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| From: Irish Political Review: Editorials |
| Date: October, 2010 |
| By: Editorial |
What's Constitutional? |
| What's Constitutional? Junior Minister Mansergh Speaks Fianna Fail Junior Minister Martin Mansergh has been putting himself about. Speaking at the McCluskey Summer School he said that Fianna Fail could not contest elections in the North because it was a party in government in the Republic and to do so would create a conflict of interest and damage the peace process. Senior Fianna Fail Ministers, Dermot Ahern and Eamon Cuiv, have been encouraging the setting up of Party organisations in the North. The measure is generally supported by Cumainn around the South. The question of contesting elections in the North has not arisen as a practical proposition because party organisation is still in a rudimentary stage. But Mansergh has jumped in to pre-empt it, supported by the new leader of the SDLP, Margaret Ritchie. The Irish News wrote:
But, in a democracy, Opposition Parties are Parties which aspire to form the Government. And, in the Republic at present, all three Opposition Parties are in with a good chance of becoming Government Parties within a couple of years. Supposing they organised in the North now, would they have to dis-organise if they won the election? And, if Fianna Fail loses, will Mansergh agree that it is free to organise in the North until it wins an election? Pre-empting the issues, and imagining problematic situations in advance of actual practical developments which might give rise to them, is the way not to do things in the North. The only sensible way there is to feel your way and see what can be done. Belfast television interviewers did their best over many years to stultify Sinn Fein by binding it into imaginary 'scenarios' about the future. And they did the same with the SDLP before that. (But UTV/BBC interviewers were models of well-informed good sense by comparison with RTE interviewers whose only interview technique for Sinn Fein was a hectoring, condemnatory, tone of voice.) The future is not a suitable subject for political analysis as a means of throwing light on what should be done in the present. It doesn't exist until it emerges from what is done in the present, and therefore it cannot be a guide to the present. It cannot be grasped by calculus in advance of the event. And, if it could be known in advance, that knowledge operating in the present would probably prevent the known future from happening. Human nature, as Dostoevsky observed, is perverse in that regard. The variability of human conduct is infinite, therefore, as Goethe put it, the grey calculus of human affairs cannot stop the sprouting of "the green tree of life". Or, as Kant put it, nothing straight can be made out of the crooked wood of humanity. The logic of Mansergh's position is that Northern Ireland should be sealed up in its Limbo, and that people should try to be nicer to one another in it. That was also his father's position. He appears to be closely guided by the views of his father, who was a British spy-master in the 2nd World War and a Professor/Administrator after the War in the interface between the British Foreign Office and academia called Chatham House. But the father at least had the grace to compare Northern Ireland to the Sargasso Sea, where snakes breed. The Peace Process, that Mansergh is concerned about upsetting if Fianna Fail has more than token Party organisation in the North, happened a long time ago. We never saw that Fianna Fail had much to do with "bedding it down", beyond blackguarding Sinn Fein to conciliate Trimble—to Save Dave from the Paisleyites so that he might play his part in the Process. It was our judgment from the start that Trimble's object was to sabotage the Process from within. The process did not begin to work until Trimbleism was set aside by Paisleyism. It has now bedded down as an authentic apartheid system detached form the political system of the state. Its bedding down owes little or nothing to Fianna Fail's "co-sponsorship" of it, and nothing at all to the SDLP's Hibernian carping. It is working because Paisley came back to tell his successors in the DUP leadership to toe the line, and because the Provos are making it as easy as possible for them to toe the line. Martin McGuinness tactfully declined an invitation to meet the Pope when he was visiting the State—which is still very much the State despite the "co-sponsorship"—because he knew that Peter Robinson could not go for reasons to do with the Day of Judgment. There are elements in the Provo leadership that would settle for the routine operation of what has been established, as the SDLP did when Mallon, and then Durkan, succeeded Hume. That was the undoing of the SDLP. Northern Ireland was not designed for the routine operation of democracy. If Sinn Fein treats it as such—as Junior Minister Mansergh intends that it should—then it is likely that it too will be eroded, though perhaps more slowly than the SDLP was. There is already significant discontent with it, despite the calibre of its leaders and the awareness, on the part of some of them at least, of what Northern Ireland is. The political culture of Sinn Fein lies in the personal understanding of its leaders worked out through experience. There is no sign in Sinn Fein publications of the quality of understanding that enabled it to do what it has done in the North. Its publications are empty. It was our view in the mid-1970s that the Provos were effective in the North insofar as they were the specific product of 'the Northern Ireland state'. They became part of the traditional Republican movement of the country because that was what was to hand when the 1969 pogrom threw the Catholic community into flux. At a certain point the Northern element separated itself from that general Republicanism and went its own way so successfully that it is now the biggest party in the 6 Counties and unapologetic IRA men are are senior Ministers. It is the fact of IRA men in political office