Henry Patterson: GCSE history students are being given an inadequate account of post-partition Stormont rule

Paul Kingsley wrote the article: ‘The distortion of history has at its worst fomented sectarian hatred of Protestants,’ News Letter July 17 2020 (click here to read it).

There are two units in that history GCSE: Changing Relations: Northern Ireland and Its Neighbours, 1920-49 and Changing Relations: Northern Ireland and its Neighbours 1965-98.

A project by school students in England had trawled the websites of Northern Ireland schools to find which option they chose to study. They found that 90 per cent of Catholic schools taught the 1965-98 option while in controlled non-selective schools, two thirds of pupils would have chosen the 1920-49 option.

The result, Dr Kingsley claimed, was that Protestant pupils did not cover the civil rights movement. This left them unequipped to deal with the claims made by the movement, and repeated in the main textbook for the course, that the unionist regime treated Catholics unfairly.

He added that the problem was added to by the fact that the historical treatment of the subject was unreliable and lacked balance.

He makes a serious point and the references are rather dated and do not include for example Dr Graham Gudgin’s ‘Discrimination in housing and employment in Northern Ireland’.

However, there is another, perhaps more profound problem: the inadequate coverage of the history of Northern Ireland during much of the Stormont period. Although the titles of the units refer to Northern Ireland and its neighbours , the focus is overwhelmingly on the North-South relation.

Northern Ireland’s most important relation, the East-West one is relatively marginalised.

Key economic and financial dimensions of Northern Ireland’s history are ignored.

There is a whole section on the Economic War between Ireland and Britain in the 1930s. Like much in the book this is well described and its effects itemised. We learn about Sean Lemass’s role as Minister of the Industry and Commerce in the Free State but nothing about Hugh MacDowell Pollock, Northern Ireland’s Minister of Finance or John Milne Barbour, Minister of Commerce, in the same period.

There is no discussion of the financial provisions of the Government of Ireland Act which had assumed that Northern Ireland would not only be able to support services and benefits from taxation but also make an Imperial Contribution to the costs of defending the UK and its Empire.

However, the decline of its traditional industries and mass unemployment faced by the Northern Ireland government in the 1920s and 1930s led to Sir James Craig and his ministers successfully persuading the Treasury to accept that Northern Ireland needed a financial subvention to ensure parity of social services with Britain.

The crucial importance of parity of services and benefits and, after 1945, of making up leeway with the UK is not acknowledged.

The 1920-49 unit has a section on life in post-War Northern Ireland and Eire which refers to the arrival of the welfare state and the revolutionary implications of the 1947 Education Act which provided free secondary and university education .

It emphasises the Stormont government’s suspicions of the Labour government’s socialism and shows a cartoon of Basil Brooke, the prime minister, unwillingly swallowing a dose of ‘socialistic syrup’ from Westminster.

It fails to register that it was Brooke who faced down those in his government and party who supported Dominion Status to preserve Ulster from socialism.

There is no mention in either unit of how the fierce opposition of the Catholic hierarchy and the doctors to ‘socialised medicine’ doomed a very limited scheme of free health care for mothers and children in the South and forced the resignation of the Irish Minister of Health in 1951,

The decade of the 1950s in Northern Ireland is almost wholly absent from the coverage of the two units. Yet this was when the full promise of the post-war Labour government’s welfare state was being realised and the gap in economic well being for ordinary people between Northern Ireland and the Republic became a chasm.

In the 1965–98 unit we are told that ‘The political, economic and social conditions created in the early 1920s remained largely unchanged until the 1960s’. Leaving politics aside this ignores major economic and social changes and improvements which had occurred.

The new health service, the investment in new schools and hospitals, the very successful policy of attracting new industries were all a feature of Northern Ireland in the fifties.

The only forces for change mentioned in the units appears to be that of Catholic grievances and IRA challenges to the state.

The crisis of traditional forms of anti-partitionism after 1945 and the weakness of political nationalism in Belfast are not mentioned. Nor is the Northern Ireland Labour Party whose growth in the fifties and winning of four Stormont seats in 1958 was seminal in reflecting working class dissatisfaction with the unionist government.

Its success was the threat that forced the resignation of Lord Brookeborough and the accession of Terence of O’Neill.

Many commentators have noted that unionism seems to lack the intellectual and ideological resources of nationalism and republicanism. Perhaps one reason for that is the absence of a comprehensive GCSE unit on the political, economic and social history of Northern Ireland from partition to the 1960s.

Without it there is little to challenge one-sided and historically defective narratives of an ‘Orange State’.

This is not to deny that Northern Ireland’s post-war government’s failed to use the much strengthened position because of the welfare state to address the state’s legitimacy problem with its Catholic community.

An historically aware and critical sense of our past is important to all our young people whatever their community origins.

• Henry Patterson is emeritus professor of Irish Politics at the University of Ulster