Manchester University Press No Solution: The Labour Government and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1974–79

Under the Labour government of 1974 to 1979, the approach of the British state to the Northern Ireland conflict underwent a significant change. Key ministers and civil servants began to accept that a constitutional solution was unachievable in the short term and that violence would continue for many years. With No solution, S. C. Aveyard sheds new light on this difficult period. Using a wide range of archival correspondence and diaries, he reconstructs private discussions and policy formulation under Labour. He considers the collapse of power-sharing in May 1974, the secret dialogue with the Provisional IRA during the 1975 ceasefire and the acquiescence of Labour ministers in continuing indefinite direct rule from Westminster. A major shift in security policy, frequently misunderstood as ‘Ulsterisation’, is examined alongside republican responses and the Provisional IRA’s adoption of a ‘long war’ strategy. Attention is also given to the sometimes desperate efforts of the British government to mitigate conflict through economic policy. In so doing, Aveyard sheds light on the challenges faced by British ministers, civil servants, soldiers and policemen and the reasons why the conflict lasted so long. Other accounts have tended to assume that the British state, enjoying more resources than other parties to the conflict, had the capacity to impose a solution but lacked the insight to do so. Aveyard reveals that such resources could not overcome political conditions in Northern Ireland during these key years and that those who have argued the Good Friday Agreement could have been achieved twenty years earlier have failed to appreciate the basic context of the 1970s.