‘Ulster Says No!’ Unionists against Europe

The most vehement opposition to membership came from the Unionist parties, especially the more evangelical wing represented by Ian Paisley and Ulster Loyalism. The Democratic Unionist Party, the Orange Lodges, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association all campaigned against membership, with Paisley and Enoch Powell taking the leading roles. Unionists were not, of course, unanimous on the question: the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland argued for a Yes vote, while the Ulster Unionist Council and the Official Unionist Party took no formal position. Ulster Vanguard was usually counted in the No camp, but its leader William Craig and rising star David Trimble were thought to favour membership.¹⁰ An organisation called ‘Unionists for Europe’ placed adverts in the major newspapers, though its provenance was somewhat murky.¹¹ Nonetheless, the majority of Unionist politicians and the major Loyalist paramilitary organisations campaigned to leave the Community, mobilising a wide range of legal, confessional and economic arguments.

Figure 11.1 An armed soldier on patrol passes anti-Market graffiti in Northern Ireland.

Source: With permission of Victor Patterson

Unionists approached the referendum in febrile mood. Over the previous three years they had been deprived of their parliament, subjected to direct rule from Westminster and confronted with demands for ‘power-sharing’ with the Catholic minority. The abolition of Stormont was not simply a blow to Unionist pride; worse still, it placed the government of Ulster in the hands of politicians in London, whose commitment to the Union was distinctly suspect. Only a year earlier, in 1974, the Ulster Workers Council had beaten off a power-sharing Assembly established as part of the Sunningdale Agreement, prompting a furious riposte from the Labour government. The prime minister, Harold Wilson, was known to favour a united Ireland, and in 1974 he had launched a memorable assault on those Unionists ‘who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods’.¹² Wilson's Northern Ireland secretary, Merlyn Rees, had legalised Sinn Féin in 1974 and was known to be in contact with the IRA during the 1975 truce.

With an economic crisis in Britain and spiralling security costs in Northern Ireland, the prospect that the British might simply ‘scuttle’ – leaving the two sides to fight out their own future – was taken seriously by Unionists and Nationalists alike. It was a policy with an inglorious pedigree across the British Empire, and Garret FitzGerald, foreign minister in Dublin, was so alarmed at the prospect of a sudden withdrawal that he asked Henry Kissinger to intervene with the UK government.¹³ Such fears, however ill-founded, encouraged two convictions that were always latent within Unionist thought: that the survival of the border depended solely on their own courage and determination; and that UK politicians were never far from betraying Ulster into the hands of the Republic.

Unionist thinking on the EEC focused heavily on the location of sovereignty, an issue with particular resonance in the North. The UK and the Republic of Ireland both claimed sovereignty over the six counties, while a strand of Loyalist thought identified Ulster itself as a sovereign territory.¹⁴ The concept of ‘pooling sovereignty’ had formed part of numerous peace proposals, and many Unionists saw the EEC as another vehicle for the kind of cross-border interference they had fought off in Sunningdale. The Official Unionist Neil Oliver, who chaired the Northern Ireland ‘Get Britain Out’ campaign, urged voters to ‘reject power-sharing and a Council of Europe’, just as they had ‘rejected power-sharing and a Council of Ireland’. It did not help that the presidency of the Council of Ministers in 1975 was held by the Republic, making Dublin a particular focus of Community activity. Nor was it reassuring that the European Court of Human Rights was hearing a case, brought by the Republic, concerning the treatment of detainees in the North.¹⁵

Some in the Republic undoubtedly hoped that membership would advance a united Ireland, by making partition a matter of common European concern.¹⁶ Anticipating interference in the province, constitutionalists in Ulster were quicker than their British counterparts to identify the potential of Qualified Majority Voting, over the longer term, to erode the national veto. Such concerns were given special emphasis in Combat, the newsletter of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which warned readers that the ‘most serious objection’ to the Common Market was ‘the erosion of our national sovereignty’:

Sovereignty was a particular lodestone for Enoch Powell, the former Conservative who had sat since October 1974 as the Unionist MP for South Down. Powell's emphasis on sovereignty found a warmer reception in Ulster than it did elsewhere in Britain; indeed, the stubborn determination of Unionists to govern themselves was partly what drew Powell to Ulster politics.¹⁸ Powell's speeches flattered the historical sensibility of Ulster Protestantism, likening resistance to the EEC to the muster of the Ulster Volunteers in 1912.¹⁹ Deploying a word with special resonance in a context of terrorist violence, he accused the Heath government of ‘hijacking’ the United Kingdom, claiming that Heath's hatred of Ulster ‘and his impatience to find some way, any way, of getting rid of it altogether’ was a principal reason ‘why he forced the United Kingdom into the EEC’.²⁰ Powell pledged to fight ‘shoulder to shoulder with the Ulster Unionists against the betrayal of Britain to the Common Market’, just as he had fought ‘against the betrayal of Ulster to Republican terror’.²¹

