Lord Laird
Ulster Unionist who promoted Ulster-scots culture but became involved in a lobbying scandal
LORD LAIRD, who has died aged 74, was a colourful Ulster Unionist (UUP) politician and railway enthusiast who in 1999 became founding chairman of the Ulster-scots Agency, set up under the Belfast Agreement of 1998 to promote the language and culture of the descendants of the Scottish Presbyterians who settled in Ulster in the 17th century; his card described him as “Heid-yin o tha boord o Ulster Scotch”.
In 2013, however, he was suspended from the House of Lords for four months and was forced to resign from the UUP over a lobbying scandal.
Ulster-scots is very close to the Scots dialect in which Robert Burns wrote, but became distinct by separation and through borrowings from Irish. Though Laird claimed there are about 100,000 Ulster-scots speakers, some claim it is more or less defunct as a living language. Yet in a move widely seen as a quid pro quo for the creation of an all-island agency to promote the Irish language, the Belfast negotiators agreed that a parallel agency would be created to cultivate Ulster-scots.
As its first chairman, Laird faced considerable challenges in getting the new agency up and running and in establishing its legitimacy. Its rationale was challenged by a debate over the linguistic status of Ulster-scots, with some dismissing it as a “DIY language for Orangemen”. Meanwhile, in contrast to its Irish language counterpart, which took over the activities of pre-existing bodies, Laird’s agency began life with only three staff and in 2001 its spending and accountancy practices were criticised in an internal government audit.
Despite these problems, under Laird’s leadership the agency set about its mission with energy, supporting groups involved in traditional music and dance, helping to organise festivals celebrating Ulster-scots culture, launching education campaigns, promoting cultural links with the Ulster-scots diaspora in the US and establishing a newspaper. In its first five years the agency was said to have helped bring about the fastestgrowing cultural revival in Europe. Even unionists reacted in amazement as Ulster-scots gained a dictionary.
The considerably higher funding level of the Irish language agency, however, attracted criticism in Northern Ireland and in April 2004 Laird resigned from the agency in protest at cuts to its funding.
In the House of Lords, meanwhile, the flamboyant Laird ran into a series of controversies to do with money.
In 2005, in an unfortunate if entertaining postscript to his chairmanship of the agency, he was criticised following revelations that he had clocked up massive taxi bills at taxpayers’ expense during his tenure. Accounts for 2001 revealed that his travel costs included fares of up to £260 for return trips between Belfast and Dublin. Laird claimed that the use of reserved Belfast taxis had been necessary for his security during journeys down south, as wearing a kilt made him a potential target.
Laird was equally unapologetic when it emerged he had claimed £73,000 in parliamentary expenses in 2008/09 – more than any other member of the House of Lords that year, justifying himself as good value due to his record as the most prolific asker of parliamentary questions. (In his “best” year he claimed to have asked 701.)
In 2013, however, he was secretly filmed telling Daily Telegraph journalists posing as South Korean businessmen that he would set up an all-party parliamentary group to lobby on their behalf and reportedly claimed that he swapped the task of asking parliamentary questions for paying clients with other peers. In a separate undercover sting Laird was caught by BBC Panorama journalists offering to set up a parliamentary group and influence debates on behalf of a fictitious client paying him a retainer on behalf of the Fijian government, promising to “bribe” his colleagues to ask parliamentary questions about Fiji.
Laird returned to the cross-benches of the Lords in 2014, but his political career was over.
John Dunn Laird was born in Belfast on April 23 1944, the son of Norman Laird, a GP who would become UUP MP for Belfast Saint Anne in the old Stormont parliament, and his wife Margaret. From the Royal Belfast Academical Institution he went into banking becoming, aged 24, the Province’s youngest bank inspector.
In 1970, however, his father died of a heart attack and John, by then chairman of the Young Unionist Council, was invited to step into his shoes for the by-election. At the time, rioting was breaking out over attempts by the Unionist government to end discrimination against Catholics and in 1972 Laird had the UUP whip withdrawn after backing a Democratic Unionist Party motion opposing a ban on parades on July 12.
The same year the British government suspended Stormont after the then Northern Ireland prime minister, Brian Faulkner, rejected Westminster demands for powersharing, inaugurating one of the most divisive periods in the Province’s political history. Laird again defied the UUP by opposing the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974 and cultivated links with William Craig’s Vanguard Unionist Party which was organising opposition to Sunningdale.
In 1976, when the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention was suspended, Laird left politics and set up a public relations firm, John Laird Public Relations, which became very successful and of which he remained chairman until 2001. In 1993 he was made a visiting professor of Public Relations at the University of Ulster.
It was through Vanguard that he formed a friendship with the future UUP leader David Trimble, and when in 1999 Trimble, a convert to powersharing, became first minister in the new Northern Ireland executive, Laird was one of his backers. When Trimble encountered opposition from MPS in his own party, the Blair government put three peerages at his disposal to buttress his position at Westminster. In 1999 one went to Laird.
Laird called his 2010 political biography A Struggle To Be Heard, but it was a battle he was never in danger of losing. With his mane of silver hair and penchant for pinstriped suits and ostentatious shirts, he cut a striking figure. “I can’t stand being understated,” he once declared. “It’s important to be properly stated at all times.” In the House of Lords he organised events including a dinner at which re-enactment musicians played Lambeg drums.
A convivial man who, unlike many of his fellow Orange Order members, was no teetotaller (in a 2006 interview he observed that Dublin was “a bloody good place to get pissed”), in the House of Lords he defied the Order to vote in favour of legalising gay marriage, was an outspoken opponent of foxhunting and claimed to be “a Left-of-centre human rights campaigner, a champion of the outsider”.
Controversially, he used parliamentary privilege to voice allegations of involvement in the IRA of senior figures in the Republic that would have been potentially libellous outside the House.
Earlier, Laird made several videos about trolleybuses and steam railways.
In 1971 he married Carol Ferguson, who survives him with their son and daughter.
Lord Laird, born April 23 1944, died July 10 2018