Basil McIvor

Unionist politician and educationist

William Basil McIvor, politician and lawyer: born Tullyhommon, Co Fermanagh 17 June 1928; called to the Bar, Northern Ireland 1950; MP (Unionist) for Larkfield, Northern Ireland Parliament 1969-72, Minister of Community Relations 1971-72; PC (NI) 1971; Member (Unionist) for South Belfast, Northern Ireland Assembly 1973-74, Minister for Education 1974; Resident Magistrate 1976-93; Chairman, Board of Governors, Lagan College, Belfast 1981-2004; OBE 1991; married 1953 Jill Anderson (two sons, one daughter); died Ballynahinch, Co Down 5 November 2004.

The Unionist politician Basil McIvor served as a minister in Brian Faulkner's government in the Northern Ireland Parliament, before direct rule was imposed by Edward Heath in 1972. He was then Minister of Education in the power-sharing executive of 1973-74 and a passionate advocate of integrated education for the province.

McIvor was born on the very edge of the Union. The child of a Methodist clergyman, he was born in 1928 in the Tullyhommon part of the village of Pettigo, which straddles the Northern Ireland border - the larger part of Pettigo being in Donegal. About a hundred yards from McIvor's birthplace is a memorial in the Irish Republic to four young IRA volunteers killed by British forces on 4 June 1922, an incident ordered by Winston Churchill following an intensification of IRA aggressive activity in the area.

McIvor's father had been a Methodist clergyman. He was in Cork in the early 1920s at a time of substantial anti-Protestant violence and later moved to Mayo where matters were only slightly better. Keeping in touch with small Methodist congregations in outlying areas meant a need for open-air services in market towns, precisely the sort of activity which was not universally appreciated by local Catholics.

But despite this there was no bitterness in the McIvor household. His parents strongly opposed the language of sectarian recrimination and he was raised with a strong sense of Irishness. McIvor later wrote,

My upbringing as a son of the Methodist manse in the border county of lovely Fermanagh informed my attitude to the Northern Ireland problem. I have always been conscious of my Irishness, born as I was in a part of Northern Ireland where, in the Thirties, the population was more or less equally divided between Protestants and Catholics, and where the two communities existed side by side in reasonable harmony. It was a place where Irishness and Britishness overlapped, where English was spoken, but with the Irish idiom.

McIvor did not romanticise Fermanagh. In his 1998 memoir, Hope Deferred, he recalled the negative impact on Catholics and nationalists of the sectarian speeches of Sir Basil Brooke, later Unionist prime minister of Northern Ireland. He also recalled a local republican enjoying a cup of tea and wheaten bread with a Protestant family saying, "Sorry will I be the day I have to shoot my neighbours." But as a young boy in Fermanagh, McIvor was unaware of the violence going on in Belfast and he was also influenced by his father's classic Wesleyan view that Catholics and Methodists had more in common than that which divided them.

McIvor was later educated at Methodist College in Belfast and at Queen's University where he read Law. After graduating he became active at the Bar but was drawn into politics in the mid 1960s. This was the era of the premiership of Terence O'Neill (1963-69), the great white hope of liberal Unionism. McIvor saw himself as being part of a liberal tradition in Ulster Protestant thinking which goes back to William Drennan. He remained always a firm and unapologetic believer in the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland but was also convinced of the need for power-sharing with the local nationalist community.

In 1969 McIvor won the seat of Larkfield in the Stormont Parliament - among those who canvassed for him was a young David Trimble. Larkfield was half Protestant and half Catholic and the scale of McIvor's victory indicated the ability of a liberal Unionist to attract Catholic support in areas such as Andersonstown which were subsequently to be identified with a hard-line republican stance.

Indeed, when internment was introduced in Northern Ireland in August 1971, McIvor was placed in a difficult position. He was chairman of the Northern Ireland group of Amnesty International. Radio Free Belfast, broadcasting from the Falls Road on the hour every hour, advised relatives of internees to contact him for help in securing the release of their loved ones. His wife Jill received frequent phone calls from his Andersonstown constituents who complained, "There's Basil McIvor getting niggers out of jail and our wee Hughie walking down the Crumlin Road was lifted for nothing."

When Brian Faulkner became Prime Minister in 1971, McIvor was offered the seat of Community Relations in the cabinet, a seat he held until Edward Heath's government prorogued Stormont in 1972 and introduced direct rule from Westminster. McIvor again served Faulkner as Minister of Education in the power-sharing executive of 1973-74.

He now became, for the first time, a passionate supporter of integrated education, believing that the province's schooling system, built around the Catholic-Protestant division, was intensifying sectarianism. He ran into opposition immediately from the Catholic clergy and certain Protestant interests. The Labour direct rule team which replaced him judged that integrated educated was too a hot a potato and dropped the issue. It was not until the return to Stormont of another Ulsterman, the Conservative politician Dr Brian Mawhinney that integrated education had a friend at the heart of the system. But McIvor never wavered in his enthusiasm for the cause.

After the loyalist strike in 1974, which destroyed the power-sharing executive, McIvor retired from political life. He became a respected resident magistrate but he also played a pivotal role in the formation of the pioneering Lagan College, the flagship of Northern Ireland's growing integrated school sector.

Paul Bew