title: Jantje Friese

text: With Odar, she wrote the screenplay for "Who Am I - No System Is Safe" (2014), which was directed by Odar. Her screenplay was nominated for Best Screenplay at the German Film Award 2015.


title: Jantje Friese

text: Through this film, Netflix became aware of Friese and Odar and offered both to make a series based on the film. Instead, Friese and Odar jointly developed the first German Netflix series, "Dark", which premiered 1 December 2017. Friese was honored with a Grimme-Preis, Germany's most prestigious television award, in 2018 for her writing on "Dark" season 1"." In 21 June 2019, "Dark" season 2 was released and Dark was renewed for a third season. which released on 27 June 2020.


title: Jantje Friese

text: Prior to the release of "Dark" season 3, Friese and Odar announced their next series, "1899". The first two episodes premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022. The full season released on 17 November 2022 on Netflix.


title: Meretz

text: Meretz (, ) is a left-wing political party in Israel. The party was formed in 1992 by the merger of Ratz, Mapam and Shinui, and was at its peak between 1992 and 1996 when it had 12 seats. It currently has no seats in the Knesset, following its failure to pass the electoral threshold in the 2022 elections.


title: Meretz

text: Meretz is a social-democratic and secular party emphasising a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, social justice, human rights (especially for religious, ethnic and sexual minorities), religious freedom and environmentalism. The party is a member of the Progressive Alliance and Socialist International, and is an observer member of the Party of European Socialists.


title: Meretz

text: Meretz was formed prior to the 1992 Israeli legislative election by an alliance of three left-wing political parties, Ratz, Mapam and Shinui, and was initially led by Ratz's chairwoman and long-time Knesset member Shulamit Aloni. The name "Meretz" () was chosen as an acronym for Mapam () and Ratz (). The third party of the alliance wasn't reflected in its name, but was instead mentioned in the party's campaign slogan: "" ("A government with vigor "[Meretz]", the strength to make the change" [Shinui]). Its first electoral test was a success, with the party winning twelve seats, making it the third-largest in the Knesset. Meretz became the major coalition partner of Yitzhak Rabin's Labor Party, helping pave the way for the Oslo Accords. The party also picked up several ministerial portfolios; Aloni was made Minister of Education, though disputes over the role of religion in education meant she was moved out of the education ministry to become Minister Without Portfolio in May 1993. In June 1993, she became Minister of Communications and Minister of Science and Technology, a role that was later renamed Minister of Science and the Arts. Amnon Rubinstein became Minister of Energy and Infrastructure and Minister of Science and Technology, and later Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, whilst Yossi Sarid was named Minister of the Environment and Yair Tzaban was named Minister of Immigrant Absorption.


title: Meretz

text: After the 1996 elections, in which Meretz lost a quarter of its seats, Aloni lost internal leadership elections to Yossi Sarid and retired, and the three parties decided to officially merge into a single entity by 1997. Although Shinui leader Amnon Rubinstein supported the merger, most Shinui members rejected it; once the merger became effective, part of Shinui (under the leadership of Rubinstein) broke away to participate in the merger, while the party mainstream elected Avraham Poraz as the new party leader and re-established Shinui as an independent movement. Later in the Knesset session, David Zucker also left the party to sit as an independent MK.


title: Meretz

text: The 1999 Meretz leadership election saw Yossi Sarid reelected as party leader. The election was held through a vote of delegates to the party's convention. The vote took place in advance of the 1999 Knesset election.


title: Meretz

text: The 1999 elections saw the party regain its former strength, picking up 10 seats, including the first-ever female Israeli Arab MK, Hussniya Jabara, while Shinui (now effectively led by TV celebrity journalist Tommy Lapid, although Poraz remained its formal leader) won six seats. Meretz were invited into Ehud Barak's coalition, with Sarid becoming Education Minister, Ran Cohen Minister of Industry and Trade and Haim Oron Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development. However, after Likud leader Ariel Sharon beat Barak in a special Prime Ministerial election in 2001, Meretz left the government.


title: Meretz

text: On 22 October 2002, Meretz MK Uzi Even made history by becoming the first openly gay Member of Knesset, after Amnon Rubinstein retired. This created a vacancy and Even was next on the Meretz list. His term lasted less than three months, however, as the Knesset was dissolved in January 2003. Even's entry to the Knesset was met by mixed reactions from the ultra-Orthodox parties; Shas's Nissim Ze'ev was the harshest, saying Even "symbolized the bestialization of humanity", adding that he should be "hidden under the carpet" and banned from entering the Knesset.


title: Meretz

text: For the 2003 elections, Meretz were joined by Roman Bronfman's Democratic Choice. However, the party shrank in representation again, this time to just six seats. Sarid immediately took responsibility and resigned from leadership, though he did not retire from the Knesset and continued serving as an MK, before stepping down prior to the 2006 elections.


title: Meretz

text: In December 2003, Meretz was disbanded, in order to merge with Yossi Beilin's non-parliamentary Shahar () movement. The original name suggested for the new party was "Ya'ad" (, "Goal"), but was not used because it sounded like the Russian word for poison ("yad"), and it was feared that it might alienate Israel's one million Russian-speaking voters (although there had been two parties previously in Israel using the name – Ya'ad and Ya'ad – Civil Rights Movement, the latter ironically a forerunner of Meretz, they both existed before large-scale immigration from the Soviet Union). Instead, the name "Yachad" (Hebrew: יח"ד) was chosen. As well as meaning "Together", it is also a Hebrew acronym for "Social-Democratic Israel" (Hebrew: , "Yisrael Hevratit Demokratit").


title: Meretz

text: The new party was established in order to unite and resuscitate the Israeli Zionist peace camp, which had been soundly defeated in the 2003 elections (dropping from 56 Knesset members in 1992 to 24 in 2003) following the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The party's purpose was to unite a variety of dovish Zionist movements with the dovish wing of the Labor Party. However, the efforts were largely unsuccessful as, except for the original Meretz, Shahar and Democratic Choice, no other movement joined the new party. It has suffered from declining popular interest in left-wing peace movements, and only 20,000 people are now registered members of the party, half the number who were prior to the 1999 party primaries.


title: Meretz

text: In March 2004, Yossi Beilin was elected party leader, beating Ran Cohen, and started a two-year term as the first chairman of Yachad. In July 2005, the party decided to change its name to Meretz-Yachad, because opinion polls revealed that the name "Yachad" was not recognisable to the Israeli public and that they preferred the old name "Meretz". The chairman Beilin opposed the motion to revert the name to Meretz and a compromise between the old and new names, "Meretz-Yachad", was agreed upon.


title: Meretz

text: However, in the 2006 election campaign, the party dropped the "Yachad" part of its name, running as just "Meretz", under the slogan "Meretz on the left, the Human in the centre". Nevertheless, it failed to stop the party's decline, as they won just five seats. In 2007, Tsvia Greenfeld, sixth on the party list, became the first-ever female ultra-Orthodox Knesset member, following Yossi Beilin's decision to retire from politics.


title: Meretz

text: In March 2008, internal elections for the chairman of the party were held. At an early stage, Yossi Beilin, Zehava Gal-On and Ran Cohen announced their bids. After Haim Oron announced his bid in December 2007, Beilin withdrew his bid and announced his support for him. Oron went on to win the internal elections held on 18 March 2008 with 54.5% of the vote, beating Ran Cohen (27.1%) and Zehava Gal-On (18.1%) to become Meretz's new chairman.


title: Meretz

text: On 22 December 2008, Meretz finalized its merger with Hatnua HaHadasha ("The New Movement") for the 2009 Israeli elections.


title: Meretz

text: The joint Meretz–Hatnua HaHadasha list ended up winning only 3 seats in the election. This electoral loss was largely attributed to traditionally left-wing voters choosing to strategically vote for Kadima, in an effort to get Tzipi Livni to head the next government, instead of Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud.


title: Meretz

text: Following the party's failure in the 2009 legislative elections, some of the party members called for the resignation of the party chairman Haim Oron and to give way for Zehava Gal-On. Haim Oron indeed left the Knesset on 23 March 2011 and later left the chairmanship of the party. As a result, MKs Zehava Gal-On, Ilan Gilon, and youth activist Ori Ophir began campaigning to win the position of the party chairman. The primaries were held on 7 February 2012 for the position of the party's chairman; Gal-On was elected as the chairman with 60.6% of the votes, whilst Ilan Gilon was second with 36.6%, and Uri Ofir was third with 2.8%.


title: Meretz

text: On 8 December 2014, Meretz signed a surplus-vote agreement with the Labor Party for the upcoming 2015 legislative election, the latter set to contest the election as the Zionist Union. On 19 January 2015, Meretz held its primaries at a meeting of its 1,000-member central committee in the Tel Aviv Convention Center: Zehava Gal-On was re-elected party leader, whilst MK Nitzan Horowitz chose not to stand for re-election.


title: Meretz

text: In 2015, as preliminary results of the Knesset elections indicated that the party representation would be reduced, Zehava Gal-On announced that she would resign as chairperson of Meretz as soon as a successor was chosen, and from the Knesset, in order to open a place for Tamar Zandberg, the party's fifth place-candidate who appeared to have lost her seat. Zandberg, Ilan Gilon, and others urged Gal-On to reconsider her decision. However, once absentee and soldier ballots were counted, Meretz gained a fifth seat, negating the premise for Gal-On's earlier announcement, and she announced that she would continue as party leader, saying: "Meretz received a fifth seat from young supporters, from Israeli soldiers, who raised the party's rate of support. That allowed Meretz to maintain its strength in terms of the number of voters – some 170,000 – compared with the last election. Under the circumstances, and against all odds, that is a success."


