As Minister of Education, McIvor advanced plans for what has since become known as integrated education. He proposed that, in addition to the existing (Catholic) Maintained Schools and the (non-Catholic) Controlled Schools, there should be "shared schools", "available to Catholic and Protestant parents alike who wished to have their children educated together". Disregarding a message from Cardinal William Conway "not to interfere with the schools", McIvor, with Faulkner's support brought the proposal to the Executive where he recalls it being welcomed by all, save Hume. Hume was "less than enthusiastic".[6]: 113
The executive lasted but five months, brought down in May 1974 by the Ulster Workers Council strike. McIvor believed that much of the responsibility lay with the determination of the Unionists' Social Democratic and Labour Party partners to "achieve all-Ireland institutions that would produce the dynamic that could lead ultimately to an agreed single state of Ireland".[6]: 101 The insistence of their deputy leader John Hume on a cross-border Council of Ireland, in particular, blew "out the light at the end of the tunnel". For the survival power sharing Hume's "grim and unbending" approach was a "disaster".[6]: 104 (After the 1998 Belfast Agreement, McIvor did allow that Hume had "courageously done much to promote peace in Northern Ireland within the context of his nationalist aspirations, and [had] been a force in compelling Unionists, and rightly so, to engage in dialogue with their arch enemy, Sinn Féin).[6]: 105
After the fall of the executive, The McIvor left politics and sat as a resident magistrate.
In 1987, he was subject of a motion tabled in the United Kingdom House of Commons by four UUP MPs who accused him of showing bias against unionists and members of the Orange Order in a County Antrim case and so demanded McIvor's removal from the bench.[7]
In 1981, McIvor became the first chairman of Lagan College, Northern Ireland's first integrated secondary school.[2] When Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness became education minister he invited him to visit the college.[8] He was also a governor of Campbell College, Belfast from 1975 until his death.
Basil McIvor died on 5 November 2004 aged 76 while playing golf at Royal County Down.[2]
As a Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police Service, he was criticised by the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry for his failure to manage the initial investigation of the scene of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.[10]