Powell was drawn to Ulster Unionism by its proud historical sense, its commitment to the defence of historic liberties and its determination to uphold the right to independent self-government. He was less comfortable with its confessional politics, refusing to join the Orange Order and insisting that Unionism had no necessary connection with Protestantism.²² This set him at odds with the highly charged evangelicalism of Ian Paisley and the Orange Lodges. Paisley ran an overtly sectarian campaign, warning that there was ‘no future for traditional British Protestantism’ or ‘our Reformation heritage’ in the Community. For Paisley, the EEC was a Catholic organisation run by and for its Catholic majority. To submit to Popish rule from Brussels, he believed, made no more sense than to submit to Catholic rule from Dublin.²³

Paisley was a charismatic orator who revelled in the street politics of the referendum. He held news conferences, preached sermons and led a rumbustious motor cavalcade through Belfast.²⁴ As one of the few men to have founded a newspaper, a political party and a church, he commanded the loyalties of an unusual range of campaign vehicles. Through the Protestant Telegraph, the Democratic Unionist Party and the Free Presbyterian Church, he waged holy war on the European project, which he represented in nakedly anti-Catholic terms.²⁵ Had not the Pope set aside a feast day for ‘the Madonna of the Common Market’, the ‘greatest Catholic Super State the world has ever known’? Posters warned that ‘A vote for the Common Market is a vote for 1. Rome 2. Ecumenism 3. Dictatorship 4. Anti-Christ.’ As ‘a predominantly Roman Catholic community’, Paisley insisted, the Common Market owed ‘its first allegiance to the Pope and recognizes the ultimate authority of the Vatican’.²⁶

In Paisley's view, everything from Heath's defeat in 1974 to rising inflation could be attributed to ‘the Papist Super State’.²⁷ Headlines in the Protestant Telegraph became increasingly lurid: ‘Communism is “Deeply Christian” – says Roman Catholic Priest’; ‘Pope Defends Mass Murderer’ (a reference to Pope Pius XII, ‘the greatest war criminal unhung’). ‘The very mention of … the “Treaty of Rome”’, the paper grumbled, should have been ‘sufficient to arouse most Ulstermen’.²⁸ Cartoons portrayed the Community as an extension of the Pope himself, his talons spelling out the letters EEC.²⁹

The rhetoric of ‘No Popery’ was not confined to the Paisleyite press. Papers like Loyalist News also saw in the EEC a ‘religious union’ that would undermine the culture of Protestant Ulster.³⁰ Vanguard warned that Catholicism would be ‘the dominant faith’ in Europe and that ‘Roman Catholic social doctrine’ would infect every area of ‘political and economic life’; ‘all will come under the dictatorship of the Roman Catholic dominated beast.’³¹ There were also concerns for the purity of the Sabbath, given lax Continental customs.³²

Elsewhere in the UK, the potential for interdenominational exchange was part of the EEC's appeal. By contrast, Paisleyism, like many Calvinist sects, remained intensely suspicious of ecumenism, viewing it as an attempt to bring ‘into one filthy cage all the unclean birds of Christendom’. For Paisley and his associates, the Catholic Church was not a misguided branch of Christianity but a ‘disreputable, dishonest and deceitful suitor’, bent on corrupting the bride of Christ.³³

The visceral anti-Catholicism of Paisley and his allies was a minority taste, even among Unionists. For No campaigners seeking to win Catholic votes for their cause, Paisley was a positive embarrassment; as Brian Brennan, of the Antrim Republican Clubs, complained, it was the Common Agricultural Policy ‘and not the colour of the Pope's socks towards which the attention of the electorate should be directed’.³⁴ Yet it was possible to construct a Protestant case against membership that did not rest on Paisleyite principles. Ulster Protestantism retained a strong historical sense, which viewed the Reformation as a constitutional milestone, not simply as a theological event. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 could be seen as a declaration of independence by the English state, which shook off the authority of a foreign court and made the secular authorities in London the highest court of appeal. From this perspective, the Treaty of Rome unpicked one of the great political achievements of the Reformation: it placed Britain once again under the instruction of ‘a mainly foreign court’. Loyalist News, the organ of the Ulster Workers' Council, warned that

The idea that British liberties had been carved out through resistance to foreign and clerical interference ran deep in Ulster Protestantism, and made the allegedly Catholic character of the Community especially disturbing. In the words of the Protestant Telegraph,

From this perspective, the challenge of the Common Market was analogous to that of the Catholic Pretender, James II, at the Battle of the Boyne. ‘The No Surrender of 1690’, urged the Protestant Telegraph, ‘must still be our watchword when we record our NO TO EUROPE!’³⁷