title: Meretz

text: Tamar Zandberg became the leader of Meretz in 2018. In February 2019, Meretz held its first-ever open primary contest. Eighty-six percent of party members cast votes. Ilan Gilon won first place; he will be placed second on the party's Knesset slate, behind party leader Tamar Zandberg. Michal Rozin came in second place, followed by Issawi Frej and Ali Salalha. In the April 2019 elections, the party won four seats.


title: Meretz

text: In July 2019 Meretz agreed to form an electoral union with Ehud Barak's Israel Democratic Party and breakaway Labor MK Stav Shaffir for the September elections, a decision ratified on 29 July. The alliance won five seats, three of them going to Meretz. Prior to the March 2020 elections, the party joined an alliance with Labor and Gesher, which won seven seats, three of them held by Meretz.


title: Meretz

text: After winning six seats in the March 2021 elections, Meretz joined a coalition government alongside Yesh Atid, Blue and White, Yamina, the Labor Party, Yisrael Beiteinu, New Hope and the United Arab List. Three Meretz MKs became ministers, with Horowitz becoming Minister of Health, Zandberg Minister of Environmental Protection and Issawi Frej Minister of Regional Cooperation. This is the first time Meretz has returned to government since 2000.


title: Meretz

text: The party did not win any seats in the 2022 elections under the leadership of returning chairwoman Zehava Gal-On, missing the electoral threshold by 3,800 votes, marking the first time that the party did not retain Knesset seats in an election.


title: Meretz

text: Meretz is positioned on the left-wing on the political spectrum. It is a social-democratic, and Left Zionist party, that supports green politics, progressive and egalitarian policies, and secularism. The party also supports two-state solution.


title: Meretz

text: In addition to being a full member of Socialist International and the Progressive Alliance, it has participated in Global Greens conferences. In the international media, Meretz has been described as left-wing, social-democratic, dovish, secular, civil libertarian and anti-occupation.


title: Meretz

text: Meretz petitioned the 2018 and petitioned the Supreme Court of Israel to invalidate the legislation, arguing it was discriminatory against Arabs and the Druze.


title: Meretz

text: Shulamit Aloni became the party's leader in 1992 not by a formal leadership election, but instead by a consensus of the party's founding leaders. After her 1996 retirement as leader, the party held its 1996 leadership election, for which the electorate was the membership of its Party Council. The party's 1999 leadership election saw a broader electorate, with the delegates of the Party Convention voting for its leader. In the 2004 leadership election, the party again expanded its leadership election elecotrate, opening the leadership vote up to the party's general membership. More than 15,000 party members participated in this leadership election. The 2012 leadership election saw a return to limiting the elecotrate to party convention delegates. In the 2018 leadership election, voting was re-opened to the party's general membership, before being closed for the 2019 leadership election, and later re-opened in 2022.


title: Meretz

text: A number of left-wing Zionist organizations that share many of the ideas of Meretz are affiliated with the Israel-based World Union of Meretz, which is an ideological faction within the World Zionist Organization; this includes the London-based Meretz UK, France's Cercle Bernard Lazare and the USA's Partners for Progressive Israel. The World Union of Meretz has representation in other organizations, including the Jewish National Fund.


title: Meretz

text: Hashomer Hatzair, a progressive Zionist youth movement with branches in many countries, is informally associated with Meretz; it had previously been affiliated with Mapam.


title: Meretz

text: American Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, whose sister Susan moved from the US to Israel and is a Reform rabbi there, asked Israeli voters to choose Meretz in the 2015 election.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: "We Shall Overcome" is a gospel song which became a protest song and a key anthem of the American civil rights movement. The song is most commonly attributed as being lyrically descended from "I'll Overcome Some Day", a hymn by Charles Albert Tindley that was first published in 1901.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The modern version of the song was first said to have been sung by tobacco workers led by Lucille Simmons during the 1945–1946 Charleston Cigar Factory strike in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1947, the song was published under the title "We Will Overcome" in an edition of the "People's Songs Bulletin" (a publication of People's Songs, an organization of which Pete Seeger was the director), as a contribution of and with an introduction by Zilphia Horton, then-music director of the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee (an adult education school that trained union organizers). Horton said she had learned the song from Simmons, and she considered it to be her favorite song. According to Horton, "one of the stanzas of the original hymn was 'we will overcome'. ... It sort of stops them cold silent.'"


title: We Shall Overcome

text: She taught it to many others, including Pete Seeger, who included it in his repertoire, as did many other activist singers, such as Frank Hamilton and Joe Glazer, who recorded it in 1950.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The song became associated with the civil rights movement from 1959, when Guy Carawan stepped in with his and Seeger's version as song leader at Highlander, which was then focused on nonviolent civil rights activism. It quickly became the movement's unofficial anthem. Seeger and other famous folksingers in the early 1960s, such as Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk festivals, and concerts in the North and helped make it widely known. Since its rise to prominence, the song, and songs based on it, have been used in a variety of protests worldwide.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The U.S. copyright of the "People's Songs Bulletin" issue which contained "We Will Overcome" expired in 1976, but The Richmond Organization asserted a copyright on the "We Shall Overcome" lyrics, registered in 1960. In 2017, in response to a lawsuit against TRO over allegations of false copyright claims, a U.S. judge issued an opinion that the registered work was insufficiently different from the "We Will Overcome" lyrics that had fallen into the public domain because of non-renewal. In January 2018, the company agreed to a settlement under which it would no longer assert any copyright claims over the song.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: "I'll Overcome Some Day" was a hymn or gospel music composition by the Reverend Charles Albert Tindley of Philadelphia that was first published in 1901. A noted minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Tindley was the author of approximately 50 gospel hymns, of which "We'll Understand It By and By" and "Stand By Me" are among the best known. The published text bore the epigraph, "Ye shall overcome if ye faint not", derived from Galatians 6:9: "And let us not be weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not." The first stanza began:


title: We Shall Overcome

text: Tindley's songs were written in an idiom rooted in African American folk traditions, using pentatonic intervals, with ample space allowed for improvised interpolation, the addition of "blue" thirds and sevenths, and frequently featuring short refrains in which the congregation could join. Tindley's importance, however, was primarily as a lyricist and poet whose words spoke directly to the feelings of his audiences, many of whom had been freed from slavery only 36 years before he first published his songs, and were often impoverished, illiterate, and newly arrived in the North. "Even today," wrote musicologist Horace Boyer in 1983, "ministers quote his texts in the midst of their sermons as if they were poems, as indeed they are."


title: We Shall Overcome

text: A letter printed on the front page of February 1909, "United Mine Workers Journal" states: "Last year at a strike, we opened every meeting with a prayer, and singing that good old song, 'We Will Overcome'." This statement implied that the song was well-known, and it was also the first acknowledgment of such a song having been sung in both a secular context and a mixed-race setting.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: Tindley's "I'll Overcome Some Day" was believed to have influenced the structure for "We Shall Overcome", with both the text and the melody having undergone a process of alteration. The tune has been changed so that it now echoes the opening and closing melody of "No More Auction Block For Me", also known from its refrain as "Many Thousands Gone". This was number 35 in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's collection of Negro Spirituals that appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly" of June 1867, with a comment by Higginson reflecting on how such songs were composed (i.e., whether the work of a single author or through what used to be called "communal composition"):


title: We Shall Overcome

text: Coincidentally, Bob Dylan claims that he used the very same melodic motif from "No More Auction Block" for his composition, "Blowin' in the Wind". Thus similarities of melodic and rhythmic patterns imparted cultural and emotional resonance ("the same feeling") towards three different, and historically very significant songs.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: Music scholars have also pointed out that the first half of "We Shall Overcome" bears a notable resemblance to the famous lay Catholic hymn "O Sanctissima", also known as "The Sicilian Mariners Hymn", first published by a London magazine in 1792 and then by an American magazine in 1794 and widely circulated in American hymnals. The second half of "We Shall Overcome" is essentially the same music as the 19th-century hymn "I'll Be All Right". As Victor Bobetsky summarized in his 2015 book on the subject: "'We Shall Overcome' owes its existence to many ancestors and to the constant change and adaptation that is typical of the folk music process."


title: We Shall Overcome

text: In October 1945 in Charleston, South Carolina, members of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers union (FTA-CIO), who were mostly female and African American, began a five-month strike against the American Tobacco Company. To keep up their spirits during the cold, wet winter of 1945–1946, one of the strikers, a woman named Lucille Simmons, led a slow "long meter style" version of the gospel hymn, "We'll Overcome (I'll Be All Right)" to end each day's picketing. Union organizer Zilphia Horton, who was the wife of the co-founder of the Highlander Folk School (later Highlander Research and Education Center), said she learned it from Simmons. Horton was Highlander's music director during 1935–1956, and it became her custom to end group meetings each evening by leading this, her favorite song. During the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace, "We Will Overcome" was printed in "Bulletin No. 3" (September 1948), 8, of People's Songs, with an introduction by Horton saying that she had learned it from the interracial FTA-CIO workers and had found it to be extremely powerful. Pete Seeger, a founding member of People's Songs and its director for three years, learned it from Horton's version in 1947. Seeger writes: "I changed it to 'We shall'... I think I liked a more open sound; 'We will' has alliteration to it, but 'We shall' opens the mouth wider; the 'i' in 'will' is not an easy vowel to sing well ..." Seeger also added some verses ("We'll walk hand in hand" and "The whole wide world around").


