ABSTRACT
Northern Ireland in 1968, like any other western liberal democracy, had free and regular elections. Admittedly it was the poorest region of the United Kingdom with the highest cost of living, highest unemployment and lowest (natural) life expectancy. But even these problems were being tackled by Captain Terence O'Neill, a Prime Minister who had self-consciously undertaken a modernization programme after he took office in 1963. And it was beginning to bear fruit: he was able to boast that the unemployment figures for March 1966 had been the lowest of any March since the war. In addition he had inaugurated what Richard Rose described as an 'era of good feelings' in which Catholics and Protestants in all kinds of localities were agreed that community relations were improving. But there was something artificial in all of this. When a visit by the Prime Minister to a Catholic school becomes particularly newsworthy it suggests that such gestures are unusual. When there are those who protest against such gestures one has to question the nature of the democracy in which it occurs.
