When I think of Roy Mason former NIO SOS the word smugness enters my head. It would be a straight battle between him and a fellow Labour SOS Peter Mandelson as to which of them liked himself more.
The diminutive little Mason branded ‘pint tin size Mason’ by Ian Paisley saw himself as s hard man, pro army and pro police. With the deployment of the SAS, the decline in numbers of those being killed in paramilitary violence during his tenure and the establishment of the De Lorean gull-wing sports car plant in Dunmurry the Barnsley MP believed he had cracked Northern Ireland. He spoke of squeezing the Ira “like tooth paste in a tube.”
Sadly that is not what Mason’s successors discovered. The graph of violence would deliver hundreds more killings and bombings in the ensuing years.
Roy Mason saw Northern Ireland through a security lens. He was mindful of how his predecessor Merlyn Rees had been so criticised for his handling of the 1974 Loyalist Ulster Workers’ Council Strike and determined that Ian Paisley’s 1977 Strike would not succeed and it didn’t.
The late DUP leader, unlike mainstream Unionism, had contempt for the pipe smoking Mason declaring “I never knew if he held the pipe or the pipe held him.”
My familiarity with Northern Ireland Secretaries of State date back to Merlyn Rees’s days.
I simply didn’t agree with many of the policies promoted by Conservative governments but when I reflect on the calibre of Secretaries of Sate such as Douglas Hurd, Jim Prior and Peter Brooke….unlike Roy Mason these were heavy weights, much more nuanced and politically aware.
1 Comment
Appropriately you publish a picture of John Delorean and his white-elephant car.
After quite a few countries around the world, including the IDA in the south, turned the slick salesman and his plan to set up a car assembly plant from their doors, Roy Mason and his sidekick Don Concannon welcomed them to Dunmurry at a cost to Westminster of £80mn.
I wonder will the story ever break as to what inducements Zac may have offered the duo.