Echo of PM’s sectarian head count On this day. November 3, 1945
Posted By: November 04, 2014
Irish News (Belfast). Monday, November 3, 2014 A statement made some years ago by Mr. J.M. Andrews [former prime minister of
Northern Ireland] while minister of labor that out of the 33 porters employed at Stormont only one was a Catholic, and that he was only temporary, was recalled at Stormont yesterday.
During a debate on a supplementary estimate for the minister of commerce, Mr. J. W. Nixon (Independent Unionist, Woodvale) said that Mr. Andrews, in a speech on a Twelfth of July platform at Downpatrick, had said that of the 33 porters employed at Stormont only one was a Roman Catholic, and he was only temporary.
(In this bitter exchange the maverick Independent Unionist MP, John W Nixon—a former district inspector in the RIC with a notorious sectarian reputation in the 1920s “Troubles—sought to embarrass the former prime minister, John M.
Andrews. This was par for the course for Nixon who never forgave the Unionist
leadership for his dismissal from the police in 1924.
Andrews ( 1871-‐1956) , a member of a leading north Down linen family, was minister of labor in the early years of the state. A founder of the Ulster Unionist Labor Association (1918) , set up to prevent Protestant working men defecting to socialism, he delivered an infamous speech at a July 12 demonstration in 1933 refuting allegations that a majority of porters at Stormont were Catholic. (As the historian Joe Lee notes, such a computation did not require a command of higher mathematics.)
As prime minister in the early war years Andrews was obsessed by his hostility in
both the nationalist minority and the south. His failure to vamp up the war effort
led to his overthrow in 1943.
Edited by Eamon Phoenix |
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