Peer through the murk keenly and you can see the general shape of the settlement promised by the “peace process” that nobody, on pain of being perceived as a bigoted violent bastard, is permitted to oppose. You can even, I think, plot the rough course of the negotiations which might bring it about.
“Might,” because there is no certainty that formal negotiations will even begin, much less end with agreement. But first it might be helpful to get out of the way some of what has been passing for commentary and analysis Down South. Take Sean Donlon, if you will, which if I had my way I wouldn’t.
Bitter words have been exchanged in serious formal ways about the appointment by John Bruton of the high-flying ex-diplomat and Guinness Peat Aviation executive – GPA: that’s the outfit founded by the once and famous epitome of thrusting-forward Irish capitalism Tony Ryan of whom remarkably little has been heard since his outfit plummeted like, well, a stricken plane – as “special advisor to the Taoiseach” on the North.
This Bruton has been around and prominent in politics for yonks but needs a “special advisor” on the North. He doesn’t have a “special advisor” on unemployment, you’ll have noticed. Nothing special to be done about that.
On a more than usually hilarious edition of Questions And Answers a couple of weeks back the editor of The Sunday Business Post, Damien Kiberd, and some Fianna Fail TD who is now a “front-bench spokesman” tut-tutted about the choice of this Donlon, suggesting that he, unlike his splendid predecessor under Fianna Fail-led governments, did not enjoy the confidence of Northern Nationalists.
Stung to respond, as he so frequently is, Conor Cruise O’Brien of the Sunday Independent argued that while Donlon might be regarded with some hostility by Sinn Feiners, he could reasonably be expected to command the support of the SDLP. Hadn’t he been closely associated with Pope John Hume in helping to frame the 1985 Hillsborough Agreement and in constructing an effective “moderate” bloc among Irish-American activists and politicians.
Now it might occur to some cynics among you to wonder why, if the Hillsborough Agreement of 1985 was such a super achievement, there is any need now to be talking about a different agreement entirely. But sure only a malcontent would bring up a point like that. Anybody even remember the Hillsborough Agreement?
I do, matter of fact. I was standing by the aisle between the gilded-back chairs as Margaret Thatcher descended from the ceremonial signing with Garret FitzGerald in Hillsborough Castle. Sheerly by coincidence (I think) I was the only person she spoke to as she made her awkward way out. “I do hope you’ll read it,” she said. I told her that I’d been in the vicinity when the shit started and that this wouldn’t end it. She’s never spoken to me since.
Sean Donlon, who I read has idealistically and out of his fervent sense of patriotism taken on his new job at a drastic cut in salary, earning, so to speak, only 78 grand a year (although his GPA pension entitlements are happily secured) is worth mentioning not because his appointment has any important relevance to the likely course of events but because it has not and is therefore typical of how the North tends to figure in political exchange in the South.
Mr. Donlon, to be sure, has few fans among Sinn Fein supporters in the North. The Cruiser is right about that. On the law of averages, given the number of flighty opinions he launches per week, he has to be right about something. The Provos’ attitude has been conveyed in sharp terms in the pages of An Phoblacht. Which is the way with spirited, partisan journals. But it isn’t my impression that Donlon’s appointment is a big issue with people directly concerned.
I suspect that I am in the company of committed Northern Republicans more frequently and congenially than Mr. Kiberd, O’Brien or any Fianna Fail TD, and I have yet to hear in these circles a spontaneous discussion of the significance of the arrival of Mr. Donlon as Bruton’s “special advisor.” The most common reaction to mention of his name is, “Who?”. Where it matters, the man’s a nonentity.
Just as pertinent, we know that this Donlon wasn’t Bruton’s first choice for the post. It was originally offered to Martin Mansergh, who was a sensation at the Dáil Committee on How Reynolds Fucked Himself Up on account of being able to talk in joined-up sentences. He’s been “Special Advisor On The North” to Charlie Haughey and then to Albert Reynolds and as I understand it is persona very grata indeed with the Sinn Fein leadership.