that offers the best hope of the 'Peace Process' being sustainable and remaining a process, rather than falling into a routine—as Mansergh desires. But the Provos lost something as well as gaining something by separating from traditional Republicanism. Some years ago Mansergh, to our astonishment, published in the form of a review, in the Times Literary Supplement, a long condemnation of Rory O'Brady's biography of General Maguire. His object was to stamp on traditional Republicanism as a means of consolidating the Good Friday Agreement. But Republican discontent with the GFA was not going to be snuffed out by condemnation in a London literary magazine by somebody like Mansergh, who never showed any sign of understanding what life the Sargasso Sea of Northern Ireland is like. Rory O'Brady's view of things was not rendered obsolete by the GFA, or by the spurious "all-Ireland election" held as a propaganda exercise in support of it. And the more Fianna Fail levitates free of its foundation in the 1918 Election, the more relevant O'Brady's view of things becomes. Traditional Republicanism did not survive over the decades on merely sentimental grounds. It remained current because of the way Britain chose to govern its 6 County region after dividing the country. It deliberately governed the North outside the political system of the State in a mode that the British statesmen of the time—and they actually were statesmen in those days—could not conceivably have thought was conducive to good government, peace and order. They did not try to draw the Northern minority into the seductive party politics of the State. And, when the minority, with support in the majority community, elected Jack Beattie to Westminster on a policy of becoming part of British party-political life, he was rebuffed at Westminster. The Catholic community could not take part in Northern Ireland political life because there was none. It was not open to it to take part in British political life. If British politics had been open to it, and it had participated, does anybody think that Republican nostalgia could have started a war and sustained it for a quarter of a century. Mansergh thinks that, while all-Ireland party organisation is not practical for viable political parties, there is "a space north of the border for an unapologetic constitutional republicanism". Does this mean that he does not consider Sinn Fein to be Republican? Or is it that he does not think it constitutional? Or is it that a party that operates in two different Constitutions, and makes a practical functional adaptation to each of them, is unconstitutional because only a party which is bound into a particular Constitution can be described as constitutional? If that is the case, would he regard the Provos as constitutional Republicans if they dissolved their 26 County region? Or must they sit in Westminster to be constitutional? But, if there is a 'Northern Ireland state'—and we are told on all sides that there is—why should it be necessary for elected politicians in the North to go and sit in the Parliament of another State in order to be properly Constitutional? Re 'the Northern Ireland state', the Provos have given it a semblance of reality which it never had in the past, and have even cast an aura of democracy around it. In the past it could never have been mistaken for a democratic state or any other form of state. It was a subordinate regime of communal (or sectarian) dominance set up for its own purposes by the Mother of Parliaments and always subject to the maternal will. It would be useful if Mansergh spelled out the kind of sub-provincial constitutional Republicanism he would approve of. He is, after all, a Fianna Fail Minister, and a voluble though a junior one. He must be in tune with some strain of thought within Fianna Fail. It would be useful to know what kind of republicanism Fianna Fail would approve of in the North. A futile, consolatory, nostalgic kind? The McCluskey Summer School, at which Mansergh ruled all-Ireland politics off the agenda, was launched a couple of years ago to mark the fortieth anniversary of the setting up of a Civil Rights, as distinct from an Anti-Partition, agitation, to concentrate on discrimination against Catholics in housing, jobs, and Local Government voting. The first session was addressed by Brid Rodgers, who described the shock of moving the short distance from Donegal:
That was the dreadful "personation" that one heard so much about at one time. Personation was a reasonable way of conducting "democracy Northern Ireland style". The crucial political organisations were the Catholic and Protestant Electoral Registration Societies, which saw to it Catholics and Protestants went on the electoral register as they came of age, and were then turned out to vote. And personation was an appropriate way of ensuring full voting. The effective choice was between Catholic and Protestant and, so long as cross-community personation was prevented by Catholic and Protestant supervision, there was really nothing to complain about. Party politics as understood in the state had no place in its Northern Ireland system. Brid Rodgers brought irrelevant political assumptions with her from Donegal. The surprise is that Northern Ireland was not understood even in Donegal. She gave some examples of discrimination and then observed:
