Labour and the North

NEITHER of Labour's two Northern Ireland secretaries, Merlyn Rees and Roy Mason, is remembered for any success in shifting the Northern deadlock.

Merlyn Rees was unlucky enough to arrive at Stormont in March 1974 as hardline unionist and loyalist forces were gearing up for a full-scale assault against the power-sharing executive of Brian Faulkner's unionists, the SDLP and Alliance.

The result was the Ulster Workers' Council strike and the executive's collapse two months later. Mr Rees spent most of the next two years vainly trying to make the next attempt at political accommodation, the Constitution Convention, work.

In February 1975 the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire, and Rees allowed them toe become involved in talks with British government officials in the hope that they would become "politicised".

However, a unionist majority in the 1975 elections to the Convention ruled out any prospect of a repeat of the power-sharing experiment, and the rising level of loyalist paramilitary attacks led to the virtual end of the IRA ceasefire by the summer of that year.

His successor, Roy Mason, believed less in political initiatives than in strong security measures.

For this reason he is remembered fondly by many unionists as the most effective secretary of state of all, but detested by nationalists.

His main success was in facing down an 1977 attempt, led by Rev Ian Paisley, to stage a re-run of the Ulster Workers' Council strike.

Another feature of his approach was to reduce the role of the British army and increase that of the RUC and the locally-recruited UDR in the struggle against the IRA - the so-called "Ulsterisation" of security.

He also emphasised the liberalisation of the laws on divorce and homosexuality to bring them into line with those in a Labour-governed Britain.