Holding the ground - Brendan Lynn

In spite of the fact that for almost fifty years the Nationalist Party was regarded as the main representative of the minority community in Northern Ireland little detailed research has ever been carried out on the party. The only major work so far completed on the subject has been that done by Dr Eamon Phoenix in his most recent work, Northern Nationalism: Nationalist Politics, Partition and the Catholic Minority in Northern Ireland 1890-1940 (Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, 1994). This book is therefore an attempt to look at the events and developments which were to affect the party in the period from the end of the Second World War up until the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. What one discovers is a political grouping, made up of various individuals, trying to provide constitutional opposition in circumstances where it has no prospect of securing power, either to force any movement on the constitutional question, or to compel the authorities at Stormont to introduce a reform package capable of satisfying the alleged grievances of Northern Catholics. The 1960s were to bring rising expectations from this group and ultimately the party was to pay the price for failing to provide it with the leadership it demanded.