title: We Shall Overcome

text: In 1950, the CIO's Department of Education and Research released the album, "Eight New Songs for Labor", sung by Joe Glazer ("Labor's Troubador"), and the Elm City Four. (Songs on the album were: "I Ain't No Stranger Now", "Too Old to Work", "That's All", "Humblin' Back", "Shine on Me", "Great Day", "The Mill Was Made of Marble", and "We Will Overcome".) During a Southern CIO drive, Glazer taught the song to country singer Texas Bill Strength, who cut a version that was later picked up by 4-Star Records.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The song made its first recorded appearance as "We Shall Overcome" (rather than "We Will Overcome") in 1952 on a disc recorded by Laura Duncan (soloist) and The Jewish Young Singers (chorus), conducted by Robert De Cormier, co-produced by Ernie Lieberman and Irwin Silber on Hootenany Records (Hoot 104-A) (Folkways, FN 2513, BCD15720), where it is identified as a Negro Spiritual.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: Frank Hamilton, a folk singer from California who was a member of People's Songs and later The Weavers, picked up Seeger's version. Hamilton's friend and traveling companion, fellow-Californian Guy Carawan, learned the song from Hamilton. Carawan and Hamilton, accompanied by Ramblin Jack Elliot, visited Highlander in the early 1950s where they also would have heard Zilphia Horton sing the song. In 1957, Seeger sang for a Highlander audience that included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who remarked on the way to his next stop, in Kentucky, about how much the song had stuck with him. When, in 1959, Guy Carawan succeeded Horton as music director at Highlander, he reintroduced it at the school. It was the young (many of them teenagers) student-activists at Highlander, however, who gave the song the words and rhythms for which it is currently known, when they sang it to keep their spirits up during the frightening police raids on Highlander and their subsequent stays in jail in 1959–1960. Because of this, Carawan has been reluctant to claim credit for the song's widespread popularity. In the PBS video "We Shall Overcome", Julian Bond credits Carawan with teaching and singing the song at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1960. From there, it spread orally and became an anthem of Southern African American labor union and civil rights activism. Seeger has also publicly, in concert, credited Carawan with the primary role of teaching and popularizing the song within the civil rights movement.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: In August 1963, 22-year old folksinger Joan Baez, led a crowd of 300,000 in singing "We Shall Overcome" at the Lincoln Memorial during A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington. President Lyndon Johnson, himself a Southerner, used the phrase "we shall overcome" in addressing Congress on March 15, 1965, in a speech delivered after the violent "Bloody Sunday" attacks on civil rights demonstrators during the Selma to Montgomery marches, thus legitimizing the protest movement.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: Four days before the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., King recited the words from "We Shall Overcome" in his final sermon, delivered in Memphis on Sunday, March 31. He had done so in a similar sermon delivered in 1965 before an interfaith congregation at Temple Israel in Hollywood, California:


title: We Shall Overcome

text: "We Shall Overcome" was sung days later by over fifty thousand attendees at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: Farmworkers in the United States later sang the song in Spanish during the strikes and grape boycotts of the late 1960s. The song was notably sung by the U.S. Senator for New York Robert F. Kennedy, when he led anti-Apartheid crowds in choruses from the rooftop of his car while touring South Africa in 1966. It was also the song which Abie Nathan chose to broadcast as the anthem of the Voice of Peace radio station on October 1, 1993, and as a result it found its way back to South Africa in the later years of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association adopted "we shall overcome" as a slogan and used it in the title of its retrospective publication, "We Shall Overcome – The History of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland 1968–1978". The film "Bloody Sunday" depicts march leader and Member of Parliament (MP) Ivan Cooper leading the song shortly before 1972's Bloody Sunday shootings. In 1997, the Christian men's ministry, Promise Keepers featured the song on its worship CD for that year: "The Making of a Godly Man", featuring worship leader Donn Thomas and the Maranatha! Promise Band. Bruce Springsteen's re-interpretation of the song was included on the 1998 tribute album "Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger" as well as on Springsteen's 2006 album "".


title: We Shall Overcome

text: "We Shall Overcome" was adopted by various labor, nationalist, and political movements both during and after the Cold War. In his memoir about his years teaching English in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, Mark Allen wrote:


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The words "We shall overcome" are sung emphatically at the end of each verse in a song of Northern Ireland's civil rights movement, "Free the People", which protested against the internment policy of the British Army. The movement in Northern Ireland was keen to emulate the movement in the US and often sang "We shall overcome".


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The melody was also used (crediting it to Tindley) in a symphony by American composer William Rowland. In 1999, National Public Radio included "We Shall Overcome" on the "NPR 100" list of most important American songs of the 20th century. As a reference to the line, on January 20, 2009, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, a man holding the banner, "WE HAVE OVERCOME" was seen near the Capitol, a day after hundreds of people posed with the sign on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: As the attempted serial killer "Lasermannen" shot several immigrants around Stockholm in 1992, Prime Minister Carl Bildt and Immigration Minister Birgit Friggebo attended a meeting in Rinkeby. As the audience became upset, Friggebo tried to calm them down by proposing that everyone sing "We Shall Overcome". This statement is widely regarded as one of the most embarrassing moments in Swedish politics. In 2008, the newspaper "Svenska Dagbladet" listed the Sveriges Television recording of the event as the best political clip available on YouTube.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: On June 7, 2010, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame released a new version of the song as a protest against the Israeli blockade of Gaza.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: On July 22, 2012, Bruce Springsteen performed the song during the memorial-concert in Oslo after the terrorist attacks in Norway on July 22, 2011.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: In India, the renowned poet Girija Kumar Mathur composed its literal translation in Hindi ""Hum Honge Kaamyab (हम होंगे कामयाब)"" which became a popular patriotic/spiritual song during the 1970s and 80s, particularly in schools. This song also came to be used by the Blue Pilgrims for motivating the India national football team during international matches.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: In Bengali-speaking India and Bangladesh, there are two versions, both of which are popular among school-children and political activists. ""Amra Korbo Joy"" (আমরা করবো জয়, a literal translation) was translated by the Bengali folk singer Hemanga Biswas and re-recorded by Bhupen Hazarika. Hazarika, who had heard the song during his days in the US, also translated the song to the Assamese language as ""Ami hom xophol"" (আমি হ'ম সফল). Another version, translated by Shibdas Bandyopadhyay, ""Ek Din Shurjer Bhor"" (এক দিন সূর্যের ভোর, literally translated as ""One Day The Sun Will Rise"") was recorded by the Calcutta Youth Choir and arranged by Ruma Guha Thakurta during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence and it became one of the largest selling Bengali records. It was a favorite of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and it was regularly sung at public events after Bangladesh gained its independence in the early 1970s.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: In the Indian State of Kerala, the traditional Communist stronghold, the song became popular on college campuses during the late 1970s. It was the struggle song of the Students Federation of India SFI, the largest student organisation in the country. The song translated to the regional language Malayalam by N. P. Chandrasekharan, an activist for SFI. The translation followed the same tune of the original song, as ""Nammal Vijayikkum"". Later it was also published in "Student", the monthly of SFI in Malayalam as well as in Sarvadesheeya Ganangal (Mythri Books, Thiruvananthapuram), a translation of international struggle songs.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: "We Shall Overcome" was a prominent song in the 2010 Bollywood film "My Name is Khan", which compared the struggle of Muslims in modern America with the struggles of African Americans in the past. The song was sung in both English and Hindi in the film, which starred Kajol and Shahrukh Khan.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: In 2014, a recording of "We Shall Overcome" arranged by composer Nolan Williams Jr. and featuring mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves was among several works of art, including the poem "A Brave and Startling Truth" by Maya Angelou, were sent to space on the first test flight of the spacecraft Orion.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The copyright status of "We Shall Overcome" was disputed in the late 2010s. A copyright registration was made for the song in 1960, which is credited as an arrangement by Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, and Pete Seeger, of a work entitled "I'll Overcome", with no known original author. Horton's heirs, Carawan, Hamilton, and Seeger share the artists' half of the rights, and The Richmond Organization (TRO), which includes Ludlow Music, Essex, Folkways Music, and Hollis Music, holds the publishers' rights, to 50% of the royalty earnings. Seeger explained that he registered the copyright under the advice of TRO, who showed concern that someone else could register it. "At that time we didn't know Lucille Simmons' name", Seeger said. Their royalties go to the "We Shall Overcome" Fund, administered by Highlander under the trusteeship of the "writers". Such funds are purportedly used to give small grants for cultural expression involving African Americans organizing in the U.S. South.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: In April 2016, the We Shall Overcome Foundation (WSOF), led by music producer Isaias Gamboa, sued TRO and Ludlow, seeking to have the copyright status of the song clarified and the return of all royalties collected by the companies from its usage. The WSOF, which was working on a documentary about the song and its history, were denied permission to use the song by TRO-Ludlow. The filing argued that TRO-Ludlow's copyright claims were invalid because the registered copyright had not been renewed as required by United States copyright law at the time; because of this, the copyright of the 1948 "People's Songs" publication containing "We Will Overcome" had expired in 1976. Additionally, it was argued that the registered copyrights only covered specific arrangements of the tune and "obscure alternate verses", that the registered works "did not contain original works of authorship, except to the extent of the arrangements themselves", and that no record of a work entitled "I'll Overcome" existed in the database of the United States Copyright Office.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: The suit acknowledged that Seeger himself had not claimed to be an author of the song, stating of the song in his autobiography, "No one is certain who changed 'will' to 'shall.' It could have been me with my Harvard education. But Septima Clarke, a Charleston schoolteacher (who was director of education at Highlander and after the civil rights movement was elected year after year to the Charleston, S.C. Board of Education) always preferred 'shall.' It sings better." He also reaffirmed that the decision to copyright the song was a defensive measure, with his publisher apparently warning him that "if you don't copyright this now, some Hollywood types will have a version out next year like 'Come on Baby, We shall overcome tonight. Furthermore, the liner notes of Seeger's compilation album "If I Had a Hammer: Songs of Hope & Struggle" contained a summary on the purported history of the song, stating that "We Shall Overcome" was "probably adapted from the 19th-century hymn, 'I'll Be All Right, and that "I'll Overcome Some Day" was a "possible source" and may have originally been adapted from "I'll Be All Right".


