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From: Irish Political Review: Editorials
Date: February, 2010
By: Editorial

The Crisis In The North (again)

Britain divided Ireland and kept part of it under its own control but refused to govern it. Government was farmed out to a local majority which was locked in combat with the local minority when the deed was done. The farming out of government of the region, outside the political life of the state, preserved the condition of conflict that was there at the outset. The minority community, whose energy was denied an outlet in the meaningful politics of the state, eventually made so much trouble that the state abolished the majority rule principle in the farmed-out government, and made it a rule that representatives of both communities should hold governing ministries as of right, and that these ministries should not be subordinate to a Cabinet, or to the 'Parliamentary Assembly' on which you could believe the whole thing was based if you were careful not to think about it.

The only political connection between the two communities under this system lies in the appointment of the two First Ministers by the Assembly. Although one of these is called the First Minister and the other is called the Deputy First Minister, they are of equal status. But they have to be appointed as a packet by representatives of the two communities whose votes are counted separately. There must be a majority in each community for the packet. The local parties then appoint Ministers according to a scheme that is laid down.

The DUP rejected the whole arrangement at the start, but took the Ministers to which its vote entitled it, and ran them independently of the other Ministers and of the First Minister. It allowed no semblance of Cabinet Government to creep in.

The first First Minister was David Trimble, leader of the UUP, then the biggest party. Trimble signed the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 when Tony Blair, then in his primeval vigour, threatened that he would make him sorry if he didn't. Having signed, Trimble immediately set about preventing the Agreement system from functioning, but nevertheless got a half share of the Nobel Peace Prize. After about a year and a half Whitehall decided to make him play, and found the means of doing so. But he did so only with a post-dated letter of resignation.

In the Trimble period the system only functioned by fits and starts. It was suspended to facilitate him at one point on the grounds that the theft of confidential files from the high security Castlereagh Barrack by men who walked in in broad daylight without masks—with the cameras switched off, knew where the files were—and took them without a disturbance, was the work of Sinn Fein/IRA.

Trimble lost ground by this carry-on to those who rejected the Agreement in principle, without gaining support by implementing it with a will. And the SDLP lost support, under the leadership of Seamus Mallon and then of Mark Durkan, by its uncritical tolerance of Trimble's antics. And so the DUP and Sinn Fein became the major parties. After some hesitation Paisley decided to operate the Agreement with Sinn Fein, and it became functional for the first time.

The UUP then set about eroding Unionist support for the DUP by use of the 'extremist' criticism the DUP had earlier directed against it. And a new 'rejectionist' movement was launched, the Traditional Unionist Voice. And a trivial 'corruption' campaign was got up against the DUP—Paisley's son was said to be paying too high a rent for a premises owned by a close connection. The 'investigative journalists', briefed by 'extremists', made hay with this weed for a while. Paisley stood down to avert a split in the Party. The hard men took over, led by Peter The Punt.

Paisley's approach of working the Agreement in a way that might influence Sinn Fein was abandoned. There was a standstill in the agreement the DUP had made with Sinn Fein regarding the devolution of Policing and Justice powers. This was intended to create a dilemma for Sinn Fein, making it issue an ultimatum that might possibly damage it. And then the Robinson scandal happened.

It is impossible for anybody involved in the Northern Ireland business over the last forty years to think of Robinson as anything but Peter the Punt. He ventured across the border about thirty years ago and committed some little act of rebellion to cause himself to be arrested and cause some embarrassment to the Dublin Government. He got himself arrested alright, but instead of seeing the thing through, he paid a fine and came home. In those days Irish currency was in transition between the pound sterling (with a picture of an Irish coleen on it) and the Euro, and it was called the punt.

Robinson was 'extreme' but careful. He did not cast his bread upon the waters and depend on Providence. He made a profit out of standing four-square for Ulster. And now this careful calculator, who nudged Paisley aside and took over the leadership to show how it should be done, has brought the Party to the brink of disintegration, with the Traditional Unionist Voice willing and able to take over.

It seems that the Paisley family has exerted itself to ward off disintegration for the time being, making Robinson stand aside from his position of First Minister (though not as leader of the DUP), and insisting that negotiation with Sinn Fein on policing should begin. And Trimble's instant demand that Robinson should resign was helpful in bringing about this device. What Trimble advised was the thing that should not be done.

