Read: The Buck Stops . . .<em> where?</em>

From: Irish Political Review: Editorials

Date: October, 2013

By: Editorial

The Buck Stops . . . where?

By any reasonable reckoning the responsibility for what happened in the North lies with the sovereign power which imposed the undemocratic system that could only function through sectarian conflict. But British Governments like to blame others for the foreseeable consequences of what they do, and they are pretty good at it.

Dublin Governments had no part whatever in the governing of Northern Ireland. But Whitehall was determined that they should be blamed for the way things turned out in the North. And of course the Ulster Unionists have always seen Roman influence operating through Dublin as the cause of all their troubles.

The Loyalists some time ago demanded an apology from the Southern Government for the war it inflicted on them. The Taoiseach, Fine Gaeler Enda Kenny, dismissed the demand. But his Coalition Foreign Minister and Tanaiste, Stickie Labour Party leader Eamonn Gilmore, has now said that the demand must be taken seriously and has promised an investigation into the charge that the Government of the Southern State did not do its duty to prevent the Provos from waging war in the sectarian British state in the North.

The power of the Provisional IRA was generated out of the way the Catholic two-fifths of the population was governed in the British system in the North. The Provos did not exist in August 1969. They existed a few months later as a consequence of August 1969.

There was natural sympathy between the majority of people in the South and their fellow-nationals in the North during the two generations when the Northern minority was quiescent under oppression. But it was not Southern influence that stirred the Northern minority to action. It was the pogrom launched by the agents of the British State in the North. When the Northern minority refused to lie down any longer, there was widespread admiration for them in the South. But the Provo movement was self-organised in the North, with the assistance of some Southern Republicans, but none from the Southern State.

The British Government, unable to stamp out the Republican upsurge which it provoked, said that was because it was Southern-based. It demanded repressive action in the South. The Fianna Fail Government in 1972 brought in a repressive Bill. Fine Gael and Labour combined against it and its passage became doubtful. British/Loyalist bombs were set off near the Dail. A clear message was sent, as British diplomacy likes to put it when doing something diabolical. The opposition to the Bill collapsed.

Two years later a power-sharing devolved Government was in place in the North and the establishment of a Council of Ireland was in the offing. An SDLP MP said the Council would "trundle" the Unionists into a United Ireland. The Unionists were protesting but the Dublin Government (a Fine Gael/Labour Coalition) paid no heed. Three bombs were set off simultaneously in Central Dublin, and another in Monaghan town, in a British/Loyalist operation, causing casualties greater than any suffered in the North. Again a clear message was sent.

Dublin Governments then acted to the best of their ability to do what Britain demanded of them in the way of helping Britain to win the War which undemocratic British governing arrangements had brought about in the North.

A security report to the Dublin Government on the eve of the Dublin/Monaghan Bombings of 1974 rated the top danger to the state as coming from the Stickie Republicanism, from which the present Foreign Minister emerged. (See The Dublin/Monaghan Bombings, 1974, a Military Analysis, by John Morgan, Lt. Col (Retd.).)

The Stickies of those times spun the yarn that they were a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist organisation and had the Southern State in their sights, and that the capitalist rulers of the South had created the Provisionals as a diversionary bourgeois-nationalist tactic. That yarn continues to be told, for example, by Stickie historians like Lord Bew who are commissioned to write Oxford history under the patronage of the British State. How then can the Foreign Minister deny the Loyalist charge—as his Taoiseach does—without giving the lie to his own development?

(For the record: as far as we have been able to discover, it was the Stickies who received a large sum of money from the Dublin Government in that critical period of 1970.)

Gilmore's concession to the British/Ulster Loyalist attempt to push responsibility for the War in the North from the sovereign authority in the North onto Dublin Governments which played no part whatever in the governing of the North, was made at a meeting of the British/Irish Association at Cambridge in September. It does not appear to have been put on the Foreign Affairs website, but it has been given considerable publicity by the Irish Times, which, in an editorial comment on September 16th welcomed it as "a useful gesture, as part of an unfolding process of reconciliation".

