The Royal Irish Academy’ s Dictionary of Irish Biography has just published its entry for Maurice Hayes. in my book Maurice was a principal hero of the Troubles, the very model for adapting a Catholic nationalist background to an instrument of change to create a new Northern Ireland. He was one of those essential people who kept the show on the road. Not least he was an attractive human being who obviously enjoyed his own life and the diverse company of others.
Starting as the de facto hereditary town clerk of mainly Catholic Downpatrick and a passionate supporter of Gaelic games and language, Maurice Hayes triumphed over institutional discrimination by skirting his way round rather than knocking his head against the many obstacles set in his path. By the mid 1970s perhaps to his surprise, he was often knocking at an open door. Later after stints as a servant of both states he became a witty and sometimes unsparing commentator on what followed his main career north and south of the border. Throughout his career he refused to hold people especially politicians to their own stereotypes and approached them with an open mind
The following extracts give glimpses of his achievement from the beginning of the Troubles career which still hold powerful lessons for today.
Hayes was critical of older administrators who privileged cultural revivalism over sport and, by transacting business in Irish, excluded contributions from those not fluent in the language.
Hayes’s work on housing allocation brought him into contact with the local Stormont MP, Brian Faulkner (qv); despite Faulkner’s opportunistic use of Orangeism to secure advancement within the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), Hayes regarded him as generally fair-minded and a man of outstanding ability.
Hayes was appointed – through Faulkner’s influence – as chair of the Community Relations Commission (CRC), a new part-time body intended to promote reconciliation, particularly in local government. Hayes privately regarded the CRC as indecisive and ineffective, but it allowed him to develop further media, administrative and political contacts in Britain as well as Northern Ireland. As one of the most prominent and experienced Catholic administrators in Northern Ireland, Hayes was a prime candidate for advancement as proof that progress was being made against discrimination. He was sensitive to the possibility that he might be perceived as a token collaborator, and was himself suspicious of many self-professed Protestant liberals as hypocritical, self-righteous, or sincere but ineffective. He was critical of O’Neill’s failure to follow up his rhetoric with sufficiently swift and radical reforms, and regarded his successor, James Chichester-Clark (qv), as a nonentity who made the situation worse by keeping the more capable Faulkner out of the premiership for almost two years. (In contrast, Hayes displayed a certain respect for extremists with leadership abilities, such as Ian Paisley (qv).)
While Hayes attributed the principal responsibility for the Northern debacle to Protestant/unionist discrimination and incompetence, he thought Catholics/nationalists had contributed to their marginalisation by self-segregation, and favoured working for reform from within; he proclaimed firmly that discrimination never justified the taking of a single life.
He maintained that the public service (in its widest sense) preserved Northern Irish society from disintegration during the Troubles. While Hayes thought many socio-economic measures enacted by Margaret Thatcher’s government were necessary and beneficial attacks on vested interests, he was fiercely critical of her suspicious attitude towards the public sector ethos and her exaltation of market forces. He also criticised her handling of the H-block protests and 1980–81 hunger strikes.
Stormont civil servant
Hayes always regarded Sunningdale as a major achievement whose central principles established the template for any future settlement, vindicated by the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. He attributed its failure in part to excessive nationalist emphasis on a cross-border Council of Ireland, regarded in some quarters as a vehicle for eventual Irish unification, which exceeded what Faulkner could sell to unionist opinion.
Hayes bitterly denounced the failure of British authorities to intervene early and decisively against the May 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike, whose success he attributed to naked violence and intimidation; he compared the willingness of the Protestant professional classes to cooperate with the strikers to the collapse of the Weimar Republic (though he also admitted that the Executive was indecisive).
Elder statesman: the Patten Report and member of the Seanad
In 1990 Hayes became a non-executive board member of Independent News and Media, retiring in 2009. He wrote extensively for the group’s papers, and was greatly respected by the proprietor, Tony O’Reilly; Hayes was credited with influencing the newspaper group in favour of John Hume’s controversial attempts to bring Sinn Féin into the peace process. Until a few months before his death Hayes continued to comment on public affairs in print media, made frequent radio and television appearances, and reviewed books for the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Independent (mostly twentieth-century Irish history and Northern Ireland fiction).
Hayes published three volumes of memoirs. Sweet Killough, let go your anchor (1994) and Black puddings with slim: a Downpatrick boyhood (1996) are evocative but unsentimental depictions of the changing Lecale of his childhood and adolescence. Minority verdict: experiences of a Catholic public servant (1995) is a deceptively simple text combining illustrative anecdotes with an analysis of the expansion and development of managerial public service in post-war Northern Ireland.
Hayes was asked to serve on numerous public commissions and inquiries. Perhaps the most significant of these was the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland (1998–9), established under the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement and chaired by Chris Patten. Hayes was seen as a major influence on aspects of the commission’s report which were unpopular among unionists, including changing the name of the Royal Ulster Constabulary to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the removal or downplaying of British symbols, and the institution of 50:50 Catholic–Protestant recruitment to the PSNI to rectify Catholic under-representation. Although Hayes was indignant at claims that he was a nationalist representative and that he influenced the commission’s advocacy of an end to the GAA’s exclusion of members of the British security forces (repealed in 2001), many otherwise moderate unionists complained that Hayes tilted the balance too far and provided anti-agreement unionists with an effective weapon against David Trimble.
Hayes personally believed Trimble was too reluctant to make a positive case for the agreement, and that Peter Robinson was more effective in this respect after becoming first minister in 2007. Hayes was increasingly concerned at the tendency for the population of the Irish Republic to assume that the post-peace process North could be ignored, with northern nationalists in particular seen as aliens. In his last years Hayes criticised the failure of the Northern Ireland executive to move beyond peace maintenance by developing a sense of shared identity and a wider strategy for the co-ordinated pursuit of the common good; he believed that while it was important not to neglect victims of the Troubles, it would eventually be necessary to close the book and move on.
Downe Hospital, Downpatrick, on 23 December 2017 after a short illness. At his own request, as an expression of communal reconciliation, he was buried (after funeral mass in St Patrick’s Catholic church, Downpatrick, on 27 December) near the alleged grave of St Patrick (qv) in the graveyard attached to Downpatrick’s Church of Ireland cathedral.
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
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