All this gave the Unionist case a character that was rooted as much in a form of constitutional politics as in sectarianism. In the politics of Northern Ireland, the word ‘Nationalist’ – with a capital ‘N’ – is conventionally applied to the supporters of a united Ireland; but the politics of the Province might equally be understood as a collision between rival nationalisms. For Unionists, as much as for Republicans, politics was structured around the defence of an authentic national community against alien intrusions, which were thought to endanger both the integrity and the democratic legitimacy of the nation. Paisley, in particular, was never slow to invoke suspicion of the foreigner or to mobilise jingoistic sentiments against the European project. Voters were urged to choose between ‘British democracy and Brussels dictatorship’, while Paisley complained that the ‘terms of the Treaty of Rome are like those imposed by a conqueror on a defeated enemy – unconditional surrender’. Douglas Hutchinson, a DUP Convention Member from Armagh, noted that the EEC was controlled ‘by Germany and France, the enemies of the British nation for centuries’, and ‘thanked God that in the past 1,000 years Britain had never bowed at the proud foot of a conqueror’.³⁸

If Protestantism was a core part of Unionist identity, so too was a brand of colonial spirit. As a plantation people, operating on the margins of the British government's attention, Unionists felt an affinity with settler populations elsewhere. For this reason, the idea that membership was a betrayal of Commonwealth interests resonated more powerfully in Ulster than in other parts of the UK. Alleging a plot to separate the British people from their ‘children in the Commonwealth’, Loyalist News complained that entry to the Community, with its tariff barrier and protectionist trade arrangements, had ‘made a devastating impact on the British World’.³⁹ This was also a theme of the National Front's campaign, which alleged that the ‘Empire has disintegrated, not through a single defeat in battle, but because of total loss of political will’. With its hyper-charged nationalism and overwrought persecution complex, the Front saw Ulster as a key battleground, and its literature urged voters to get ‘OUT of the Common Market’ and ‘back together with the White Commonwealth’.⁴⁰

As a shipbuilding centre, Belfast had strong historic links with the Empire; and its declining economic significance boosted suspicion of the imperial metropole. Just as Britain stood accused of ‘selling out’ the colonies, once they had lost their economic value, so it was feared that Britain would abandon Ulster under the financial burden of the ‘Troubles’. Here, as so often in Northern Ireland, imperial, constitutional and religious arguments intersected, pitting what a DUP official called ‘the materialistic ethic which would sacrifice anything for economic gain’ against ‘the Christian ethic which cherished the British tradition of parliamentary democracy and sought to preserve our national identity, distinct and separate, from the latent forces of darkness and tyranny in Continental Europe’.⁴¹ By disrupting the Commonwealth, it was claimed, the EEC would cut Britain off from ‘those countries on other continents with whom we have the closest of traditional ties’.⁴²

The emphasis on sovereignty, nationalism and the colonial spirit operated alongside a more hard-nosed economic campaign, focused on jobs, investment and the supply of cheap labour. In the 1970s, about 60 per cent of Ulster's exports went to the British market, which made the prospect of competition from the Continent extremely alarming.⁴³ Like the Left in Britain, the No campaign stressed the capitalist, free market credentials of the Community and the constraints it placed on state intervention. ‘Rights denied’ to members included the ‘right to curb the activities of big monopolies and help the nationalized industries’ as well as the ‘right to stop British firms and financial institutions investing abroad instead of in Britain’.⁴⁴ The Ulster Workers Council, which oriented its campaign specifically towards the Ulster working class, condemned the EEC as ‘an economic millstone around the necks of the British people’, which would ‘turn Britain and Ulster into an industrial backwater’.⁴⁵

Northern Ireland was one of the few parts of the UK where immigration was a major issue in the campaign. This was partly an economic concern, based around competition for jobs. Loyalist News warned that Article 48 of the Treaty of Rome, guaranteeing free movement, could facilitate strike-breaking, allowing ‘foreign labour … to take over the jobs of the strikers’.⁴⁶ Immigration would increase competition for jobs, putting pressure on public housing and draining the social security budget. A Yes vote, the paper warned, would be ‘a victory for the giant business concerns, the big investors and speculators and a defeat for the small businessmen and the ordinary worker’.⁴⁷

Yet the real concern focused on Catholic immigration from the South, with its potential to recast the balance of population north of the border. There was particular anxiety about the Safeguarding of Employment Act, which reserved jobs in protected industries to workers from the North. On entry to the EEC, the UK had negotiated an extension of the Safeguarding Act for five years, but it was widely predicted that the legislation would fall foul of European law.⁴⁸ Thereafter, warned Loyalist News, ‘we can expect the inhabitants of Eire to flock here in their thousands’.⁴⁹

This allowed the No campaign to annex an economic critique of membership to anxieties about the border. The Ulster Workers Council warned that free movement would bring large numbers of Catholics into the North, swelling the electoral strength of the Nationalist parties with ‘implications … too obvious to spell out’. ‘After the initial invasion’ – a characteristic choice of words – ‘consolidation would take place in the border counties and there would be a gradual thinning out of the Loyalist communities’. ‘This newly acquired hinterland … could be the terrorist launching ground for the final Republican armed onslaught on what was left of Northern Ireland.’ It was futile to expect Britain to resist such an incursion: impoverished by the effects of European integration, it would be only too glad to be rid of an expensive burden. In short, integration into the European Community would ‘achieve what an IRA terrorist campaign could never do – a 32 county Republic’.⁵⁰

