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| Affiliation | Ulster Unionist |
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| Name | Harry West |
| Address |
, Northern Ireland , United Kingdom |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
March 27, 1917 |
| Died |
February 01, 2004
(86 years) |
| Contributor | Easily Offended Man |
| Last Modifed | Juan Croniqueur
Aug 07, 2024 06:27pm |
| Tags |
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| Info | Henry William West was born on March 27 1917, the son of a Fermanagh farmer and secretary of the County Council. He attended Portora Royal School, where he was a keen sportsman, and captained rugby, rowing, and boxing. He later became a governor of the school, in which capacity he once tried to sack a history master who had the temerity to teach his pupils about the Easter Rising.
West's plans to read Agriculture at Queen's University Belfast were scuppered when his father died; at the age of 17, Harry had to run the family farm. Eventually he farmed 600 acres - a sizeable holding by Ulster standards. He was a member of the British Wool Marketing Board from 1950 to 1958, and President of the Ulster Farmers' Union from 1955 to 1956.
He was also High Sheriff of Fermanagh in 1954, the year he was asked to stand for Enniskillen on the death of T C Nelson, the Stormont MP for the seat. At the time West had no political experience; nor was he even, until much later, an Orangeman. He was, though, related by marriage to the Coopers and Fergusons, two of the leading families in Fermanagh Unionism. He was elected unopposed at the by-election and at the subsequent general elections in 1958 and 1962. His maiden speech was on the Marketing of Pigs Bill.
Given West's agricultural interests, it was unsurprising that in 1958 he became parliamentary secretary to the minister of agriculture, rising to minister in 1960.
But after Terence O'Neill succeeded Lord Brookeborough as prime minister in 1963, West proved a difficult colleague. He lost his ministerial post after he had acquired a 252-acre farm at Rossahilly from his cousin Albert Victor West in 1964 for ?24,250. O'Neill, who introduced a code to cover ministers' business dealings, claimed there had been a conflict of interest because nearby land was being considered for development.
When the Lands Tribunal met in April 1967, it found that the ?24,250 West had paid in 1964 was a concessionary price which reflected his family ties with the vendor. On April 26 O'Neill obliged West to resign, replacing him with his own distant relative James Chichester-Clark. West maintained that O'Neill had worked to get rid of him.
He was not alone in this opinion. Harry Diamond, a Republican Labour MP, also argued that West had been dismissed because he was one of O'Neill's opponents; while Faulkner, then minister of commerce, declared that West was "absolutely blameless". (In his posthumously published autobiography, Faulkner wrote that O'Neill's motives in removing West were "entirely political".) The Unionist backbench committee at Stormont sat on the fence, judging that O'Neill had acted properly but that West had not been dishonest.
In removing West, O'Neill made an enemy. West was critical of O'Neill's reformism, and in January 1969 he was one of 13 backbenchers who signed a motion calling for a change of leadership. When O'Neill resigned in April 1969 West voted for Faulkner against Chichester-Clark: the latter won.
West was as critical of the new prime minister as of the old. He claimed that the government showed a "lack of fight" in allowing the removal of the 'B' specials, and he opposed the creation of a central housing authority for the province. With other dissidents he formed the West Ulster Unionist Council (the 'West' was geographical, not Harry). In 1970 he was expelled from the parliamentary party.
In March 1971 West was recalled as minister of agriculture when Faulkner became prime minister, on condition that West accepted changes made during Chichester-Clark's premiership. Some months later he resigned from the West Ulster Unionist Council when it passed a motion of no confidence in the government. The following year saw the final crisis of Stormont. Edward Heath asked the Northern Ireland government to cede control of security. In cabinet on March 22 West advised Faulkner not to resign, but he was ignored. On March 24 Heath accepted Faulkner's resignation and Stormont was prorogued.
The autumn of 1973 saw a split between West and Faulkner when the latter accepted the principle of power-sharing. After the Sunningdale Talks (to which West was not invited) a power-sharing executive was formed, linked to the new Northern Ireland Assembly in which West represented Fermanagh-South Tyrone. Faulkner was ousted from the party leadership in January 1974.