Paisley's solution of the Robinson problem is very like the solution proposed by William O'Brien for the Parnell problem in 1891. Gladstone, speaking for the fundamentalist Protestantism of his Party, said he could no longer deal with Parnell, as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, on the Home Rule issue. O'Brien proposed that Parnell should give up the Parliamentary leadership for the time being while remaining leader of the Party. Parnell refused, and set about wrecking the Party instead.

The Good Friday Agreement allows for the First Minister to stand down for a maximum of six weeks, after which he is deemed to have resigned the position and the Assembly has to elect a new pair of First Ministers. Whether Robinson returns as Parliamentary (so to speak) leader remains to be seen. He probably will, though Arlene Foster (who left the UUP for the DUP many years ago in disgust at Trimble's carry-on) has an altogether better public presence because, if he doesn't, there could be a serious problem under the curious rules of the Agreement about the election of a new packet of First Ministers.

In the case of Iris Robinson it appears there is serious corruption for a change. How far this is chargeable against Peter depends on how one regards the family. In English law it used to be the case that the family, as the unit of society, was outside the law. A wife, as we recall, could not give evidence against her husband, but in recent cases wives have been prosecuted for not informing on their husbands. In England the family is officially defunct and there is Labour and Liberal outrage at a tentative Tory suggestion that a family income tax might be restored. So was it Peter's business to know his wife's business, and if he did know, what he legally obliged to inform on her?

In the Republic there has been some strange comment on the sexual aspect of the affair, the strangest of which was Colm Toibin's contribution to a discussion of it on Marian Finucane's radio show. Homosexualist culture is one of the active principles of general culture following its comparatively recent liberation, and judging by Toibin's smirking remarks it is still in an adolescent phase. And, of course Iris Robinson's up-front heterosexualism made her an irresistible target for it.

Alasdair McDonnell, who won South Belfast, a natural Unionist seat, for the SDLP, when the Unionist vote was split, by presenting himself as almost a Unionist, now proposes an anti-Sinn Fein/DUP alliance with the UUP. He says: "the Stalinist style of political intolerance being forced upon Northern Ireland by the DUP/Sinn Fein axis is failing miserably as far as working for the benefit of our people is concerned". McDonnell is in the running for the leadership of the SDLP if it survives. The present leader, Mark Durkan, made a similar proposal a couple of years ago, but backed away from it very quickly under pressure from his electorate. (These proposals from what claims to be the Labour Party in Northern Ireland sits oddly, in view of the UUP's alliance with the Tory Party.)

The SDLP/UUP alliance is the middle-class will-o-the-wisp, tempting but ungraspable. Sinn Fein and the DUP are, if not strictly working class, at least plebeian and vulgar in the eyes of the SDLP which, if not quite middle class, is at least pretentious. It was not class that brought Sinn Fein and the DUP together. Each was simply the most durable political element in the class melange of its community. When a third of a century of conflict exhausted the 'Stalinist' energies of the SDLP and the UUP, the 'extremists' were all that remained for making a deal. They made a deal that was more workable than the attempted deals between the SDLP and the UUP. That deal made at St. Andrew's might even survive the present crisis, despite the destructive efforts of the SDLP and the UUP along with various media efforts.

Sinn Fein and the DUP are an "axis of failure", and they "use obstacles as bolt holes" says McDonnell (Irish News, 6 Jan). The SDLP had at least three opportunities to form an axis of success with the UUP, and it blew all of them. The most serious was when it brought down the semi-voluntary power-sharing of the Sunningdale Agreement, destroying the only Unionist leader who was ever a willing partner, Brian Faulkner. It did this by giving priority to the Council of Ireland aspect of the Agreement, even though the Dublin chicanery in the matter of the Council had been revealed. There was then a gap of a quarter of a century before the present system was set up. The SDLP claimed to be its architect, but then allowed Trimble to break its terms and make rubbish of it.

SDLP/UUP deals did not hold. The critical difference between the SDLP and Sinn Fein is that the SDLP, despite its formal anti-Partition position, from which it dare not budge, is locked within Northern Ireland horizons. Its Anti-Partitionism acts as a disabling taboo on it. It is a forlorn ideal which it dare not give up.