Now as it happens I once had a long private chat with this Mansergh about how the “national question” might be resolved. He explained to me at more length than I care to relive that the North should have the same constitutional relationship with the South as Scotland now has with England. This would make everybody happy. Charlie Haughey complained to me some time later that I hadn’t written the major expected article revealing this exclusive, pioneering plan. Cravenly, I didn’t tell him that I thought I’d been doing Mansergh a favour. There you go.
The point is, Mansergh went on to play an important role in securing the “pan-nationalist alliance” of Sinn Fein, the Dublin Government and the Irish-American lot, to which both Sinn Fein and the SDLP are now firmly committed. It was only when Mansergh opted to work with the Fianna Fail party rather than to serve in the new Fine Gael-led government that Bruton turned to Donlon. So the notion that Donlon’s appointment signals a break with the Mansergh past is obviously wide of the mark. That’s that.
The argument about Donlon, then, has far more to do with the venal rivalries and sour resentments within Southern politics than with Government policy on the North. This, as I say, is what makes it typical, and makes it sensible to brush it and arguments like it aside so as to concentrate on relevant matters.
the wild peace chase
The dust-up between the Official Unionist Party and the British Government about “cross-border institutions with executive power”: now that’s relevant. It is here that we can see the outline of part of a proposed new settlement beginning to shimmer through the propaganda mist.
OUP leader James Molyneaux and any number of his eager lieutenants issued a frantic flurry of statements a fortnight ago warning that the British Government seemed intent on including all-Ireland bodies of some substance in the long-awaited “framework document” which would set the agenda for all-party talks. The OUP wouldn’t enter talks on this basis, they warned, quivering their jowls for emphasis. They’d even withdraw support at Westminster from Major’s schemes to grind the poor deeper into the dirt if they had to. Which, to be fair to them, would be a major sacrifice on their part.
They did allow themselves a little room for movement. Molyneaux’s daft deputy, Willie Ross of East Londonderry, told Radio Ulster that the objection was to “institutions which undermined Ulster’s (sic) constitutional position,” then scurried into thickets of disconnected subordinate clauses when asked whether this ruled out any authority for 32-county bodies. But, clearly, the margin for movement is narrow. The OUP, after all, has to be on permanent red-alert for Paisley, poised to roar out that another new Lundy has arisen.
To go further we have to delve down into the realms of speculation. It is possible that the OUP, so as not to endanger its exposed purple flank, would refuse to move away from outright opposition to all-Ireland institutions. Which would swiftly bring the “process” to a shuddering halt. The London and Dublin Governments might be willing to press on and leave Paisley’s crowd scanting behind. But there are no circumstances in which they’d move on if neither of the main parties of not-an-inch bigotry would come on board. In their terms, there’d be no point.
To avoid this, the British Government can be expected to put the maximum coaxing and pressure it can muster on Molyneaux. It’s gone a long way already. There’ll have to be an all-party agreement, and a referendum as well. And in time there’ll be a reciprocal agreement by Dublin to amend the De Valera constitution so as to make clear that the new institutions are a full settlement of “the national question” for as far into the future as anyone can see and won’t, because they can’t, be used as stepping-stones that Nationalists might slyly tip-toe across towards a unitary State.
It will require quite a display of fudging and fancy footwork to get this far, but they are up to it. It could be done. That, in British and Irish Government terms, would amount to a glittering success for the “peace process”. So let’s consider what areas the all-Ireland institutions might cover.
Here we have the benefit of Albert Reynolds’ public musings at a time when he never thought he’d be brought down by such a trivial matter as his State’s legal system doing sweet fanny adams about a pederast in a Roman collar skulking odorously in a monastery from the cops. Just weeks after the announcement of the IRA ceasefire last autumn, the shifty gobshite from West Meath, then Taoiseach, identified trade, transport and tourism as areas which might usefully be handled on an all-Ireland basis. Before and since, others, including leading bankers and business-people as well as politicians, have spoken about the benefits of co-ordinating North-South efforts to attract con-persons on the make to select Ireland as the site for the exploitation of labour.