title: We Shall Overcome

text: Gamboa has historically shown interest in investigating the origins of "We Shall Overcome"; in a book entitled "", he notably disputed the song's claimed origins and copyright registration with an alternate theory, suggesting that "We Shall Overcome" was actually derived from "If My Jesus Wills", a hymn by Louise Shropshire that had been composed in the 1930s and had its copyright registered in 1954. The WSOF lawsuit did not invoke this alternate history, focusing instead on the original belief that the song stemmed from "We Will Overcome". The lawyer backing Gamboa's suit, Mark C. Rifkin, was previously involved in a case that invalidated copyright claims over the song "Happy Birthday to You".


title: We Shall Overcome

text: On September 8, 2017, Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York issued an opinion that there were insufficient differences between the first verse of the "We Shall Overcome" lyrics registered by TRO-Ludlow, and the "We Will Overcome" lyrics from "People's Songs" (specifically, the aforementioned replacement of "will" with "shall", and changing "down in my heart" to "deep in my heart") for it to qualify as a distinct derivative work eligible for its own copyright.


title: We Shall Overcome

text: On January 26, 2018, TRO-Ludlow agreed to a final settlement, under which it would no longer claim copyright over the melody or lyrics to "We Shall Overcome". In addition, TRO-Ludlow agreed that the melody and lyrics were thereafter dedicated to the public domain.


title: Carl Cox

text: Carl Cox (born 29 July 1962) is a British house and techno club DJ, as well as radio DJ and record producer. He is based in Hove, Sussex, England.


title: Carl Cox

text: Cox has won and been nominated for numerous awards. He has performed at numerous clubs and electronic music or dance events worldwide. He has hosted a residency known as "Music is Revolution" every summer season at the Space Ibiza nightclub, from 2001 to 2016. He has featured his own "Carl Cox & Friends" stage at many festivals, such as Ultra Music Festival, The BPM Festival and Tomorrowland. Cox has also served as a monthly DJ for BBC Radio 1's "Essential Mix".


title: Carl Cox

text: He runs the record label, Intec Digital, which was founded around 1998 as Intec Records. Cox also had his own radio show and podcast, entitled "Global", which he ran until February 2017.


title: Carl Cox

text: Cox was born on 29 July 1962 in Oldham, spent his early life in Carshalton, south London and moved to Brighton in his late teens.


title: Carl Cox

text: At age 15, Cox began working as a mobile DJ, finding a passion for disco music. He began his music career around the same time that Chicago house music found its forefront in the world of dance music.


title: Carl Cox

text: In the 1980s, Cox became a mainstage DJ in the electronica industry. He eventually became known as one of the founders of that sound and was part of the emerging British rave scene, and became renowned for the uncommon practice of three-deck mixing. He played at the first night of Danny Rampling's Shoom night after his return from Ibiza in the summer of 1987, a Balearic / Acid House night in London.


title: Carl Cox

text: In the early 1990s he released his debut single for Paul Oakenfold's Perfecto label, "I Want You (Forever)". Cox continued to create music, eventually embracing techno music that would soon become popular.


title: Carl Cox

text: He ran Ultimate Base at the now defunct Velvet Underground club on Charing Cross Road, London in the mid-to late 1990s. Cox also played the Millennium on New Year's Eve 1999, by performing in Sydney, Australia, and again in Hawaii after flying back over the International Date Line. He was also global resident DJ for BBC Radio 1's "Essential Mix" in 1998–99. In 1997, "DJ Magazine" chose Cox as the first #1 DJ for its first top 100 poll.


title: Carl Cox

text: In 2001, Cox began a yearly residency at Space Ibiza, a nightclub in Ibiza, Spain. He began playing on the terrace for Space's "We Love... Space on the Terrace". Following that, he played on Thursdays inside the club. For fifteen years, Cox built his residency entitled "Music is Revolution". The final season of Cox's residency was entitled "The Final Chapter" and took place every Tuesday during the summer of 2016. Cox finished the residency on 20 September 2016 by playing a vinyl and CDJ, ten-hour set. Artists who joined Cox on his final night included tINI, Popof, Nic Fanciulli and DJ Sneak. Cox also played at the closing night of the club itself on 2 October 2016.


title: Carl Cox

text: In 2004, Cox debuted the Carl Cox & Friends arena at Ultra Music Festival, which has since taken place for twelve years. In the film "Can U Feel It?", a documentary about Ultra Music Festival, Cox explains that the concept of Carl Cox & Friends came about as a result of not only wanting to play longer sets at festivals, but also to give festival goers an experience within the festival, as Carl has far more creative control over his own stage. The stage is popular with festival goers, and has featured artists like Laurent Garnier, Nic Fanciulli, Loco Dice, Marco Carola, Maceo Plex and many more. Since he created the Carl Cox & Friends concept in 2004, this curated stage has taken place at other festivals and events including Awakenings, EDC Las Vegas, The BPM Festival, Ultra Europe, Tomorrowland, Amsterdam Dance Event and many others.


title: Carl Cox

text: Cox has performed at clubs such as the Eclipse, Shelley's Laserdome, Sterns Nightclub, Heaven, Sir Henry's, Angels and The Haçienda, as well as raves for Fantazia, Dreamscape, NASA and Amnesia House.


title: Carl Cox

text: While it was speculated that he would retire in 2017 after he finished his residency at Space Ibiza, Cox has continued to announce festivals and events for 2017 including three showcases at The BPM Festival, his stage at Ultra Music Festival, and two appearances at the Social Festival in Mexico and Colombia. In 2017, Cox was also named the global ambassador of Ultra Music Festival's techno and house music concept, Resistance. Carl Cox also announced the 2017 dates for a festival he has curated entitled Pure Festival, which took place in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, during April 2017.


title: Carl Cox

text: After sixteen years of Cox's "Global" radio podcast, he announced via Facebook that he would no longer be working on the show and that it would end in February 2017.


title: Carl Cox

text: In 2019 Cox travelled to Australia and worked with Gavin Campbell, producing a remix of Yothu Yindi's song "Treaty", performing live outdoors with Yothu Yindi & The Treaty Project at the Babylon Festival, Carapooee, Victoria, in February 2019.


title: Carl Cox

text: For 2020, he announced via the Goodwood website that he would be playing a summer festival DJ set at the first of the Three Friday nights at Goodwood Racecourse with a special dedication to the Lloyds before their departure.


title: Carl Cox

text: Cox formed his own record label, Intec Records in 1998–9. Intec Records released music from 1999 to 2006. However, in 2006 he decided to put the label on a brief hiatus and relaunched it in 2010 as Intec Digital.


title: Carl Cox

text: In 1999, Cox starred in the British film "Human Traffic" as Pablo Hassan, the manager of the Asylum club.


title: Carl Cox

text: Cox starred in a 2017 EDM-themed documentary titled "What We Started" with Martin Garrix showing thirty years of EDM history by focusing mainly on his and Martin Garrix's diverging careers. The documentary is co-written, produced and directed by Bert Marcus alongside executive producer and music supervisor Pete Tong.


title: Carl Cox

text: Scooter mentions Cox in their 1994 song Hyper Hyper, during which lead singer H.P. Baxxter reads out the name of numerous DJs.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: Balraj Sahni (born Yudhishthir Sahni; 1 May 1913 – 13 April 1973) was an Indian film and stage actor, who is best known for "Dharti Ke Lal" (1946), "Do Bigha Zameen" (1953), "Chhoti Bahen" (1959), "Kabuliwala" (1961) and "Garam Hawa" (1973). He was the brother of Bhisham Sahni, noted Hindi writer, playwright, and actor.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: Sahni was born on 1 May 1913 in Rawalpindi, Punjab, British India. He studied at Government College (Lahore) and Gordon College. After completing his master's degree in English Literature from Lahore, he went back to Rawalpindi and joined his family business. He also held a bachelor's degree in Hindi. Soon after, he married Damayanti Sahni.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: In the late 1930s, Sahni and his wife left Rawalpindi to join Tagore's Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan in Bengal as an English and Hindi teacher. It is here that their son, Parikshit Sahni was born, when his wife Damayanti was earning her bachelor's degree. He also collaborated with Mahatma Gandhi for a year in 1938. The next year, Sahni, with Gandhi's blessings, went to England to join the BBC-London's Hindi service as a radio announcer. He returned to India in 1943, and his wife died in 1947 at age 26. In 1951, he remarried, to writer Santosh Chandhok; they remained married until his death in 1973. While at the BBC, Sahni worked alongside George Orwell.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: Sahni was always interested in acting, and started his acting career with the plays of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA). Incidentally, his wife Damayanti became well known as an IPTA actress much before Sahni made a name for himself in films. He started his film career in Bombay with the film "Insaaf" (1946), followed by "Dharti Ke Lal" directed by KA Abbas in 1946, Damayanti's first film, "Door Chalein" in 1946, and other films. But it was in 1953, with Bimal Roy's classic "Do Bigha Zamin", that his true strength as an actor was first recognised. The film won the international prize at the Cannes Film Festival.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: Sahni's wife Damayanti, who was the heroine of his 1947 film "Gudia", died at a young age that same year. Two years later, he married his first cousin, Santosh Chandhok, later known as an author and television writer.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: He acted opposite heroines such as Padmini, Nutan, Meena Kumari, Vyjayanthimala and Nargis in films such as "Bindya", "Seema" (1955), "Sone Ki Chidiya" (1958), "Sutta Bazaar" (1959), "Bhabhi Ki Chudiyaan" (1961), "Kathputli" (1957), "Lajwanti" (1958) and "Ghar Sansaar" (1958). His character roles in films such as "Neelkamal", "Ghar Ghar Ki Kahani", "Do Raaste" and "Ek Phool Do Mali" were well received. However, he is perhaps best remembered by the current generation for his picturisation of the legendary song "Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen" from the movie "Waqt" (1965). Sahni appeared opposite Achala Sachdev in the number.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: He also starred in the classic Punjabi film "Nanak Dukhiya Sub Sansar" (1970) as well as the critically acclaimed "Satluj De Kande".


