Basil McIvor: Basil McIvor was a Unionist politician who held office in both the last Stormont administration and the short-lived powersharing executive that followed it. On his retirement from politics in 1974 he took up the cause of integrated education, and had a long association with Lagan College, the first integrated post-primary school in Northern Ireland.
Believing that segregated education reinforced the sectarian divide, he had as minister for education in the Executive drafted proposals for "shared schools".
These lapsed with the fall of the Executive and he subsequently pursued his objectives in the All Children Together Movement. His proposals were incorporated in a bill that was successfully piloted through the House of Lords by Lord Dunleath of the Alliance Party and became the Education Act (Northern Ireland), 1978, but was not taken up.
In 1987 he lobbied Brian Mawhinney, the minister of state responsible for education in Northern Ireland, and this led to legislation that obliged the education authorities to encourage the development of integrated education.
William Basil McIvor was born on June 17th, 1928, on the Fermanagh side of Pettigo parish, which straddled the border with Co Donegal. The son of a Methodist minister, he was educated in Belfast at Methody.
Having studied law at Queen's University, Belfast, he graduated in 1948 and was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1950.
But he was surprised to be approached in 1966 to stand for the Unionist Party, particularly since he was not a member of the Orange Order, then a sine qua non for Unionist election candidates. In 1969 he was elected to Stormont representing Larkfield, a "mixed" constituency that included nationalist Andersonstown and loyalist Finaghy.
A supporter of the reformist prime minister, Terence O'Neill, he quickly learnt that party functionaries had no time for moderate opinion. In his 1998 memoir, Hope Deferred, he wrote: "I came to dread meetings at Unionist Party headquarters in Glengall Street, where O'Neill would courageously and stubbornly advocate the need for reform."
But he thought O'Neill "distant and uninspiring. I would not, I confess, have felt like dying in a ditch for him."
O'Neill's resignation in April 1969 came as no surprise to McIvor. He turned down an invitation to join the Alliance Party and, following the resignation in 1971 of James Chichester-Clark he hoped that his successor, Brian Faulkner, would be a reforming prime minister.
But security was Faulkner's priority, and in August he introduced internment without trial. This led indirectly to McIvor's appointment as minister for community relations when David Bleakley resigned the post.
However, Bloody Sunday in January 1972 proved to be the beginning of the end of Stormont. McIvor angered many colleagues and friends when he voiced support for secretary of state Willie Whitelaw's direct rule arrangements.
Unionists were divided on the British government's White Paper on the political reconstruction of Northern Ireland, published in March 1973.
But support from the SDLP and the Alliance Party, together with that of like-minded Unionists, ensured that plans for an Assembly elected by proportional representation and a powersharing administration could proceed.
Standing in the Assembly election as a "pledged" or "Official" Unionist, McIvor topped the poll in South Belfast.
He was a member of the delegation that negotiated the Sunningdale Agreement and in January 1974 took his place as minister for education in the Executive.
But the Executive was shaken by the Unionist Party's formal rejection of the "proposed all-Ireland settlement" which forced Faulkner to resign, and in February the anti-agreement United Ulster Unionist Council, campaigning under the slogan "Dublin is only a Sunningdale away", won 11 of the 12 Northern Ireland seats in the Westminster elections.
A vivid description of McIvor's disgust at those who spat upon, jostled and verbally abused Faulkner and his colleagues in the Assembly chamber comes from a memoir by Maurice Hayes, then assistant secretary to the Executive.
Hayes recalled with pleasure the sight of "the normally calm and sedate Basil McIvor landing a telling punch on a member of the DUP". Before long the Ulster Workers' Council strike - "an extraordinary rebellion by the vast majority of one million Protestants", in McIvor's opinion - had put the Executive out of business.
In the week after the strike, McIvor wrote in Hope Deferred, he met "a very senior member of the Supreme Court Bench" who said: "Maybe now the Brits will allow us to do our own thing."
In September 1974 he became a resident magistrate, replacing Martin McBirney who had been assassinated by the IRA.
Years later two McIvor decisions caused controversy.
In 1987 four Unionist MPs called for his removal on the grounds that he had shown bias against unionists and Orangemen in a case at Ballymoney. The following year he dismissed charges against a man security forces believed to have been a former Belfast commander of the IRA, Pat McGeown.
McGeown, now dead, faced charges of murder relating to the deaths of the two British army corporals who drove into a republican funeral in 1988. He walked free from the court with his solicitor, Pat Finucane, himself later murdered by loyalists and the subject of long-running allegations of police collusion. The photograph of the two men leaving court, widely published, was said to have been used to target Pat Finucane.
McIvor retired as a resident magistrate in 1993 and thereafter acted as a deputy.
Surveying his political career late in life, he wrote, "Challenging the integrity and fairness of Unionist domination in Northern Ireland never promised to be much fun - and it wasn't." He found satisfaction instead in the All Children Together movement, becoming a tireless lobbyist and convener of meetings, and served for decades as governor of Lagan College.
When former IRA leader Martin McGuinness became Sinn Féin minister for education and offered support for integrated education, McIvor invited him to Lagan and was happy to be photographed shaking hands.
His wife, Jill, their sons, Jonathan and Timothy, and daughter, Jane, survive him.
Basil McIvor: born June 17th 1928; died 5th November, 2004