On January 22 the party's standing committee elected West as leader, with 85 votes to James Molyneaux's 43. West, Ian Paisley, and Bill Craig (leader of his own Vanguard Unionist Party) formed the United Ulster Unionist Council to oppose the new executive. In the Westminster general election of February 28 1974, 11 of the 12 seats went to anti-Sunningdale candidates.
West himself was returned for Fermanagh-South Tyrone with 26,858 votes; he was the first Unionist leader to sit at Westminster since 1921.
Meanwhile events at home moved to a point of crisis. West, like Craig and Paisley, had been co-opted to the committee of the Ulster Workers' Council which had been formed to oppose the Sunningdale Agreement. The UWC included a number of trades unionists, besides Andy Tyrie, who belonged to the then still legal UDA. In May 1974 the UWC called a strike which tainted Unionism's reputation outside Northern Ireland. (West learned from his mistake and, with other Unionists and Loyalists, shunned a strike called by Ian Paisley in 1977.)
At the end of May 1974 the strike brought down the executive. West proved to be less successful at the next general election. On October 10 1974 he polled 30,285 votes against 32,795 for Frank McManus, the sole nationalist candidate.
Despite losing his seat, West remained leader of the UUP and UUUC; Molyneaux became leader of the parliamentary party. However, West's absence from Westminster proved a weakness in the long run. In 1975 he was elected to the Constitutional Convention established by the then Secretary of State, Merlyn Rees.
In August of that year West expressed the hope that agreement would be reached with the SDLP, but this did not happen. West rejected power-sharing on the basis of SDLP involvement in an executive. The Convention was eventually dissolved. Afterwards further talks between the UUP and SDLP during the summer of 1976 also came to nothing. The UUUC itself broke up in 1977.
West had problems with his own party. Molyneaux came under the intellectual influence of Enoch Powell, who had been elected as UUP MP for South Down in October 1974. West had helped secure Powell for the UUP, having visited him in April 1974 to sound him out about the South Down seat, but after Powell's election relations proved tense. Powell was an integrationist, and Molyneaux soon espoused that cause. West was for devolution, and attacked direct rule at his 1976 party conference as a form of "bondage". By the summer of 1976 Powell was hinting privately that Molyneaux should replace West.
West's own downfall followed swiftly. In the 1979 general election the UUP lost two seats to the DUP. Then, in June, the UUP put up two candidates in the first direct elections to the European Parliament: John Taylor and West. The tactic was disastrous. There were only three seats, and Ian Paisley won more first preference votes than both UUP candidates together. John Hume took the second seat, and Taylor the third once West's votes had been reallocated.
According to a pseudonymous article by David Trimble which appeared some months later in the magazine Fortnight, Molyneaux telephoned West just after the count to tell him to resign. West offered to, but some party officers persuaded him to stay on. In July, however, West left office, to be succeeded by Molyneaux, who declined to recommend him for a peerage.
Two years later West stood again in Fermanagh-South Tyrone, in a by-election precipitated by the death of Frank Maguire. His only nationalist opponent was the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who secured 30,492 votes against West's 29,046, and died in prison a month later. West claimed that moderate Catholics had voted for him but that he had lost because Paisleyites had spoiled their ballot papers.
His last major political initiative came after the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. With Austin Ardill and David McNarry he formed the Charter Group, which attacked Molyneaux's leadership in February 1987 on the grounds that he was not interested in devolution. In May 1987 West met Tom King, then Secretary of State, while other Unionists shunned the Northern Ireland Office in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. But the Charter Group soon faded from the scene.
In 1998, West, who had once been a patron of David Trimble, was a supporter of the Good Friday Agreement.
In person West was bluff, not overly intellectual, affable and well-built - at one point he weighed 17.5 stone.
Harry West married, in 1956, Maureen Hall, a schoolmistress; they had four sons and three daughters.
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