Read: North and South

From: Irish Political Review: Editorials

Date: November, 2013

By: Editorial

North and South

North And South
Policing is a rough and ready business, even in a soundly-based functional democracy in a liberal state with an adversarial system of law. In Northern Ireland, which has never had democratic government, it is necessarily much rougher and readier. For half a century it was a system of Protestant communal authority slightly related to law. Then, for a further quarter of a century, it was a system of Whitehall authority, unrelated to Six County politics, operating in a war situation.
During that quarter century this journal expressed the opinion that Justice was deterred from becoming a mere administrative organ of undemocratic government by assassination.
Lord Reith, founder of the BBC, said that the best form of government was despotism tempered by assassination. While it cannot be said that Northern Ireland had anything like good government, it would be fairly true to say that it has had despotism tempered by assassination.

Professor Henry Patterson, of the New University, was once a theoretically-rigorous Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, then a leading member of Official Sinn Fein and political adviser to David Trimble when he was First Minister of the 1998 system. He now appears to be simply an academic waging the 'battle of ideas' in the Ulster Unionist interest. He recently had an article in the Irish Times (14th September) holding Dublin Governments responsible for the effectiveness of the Provisional campaign in the North.
(This was in accordance with the Official IRA line of the early 1970s, which declared that the Provos were a creation of the Dublin Government for the purpose of preventing the Official IRA from achieving a revolutionary socialist overthrow of the Southern State. As far as we could discover at the time, however, it was the Officials who received a large sum of money from the Dublin Government.)
The Irish Times, which in recent years has been trying to polish up its national credentials, which had become heavily tainted when it was discovered that in a critical situation it had sought Whitehall advice, felt obliged to publish some weeks later (8th October) a detailed rebuttal of Patterson's contentions by a representative of the Pat Finucane Centre, Margaret Urwin (Justice for the Forgotten). As we go to print there has been no published reply from Patterson.

A book about the collaboration of the Whitehall authorities in the North with Ulster Unionist militants to kill Catholics, North and South, as an anti-Republican measure, is about to be published. It is based on research into official documents by the Pat Finucane Centre and is written by Anne Cadwallader. The title is Lethal Allies.
Pat Finucane was a lawyer who acted for Republicans (and Loyalists) in what there was of a legal system in the North. He acted too effectively for the liking of the unrepresentative rulers of the Six Counties. A high-minded, and influentially-connected, MP, who knew that Northern Ireland was not a suitable arena for a free and skilful operation of all the theoretical resources of the British legal system, Douglas Hogg, pointed the finger at him in Parliament, and he was killed.
This killing of a lawyer, because he was an effective lawyer, in a situation which was beyond the resources of law to cope with, but in which the State thought it expedient to maintain the pretence of the 'rule of law', has led to intensive legal scrutiny of the operations of the system by the Finucane family and their supporters.
The Finucane family was wantonly damaged by the State and is exacting revenge by accepting the State at the face value it presents and demonstrating that it has engaged in what in a functional democracy would be a system of atrocities amounting to a system of terrorism. It was not their business to deal with the political context in which this was done.

The book is to be launched by Seamus Mallon of the SDLP. The SDLP was the major political party of the Catholic community for thirty years. It purported to be, not a party of the Catholic community, but a Social Democratic and Labour Party. And Mallon, Deputy First Minister in the North in 1998-201, presented himself as a Republican of the classical rather than the Irish kind. He looked to the American Civil War as a founding event of Republican democracy. He abhorred the idea of the unification of Ireland by force, oblivious of the fact that the unity of the American Republic was achieved by the killing of a million men in battle and untold collateral damage to civilians. As SDLP leader, he was dismally unable to deal with David Trimble's heel-dragging over the implementation of the 1998 Agreement, and his ineffectiveness set the party on the slippery slope.
He toyed with the idea of forming a Centrist alliance with the UUP against the "extremists" of Sinn Fein and the DUP, but made no serious attempt to carry it through—probably having enough sense of Northern Ireland realities, amidst all his exotic high-mindedness, to see that it was not on the cards.
Sinn Fein took over and made a functional deal with Unionists—which the SDLP had altogether failed to do. That deal had its operational logic. It involved a pragmatic acceptance that there had been a genuine war, not an outbreak of mere criminality, and that the force which the British Army failed to smash had to be a pillar of the new arrangements, i.e. Sinn Fein/IRA. But Mallon, resenting the displacement of the SDLP by Sinn Fein, would not accept that fact. He applied a kind of fetishism, or tokenism, of law and democracy, to the working arrangement made by Sinn Fein and the DUP with a view to subverting it.
Earlier this year he combined with fundamental Unionist Jim Allister to gain an Assembly motion disqualifying Special Advisers, appointed by Ministers, from serving if they had served prison terms of more than five years. This was directed at Sinn Fein and meant the replacement of a couple of advisers.

