June 14 1975

It is interesting news that the British Conservative Party’s Parliamentary Northern Ireland Committee has set up a fact-finding sub-committee to study the political situation in the north.

The sub-committee will operate under the chairmanship of Mr Airey Neave, and it will be the considered opinion of a great many people all over the island, and in Britain too, that there is nothing Mr Airey Neave needs so urgently as someone to find him the facts.

If he is to be judged by past performance, and presumably it is only by his words and actions that a politician can be accurately judged, Mr Neave came to his post as Mrs [Margaret] Thatcher’s shadow spokesman for Northern Ireland with no more expertise than that of a Channel swimmer taking up a professorship in marine biology.

For anyone to enter the thorn-strewn arena of Northern Ireland’s past history and present problems with the sort of simplistic notions uttered by Mr Neave in his first speeches was naive to the point of embarrassment.

Had he but taken the briefest glance, it seemed to those who heard him, at such salient documents as the Hunt Report or the findings of the Cameron Commission, to ask no more of a man appointed to his position, it should have alerted him to the idea that there was more to the Northern Ireland situation that might meet the eye of a Colonel Blimp.

As Conservative spokesman for Northern Ireland, Mr Neave has not, so far, shown that he knows anything at all about matters so integral to an understanding of his role as the start of the civil rights movement and the causes which gave it impetus; or the assault upon Catholic homes and businesses in August 1969 which opened up an era of physical violence surpassing in horror anything which even this storm-torn area has known.

He has not indicated that he knows much about unemployment; or about discrimination in such employment as there is. He has not, so far, shown awareness of the foul facts of sectarian assassination.

He has not, as yet, referred to the inescapable fact that 600,000 members of the minority who live here, who bring up their families and pay their taxes, have exactly the same rights as the citizens of Manchester or any other part of the United Kingdom.

Nor has he, to date, mentioned the highly significant fact that in all the spate of elections to which we have been subjected, the minority has never voted into public office one single supporter of physical violence.

Irish News editorial attacking the Conservative Party spokesperson on Northern Ireland, Airey Neave, for his ignorance and simplistic understanding of Northern Ireland’s history and current problems. Neave was killed by an INLA car bomb in 1979.