Decline
The organisation was never able to attract leading trade unionists, and soon declined in importance. While Andrews and William Grant were initially able to speak on its behalf in the Parliament of Northern Ireland, in later years only the less prominent William Kennedy and occasional Senators sat in the Stormont Parliament.
The Great Depression saw many workers look instead to the official trade union movement and the Northern Ireland Labour Party, and many branches of the UULA became moribund. A drive to reinvigorate the UULA was launched in the 1950s, although only one new branch was formed, in Londonderry.
In the 1970s, its role as a movement for the mobilisation of the loyalist working classes was taken over by more militant groups such as the Loyalist Association of Workers and the Ulster Workers Council.
Already by the early 1970s, the Association's primary role was organising the wreath laying at the annual memorial service for Carson, and today it exists solely to perform this ceremonial role.
Read more about this topic: Ulster Unionist Labour Association
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)