Sunningdale and the Common Market1973 CE

Dateline

In 1973 Ireland entered a year of strikingly different horizons. On 1 January the Republic joined the European Economic Community, acquiring a formal place in a continental organisation alongside the United Kingdom and Denmark. Yet the same island remained convulsed by the Troubles. Violence crossed and unsettled the border; constitutional experiments in Northern Ireland sought to replace the old Stormont order; and Dublin changed government for the first time in sixteen years. By December, the Sunningdale Agreement offered an unprecedented scheme for power-sharing and Irish-British co-operation. It was a year in which the language of consent, Europe and institutions competed with the immediate reality of bombs, killings and communal fear.

A New European Membership

Ireland became a member of the EEC on 1 January 1973. The step followed the accession treaty signed in Brussels in January 1972 and the Irish referendum of May 1972, in which an overwhelming majority had approved entry. Membership did not instantly transform farms, factories or family budgets. It did, however, alter the framework within which Irish governments, businesses and farmers would make decisions. Ireland now participated directly in a Community enlarged from six to nine states, while Britain’s simultaneous entry mattered especially because Irish trade had long been tied closely to the British market.

The practical attraction of accession was clear. The Republic remained comparatively poor, with a large agricultural workforce and persistent emigration. Access to the Common Agricultural Policy and to wider European markets promised better prospects for farmers and a route away from an economy dependent upon Britain. That promise should not be mistaken for an immediate windfall: adaptation to Community rules, competition and changing prices would take time. But 1973 marked a decisive reorientation. Ireland was no longer simply seeking favourable terms from its nearest neighbour; it had a seat in a wider European system.

The new connection had a cultural and linguistic aspect as well as an economic one. Irish acquired official, though limited, Treaty status in the European Communities. Irish versions of the treaties were available and citizens could correspond with Community institutions in Irish, but it was not yet a full working language of the institutions. This modest status nevertheless placed the language, and the State that supported it, within a new international setting.

Europe also entered the Northern Irish settlement discussions later in the year. The Sunningdale communiqué explicitly identified the impact of EEC membership as a field in which north-south co-operation might prove useful. Thus a development often remembered as the Republic’s economic opening was, in 1973 itself, already connected to attempts to make the border less divisive in practical affairs.

Election and Constitutional Change

Political authority in the Republic changed hands after the general election of 28 February. Fianna Fáil, led by Taoiseach Jack Lynch, had governed since 1957. It won the largest single party total, but Fine Gael and Labour had fought as a united opposition and together secured the numbers to govern. Liam Cosgrave became Taoiseach at the head of the Fine Gael–Labour National Coalition, with Labour leader Brendan Corish as Tánaiste. The incoming government inherited both the opportunities of EEC membership and the grave diplomatic and security questions posed by Northern Ireland.

The election campaign had included the Northern crisis, but domestic concerns were also prominent: prices, housing, employment, public services and confidence in government. This was important in its own right. The Republic was not merely an observer of events across the border; it was a parliamentary democracy whose voters could replace an administration, and did so, while the constitutional arrangements of Northern Ireland were being reconstructed from Westminster.

Two constitutional changes took legal effect on 5 January, following referendums held the previous December. The Fourth Amendment reduced the voting age at Dáil and presidential elections and referendums from twenty-one to eighteen. The February general election was held too soon for the new age threshold to alter its electorate, but the amendment was an unmistakable recognition of younger adults as full political participants. The Fifth Amendment removed from Article 44 the Constitution’s recognition of the Catholic Church’s ‘special position’ and its naming of several other denominations. Ireland remained socially conservative and predominantly Catholic, but this was a formal movement away from denominational preference in the State’s basic law.

These changes were not products of a sudden 1973 referendum campaign: voters had approved them on 7 December 1972. Their promulgation in January 1973 is what firmly places them in this year’s political record. Together, they show that constitutional life in the Republic was changing on questions of citizenship and religion even as the island’s territorial question grew more dangerous.

Violence Across the Border

No institutional development insulated ordinary people from the conflict. On New Year’s Day, the bodies of Breege Porter and Oliver Boyce were found near Burnfoot, County Donegal; they had been killed by loyalist paramilitaries. The murders brought the violence of Northern Ireland directly into the Republic’s borderlands at the opening of the year. On 20 January, a car bomb in Sackville Place, Dublin, killed Thomas Douglas and injured seventeen others. No organisation claimed responsibility, though the attack was widely believed at the time to have been loyalist. These events underlined the vulnerability of people and places south of the border without collapsing the important distinction between the Republic’s political institutions and the conflict’s principal theatre in Northern Ireland.