The Anti-Partitionism of Sinn Fein is different in kind. For a start it is an all-Ireland party with a foothold in the South. And, like it or not, its willingness to support physical force in the undemocratic set-up of "the Northern Irish state" (as Professor Keogh calls it) gives it historic roots, and the ability to play a long game. (Fr. Faul regarded the Provos as not being Irish at all because their war was, like the the game of cricket, endless, while proper Irish wars were like hurling: fast, furious and short. It was strange how such an astute man failed to notice the Fenian phenomenon.)

We assume that McDonnell's middle-class alliance is not practical politics and is not going to happen. It is probable that there would have been a development of that kind within the political life of the State—such as we campaigned for for almost a quarter of a century. But the UUP was no less vehemently opposed to British politics than the SDLP. The British political system is effectively trans-national and all sorts of people find their places in it opportunistically. The Unionist and Nationalist middle classes both rejected that development. And at home each is locked into its national community.

Political unity in the North has, with transient exceptions in 1903 and 1932, not been class unity since 1885. Class analysis was extensively deployed to study of the situation, but it was a study of what did not exist.

A book entitled Politics, Society And The Middle Class In Modern Ireland has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. It is a collection of articles by various authors edited by Fintan Lane. It is a symptom of the collapse of socialism that Lane, Editor of the Labour History magazine, Saothor, for many years, has turned his mind to the middle class. Labour History failed to make an impact because it refused to come to terms theoretically with the realities of working class existence within the national division, adopted a Nationalist stance, and could not see working class activity on the Unionist side.

Much time is spent mulling over the term "middle class", but it is not asked what its sense can be in the absence of an upper or ruling class (in the case of Nationalist Ireland) or of a state (in the case of Ulster Unionism). The historic meaning of the term is a class lying between a ruling upper class of landlords and the working class. This existed in Britain but not in Ireland. In Ireland there was for two centuries after the Williamite conquest a landlord class, which for more than a century monopolised political office, and which dominated local government until the late 19th century, but it was not a ruling class in the British sense. It was a merely exploitative economic class of landlords. It did not shape developments taking place under it, as in England. In 1903 it was sloughed off economically, and in most of the country that was that.

In Protestant Ulster it had functioned as the upper class of a connected community, but in 1903 the Orange tenant-farmers combined with William O'Brien's movement in the rest of the country to get the land for themselves. An attempt by the landlords to use the Orange Lodges against the land reform was thwarted, but it led to a serious rift within Ulster Unionism for a few years. The landlords were bought out, but thereafter they continued in the role of a ruling class to some extent, giving the Unionist movement during the Home Rule conflict something of an upper class style, which was important in evoking English sympathy, even though the personnel of the movement were predominantly working and middle class.

Ulster Unionism was identifiable in Britain as British because it was part of the British Unionist Party and its style did not jar on British political culture as developed over the centuries by the ruling class. Then in 1921 it was cut adrift by the British Unionist Party, which was itself changing into the Tory Party, having absorbed the Liberal Unionists. Only Lord Londonderry made any attempt to keep Northern Ireland part of the British political system, and he soon gave it up as hopeless.

The upper class continued to play a part in the political life of the British State. The BBC (which John Waters idolises) was constructed by it. There are things which it is almost impossible for middle class egoism to do, and which can only be done from above or below. Thatcher did her best to scotch what remained of the ruling class in the corridors of power, and maybe she succeeded. Cameron & Co. are beginning to find it hard to strike the right note.

There was an upper-class residue in the North. The North was a "de facto one-party state", we are told by N.C. Fleming, of Cardiff University, in Lane's book (p224). If the North was in fact a state, it is probable that the upper class residue would have played an influential part in it. Middle class conduct too would have been strongly influenced by it. And issues needing resolution would have arisen within it that would probably have given rise to a party-system appropriate to the conduct of a state in a modern industrial capitalist society. But it was not a state. The main functions of state were to be British after 1921 no less than before. The "Northern Ireland state" was a vision seen 30 years ago by Lord Professor Bew, and taken to be a fact by the weak-minded Professor Keogh. When the semblance of a state was abolished in 1972 the actual State continued without interruption. It is precisely because the Constitutional entity called Northern Ireland is not a state, but a strategic local government device of the British State for an unacknowledged, and unquestioned, purpose, that it can carry on as it does.

