THE year 1966 was the year when Terence O'Neill's policy of improving relations between the two communities in the North and between North and South began to go badly wrong.
Throughout the year, O'Neill faced the outright hostility of the Rev Ian Paisley and his supporters on the one hand and the newly formed Ulster Volunteer Force on the other. The prospect of republican commemorations in the North to mark the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising also raised the political temperature in March.
By February 1966, Dr Paisley had launched a virulently anti Catholic weekly, the Protestant Telegraph, and by April he had formed the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee with the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV) as its political power base. Dr Paisley's activities dominated the year's news.
In March he brought Sir Edward Carson's son to Belfast where he warned that "O'Neill's policies will destroy Ulster's hard won constitution and liberties'." In June, Dr Paisley led a loyalist march through the mainly nationalist Markets area of Belfast. Serious rioting ensued and these scenes and the subsequent disorder at the Presbyterian General Assembly building in Howard Street resulted in Dr Paisley's prosecution and imprisonment for three months.
Meanwhile, paramilitary violence stalked the streets for the first time since 1935 with the UVF. By June, the organisation had claimed two Catholic victims, both murdered. Three men, including Gusty Spence, were charged with these murders while the UVF was proscribed by a stunned government.
On the minority side, the nationalist population still smarted from the "bad faith" perceived in the decision to locate Northern Ireland's second university in Coleraine.
AS nationalist goodwill turned to cynicism, the British Labour Prime Minister, Mr Harold Wilson, impressed on Terence O'Neill at a forthright conference in London that August that he must expedite his efforts to "liberalise" Northern Ireland society and, in particular, to eradicate discrimination and gerrymandering.
O'Neill warned his colleagues that he had merely "bought time" on the reform front. By September, his position had become even shakier as a backbench revolt sought to replace him with Mr Brian Faulkner. O'Neill survived the subsequent vote of confidence but he faced large scale grassroots opposition to his modernising policies.
As Minister of Commerce, Mr Faulkner proceeded with his programme of advance factories. As well as the new city of Craigavon, Co Armagh, he identified three centres for special consideration - Belfast, Bangor and Derry. Nationalists, however, complained at what they saw as the neglect of the south and west.
Relations between O'Neill and the Catholic hierarchy improved considerably during the year with the prime minister congratulating Cardinal Conway on his condemnation of the IRA in February. "We must hope and pray," the new head of the Irish Catholic Church told O'Neill in a reference to the future. He could not have been more candid.