By Jack Holland
The great experiment that began in 1994, an experiment in trying to build consensus politics in a region where it has never existed, is now tottering dangerously. The British and Irish governments, along with the various parties to the peace process, are still struggling to bridge the gap between the Ulster Unionists’ refusal to countenance Sinn Fein in government without some gesture of disarmament and the IRA’s equally adamant refusal to make that gesture. The whole debate has been chewed over a thousand times already and I don’t mean to repeat that. What I would like to point out is what the dispute actually tells us about the nature of the Northern Ireland problem.
The first question to ask about any dispute is who is having it. After all, you cannot solve a problem until you know where it lies. That seems so obvious as not to be worth mentioning. But in Northern Ireland it is a matter of controversy. Republicans (at least in public) insist that the dispute is between them and the British. But if you look at the row over decommissioning, who is having the argument? It is the Ulster Unionist Party and Sinn Fein. That is, it is not an argument between the British government and the republican movement. Nor is it an argument between Unionists and the Irish government. It is an argument between Northern Ireland republicans and Northern Ireland unionists.
The British and Irish governments would be happy to see the provisions of the Good Friday enacted, Sinn Fein take its seats in the power-sharing executive, so that Northern Ireland can on merrily on its way as far out of British politics as possible. But this can’t happen, simply because David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, finds it impossible to sit in the same executive with representatives of a still well-armed IRA, an organization which for the last 30 years has been dedicated to the destruction of the state that Sinn Fein is now willing to help run.
The decommissioning dispute is Northern Ireland in a nutshell. Ulster unionists refuse to trust their republican neighbors enough to share power with them. Republicans refuse to believe that Ulster unionists are intent on anything other than preventing them from achieving the equality and justice that they are demanding. What it tells us, starkly, is that the Northern Ireland problem was and is a dispute between Irishmen.
This is heresy to republicans, who maintain that Britain is responsible for the mess. Up to a point they are right — Britain is responsible for creating Northern Ireland, which it did as a response to the intransigent refusal by unionists to go into a United Ireland. It could be argued that the British are at least partly responsible for that intransigence. But it does not serve British interests to prolong the current impasse over decommissioning. Why would Britain undermine the very agreement that it fought so hard and took such pains to create in the first place? Yet republicans are darkly hinting that there is some such plot, spawned by the gray men in suits they call securocrats.
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At least they like to maintain this argument. But whether they actually believe it is another matter. The involvement of the IRA and Sinn Fein in the peace process would suggest that they do not, since that involvement was based on the acceptance of the need to win the consent of the unionist population of Northern Ireland for any settlement. Thus, it recognized that unionist intransigence is more than just a product of British imperialism but is something deeply felt, which John Hume, and others, have been saying for years.
The current Sinn Fein tack is to demand that Britain deal with the unionists and confront them, thus implying that somehow Britain is to blame for unionist opposition to republican goals. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, however, knows that putting UUP leader Trimble under too much pressure to concede would spell doom for Trimble, who would be torn apart by his own already restive right wing. The "Faulknerization" of the Trimble-led UUP would then be complete and the hope for reaching any kind of accord would probably vanish.
Look what happened after Brian Faulkner, the North’s last prime minister, fell in the collapse of the power-sharing experiment in 1974. The failure effectively ended British attempts to find a political solution to the crisis for more than a decade. If the Good Friday agreement were to fall apart, it is unlikely that Britain would want to engage in another difficult search for a solution for a long time, at least not in the life of the current British government. It would also probably spell the end of the current Sinn Fein and IRA leadership.
In the meantime, the latter is going through some interesting changes. According to a story that appeared in a recent Dublin Sunday Tribune, Gerry Kelly, a former adjutant general of the IRA and currently a member of the new (still to be established) Northern Ireland assembly, was in Garvaghy Road on St. Patrick’s Day. His attempts to quell a local riot were, according to the report, not welcomed by the locals, who were incensed by Orange demonstrators. They claimed the Orangemen were jeering about Rosemary Nelson, who had been murdered a few days earlier.
"Kelly was told by the rioters to go back to Belfast," the report said.
People talk about the "Faulknerization" of the Unionist Party. Is there a "Sticky-fication" of the Provisionals? That is, are they becoming an updated version of the Workers’ Party, eager to defuse Catholic militancy?
Their enemies, especially on the republican side, would like to suggest that they have gone the way of Cathal Goulding in a march toward political respectability.
There are resemblances, of course. Both the Officials and the Provisionals came to the same conclusion — that the war against Northern Ireland could not be won, except the Officials realized that long ago. Both decided to accommodate themselves to the prevailing political structures. Once that happens, you end up condemning former colleagues for doing today what you yourself were advocating yesterday. The difference, however, is that the Provisional leadership is still committed to achieving a United Ireland, and is still trusted by the majority of the republican movement, at least in the North. By 1982, Goulding and his group had completely lost credibility north of the border, where the "Stickies" more or less disappeared as a viable political entity.