The Assembly system was carefully arranged to avert majority rule. Its rules include a blocking system to ensure that the Unionist majority could not engage in subversive harrassment of the divided (rather than shared) power system. Sinn Fein was one member short of being able to operate this on its own. The SDLP, under Mallon's influence, refused to supply that one vote. While it then abstained on Allister's motion, the effect of what it did was that it joined with the fundamentalist Traditional Unionist Voice, the UUP, NI21, Alliance and the DUP to carry a decision against Sinn Fein.
The initiative for this did not come from the DUP leadership. It came from the Unionist tail, the TUV, seconded by the nationalist tail, Mallon—two tails wagging the two dogs.
Mallon has often indulged in gestures of dissociation from the crude political realities of the situation in which he chose to be a politician. But in his democratic gesturing he never acknowledged the over-arching political reality that, in erecting the Six Counties of the United Kingdom into the anomalous constitutional entity of Northern Ireland, Britain deliberately arranged for this part of the British state to be governed undemocratically—that it set up a structure that could not be democratic.
Mallon, therefore, is a supporter of Northern Ireland. He was against the establishment of an all-Ireland state by force. He never made any serious attempt that we could see to win Protestant support for unification. And he was opposed to our campaign to bring the Six Counties within the democracy of the rest of the United Kingdom. He was therefore a supporter of Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland was a recipe for war. What has happened in it is what always seemed likely to happen in it.
To support the existence of Northern Ireland, while denouncing the means of government which it made necessary, is not statesmanship. And Mallon has fancied himself as a statesman.
Partition was necessary if Britain was unwilling to deploy massive force against Ulster Unionism. There was, in our view, no necessity to set up the Northern Ireland system. That was a wanton act of irresponsibility as far as good government in the Six Counties was concerned—though it undoubtedly had an ulterior purpose directed towards the South.

Mallon's position, as a supporter of Northern Ireland as region of the British state excluded from the democracy of the state, is that it can be democratically governed within its own subordinate system, while all theoretical and actual sovereign power of State is exercised by Whitehall.
On 8th October he was awarded an honorary PhD by Dublin City University to mark the 15th anniversary of the Peace Process, along with Lord Trimble—who gave him the run-around when they were First and Deputy First Ministers in 1998-2001. He availed of the occasion to attack Sinn Fein for "debasing" Republicanism (from the purity in which the SDLP maintained it!!) and for operating the Peace Process as a "Them and Us" arrangement. But the 1998 Agreement, which the SDLP played a central part in negotiating, is a carefully-structured "Them and Us" arrangement. If Mallon thought that, by joining the fundamentalist margin of Unionism to ban Sinn Feiners with convictions from taking part in administration, he was establishing a Northern Ireland "We", then he is uniquely deluded.
Divided We Stand was the title of a booklet published around 1960. The author acknowledged the practical necessity of Partition, though he had no insight into the diabolical Northern Ireland structure which accompanied it. Divided We Get Along might be a description of the working arrangement made by Sinn Fein and the DUP. Under this arrangement, the Catholic community feels that it has achieved something. It had no such feeling during the years when Trimble was giving a helpless Mallon the run-around.