From this perspective, membership of the EEC was not simply a policy error; it represented an existential threat to the Ulster state. Thomas Passmore, Grand Master of the Belfast Orange Lodge, warned that membership would deliver Ulster ‘lock, stock and barrel’ into the hands of the Republic. In voting against the Market, voters ‘would also be saying “No” to an eventual United Ireland’.⁵¹ The Ulster Workers Council urged voters to ‘treat the forthcoming referendum as yet another border poll’, while the ultra-Protestant organisation TARA warned that ‘if Britain says “Yes” Common Market troops will march through Belfast leading the Eire Army to hoist the tricolour over Stormont’.⁵²

All this constituted a distinctly Unionist case against the European Community, a supranational entity whose raison d’être was the erosion of national borders. Yet organisations like the DUP, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Orange Lodges found themselves in an uneasy alliance on the European question with Nationalist and Republican parties. These groups began from strikingly different premises, but forged similar warnings about employment, sovereignty and investment. In this respect, they demonstrated how the sectarian divide distorted political allegiances in Northern Ireland, while disguising the extent of common ground between the parties on issues other than the border.

‘Vote No to the New Act of Union’

With the SDLP campaigning for a Yes vote, the most prominent Nationalist voice for the Out campaign was Sinn Féin. For Sinn Féin to take part in the referendum at all was in some respects surprising, for Republicans did not recognise the validity of elections in what they regarded as occupied territory. The civil rights organisation People's Democracy, for example, boycotted the referendum, despite its ‘long-standing opposition to the EEC as an imperialist and monopoly capitalist super power’, because it denied ‘that the 6-County area has any right to decide on its own future or its international links. The Six Counties are part of Ireland and all decisions about their future must be taken by the Irish people as a whole.’⁵³ The Irish Catholic demanded that Dublin make a formal protest against the claim of a foreign power to organise an election on Irish soil. Surely the EEC could not permit ‘this violation of the sovereignty of one of its member-states by another’?⁵⁴

Sinn Féin, by contrast, took an active part in the referendum. It urged its supporters to vote on 5 June and promised ‘a full scale anti-EEC campaign’. Malachy Foots, the party's Ulster press officer, told journalists that ‘Posters and leaflets would be circulated, there would be door to door canvassing and Sinn Féin members would be placed outside polling stations. There would also be public meetings.’ Like People's Democracy, Sinn Féin denied the legitimacy of UK elections on Irish soil, but it reserved the right to participate where, as in 1918, doing so might advance the national struggle.⁵⁵

For Sinn Féin, there were two obvious benefits to participation. First, the referendum provided a golden opportunity for the party, which had only been legalised a year earlier, to broaden its appeal. With the SDLP campaigning to stay in, the referendum allowed Sinn Féin to position itself as the leading Nationalist voice for a No vote, colonising what it believed to be the centre ground of Nationalist politics. The SDLP was experiencing its own tensions over the question; Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin both opposed the Common Market, as did many branches and activists. By fighting for a No vote, Sinn Féin hoped to peel away support from the SDLP while stoking its internal tensions. The party newspaper, An Phoblacht, predicted optimistically that ‘The Referendum … might see the end of the SDLP.’⁵⁶ A strong performance in the referendum might also break the perception that the party stood only for the removal of British troops. As Sinn Féin president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh told a press conference, the referendum campaign provided an opportunity to campaign on a wider prospectus and to engage the party with a broader range of social and economic concerns.⁵⁷

The second great prize on offer was the possibility of driving a wedge between the politics of Northern Ireland and those of the wider UK. Like the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, Sinn Féin recognised that a No vote in Northern Ireland, which was subsequently overruled by a Yes vote in England, would strengthen the argument that the United Kingdom stripped its smaller nations of democratic self-government.⁵⁸ ‘Massive NO votes in these countries’, it argued, might even ‘lead to a break-up of the UK’.⁵⁹

Sinn Féin's opposition to the EEC, however, was not merely tactical. The party had campaigned for a No vote in the Republic in 1972, and it hoped that a No vote in the North would reanimate the anti-Market cause on both sides of the border.⁶⁰ Like the DUP, Sinn Féin was fiercely critical of what it called ‘the dictatorship of the Catholic hierarchy in the ecclesiastical sphere’, which it blamed for upholding conservative economic and social policies and interfering in the affairs of the Irish people. It accused the Papacy of conniving in British rule, and its newspaper, An Phoblacht, published a series of essays on this theme in the summer of 1975.⁶¹ Like the DUP and the Labour Left, it also viewed the Common Market as an instrument of international finance, ‘opposed to the interests of ordinary workers’.⁶² Sinn Féin saw itself as a revolutionary socialist party, and warned that the Common Market ‘stands for merciless competition and for driving smaller, weaker firms to the wall’. Membership would drive up unemployment, decimate small farms and move heavy industry away from ‘peripheral’ regions like Northern Ireland to the ‘golden triangle’ of France, Germany and the Benelux. Like Plaid Cymru and parts of the SNP, Sinn Féin preferred to align itself with anti-imperial, anti-NATO elements among the smaller countries of Europe. The EEC, it believed, was both ‘an economic conspiracy’, uniting ‘the owners of wealth against those who work for a living’, and ‘a political conspiracy against the poor countries of the developing world’.⁶³