That was in the mid 1960s, almost half a century ago. The Civil Rights Movement became the SDLP plus the Alliance Party. Two generations on the Alliance runs the police and is a spent political force. The SDLP has run the natural course of the political life it chose to live. There is intermittent Republican violence on a scale far greater than there was between 1923 and the appearance of the Civil Rights Movement as a mass agitational force in 1968—the bad old days. The possibility of holding it in check lies with the constitutional force of Provo Sinn Fein. Fianna Fail, having inflamed the situation with an irresponsible speech by Taoiseach Jack Lynch in August 1969, is washing its hands of responsibility for the mess it helped to create—if the views of the Party intellectual and former adviser of Taoiseachs are the views of the present Taoiseach, and there are reasons to suppose that they are. And the Civil Rights Summer School is discussing the unknowable—how things would have gone if there had not been violence in 1969-70—but is doing so only as an expression of resentment against the Provos. Brid Rodgers commented on Stormont's "policies of apartheid" in the 1960s. We have not moved away from apartheid. The SDLP sought equality for the Catholic community through equitable apartheid. That is what was provided for by the GFA, and established by the Provos and Paisleyites. The British Government "shirked its sovereign responsibility" fifty years ago, and continues to do so. "British rights for British citizens" exist no more now than they did then. They were not pursued by the Civil Rights Movement in a way that made them achievable. They were pursued outside the British political system, which was their condition of existence. The people of the North have equitable apartheid outside the citizenship of the state. They are not British citizens—the primary business of citizenship being the business of governing the state. And the adviser to Taoiseachs says it is out of the question for them to become citizens of the Irish State. And, at this year's Summer School, Britain, which Brid Rodgers thought had "sovereign responsibility" which it was shirking, is excused of responsibility with a reference to 'the Northern Ireland state'. If you stir up an agitation on some complaint, you must be under obligation to direct the agitation towards a realistic means of remedying the matter, especially if you make a Pharisaical song and dance about being Constitutional. To do that you must at least know which State you're in. The Oh-so-Constitutional Civil Righters did not know that, and their movement soon went off the rails. If "British rights for British citizens" was the mantra forty years ago, it soon gave way to a mantra that condemned the blaming of Britain as a blinkered, small-minded, sectarian view of the situation. And if, when one stopped to think about it, one had to admit that Britain was to blame, then it was best not to think about it. Not thinking became the Constitutional Nationalist frame of mind. Mindless Constitutionalism became incapable of constituting anything. The word came to mean Pacifist. The actual power of constituting passed to the "men of violence", who dealt in realities. What they have constituted is a reasonably equitable system of apartheid. And Mansergh says that is how Northern Ireland must remain. Is it surprising that there are people who refuse to settle for that? For a level playing field of structured communal antagonism undergoing a process of demographic change. If Fianna Fail boycotts the North—except for the futile "co-sponsorship"—what will happen when the demographics change a bit more?  Mansergh also protested during the month against the Dublin demonstrations against Tony Blair which deterred him from promoting his book generally. Blair "should be received as a friend" because he "did more for peace in Ireland as prime minister than any of his predecessors" (IT 8 Sept.) There it is again. The Irish needed Britain to make peace amongst them! Didn't we have a referendum twelve years ago that made the Six Counties part of the UK State de jure as well as de facto? If so, was it not in part of his own State that Blair made peace? And why should Ireland be grateful to him for pacifying a turbulent part of Britain? Michael McDowell, reviewing Blair's book (IT 9th September) says "at the outset that Ireland owes Tony Blair a huge debt of gratitude for… the settlement of the Troubles". It is a debt that "we collectively owe". How fortunate Britain is to be able to misgovern a section of itself deliberately and have a neighbour willingly take the blame for it, and then feel indebted to it for stopping the trouble caused by its misgovernment! But MacDowells gratitude to Blair, unlike Mansergh's, does not blind him to the damage Blair did in other parts of the world. He sees him as having been emotionally unbalanced by the attack on the World Trade Centre, and as a consequence making possible "the wrong legally and politically" invasion of Iraq, which Bush could not have undertaken without him. And then his efforts to get something done about Israel were "belated, weak and wholly inadequate". Mansergh's view is:
If Iraq was a tyranny, it was a functional tyranny. Sunni, Shia, Kurds and Christians were all drawn into the running of the state, which was conducted on liberal and secular lines. The "tyranny" was the mode of development that was enabling the various peoples thrown together for Britain's own ulterior motives to gell as a national unit. It was a progressive tyranny, and that was nothing new in the history of Progress. It was only through the evolution of the "tyranny" that liberal,secular, bourgeois Iraq was ever likely to become democratic. In such developments democratisation usually comes last. The invasion which broke up the tyranny trashed the social development that had been accomplished by it. The different social elements which it had drawn together in a tolerant accommodation of each other were deliberately incited against each other by the propaganda and actions of the invasion force from the moment it crossed the border; and the 'fundamentalism', which had been declining as elements of the various religious communities were drawn into the functioning of the regime, was reinvigorated deliberately. And the resulting chaos was called "freedom", and even "democracy". And the killing rate, which had been declining steeply under the "tyranny", even by Amnesty International figures, shot up to unprecedented quantities in random destructive activity with no overall purpose. We cannot recall when it was that Lenin and Trotsky invaded another state and, with wanton destructiveness, trashed it. Maybe Minister of State Mansergh will remind us. C O N T E N T S |