Gaitskell and Wilson a l'Orange
Captain O'Neill has now lost three senior colleagues from his government in three months, yet for the moment he emerges the stronger for their departure. He has estab- lished that his deputy's resignation was pro- voked by personal ambition rather than principle, and with the departure of Mr Morgan he has achieved a more cohesive cabinet, and one that is loyal to his leader- ship. He has won his motion committing par- liament to support his policies without a division, after a debate in which his oppo- nents seemed willing to wound but afraid to strike. Moreover, he has, temporarily at least, secured for the Province a respite from week- end violence, and one vociferous group of his political opponents has hardly enhanced its credibility by insisting on the law- abiding nature of Protestant extremism while in the act of resisting legal arrest. The estab- lishment of the Commission of Inquiry into the causes of civic unrest, balanced by much stricter rules against trouble-makers, should now allow the Province to settle down—pro- vided there is no change of leadership.
Mr Faulkner's challenge to the Prime Minister is patently disingenuous. He de- nounces Captain O'Neill for failing to assert strong leadership and for yielding to external pressures in the establishment of the Cameron Commission, while at the same time he argues that the Prime Minister should instead have opted for a concession —the introduction of one man one vote in local elections—which would have been re- garded by the majority of the Ulster Unionist party as outright surrender. it seems clear that this was intended as a gesture towards liberalism designed to im- press the central section of the Unionist party, without whose support Mr Faulkner cannot hope to secure the crown from Captain O'Neill. The comparison has been made with Mr Wilson's campaign to unseat Mr Gaitskell at the height of the unilateralist controversy in the Labour party. It is a fair one. Others may want a change of policy; Mr Faulkner simply wants a change of personalities. And just as the replacement of Mr Gaitskell by Mr Wilson involved a lowering of standards of leadership for the Labour party, so the replacement of Captain O'Neill by Mr Faulkner would involve a lowering of the standards of leadership for Northern Ireland—with potentially disas- trous consequences.
Unfortunately, Captain O'Neill, like Mr Gaitskell, gives unnecessary hostages to for- tune. In his excessively lengthy and almost shrill reply to Mr Faulkner's letter of resig- nation he went out of his way to emphasise that the Cameron Commission has been commended by the leaders of both major parties at Westminster.' It is rather as if the Secretary of State for Scotland were to com- mend the Crowther Constitutional Commis- sion to an audience of Scottish Nationalists by saying that it had the support of Mr Wilson and Mr Heath.
It is precisely here that Captain O'Neill is most vulnerable. To many Protestant Ulstermen he appears as someone who has been brought up in an English climate and who cannot therefore be expected to take proper account of the deep inherited anti- pathies of Protestant and Catholic in the back streets of Belfast. All the more dan- gerous, therefore, for him to give the im- pression that he is more concerned with opinions at Westminster than with opinions at Stormont. This is the chink in his armour which Mr Faulkner is attacking by implica- tion with his references to 'an abdication of authority.' - Captain O'Neill has, in fact, shown him- self as Prime Minister to be endowed with both an understanding of the ritual tensions of his Province and a determination to ease them. Now that he has disposed of those of his colleagues who were foremost in demand- ing defiance of Westminster, he should henceforth combine the urgent pursuit of reform with emphasis on his complete inde- pendence of action in so doing. Mr Wilson ought, from his own experience, to recognise that the end is well worth the means.
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