That economic case resonated with Republicans of all stripes. The Irish Republican Socialist Party, which had broken from the Official IRA in 1974, pledged ‘an intensive campaign of opposition to EEC membership’, describing the EEC as ‘a rich man's club where the European working class will be the victims’.⁶⁴ Writing for the Republican Clubs’ Committee for Women's Rights, Philomena Donnelly urged voters to ‘view the Common Market in class terms’. A Yes vote would blight ‘the future of the working class’, producing spiralling unemployment and rapid deindustrialisation.⁶⁵

All this, however, was subordinate to the larger question of sovereignty. As a movement that existed to wrest back self-government, Republicanism was inherently suspicious of calls to ‘pool’ sovereignty. For An Phoblacht, the Common Market simply recreated in a new form the European empires of old, and was designed, like them, to bring peripheral economic zones under the control of their larger neighbours. The EEC, it declared, had perpetrated ‘exploitation and robbery’ on a scale

This vision of economic imperialism was fundamental to the political thought of Sinn Féin.⁶⁷ In the words of Republican News, the EEC was simply ‘an attempt to resurrect the old European empires, to make them viable in the modern world’. Republicans should ‘VOTE NO TO THE NEW ACT OF UNION.’ ‘DON'T BE ENSLAVED BY THE NEW EMPIRE.’⁶⁸

While Unionists saw the EEC as a threat to the constitutional status of the North, Republicans took precisely the opposite view. The Treaty of Rome, they warned, ‘puts a seal on partition and accords formal recognition to existing frontiers’. Members were required to respect one another's territorial integrity, raising concerns that membership would embed Partition in international law. Was it a coincidence that ‘the Dublin Government’ (Sinn Féin did not accept the legitimacy of the Irish Republic) was ‘preparing to draft a new Constitution … in which partition will be fully recognized’?⁶⁹

Underpinning all this was a more atavistic nationalism, which was suspicious of the very principle of foreign interference. Republican News warned that membership would mean ‘foreigners buying up our land’ and Irish children ‘digging sewers in Munich’. Europeans would ‘grow rich by making Ireland poorer’. Continental states, it was feared, did not share the values of the Irish people, or their commitment to neutrality in world affairs. The newspaper of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the Starry Plough, reminded readers that Ireland was already under occupation by ‘20,000 British Troops’. As a part of the Community, with Ireland's commitment to neutralism overturned, might they soon be joined by ‘20,000 French or Dutch troops in Ireland defending their interests?’⁷⁰

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Northern Ireland for Europe

For the advocates of a Yes vote, the situation in Northern Ireland could hardly have seemed less propitious. Most of the leading parties were campaigning to leave the EEC, as were many of its most charismatic figures, and they had assembled a powerful, cross-community case for withdrawal. Britain in Europe seemed scarcely interested in the region: though its director, Con O'Neill, was himself from a prominent Ulster family and a cousin of the former prime minister, Terence O'Neill, BIE allocated only £2,000 of the £125,000 government grant to Northern Ireland.⁷¹ Nationalists and Unionists seemed to be marching in step on the issue, while voter fatigue made it harder to change minds or to achieve the kind of positive mood for which the campaign was striving in Britain.

To make matters worse, the slightest misstep could inflame sectarian grievances. At Queen's University, stickers circulated by the Yes campaign had to be withdrawn after protests: intentionally or not, slogans like ‘Don't Withdraw’, ‘Don't Pull Out’, ‘Stay Right in’ and ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ looked more like a commentary on Catholic birth control than an intervention in the European debate.⁷²

Yet the situation was less dire than at first appeared. On the one hand, both Unionists and Nationalists were in practice deeply divided. The Official Unionist Party and the SDLP both favoured membership, while the ‘Northern Ireland in Europe’ campaign included representatives from both sides of the confessional divide. The United Ulster Unionist Council was unable to agree a position on the referendum, disabling the campaigning vehicle that had been so effective in 1974.

At the same time, for all the sound and fury it generated, the European question was generally considered a second-order issue. Conscious of the need to maintain a united front on the border, Unionists and Nationalists alike took steps to contain their divisions on Europe. Magazines like Combat and the UWC Journal argued vehemently for a No vote, but also provided space for divergent viewpoints; a courtesy that they did not extend on many other subjects.⁷³ Even Paisley was careful to stress that he would accept a Yes vote, while letting it be known that he would welcome a seat in the European Parliament.⁷⁴

Furthermore, the backing of the London and Dublin governments played to the advantage of the Yes campaign. It was difficult to argue that a No vote would strengthen the Union, when the rest of the UK seemed likely to approve membership. The idea that withdrawal would advance the cause of a united Ireland seemed equally perverse, when the Republic had made clear its own determination to remain in. For Nationalists who did not, like Sinn Féin, deny the legitimacy of the Southern state, the fact that 83 per cent had voted for membership in the 1972 referendum was a significant fact.⁷⁵

