc Congressional Committee on Irish Affairs, with the response above on the MacBride Principles.

A few weeks later, just before the Democratic Presidential primary in New York, O’Dwyer introduced Jackson to Irish politicians and lawyers at a fundraiser, extolling the candidate’s interracial vote-getting potential.

Though the party’s eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, had endorsed this corporate code of conduct as governor of Massachusetts, he did not discuss it much on the campaign trail after securing the nomination.

In any case, his failure at the polls that autumn meant that it would take another four years before O’Dwyer found, in Bill Clinton, a candidate willing to endorse the MacBride Principles and appoint a special envoy to facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland.

With Jackson’s passing—and access to his papers and the recollections of friends and family members—the time is ripe for historians and biographers to investigate and weigh the legacy of this complicated but critically important American progressive. His advocacy on behalf of Northern Ireland should be a part of such research.

(The portrait of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson that accompanies this post was taken during the 1980s by Jesse Jackson for President, Inc.)

This Day in Irish History (Downing Street Declaration Offers ‘Framework’ for Ulster Peace Process)

Dec. 15, 1993—The leaders of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland advanced the fraught peace process in Northern Ireland by signing the Downing Street Declaration, a joint statement of intentions that capped a year when a change in policy on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to dissolve decades of mistrust and violence in the troubled province.

In this “charter for peace and reconciliation," the UK government forswore any "selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland."

At the same time, Ireland agreed that any settlement needed to "respect the democratic dignity and the civil rights and religious liberties of both communities"—not just Catholics who had been pressing for issues like justice, economic gains, and better housing since “The Troubles” broke out in 1969, but also Protestants who feared any agreement that would leave them at a disadvantage.

Above all, both governments pledged to abide by the wish of the majority in any future agreement.

At the time, that was regarded as a concession to the Protestants who had held sway in the province since the 1920s, when a commission to determine the boundary between Ulster and the more republican-dominated region to the south dissolved. Their unsettled work resulted in a de facto gerrymandered Northern Ireland that favored Unionists.

At the time of this partition, Protestants had enjoyed a nearly 2-1 advantage in population over Catholics, based on the 1911 census, and they had retained that edge for decades. But by 1992, higher birth rates for Catholics had left them not far behind Protestants: 42.8 percent versus 38.4 percent.

Now, according to the 2021 census, there are more Catholics than Protestants living in Northern Ireland: 42.3 percent versus 30.5 percent. (A growing 8.2 percent identify as non-Christian religious.) This was a boon welcomed by advocates of Ulster’s unification with Ireland—and a nightmare scenario for those preferring continued association with the United Kingdom.

Although these demographic trends were gathering steam in the 1990s, leaders in Britain, Ireland—and now, the United States—were primarily concerned in the Downing Street negotiations with ending nearly a quarter century of violence between the nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA) and loyalist paramilitaries that was increasingly exhausting all sides.

On the surface, little seemed to be happening to end the stalemate. But much was happening outside public view, starting with the development of a friendly dialogue over the prior two years between British Prime Minister John Major (left in the photo) and Ireland’s Taoiseach (“Chief” or “Leader”), Albert Reynolds (right).

Neither leader possessed an especially strong hold over either their party or the wider electorate. But both believed, as Major told the House of Commons in his Dec.15 address announcing the agreement, that “we had to make it a personal priority both to seek a permanent end to violence and to establish the basis for a comprehensive and lasting political settlement.”

What they produced was “a framework for peace,” a carefully chosen phrase meant to convey mutual understanding—and a set of principles to guide future diplomacy.

All the same, getting the two governments to agree even on this much would have been well-nigh impossible for the prior 25 years. Even events in the last year before the agreement could have upended everything:

*Whatever warm feelings existing between Major and Reynolds were not replicated between the British leader and Bill Clinton. The Prime Minister had been deeply embarrassed when news leaked in the 1992 campaign that the Home Office had investigated whether as an Oxford student, Clinton had applied for UK citizenship as a means of avoiding military service during the Vietnam War.

*Major could barely command a majority in the House of Commons—and it could all come apart if Ulster’s Unionist MPs thought he was making too many concessions to the nationalists.

