James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon

On his return to Ireland, having received a £100,000 legacy from his father's will, he turned to politics. Following his brother Charles who had successfully stood as an Irish Unionist in a by-election in South Antrim the previous month, in March 1903 by-election Craig attempted to secure the unionist seat of North Fermanagh. Unlike his brother, he norrowly failed to defeat his Russellite rival (Edward Mitchell). He had to wait until the 1906 General Election to win his first seat, East Down (the constituency he represented until returned from Mid Down in 1918).[6] Already he was playing a leading organisational role for Irish Unionism in Ulster.

In 1905, he had co-founded the Ulster Unionist Council to coalesce loyalist opposition to Irish Home Rule in northern province. In this task he regarded the coontribution of the parading Orange Order (that commanded 50 of 200 seats on the council) as key. Opening an Orange Hall in after the 1906 election he declared that he was "an Orangeman first and a Member of Parliament afterwards" and called for "the Protestant community to rally around the [Orange] lodges, strengthen and support them".[7]

In 1912, Craig helped orchestrate "Ulster Day”. In a massed demonstration in Belfast, Edward Carson, the Dublin barrister he had nominated for the leadership of the UUC, led in signing the Ulster Covenant. The signatories pledged "to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom", and to use "all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland".[8][9]

In January 1913, unable to prevent passage of the Liberal government's Home Rule Bill at Westminster, the UUC called the exclusion of Ulster from its provisions, a demand backed with a call for up to 100,000 Covenanters to be drilled and armed as Ulster Volunteers. On 23 September, Craig persuaded Carson to accept Chairmanship of a Provisional Government which he had planned and primed to assume the administration of Ulster should the Government move to enforce the authority of a new Dublin parliament.[10]

In April 1914, Craig supported Major Frederick Crawford in arming the Ulster Volunteers (UVF) with rifles and ammunition purchased, and smuggled, from Imperial Germany.[11] Years later (1934) in a speech in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland the political leader of the Northern Ireland Nationalists Cahir Healy spoke of Craig's support in the arming of Loyalists and opposition to Irish Home Rule:

"Did not the Irish Republican Army march in the footsteps of the gentleman who is now the King's Prime Minister in Northern Ireland? I shall be told your treason was of the conditional type. You knew and Sir Edward Carson knew you would never be obliged to make good in the flesh your promises to the mob. And you were right in that. For you and the ringleaders in rebellion, there was to be the Government Bench and the profitable post of a law lord. For Casement, Pearse, Connolly and the rest there was a bullet at dawn and a grave of quick lime. That is how justice is administered...When treason prospers men do not call it treason. Treason has prospered with you. You have achieved place and power by treason."[12]

In 1912, Craig broke with other Irish MPs, both unionist and nationalist, in voting for the Conciliation bill that would have extended the parliamentary vote (albeit on a restrictive property basis) for the first time to women. Consistent with the prominent role in mobilising opposition to home rule played by the Ulster Women's Unionist Council (UWUC), and the invitation to women to sign their own declaration in support of the Ulster Covenant,[8] in September 1913 Craig's UUC informed the Women's Council that the draft articles for the Provisional Government included provisions for female suffrage.[13]

When in the spring of 1914, Carson, seeming to overrule Craig, made it clear that a potentially divisive endorsement of votes for women was not a politic option for unionism, Dorothy Evans, organiser in Belfast for Women's Social and Political Union declared an end to "the truce" that the organisation had "held in Ulster".[14] In the months that followed WSPU militants were implicated in a series of outrages against property that, in addition to arson attacks on Unionist-owned buildings and on male recreational and sports facilities,[15] included forced entry into Craig's home.[16]

On 3 April 1913 police raided the flat in Belfast Evans was sharing with local activist Midge Muir, and found explosives. In court, five days later, the pair created uproar when they demanded to know why the gun-runner Craig was not appearing on the same charges.[14]

Following the United Kingdom declaration of war upon Germany in August 1914, Craig persuaded Lord Kitchener to remould the UVF into the 36th Ulster Division. He was given the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but unift for front line service he resigned his commission at the end of 1916 and took up a junior post, Treasurer of the Household, in the wartime coalition government of Lloyd George. He spoke in favour of conscripting Irishmen into the army in 1918 as the Government looked to extend the Military Services Act.[6]

After the World War, Craig continued in the service of the coalition government first as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Pensions (1919-1920) and then Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty (1920–21). In February 1921, with the war of independence underway in the south, Craig succeeded Edward Carson as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party.

Craig persuaded his fellow Unionists and the British Government that if exclusion, and thus partition, was to be the solution to the challenge posed by the Catholic-majority desire for Irish self government, it should apply to only six of the nine Ulster counties. In three, Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, he argued Sinn Féiners would make government "absolutely impossible for us".[17] He also led Ulster Unionists in accepting that the six counties—Northern Ireland as they were to become—should have their own home-rule parliament in Belfast.

