REFORM AND REACTION

When Seán Lemass reputedly told Terence O'Neill at their meeting in Stormont in January 1965 that he would get into trouble in Dublin over his visit, O'Neill retorted that he himself would get into much worse trouble. Events proved him right. He already had grounds for his premonition, for he had embarked on one of the most perilous enterprises in statesmanship, to persuade a triumphalist ascendancy to begin treating its hereditary inferiors as its contemporary equals. O'Neill's policy of integrating Catholics, however gradually, into the Stormont state, required not only a change in political behaviour, but the virtual assumption of a new political personality, by unionists.

The state that O'Neill inherited from the ailing Brookeborough in March 1963 was, in material respects, a vast improvement on the state Brookeborough himself had commandeered from John Andrews in 1943. That was due less to specific Stormont measures, though the number of these would increase, than to the stimulus of the war economy, and the expansion of the British welfare state after the war. The Unionist cabinet contemplated with distaste the election of a Labour government in Britain in June 1945. After reviewing the alternatives open to it, however, including dominion status and integration, it decided it had no option but to adhere to the existing constitutional arrangement and do its best to modify the more repellant features of Labour's welfare legislation.