Brian Faulkner

Arthur Brian Deane Faulkner, Baron Faulkner of Downpatrick (18 February 1922 - 3 March 1977) was the last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland before the Parliament of Northern Ireland was prorogued by the British government in March 1972.

Faulkner was born in Helen's Bay, County Down on 18 February 1922, the eldest of two sons of James and Lilian Faulkner. Educated initially in Northern Ireland, he was sent to the Anglican St. Columba's College at Rathfarnham in County Dublin at the age of fourteen, where his best friend was Michael Yeats, son of W.B. Yeats.

Faulkner entered Queen's University in Belfast in 1939 to study law, but, with the event of war, he quit his studies to work full time in the family shirt-making business.

Faulkner became involved in Ulster Unionist politics, the first of his family to do so and was elected to Stormont as Ulster Unionist MP for the constituency of East Down in 1949. His vociferous traditional Unionist approach to politics ensured him a prominent backbench position.

He married Lucy Forsythe in 1951. They met through their common interest in hunting. She was equally at home in a political partnership having had a career in journalism and was secretary to the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Sir Basil Brooke (later Viscount Brookeborough) when they met. Together they had three children - a daughter and two sons.

In 1956 Faulkner was offered and accepted the job of Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Finance, or Government Chief Whip.

In 1959 he became Minister of Home Affairs and his safe handling of security for most of the IRA campaign of 1956-62 bolstered his reputation in the eyes of the right wing of Ulster Unionism.

When Terence O'Neill became Prime Minister in 1963 he offered Faulkner, his chief rival for the job, the post of Minister of Commerce. Faulkner accepted and, until his acrimonious resignation in 1969, revelled and was extremely successful (from his point of view, but was congratulated by others, including the Nationalist opposition for his energetic and sustained approach) in this high profile role.

His resignation over the technicalities of how and when to bring in the local government reforms which the British Labour Government was pushing for was probably the final nail in the political coffin of Terence O'Neill, who resigned in the aftermath of his failure to achieve a good enough result in the 1969 Stormont election.

In the ensuing leadership contest, Faulkner was again denied the prize when O'Neill gave his casting vote to his cousin, James Chichester-Clark.

Faulkner came back into government as Minister of Development under Chichester-Clark and surprisingly began the implementation of the political reforms that were the main cause of his resignation from O'Neill's Cabinet.

Chichester-Clark himself resigned in 1971; the political and security situation and the more intensive British interest proved too much for this mild-mannered man.

Faulkner finally achieved what history has deemed was his political goal in March 1972 when he was elected leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and Prime Minister. His year in this office was a disaster both for himself and for the Ulster Unionist Party's 50 year hold on the Government of Northern Ireland.

In his initial innovative approach to government, he gave a non-unionist, David Bleakley, a former Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) MP, a position in his Cabinet as Minister of Community Relations. In June of 1971, he proposed three new powerful committees at Stormont which would give the Opposition salaried chairmanships of two of them.

However, this initiative (radical at the time) was overtaken by events. A shooting by the British Army of two Nationalist youths in Derry caused the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the main Opposition, to boycott the Stormont Parliament. The political climate deteriorated further when in answer to a worsening security situation Faulkner introduced internment on 9 August 1971. This alone was a disaster; instead of lessening the violence, it caused the situation to worsen.

Faulkner staggered on through the rest of 1971, insisting that security was the paramount issue. In January 1972, an incident occurred during an anti-internment march in Derry, during which the British Army shot and killed thirteen civilians. What history has come to know as Bloody Sunday was, in essence, the finish of Faulkner's Government. In March 1972, Faulkner refused to maintain a government without security powers which the British decided to take back. So the British Government dissolved the Stormont parliament and imposed direct rule.

In the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Northern Ireland parliament, he initially joined with the militant Ulster Vanguard movement to demonstrate against the action of the British Government.

However in 1973, as a result of assembly elections that split the Ulster Unionist Party, he formed a power-sharing Executive with the SDLP and the middle-of-the-road Alliance Party, a political alliance cemented at the Sunningdale Conference that year. However the prominence in the Sunningdale Agreement of the cross-border Council of Ireland only showed that Faulkner had strayed just too far ahead of his party. A section of the party left to form the Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party which contested the elections in opposition to the Ulster Unionists.

In 1974 Faulkner lost the leadership of the Ulster Unionists to anti-Sunningdale elements led by Harry West. He subsequently resigned from the Ulster Unionist Party and formed his own Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI).

The power-sharing Executive which he led lasted only six months and was brought down by a loyalist Ulster Workers Strike in May 1974. Loyalist paramilitary organisations were prominent in this strike, which probably would not have succeeded without them. However, it is generally accepted that the strike had the tacit support of the majority of Unionists in Northern Ireland.

Faulkner's party fared badly in the Convention elections of 1975 winning only 5 out of the 78 seats contested.

In 1976 Faulkner announced that he was quitting active politics and, in 1977, he became a Life Peer taking the title Baron Faulkner of Downpatrick.

An avid horseman, he was killed in a riding accident on 3 March 1977

Preceded by: James Chichester-Clark

Prime Ministers of Northern Ireland

Followed by: position abolished

Readings

• Brian Faulkner, 'Memoirs of a Statesman',Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1978 (An autobiography published posthumously)
• David Bleakley, 'Faulkner', Mowbrays, London, 1974
• Andrew Boyd, 'Brian Faulkner and the Crisis of Ulster Unionism', Anvil Books, Tralee, Ireland, 1972.