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Pat Smyth, a civil servant with the National Assistance Board in West Tyrone from the 1930's to the 1950's, recalls his memories, experiences and the larger than life personalities he encountered on the way.
In the 1940's Omagh town and West Tyrone had the best of government in terms of infrastructure, but the worst in the eyes of the Nationalist community who were in the majority.
At local government level it had a town council and elected poor law guardians. The majority had several Nationalist members of the Stormont Government and Senate, plus two Nationalist members at Westminster but they were in practice almost totally impotent politically.
Being a county town, that is to say the capital of county Tyrone, the seat of all the various local government departments was Omagh. It was an assize town and county court venue as well. The clerk of the Crown and Peace had his office at Omagh courthouse. The Secretary to the county council, the county surveyor, the 'county this' and the 'county that' and the Land Registry Office were all to be found there as well, with their underlings.
There was a plethora of solicitors and justices of the peace, and a resident magistrate. With the local offices of various Stormont Government departments including the Ministry of Finance Valuation, the Works Division, the Ministry of Labour and the Assistance Board, plus the offices of Imperial (Westminster) Departments like Inland Revenue, Post Office, etc., whatever else the area may have lacked, it did not lack the manpower and the machinery to provide good government.
Unhappily, it also had the worst of government in terms of civil rights with the majority population deprived of their proportionate share of local government votes through gerrymandering by the ruling Unionist Party.
Civil Services rules precluded public officials like myself from any prominent role in politics; hence I had a kind of neutral sideline seat. In addition, I had a foot in either camp by virtue of my religious affiliations and my official status. I was treated with courtesy and fairness at all times by the ruling party - at least until I put my name down for a new council house, when, by deliberately refraining from canvassing, I paid the penalty.
A prominent public figure on my own side of the house professed outrage at such shabby treatment for an essential public servant, but when one of his own houses fell vacant, and I expected to get it, he decided to furnish it and rent it out in apartments! The setting up of the Housing Trust came at the right time as far as I was concerned and I had no difficulty in getting a house in 1951.
In the political climate to which I have referred, the press had a key role. There were two rival weekly papers - the Tyrone Constitution (The Con) and the Ulster Herald, which were the mouthpieces of their respective political parties.
A prominent Unionist, Robert Parke, was editor of 'The Con' and Anthony Mulvey, a Nationalist M.P. was editor of 'The Herald', which was owned or partly owned by Louis Lynch, a Nationalist Senator at Stormont and 'The Con's' Unionist orientation was manifest
From their respective chairs, the two editors stirred the political pot and poured scorn, on the opposition. If either was spotted even speaking to the other in public, he was apt to get stick from the more fanatical of his supporters.
What these folks failed to understand was that neither Parke nor Mulvey let politics take precedence over civilised standards of personal relationships. They were actually on friendly terms and when Mulvey was struck down with illness in the 1950's, Parke compiled his regular news contributions for the 'Irish News' and faithfully sent them in for him.
After the war, when the Labour Party gained power at Westminster, Anthony Mulvey applied constant pressure on the then Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, in Parliament, to influence him to intervene in the field of civil rights but always the response was the same. 'These are matters for the Government of Northern Ireland and we cannot intervene'.
It was not until Austin Currie took on the role of squatter in a new council house at Caledon that Whitehall first began to take notice.
As an M.P., Mulvey was frustrated by vacillations at the grass roots level of the local Nationalist party. One year they were totally for abstention, the next they were totally against. When in exasperation he eventually demanded an undertaking and imposed a condition that he would be allowed to take his seat if elected, and resigned his post as newspaper editor, he found himself out on a limb a very short time after.
Attlee, the then British Prime Minister, had called a snap election, and in the run up to it the pro-abstentionist Nationalist lobby got the upper hand again. Mulvey was left with no seat, no salary and no job. This dealt him a cruel blow and probably shortened his life.
Paddy McGill, a lively Derry man, took over the editorial chair when Mulvey resigned. He was quite a firebrand verbally, and seized every opportunity to castigate the Unionists publicly. Louis Lynch, who later became Austin Currie's father-in-law, had held a seat in the Senate at Stormont and he resigned to make way for McGill.
The latter was bi-lingual and when he switched to his native Irish language during debates in the /Senate he caused uproar. He also became a headache for the Hansard note-takers, and has gone down in history as the fastest speaker ever to address the Second Chamber
Three popular newspaper reporters of that time come to mind - Gerry Quigley of 'The Herald', Bob McFadden of 'The Con' and Donal Gillespie of 'The Herald'. Donal was a student and he left to answer a call to the priesthood.
A chap called Shepherd was also appointed as a welfare officer, but the top position of County Welfare Officer went to Colonel Jones who made headlines during his brief reign. He worked closely with me, since I had control of cash grants
With both Unionists and Nationalists to contend with in defending decisions given on claims for means-tested pensions and benefits, I was kept on my toes - not to mention the attentions of a host of solicitors, some Unionist, other Nationalist who also closely monitored case work. Solicitors, the Crown Solicitor, the Clerk of the Crown and Peace, and local M.P.'s all queried our decisions from time to time on behalf of clients, and needed letters of explanation.
When I was transferred from the lowlands of South Antrim to the highlands of West Tyrone my horizons were significantly widened, not only territorially but in terms of politics as well.
In contrast to South Antrim where Unionists had, and always have had, a solid majority, County Tyrone had, and still has, a solidly anti-partitionist majority. Pre-partition the division in Tyrone was in the region of 71,000 anti-partitionist votes of 57,000 Unionists, with the seats divided eleven to nine.
By abolishing the proportional representation voting system, allocating multiple votes to companies and re-aligning the boundaries of electoral areas, the Unionist government at Stormont guaranteed its supporters in County Tyrone sixteen local government seats against eleven for the anti-partitionists.
Under the Westminster rules for electing members to the Imperial Parliament the mid-Tyrone constituency, which included Omagh, was held by two anti-partitionists, namely Anthony Mulvey and Patrick Cunningham.
Although the U.K. Parliament was constitutionally supreme, Stormont jealously guarded its jurisdiction over internal affairs and when Nationalist grievances, such as bias to the allocation of houses and jobs, was raised with the British Home Secretary by Nationalist M.P.s his stock answer was to outline Stormont's constitutional responsibility and decline to comment further.
I was duty bound to read all the local newspapers as part of my official duties and long before I left Omagh I was indeed well versed in local politics.
West Tyrone readers were apt to regard every word that was said in 'their' paper as gospel and all that was said in the other local paper as lies. As an erudite doctor of philosophy, McGill was a master of the written word and his invective was more deadly than the sword. McGill's journalistic opponent, Robert Parke, did not miss him and hit the wall when he responded, and it all added up to a lively on-going debate.
Compared with South Antrim, the interest taken in revising the electoral register was phenomenal in Tyrone. In each session every addition or deletion was liable to cause a dogfight between opposing camps, every word of which was publicised in the newspapers.
Before I went to Tyrone I hadn't even heard of the electoral register, as interest in South Antrim was negligible. Candidates like Sir Milne Barbour were regularly elected unopposed and if there was an election at all the anti-partitionists mostly ignored it, leaving the way open for wholesale impersonation and massive landslide victories.
That most certainly did not happen in County Tyrone. Anyone who refused to come out to vote was publicly blackballed, and even the dead voted on occasions! I recall how I planned to stay at home, when the first election was held after I went to Omagh, but before the poll closed I was almost frog-marched to the polling station. I had never before bothered to cast my vote.
Pat Smyth, 2001
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