Sinn Fein has established a working relationship with a section of the Unionist leadership—a thing which the SDLP signally failed to do. And it has established a strong base for itself in the political life of the South—which the SDLP, being Northern Irelandish, did not even attempt but which is a further ground of its resentment of Sinn Fein.
Sinn Fein is tactically flexible because its position is based on power which Whitehall failed to break and because its political horizon is not Northern Ireland. It can be practical—opportunist if you prefer—in the exercise of power because it has got power that it acquired independently of British policy. For a while the SDLP had got a semblance of power by selling itself to Whitehall as an alternative to the Provos, with the ability to undermine the Provos if conciliated. But, when its opportunity came in 1998, it failed utterly because Mallon imagined that he constituted a "We": with Trimble, and Trimble (advised by the Official IRA) was intent on subverting the Agreement which he had been compelled to sign—and which we were told he did not sign in the literal sense.

If Mallon subverts the Peace Process which he disparages, the outcome will not be an orgy of sentimental reconciliation but a resumption of something like war—and with it a resumption of the dirty tricks which are being exposed so effectively by the Pat Finucane Centre.

Northern Ireland is an inherently unstable structure, deliberately set up by Whitehall for its own purposes. Given what it was, it could only be governed in the way it was governed. It could not be governed as the rest of the state is governed, and law could not function in it as it does of the rest of the state, because it is governed apart from the life of the state. And law is never detachable from politics.

The "Peace Process" operated by Sinn Fein and the DUP, which Mallon attacks from an idealist position which he failed to make effective as a politician, is not a departure from the norm of democracy. It is a departure from the norm of raw communal antagonism in which the leaders of the two communities could do nothing but shout at each other. The default position of Northern Ireland, which prevails when it is not being over-ridden, does not lead to democratic peace but to war. And it is the party that was able to make war that is over-riding it for the time being, despite harassment by resentful failures.

The SDLP was in power—or at least in Office—in 1974 under the Sunningdale Agreement. It was in a power-sharing arrangement with Brian Faulkner's Unionists under Whitehall supervision. It had not made its own way to power and it did not know how to use the power that had been conferred on it. It was sulking in its Dungiven Assembly, having declared for "united Ireland or nothing", but it was coaxed and nudged out of its lair by Secretary of State Whitelaw and was manipulated into Northern Ireland power-sharing.
The whiff of power then went to its head, and by its conduct in Office (January-May 1974), it undermined the position of its Unionist ally. It declared that, by means of a Council of Ireland that was to be set up, it would trundle the Unionists into a United Ireland. Its Ministers posed for a photograph with members of the Dublin Government in preparation for All-Ireland Government.
When its conduct provoked general Unionist opposition to the power-sharing, and to a Strike against the establishment of the Council of Ireland which was supported by virtually the entire Protestant community, Premier Faulkner resigned. The SDLP then, declaring that the Strike was a Fascist uprising, said that it was willing to govern alone in order to ensure that there was not a repeat of the German events of 1933. Gerry Fitt became Premier. At that point Whitehall scrapped Sunningdale.

When, 24 years later, restoration of Northern Ireland Government was provided for, Seamus Mallon described the Good Friday Agreement as "Sunningdale for slow learners", the implication being that the Provos had brought down the Sunningdale arrangement but were now willing to participate in a similar set-up.
We supported Sunningdale. The Provos did not. But it was not the Provos that brought it down. It was the conduct of the SDLP in Office that wrecked it, by provoking general Protestant hostility to it. We tried to warn the SDLP that it needed to change tack in order to preserve Power-Sharing, but it was lost in hubris.
The Provos eased up on their military campaign and let political events run their course. It was the posturing of the SDLP in Office, assisted by complementary posturing of the Coalition in Dublin (notably by Conor Cruise O'Brien), that provoked the Strike (the Constitutional Stoppage) which destroyed the Executive.