The Yes campaign in Northern Ireland was run by Erskine Holmes, a lecturer and Belfast councillor who later founded and served as first chief executive of the Northern Ireland Federation of Housing Associations. Holmes was a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), like many of those working to ‘Keep Northern Ireland in Europe’; yet the campaign was genuinely cross-party, bringing together activists from the Alliance Party, Labour, Ulster Vanguard, the SDLP and the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.⁷⁶

Outside the NILP, the main support for the campaign came from the SDLP, the Alliance Party and members of the Official Unionist Party. It was no coincidence that these were also the parties most sympathetic to power-sharing. The SDLP, in particular, had a long-standing strategy of reorientating political debate away from sectarianism towards more class-based issues of social and economic opportunity. Though individuals were permitted to dissent – and figures of the stature of Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin did so – the bulk of the SDLP saw in the EEC an opportunity for the kind of cross-border co-operation they had hoped to achieve through the Council of Ireland.⁷⁷ John Hume campaigned hard on the economic benefits of membership, warning that the choice lay between membership of ‘a massive market and fast growing economy’ or a state of ‘permanent isolation pretending proudly that we are masters of our own affairs when we will have, in fact, very few affairs to master’.⁷⁸ Others, such as Seamus Mallon, Frank Feely, Michael Canavan and Hugh Logue, focused on issues like climate change, environmental degradation and the European Social Fund.⁷⁹

For many of those involved in the referendum, the chance to work with people from diverse political backgrounds was among the most exciting opportunities of the campaign. It was also a microcosm of something larger: a chance to soften national rivalries and promote a more outward-looking spirit. As Hugh Logue, SDLP Convention member for Londonderry, put it:

For John Hume, the movement of peoples across borders offered a chance to break down ‘the real border in Ireland, which is in the hearts and minds of our people’. Hume saw in the Community both a ‘challenge’ and an ‘inspiration’, showing how old enemies who ‘in this century alone have killed each other by the million’ could find peace through the building of common institutions that respected their national interests and identity. ‘If bitter enemies like France and Germany can build new relationships, can we not do the same?’⁸¹

That view was not restricted to the SDLP. Berrie O'Neill, the treasurer of Northern Ireland in Europe, was just one of those who looked to membership to ‘soften’ the division between North and South, so that their ‘political problems might be discussed in a wider regional context’. The violence of the Troubles, he believed, gave a special resonance to what he called ‘the noble ideals of the German and French founders’, with old antagonists working in partnership to prevent ‘the horrors of war being repeated’.⁸²

In this respect, the Yes campaign in Northern Ireland, as in the rest of the UK, pitched its appeal explicitly to the political centre, reaching out to those who disliked the atavistic nationalisms of both the Unionist and Republican extremes. This partly explains the appeal of the EEC to the Northern Ireland Labour Party, which hailed membership as a way of ‘promoting internationalism and defeating nationalism’.⁸³ As Erskine Holmes later recalled, ‘I opposed nationalism. I had absolutely no time for any form of nationalism.’⁸⁴ This anti-nationalist dimension also contributed to one of the more distinctive features of the referendum debate in Northern Ireland, which was the willingness of sections of the radical left to back membership. While the Communist Party of Ireland, under its chairman Andy Barr, favoured leaving, the Workers Association (WA) campaigned vigorously the other way. For the WA, nationalism was as much the enemy of class solidarity as international finance, and it found in the EEC ‘a very welcome change from the sterile world of cul-de-sac nationalism’. The WA was keen to build links with trade unionists in Europe, on the principle that ‘if the bourgeoisie can organize and develop on a European basis the working class can do the same’.⁸⁵

There was also support from many churchmen, sick of sectarian violence and keen to distance themselves from the aggressive evangelicalism of Ian Paisley. Echoing the ‘Christians for Europe’ campaign in the rest of the UK, pro-Marketeers stressed the historic links between Irish Christianity (whether Catholic or Protestant) and a larger, European Christendom. As the Methodist minister R.G. Livingstone reminded his congregation on the Shankhill Road, the ‘first carriers of the Christian Gospel to these shores came from Europe. In return we in Ireland sent Columba to Iona, Columbanus to France, Gall to Switzerland.’ The idea that Protestantism was ‘in danger of being swamped by the Roman Catholic population and priesthood of the EEC’ seemed, to Livingstone, ‘a frightening confession of weakness’. Preaching the following evening at Grosvenor Hall, the Rev Eric Gallagher accused the No campaign of ‘unChristian’ political values. ‘An insistence on national sovereignty’, he claimed, was ‘almost a blasphemy … The only sovereign rights were the rights of God.’⁸⁶

Like the Yes campaign in London, pro-Marketeers in Northern Ireland worked to mobilise celebrities, sports personalities and other figures from outside the political mainstream. Posters gave pride of place to those men and women who had gone outside Northern Ireland to compete successfully in the world: the pentathlete Mary Peters, who had won gold in the 1972 Olympics; Derek Dougan, the record-breaking striker for Wolverhampton Wanderers; and Willie John McBride, who had captained the British and Irish Lions to victory in South Africa in 1974.⁸⁷ Voters were urged, like them, to ‘give Europe a sporting chance’ and to ‘join their team’ in the referendum fight.⁸⁸

