The man behind Ulster Vanguard

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32879, 30 March 1972, Page 11

The man behind Ulster Vanguard

(By

BERNARD WEINRAUB,

, of the New York Times News Service, throuoh N.Z.P-A.)

BELFAST, March 29. He speaks in a solemn monotone, rarely raising his voice. At packed rallies he steps to the rostrum and, almost hypnotically, wills the crowd into silence. His voice is even and emotionless, but his words are electric.

“One day it may be our job, if politicians fail, to liquidate the enemy,” he told 60,000 cheering Protestants at a recent rally. And last month he told a visitor. “There are still some chances of averting a ProtestantRoman Catholic war, but they are very slim.” After a turbulent career as a politician on the Protestant Right, Mr William Craig has now emerged as the cen-

tral figure behind a new, powerful—and. to Roman Catholics, frightening—coalition of hard-line Protestants, the Ulster Vanguard Movement. For the first time in the 51-year history of Northern Ireland, a Protestent organisation has now successfully united members of the work-ing-class with the Orange Order, the semi-secret fraternal organisation with political and social muscle in Ulster. “We are an umbrella organisation to bring together loyalist people and organisations of all classes and creeds,” the dismissed Cabinet Minister says. “Vanguard will oppose any Ulster takeover. We oppose any inroads into our Constitution. We have rallied our strength, and are ready to do or die.” Mr Craig’s U.V.M. coinciding with the political initia-

tive from Britain, stirs blunt threats of a Protestant backlash. and raises a new spectre of violence in the racked province. Mr Craig himself arrives at rallies with a motor-cycle escort, preceded by a utility vehicle wth Union Jacks flying. The rallies are mobbed by youths wearing dark glasses, marching in military formation behind banners. To his many opponents—including another Protestant Right-winger, the Rev. lan Paisley—Mr Craig is “iresponsible,” “dangerous,” “a man of limited intelligence,” and “power hungry.” To his associates, and to some observers. Mr Craig is the symbol of a stubborn core of militant Protestants who are terrified of the loosening of Protestant dominance in Northern Ireland.

Ambitious, and driving, Mr Craig is. at first glance, a humourless lawyer whose rhetoric inflames a tense populace. Like several other Northern Ireland politicians, however, he is a complex figure and a study in contrasts. There are few uncertainties or contradictions, though, about his statements concerning the Roman Catholic minority—statements that chill many Roman Catholics, some of whom have called him “Adolf Craig.” He has made references to "the lack of family planning among the Roman Catholic cbmmunity,” and has said that there are educational and social reasons why more Roman Catholics are not given appointments to State positions; he later apologised to the Northern Ireland Bar Association for those comments.

Mr Craig has warned the Protestant Unionists: "The Roman Catholic community has quite different standards of democracy from what we have because their religious faith dictates that it must be that way. ... It would be dangerous to relv on individual Roman Catholics until there is a fundamental change on the part of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Probably Mr Craig’s mostquoted comments, however, were made before his recent speech calling for the “liquidation” of the I.R.A. terrorists, in a series of speeches

in 1968, which led to his dismissal from the post of Minister of State for Home Affairs. At that time, the civil rights demonstrations were beginning. “There is all this nonsense about civil rights,” he told a cheering Belfast audience. “There are our old traditional enemies; exploiting the situation. The civil rights movement is bogus and is made up of ill-informed radicals and people who see in unrest a chance to renew the campaign of violence. “There is a difference between our concept of democracy and that of a Roman Catholic country, and the greatest civil right they have in the Irish Republic is to leave it”

William Craig was bom on December 2, 1924, in Cookstown, also the birthplace of Miss Bernadette Devlin, the militant member of the British Parliament. His father was a bank official. He attended Dungannon Royal School, Lame Grammar School and Queen’s University, Belfast, but his school career was interrupted by the war: he joined the Royal Air Force and served in Bomber Command as an air gunner. On his release he went back to the university to resume his law studies. “I was appalled at the radical way of thinking that was prevalent, so I formed a Conservative group, and things began to develop from there,” he recalls. “I found myself drawn closer and closer into the centre of politics.” Mr Craig qualified as a solicitor in 1952, and joined a law firm in Lurgan. In 1960, he was elected Unionist member of the Stormont from the Lame district of Antrim, and two years later he was appointed to the influential post of Chief Whip. His rise through the Unionist hierarchy was rapid: he succeeded Mr Brian Faulkner as Minister of Home Affairs in April, 1963, and in the following years he served as Minister of Development, Minister of Health and Local Government, and again, Minister of Home Affairs. His reputation, and his career, were based solidly on hard-line Protestantism. He repeatedly rejected the civil

rights demand of the Roman Catholics, urged wide police powers, and threatened to use force to cope with “the conspiracy of evil persons”-— a favourite phrase. Mr Craig and his Germanborn wife and their two sons live in the upper-class Malone Road area of Belfast.