*Despite continued denials that it would not deal with the IRA unless it gave up its campaign to drive the British out of Ulster, Major’s government had been forced to admit, in late November 1993, that it had been maintaining back-channel talks with the organization for many years.

*October 1993 was marked by the largest loss of life (27 dead) in Northern Ireland in a single month since 1976, including, most notoriously, nine civilians, all Protestant, and one IRA bomber killed in a bombing on Shankill Road, aimed on faulty intelligence at the leadership of the loyalist paramilitary force, the Ulster Defence Association.

Other factors contributed to the Good Friday Agreement concluded in 1998, including talks between Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, and John Hume, the leader of the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party; Irish-American politicians and lawyers who pushed for justice and peace in Ulster; and more active American facilitation of talks among the parties through President Clinton.

But the Downing Street Declaration created an avenue for paramilitary forces to participate in the political process, and momentum for the IRA to declare its first ceasefire nine months later.

(In light of one massive change in the UK in the last decade, I urge you to read Darren Litter's March 2021 blog post on the role of the European Council in paving the way for the Downing Street Declaration. Given the UK and Irish governments' "sensitivity to leaks and failure to reconcile positions," he argues, two summits held by the council in the fall of 1993 enabled Major and Reynolds to discuss obstacles to compromise "away from the lights" of media gathered in Belfast.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Bedazzled,’ on a Faustian Bargain for Prime Minister)

George Spiggott [aka Satan] [played by Peter Cook]: “Now, then, what'd you like to be first? Prime Minister? Oh, no, I've made that deal already.”—Bedazzled (1967), screenplay by Peter Cook, from a story by Dudley Moore, directed by Stanley Donen

As Peter Cook’s clever take on the old Faust tale indicates, Boris Johnson (yes, he’s the one pictured, not the late, lean Mr. Cook) is hardly the first British PM suspected of bargaining with Ol’ Scratch for a stay in 10 Downing Street. 

But the man who used Brexit as his crude instrument for supplanting predecessor Theresa May must now feel that, after only three years in power, his sojourn in Hell is arriving a bit early.

Now that he’s resigned under overwhelming duress—and even then, vowing to serve until his party can find a replacement—Johnson may wish that he had fewer of those Houdini-like instincts long wondered at by the press.

In the end, all of those escapes from political death only prolonged the final agony: questions about what he was doing about former deputy chief whip, Chris Pincher, who was accused of groping two men last week. All of this was too much for nearly 60 members of his government who resigned.

In his overturning of the traditional political order and his fast-and-loose approach to the truth, Johnson has sometimes been compared with Donald Trump. I can’t imagine that Johnson’s former ministers and party colleagues loathe him more than Trump’s did. 

But the political situation in the UK was certainly more conducive to them telling the PM that it was time for him to go.

You can almost hear the sigh of relief over Johnson’s departure coming from the Republic of Ireland. After all, Brexit—and Johnson’s unseemly trashing thrashing about to maintain the loyalty of Ulster Unionists—led him to trash the Protocol agreement his own government negotiated just a few years ago, unnecessarily complicating the survival of the Good Friday Agreement that wound down 30 years of “The Troubles.” 

(For an analysis of the damage caused by Johnson’s blithe disregard for his own diplomacy, see David Lammy’s Guardian article from three weeks ago.)

"The relationship between our governments has been strained and challenged in recent times," acknowledged Taoiseach (Irish PM) Micheál Martin, who urged Johnson’s successor towards “broader bilateral relations between us…[and] to work together in a spirit of respect, trust and partnership." 

Let’s see if the nation that produced the likes of Johnson, chuckling at the antics of the overgrown schoolboy scamp even as he overturned one political norm after another, is now ready to move decisively away from his policies. Lots of luck with that—especially if Peter Cook’s “Mr. Spiggott” has anything to say in the matter.

