The Beginning of the End?

It is both a strength and a weakness that print journalism is so governed by the deadline. There is no ambiguity, as the courier sweeps away with the final proofs, or film or discs. Anything else is for the next issue, for tomorrow, for next year. The blade has dropped. The die is cast.

Thus it was with the Hot Press Christmas issue and the Downing Street Declaration. There we were rounding up the year, wondering about the odds on peace, with our ruminations intended to survive all courses, from starter to pud, and the two governments hit overdrive to yield forth an agreed Christmas statement aimed at peace in the north.

For once the hype may be justified. It may be one of the key historical documents of our time, and a landmark in terms of settlement of ethnic disputes. Insofar as the major challenge confronting the two governments was to find a way of expressing the progressive middle ground, they have succeeded.

Suddenly, we have an articulation of what the inhabitants of the island have in common, rather than of their differences. It isn’t a solution. It doesn’t claim to be. Just a beginning. And while, right now, the emphasis is on a cessation of violence, in time it will move on, cessation or no. But already much has been revealed.

Gulfs in perception have been identified, and are being explored. A great deal of pain has come flooding to the surface. There is disappointment that the document hasn’t stitched the whole thing up. But this is to misunderstand its function.

Moreover, this feeling of being let down is found on both sides of the ethnic divide. It was clear from reaction on the streets of the North after the statement came out that both sides wanted it to represent a victory.

Both nationalist and loyalist wanted the joint declaration to be a vindication of their fortitude, to be the evaluators’ final summary, a clear declaration as to who was right and who was wrong in the conflict.

If one might make an analogy, it is of a family, or the staff of a disputatious firm in which colleagues have been denied escape or paths of development. This enclosure engenders a peculiar claustrophobic cabin-feverish hatred.

The reaction-piece by Bernadette McAliskey in the Sunday Tribune eloquently expresses this resentment.

She “rejects” the declaration, it is a “fraudulent document whose political intent is to deceive”, and its tactics are “so lacking in integrity as to be beneath contempt”. All of the positions outlined are “unacceptable to republicans and most nationalists”. We are brought back across “75 years of violence against the nationalist community”; indeed she states that “it begins to look like a replay of 1921.”

She adds that she does not believe that, “North or South, nationalists fully comprehend the depth or extent of the Southern betrayal in this document.

“There is not a line, a sentence, a word, even a space between the lines which acknowledges the injustice suffered and still being suffered by the nationalist community . . .”

Okay. An example of what she is referring to is the acquittal of two Royal Marines of murdering south Armagh Sinn Fein member Fergal Caraher.

Whatever about the rights and wrongs of this case (and even the trial judge described it as a “disturbing case in which a young unarmed man, who was not a terrorist, was shot dead by soldiers”) it will be widely seen in the nationalist areas of the north as being one more example of a shoot-to-kill policy, and of the unwillingness of the courts to dispense justice when Catholics are the victims of injustice violence or murder.

For those nationalists, as is clear from Bernadette McAliskey’s piece, it is merely the latest injustice in a very long line.

Make no mistake: these resentments are real, in the sense that they are now the accepted truth in the Catholic communities. This is not to say that they are necessarily more objectively accurate than the received truths of the Protestants. Some are, others are not. But one must acknowledge their existence and hence their emotive power: they are the fuel which energises Sinn Fein and the IRA, and their Ulster British counterparts.

But those resentments are not in themselves an argument for the kind of trophy that people like McAliskey are looking for, which is a definitive and unambiguous kick in the bollox for the Prods.

As for “southern betrayal”, such accusations carry ever less weight in the Republic these days, as indeed do appeals to history. As I have repeated many times here, southerners have moved on.

For better or worse, there’s a “modern” European outlook in the South, a more inclusive and essentially pluralist society. There is, also a sense that the Republic has its own problems, and doesn’t need any more, especially ones as intractable as those of the North. And the people of the South are vastly more outward-looking and pragmatic than before.

But some of the disengagement can be simply attributed to the passage of time. In historic and ethnic terms, they have forgotten how to hate.

This capacity (to hate another people) would have to be relearned in order to satisfy the northern nationalist ache for vengeance and retribution. Frankly, it’s too late for that.

To put it another way, southerners have a choice: to “betray” northern nationalists (in Bernadette McAliskey’s terms), or to “betray” themselves . . . and no pragmatist will ever do that. Like it or lump it, it’s a fact of life.

As is the fact that 30% of the inhabitants of the island are British. This is no craven aspiration on their part: they’ve been British for hundreds of years.

The denial of this ethnic group’s right to exist is one of the paradoxes of republicanism in Ireland which demands self-determination for “the Irish people as a whole”. But who are these Irish people? What is Irishness?

The answer will probably refer to history, to 1921, to 1914, to 1912, to the 1890s, to the 1880s, to the act of Union, to the Penal Laws, and beyond. But there is selectivity here. Nobody is innocent in history.

There is also, incidentally, a peculiar irony (ably delineated by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times) in a movement that draws so much of its justification from history bombing the Linenhall library just after Christmas.

Nationalists assert that the North is exactly the same as the rest of Ireland: exactly the same argument as is made by those who (stupidly) claim that Belfast is as British as Brighton. Neither is true. The North is the North; a place that is both apart and a part.

Yet more paradoxes: one notes that the reaction among humanists, modern Catholics and Anglican Protestants has been, for the most part positive. Not so the fundamentalists. Both extreme republicans and extreme loyalists have expressed disappointment and anger that the document is not more explicit, more unambiguous in its delineation of nuts and bolts.

For the fundamentalist, words (especially written) are not to be trusted. Fundmentalists prefer action (even burning the books and bombing the theatres) and “straight talking”. But what else is there, other than words, to signify the complexity of meaning?

Besides, the framers of the Joint Declaration didn’t set out to write the Absolute Truth. It’s a framework, a set of principles, an attempt to identify the common ground. In other words it is just the first step. As such, it isn’t ambiguous at all. It’s inclusive and pluralist. But to the believer in absolutes, there’s no difference.

The Declaration is a very subtle document. It’s well composed, and, despite the cavils of republicans and loyalists, there is something in it for everyone.

Republicans and Paisleyites may well feel that it was written in such a way as to isolate them on the fringes. Perhaps it is.

But it also opens up the prospect of vigorous and competitive democratic process in which (for the first time ever?) republicans have to articulate an inclusive and understandable vision of a possible future unified state, i.e. one that would appeal to a democratic majority of the North’s population, and unionists have to articulate and operate a vision that will appeal to the middle ground, that will also include those who disagree.

And Sinn Fein should make no mistake: it is quite clear from the document that a united Ireland is indeed a legitimate ambition for people to hold in the north. But you have to make it inclusive: you have to sell the idea. Coercion and militarism and terrorism are unacceptable.

And there’s the challenge: is it easier to carry on with an increasingly unpopular and fundamentally unwinnable (if also unlosable) terrorist campaign, or to pack away the guns and concentrate on articulating a persuasive vision?

It’s a fearsome choice: between the known and predictable, however horrible, and the unknown and as yet unwritten, however potentially hopeful.

And each person has to reach his or her own decision. That’s not betrayal or treachery. It is, however, the truth.

Happy New Year.