IT'S THE SAME DIFFERENCE

THE USUAL people have been spluttering the usual outrage since the revelation in the Sunday Tribune (August 29th) that a former senior civil servant, Michael Lillis, met Gerry Adams on two occasions earlier this year to discuss peace in the North.

It's getting a bit repetitive, this passing cavalcade of controversy. Adams and Hume, Adams and Mary Robinson, Adams and Michael Lillis, and the same selection of sleek commentators complaining each time that the Provos have been presented with a propaganda bonanza.

So maybe, by way of variation, we could once again look at the issue from the opposite direction: why is Gerry Adams meeting with people who represent ideas and forces which Republicans claim to abhor?

The Republican Movement puts itself forward as something other than a traditional, conservative, Catholic-nationalist outfit. Its paper, An Phoblacht, as well as carrying approving accounts of the military and political activities of the Movement in the North, also features regular reports suggesting that this is, broadly speaking, a progressive publication, a paper of the Left.

The long struggle of women workers at Timex in Dundee was held up as the same sort of action Republicans might support and associate themselves with. The fight for union recognition at Pat The Baker in Ballyfermot is reported regularly. Aer Lingus workers are urged to stand firm against the bullying and blackmail tactics of their management. The freedom struggles of Eastern Timor, El Salvador, Kurdistan and other oppressed areas are celebrated. The US role in the oil war against Iraq, the murder attacks on Libya, Western collusion in Zionist aggression and so on are exposed.

Generally speaking, that is, the Republican Movement positions itself publicly on the side of the oppressed and disadvantaged, and against the ruling elites, including the Southern Irish ruling elite. It is in the context of fighting for radical social and economic change that they locate their own efforts to end the predicament of Catholics in the North.

This raises interesting questions about Adams' meetings with establishment figures . . .

Michael Lillis was boss of the Anglo-Irish division of the Department of Foreign Affairs during the Fitzgerald-led Coalition in the eighties. In this capacity he was one of the key figures in the negotiations which lead to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.

Lillis then became the first head of the Anglo-Irish Secretariat, the group of senior British and Irish officials based at Maryfield outside Belfast, which coordinates British and Irish Government activity regarding the North. He was later Southern Ireland's Permanent Representative at the United Nations in Geneva. More recently, he has hired his talents out to the private sector, and now heads Guinness Peat Aviation's aircraft leasing operation in Latin America.

Lillis is a very prominent member of the ruling elite in Southern Ireland, with close ties to ruling class elements in the UK and further afield. He represents no force for radical social or economic change. On the contrary, he has a clear and compelling interest in maintaining the existing order.

So what's with Gerry Adams holding secret meetings with him - extended and "full" meetings, according to Lillis? And what are we to make of Lillis pronouncing himself "impressed" by the Sinn Fein president?

Of course, occasions arise in any conflict when discussions - "official" or "unofficial" - are in order between representatives of the opposing sides. And one side may well be "impressed" by a representative of the other without any principle being compromised. But that's not what was happening here.

Lillis explained in the Tribune that he had outlined the constitutional nationalist strategy embodied in the Anglo-Irish Agreement and had suggested to Adams that the Agreement could be more constructively used by the Reynolds government. He had argued that while the British had no strategic reason for staying in the North their room for manoeuvre was limited by the certainty of Unionist resistance to a withdrawal, and that Adams and his colleagues should take this into account in framing demands to be put to the British side. He had suggested that in this situation the armed struggle had no useful role to play.

There was no hint in Lillis' detailed account that he and Adams had identified any contradictory views about the type of Ireland which might result from a cessation of violence, no suggestion that they represented or were speaking for different classes of people, no indication that the one had a vision of Ireland in the future which the other couldn't accept.

Evidently, there was no disagreement about where the two men wanted to go, only a difference of opinion about the best and most moral route to take.

