Ulster Unionist Party

I

Introduction

Ulster Unionist Party or Official Unionist Party, Northern Irish Unionist political party dedicated to the maintenance of union between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. The Ulster Unionist Party was formed out of the conservative wing of the old Liberal Unionist Party following the partition of Ireland in 1920, and was first led by Sir James Craig. It was the party of government in the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont 1921-1972. Until the 1970s the party represented a broad coalition of unionist interests and was led by members of Ulster’s aristocracy. Its Members of Parliament at Westminster took the Conservative Party whip until February 1974. It has traditionally been supported by the mainly Protestant middle and working classes.

II

The UUP and the Troubles

During the late 1960s the party began to disintegrate under the leadership of the Northern Ireland prime minister Captain Terence O’Neill. In response to demands from the Catholic minority population to end discrimination against them, especially in housing, elections, and employment, O’Neill attempted to introduce a series of reforms. His policies alienated the right-wing hardline element of Unionism, which was articulated by Dr Ian Paisley and later by his Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). O’Neill’s leadership was challenged by Brian Faulkner in January 1969. Attempting to unify the party and maintain his leadership, he called an election which returned him to power but the worsening civil disobedience and violence eroded his position further, and he resigned as leader on April 28, 1969.

O’Neill’s successor, his cousin James Chichester-Clark, continued with the reform programme amid further violence and the deployment of British soldiers in Northern Ireland (see The Troubles). His repeated demands for more troops, in the face of deteriorating relations between the Catholic nationalist community and the British army, and the introduction of internment (detention without trial on suspicion of terrorist involvement) to meet the escalating crisis, were refused by the British government, and he tendered his resignation on March 20, 1971. The party continued to divide and disintegrate. Liberal unionists who had supported O’Neill regrouped in the Alliance Party in April 1971, while five right-wing members of the parliamentary party were expelled for refusing to support a vote of confidence in Chichester-Clark’s security policy in March. Brian Faulkner, former minister of home affairs (1959-1963) at Stormont, became the new leader of the Unionist Party on March 23, 1971. Faulkner, arguably a more able political mind than his two immediate predecessors, inherited a crisis which was developing into an open war in the streets between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British army. In an attempt to defeat the IRA he introduced internment on August 9. Internment proved disastrous: the army, relying on poor intelligence, captured few important IRA members while in the process managing to alienate the entire Nationalist community.

Faulkner inherited power too late to take decisive action to save either the unity of the party or the Stormont regime. In February 1972 the right-wing of the party under the leadership of William Craig broke away and formed the Ulster Vanguard movement with the declared aim of reasserting unionist ascendancy. In response to Craig, Faulkner attempted to redouble his efforts against the IRA and demanded increased powers from the British prime minister Edward Heath. Heath refused, and prorogued the parliament at Stormont replacing it with direct rule from London on March 28, 1972.

A

The Sunningdale Agreement and After

On January 1, 1974, according to the terms of the Sunningdale Agreement, a power-sharing executive was established at Stormont under the chairmanship of Faulkner to govern Northern Ireland, comprising the mainly nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), the Alliance Party, and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). However, opposition to the executive within his party undermined Faulkner’s leadership, and he was succeeded by Harry West in February 1974. Faulkner, retaining the support of 19 of the 21 UUP MPs and continued to act as chairman of the executive until it collapsed in May 1974. In the February 1974 general election, the anti-executive unionists were returned to 11 of 12 of the UUP seats in Northern Ireland and West led a unionist coalition comprised of Ian Paisley’s DUP, the Ulster Vanguard, and his own UUP members at Westminster.