Alasdair McDonnell's proposal for a middle-class political initiative was scotched while this article was being written. It seems instead that there is to be a Pan-Unionist Pact connected with the Tory Party. The UUP remnant was made part of the Tory Party last year. It became an attachment to the Tory Party. But its only Westminster MP, Lady Hermon, rejected that measure on the bizarre grounds that she was in serious disagreement with Tory policies.

Be in no doubt: that is bizarre reasoning for a Unionist politician in Northern Ireland. Lady Hermon is living in wonderland. That is to say, she thinks she's living in British political life where one takes a stand on policies for the conduct of the State.

Remember 1979! There was a hung Parliament, and, for once in a wonder, the MPs from outside the system counted. The SDLP voted with the Labour Party on policy grounds for a while, just as if it was part of it. But then it brought down the Government, precipitating the Election that Thatcher won. And the issue? The Labour Government decided to end the under-representation of the North at Westminster by increasing its MPs from 12 to 18!

In the good old days the UUP sometimes got all 12 Northern seats. Constitutional Nationalist politics was futile and morale was low. Only Republicanism aroused any enthusiasm. There was an occasion when Republican prisoners, standing as Independents, won two Westminster seats. They were disqualified and the seats given to the losing Unionists.

The UUP is once again attached to the Tory Party, as in the good old days. But what Cameron got last year was little more than a corpse. And the UUP did not think it prudent to stand as Tory in the European Elections. (It called itself Ulster Conservative And Unionist New Force.)

But Cameron saw the Robinson Crisis as a chance to attach other Unionists to the Tories for the Westminster Election.

As the situation had been developing during the past year, there was the prospect of a three-way Unionist split at the next Assembly Election: Democratic Unionist Party, Traditional Unionist Voice, and Ulster Unionist Party. And that raised the distinct possibility of Sinn Fein becoming the largest party and Martin McGuinness becoming First Minister. And the depth of Unionist commitment to democracy in the Assembly is indicated by the general assumption that, if that happened, the Good Friday Agreement—though copper-bottomed with referendums and international law—would sink.

The UUP proposed in Stormont that voting be made compulsory in Northern Ireland, presumably to force increasingly apathetic Unionists to vote, and no doubt calculating that the UUP—lowest common denominator party of the majority—would benefit.

It has long been taken for granted that, if the Catholic electorate becomes a majority and votes for a united Ireland, a 1912 situation would be restored. But now it seems that the fact of Sinn Fein outstripping the divided Unionist parties is enough to re-activate 1912 reflexes.

That assessment is confirmed by the Sunday Independent which, out of the blue, produced a worthwhile report on the Northern crisis. Alan Murray and Daniel McConnell wrote:

"The British Conservative Party… fears inheriting a meltdown in Northern Ireland if Martin McGuinness is to become First Minister after an election.

"Senior figures in the less hardline UUP say that even their members would refuse to serve under a Sinn Fein First Minister.

"It would cause major upheaval in the unionist community and lead to a loss of confidence and repercussions politically would be enormous. There would be no trust in that situation and it could cause mayhem in society and on the streets during the marching season, one senior party source said…" (24.1.10).


Cameron stepped in to ward off a premature recurrence of 1912 by bringing the Unionists back under the Tory wing. And it seems that the DUP is so traumatised by the implications of the Robinson affair that it is giving the proposal serious consideration.

And, to help them reach a positive conclusion, Cameron whipped them out of the contentious Northern Ireland atmosphere to a conference in the dynastic home of the last real grandee of the English upper class, Lord Salisbury. It was in the long Salisbury era of English Toryism that the British Unionist Party was formed through a merger of the Tories and the social reform and anti-Home Rule Liberals. And that Unionist Party took the Ulster Unionists in tow and put British manners on them for the long generation of the Home Rule conflict. And then made the Northern Ireland outhouse for them and dumped them in it.

Cameron is finding it had to strike the right Tory note in England. But it might be that his false note will still be good enough to re-activate deference in the North. If so, and if he gets the 12 Unionist seats he hopes for, and if there is a hung Parliament, then for the first time in generations there will be somebody elected from Northern Ireland in the Government of the State.