title: Balraj Sahni

text: His role as the angst-ridden, but stoic Muslim man who refuses to go to Pakistan during partition, in his last film Garam Hawa, has often been called his best performance by critics. Balraj, however, could not see the completed film to rate his own performance, as he died the day after he finished dubbing work. The last line he recorded for the film, and hence his last recorded line is Hindustani: "Insaan Kab Tak Akela Jee Sakta Hai?" which can be translated to English as: "How long can a man live alone?"


title: Balraj Sahni

text: Sahni was a gifted writer; his early writings were in English, though later in life he switched to Punjabi, and became a writer of repute in Punjabi literature. In 1960, after a visit to Pakistan, he wrote "Mera Pakistani Safarnama". His book "Mera Rusi Safarnama", which he had written after a tour of the erstwhile Soviet Union in 1969, earned him the "Soviet Land Nehru Award". He contributed many poems and short stories in magazines and also penned his autobiography; "Meri Filmi Aatmakatha". Sahni was an extremely well-read and politically conscious person.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: He and P K Vasudevan Nair worked on the idea of All India Youth Federation with firebrand Delhi communist, Comrade Guru Radha Kishan to organise the first national conference of AIYF in Delhi. Their wholehearted efforts were visible as more than 250 delegates and observers representing several youth organisations of various states of India attended this session. Balraj Sahni was elected as the first president of All India Youth Federation, the youth wing of Communist Party of India. The organisation was a huge success and strong presence of the organisation was noticed by other political groups and the senior communist leaders everywhere.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: Sahni also dabbled in screenwriting; he wrote the 1951 movie "Baazi" which starred Dev Anand and was directed by Guru Dutt. He was also a recipient of the Padma Shri Award (1969). Balraj Sahni also wrote in Punjabi and contributed to the Punjabi magazine "Preetlari".


title: Balraj Sahni

text: His acting in "Do Bigha Zameen" and "Garam Hawa" were the highlights of his career. He believed in what is known as neo-realistic cinema.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: Balraj's brother Bhisham Sahni was a well-known writer who wrote the book "Tamas". His son Parikshit Sahni is also an actor. Balraj Sahni died on 13 April 1973 of a massive cardiac arrest, less than a month before his 60th birthday. He had been depressed for some time by the untimely death of his young daughter, Shabnam; she died a year earlier.


title: Balraj Sahni

text: "Punjabi Kala Kender", founded in 1973 at Bombay by Balraj Sahni, gives away the annual Balraj Sahni Award, also given by the "All India Artists Association".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Unionism is a political tradition on the island of Ireland that favours political union with Great Britain and professes loyalty to the British Crown and constitution. As the overwhelming sentiment of Ireland's Protestant minority, following Catholic Emancipation (1829) unionism mobilised to keep Ireland part of the United Kingdom and to defeat the efforts of Irish nationalists to restore a separate Irish parliament. Since Partition (1921), as Ulster Unionism its goal has been to maintain Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom and to resist a transfer of sovereignty to an all-Ireland republic. Within the framework of a 1998 peace settlement, unionists in Northern Ireland have had to accommodate Irish nationalists in a devolved government, while continuing to rely on the link with Britain to secure their cultural and economic interests.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Unionism became an overarching partisan affiliation in Ireland in response to Liberal-minority government concessions to Irish nationalists. Typically Presbyterian agrarian-reform Liberals coalesced with traditionally Anglican Orange Order Conservatives in opposition to the Irish Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893. Joined by loyalist labour, on the eve of World War I this broad opposition to Irish self-government concentrated in Belfast and its hinterlands as Ulster Unionism, and prepared an armed resistance—the Ulster Volunteers.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Within the partition settlement of 1921 by which the rest of Ireland attained separate statehood, Ulster Unionists accepted a home-rule dispensation for the six north-east counties remaining in the United Kingdom. For the next 50 years the Ulster Unionist Party exercised the devolved powers of the Northern Ireland Parliament with little domestic opposition and outside of the governing party-political system of the United Kingdom.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In 1972, the British government suspended this arrangement. Against a background of growing political violence, and citing the need to consider how Catholics in Northern Ireland could be integrated into its civic and political life, it prorogued the parliament in Belfast.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Over the ensuing three decades of The Troubles, Unionists divided in their responses to power-sharing proposals presented, in consultation with the Republic of Ireland, by successive British governments. Following the 1998 Belfast Agreement, under which both republican and loyalist paramilitaries committed to permanent ceasefires, unionists accepted principles of joint office and parallel consent in a new Northern Ireland legislature and executive.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Renegotiated in 2006, relations within this consociational arrangement remain fraught. Unionists, with diminished electoral strength, charge their nationalist partners in government with pursuing an anti-British cultural agenda and, post-Brexit, with supporting a customs regime (the Northern Ireland Protocol) that conflicts with the Act of Union.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In the last decades of the Kingdom of Ireland (1542–1800), Protestants in public life advanced themselves as Irish Patriots. The focus of their patriotism was an Ascendancy parliament in Dublin. Largely confined on a narrow franchise to members of the Anglican communion— the established Church of Ireland—the parliament denied equal protection and public office to Protestant Dissenters (non-Anglican Protestants) and to the Kingdom's dispossessed Roman Catholic majority. The high point of this parliamentary patriotism was the formation during the American War of Independence, of the Irish Volunteers and, as that militia paraded in Dublin, the securing in 1782 of the parliament's legislative independence from the British government in London.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In Ulster where, because of their greater numbers, Protestants were less fearful of sharing political rights with Catholics, combinations of Presbyterian tradesmen, merchants, and tenant farmers protested against an unrepresentative parliament and against an executive in Dublin Castle still appointed, through the office of the Lord Lieutenant, by English ministers. Seeing little prospect of further reform and in the hope that they might be assisted by republican France, these United Irishmen sought a revolutionary union of "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter" (i.e. of Catholics and Protestants of all persuasions). Their resolve was broken with the defeat of their uprising in 1798, and by reports of rebel outrages against Protestant Loyalists in the South.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: The British government, which had had to deploy its own forces to suppress the rebellion in Ireland and to turn back and defeat French intervention, decided on a union with Great Britain. For the chief of the Castle executive Lord Castlereagh, the principal merit in merging the two kingdoms was a resolution of the Catholic Question. Linked to England, Protestants would have less reason to fear Catholic advancement, while Catholics, reduced to a minority within the United Kingdom, would moderate their demands. However, due to opposition in England, and from the King, George III, a provision for Catholic emancipation was dropped from the Acts of Union. A separate Irish executive in Dublin was retained, but representation, still wholly Protestant, was transferred to Westminster constituted as the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In decades that followed the Act of Union (1800) supporters of the United Irish cause and their descendants were reconciled to the loss of an Irish parliament. Having refused calls for reform—to broaden representation and curb corruption—most saw little cause to regret its passing. In time, and as Protestants, they came to regard the legislative union with Great Britain as a source of their relative prosperity and, as the Roman Catholic majority in Ireland began to gather in a new national movement, as a guarantee of their security.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: It took the Union thirty years to deliver on the promise of Catholic emancipation (1829)—to admit Catholics to Parliament—and permit an erosion of the Protestant monopoly on position and influence. An opportunity to integrate Catholics through their re-emerging propertied and professional classes as a minority within the United Kingdom may have passed. In 1830, the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O’Connell, invited Protestants to join in a campaign to repeal the Union and restore the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In the North, resistance to the call was stiffened by a religious revival. With its emphasis upon "personal witness", the New Reformation appeared to transcend the ecclesiastical differences between the different Protestant denominations At the same time, it launched them into "a far more conscious sense of separateness from the Church of Rome", then undergoing its own devotional revolution. The leading Presbyterian evangelist, Henry Cooke took the occasion to preach Protestant Unity. In 1834, at a mass demonstration hosted upon his estate by the 3rd Marquess of Downshire, Cooke proposed a "Christian marriage" between the two main Protestant denominations (Anglican and Presbyterian). Setting their remaining differences aside, they would cooperate on all "matters of common safety".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Presbyterian voters tended to favour reform-minded Whigs or, as they later emerged, tenant-right and free-trade Liberals, over the Conservative and Orange-Order candidates of the landed Ascendancy. But as the Irish party-political successors to O'Connell's Repeal movement gained representation and influence in Westminster, Cooke's call for unity was to be heeded in the progressive emergence of a pan-Protestant unionism.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Up to, and through, the Great Famine of the 1840s, successive governments, Whig and Tory, had refused political responsibility for agrarian conditions in Ireland. The issues of a low-level tenant-landlord war came to Westminster in 1852 when the all-Ireland Tenant Right League helped return 48 MPs to Westminster where they sat as the Independent Irish Party. What the Young Irelander Gavan Duffy called the League of North and South soon fell apart. In the South the Church approved the Catholic MPs breaking their pledge of independent opposition and accepting government positions. In the North, the Protestant tenant righters, William Sharman Crawford and James MacKnight had their election meetings broken up by Orangemen.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: For unionism the more momentous challenge lay in the wake of the 1867 Reform Act. In England and Wales it produced an electorate that no longer identified instinctively with the conservative interest in Ireland and was more open to the "home-rule" compromise that nationalists now presented. Ireland would remain within the United Kingdom but with a parliament in Dublin exercising powers "devolved" from Westminister. Meanwhile, in Ireland, a combination the secret ballot and increased representation for the towns, reduced the electoral influence of land owners and their agents, and contributed to the triumph, in 1874, of the Home Rule League. Fifty-nine members were returned to Westminster where they sat as the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP).