In Northern Ireland, killings, shootings and bomb attacks continued through the year, committed by republican and loyalist paramilitaries as well as occurring amid security-force operations. The human consequences were local and intimate: bereavement, damaged streets, disrupted work, fear at checkpoints and the hardening of segregated neighbourhoods. On 8 March, the Provisional IRA detonated car bombs in London, including one at the Old Bailey, injuring more than 200 people. The attack demonstrated that the conflict could not be contained within the island and increased the pressure upon British and Irish leaders to find a political route out of violence.

It would be wrong, however, to portray 1973 simply as a year of unbroken escalation. It was also a year of sustained constitutional engineering. The difficulty was that negotiations took place while violence itself continued to destroy trust and while each proposed arrangement was judged through sharply opposed unionist and nationalist understandings of sovereignty, security and legitimacy.

The Border Poll and a New Assembly

On 8 March the British Government held the Northern Ireland border poll, asking voters whether Northern Ireland should remain within the United Kingdom or join a united Ireland. Nationalists largely boycotted it, regarding the poll as illegitimate and its result predetermined. Turnout was about 57 per cent, and more than 98 per cent of votes cast favoured remaining in the United Kingdom. The figure therefore measured participation in a deeply contested exercise rather than a shared constitutional settlement. Far from removing the border from politics, the poll emphasised the gulf between the communities.

The British Government’s White Paper, Northern Ireland Constitutional Proposals, followed on 20 March. It proposed a 78-member Assembly elected by proportional representation, a power-sharing administration and a Council of Ireland. Westminster would retain responsibility for law and order. The design accepted that majority rule by unionists alone could no longer command sufficient legitimacy, while stopping short of any alteration in Northern Ireland’s constitutional position.

The Northern Ireland Assembly Act became law in May, and an Assembly election took place on 28 June. Parties supporting the White Paper won a majority of seats, though that headline disguised major internal divisions, particularly among unionists. The Assembly first met at Stormont on 31 July amid noisy protest. The Northern Ireland Constitution Act, enacted on 18 July, abolished the old Parliament of Northern Ireland and established in statute that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom unless a majority voted otherwise. It also made provision for a devolved administration and prohibited religious and political discrimination by public authorities. The constitutional architecture was extensive; whether it could command allegiance was another matter.

Sunningdale’s Uncertain Promise

During the autumn, negotiations involving Brian Faulkner’s pro-power-sharing unionists, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Alliance Party produced agreement in principle on an Executive. On 21 November, an eleven-member power-sharing Executive was announced, comprising six Faulknerite unionists, four SDLP members and one Alliance member. It had not yet taken office: that would occur on 1 January 1974. In 1973, the achievement was the agreement to govern together, not the operation of a stable devolved government.

The decisive further talks took place at Sunningdale, Berkshire, from 6 to 9 December. The British and Irish governments joined representatives of the Executive-designate. The resulting communiqué repeated two positions that had seemed irreconcilable: the Irish Government continued to uphold the aspiration to unity by consent, while the British Government affirmed that Northern Ireland’s status could change only if a majority there wished it. It then proposed a Council of Ireland: a Council of Ministers with equal northern and southern membership, acting unanimously, and a 60-member Consultative Assembly drawn equally from Dáil Éireann and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The planned Council was intended to identify and administer agreed functions where co-operation could avoid duplication and serve agriculture, commerce, industry and other shared interests. For Dublin, it supplied an institutional Irish dimension. For the SDLP, it offered recognition that relationships on the island mattered. For Faulkner and his supporters, participation in power-sharing did not mean surrendering the Union. Yet many unionists regarded the Council as a dangerous step towards a united Ireland. On 10 December, loyalists announced an Ulster Army Council to resist it. The agreement’s opponents were organised before the new institutions had begun their work.

Prosperity, Pressure and an Open Future

For households, 1973 combined expectations of European opportunity with gathering economic anxiety. The international oil crisis began late in the year, exposing Ireland’s dependence on imported energy and helping to usher in an era of higher prices and economic instability. Contemporary political debate also reflected concern over inflation. EEC entry offered farmers new supports and markets, but rising energy and input costs could quickly erode gains. The optimistic language of modernisation therefore coexisted with worries recognisable at the shop counter, on the farm and in workplaces.

By year’s end, Ireland had acquired new European responsibilities, a new coalition government, a lower voting age and a more secular constitutional text. Northern Ireland had acquired a new Assembly, the prospect of a cross-community Executive and a proposed all-Ireland Council. None of this ended violence or settled competing national allegiances. Still, 1973 established ideas that would outlast its immediate disappointments: consent as the basis of constitutional change, power-sharing as a necessary remedy to exclusion, and structured north-south co-operation as a practical part of any durable settlement.