THE ULSTERCONFLICT nomies of scale" anda larger state sector, but this would have to be done on a basis of "mutual agreement", since the lessons of history had taught about the dangers of backlash. The Labour government had not, however, reckoned with the ferocity of the opposition that even the hint of any "abandonment" of the Ulster Protestants would unleash among the Ulster small farmers and heavy industrial workers, who knew that their economic futures depended on the continuance of British subsidies to agricultura! products and the Harland and Wolff shipyard. The Reverend Ian Paisley who acted as a megaphone for sorne of these interests denounced the O'NeillLemass talks straightaway, and the British government were soon made ware of the existence of an Ulster Volunteer Force prepared to committ sectarian murders to uphold the superiority of the Protestants. Nor had the Labour government reckoned that Lemass's attempt at a pragmatic accomodation between North and South, trying to wither the border issue away, in the interests of the new Free Trade policies, would generate an area of political confusion which the I.R.A. would exploit with considerable ability. 1.R.A. RESURGENS After its defeat in the 1956-57border dispute the I.R.A. had changed to social agitational tactics. When Lemass seemed to have it in mind that the partition issue could be discreetly forgotten in the course of a pragmatic economic development, the I.R.A. started to campaign against Fianna Fail's desertion of its Sinn Fein inheritance with regard to trade policy and to relations with the North. As far as its Sinn Fein economic policies were concerned nobody took any notice of the I.R.A., but its traditional view that the border was only to be erased by military force aroused considerable enthusiasm. There can be no doubt that the middle class Catholics who launched the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association did not intend that it should become a vehicle for a relaunching of the Republican offensive in the North, but the tactics employed in the campaign eventually had that effect. One of the central demands of the campaign was "One man, one vote", which was intended to evoke in the mind of the British public the image of Ulster being a society with a colonial structure like 67
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