Paul Rose and the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster

Paul Rose, MP for Manchester Blackley, helped to set up the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster in 1965. The campaign attempted to raise the question of discrimination and civil rights abuses in northern Ireland, largely unsuccessfully.

Paul Rose was born in 1935 in Manchester and educated at Bury Grammar School and the University of Manchester. He was chair of the Manchester Federation of Young Socialists. He trained as a lawyer and in 1958 was called to the bar. Rose had no personal Irish connections, but apparently became interested in 1962 after addressing a meeting in Manchester on civil liberties and being been told about the situation in Northern Ireland. In the general election of October 1964 he was elected to the House of Commons for Blackley, Manchester. The Labour Party defeated the Tory party after 13 years with a majority of just 4 seats.

The Campaign for Democracy in Ulster was established in early 1965 at a meeting in a public house in Streatham by a group of Irish trade unionists and Labour Party members. The Vice-President was Paddy Byrne, who had been active thirty years before in Ireland in the Republican Congress. The first secretary of the organisation was Bill O’Shaughnessy. When O’Shaughnessy moved to Manchester in the late 1960s Byrne took over the post. The CDU’s aims were to achieve a reform of election laws in Northern Ireland; to secure a Royal Commission into running of the Stormont government and investigate allegations of discrimination; and to have the Race Relations Bill amended to include religion and then extended to Northern Ireland.

The CDU was publicly launched in June 1965 at a meeting in the House of Commons at which Patricia McCluskey was one of the guest speakers. They attracted interest from a number of MPs. Paul Rose agreed to become President of the CDU. As an organisation the CDU was in practice confined to London with only Manchester forming a branch for a while. In the Commons it attracted support from 60 to 80 MPs, principally Labour with a few Liberals

It soon became obvious that the Wilson government intended to follow exactly the line taken by its predecessors for nearly fifty years and claim that it was unable to interfere in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland. CDU members made a number of attempts to raise issues in the Commons but were rebuffed each time. Eventually Harold Wilson himself stated in May 1966 that he was “not aware of any issue on which an inquiry is needed”. Attempts to amend the Race Relations bill to include religious discrimination failed, as did an attempt to have the remit of the Ombudsman extended to Northern Ireland. Some new impetus was given to the CDU in parliament by the election of Gerry Fitt as Republican Labour for West Belfast in March 1966 , who then worked closely with the campaign in their efforts to get Wilson to act on Northern Ireland.

Events in the summer of 1966 momentarily thrust the six counties into the headlines and provoked some British newspapers into taking a hard look at what was happening there. On 7th May an elderly Protestant woman, Mrs Gould, was killed in a petrol bomb attack on a Catholic pub next door to her home. Three weeks later a Catholic man named John Scullion was shot in Clonard Street off the Falls Road and later died of his wounds (the intended victim had been well known Republican Leo Martin). On 26th June Loyalist gunmen shot three Catholic barman from the International Hotel as they left a public house in Malvern Street, killing a young man named Peter Ward. The three killings had been carried out by a group formed by Gusty Spence (a former soldier and shipyard worker) which had taken the historic name of the Ulster Volunteer Force. Nearly thirty years later on 13th October 1994 Spence announced the Loyalist ceasefire in response to the IRA ceasefire announced several months earlier.

On 3rd July, to coincide with a royal visit to Northern Ireland, the Sunday Times published a hard-hitting article compiled by its Insight team of investigative journalists, entitled John Bull’s Political Slum. “When the flags and bunting are hauled down after the Royal visit,” it began, “Mr Wilson’s government will still be confronted with a sharp alternative; whether to use reserve powers to bring elementary social justice to Ulster or simply allow Britain’s most isolated province to work out its own bizarre destiny. During the 45 years since partition the latter has often been negligently adopted with what looks like disastrous results.” The article went on to document political gerrymandering and high levels of Catholic unemployment and emigration and noted that the new Ulster town of Craigavon was going to be built in a Protestant area between Portadown and Lurgan, while the new University was going to the Protestant town of Coleraine and not Derry, the second city and natural choice.

