A ‘Supreme and Permanent Symbol of Executive Authority’: The Crown and the Governorship of Northern Ireland in an Age of ‘Troubles’

Abstract

Less than 50 years after the imposition of direct rule from Westminster, it is remarkable how few commentators in Great Britain recall the constitutional distinctiveness of Northern Ireland, despite current concerns regarding impediments presented by the Irish border in Brexit negotiations. From 1922 until 1973, the Province possessed its own Governor, at the head of an elaborate miniature of Westminster. He summoned and prorogued Parliament, read the King’s, or Queen’s, Speech from the Throne of the Senate, setting out the legislative programme for the forthcoming term before assembled Senators and members of the House of Commons, summoned by a Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod. Governors, despite the office’s theoretical powers, acted like a dominion Governor-General, on the advice of the Northern Ireland Cabinet. This was especially evident in the choice of Northern Ireland’s Prime Ministers, which typically occurred after the Governor had taken ‘soundings’ among the hierarchy of the ruling Unionist Party. At no point was draconian emergency legislation, unique within the United Kingdom in peacetime, referred by the Governor, or reserved to Whitehall. Westminster seemed only concerned with maintaining financial control, ruling by convention that law and order and the internal affairs of the Province were reserved to Stormont. The outbreak of violence in the late-1960s largely coincided with the official term of the most energetic of Northern Ireland Governors, Lord Grey of Naunton, a New Zealander who had served previously in Nigeria and as Governor of British Guiana at a time of emergency. As direct rule became likely and with fears of an Ulster loyalist UDI, British ministers came to rely on him as a crucial symbol of legitimacy and authority. The appointment of a politically less constrained ‘UK Representative’ as a British diplomatic agent to the Stormont administration, however, underlined the limitations of the governorship, even in the hands as one as capable and as dutiful as Lord Grey. The abolition of the office in 1973 divided unionist opinion, with many seeing the office as a badge of Ulster autonomy and distinctiveness, while some saw it as an ‘archaic and colonial’ impediment to Northern Ireland’s full integration in the United Kingdom. The appointment of Secretaries of State under direct rule retained elements of Ulster’s past constitutional exceptionalism, combining the roles of Governor and Prime Minister, thus underlining the Province’s continuing position as a ‘place apart’ within the United Kingdom.

Nicholas Mansergh, The Government of Northern Ireland: A Study in Devolution (London: 1936), p. 169.