Quote of the Day (Kenneth Branagh, on Moving Out of Ulster During ‘The Troubles’)

“That rupture was the most significant event in my personal life. There was a sense that before that mob came up the street [i.e., a riot he witnessed as a child in Belfast in August 1969], I knew who I was and that I was at peace. From that point onward, a whole series of identities and masks was constructed. What I wanted to do [in his new film Belfast] was peel some of those away. To do some self-remembering without indulgence, simply trying to open what had been covered up. Because there’s so much of who I am that was formed in that period up to 8 years old and before that riot occurred. But from that moment there was a guardedness, there was an inability to roll with things in the way that one had done before.”—Actor-director Sir Kenneth Branagh quoted in David Marchese, “Talk: Kenneth Branagh Is Finally Processing His Childhood Trauma,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 7, 2021

Nearly 30 years ago, while still married to Kenneth Branagh, actress Emma Thompson told an interviewer that, because of the sectarian unrest he had witnessed during his Ulster boyhood, the sight of a church left her husband almost physically ill as an adult.

Now, in Belfast, Branagh immerses moviegoers in a semi-autobiographical recreation of that traumatic childhood. 

I have been following the actor’s career off and on since he first attracted wide notice here in the U.S. with his Oscar-nominated performance in Henry V. But, as an Irish-American, I am especially interested in how he treats this particularly intense chapter in the tangled British-Irish relationship in his critically acclaimed new movie.

A move away from all the friends, places and other certainties one has known to date can be difficult for any child. The decision by Branagh’s parents to relocate to England as a result of the wrenching violence that erupted in Northern Ireland in 1969 must have been far worse.

Fans of film and theater should be glad that he and his family survived. It should never be forgotten that far too many others died—physically, emotionally or spiritually—during the three-decade period that ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

One can only hope that the Protestants and Roman Catholics of Ulster’s six counties will be able to work out on their own a future of justice, peace, opportunity and equal rights for all, without the specter of the gun ever darkening their lives or the history of that region again.

(The accompanying photo of Kenneth Branagh was taken on July 10, 2009, at the Roma Fiction Fest that year, by Giorgia Meschini. For a fine short piece from six years ago, hailing Branagh’s “diversity of work” while centering on his abundant productions of The Bard, I urge you to check out this this post from “The Shakespeare Blog” by Sylvia Morris.)

A Thatcher Depreciation

“Say what you will about the politics of Margaret Thatcher,” a liberal friend of mine posted on Facebook last week, upon hearing about the death of the former British Prime minister, “but she was a strong, powerful, and intelligent woman.”

To tell the truth, I disagreed vehemently with that assessment—and so would have, from a very different perspective but ultimately for the same reason, Thatcher herself. During her career, she had little use for feminism, and, having beaten male politicians at their own game repeatedly, she would have bridled at any attempt to judge her legacy by any gender-based yardstick. Besides, what did that first clause mean? If you didn’t view her through politics, her life’s work, then how on earth should she be viewed?

In short, I’m afraid she would ask, “Why couldn’t you just write, ‘Margaret Thatcher was strong, powerful, and intelligent’?”

As it happens, I have issues with the “was strong, powerful, and intelligent” part of that sentence, too. Saying a world leader is “powerful” comes with the job description; it tells nothing useful about the important question—i.e., how is power used? Though intelligence cannot be taken for granted among today’s politicians, its possession confers neither greatness nor even effectiveness, as seen in the cases of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. As for strength, it is not to be confused with inflexibility, anymore than love should be mixed up with obsession. Thatcher did her best to annihilate opponents, not convert them.

Something of the same measures of success used by my Facebook friend also colored the thinking of the powers that be at The New York Times. What was worse, though, was that, with far greater space and resources than my friend, it gave short shrift to a matter of grave importance for hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic: her policy on Northern Ireland.

From 1969 to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, more than 3,000 people lost their lives in these six provinces, with 2% of the population killed or wounded. The equivalent of that in the U.S. during that time would have been 500,000--nearly 10 times the number killed in the Vietnam War. 

Twelve years of this tragic history occurred during Thatcher’s time at Downing Street. She had the opportunity to advance the peace process significantly. Not only did she fail to do so; not only did she regret the one tiny step she did make, under extreme sufferance; but she also damaged hopes for negotiations.

