Bid to widen unionism never recovered from wrong response to Eamon de Valera’s anti-partition campaign

Sam McBride in his brilliant essay on Saturday on unionism’s failure in diplomacy (March 20, see link below) overlooked that the older unionism was something of a coalition in which “big house” unionism did much to hold the various concerns — religious, industrial, commercial, labour — together in one party.

This was particularly important in the latter part of the 1940s when the Education Bill was being debated at Stormont.

That was enough for Harry Midgley then of Commonwealth Labour (see “The politics of frustration” by Graham Walker, Manchester University Press, 1985) later to join the Unionist Party (Northern Ireland Labour fence sitting on the border issue) believing in unionism there was genuinely a party open to welfare reform

The well attended rallies on wider political issues that were held at the time in the then Wellington Hall addressed by such speakers as the young Quintin Hogg (as Lord Hailsham was then known) and the elder statesman Leo Amery had much promise for the future of politics in Northern Ireland.

That came to an end in the response to Eamon de Valera’s after Sunday mass chapel gate collections in aid of launching his ant-partition campaign.

The 1950s despite that throw back was a period of relaxation that even the IRA could not unsettle. But despite the later O’Neill and the tacit recognition of Stormont by Sean Lemass and the change in the Vatican Council II dropping strictures on religious freedom it never recovered from that wrong response to Eamon de Valera and was just not ready for the changes to come within the archipelago.

WA Miller, Belfast BT13

• Sam McBride: A failure of unionist diplomacy has left it more isolated than for decades

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