David Bleakley
Respected Northern Ireland Labour MP whose career was undermined by growing sectarianism
DAVID BLEAKLEY, who has died aged 92, was a lifelong campaigner against sectarianism in Ulster. A Northern Ireland Labour Party MP and briefly a minister at Stormont, his political career was torpedoed by the polarisation between loyalists and nationalists as the Troubles erupted.
However, his status in the community and as a respected Anglican layman gave him a moral authority that kept him involved right up to the negotiation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Throughout, Bleakley remained adamant that “the majority of people in Northern Ireland simply have no interest in giving up their British citizenship”.
David Wylie Bleakley was born into a socialist home on January 11 1925 and left school at 15 to become a shipyard electrician’s apprentice. In 1946 he went to Ruskin College, Oxford, to study economics and political science. From there he won a scholarship to Queen’s University, Belfast.
On graduating he became a tutor in social studies and, in 1955, principal of East Belfast Further Education Centre. From 1965 he spent two years lecturing in Dar-es-salaam before becoming head of economics and political studies at Methodist College, Belfast. He stayed there 10 years and served for 12 more as chief executive of the Irish Council of Churches.
In 1958 Bleakley was elected to the Northern Ireland Parliament for the east Belfast seat of Victoria. The Ulster Unionists held a huge majority, and Labour’s influence was limited, though by 1963 he was chairing the Public Accounts Committee.
Then Ulster was rocked by the Seenozip scandal, in which two directors of a company with strong Unionist connections were convicted of misusing £30,000 in Ministry of Commerce grants. Bleakley discovered his committee had no powers to investigate it, but when he called for an inquiry the premier, Captain Terence O’neill, slapped him down.
In 1965 Bleakley lost his seat by a handful of votes to the Unionist Roy Bradford, as tribal allegiance overtook class loyalties. When strife broke out in West Belfast in 1969, Bleakley, as president of Belfast’s standing conference of peace committees, used his influence to prevent it spreading to the shipyard areas. At the 1970 Westminster election, however, with tensions escalating, he stood for Belfast East, but lost by more than 8,500 votes.
In March 1971 the province’s embattled Unionist premier Brian Faulkner called Bleakley from a tutorial he was giving to lunch with himself and the Home Secretary James Callaghan. Despite Bleakley’s not having a seat, Faulkner used a loophole to appoint him the only non-unionist member of his Cabinet and a Northern Ireland privy councillor. But he failed to secure Bleakley a seat in the Senate so he could remain a minister and he resigned after six months.
In his final month, Belfast was hit by a wave of IRA killings, which Bleakley despairingly denounced as “savagery on an unbelievable scale”. When Loyalists retaliated, he accused them of “savage attacks on the jobs of working people”.
Bleakley denounced internment as a “tragic error” that had driven Catholics into the arms of the IRA, and in his resignation letter he urged Faulkner to broaden his government, introduce proportional representation and reform Stormont. Instead, direct rule was imposed, Bleakley seeing the 1973 elections to a power-sharing Assembly as “the last chance to build a new Ulster”. He stood for East Belfast under PR and was the only NILP candidate to be successful.
Faulkner wanted Bleakley as the Assembly’s presiding officer, but was blocked by Unionist hardliners. Bleakley would later say the administration formed by Faulkner and the SDLP’S Gerry Fitt was “sabotaged by sectarianism”.
Bleakley stood in the two 1974 general elections, but the contest was between militant and moderate Unionism and he finished a poor third.
Now leader of his party, he was elected after the collapse of the Assembly to the Constitutional Convention set up by Labour’s Merlyn Rees. The Convention also proved abortive, but at least this time there were no fisticuffs between members.
Rees appreciated Bleakley’s qualities, and on becoming Home Secretary appointed him to the Edmund-davies Committee on police pay. He went on to chair the Northern Ireland Standing Committee on Human Rights. He stood down in 1984 with a CBE.
Though the NILP was a shadow of its former self, it gave Bleakley a locus in successive political frameworks. In 1994, with the IRA moving toward a political solution, he told Sinn Fein they could expect no “favoured group” status as they had lost the battle for hearts and minds. But, he added, there would be an honourable role for them if they could become a “democratic persuader”. He was a member of Labour’s delegation to peace talks in 1996, and when a devolved assembly was elected in 1998 he again fought East Belfast – polling just 369 votes.
Bleakley’s involvement with worldwide Anglicanism began in 1971 when he attended the Church’s consultative council in Nairobi. The gathering favoured the ordination of women, Bleakley declaring: “Instead of bouncing around on the head of a pin, the Anglican Church must move into the 20th century and accept women as equals.”
For 14 years Bleakley was president of the Church Missionary Society. He was a Workers’ Educational Association and Open University tutor, senior lecturer in peace studies at Bradford University, and briefly a member of the Press Council.
Bleakley’s books include Peace In Ulster (1972); Faulkner – A Biography (1974); Europe: A Christian Vision (1992); Peace In Ireland: Two States, One People (1995); and CS Lewis: At Home In Ireland (1998).
David Bleakley married Winifred Watson in 1949; she predeceased him and he is survived by their three sons.
David Bleakley, born January 11 1925, died June 26 2017