Born June 15th 1931
Died August 22nd 2025
The Reverend Martin Smyth, Presbyterian minister, former Ulster Unionist MP and Orange Order leader, who has died aged 94, was staunchly anti-Belfast Agreement and came close to undermining David Trimble in the latter’s efforts to persuade his party to maintain support for the agreement. He also tried to implicate Charles Haughey in an IRA gun-running plot during the 1980s.
On two occasions Smyth competed with Trimble for the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). In the first attempt in 1995 he polled last of five candidates. Five years later, when they faced up again at a critical stage of the peace process, he demonstrated that he was no mere “cart horse”, as some of the first minister’s supporters characterised him.
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That election in March 2000 was during one of the periods when the Northern Executive was in suspension over the vexed issue of IRA decommissioning. Shortly before the vote Trimble indicated he could go back into government without IRA arms being delivered “up front” but on a commitment that the issue would be properly resolved.
This infuriated the anti-agreement element of the UUP. The chief threat to Trimble was viewed as the then Lagan Valley MP Jeffrey Donaldson but, surprisingly, it was Smyth who decided to challenge the first minister for the leadership at the annual general meeting of the UUP’s ruling Ulster Unionist Council at the end of March.
Trimble’s allies were relieved he was not facing, in their eyes, a more serious contender. They suspected the reserved and rather stern 68-year-old Smyth was a plodding “stalking horse”, possibly for Donaldson, but were confident he would poll well below 40 per cent. But when the ballot papers of the 800-plus delegates were counted, Smyth won more than 43 per cent of the vote, shocking Trimble supporters, emboldening anti-agreement unionists and depressing the British and Irish governments – and almost everyone else who wanted the new dispensation powersharing politics to work.
Smyth remained a thorn in the side of Trimble during the remainder of his Stormont career, which ended in 2005 when he lost his Upper Bann seat and resigned as UUP leader. In 2003 Smyth pumped up the anti-agreement resistance by resigning the UUP whip, with fellow MPs Donaldson and David Burnside in opposition to a British-Irish joint declaration designed to get the Stormont Assembly up and running again. Trimble accused them of engaging in rejectionist “Stone Age politics”. Smyth later regained the whip.
Trimble just about maintained party support for the Belfast Agreement but Smyth always had significant support in the party. This was further demonstrated in 2001 when the pro-agreement Ulster Unionist Michael McGimpsey failed in his challenge against Smyth for the South Belfast Westminster election nomination.
Smyth remained grimly determined in his not-an-inch unionism, but still he held with the UUP, in contrast to Donaldson and Arlene Foster, who quit the party at the end of 2003 and joined the DUP in January 2004.
William Martin Smyth was born on June 15th, 1931, twin son of James Smyth, a plumber; and the former Minnie Kane. He was educated at Methodist College in Belfast. He studied at Trinity College Dublin, at Magee University in Derry and at the Presbyterian college in Belfast, gaining bachelor of arts and bachelor of divinity degrees. He later studied at the San Francisco Theological Seminary.
He was ordained in 1953, serving as minister in parishes such as Raffrey in Co Down and at Alexandra Church in north Belfast.
He originally enrolled with the junior lodge of the Orange Order and rose through the ranks to become the grandmaster of the order from 1972 to 1997. He joined the politically dominant UUP in 1959. He sided with the hardline Ulster Vanguard movement in 1972, a UUP pressure group led by former Stormont minister William Craig, which also won the support of loyalist paramilitary groups.
Smyth was one of two deputy leaders of Vanguard, but he remained with the party when Craig broke away from the UUP. Smyth was elected to the 1975-1976 Constitutional Convention, one of a number of British government failed attempts to create some form of normal government in Northern Ireland. During this period, with other Ulster Unionists, he engaged in secret talks with the SDLP led by John Hume and Paddy Devlin aimed at breaking the political deadlock.
When the Rev Robert Bradford, the UUP MP for South Belfast, was murdered by the IRA in November 1981, Smyth was chosen as the candidate to replace him. In the byelection in March 1982 he saw off the challenge of David Cook of Alliance and the Rev William McCrea of the DUP with a majority of more than 5,000 votes. He held the seat until his retirement in 2005, with former SDLP leader Dr Alasdair McDonnell then taking the seat.
With other unionists, Smyth temporarily resigned his seat in protest against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement but he was easily re-elected in the subsequent byelections with a majority of more than 14,000. In response to that agreement, in 1987 he proposed the creation of a federal UK with a parliament in Belfast and a facility for the Republic to rejoin the British union.
During the period of the peace process in 1993, he earned criticism from the DUP when he said Sinn Féin could be involved in all-party talks, but under very strict conditions. In August the following year, just before the first IRA ceasefire, he was prescient in predicting that unionists would “have to deal with” Sinn Féin in the eventuality of an IRA renunciation of violence and disarmament.
On the troubled issue of parades, Smyth believed the loyal orders should have the right to parade through Catholic and nationalist areas. In 1996, around the period of the Drumcree and other parading disturbances – and while he was still head of the Orange Order – he was criticised for stating that Orangemen may have to break the law to assert their marching rights.
In 1987 Smyth wrote to the UK prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, suggesting that Haughey, the taoiseach, could have been linked to the huge seizure of arms on board the Eksund trawler bound for the IRA from Libya’s Col Muammar Gadafy. Smyth, citing the 1970s arms crisis, said Haughey “had a questionable background when it comes to supplying arms for the IRA”.
A senior official at the Northern Ireland Office, the recently deceased Robin Masefield, advised that the “prime minister should ignore the connotations placed on the article by Mr Smyth”, and the matter went no further.
When Thatcher effectively was deposed as Tory leader in 1990, Smyth sympathised with her “because we know what betrayal means”.
The Rev Martin Smyth was predeceased by his wife, Kathleen; his daughter Margaret; and grandchild Hilary. He is survived by his daughters Rosemary and Heather, sons-in-law David and Ivan and grandchildren Sarah, Mark and Erin.
