Ringside Seats: An Insider's View of the Crisis in Northern Ireland (review)

There are now enough memoirs from Northern Ireland civil servants to amount almost to a literary industry. Robert Ramsay follows Maurice Hayes, Ken Bloomfield, Patrick Shea, and John A. Oliver in providing an eyewitness account of tumultuous times attempting to govern that small, strife-ridden statelet. He holds the additional distinction of having moved from a high-flying career in Northern Ireland to an equally or even more distinguished one among the European institutions in Brussels. Self-identified as a low church Unionist, Ramsay's efforts to speak plainly sometimes reveal, inadvertently or not, some sectarian slippage that is not at all attractive.

For example, he relates some of the political aftermath of the death, in April 1977, of Cardinal William Conway, archbishop of Armagh and the Catholic primate. The four months prior to the appointment of his successor, Tomás Ó Fiaich, were a time of tension, during which the United Unionist Action Council led an abortive general strike and elections were held in Northern Ireland and the Republic. It was thus arguably sensible for the Vatican to take political soundings before deciding on the new primate. Accordingly, the well-regarded apostolic delegate to London, Archbishop Bruno Heim, requested a meeting with the Northern Ireland Office, then responsible for London's direct rule of the province. In Ramsay's account, he received Heimand Cardinal Basil Hume, the very popular primate of England and Wales, in the company of the department's senior politician, Roy Mason, and senior civil servant Sir Brian Cubbon. The British government had instrumental—and not unrespectable—reasons for not appearing to influence the appointment. There was no reason why the three men could not have said as much. Instead, they allowed the two clerics to flounder around, getting no answers: when Cubbon was asked directly about his views on Armagh, he replied facetiously "I should have thought that this was one for the Holy Spirit." Ramsay clearly loves this story, and relates with relish the mandarin Cubbon's disdain for the two men and the pleasure he took in baiting them. "Weren't they just awful?" Cubbon is reported as saying, comparing them to "a couple of country bumpkins in a good restaurant, not knowing how to call the waiter." A few lines later, Ramsay jibes at Ó Fiaich as "aka 'Wee Tommy Fee' on the Shankill Road." Neutral readers might think this is a shabby way to treat decent men trying to do the right thing during challenging times, and that such schoolboy japes and attitudes are to be disdained; Ramsay tells the story as if they were all having a great laugh.

Ringside Seats does not include a lot of this type of thing, but there is enough to reveal an at-times-ugly face behind the jocular mask. At one level, such lapses help to put into context Ramsay's cooler descriptions and analyses of major events. One of the most tumultuous of these is the suspension of the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont in March 1972 and the imposition of direct rule from London. Ramsay, as principal private secretary to the last prime minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner, was a close witness of the dramatic events leading up to this moment. Many others have described these: one of the few senior Catholic civil servants, Patrick Shea, attested to the "bitter disappointment" among Unionists at the "cruel betrayal" of their cherished political institutions by a British government, while also pointing out that the huge cross-party vote for direct rule in the British parliament was "clearly an expression of no-confidence in the parliamentary structure established under the [Government of Ireland] Act of 1920."

Ramsay strives for this kind of balance, but sometimes the mask slips. His account of the introduction of direct rule does not materially differ factually from that of the cabinet secretary, Ken Bloomfield, but it is more visceral...