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History > UK > Northern Ireland
Roy Mason 1924-2015
Roy Mason outside No 10 in 1974.
Photograph: Roger Jackson/Getty Images
Lord Mason of Barnsley obituary G Monday 20 April 2015 16.15 BST Last modified on Friday 6 May 2016 00.54 BST http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/20/lord-mason-of-barnsley
Roy Mason, Baron Mason of Barnsley 1924-2015
Labour MP and minister determined to take on the IRA by force during his time as Northern Ireland secretary in the 1970s
The Labour politician Roy Mason (...) was a small and dapper but pugnacious man, proud of his mining heritage, whose characteristic pout of the lips before delivering a bon mot could set most latterday National Union of Mineworkers gatherings and any Irish nationalists quivering with rage.
Mason’s effect on Ulster unionists was quite different.
His aggressive style and the pro-security services policies he pursued as secretary of state for Northern Ireland from 1976 to 1979 were welcomed by unionists as a protection against creeping integration into the whole of Ireland.
He was, the unionist Lord (John) Laird said: “Like a hard wee rubber ball, he kept bouncing.”
And he seemed to be playing ball for unionists, although not reliably enough for them to support him when the chance of a Conservative government beckoned.
Laird remembered one unionist MP summing Mason up by saying: “He isn’t an Englishman. He’s a Yorkshireman.”
Lord Mason of Barnsley, as he became in 1987, would have loved the epitaph.
When James Callaghan took office as Labour prime minister in April 1976, following the unexpected resignation of Harold Wilson, he appointed Mason, who had been defence secretary since 1974, as the fourth Northern Ireland secretary.
The first to hold the post, William Whitelaw, had been appointed in 1972 by the Tory prime minister Edward Heath when he imposed direct rule from Westminster.
In 1974, Whitelaw and Heath had established the Sunningdale Executive, the first experiment in power-sharing, between Protestants in the Ulster Unionist party led by Brian Faulkner, and Catholics in the Social Democratic and Labour party led by Gerry Fitt.
Wilson became prime minister as the loyalist workers’ strike led by the Rev Ian Paisley was threatening Sunningdale.
It was the refusal of Wilson, on the advice of Mason as defence secretary, to use the army against the strikers that destroyed Sunningdale.
(...)
Essentially, Mason concentrated on security, aiming to return control of policing from the army to the Royal Ulster Constabulary and break the Provisional IRA by force.
Mason, as defence secretary, had introduced the SAS into Armagh and allowed its increased use against IRA units.
He also pursued a hardline policy of removing political status from prisoners convicted of terrorist crimes.
That led to the dirty protests inside the H-Blocks in the Maze prison.
Mason earned a reputation summed up by a Provisional IRA slogan during the Queen’s 1977 Jubilee visit to Northern Ireland: “Stonemason will not break us.”
By the time he left office, many felt that Mason had come close to breaking the IRA.
However, a decade later it was clear that his policies had, instead, weakened the constitutional Catholics in the SDLP.
The dirty protest was the curtain-raiser for the IRA hunger strike under the Thatcher government, which seriously undermined the SDLP, partly because of the sympathy for IRA political violence rather than SDLP constitutional tactics that Mason’s policies helped create among Catholics. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/20/lord-mason-of-barnsley
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/20/
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