Stormont's Ill-timed Jubilee: The Ulster '71 Exhibition

David Cannadine has written that "politics and ceremonial are not separate subjects, the one serious, the other superficial. Ritual is not the mask of force, but is itself a type of power."¹ The official planning to celebrate the June, 1971, jubilee of the Stormont parliament began in 1968, and from the first, the organization of what became known as Ulster '71 offers a case study of Cannadine's observations concerning the links between power and ceremony. During the same period that Ulster '71 was organized, executed, and evaluated, Northern Ireland suffered serious civil unrest and saw three changes of prime minister. The jubilee of the Northern Ireland parliament—and, in particular, the government's attempts to organize a royal visit to correspond with its commemoration—revealed much about the Unionist government. In its failure to commemorate the jubilee as intended; in its difficulties uniting disparate forces to organize the events; and, indeed, in its failure to dictate the form the jubilee would take, the Northern Ireland government in effect indicated that it was no longer in control of the state.

The fact that it still attempted to stage the commemoration in the face of opposition indicates the importance of the ritual to the Unionist government. Ultimately, its failure to command the ritual revealed the collapse of the government's power as much as did the civil disorder that escalated and intensified steadily over the same period.

Terence O'Neill, Northern Ireland's prime minister, announced the government's plans for the jubilee in December, 1968:

In that year Northern Ireland will celebrate its 50th anniversary—50 years of challenge and difficulty and occasional disappointment, but also 50 years of splendid achievement, of growing prosperity, of expanding opportunity. . . . But I hope we will see it not just as a commemoration but as a rededication to seek solutions for any problems we still face. I should like to see 1971 becoming Ulster's Year just as certainly as 1967 was Canada's Year, and the Cabinet has been considering, in addition to the other events which will mark the occasion, the idea of some permanent memorial. Our strong feeling is that the emphasis should be placed on the family and on youth, and accordingly we are proposing to discuss with interested bodies the idea of erecting in Belfast a leisure centre for Northern Ireland. . . . Can we not all be equally proud of what is good in Northern Ireland, equally determined to set right anything that may be wrong, equally confident that this Province and its people have much to achieve in the years ahead.²

These sentiments were very much in keeping with O'Neill's attempts at improving community relations. However, while he may have thought that the jubilee of the state might provide an opportunity for such bridge-building, others rejected this attempt at inclusiveness. The Unionist chief whip Roy Bradford pointed out that this was no ecumenical commemoration. Partition had been a Unionist victory, and "Care must be taken not to frame a programme so bland and all-embracing that it appeared to turn its back on these associations."³ Early suggestions for commemorating the jubilee highlighted the government's attempts at modernization, and suggested using the new transport museum at Cultra, County Down, as a focal point, with a specific focus on the history of transport and the future of motorways. Fred Carbett, press officer at Stormont, suggested the Prince of Wales as the principal royal visitor because

He would also embody the modern outlook which we are keen to put over, and an incidental point of interest is that it was his predecessor as Prince of Wales who officially opened our Houses of Parliament at Stormont in 1932.⁴

A government committee in charge of organizing jubilee celebrations was established in July, 1969.⁵ Cabinet discussions about their format concluded that—given the state's financial problems and what was euphemistically termed "the general state of the country"—the initial suggestion that the celebrations be linked to a proposed leisure center at Maysfield in Belfast should be dropped. Both the prime minister...