Basil McIvor

William Basil McIvor OBE PC (NI) (17 June 1928 – 5 November 2004) was an Ulster Unionist politician, barrister and pioneer of integrated education.

The son of Rev. Frederick McIvor, a Methodist clergyman, McIvor was born in the Tullyhommon, County Fermanagh part of the village of Pettigo, which straddles the Northern Ireland border. McIvor attended the Methodist College, Belfast and the Queen's University of Belfast and was called to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 1950. In his career at the Bar, Basil McIvor became Junior Crown Counsel and a Resident Magistrate in the 1970s.

He was elected to the Northern Ireland Parliament as Ulster Unionist Party MP for Larkfield in the 1969 election. He was one of a group of MPs who supported the beleaguered Prime Minister, Terence O'Neill. Viewed as a liberal he was given the job of Minister of Community Relations by Brian Faulkner in 1971 and resigned from the Orange Order.

McIvor was a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, 1973, topping the poll in Belfast South, and a member of the Ulster Unionist contingent who negotiated the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973. When the powersharing Executive was set up in the aftermath of Sunningdale McIvor headed the Education Department. McIvor left politics after the fall of the Executive in 1974 and sat as a resident magistrate.

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