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In his first ministry (1868-1874), the Liberal premier William Ewart Gladstone had attempted conciliation. In 1869, he disestablished the Church of Ireland, and in 1870 introduced the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act. In both measures conservative jurists identified threats to the integrity of the union. The establishment of the Anglican communion had been explicitly guaranteed by the Act of Union (the Ulster Protestant Defence Association claimed breach of contract); and provisions for tenant compensation and purchase, weak as they were, created a separate agrarian regime for Ireland at odds with the prevailving English conception of property rights.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In the Long Depression of the 1870s the Land War intensified. From 1879 it was organised by the direct-action Irish National Land League, led by the southern Protestant Charles Stewart Parnell. As late as 1881 Gladstone resorted (over a 41-hour filibuster by IPP) to a Coercion Act allowing for arbitrary arrest and detention in protection of person and property. That year, in a further Land Act, he conceded the three F's—fair rent, free sale, and fixity of ternure. Recognising that "the land grievance had been a bond of discontent between Ulster and the rest of Ireland and in that sense a danger to the union", Irish Conservatives did not oppose the measure. Protestants in the eastern counties had admitted to the leadership of the tenant-right movement men, like the Rev. James Armour of Ballymoney, who were at best agnostic on the union, while in the west of the province (in Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh and Tyrone) even Orangemen had started joining the Land League.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: The final and decisive shift in favour of "constitutional" concessions came in the wake of the Third Reform Act of 1884. The near-universal admission to the suffrage of male heads of household tripled the electorate in Ireland. The 1885 election returned an IPP, now under the leadership of Parnell, of 85 Members (including 17 from Ulster where Conservatives and Liberals split the unionist vote). Gladstone, whose Liberals lost all 15 of their Irish seats, was able to form his second ministry only with their Commons support.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In June 1886, Gladstone tabled a The Government of Ireland Bill that was largely of his own drafting. Unionists were not persuaded by his inclusion of measures to limit the remit of a Dublin legislature and to reduce the weight of the popular vote (the 200 or so popularly elected members were to sit in session with 28 Irish Peers and a further 75 Members elected on a highly restrictive property franchise). Regardless of how it was constituted, they believed that an Irish legislature would enter into conflicts with the "imperial parliament" in London that could only be resolved through "complete separation".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In their opposition there was a clear economic interest. The upper and middle classes found in Britain and the Empire "a wide range of profitable careers--in the army, in the public services, in commerce--from which they might be shut out if the link between Ireland and Great Britain were weakened or severed". That same link was critical for all those employed in the great export industries of the North—textiles, engineering, shipbuilding. For these the Irish hinterland was less important than the industrial triangle that linked Belfast and region with Clydeside and the north of England. Yet the most popular summary of case against Irish self-government remained the message broadcast in a "great revival" of the Orange Order — "Home Rule means Rome Rule".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In the north, the competition represented by the growing numbers of Catholics arriving at mill and factory gates had already given the once largely rural (and Anglican) Orange Order a new lease among Protestant workers. The pattern, in itself, was not unique to Belfast and its satellites. Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and other British centres experiencing large-scale Irish immigration developed similar Orange and nativist ward and workplace politics with which unionists—organised in the Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union—sought to connect. With Gladstone's conversion to home rule, politicians who had held aloof from the Order now embraced its militancy. Colonel Edward Saunderson, who for many years had represented Cavan as a Liberal, donned an Orange sash "because", he said "the Orange society is alone capable of dealing with the condition of anarchy and rebellion which prevail in Ireland".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In February 1886, playing, in his own words, the "Orange card", Lord Randolph Churchill assured a "monster meeting" of the Anti-Repeal Union in Belfast, that English Conservatives would "cast in their lot" with loyalists in resisting Home Rule, and he later coined the phrase that was to become the watchword of northern unionism: "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Gladstone's own party was split on Home Rule and the House divided against the measure. In 1891 Ulster's Liberal Unionists, part of a larger Liberal break with Gladstone, entered Saunderson's Irish Unionist Alliance, and at Westminster took the Conservative whip.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In 1892, despite bitter division over the personally compromised leadership of Parnell, the Nationalists were able to help Gladstone to a third ministry. The result was a second Home Rule bill. It was greeted by an Ulster opposition more highly developed and better organised. A great Ulster Unionist Convention was held in Belfast organised by the Liberal Unionist Thomas Sinclair, whom the press noted had been an outspoken critic of Orangeism. Speakers and observers dwelt on the diversity of creed, class and party represented among the 12,300 delegates attending. As reported by the "Northern Whig" there were "the old tenant-righters of the 'sixties' . . . the sturdy reformers of Antrim. . . the Unitarians of Down, always progressive in their politics . . . the old-fashioned Tories of the Counties . . . modern Conservatives . . . Orangemen . . . All these various elements--Whig, Liberal, Radical, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Unitarian and Methodist . . united as one man."