But that does not mean that the party-politics of the State will become active in the North, with the prospect of 'sectarian' politics being superseded. Cameron's initiative is a travesty of what this magazine tried to bring about (through the CLR and CEC) during the 1970s and 1980s, and which the Tory Party then opposed no less than the Labour Party.

Cameron's success would mean the restoring of 'sectarian' political unity among Protestants by overcoming the divisive effects of a form of devolved government in which a status of equality between the Protestant and Catholic communities is structurally enforced.

Its counterpart, according to the logic of the system, should be a reinforcing of Catholic cohesion, an implementation of the Northern presence in the Dail promised by Bertie Ahern but vetoed by the Labour Party and Fine Gael (no doubt at the urging of the SDLP), and a more active development of Fianna Fail party organisation in the North.

As we go to print, Sinn Fein is threatening to withdraw from Stormont over the failure to complete implementation of the 2006 St. Andrew's Agreement, negotiated with Dr. Paisley on the terms on which the Good Friday Agreement would be operated. The DUP had refused to deliver on various aspects of that Agreement, notably the devolution of the administration of Justice and Policing. It has been encouraged in its intransigence by the Tory Party which recently indicated that it wished to revoke the GFA. If that attitude is maintained, it means the end of Paisleyism.

Paisleyism, as a distinctive political position, was the decision to make the GFA functional through an agreement with Sinn Fein. What was called Paisleyism in the demonising culture of 'Constitutional nationalism' was merely the general attitude of Ulster Unionists, to which Paisley gave eloquent expression. The distinctive contribution by Paisley to politics in the North was the St. Andrew's Agreement. And that was what made 'extremists' of the official 'moderates'.

Lord Fitt, before he retired to the House of Lords, used to say that there was no sense in making distinctions between Unionists because they were all Unionists and that was all that counted. We can think of only two exceptions: Faulkner in the early 1970s and Paisley in recent years. And the fate of both of them confirms Fitt's view that Unionism is Unionism. And our view is that, under the perverse arrangement that Britain made for the governing of its Six Counties, there was nothing else for it to be. Functional democracy is a highly artificial, complex, sophisticated form of state which maintains stability through a form of all-out party-political conflict, which appears absolutely in earnest, and always seems to threaten a Civil War, but always ends with almost everybody going home quietly after each election, win or lose, living submissively for a couple of years, until the fury is unleashed again for the next election. Britain has it in a high degree, but ninety years ago it decided that the Six Counties should not have it when they were retained within the State.

Cameron says he will 'renegotiate' the Agreement and replace it with 'voluntary power-sharing', which is a form of majority rule. Who will he renegotiate with?

Martin Mansergh, now a Fianna Fail Minister, published a denunciation of Rory O Brady in the Times Literary Supplement in 1998, in which he asserted that the Agreement superseded the 1918 Election because it was enacted by an All-Ireland vote, and was part of international law. (In fact, the All-Ireland vote was two separate votes, for different objects, held on the same day.)

In the working out of whatever it was that was voted for in 1998, the British Government has acted as Unionist (except for Gordon Brown in the last two years) and Cameron has now attached Ulster Unionism to the Tory Party. And, apparently without consulting the South, he says that the GFA should be set aside.

The Dublin Government did not act towards the Nationalist community as the British did towards the Unionist. In the realpolitik implicit in the GFA, it was the guarantor of the Nationalist interest under it, but it refused to play that part. Possibly it thought that, by keeping aloof from the Nationalists, and taking part in Boyne and Somme celebrations, it would disarm the Unionists. But its primary concern was to damage Sinn Fein, even if that also damaged the Agreement—with the natural result that it provoked the Northern Nationalists to turn decisively towards Sinn Fein. (No political leader—aside from Haughey, and Reynolds to a lesser extent—has ever troubled to understand what Northern Ireland is. They don't know. What is worse, they know that they don't want to know.)

If Cameron gets Unionism securely under his wing with his Anti-Agreement policy, the growth of Traditional Unionist Voice is likely to be halted, if it does not join the Tory Alliance. And, with Cameron on track to get 12 Unionists back in the Tory stable, the SDLP—its overture to the UUP rebuffed—will have to decide what it is, and whether it is anything.



