Tommy Lyttle, Glen Barr, Ian Adamson, Andy Tyrie, John Mc Michael

The Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike was a successful general strike which took place 40 years ago between 15 May and 28 May 1974, during ” The Troubles”. The UWC was the brainchild of my old friend Harry Murray, a shop steward at Harland and Wolff. The strike was called by Ulster Loyalists and Unionists who were against the Sunningdale Agreement, which had been signed in December 1973. This Loyalist uprising, co-ordinated by the UWC, was largely organised by the Ulster Defence Association under its Chairman Andy Tyrie.

Specifically, many strikers did not oppose the sharing of political power with Irish Nationalists per se, as Harry’s later actions proved, but rather the undemocatic way it was applied and the imposed “Council of Ireland”. This proposed role for the Republic of Ireland’s government in the running of Northern Ireland  was unacceptable to the bulk of the Unionist population in Northern Ireland who supported the strike, notwithstanding the Government-inspired propaganda to the contrary that they were generally intimidated.

In The Break-Up of Britain Tom Nairn concluded that: “It was the working class which made the Ulster Nation. Its 1974 strike defied, and defeated, three bourgeois governments and the British Army. Although they will never concede the fact, it relegated the claims of the IRA forever to that historical archive from which they should never have re-emerged. It was without doubt the most successful political action carried out by any European working class since the War”.