It was often said that after Douglas-Home there were no OE Prime
Ministers until 2010. But this overlooks two PMs of Northern Ireland.
The top politician in Northern Ireland was titled ‘Prime Minister’ from
1922 to 1972.

Terence O’Neill was handsome, lissome, debonair, always immaculate
and every inch a Guards officer. He was also shallow, vain,
unintellectual, conformist and ultimately unsuccessful.

O’Neill was born at London in 1914. The house that he was born in still stands in Kensington. He was well got as both sides of his
family were upper class with political connections. He was baptized into
Anglicanism. His father was an Irish Conservative MP and also an OE.
Terence’s mother was Anglo-Welsh. Terence was the youngest child in
the family. Just weeks later Terence’s father was killed in action: the
first MP killed in the war. Terence’s middle name was Marne because
his father had been serving at that battle when Terence was born.
Terence spent regular holidays at the family seat in Tyrone. He saw no
contradiction between being British and Irish. It was only much later
that he described himself as Northern Irish or Ulster. The O’Neill’s had
moved from England to Ireland in the 17 th century. Their surname was
originally Chichester but they had assumed the surname of the local
Gaelic chieftain.

In 1922 the IRA turned up at the O’Neill’s house in the middle of the
night and ordered everyone out. The IRA burnt it down. Terence’s
mother told him not to harbor any rancour towards Catholics because
of this. This was a time of internecine sectarian conflict.
Terence went to prep school in Winchester. He was a sound sportsman
but not scholarly. Then he went on to Eton where his career was

undistinguished. Like half of all Etonians in the 1930s he did not go to
university. Instead Terence worked in the City and briefly in Australia.
When the Second World War erupted O’Neill volunteered. He was
commissioned into the Irish Guards. He served with the army in France
and both his elder brothers were killed in the war. During the war he
met and married an Englishwoman. They connubial bliss was blessed
with a brace of children. O’Neill’s military career was as mediocre as
the rest of his life. In 1946 he was demobilized.
Back on civvy street, Terence got into politics. He had contacts par
excellence in the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). The UUP was then an
adjunct of the Conservative Party. It was de rigueur for an aspiring UUP
candidate to join the Orange Order. This Terence did. The UUP were
traditionalists in every way and their working class voters were very
deferential. It was an epoch when in right wing circles the patrician
bray commanded instant authority.
In the decades after the war Terence was known as Captain O’Neill:
that being his highest army rank. It was uncommon to use a military
rank in civilian life unless one had risen to major at least.
Terence was soon elected to the Parliament of Northern Ireland
(Stormont) for an Antrim seat of Bannside. It abutted his late father’s
constituency. Terence was a whip. Had either of his more gifted
brothers survived one of them might have gone into politics instead.
Ere long the PM Lord Brookeborough (a Wykehamist) promoted
Terence to be Home Minister and later Finance Minister.
In 1963 Viscount Brookeborough stood down as PM. O’Neill was
shoehorned into office. The UUP was very dominant and had seen off a
spirited challenge by Northern Ireland Labour.

Pork belly politics was prominent in Northern Ireland. In a region with
high unemployment the state had many jobs in its gift. The UUP tended
to give them to Protestants who were more likely to vote UUP than
Catholics were.
O’Neill embarked on a sunshine policy towards the Republic of Ireland.
He invited his southern analogue to Belfast. Sean Lemass was a former
IRA gunman but there was good chemistry between the two premiers.
The Labour Government at Westminster pressed Stormont to reform.
Harold Wilson reminded O’Neill that a third of Northern Ireland’s
budget came from Whitehall and would be docked if Stormont did not
make life more amenable for Catholics.
O’Neill believed that he could convince a significant number of
Catholics to vote UUP. Some of his parliamentary colleagues thought he
was in cloud cuckoo land because he had not actually grown up in the
province. He visited a Catholic school which no PM had done before.
Ulster at a crossroads is O’Neill’s most celebrated allocution. His vision
of harmonious communal relations has since been realized.
Some of O’Neill’s rhetoric was far-fetched. He wanted Northern Ireland
to be ‘’the most modern part of Britain.’’ He reflected on the relative
pauperism of the Catholic community. However, it did not occur to him
that this was partially consequent on UUP policies.
Hardliners were alarmed by O’Neill’s reformism. A terrorist group called
the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was founded in 1966. It murdered
innocent Catholics. It did not have lineage to the UVF of the 1913
foundation.
Civil rights demonstrators clashed with the RUC (i.e. police). Some
loyalists attacked civil rights protestors. Northern Ireland had been very
peaceful but the rising tide of violence was more than the RUC could

handle. Stalwarts of the UUP attribute this to O’Neill’s
wrongheadedness and to the IRA. They minimised the menace of
loyalism terrorism.
O’Neill was willing to reform the RUC. The B Specials were part-time
RUC officers and they had lost the trust of the Catholic population.
O’Neill was willing to have council houses allocated on the basis of
need and not political affiliation. He was prepared to have constituency
boundaries redrawn to remove any advantage for his party. Some of his
colleagues considered his liberalism to be dangerously naïve.
Ian Paisley founded the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Reverend
Paisley also ran his own fundamentalist church. The 6’5’’ firebrand
denounced O’Neill as a Lundy. Paisley tapped into some working class
resentment against a toff who seemed more English than Ulster. Paisley
coined a slogan ‘’O’Neill must go.’’
The pace of reforms was too slow to satiate nationalist but too rapid to
mollify loyalists. As Abbe Sieyes said the most perilous moment is when
a previously hermetic system seeks to reform itself.
The UVF’s bombing in 1969 was misattributed to the IRA. Half of
O’Neill’s cabinet was against him. Terence bowed to the inevitable and
tendered his resignation. He wrote that he was ‘’blown from office.’’ He
was succeeded by his distant cousin and fellow OE Sir James
Chichester-Clark.
In 1970 Terence suffered the ultimate ignominy. He lost his seat to
Paisley. The DUP has retained it ever since.
Terence retired to Hampshire. He was ennobled as Lord O’Neill of the
Maine. Maine being the river by his old seat.
Terence wrote a very episodic and jejune autobiography. He lived in
obscurity and was unwelcome in unionist circles. They scorned him as

being responsible for the Trouble owing to what they perceived as his
invertebracy.
Notwithstanding his inability to make his plans come to fruition, there
is a posthumous achievement for Terence. Northern Ireland is a much
more inclusive society partly as a result of the reformist path that he
set out for the province. The attitudinal obduracy in the 1960s made
the necessary reforms almost impossible. O’Neill lacked the nous and
the hinterland to make it happen.