The moral is that the SDLP, having had power conferred on it, was incompetent in the exercise of that power in an intricate political situation, and this incompetence was again in evidence 25 years later, while the Provos, having achieved power through their own effort, are able to exercise it practically: "Is fear ciall ceannuithe ná ciall an muinteoire".*
The main military event during the crisis of the Sunningdale system was the bombing of Dublin and Monaghan, which caused the greatest loss of life in the War. There is little doubt that the bombing was the work of Loyalist paramilitaries, organised by the British military. The Dublin Government, led by Liam Cosgrave, was supporting the SDLP in its conduct which was outraging the Ulster Protestant community, yet it made no arrangements to defend the Republic from attacks from the North. In a recently-published book, John Morgan, a retired Colonel of the Irish Army, traces the course of those bombings, and argues that, not only was there close collaboration between the British military and the Ulster Loyalists, but that collaboration with elements of the Gardai to leave an escape route open is a strong probability.

Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave made a statement on the day of the Bombings, implying that they were the work of the IRA. That was credible only for a fraction of a second, while people were in shock. After that the Cosgrave Government, and all subsequent Governments, stifled investigation of the incident. They were all overawed by Britain and dared not risk finding it guilty.
Cosgrave has recently spoken about his father, W.T. (Irish Times, Oct. 13), who in 1922, after Michael Collins was killed in his mad escapade into West Cork, took over the leadership of the Provisional Government set up by Britain to enforce the 'Treaty', repudiated the complexities of Collins's approach, and consolidated the Treaty regime by means of unrestrained terrorism, free of any appearance of law, supported by Whitehall. The high points of that campaign were the killing of Erskine Childers because he was found in possession of a kind of toy pistol given to him by Collins; the killing by Government decision, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (Dec. 8) of four prisoners who had been held since the fall of the Four Courts in August; and the chaining of a group of prisoners-of-war at Ballyseedy in Kerry to a mine which was exploded and the survivors machine-gunned. The latter is known about because, against the odds of a million to one, there was a survivor who was overlooked.

This was done in the era of the League of Nations, under the ultimate authority of the British Parliament. A Dail elected in June 1922 was not allowed to meet until after the Treaty War—the 'Civil War'—was launched. And it was launched on the insistence of Whitehall (which is one of the reasons why Manus O'Riordan has called it the War of Foreign Intervention).
The terror worked in the short term, but it failed to engender a Treatyite mentality in the populace. The Treatyites almost lost power in 1927. They did lose it in 1932, and they never again won an election outright. In 1933 they became Fascists and were vehemently but futilely Anti-Partitionist. They returned to Office in 1948, in Coalition with Sean MacBride's Clann na Poblachta and launched another round of vehement but futile Anti-Partitionism. then, in 1974, again in Coalition, they backed the SDLP in outraging the Unionists but left the Border undefended.

* Sense bought is better than sense taught.

The Dublin/Monaghan Bombings, 1974, a military analysis, by John Morgan, Lt. Col (Retd.). 248pp. €20, £17.50

November
North And South. Editorial
Irish Budget 2014. John Martin
A Professor Writes . . . Jack Lane
Readers' Letters: T.E. Lawrence: Irish? Ivor Kenna
Free Speech. Wilson John Haire (Poem)
Israel And Its Friends. Editorial
The Referendums. Report
The War On The Peace. Pat Walsh
Editorial Digest. (Anthony McIntyre; Credit Unions Retain Strength; Hurling Final)
The Thatcher Who Burnt The House Down. Walter Cobb (Poem)
Shorts from the Long Fellow (Journalism In Irish Independent; More Bullshit; Children Survey; Emigration Once Again; The Guarantee)
Annette McDonald, Some Memories. John Minahane
Was. Wilson John Haire (Poem)
Es Ahora. Julianne Herlihy (The Raj In The Rain)
Dublin's Ground-Breaking Bobbies. Donal Kennedy (Unpublished Letter)
Towards A Position On Germany, Ireland And Europe. Philip O'Connor
The Adams Hunt. Editorial
"I Did All I Could To Help My Abused Niece". Gerry Adams (Report)
Harris On Harris. Jack Lane
Biteback: Cosgrave On Ruthlessness. Manus O'Riordan
Donal Kennedy: Redmond's Folly; Terence McSwiney's Funeral;
De Valera In Context (Unpublished Letters)
Does It Stack Up? Michael Stack (Democracy: What Democracy?; The Budget)
The State Deserts The Guilds, Mondragon, Part 24
Trade Union Notes.

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