The Ulster Unionist Party has been much criticised for the way in which it ran Northern Ireland under the devolved Stormont Parliament from 1921 to 1972. Too little attention has been given to the reformers in its ranks who sought to heal the divisions between the two communities and prevent the breakdown of law and order. No one was more fully committed to improving the Province’s first system of devolved government than Sir Robin Chichester-Clark, MP for Londonderry at Westminster from 1955 to 1974 ,who died on 5 August at the age of 88. Alistair Lexden paid tribute to him in the obituary section of The Times on August 26.
Robin Chichester-Clark was a central figure in the determined, but doomed, efforts to set Ulster Unionism on a new, liberal course in the late 1960s. He was a principal confidant of Terence O’Neill, the Ulster prime minister and leader of the reform movement, who Chichester-Clark admired for his “courage, idealism and foresight”, as he put it in his important unpublished reminiscences which have been deposited with his political papers in the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.
The two men worked together on an ambitious reform programme from which sprang the full extension of civil rights throughout the Province. They talked endlessly on the telephone, O’Neill even seeking advice on what he should do about an Ulster cabinet colleague who “had been spotted more than once accosting prostitutes in Curzon Street on his visits to London”.
It was Chichester-Clark’s friend, Ted Heath, who finally ruined the new Unionism through the premature introduction of power-sharing in 1973. Though right in principle, Chichester-Clark believed that “it was applied too fast and without enough preparation”. This wonderfully accomplished moderate Unionist was never more conscious of the ruin of his hopes than when Heath, having retired, said to him: “Fundamentally you were always in favour of a united Ireland weren’t you?”