It seems then, although there is presumably more detail in the crafty documents zinging back and forth between Dublin and London, that what will be on offer will be all-Ireland control or supervision of the process whereby Irish workers are invited to take low pay and rotten conditions because if they don’t workers elsewhere will take less, while “political” affairs are left to whatever institutions emerge within the North, and the North still constitutionally within the UK.
Now if this is the way of it, and if, as is certain, it gives rise initially to OUP outrage, where would it leave Northern Nationalists, and particularly supporters of the Republican Movement?
The IRA dropped its armed struggle because it had been persuaded that the Nationalist cause might be better advanced through Sinn Fein forming an alliance with the SDLP and the Dublin Government and, through them, with the Irish-American lobby around Clinton. This, as we know, to the consternation of many conservatives and reactionary gobdaws, gave the Republican leadership a new standing in respectable political circles in the US and elsewhere. But it gave the same respectable elements a hold on the Republican leadership, too.
The implications of all this will become more clear if the major concern of both governments over the next months is, as is likely, to coax the OUP towards acceptance of the framework. If Sinn Fein in these circumstances were to reject the framework, demanding more substantial cross-border institutions and/or a more open path towards eventual Irish unity, it would have to break with the Dublin Government and, in effect, abandon the strategy on the basis of which the IRA announced the suspension of its operations last August. This might not happen suddenly, in a single dramatic move. But it would be the logically inevitable outcome.
Of course, the all-Ireland dimension is not the only aspect of the matter: there’s internal arrangements in the North and Anglo-Irish relations to be considered – the so-called “three strands”. But nobody will gainsay that the “process” depends crucially on agreement about the constitutional strength and precise role of institutions linking the North to the South.
The horrible crunch question which Sinn Fein leaders would face is whether progress of this limited sort towards a united Ireland would represent an adequate or acceptable return on the investment of pain and death made over the past quarter century by the most disadvantaged section of the North’s people, their own core constituency, the Catholic section of the working class. And if the answer to that is no – what then?
Resuming the armed struggle – assuming that that is a practical option by the time the question is posed – would offer no certainty of further advance, while alienating the Republican Movement from recently-found powerful allies and earning it opprobrium for having shattered the peace to which it had pledged itself fervently.
I should concede here that things might not work out like this at all. I am uncomfortably aware that once upon a long past time I assured all who would listen that they could continue to sleep snug in their own beds, that the British would not introduce internment without trial. My reasoning was that they’d be crazy to go down that road since it led straight to disaster for themselves. And so it turned out. But they did it anyway. I was wrong.
Still, the scenario outlined here seems at least as likely as any other. And it leads me to say, again, that we should separate the peace from the “process”.
For at least a year now there has been an unspoken edict operating in Irish politics declaring that to reject the “process” is to call for a resumption of war. But not so. A collapse of the “process” does not necessarily mean a return to where we were before the ceasefire. What should be in train now is discussion of what other avenues of advance can be opened up when and if it becomes plain that the “process” can deliver nothing worthwhile.
We have been mired so long in the “process”, and told so insistently that it is impermissible to think outside its limits, that we may almost have lost sight of what’s at issue. The right to equality of treatment and, to use the word in vogue, of “esteem”. The right to a decent job and dignity in day-to-day living. A fair chance for our children to grow and express themselves and to realise all the potential within them. The right to live in peace and without fear of officialdom. The right to be what we are under political arrangements we experience as congenial.
These are not rights which are particular to Catholic areas in the North but rights which are denied in all working-class areas, and not just in the North. A recognition of that is the key to the Bogside and the Falls working out what strategy, tactics and alliances might prove best for pushing ahead with the struggle of the last 25 years, rather than allowing it to be held back or diverted by a process which requires the maintenance of an alliance with John Bruton or Albert Reynolds and their smoothly cynical “special advisors”.