In all of this, the Iron Lady not only had a predictable American ally in fellow conservative Ronald Reagan, but a more unlikely one in the liberal Gray Lady. In the 1980s, when one of the Times reporters, Jo Thomas, began to inquire into the “shoot-to-kill” practices in Ulster that were at the heart of the controversy surrounding investigator John Stalker, she was quickly frozen out by the complaining Thatcher government, then reassigned by her compliant bosses.

One might expect the passage of time to produce greater objectivity at the Times, but all readers found instead was a case of amnesia. In the two days immediately after her death, the paper devoted the equivalent of three of its very long pages, counting news and editorial space, to Thatcher. Out of this, only two paragraphs concerned Northern Ireland.

At her most benign, Thatcher saw Ulster as a backwater hardly worth learning about; at her worst, she regarded its beleaguered Roman Catholic minority as a group whose grievances she didn’t need to understand. The Times might have disagreed with her economic policy, but on this issue, hardly a whit.

The newspaper, particularly after the Jayson Blair scandal, has made a great fetish out of correcting the slightest spelling error, but it continues, all too often, to provide insufficient background and alternative points of view. It has flagellated itself on not questioning the official government version of events in the rush to war in Iraq, but its lack of curiosity about Northern Ireland extended for far longer. More often than not, the paper of record continues to publish columns of inches on this subject that makes for great garbage lining.

Believe me, though the Times continues to demonstrate historical amnesia about Northern Ireland, many Irish-Americans feel otherwise, including many progressives. The bar Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook, Brooklyn, held a party celebrating her death. A friend posted, out there in the social media, that Thatcher might find herself soon consigned to the ninth circle of hell.

I subscribe to neither view, but I know why so many feel so vehemently. Columnist Jimmy Breslin explained why, in a passage that also underscores why admiration for Thatcher’s “firmness” is so misplaced:

“She is a woman born to smell milk in the mouth of an unworthy, and she has the eyes of Captain Bligh. She is admired everywhere because when she takes a stand, she does not change it because if she changed, why, then it would mean she had changed. And this she would never do.”

American conservatives often liken Thatcher to Winston Churchill, but aside from their leadership of the Conservative Party, it is hard to see what the two had in common. Consider these differences:

* While Thatcher widened the gap between haves and have-nots, Churchill narrowed it. Allied with David Lloyd George, who had persuaded him to join the Liberal Party, Churchill, in the decade before World War I, helped ram through Parliament much of the social-welfare legislation (e.g. old-age pensions, national insurance against unemployment and sickness), that would not pass in the United States until FDR’s New Deal two decades later. 

 *Churchill was every bit the imperialist Thatcher was, but he was enough of a realist to at least sit down to negotiate with Michael Collins and his Irish colleagues the treaty that gave Ireland at least a measure of self-rule. Furthermore, despite all his disagreements with the Labour Party, Churchill was the only Conservative leader that the opposition would accept in forming a new British government after Neville Chamberlain lost the no-confidence vote in Parliament. It is impossible to conceive of a similar positive outcome involving Thatcher.

* Churchill became justly famous for his eloquence, inspiring his countrymen to stand alone for a year against Nazi Germany, until the formation of the Grand Alliance. His effectiveness in Parliamentary debate was heightened by a wit that, when it did not decimate foes, could mock himself. ("All men are worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.") His words reminded his fellow citizens of the best of their political traditions, and of Western Civilization itself. In contrast, what Thatcher quotes will be recalled in the future? “The lady’s not for turning”; her response to Irish Taoiseach Garrett FitzGerald on his three Ulster peace proposals (“Out, out, out”); and her cavalier dismissal of any movement away from traditional British misrule ("Northern Ireland,” she helpfully explained, “is as British as Finchley”—her borough constituency). All of these quotes are small-minded and humorless, and, considered in terms of pure political effectiveness, utterly backfired. (Thatcher's inability even to consider any of FitzGerald's proposals backed her into such a corner that she was forced to accede to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985.)

