Fifty years ago this week, the Ulster Workers’ Council strike was in full flight, bringing Northern Ireland to its knees over the Sunningdale Agreement, which brought power-sharing at Stormont between the pro-Brian Faulker wing of the Unionist Party, the SDLP and the Alliance Party.
More controversially at that time, the Council of Ireland also hoped to bring about a new era of cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
This was the first serious attempt of the Troubles era to implement a political solution to end the cycle of violence that had started five years earlier.
This initiative’s failure has often been cited as a great missed opportunity. As the Executive fell at the end of May 1974, it would be another 25 years before devolution returned.
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Missed opportunities. There have been so many of them in our history. In the decades after the UWC strike, we had statements reflecting that the Good Friday Agreement was Sunningdale for slow learners, and more recent leaders in unionism have reflected that they were too slow to accept power-sharing in the early 1970s.
It would be wrong to lead........