Against Ulster Nationalism: A Review of Northern Ireland Politics in the Aftermath of the 1974 UWC General Strike, with Insights into the Development ... to Britain, in Reply to Tom Nairn and Others Book

"Against Ulster Nationalism" is a combination of historical explanation and political argument. It was first published 1975 with the object of thwarting the efforts of a group of British Foreign Office civil servants attached to the Northern Ireland Office to create an "Ulster Nationalist" movement among the Loyalist paramilitaries. The formal structure of the work is a line by line analysis of an article advocating Ulster Nationalism, published by Tom Nairn, a Marxist intellectual associated with the "New Left Review". Within this formal structure, a wealth of historical information about the development of both the Catholic and Ulster Protestant communities is deployed. But, though Nairn is the formal object of the argument, the real object is Merlyn Rees. Rees was then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In the immediate aftermath of the Ulster Workers' Council Strike of 1974, he purported to discover that the success of the Strike resulted from a new and powerful element in the political life of Northern Ireland - Ulster Nationalism. When no sign of an Ulster Nationalist movement manifested itself during the months following the Strike, the Secretary of State gave his civil servants the task of bringing it into being. "Against Ulster Nationalism" counterposed the sheer power of reason against the immense powers of patronage and persuasion commanded by the Northern Ireland Office. Its reasoning had considerable influence on the ground in Ulster among people of both communities, and the state-sponsored Ulster Nationalist movement never got off the Civil Service drawing board. Having been out of print as a pamphlet for more than a decade, it is now reissued in book form, both as a historical document in the double sense of including much historical material and of having played some part in history, and as a political argument which is still relevant because the long political vacuum in Northern Ireland has recently given rise to the spontaneous growth of some popularly based Ulster Nationalist sentiment.Read More