The unionist coalition lasted until 1977, following which the UUP existed largely as an independent Unionist party, defending its right wing against Paisley’s DUP. In the late 1970s the UUP was able to wield considerable influence over the minority Labour Party government at Westminster. Under the leadership of James Molyneaux after 1979, the party began to expand its vote, achieving 38 per cent and 35 per cent of the Northern Ireland poll in the 1987 and 1992 elections. The party has one seat at the European Parliament of the European Union, where it is associated with the European People’s Party. In September 1995 David Trimble, a former lecturer in commercial law at Queen’s University Belfast, succeeded Molyneaux as leader of the party. The UUP won the largest unionist representation at the elected forum convened for talks on Northern Ireland’s future in June 1996, although closely followed by the more extremist DUP.

III

The Good Friday Agreement

In 1997-1998 the UUP participated in historic peace negotiations with other Ulster parties and the British and Irish governments. The so-called Good Friday Agreement set up new arrangements for an Ulster assembly, limited cross-border bodies, and the release of terrorist prisoners. Trimble’s support was crucial in the complex negotiations securing the agreement, which was endorsed by referendums held in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on May 22. The “Yes” vote in the north was 70 per cent of the poll. In October 1998, Trimble received the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with John Hume of the SDLP for their work in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

In February 1999 the Assembly endorsed blueprints for devolution from the UK government and the formation of an executive, but progress faltered over the issue of decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, with the UUP refusing to form a devolved government while the IRA had failed to surrender any weapons. In September the peace process was given a boost when Senator George Mitchell agreed to help formulate a new peace plan, and ten weeks later the UUP voted to accept Mitchell's proposals that allowed the formation of an executive, with Trimble as first minister, before any decommissioning had begun in December. However, the Assembly was suspended in February 2000 because of the failure to formulate a precise deadline for decommissioning; direct rule from Westminster was temporarily reimposed. In March, Trimble was challenged for the leadership of the UUP by Martin Smyth following comments by Trimble that he would be prepared to reconvene the suspended government with Sinn Féin before decommissioning, provided guarantees were given; Trimble won the ballot with 57 per cent of the vote. In May 2000 the IRA pledged to put its weapons “completely and verifiably beyond use” in return for the restoration of the suspended government. The IRA also agreed to permit regular inspections of its weapons stockpiles by an international panel supervising disarmament. In June 2000 the suspended government was reconvened.

Party confidence in the executive was shaken when the DUP won the seat of Antrim South in a September by-election; the seat had previously been the UUP’s second safest. The defeat resulted in calls for Trimble to pull out of the power-sharing executive until the IRA began decommissioning. However, Trimble chose to place sanctions on Sinn Féin ministers, preventing them from attending cross-border meetings, a policy he continued despite a court decision against sanctions in March 2001.

The 2001 general election proved to be a major disappointment for the UUP. With voters moving away from the centre-ground parties that had dominated at the previous election in 1997, the UUP lost five parliamentary seats, and although it gained one seat and secured the highest number of votes of any party, was left with only six seats. Three seats were lost to the DUP, which exploited unionist dissatisfaction with both the Good Friday Agreement and the lack of progress on weapons decommissioning to become the second-largest party in the province with five seats, its highest ever total. Shortly afterwards, Trimble resigned his position as first minister in protest at the lack of progress being made over decommissioning; he was followed by three other UUP ministers. However, by this time a combination of events on the international scene had radically altered the situation. The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the apparent links between the IRA and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC: a Marxist organisation that the US believed to be involved in the international drugs trade), hardened attitudes in the US towards terrorism, and pressure on the republican movement to decommission intensified. With republicans sensing that a momentous decision was vital in order for them to continue to play a part in the peace process, the IRA finally announced in October that it would begin to decommission its terrorist weapons. Shortly after this, the body established to oversee decommissioning confirmed that a significant number of weapons had been put beyond use. The move was greeted positively by Trimble, and he quickly renominated himself as first minister; those ministers that had resigned from the assembly soon returned. The UK government also welcomed the decommissioning move, and immediately began to reduce the presence of the army in the province.

In early November David Trimble was re-elected as first minister of the assembly. However, in the first round of voting two UUP members had refused to support Trimble, and his election in the second round only came courtesy of support from the centre Alliance Party, which had temporarily designated three of its five members as unionists.