Harold McCusker, a persuasive advocate of unionism, was truly ‘a son of Ulster’

Harold McCusker was the Ulster Unionist MP for Co Armagh from February 1974 to 1983, when he became the first MP for Upper Bann.

In his maiden speech in the House of Commons David Trimble paid tribute to his predecessor by describing him, completely accurately, as ‘a man of the people’. Trimble also acknowledged the ‘high regard’ and ‘deep affection’ in which he was held by the people of Upper Bann.

The surname ‘McCusker’ literally means ‘a son of Ulster’, and Harold McCusker was truly ‘a son of Ulster’. Man and boy, ‘he was conscious of the soil from which he sprang and the traditions of the area and its people’.

A member of Boconnell LOL 123 in Lurgan District, he was an active and enthusiastic playing member of this celebrated Lambeg-druming lodge.

As unionist MPs go, he was far more pro-active than most. He sought to win friends for unionism and influence people not only in London but also Dublin and Washington DC.

He was the first unionist MP to engage with Senator Edward Kennedy. He was lively, engaging and a little waspish too. Possessing a quick and agile mind, he thought seriously about politics and had the ability to get to the nub of any issue. Unionism had a case, an extremely good one, but too often it went unarticulated and unheard.

Unlike most unionist MPs he was not a conservative but a socialist. Like many Methodists, he possessed a highly developed and active social conscience and Harold was a very staunch Methodist.

In 1979 McCusker tried to persuade his fellow Ulster Unionist MPs to prop up James Callaghan’s minority Labour government. His contention was that the UUP could hold the balance of power in Westminster and achieve tangible benefits for all the people of Northern Ireland, not least the construction of a gas pipeline to allow Northern Ireland to enjoy the benefits of natural gas.

But his colleagues – virtually all embryonic Thatcherites – failed to share his analysis. He never had placed much trust in Mrs Thatcher and in 1985 saw his prejudice fully vindicated.

No MP ever attended as many funerals of murdered constituents, many of them close political associates and friends, as Harold McCusker.

He produced a heart-breaking map detailing the Provisional IRA’s genocidal campaign against his constituents and castigated the government’s wholly inadequate response.

In 1978 he shocked fellow MPs when he informed them that Army knew the precise locations of IRA active service units across the border.

In 1981 he was to the forefront in setting up a unit to persuade the European Commission on Human Rights that border security was woefully inadequate and that the widows of innocent victims had been deprived of their human rights.

The emotion and sincerity of his speeches in the House of Commons after each atrocity demonstrated beyond doubt that here was an MP who cared deeply for the people he represented.

His speech in the House of Commons in response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 was a tour de force, probably the most significant and passionate speech delivered by a unionist MP since 1921.

He accurately summed up the mood – both the anger and the hurt – of thousands of ordinary rank and file unionists who protested outside the city hall on November 23, 1985 when he declared: “I felt desolate because as I stood in the cold outside Hillsborough Castle everything that I held dear turned to ashes in my mouth. Even in my most pessimistic moments, reading the precise detail in the Irish press on the Wednesday before, I never believed that the agreement would deliver me, in the context that it has, into the hands of those who for 15 years have murdered personal friends, political associates and hundreds of my constituents.”

In a telling passage, he continued: “I never knew what desolation felt like until I read this agreement last Friday afternoon.

“Does the prime minister realise that, when she carries the agreement through the House, she will have ensured that I shall carry to my grave with ignominy the sense of the injustice that I have done to my constituents down the years – when, in their darkest hours, I exhorted them to put their trust in this British House of Commons which one day would honour its fundamental obligation to them to treat them as equal British citizens?

“Is not the reality of this agreement that they will now be Irish-British hybrids and that every aspect – not just some aspects – of their lives will be open to the influence of those who have harboured their murderers and coveted their land? Is the prime minister aware that that is too high a price for me and hundreds of thousands of others in Northern Ireland to pay?”

In reply, Mrs Thatcher emphasised that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland within the UK could not be changed without the consent of the majority of the Province’s population and that the agreement signified no derogation of British sovereignty.

Given his natural scepticism, Harold remained unconvinced. Of the Anglo-Irish Agreement it might be said: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”

On his deathbed, in a final message to his constituents Harold reiterated the words of his most celebrated speech and some of those words appear on his headstone in Lurgan cemetery.

For much of the last 15 years of his life Harold had gallantly waged a successful battle against cancer because he was a fighter. His friend Ken Maginnis, the Fermanagh & South Tyrone MP, believed that “the recurrence of his illness was triggered by the trauma of the Anglo-Irish Agreement”. Colin McCusker, one of Harold’s three sons, concurred: “The Anglo-Irish Agreement broke his spirit and he lost the fight.”

Harold McCusker, a man surely marked out to be a future leader of the Ulster Unionist Party had he lived, died, five days after his 50th birthday, on February 11 1990.