As well as mobilising celebrities and non-partisan public figures, the Yes campaign sought to align itself with trade unions, employers’ organisations and representatives of Northern Ireland's leading industries. The Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Confederation of British Industry (Northern Ireland), the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce, the Bank of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Council and the Ulster Farmers' Union all campaigned strongly for membership. Key figures in the Yes campaign included Henry McLaughlin, director of the construction firm McLaughlin and Harvey; Berry O'Neill, of the Bank of Ireland; James O'Brien, chief executive of the Meat Marketing Board; William J. Black, managing director of Blaxnit Hosiery; and P. I. Foreman, managing director of Harland and Wolff. The campaign also recruited prominent trade unionists such as Billy Blease, regional secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, and Sandy Scott, the senior shop steward in the Belfast shipyards. Together, they sought to construct an economic case for membership that could bypass confessional loyalties.⁸⁹

The core of their argument was a warning that Ulster could not survive economically outside the EEC. The economy of Northern Ireland depended on small farming and traditional heavy industries, both of which were increasingly reliant on European grants and loans. Voters in Belfast were warned that, if Northern Ireland left the Community, all existing loans would have to be repaid, while a £15 million application to the European Investment Bank from Harland and Wolff would become defunct. The result would be the loss of ‘thousands of shipyard jobs’.⁹⁰ Foreign investors would relocate to the Continent, while exporters would face new barriers to their products. Industries such as ‘shipbuilding, agriculture and man-made fibres’, it was argued, ‘can no longer be efficiently developed in a national market. These industries require a continental market.’⁹¹

This was a particular theme for the Labour Committee for Europe. Erskine Holmes warned that a No vote could cost Ulster ‘up to £60 million of additional investment over the next three years’.⁹² The vice-chairman, Alan MacLeod, mocked those who denied that Ulster benefited from membership: ‘say so to the 24,000 unemployed who have been retrained under a scheme financed by the Social Fund, or the six thousand employed in various firms who have also been trained with funds from the EEC Social Fund’.⁹³

To counter allegations that the EEC was in the pockets of great multinationals, advertisements for ‘Northern Ireland in Europe’ prominently displayed the names of local firms. Small and medium-sized companies like Raceview Woollen Mills, A. Warnock (bagpipe makers), Barlow Threads, Wright Industries (carpet and rug manufacturers), John Dowling & Sons Ltd (heating, plumbing and electrical contractors), Alexander Reid & Frazer & McCleary all lent their names to pro-Market material. Reports on pro-Market events stressed the business credentials of those who took part. A launch event in Belfast, for example, included representatives of the construction industry, Northern Ireland Railways, the Belfast Chamber of Commerce and the Bank of Ireland.⁹⁴

Farming remained a crucial industry, with divergent views on Europe. Small farmers and pig farmers tended to be hostile, fearing that the EEC would consolidate holdings and expose small producers to unsustainable competition. This was the view of the Pigs Marketing Board and the Farmers’ Defence Association, both of which canvassed for a No vote.⁹⁵ The prestigious Ulster Farmers' Association, however, which represented large and medium-sized holdings, worked actively to stay in. Farming subsidies, it noted, were traditionally higher on the Continent, and Ulster was already benefiting from the Common Agricultural Policy. There was some evidence that farming in the Republic had benefited from membership, with per capita incomes in agriculture more than doubling in real terms between 1970 and 1978.⁹⁶ Large-scale farming depended on imports of meal and fertiliser from the Continent, which would become more costly outside the Community. Just as importantly, the prosperity of the agricultural sector was clearly linked to that of the UK economy as a whole. If withdrawal led to a decline in British prosperity, agricultural prices and demand would all fall.⁹⁷

As in Britain, the Yes campaign worked to reach out to women voters, for whom food prices were a particular concern. A conference at the Russell Court Hotel in Belfast brought together 150 representatives of women's groups and Townswomen's Guilds, where successive speakers sought to explode the ‘myth’ that food prices had risen as a consequence of membership. Particular emphasis was placed on the prospect of food shortages, and the protection provided by membership of the CAP.⁹⁸ Pro-Marketeers sought to woo organisations like the Townswomen's Guilds and the Women's Institutes, as bodies which could reach large numbers of voters without going through the established parties. Mrs D. McMurray, vice-president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, featured prominently in literature, as did Sadie Patterson, who won international peace awards for her work in the organisation ‘Women Together’. Posters showed Patterson pouring tea while reflecting on the benefits of membership, a reassuringly domestic image to set alongside younger figures like Mary Peters.⁹⁹