Meanwhile Cardinal Daly died and was buried. And First Minister Robinson neglected to attend the funeral. That would be fair enough if Robinson was content to represent the Protestant side in the egalitarian apartheid system. But he wasn't. He was preventing the final instalment of that system being put in place, and was angling for majority rule of the area in which Armagh is a prominent place.



We neglected to notice a sad book that was published some years ago by the Blackstaff Press, Rethinking Union: an alternative vision for Northern Ireland. The author, Norman Porter, who "holds a D. Phil in Politics from the University of Oxford", is the son of the Norman Porter who ran the Evangelical Protestant Society in the 1950s and 1960s and "was an Orangeman, a Blackman, an Apprentice Boy, but never a Freemason" (p4).

The family moved to Australia in 1970 after the father failed to win the Duncairn seat at Stormont on an anti-O'Neill policy. The son was then eighteen. His world view broadened out in Australia, he took an Oxford degree, and he returned to Belfast in 1994 and joined the UUP:

"I regained a sense of identity with Northern Ireland that was more subtle and nuanced than the one I left behind in 1970, but which, as I now find, fits uneasily with standard unionist expressions of belonging… I was sufficiently innocent …to believe that in the new circumstances of a peaceful Northern Ireland, unionist politics would witness an exploration of creative possibilities… That innocence has vanished and has been replaced by a deep-seated frustration at how stilted political thinking within unionism actually is…" (p5).


Porter was out in the wide world, and in Oxford University, and he came back to Belfast and set about re-thinking Unionism. But it is evident that he took Unionism with him to Australia and to Oxford and brought it back intact, and then embellished it with bits of nuance and bits of metaphysics:

"The philosophical predispositions at work in this book are most aptly described as interpretative or “hermeneutic” in nature. As I appropriate it here, this philosophical term of description connotes two central theses, a general one concerning the conditions of understanding, and a more specific one concerning an image of humans as self-interpreting beings… This formulation may be amplified by two related claims. One underscores the inescapably historical condition of understanding… within some historical horizon of meaning which may be qualified, challenged or even replaced by another, but not transcended through ascension to a 'view from nowhere'… The other claim deals with the types of critical probing often associated with attempts to understand what is going on in various tracts of human experience…" (p11-12).


Two hundred pages follow in which nothing more than this is said.

The "historical horizon" within which Unionism is to be nuanced hermeneutically is Northern Ireland. Beyond Northern Ireland is "nowhere". The world within which the metaphysical display must be confined was created in 1921.

But, when Unionism sprang into being in 1885-6, did it imagine itself living in this Wee Ulster, in a constricted Constitutional entity, "connected with Britain" through an arrangement that also distances it, and obliged to live with a community more than half its size with which it shares nothing but space, and whose advances it must continuously repel, lest it succumb to them and lose itself?

That is the outcome, but it was most certainly not the purpose. Porter accepts the outcome unquestioningly as the historical horizon of understanding, and his profoundly nuanced meditations on his navel only seals him more securely into it.



CONTENTS


The Crisis In The North (again). Editorial

Support For Mayhem. Editorial

The European Parliament—a fifth wheel on the EU wagon. Jack Lane

Remembering 1969. Owen Bennett (Reader's Letter)

Editorial Digest (Scandals; The Military; PSNI; SDLP; Sinn Féin; UDA; The Unionist Pact?)

Shorts from the Long Fellow (Personalised Banking; Charity Begins At Home; Hamlet And A Sticky End; Something Rotten…; Ireland)

Pollution Is In The Eye Of The Beholder. Wilson John Haire

Problems Of Green-Left Convergence. Roy Johnston

Comment On Johnston's Remarks. Brendan Clifford

Climate Manipulations. Report

The 'Racist' Gaelic Revival: a case with no evidence. John Minahane

The Dunmanway Killings: as wise as ever. Jack Lane

The Scandals & Kincora (BiteBack). Niall Meehan

Downey's Memoirs Reviewed. John Martin

Does It Stack Up? (Winter 2009; Water Shortages; Fraudulent Politicians; Corporate Enforcement; USA And Afghanistan; Navigation). Michael Stack

UDA Disarm: so what? Tom Doherty

The Dearly Departed (poem). Wilson John Haire

Labour Comment Edited by Pat Maloney

The Irish Budget And The Boston Burglar. Editorial