ABSTRACT
Unemployment in Northern Ireland increased by some two and a half times in the decade up to 1938. At its highest, three out of ten had no job. Each side attempted to look after its ‘own’, and the Protestants were able to do so more effectively, ‘Many in the audience employ Catholics’, a future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland told a meeting in 1933, ‘but I have not one about my place. Catholics are out to destroy Ulster with all their might and power.’(144) Secta rian riots recurred, the most serious resulting in deaths and many injuries in Bel fast during the summer of 1935. However, although there was some comment in the British press, the Speaker at Westminster had ruled that parliamentary ques tions could not be asked on matters which had been transferred to the Stormont Parliament. The constitutional relationship was in fact a little more complicated, but it never became a major issue. There were no major administrative difficul ties either, but there were financial problems. Over a decade of experience con firmed that Northern Ireland could not hope to be self-sufficient and provide ser vices at the same level as those in the rest of the United Kingdom. In 1938, the then United Kingdom Chancellor of the Exchequer accepted the principle that in the event of a Northern Ireland budget deficit, not caused by higher social ex penditure or lower taxation, the United Kingdom government would supply the funds to maintain the same services and standards as in Britain(142). Converse ly, the IRA decided to strike in England to bring home the fact that it would never accept the arrangement in Ulster as permanent. The most serious inci dents took place just before the war, notably a bomb attack in Coventry, when five people were killed and some seventy injured.
