Lynch’s Landslide, Paisley’s Strike
In 1977, political life on the island moved in sharply different directions. In the Republic, the general election of 16 June gave Fianna Fáil and its leader, Jack Lynch, an emphatic democratic mandate. In Northern Ireland, still governed directly from Westminster, an attempted loyalist general strike demonstrated both the continuing capacity for disruption and the limits of a strategy that had succeeded only three years earlier. Violence, prison protest and profound communal division remained facts of daily life in the North; south of the Border, voters rewarded promises of relief from taxation and a more confident response to economic difficulty.