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: While references to Catholics were conciliatory the Convention resolved: to retain unchanged our present position as an integral portion of the United Kingdom, and protest in the most unequivocal manner against the passage of any measure that would rob us of our inheritance in the Imperial Parliament, under the protection of which our capital has been invested and our home and rights safeguarded; that we record our determination to have nothing to do with a Parliament certain to be controlled by men responsible for the crime and outrage of the Land League . . . many of whom have shown themselves the ready instrument of clerical domination.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: After mammoth parliamentary sessions the bill, which did allow for Irish MPs, was passed by a narrow majority in the Commons but went down to defeat in the overwhelmingly Conservative House of Lords. The Conservatives formed a new ministry.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: The new Prime Minister Lord Salisbury believed his government should "leave Home Rule sleeping the sleep of the unjust". In 1887 Dublin Castle was given standing power to suspend "habeas corpus." However, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Salisbury's nephew Gerald Balfour (with the active support of Horace Plunkett, Unionist MP for South Dublin) determined upon a constructive course, pursuing reforms intended, as some saw it, to kill home rule with "kindness".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: For the express purpose of relieving poverty and reducing emigration, in the Congested Districts of the west Balfour initiated a programme not only of public works, but of subsidy for local craft industries. A new Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction broke with the traditions of Irish Boards by announcing that its aim was to "be in touch with public opinion of the classes whom its work concerns, and to rely largely for its success upon their active assistance and co-operation". It supported and encouraged dairy cooperatives, the Creameries, that were to be an important institution in the emergence of a new class of independent smallholders.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Greater reform followed when, with the support of the splinter Liberal Unionist Party, Salisbury returned to office in 1895. The Land Act of 1896 introduced for the first time the principle of compulsory sale to tenants, through its application was limited to bankrupt estates. "You would suppose", said Sir Edward Carson, Dublin barrister and the leading spokesman for Irish Conservatives, "that the Government were revolutionists verging on Socialism". Having been first obliged to surrender their hold on local government (transferred at a stroke in 1898 to democratically elected councils), the old landlord class had the terms of their retirement fixed by the Wyndham Land Act of 1903.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: This reduced, but did not in itself resolve, agrarian tensions, even in the north. In 1906, Thomas Russell, MP, the son of an evicted Scottish crofter, broke with the Conservatives in the Irish Unionist Alliance to be returned to Westminster from South Tyrone as the champion of the Ulster Farmers and Labourers Union. With the Cork City MP, William O'Brien, Russell helped extend the period of constructivism by initiating the programme that built some 40,000 one-acre labourer-owned cottages.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: During the period of constructive unionism, and before a Liberal government revived the propects for home rule, unionists appeared more at ease with interest in Irish culture. The first Ulster branch of the Gaelic League was formed in 1895 in east Belfast under the patronage of the Rev. John Baptiste Crozier and Dr. John St Clair Boyd, both avowed unionists, and of the Orange Order Grand Master, the Rev. Richard Tutledge Kane.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In 1905, the Ulster Unionist Council was established to bring together unionists in the north including, with 50 of 200 seats, the Orange Order. Until then, unionism had largely placed itself behind Anglo-Irish aristocrats valued for their high-level connections in Great Britain. The UUC still accorded them a degree of precedence. Castlereagh's descendant and former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, The 6th Marquess of Londonderry, presided over its executive. The Council also retained the services of Carson, from 1892 MP for Trinity College Dublin and supported him from 1910 as leader of the Irish Unionist parliamentary party. But marshalled by Captain James Craig, a millionaire director of Belfast's Dunville Whiskey, it was northern employers who undertook the real political and organisational work.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Unlike the southern landowners who were politically opposed by their Catholic tenants, the manufacturers and merchants of Belfast and neighbouring industrial districts could generally count on voting with the majority of their own workforce. But the loyalty of the Protestant worker was not unconditional. In the mind of many working-class unionists there was no contradiction between the defence of Protestant principle and political radicalism, "indeed, these were often seen as one and the same because it was the wealthy who were most prone to conciliation and treachery".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In 1902, the shipyard worker Thomas Sloan, presented as the democratic candidate by the Belfast Protestant Association, defeated the Conservative Party nominee for South Belfast. His campaign was marked by what his opponents considered a classic piece of bigotry. Sloan protested the exemption of Catholic convents from inspection by the Hygiene Commission (the Catholic Church should not be "a state within a state"). But it was also as a trade unionist that Sloan criticised wealthy employers (the "fur-coat brigade") in the leadership of unionism. Together with R. Lindsay Crawford and their Independent Orange Order, Sloan supported dock and linen-mill workers, led by the syndicalist James Larkin, in the great Belfast Lockout of 1907.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In July 1912, loyalists forced some 3,000 workers out of the shipyards and engineering plants in Belfast. Unlike previous incidents, the expellees included some 600 Protestants, targeted mainly because they were seen to support labour organising across sectarian lines. The Unionist press depicted any connection with either British Labour (who had held their first party conference in Belfast in 1907) or with the Irish Trades Union Congress as tantamount to support for Home Rule. Yet loyalist workers resented the idea that they were the retainers of "big-house unionists". A manifesto signed in the spring of 1914 by two thousand labour men, rejected the suggestion of the radical and socialist press that Ulster was being manipulated by "an aristocratic plot". If Sir Edward Carson led in the battle for the Union it was "because we, the workers, the people, the democracy of Ulster, have chosen him". The majority of the signatories would have been organised in British-based unions, and could point to the growing political weight of British labour in reform measures such as the Trade Disputes Act 1906, the People's Budget 1910, and the National Insurance Act 1911. Nationalists did not seek to persuade them that collective bargaining, progressive taxation and social security were principles for which majorities could be as readily found in an Irish parliament.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: At what was to be the high point of mobilisation in Ulster against Home Rule, the Covenant Campaign of September 1912, the Unionist leadership decided that men alone could not speak for the determination of the Unionist people to defend "their equal citizenship in the United Kingdom". Women were asked to sign, not the Covenant whose commitment to "all means which may be found necessary" implied a readiness to bear arms, but their own Associate Declaration. A total of 234,046 women signed the Ulster Women's Declaration; 237,368 men signed the Solemn League and Covenant.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Unionist women had been involved in political campaigning from the time of the first Home Rule Bill in 1886. Some were active suffragettes. Isabella Tod, an anti-Home Rule Liberal and campaigner for girls education, was an early pioneer. Determined lobbying by her North of Ireland Women's Suffrage Society ensured the 1887 Act creating a new city-status municipal franchise for Belfast conferred the vote on persons rather than men. This was eleven years before women elsewhere Ireland gained the vote in local government elections.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: The WSS had not been impressed by the women's Ulster Declaration or by the Ulster Women's Unionist Council (UWUC)—with over 100,000 members the largest women's political organisation in Ireland. Elizabeth McCracken noted the failure Unionist women to formulate "any demand on their own behalf or that of their own sex". Yet in September 1913 McCracken was celebrating a "marriage of unionism and women's suffrage". Following reports that the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WPSU) would begin organising in Ulster, the secretary of Ulster Unionist Council had informed the UWUC that draft articles for an Ulster Provisional Government included votes for women. The nationalists would make no such undertaking with regard to a Dublin parliament.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: The marriage was short lived. In March 1914, Carson, after being door-stepped for fours days by the WSPU, ruled women's suffrage too divisive an issue for Unionists.There followed a series of arson-attacks on Unionist-owned and associated property that culminated in the bombing of Lisburn Cathedral, and in a trial in which the defendants, Dorothy Evans and Lillian Metge, created an uproar by demanding to know why James Craig, then arming Ulster Volunteers with German rifles, was not appearing on the same charges.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In August 1914, suffragists in Ulster suspended their agitation for the duration of the European war. Their reward was a women's franchise in 1918 and (six years after it was granted in the Irish Free State) equal voting rights in 1928.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In 1911 a Liberal administration was once again dependent on Irish nationalist MPs. In 1912 the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, introduced the Third Home Rule Bill. A more generous dispensation than the earlier bills, it would, for the first time, have given an Irish parliament an accountable executive. It was carried in the Commons by a majority of ten. As expected, it was defeated in the Lords, but as result of the crisis engendered by the opposition of the peers to the 1909 People's Budget the Lords now only had the power of delay. Home Rule would become law in 1914.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: There had long been discussion of giving "an option to Ulster". As early as 1843, The "Northern Whig" reasoned that if differences in ethncity ("race") and interests argue for Ireland's separation from Great Britain, they could as easily argue for a separation of north and south, with Belfast as the capital of its own "distinct kingdom". In response to the First Home rule Bill in 1886, Radical Unionists (Liberals who proposed federalising the relationship between all countries of the United Kingdom) likewise argued that "the Protestant part of Ulster should receive special treatment . . . on grounds identical with those that support the general contention for Home Rule" Northern unionists expressed no interest in a Belfast parliament, but in summarising "The Case Against Home Rule" (1912), L. S. Amery insisted that "if Irish Nationalism constitutes a nation, then Ulster is a nation too".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Faced with the eventual enactment of Home Rule, Carson appeared to press this argument. On 28 September 1912, Ulster Day, he was the first to sign, in Belfast City Hall, Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant. This bound signatories "to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In January 1913, Carson declared for the exclusion of Ulster and called for the enlistment of up to 100,000 Covenanters as drilled and armed Ulster Volunteers. On 23 September, the second Ulster Day, he accepted Chairmanship of a Provisional Government organised by Craig. If Home Rule were imposed "we will be governed as a conquered community and nothing else". By July 1914, the Ulster Covenant had been complemented by a British Covenant organised by Alfred Milner through the Union Defence League. Nearly two million signatories declared themselves willing to "supporting any action that may be effective" to prevent the people of Ulster being deprived "of their rights as citizens of the United Kingdom".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: On 4 August 1914, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. A few weeks later the Home Rule bill received Royal Assent but with implementation suspended for the duration of European hostilities. With the issue of Ulster's exclusion unresolved, leaders on both sides sought favour with the Government and the British public by committing themselves, and their volunteers, to the war effort.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: The strategy was challenged on the nationalist side. As the militants saw it, contingents of republican Irish Volunteers and Connolly's Citizen Army ensured that while Irishmen, at Redmond's urging, were sacrificing themselves for the sake of Belgium, Britain could be seen on the streets of Dublin in Easter 1916 suppressing an Irish strike for freedom. In the aftermath of the Rising and in the course of a national campaign against military conscription, the IPP's credibility was exhausted.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In the Coupon Election of December 1918, the first Westminster poll since 1910 and the first with all adult males, and women from age thirty, eligible to vote (the electorate tripled), the IPP was almost wholly replaced in nationalist constituencies by Sinn Féin. Acting on their mandate, Sinn Féin MPs met in Dublin in January 1919 as the Dáil Éireann, the national assembly, of the Republic declared in 1916 and demanded that the "English garrison" evacuate. In the six north-east counties, Unionists took 22 out of 29 seats.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Violence against Catholics in Belfast, driven out of workplaces and attacked in their districts, and a boycott of Belfast goods, accompanied by looting and destruction, in the South, helped consolidate "real partition, spiritual and voluntary" in advance of the constitutional partition. This otherwise uncompromising Republicans regarded as, at least for now, inevitable. In August 1920 Éamon de Valera, President of Dáil, declared in favour of "giving each county power to vote itself out of the Republic if it so wished".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In the hope of brokering a compromise that might yet hold Ireland within Westminster's jurisdiction, the Government proceeded with the Government of Ireland Act 1920. This provided for two subordinate parliaments. In Belfast a Northern Ireland parliament would convene for the six rather than nine Ulster counties (in three, Craig conceded, Sinn Féiners would make government "absolutely impossible for us"). The island's remaining twenty-six counties, Southern Ireland, would be represented in Dublin. In a joint Council, the two parliaments would be free to enter into all-Ireland arrangements.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In 1921, elections for these parliaments were duly held. But in Southern Ireland this was for parliament which, by British agreement, would now constitute itself as the Dáil Éireann of the Irish Free State. Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the twenty-six counties were to have the "same constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire as the Dominion of Canada". It was not clear to all parties at the time—civil war ensued—but this was de facto independence.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Unionists in Northern Ireland thus found themselves in the unanticipated position of having to work a constitutional arrangement that was the by-product of an attempt by British statesmen to reconcile the determination of the Protestant population of the North to remain without qualification within the United Kingdom with the aspirations of the Nationalist majority in Ireland for Irish unity and independence.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Writing to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Craig did insist that it was only as a sacrifice in the interest of peace that the North had accepted a home-rule arrangement its representatives had not asked for. No regret, however, was evident when addressing Belfast shipyard workers. Once Unionists had their own parliament, Craig assured the workers, "no power on earth would ever be able to touch them".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In debating the Government of Ireland Bill, Craig had conceded that, while unionists did not want a separate parliament, having in the six counties "all the paraphernalia of Government" might make it more difficult for future Liberal and/or Labour government to push Northern Ireland against the will of its majority into all-Ireland arrangements This was to become the prevailing attitude, summed up in a 1936 report of the Ulster Unionist Council: "Northern Ireland without a Parliament of her own would be a standing temptation to certain British Politicians to make another bid for a final settlement with the Irish Republic".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Unionists have emphasised that their victory in the Home Rule struggle was partial. It was not only that twenty-six of thirty-two Irish counties were lost to the Union, but that within the six retained unionists were "unable to make the British government in London fully acknowledge their full and unequivocal membership of the United Kingdom".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Although technically constituted by the decision of the six-county Parliament elected in 1920 to opt out of Irish Free State, the Government of Northern Ireland had some of the formal features of the Canada-style dominion status accorded to the new state in the South. Like Ottawa, Belfast had a two-chamber Parliament, a Cabinet and Prime Minister (Sir James Craig), and the Crown represented by a Governor and advised by a Privy Council. All this was suggestive, not of a devolved administration within the United Kingdom, but of a state constituted under the Crown outside the direct jurisdiction of the Westminster parliament.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: The impression that Ireland as a whole was being removed from Westminster politics was reinforced by refusal of the parties of Government and Opposition to organise, or canvass for votes, in the six counties. The Conservatives were content that Ulster Unionist Party MPs took their party whip in the House of Commons where, by general agreement, matters within the competence of the Belfast Parliament could not be raised. The Labour Party formed its first (minority) government in 1924 led by a man who in 1905 had been the election agent in North Belfast for the trade-unionist William Walker, Ramsey MacDonald. In 1907 MacDonald's party had held their first party conference in Belfast. Yet, at the height of the Home Rule Crisis in 1913, the British Labour Party had decided not stand against Irish Labour, and the policy of deferring to Irish parties was maintained after 1921.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: There was little incentive for unionists in Northern Ireland to assume the risks of splitting ranks in order to reproduce the dynamic of Westminster politics. Despite its broad legislative powers, the Belfast Parliament did not, in any case, have the kinds of tax and spending powers that might have engendered that kind of party competition. The principal sources of government revenue, income and corporation taxes, customs and excise, were entirely beyond Belfast's control.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Until the crisis of the late 1960s, unionism in Northern Ireland was effectively single-party politics. In his 28 years in Stormont (1925–1953) Tommy Henderson, a North Belfast independent, was a one-man unionist opposition. In the 1938 the Ulster Progressive Unionist Party of William John Stewart attempted to join him, averaging 30% of the vote in ten otherwise safe Government seats. After positively endorsing the Union, in 1953 the Northern Ireland Labour Party won three seats. But for the most part Government candidates were returned by unionist voters without contest. The Nationalist Party did not take their seats during the first Stormont parliament (1921–25), and did not accept the role of official Opposition for a further forty years.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Proclaimed by Craig a "Protestant parliament", and with a "substantial and assured" Unionist-Party majority the Stormont legislature could not, in any case, play a significant role. Real power "lay with the regional government itself and its administration": a structure "run by a very small number of individuals". Between 1921 and 1939 only twelve people served in cabinet, some continuously. It was in protest that the Progressive Unionists had proposed limited office in government to 8 years or two parliaments.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Although they had no positive political programme for a devolved parliament, the Unionist regime did attempt an early reform. Consistent with the obligation under the Government of Ireland Act to neither establish nor endow a religion, a 1923 Education Act provided that in schools religious instruction would only be permitted after school hours and with parental consent. Lord Londonderry, Minister of Education, acknowledged that his ambition was mixed Protestant-Catholic education. A coalition of Protestant clerics, school principals and Orangemen insisted on the imperative of bible teaching. Craig relented, amending the act in 1925. Meanwhile, the Catholic hierarchy refused to transfer any schools, and would not allow male Catholic student teachers to enrol in a common training college with Protestants or women. The school-age segregation of Protestants and Catholics was sustained.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: At the end of World War II, the Unionist Government under Basil Brooke (Lord Brookeborough) did make two reform commitments. First, it promised a programme of "slum clearance" and public housing construction (in the wake of the Belfast Blitz the authorities acknowledged that much of the housing stock had been "uninhabitable" before the war). Second, the Government accepted an offer from London—understood as a reward for the province's wartime service—to match the parity in taxation between Northern Ireland and Great Britain with parity in the services delivered. What Northern Ireland might loose in autonomy, it was going to gain in a closer, more equal, Union.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: By the 1960s Unionism was administering something at odds with the general conservatism of those to whom leadership had been conceded in the resistance to Irish Home Rule. Under the impetus of the post-War Labour government in Britain, and thanks to the generosity of British exchequer, Northern Ireland had emerged with an advanced welfare state. The Education Act (NI), 1947, "revolutionised access" to secondary and further education. Health-care provision was expanded and re-organised on the model of the National Health Service in Great Britain to ensure universal access. The Victorian-era Poor Law, sustained after 1921, was replaced with a comprehensive system of social-security. Under the Housing Act (NI) 1945 the public subvention for new home construction was even greater, proportionately, than in England and Wales.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In the 1960s, under premiership of Terence O'Neill, the Stormont administration intensified its efforts to attract outside capital. Investment in new infrastructure, training schemes coordinated with trade unions, and direct grants succeeded in attracting American, British and continental firms. In its own terms, the strategy was a success. While the great Victorian industries continued to decline, the level of manufacturing employment marginally increased. Yet Protestant workers and local Unionist leadership were unsettled. Unlike the established family firms and skilled-trades apprenticeships that had been "a backbone of unionism and protestant privilege", the new companies readily employed Catholics and women. But among Catholics too there was concern over the regional distribution of the new investment.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: When Derry lost out to Coleraine for siting of the New University of Ulster, and to Lurgan and Portadown for a new urban-industrial development, some sensed a wider conspiracy. Speaking to Labour MPs in London, John Hume suggested that "the plan" was "to develop the strongly Unionist-Belfast-Coleraine-Portadown triangle and to cause a migration from West to East Ulster, redistributing and scattering the minority to that the Unionist Party will not only maintain but strengthen its position".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Hume, a teacher from Derry, presented himself as a spokesman for an emerging "third force": a "generation of younger Catholics in the North" who were frustrated with the nationalist policy of non-recognition and abstention. (O'Neill wrote of "a new Catholic intelligentsia", the product, he imagined, of the 1947 Education Act, "unwilling to put up with the deprived status their fathers and grandfathers had taken for granted") Determined to engage the great social problems of housing, unemployment and emigration, they were willing to accept "the Protestant tradition in the North as legitimate" and that Irish unity should be achieved only "by the will of the Northern majority". Although they appeared to meet Unionists half way, Hume and those who joined him in what he proposed would be "the emergence of normal politics" presented the Unionism with a new challenge. Drawing on the civil rights movements in the United States, they spoke a language of universal rights which had a broad appeal for British and international opinion.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Since 1964, the Campaign for Social Justice had been collating and publicising evidence of discrimination in employment and housing. From April 1967 the cause was taken up by the Belfast-based Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, a broad labour and republican grouping with Communist Party veteran Betty Sinclair as chair. Seeking to "challenge . . . by more vigorous action than Parliamentary questions and newspaper controversy", NICRA decided to carry out a programme of marches.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In October 1968 Derry Housing Action Committee proposed a march in Derry. When a sectarian confrontation threatened—the Apprentice Boys of Derry announced their intention to march the same route—the NICRA executive was in favour of calling it off. But DHAC pressed ahead with activist Eamon McCann conceding that the "conscious, if unspoken strategy, was to provoke the police into overreaction and thus spark off mass reaction against the authorities". A later official inquiry suggests that, in the event (and as witnessed by three Westminster Labour MPs), all that had been required for police to begin "using their batons indiscriminately" was defiance of the initial order to disperse. The day ended with street battles in Derry's Catholic Bogside area. With this, onset of what is referred to as "The Troubles", Northern Ireland, for the first time in decades, was making British and international headlines, and television news.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: In January 1965, at O'Neill personal invitation, Taoiseach Seán Lemass (whose government was pursuing a similar modernising agenda in the South) made an unheralded visit to Stormont. After O'Neill reciprocated with a visit to Dublin, the Nationalists were persuaded, for the first time, to assume the role at Stormont of Her Majesty's Opposition. With this and other conciliatory gestures (unprecedented visits to a Catholic hospitals and schools, flying the Union flag at half mast for the death of Pope John XXIII) O'Neill incurred the wrath of those he understood as "self-styled 'loyalists' who see moderation as treason, and decency as weakness", among these the Reverend Ian Paisley.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: As Moderator of his own Free Presbyterian Church, and at a time when he believed mainline presbyteries were being led down a "Roman road" by the Irish Council of Churches, Paisley saw himself treading in the path of the "greatest son" of Irish Presbyterianism, Dr. Henry Cooke. Like Cooke, Paisley was alert to ecumenicism "both political and ecclesiastical". After the Lemass meeting, Paisely announced that "the Ecumenists . . . are selling us out", and called on Ulster Protestants to resist a "policy of treachery".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Many within his own party were alarmed when in December 1968 O'Neill sacked his hard-line Minister of Home Affairs, William Craig and proceeded with a reform package that addressed many of NICRA's demands. There was to be a needs-based points system for public housing; an ombudsman to investigate citizen grievances; the abolition of the rates-based franchise in council elections (One man, one vote); and The Londonderry Corporation (through which Unionists had administered a predominately nationalist city) was suspended and replaced by Development Commission. The broad security provisions of the Special Powers Act were to be reviewed.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: At a Downing Street summit on 4 November, Prime Minister Harold Wilson warned O'Neill that if Stormont backtracked on reform, the British government would reconsider its financial support for Northern Ireland. In a television address, O'Neill cautioned Unionists that they could not choose to be part of the United Kingdom merely when it "suits" them, and that "defiance" of the British government would be reckless. Jobs in the shipyards and other major industries, subsidies for farmers, people's pensions: "all these aspects of our life, and many others depend on support from Britain. Is a freedom to pursue the un-Christian path of communal strife and sectarian bitterness really more important to you than all the benefits of the British Welfare state?"


