On This Day / November 4, 1971

Summary: On This Day – 4th November 1971, Brian Faulkner defended Unionist majority rule while acknowledging minority rights, as Catholic priests demanded an inquiry into allegations of torture. Edited by Éamon Phoenix.

Faulkner on Minority | On This Day – 4th November 1971

STORMONT Premier, Mr Brian Faulkner, said last night that the only way to deal with the IRA was to defeat them militarily by inflicting such losses that they would conclude that they were not going to shake the will of the community or overthrow the government.

Speaking in Ardglass, County Down, Mr Faulkner said anti-Unionists had tended to be carried away by their own propaganda into making impossible demands and taking up ridiculous positions from which they found it difficult to retreat.

The Government’s every blemish had been put under the microscope but their achievements had been swept aside as being of no account.

Mr Faulkner said he was not going to don the sackcloth and ashes for ‘fifty years of Unionist misrule’.

He said the Government fully recognised that because of historical political allegiances, there was a special problem in NI in that the political minority had no prospect of coming to power.

That was why issues of civil rights and the guarantee of fair play in every sphere was especially important.

‘But no-one should imagine’, he said, ‘that this special position gives any minority the right to veto the operation of government or to exercise some sort of controlling influence.

The majority remains the majority and the rights of Unionists are not to be disregarded….’

2 RUC Men Shot Dead

TWO policemen were shot dead as they were investigating a burglary in the Andersonstown area of Belfast yesterday.

Priests Call for Torture Probe

SEVENTY-seven per cent of the North’s priests have signed a statement asking for a judicial inquiry to expose the full truth of what has been done to people arrested since August 9 under the Special Powers Act’.

In their statement, the priests say: ‘We are convinced that brutality, physical and mental torture and psychological pressures have been inflicted on the men arrested under the Special Powers Act.

We believe these barbarities are still being inflicted on innocent people convicted of no crime – at the Palace Barracks, Holywood, under the protection of law by the Special Branch of the RUC’.

Copies of the statement have been sent to Westminster MPs, General Tuzo [the GOC] and the Taoiseach.

(Éamon Phoenix editor’s note: BRIAN Faulkner’s belated acknowledgment that the northern minority were entitled to fair play and equality made no Impact on the nationalist community while drawing angry criticism from his own right wing.

The call from nearly 400 priests for a judicial inquiry into the widespread allegations of the torture of detainees underscored the deepening chasm between the Unionist government and the nationalist population.)

On This Day – 4th November 1971

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