In October Spence and another two other man were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders. Press interest in Northern Ireland, momentarily aroused, swiftly waned.

As papers released from Stormont under the thirty years rule now reveal that behind the scenes Wilson and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins were putting some pressure on Terence O’Neill to introduce one person one vote and to abolish the business vote. At a meeting at Downing Street in January 1967 with O’Neill, Craig and Faulkner, Wilson referred to the increasing unwillingness of Labour backbenchers to accept the convention that matters transferred to Stormont could not be raised or discussed in the House of Commons, while Roy Jenkins emphasised that gerrymandering in places like Derry and the local government vote would soon come under fire from Labour MPs. They also referred to the deputations on Northern Ireland that Jenkins had received. It seems that as a result of the CDU campaign the Labour government was becoming exercised about matters in the Six Counties but was not prepared to publicly pressurise the Unionists to reform.

By June 1968 the central committee of the CDU were forced to conclude that the campaign had run out of steam. Only four members of the central committee attended meetings regularly and only three constituency Labour parties remained affiliated. They had not succeeded in getting a resolution on Northern Ireland to the party conference whilst a public meeting in Kilburn in April had only attracted 20 people, despite a large amount of flyposting. Paddy Byrne presented a bleak assessment of how things stood. “In short no mass movement has developed and there is no indication that one will”, for in his view the British left were “far too concerned to save socialism from extinction than to bother about Ulster, about which the mass of British people know little, care less.

Paul Rose, who acted as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Castle between 1966 and 1968, later claimed that after his visit to the six counties in 1967, she asked why a young man like him was concerned about Northern Ireland, “’What about Vietnam? What about Rhodesia?’ I just looked at her with incomprehension and said ‘You’ll see when they start shooting one another’. She was totally oblivious to this. I think their priorities were focused on other things to the extent that they were totally blinded as to what was going on in their own backyard”. Perhaps it was not so surprising that two years later, on 14th August 1969, Barbara Castle wrote in her diary that she “was astonished to learn from the news that British troops have moved into Derry”.

Speaking in a debate on Northern Ireland in the House of commons on 22 April 1969 (just before Bernadette Devlin made her maiden speech) Paul Rose said:

“The events in Northern Ireland this weekend are a classic illustration of unheeded warnings from my hon. Friends on this side of the House. An almost uncontrollable situation has developed because too little has been done too late.
“In the debate on Northern Ireland on 22nd February, 1965, before this situation had developed, I then advocated the setting up of a Royal Commission to investigate the grievances in Northern Ireland.
“Alas, the time for Royal Commissions is past. And the fault lies largely with hon. Gentlemen opposite from Northern Ireland, who on that occasion flatly refused to acknowledge that there was any cause for concern or anxiety at all about civil rights and discrimination in Northern Ireland. They were rightly concerned with the potato subsidy. The hon. and gallant Member for Down, South (Captain Orr) informed the House that 36% of the nation’s pigs come from Northern Ireland. But not a word about discrimination or civil rights. We also faced the convention of non-interference, a convention which in that debate prompted my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Mr Delargy) to ask you, Mr. Speaker, what, apart from Short Brothers and Harland and Wolff, we could mention in a debate on Northern Ireland.
That convention is dead. It was killed when my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, West (Mr Fitt) was seen by millions of television viewers, his head streaming with blood after a vicious batoning while surrounded by a group of members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.”

In 1970 Rose wrote a book called The Manchester Martyrs: a Fenian Tragedy, which was published by Lawrence & Wishart. He acknowledged the help given to him by Tom Redmond and Jimmy McGill (both members of the Connolly Association in Manchester). It was well written and readable account of the episode aimed at a general audience. Interestingly there was no mention of his involvement in Irish affairs in the introduction.

Rose left the Commons in 1979 and returned to the law, eventually becoming a Coroner and Deputy Circuit Judge.

Article by Michael Herbert