Captain William Long had the bad luck to be Home Affairs Minister of Northern Ireland when the Troubles exploded there in the late 1960s. His tenure was brief, from December 1968 until March 1969.

Part of his job was responsibility for keeping order during the many sectarian parades held annually in the Province, which tended to inflame the passions of the participants and those excluded. Feelings often ran high and it was nigh on impossible to please both sides with whatever arrangements were made for a peaceful march. In any case, in those days parades by the Orange Order and other Protestant groups were generally allowed to follow whichever route they chose, even if they passed through Roman Catholic areas, while republican marches were either not permitted to enter Protestant “territory” or were simply banned from taking place at all. Thus, whichever minister was overseeing such potentially incendiary events — even if trying to be fair-minded and non-partisan — was often on a hiding to nothing.

Such was the fate of Captain Long when on New Year’s Day in 1969 a civil rights march by a group of Queen’s University students called Peoples’ Democracy — seeking votes for all in local elections and not just householders — set off from Belfast to Londonderry and descended into violence at Burntollet Bridge, between Claudy and Londonderry, when the marchers were attacked by a mob armed with stones and cudgels. In the mêlée dozens were injured, and windows and car windscreens smashed. A momentous decision was taken to ask for the assistance of British troops.

At Dungiven Michael Farrell, one of the civil rights leaders, made an impassioned speech calling for “one man, one vote”, the repeal of repressive laws, an end to chronic unemployment and the provision of decent homes for all.

Long, a humane and tolerant Yorkshireman who had settled in Ulster and married a local woman in 1942, was himself opposed to his powers to arrest suspects without a warrant and imprison them without a trial. But after the violence at Londonderry he changed his mind and introduced a new Public Order Act.

That night Long, who had been appointed Home Affairs Minister only two weeks previously by the Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, appeared on television to say that he had that day met the Protestant leaders the Rev Ian Paisley and Major Ronald Bunting, “commandant of the Loyal Citzens of Ulster”, neither of whom had “threatened or hinted that their followers would cause any trouble in Derry”. (They had earlier tried to persuade him to ban the march.) He added that Paisley’s followers had been wholly non-violent during the march. The bloodied marchers were astonished and incensed. The Belfast Telegraph took up the cause and accused Long of being, like the police, partisan. At a press conference at Stormont, Bunting was asked about his call to upset the progress of the march. He replied: “I have given a request to the loyal citizens of Ulster and thank God they have responded — I thank you very much indeed, God — to hinder and harry it. And I think they have hindered it, and I think to a certain extent they have harried it.”

When a journalist suggested that it might have been better if Bunting had simply ignored the march, he replied: “You can’t ignore the Devil, brother.”

The episode was to herald 30 years of bitter fighting between Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland. Three months later Long was moved to Minister of Development.

William Joseph Long was born in 1922 and was educated at Friends’ School, Great Ayton, Yorkshire, and Edinburgh University. He attended the Royal Military College Sandhurst, and served with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers from 1940 until 1948. He was secretary to the Northern Ireland Marriage Guidance Council, 1948-51, and secretary of the Northern Ireland Chest and Heart Association, 1951-62. He was elected to the Northern Ireland Parliament as Unionist MP for Ards in 1962 and represented the constituency for ten years. He was Minister of Agriculture, (1964-66, and Minister of Education, 1966-68, before his brief tenure at Home Affairs, followed by an equally short stay at the Development Ministry (March-May 1969). At the Education Ministry his ambition had been to put an end to segregated schools. The Catholic Church was just as opposed to his proposal as the Protestants, but Cardinal Conway was persuaded to accept a state role in the governance of Catholic schools in exchange for increased state funding. However, the move towards integration collapsed when the Troubles flared up.

Long left politics when the Stormont Parliament was suspended and direct rule from Westminster introduced in 1972. He become the owner and skipper of a fishing boat from 1972 until 1987. He became the chief executive of the Northern Ireland Fish Producers Organisation and chairman of the UK Association of Fish Producers. He was appointed OBE in 1985 and subsequently retired to North Yorkshire.

His wife, Doreen, predeceased him, and last year he was married to Valerie Bryans, who had been his private secretary at Stormont. She and his son by his first marriage survive him.

Captain William Long, OBE, politician and fisherman, was born on April 23, 1922. He died on February 10, 2008, aged 85