The chapter is highly critical of the Wilson cabinet's failure to defend Northern Ireland's first consociational experiment, the Sunningdale Agreement, although it concedes that this agreement may have had an inevitable encounter with a coroner. It analyses the government's reaction to the 1974 strike by the Ulster Workers Council, which led to the demise of Sunningdale. The chapter also illustrates the limits of the Callaghan government's policies in Northern Ireland, including its flawed experiments in ‘Ulsterization’, ‘normalization’, and ‘criminalization’.
Keywords: Labour, Ulsterization, normalization, criminalization, Merlyn Rees, Roy Mason, James Callaghan, Harold Wilson, Hunger strikes