The same is true of the Hume-Adams talks. The fact that Hume put his name to a "joint declaration" with Adams, and that the declaration included a reference to a right to "national self-determination", created such a furore among Unionists in the North and revisionists in the South that it has been very difficult to examine the development in any other perspective. But we should try.

What was missing from the Hume-Adams declaration was, again, any suggestion that the two men represented or sought to represent different sections of Irish society. In the text of the declaration, and in the many statements the two have since made about their talks, there has been no reference to differences of opinion on the social content of the Ireland they envisage. They, too, are discussing means, not ends.

Despite the excitement generated by this series of meetings, precedents of a sort are plentiful. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Republicanism in this century has to do with how naturally, easily, comfortably, successive waves of outlaw activists have managed to integrate themselves into the mainstream once they'd decided to come in from the cold.

Cuman na nGael (now Fine Gael) in 1922, Fianna Fail five years later, Clann na Phoblachta in 1948, Official Sinn Fein (now divided into the Workers' Party and Democratic Left) in the '70s, all peeled off from Sinn Fein/the IRA and, more or less immediately, became impeccably constitutionalist.

In each case, adherence to the tactic of armed struggle proved to be the only major factor dividing them from the respectable politics of their day. Once the armed struggle was abandoned, their innate conservatism was plain for all to see, and accept.

The same is true today. Take away the armed struggle and there is less between Sinn Fein on the one hand and mainstream nationalist parties on the other than is suggested by the ferocity with which Sinn Fein and its leaders are regularly denounced. Lillis and Hume have clearly sussed this.

The IRA's armed struggle poses a threat to political stability. But the politics of the Republican Movement poses no threat to any fundamental establishment interest.

This is the most important conclusion to be drawn from Gerry Adams' meetings with Lillis and Hume. It is a conclusion which rank-and-file Republicans who do want to see radical change might usefully ponder.

Zoo TV finally caught up with me on the Saturday at the RDS, having missed me by no more than a day or two a couple of times over the summer. I liked the comment of whoever it was said, "Whatever this is, it's a fucking big one!" The people around me on the RDS terrace kept repeating something similar: "Jayshus!", "Fuck me!", "Fucking Jayshus!" and so forth.

In fact, it was all those things which everybody had said it would be. Spectacular. Awesome. Overwhelming. Etc. But what was it about? Now there's something we could waste some time thinking on.

It was about the fact that it was about nothing. The message was, there was no message. When you added it all up, it didn't add up. I'd think of another way of saying this if there was anything to say.

Was it true that you couldn't sense the band's presence through the dazzle and shimmer of the audio-visual assault? No, is the answer to this question, possibly. The Bono person was not only discernible but discernibly in control, if this wasn't an illusion wrought cleverly by wiz tech.

How can we know that it's true that "Everything you know is a lie?," which was one of the slogans spasmed repeatedly onto the vidiwall. (Vidiwall!)

I don't think this means the same thing as "People who tell the truth are branded as liars," which was said by one of the characters in Karl Francis's great film The Angry Earth, shown conventionally on Channel 4 a few days later.

Karl Marx said that the ruling ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class. We live in a democracy. The law will give you justice. It's natural to be proud of your country. These lies are the truths of the society we live in.

Nobody elects the people who rule us. You must fight the law for justice. National emotion is artificially constructed. These truths you will be branded a liar for telling.

The interests of the mass of the people are in direct contradiction to the interests of the minority which rules. This is the defining characteristic of our world. So while it cannot be true that there is no truth, it must assuredly be true that there's more than one.

The question which arises is: whose truth are you for, boys, which side are you on? And then another question came to me: What is the stars?

Then I made it to Dame Street and the Olympia for the Sharon Shannon midnight gig, which was spectacular, awesome, overwhelming, and which maybe even ranked with Martin and P.J. Hayes on fiddle in the Flagmount beer-tent and then Sean Tyrell's "Midnight Court" by the shore of Lough Graney in the county of Clare on the glorious evening of the Saturday before which dazzles and shimmers in my mind even yet, and about which, more later.