ABSTRACT

The Callaghan Government was defeated on a motion of ‘no confidence’ in the House of Commons in May 1979, precipitating the general election that brought the Conservatives to power for eighteen years. This parliamentary humiliation was caused by two pivotal abstentions, that of Frank Maguire, an independent Irish nationalist MP, and that of Gerry Fitt, the then Leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party of Northern Ireland. The latter explained and justified his abstention as direct retaliation for Roy Mason’s conduct as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Within a year Fitt had resigned his leadership position, and John Hume, a more intelligent, dynamic and more nationalist figure, renewed the SDLP. After Maguire’s death in 1981 his Fermanagh and West Tyrone seat was won by Bobby Sands, an IRA prisoner convicted of scheduled offences – then leading a hunger strike that would end his own life. Sands’s triumph at the ballot box and his subsequent martyrdom were the decisive moments in the electoral breakthrough of contemporary Sinn Féin. These stories affirm a forgotten truth: the radicalisation of Irish nationalism in the 1980s was a by-product of the outgoing Labour Government, and not the exclusive responsibility of the Thatcher Cabinet. Many of the Irish in Great Britain and their sympathisers were also radicalised by the Irish policies of Callaghan’s Government. By 1981 the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party had embraced a policy of seeking Irish unification (by consent), the same policy as the SDLP – a platform commitment that would not be dropped until Tony Blair became Leader of the Party.