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| From: Irish Political Review: Editorials |
| Date: May, 2014 |
| By: Editorial |
North And South |
| North And South Theresa Villiers, who exercises the powers of the State in Belfast, wants to change the system of devolved local institutions over which she presides. She wants to "evolve" that system into a Government/Opposition system. She quotes Edmund Burke irrelevantly. He said: "A state without the means of change is without means of preservation". The quotation is irrelevant because the 6 Counties is not a state. The state in the North is Villiers herself, the Secretary of State. That the state has the means of change is demonstrated by its frequent changes of Government. There will be a new Secretary of State next year. The devolved system does not, properly speaking, have a Government at all. It has a number of Departments whose Ministers are elected to them directly, rather than being appointees of a Government. Political parties take it in turn to choose a Department to run, the order of choice depending on the number of votes gained in the devolved election. Every party of any electoral consequence therefore gets at least one Department to run autonomously. This was the system which made it possible for the War to be ended. Many Government/Opposition systems were tried, but all failed. A Government/Opposition system could only be "evolved" from the present system by destroying it. Whitehall academic patronage in the North has during the past few decades fostered the notion of "the Northern Ireland state". Northern Ireland is very much less of a state than Scotland is, but the Scottish system is never referred to as the Scottish State—even though there is a will to statehood within it, which there is not in Northern Ireland. There is a real prospect of Scotland becoming a state, therefore Whitehall asserts British statehood in Scotland. There is no prospect of Northern Ireland asserting statehood, therefore Whitehall encourages propaganda use of the term "the Northern Ireland State" as a means of disclaiming responsibility for all that its creation of Northern Ireland led to. But Villiers just now is using the power of State to check a small measure of consensus that has emerged in the North. There has been tacit agreement not to implement the social welfare cuts enacted in Westminster and applied to Britain. This does not mean that the Northern Executive is drawing extra funds from the (British) Exchequer. It is using its fixed Budget in a way that enables it to avoid welfare cuts. And Villiers is fining it a million pounds a month for doing so. * A document has come to light in the Dublin Government Archive, expressing strong opposition to a proposal by British Shadow Home Secretary James Callaghan, in November 1970, that a process of democratising the North as a region of the British state should be inaugurated. Callaghan came to the North in the aftermath of a pogrom of August 1960 and saw that the party-politics of the state (which was the core of its democratic life) was missing from Northern Ireland. He therefore floated the idea that the Labour Party should extend its organisation to the North and contest elections there against the Ulster Unionists, who at the time had a superficial connection with the Tory Party. If that had been done, the subsequent course of events would certainly have been very different. The Civil Rights agitation had run out of perspective, disoriented by its own success. Its demands had been met but that had not produced any real feeling of achievement—because the demands had not been directed at the core of the matter. The concession of "One Man, One Vote" changed hardly anything. It only meant the ending of extra votes for businessmen in Local Government elections, as had been done 'on the mainland' some years earlier, and it changed hardly anything on the ground. An abstract grievance was remedied with little tangible effect. The one real grievance in that area was the Derry City gerrymander. That was dealt with to the satisfaction of the Catholic majority. But overall the feeling was that, though the reform demands had been met, the nub of the matter had not been touched. The yearning of the moderate reformers was for "normal politics"—which meant politics as on 'the mainland'. The slogan "British rights for British citizens" was raised, without it being specified how these Rights might be achieved. There was in fact only one way of achieving them and getting normal politics and that was through British political practice. Britain in those days knew little of 'rights' as distinct from practices, and it doesn't know very much more today. And, if British Rights were abstracted from political practices and were all conferred legally on Northern Ireland, that would have brought "normal politics" no nearer, because political normality lay in the activity of the system of party-politics through which the state functioned. Excluded from that system, politics in the North could only be a continuation of the communal antagonism on which Whitehall founded Stormont in 1921. Politics 'on the mainland' was not cerebral but actual. In the North there might be efforts to imitate the politics of normality, but they could never be more than fringe activities. Professor Brendan O'Leary (then of the London School of Economics) in a pamphlet called Oranges Or Lemons?, written against the movement to extend the British