William Craig, Ulster Unionist, dies at 86

Former Stormont minister had role in start of Troubles; then as Vanguard leader he led strike against power-sharing

William Craig, a senior Ulster Unionist who broke away to form the Vanguard movement, has died at the age of 86.

While home affairs minister in the Unionist-dominated Stormont government in October 1968, Craig played a pivotal role at the start of the Northern Ireland conflict when he restricted a march by civil rights campaigners in Derry.

Three days of rioting began when marchers were struck with batons by police after walking onto a road which had been declared out of bounds by Craig; the subsequent chain of violence is often regarded as beginning the so-called Troubles.

Craig publicly branded the rights movement a front for Irish Republican activity, and in December 1968 was dismissed from his ministerial post by Northern Ireland prime minister Terence O'Neill. He left the Ulster Unionist party and formed the Vanguard Unionists.

David Burnside, a former Ulster Unioinst MP who was involved with Vanguard earlier in his political career, said of Craig: "As probably the most prominent hardline Unionist at the beginning of the Troubles, he brought together all the groupings of Unionism at the political and paramilitary levels."

After being elected to Stormont in 1960 for Larne, Craig had held several ministerial portfolios .

The Vanguard Unionists had affiliations with a number of loyalist paramilitary groupings and flirted with the concept of Northern Ireland independence. As their leader, Craig played a major role in the loyalist workers' strike in 1974 that led to the fall of a power-sharing government which followed the Sunningdale agreement.

That agreement brought constitutional nationalists into government, but opposition to power-sharing in the form of the strike closed down many workplaces. At one point Vanguard threatened physical resistance to the British government's support for the agreement.

In 1974 Craig won a Westminster seat, for East Belfast, but lost it in 1979 and retreated from the public eye.

He lived near Bangor in Co Down, where earlier this month he had suffered a stroke.