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: With members of his cabinet urging him to call Wilson's "bluff", and facing a Backbencher motion of no-confidence, in January 1969 O'Neill called a general election. The Ulster Unionist Party split. Pro-O'Neill candidates picked up Liberal and Labour votes but won only a plurality of seats. In his own constituency of Bannside, from which he had previously been returned unopposed, the Prime Minister was humiliated by achieving only a narrow victory over Paisely standing as a Protestant Unionist. On 28 April 1969, O'Neill resigned.


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: O'Neill's position had been weakened when, focused on demands not conceded (redrawing of electoral boundaries, immediate repeal of the Special Power Act and disbandment of the Special Constabulary), republicans and left-wing students disregarded appeals from within NICRA and Hume's Derry Citizens Action Committee to suspend protest. On 4 January 1969 People's Democracy marchers en route from Belfast to Derry were ambushed and beaten by loyalists, including off-duty Specials, at Burntollet Bridge That night, there was renewed street fighting in the Bogside. From behind barricades, residents declared "Free Derry", briefly Northern Ireland's first security-force "no-go area".


title: Unionism in Ireland

text: Tensions had been further heightened in the days before O'Neill's resignation when a number of explosions at electricity and water installations were attributed to the IRA. The later Scarman Tribunal established that the "outrages" were "the work of Protestant extremists . . . anxious to undermine confidence" in O'Neill's leadership. (The bombers, styling themselves "the Ulster Volunteer Force", had announced their presence in 1966 with a series of sectarian killings). The IRA did go into action on the night of 20/21 April, bombing ten post offices in Belfast in an attempt to draw the RUC away from Derry where there was again serious violence.