 

In January 1991, the National Review ran a picture of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on its cover with the headline, "Is the Heroic Age of Conservatism Over?" I gagged then, as I do now, at this notion. The most enduring achievement of these two leaders was not something celebrated by their movement at the time: i.e., their recognition that, as Thatcher put it, "we can do business with" the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev in easing tensions between East and West. 

Otherwise, the long-term domestic results were similar, and not readily understood at the time: policies that favored the financial sector at the expense of the industrial sector that had sustained the poor for years; resulting inequality; and radically relaxed regulatory controls that led to the global recession of several years ago that both countries are still struggling to come to terms with. 

The intersection of Thatcher’s domestic Darwinism and her neo-imperialist policy can be seen in Ulster. There, while spending on security forces increased greatly under her, expenditures in social services slowed or even reversed in some cases. The result: at a point when sectarian tensions were at their greatest in Ulster, a generation of young men on both sides experienced even greater fear and uncertainty because the jobless rate in Ulster doubled from 1979 to 1986.

One unintended consequence of the Thatcher Reaction (“revolution” is a misnomer) might be the auspices under which her funeral was conducted. The Labour Party, which suffered many painful defeats at her hands, raised the embarrassing question of how the pomp-and-circumstances services at St. Paul’s Cathedral, reportedly running anywhere from $15 million to $20 million, would be paid. At one point in the past, that might not have mattered. But, with fears of a triple-dip recession rampant, the expense was now a very live issue, and especially among members of the lowest stratum of British society.

The title of this post has a double meaning. It not only refers to the critical correction I feel necessary to apply in the face of unreflective acceptance of her own value, but also the depreciation in her historical stock that I’m sure will result, bit by bit, as historians wade through oral histories, primary documents—and, eventually, documents disgorged after the expiration of Britain’s Official Secrets Act.

Intemperate speech often bestows on their possessors the reputation of candor. It was all the more necessary for Thatcher to be so characterized, as it concealed a deep strain of hypocrisy and fraudulence. 

She claimed to be merely ratifying the wishes of the Protestant majority in Ulster to stay associated with Britain, but thought nothing of honoring the even more powerful desires of the citizens of Hong Kong to remain part of Britain rather than becoming absorbed by totalitarian China. Facing the chance of war with the world’s most populous country, unable to interpose her nation’s naval force halfway around the ground, she negotiated the handoff of one of the British Empire’s prize colonies.

 

By comparison, the Falkland Islands were of little strategic or financial value to Britain. Unlike with Hong Kong, though, Thatcher beat the drums of war when the Argentine government attempted to take by force this long-disputed region. The British Prime Minister only held onto this stretch of ground because it was logistically easier to mount a military operation across the Atlantic Ocean against a tinhorn junta. In other words, she made her decision to go to war not because re-taking the islands was moral, but because she could.  

We already know of one not-so-secret act: Despite her insistence that she would not negotiate with the Irish Republican Army, a group she associated with terrorism, she did indeed authorize a backchannel of communication with them. At the same time, one adviser, Sir David Goodall, now admits that Thatcher privately urged that Catholics not satisfied with the political situation in Ulster simply move south to the Republic of Ireland--a settlement policy that many down there rightly regard as harking back to the worst days of Oliver Cromwell. Another former aide, Peter Mandelson, her Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, divulged after her death that she had told him, "I’ve got one thing to say to you, my boy … you can’t trust the Irish, they are all liars."


Some have claimed that Thatcher was merely reacting against terrorism in Northern Ireland, including the deaths of close aides and even an attempt on her life that failed. But when she spoke of the Catholic minority, the only people she could seemingly conceive of, outside of terrorists, were fools. Furthermore, some of her contemporary admirers might be a bit surprised to learn that she also branded Nelson Mandela's African National Congress as late as 1987 "a typical terrorist organization."  

Being the first female Prime Minister of her country, as well as the Prime Minister who served the longest in the post during the 20th century, hardly merits the kind of send-off Thatcher received last week at St. Paul's. She was consequential, all right, but those she succeeded in marginalizing--the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, Scotland's independence activists, and miners and their families in England--had every right not to join the mindless cheering for her from both sides of the Atlantic last week.