It is not explained who will be reconciled with whom if Dublin accepts responsibility for "the IRA's murderous activities" (as it was put in a long Irish Times article by Stickie Professor, and political advisor to David Trimble as Unionist leader, Professor Henry Patterson, on 14th September). The feeding of Unionist delusions by scapegoating Dublin will certainly not reconcile the two communities in the North. The Catholic community knows, out of its own experience, what happened, and it won't be influenced by middle-class Dublin media. And the Unionists do not want to be reconciled with Dublin. What they want is a false confession of guilt by Dublin to use as a debating point in the communal conflict in the North.

The "moment of reconciliation", such as Stickie IRA historian Lord Bew once reflected about on RTE, is a profoundly undemocratic notion. In the functional party-political democracy of the British state, communal passions, whether conceived of a religious or ethnic, are fudged and eroded piecemeal by the opportunist temptations of the democratic process.

When the British State shaped a region of itself into Northern Ireland, it excluded it from the democracy of the state. About 80 years later a degree of stability was achieved by discarding the spurious subordinate democracy of the 1921 system and establishing in its place an apartheid system (authentic provision for "separate development", unlike the South African system established when South Africa was the darling of the British Empire). The devolved powers of state are separated out into departments and are shared out between the two communities according to objective rules. Communal antagonism is the accepted reality on which this arrangement is based. And there is no cross-community dimension to its functioning which might supersede it by bringing about a transition to something else. At its best, the system stabilises communal antagonism by structuring it so that it can operate more or less peacefully.

The Catholic community has achieved a degree of political power with this system, where previously it had none. But the Protestant community, by being put on an equal footing with the Catholic community, has suffered a loss of power, because it was previously cock-of-the-walk. And it is discontented and disoriented.

When Britain was setting up the Partition system in 1920-21 the Ulster Unionists made "the supreme sacrifice" by agreeing to operate a strange form of subordinate government functioning outside the political system by which the state was governed, so Whitehall could manipulate Sinn Fein into the 'Treaty' arrangement in the South. That meant that, in order to remain under the British State, the Unionists agreed to be something other than British in its semi-detached political life. Whitehall benefited from the "sacrifice" by splitting Sinn Fein with the 'Treaty'— and forcing the Treatyites into 'Civil War'.. But for Ulster Unionism the sacrifice was a kind of suicide.

The exclusion of the Six Counties from the political system of the state is not allowed to be mentioned in the Irish Times. The British State must be exonerated from basic responsibility for the way things went in this British region. And so there must be scapegoats.

Professor Paterson writes that a "sense that republicans have been more effective in rewriting the history of the Troubles… goes to the heart of much of recent unionist and loyalist disquiet over the peace process".

Official Republicans have been a major force in the history-rewriting business since the 1970s. In the process they somehow metamorphosed into political advisers to Ulster Unionism—Lord Bew, Professor Patterson, Eoghan Harris. It has been revealed that Lord Bew was in the Official IRA. Professor Patterson was at least a member of Official Sinn Fein. That fact should surely have been mentioned in the Irish Times cv to his article. But it wasn't. History is rewritten.

CONTENTS

The Viability Of The Irish State. Editorial

The Buck Stops . . . Where? Editorial

Mother Russia. Jack Lane

Return Of The Double Act, Patterson & Bew. Pat Walsh

A Bridge For Rosie Hackett. Manus O'Riordan

Hope. Wilson John Haire (Poem)

Shorts from the Long Fellow (Sinn Fein On Wealth Tax; Emigration; Unemployment

& Employment; Balance Sheet Recession; The Irish Times)

'Pulling Hard Against The Stream'. Malachi Lawless (obituary for

Annette O'Riordan)

The German Election Result. Philip O'Connor

Census And Nonsense. Jack Lane

Wake Up. Wilson John Haire (Poem)

Es Ahora. Julianne Herlihy (Seamus Heaney, Requiescat in Pace)

Reply From A Vile Accuser. Joe Keenan

Some Collinses And Somervilles, And The Knight Of The Levant.

Manus O'Riordan

Biteback: Partnership Helped The Unemployed. Philip O'Connor

Cameron on World War Two. Manus O'Riordan

Does It Stack Up? Michael Stack (The Irish Holocaust;

Russia Today. Report

Labour Comment: Loss Of Guild Power, Mondragon, Part 23

Trade Union Notes:

Articles

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The Buck Stops . . . where?

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The Buck Stops . . . where?

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