Writing to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Craig had declared that it was only as a "sacrifice in the interest of peace" that unionists would accept a Northern Ireland parliament they had not asked for.[18] But in debating the Government of Ireland Bill 1920, Craig noted that having "all the paraphernalia of Government" might make it more difficult for future Liberal and/or Labour government to push Northern Ireland against the will of its majority into all-Ireland arrangements[19] Once Unionists had their own parliament, Craig felt able to assure his followers "no power on earth would ever be able to touch them".[20]

To make such assurance against British pressure for Irish unity doubly sure, in November 1921 Craig suggested to Lloyd George that Northern Ireland's status be changed to that of a Crown dominion outside of the United Kingdom. Although in signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty, only weeks later the Prime Minister conceded Southern Ireland precisely this Canada-style form of statehood, to Craig he replied that he was not willing to give "the character of an international boundary" to "a frontier based neither upon natural features nor broad geographical considerations".[21]

Lloyd George was nonetheless persuaded in October 1920 to secure that still unsettled frontier by endorsing Craig's proposal for a new "volunteer constabulary ... raised from the loyal population" and "armed for duty within the six county area only".[22] Into this Ulster Special Constabulary former UVF units were "incorporated en masse".[23]

Craig (third from left) with his first cabinet, in 1921

In the 1921 Northern Ireland general election, the first ever, Craig was elected to the newly created Northern Ireland House of Commons as one of the members for County Down. On 7 June 1921, Craig was appointed the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.[24] The House of Commons of Northern Ireland assembled for the first time later that day.[25] By 1932 opposition to some of Craig’s policies became more direct. Opposition leader Cahir Healy pointed out the sectarian nature of the Prime Minister's rule:

We know how it began. He began by interning 500 Nationalists, many of them from the most peaceful parts of the Six Counties, but not a single man of his own gunmen in Belfast were interned. He began by gerrymandering local government areas, even in places where the Nationalists in relation to the Protestants were as two and a quarter to one. They were left without any control of the local councils. He drove the Nationalists out of every public position where it was possible to do so, and he made, and continues to make, public appointments on sectarian and political grounds, totally ignoring merit. That is how he began and that is how he continues.[26]

In April 1934, in response to George Leeke's question regarding the Protestant nature of the Unionist dominated parliament, Craig famously replied:

The hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more. It is most interesting for me at the moment to watch how they are progressing. I am doing my best always to top the bill and to be ahead of the South.[27]

Time cover, 26 May 1924

This speech is often misquoted, intentionally or otherwise, as: "A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People", and conflated with an incident which occurred respective to the naming of the New City of Craigavon. Knockmena (a corruption of the townland name, Knockmenagh) was the preferred name nationalists hoped would be used, and which might have attracted broad acceptance on both sides. On 6 July 1965, it was announced that the new city would be named Craigavon after Craig. A noted nationalist, Joseph Connellan, interrupted the announcement with the comment, "A Protestant city for a Protestant people".[28]

Later that year, speaking in the House of Commons at Stormont on 21 November 1934 in response to an accusation that all government appointments in Northern Ireland were carried out on a religious basis, he replied: "... it is undoubtedly our duty and our privilege, and always will be, to see that those appointed by us possess the most unimpeachable loyalty to the King and Constitution. That is my whole object in carrying on a Protestant Government for a Protestant people. I repeat it in this House".[29]

He was made a baronet in 1918, and in 1927 was created Viscount Craigavon, of Stormont in the County of Down. He was also the recipient of honorary degrees from The Queen's University of Belfast (1922) and Oxford University (1926).

Lord Craigavon's tomb, Stormont Parliament grounds

Close-up of the tomb carving

Craig had made his career in British as well as Northern Irish politics; but his premiership showed little sign of his earlier close acquaintance with the British political world. He became intensely parochial, and suffered from his loss of intimacy with British politicians in 1938, when the British government concluded agreements with Dublin to end the Anglo-Irish economic war between the two countries. He never tried to persuade Westminster to protect Northern Ireland's industries, especially the linen industry, which was central to its economy. He was anxious not to provoke Westminster, given the precarious state of Northern Ireland's position. In April 1939, and again in May 1940 in the Second World War, he called for conscription to be introduced in Northern Ireland (which the British government, fearing a backlash from nationalists, refused).[30] He also called for Churchill to invade Ireland, alternatively known as Éire, using Scottish and Welsh troops in order to seize the valuable ports and install a Governor-General at Dublin.[31] Lady Londonderry confided to Sir Samuel Hoare, the Home Secretary until the outbreak of the war, that Craigavon had become "ga-ga"[32] but Craigavon was still prime minister when he died peacefully at his home at Glencraig, County Down, at the age of 69. He was buried on the Stormont Estate on 5 December 1940, and was succeeded as the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by the Minister of Finance, J. M. Andrews.

Craig had a dual Irish-British self-identity, saying in a 1929 parliamentary debate that "We are Irishmen ... always hold that Ulstermen are Irishmen and the best of Irishmen – much the best".[33]