In all these ways, ‘Keep Northern Ireland in Europe’ sought to lift the debate above the preoccupation with the border – a necessary strategy if it was to hold together Unionists and Nationalists. Yet it also proved skilful at annexing economic and social concerns to the sectarian allegiances of particular audiences. Colonel James Sleator, secretary of the Northern Ireland CBI, warned Protestants that withdrawal would see firms that traded with the Continent switch their operations south of the border, carrying jobs and investment from Northern Ireland to the Republic. For the first time, ‘Eire would become more prosperous than Ulster’; ‘the whole “economic balance” between Northern Ireland and Eire would be altered in favour of the South’.¹⁰⁰ Speaking for the Labour Committee for Europe, Brian Garrett warned that the ‘real long-term threat to Northern Ireland’ came not from the EEC, which would never tolerate changes against the will of the majority, but ‘from the anti-Marketeers who will make this the poorer half of Ireland tied to a bankrupt Britain, under the control of elements so hostile to Northern Ireland, that we will be cut off without a penny in a hostile world’.¹⁰¹

The warning that, ‘If Britain becomes poorer, it becomes more and more likely to eject Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom’ certainly resonated with some Unionists. Outside the Common Market, it was feared,

In this way, pro-Marketeers tried to link the case for union at both a British and European level. Douglas McIldoon, of the Labour Committee for Europe, told voters that the UK faced the same decision that had confronted Northern Ireland in 1921:

‘For voters in Northern Ireland’, he concluded, only a decision to stay in the EEC was compatible with the ‘overwhelming vote’ in the recent Border Poll ‘for staying within the United Kingdom’.¹⁰³

In the same fashion, Yes campaigners sought to ground membership in the historic traditions of Ulster Unionism, contrasting it with the ‘ourselves alone’ approach of Sinn Féin:

‘A Noble Enterprise’

When the results were announced on 6 June, Northern Ireland defied pundits and pollsters alike. On a turnout of 47.4 per cent – the second lowest in the UK – it voted by 52.1 per cent to 47.9 per cent to remain in the Community. It was not an enthusiastic endorsement: only Shetland and the Western Isles, which voted to leave, showed lower levels of support; yet it was an endorsement nonetheless. Despite a late scare, when it wrongly appeared that 10,000 service votes had not been counted, voters had defied the paramilitaries and many of their politicians to produce the most unexpected result in the UK.¹⁰⁵

The disorganisation of sectarian forces clearly played a role in that result. With the IRA and the UVF campaigning on one side, while the UPNI and SDLP co-operated on the other, the vote could not, like the Convention elections or Sunningdale, plausibly be represented as a test of strength between the two communities. Paisley could not, as in 1974, claim to speak for ‘Ulster’ or even for ‘Unionism’, when so many Unionists took an opposite view. Nor could Republican Antis speak unproblematically for nationalists, when the SDLP was backing membership and the Republic had pledged to stay in regardless. All this diminished the pressure that could be exerted on the electorate, for voting or campaigning against the party line was less obviously a betrayal of one's community.

It helped, of course, that this was not an issue on which Northern Ireland had any kind of veto. Unlike the Constitutional Convention, the Sunningdale Agreement or the Council of Ireland, membership of the EEC did not require the active co-operation of the people or politicians of Ulster. Given its tiny population, the vote in Ulster was unlikely to influence the overall result – a fact which encouraged a degree of posturing, but which also gave a fatalistic cast to the debate.

This made it easier for third parties to campaign, without appearing to take sides on a confessional question or on the constitutional status of the North. Organisations like the CBI, the Ulster Farmers' Association and the Women's Institutes all played an active role, deploying the campaigning techniques they had long brought to elections elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In so doing, they switched the debate to subjects like jobs, food prices and the prospects for the economy: precisely the issues that were dominating discussion across the Irish Sea.¹⁰⁶ In this respect, the referendum was the most ‘normal’ campaign of the 1970s; the one that most closely replicated British politics. Released from the obligation to align themselves with a particular confessional or sectarian bloc, Northern Ireland's voters responded in much the same way as voters elsewhere in the UK, privileging economic and material concerns over sovereignty and confessional loyalties.

With the Constitutional Convention sitting in the summer, there was less time for soul-searching after the result than among the defeated parties in Scotland and Wales. Powell told the electors bluntly that they were wrong, likening them to the crowds that had cheered the Munich Agreement in 1938.¹⁰⁷ The Protestant Telegraph wrote bitterly of ‘A Nation's Folly’, while the Orange Lodges made a virtue out of necessity by accepting the result as a mark of their commitment to democracy. Would Nationalists follow suit, they inquired, by accepting the democratic verdict of the Border Poll?¹⁰⁸

The Newsletter struck a more optimistic note. Isolation, it acknowledged, was no longer an option in ‘the era of superpowers’, but membership of the European Community could be more than a pragmatic accommodation to necessity. It offered, instead, a new future for a nation disoriented by the end of empire, and a rebuke to Dean Acheson's famous dictum that Britain had ‘lost an Empire, but not yet found a role’:

The ‘political unification of Europe on democratic lines’, it argued, was ‘a noble enterprise’ which took on a special resonance as the bicentenary of the United States of America approached in 1976:

For those who dreamed of a politics of moderation and co-operation across communities, the politics of Northern Ireland would rarely appear so hopeful again.