party system to the 6 County region of the state, came up with the bold idea that there was no real difference between the imitation and the real thing. The imitation, he argued, was a "facsimile" of the real thing and was just as good as it. That was a properly cerebral thought. But the Northern imitations of 'mainland' politics always failed to have the effect that the real thing had, and they always withered. The Dublin Government, judging by the Report by E. Gallagher, dated 6th November 1970, and produced for the Department of the Taoiseach, understood the difference between the imitations and the real thing. It wasn't bothered by the Northern Ireland Labour Party, but if the Labour Party decided to organise "we should oppose it without reserve". The document (four closely-typed foolscap pages) will be published later. Its salient points are: "historically there has never been a British political party in the North. [A whopping great lie. Ed.] The Unionist Party… is a strictly Irish party and always has been… "…the two major political parties here, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, have been careful not to organise themselves in the North although any Irish political party has a greater right to do so than any British party. Instead their policy has been to maintain a liaison with the major opposition party in the North… Insofar as Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have restrained themselves in this situation for the general good then it might be expected that Mr. Callaghan should also stay out of the situation." The essential thing was to maintain the political isolation of the North as a political No-man's-land between the two states—legislated for in major respects, and paid for, by Britain, but excluded from British state politics. Dublin was establishing a party to serve its interests in the North, the SDLP. The SDLP policy was unity by consent, but the policy of the Labour Party would "necessarily be pro-constitution"—which, of course, provided for unity by consent! (Didn't Professor Nicholas Mansergh tell us long ago that the Partition Act was really aUnity Act.) But the document insists that the difference between these two forms of unity by consent "is more than one of verbiage". And yet the leader of the SDLP ended up in the House of Lords! The situation in November 1970, when Fianna Fail decided to use all its influence to prevent democratisation of the North through British politics, was that Taoiseach Lynch, who had adopted a policy of arming the Northern minority in August 1969 and continued it until April 1970, suddenly ended that policy and brought criminal proceedings against those who had been implementing it, including John Kelly of the Citizens Defence Committees. That betrayal of the Northern insurgency, instead of demoralising it, shocked it into a line of independent action, free from Dublin influence. Lynch condemned violence, while at the same time declaring that Partition was the cause of it an that it could only be ended by the ending of Partition. His pretend policy was to build bridges to the Unionist community and nurture it towards unity. But he categorically rejected the "two nations" view, which might have persuaded the Unionists to listen to him. Thus Fianna Fail, in November 1970, had ruled every practical option off the agenda. So a War was fought. And politicians who developed out of the War brought it to a conclusion by means of the present transitional arrangement. And Lynch''s successors—who kept up his policy of isolating the North—finding that the military/political force that developed in the isolated North is not content to remain bottled up there and is developing a strong presence in the all-too-virtuous South, can think of nothing better to do than carry on treating the War as an outbreak of criminality which should be subject to ongoing prosecution. North And South. Editorial Guests Of The Queen. Pat Walsh On The Way To A New Social Partnership? ICTU Ponders The Future. Philip O'Connor Readers' Letters: Royals At 1916 Commemoration. Philip O'Connor Massacre In West Cork. Barry Keane The White Nigger Affair. Jack Lane Martin McGuinness Denies Writing 'Up The Ra' In The Queen's Jacks. Waterford Whispers (Report) Poems. Braking News. Bringing On World War 3. Wilson John Haire Shorts from the Long Fellow (Exchequer Returns; Morgan Kelly; Seamus Coffey; Ireland And Iceland; Whistleblowers; Tom Gilmartin; Rwanda) No Room For The Auxies At Kilmichael. Report The Anglo Three Trial. John Martin Joe Clarke, Dennis Dennehy And The Heckling Of Dev. Manus O'Riordan (Report) Es Ahora. Julianne Herlihy (Bowenscourt And The TLS) Forgetting To Remember? Donal Kennedy (Unpublished letter) Easter 1916: 'One More Desperate Sally'. John Morgan (Col. retd.) Moore Street And The Developers. Lucille Redmond (Report) Easter Rising Commemoration Address. Jack Lane Angry Intellectuals. Brendan Clifford (Fintan O'Toole, Diarmaid Ferriter) German Chancellor's Speech To The Reichstag. (Report) Crossbarry Commemoration Address. Niall Meehan If Shakespeare Was A Corkman. . . Jack Lane Biteback: Suppression Of Palestinian Culture. Jim Roche Israel: Occupied Or Disputed Territories? David Morrison Does It Stack Up? Michael Stack (Taxation) Rejoining The British Commonwealth? Tom Cooper Henry Harrison. Pat Walsh Labour Comment: Mondragon, Part 29 Read That Prescription: TWICE. Seán O Riain Gerry Adams: Irish Political Review Supplement |