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Dublin Report: Only compromise, concessions can head off trouble

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By John Kelly

We will march down this street — you will not march down. We will not sit at the same table with Fenians — we insist on sharing government. You will have to give up your guns — so will you.

Not a very promising Northern scenario, is it? Not a pretty sight as Drumcree and the Twelfth draws ever nearer.

The Rev. Ian Paisley is now beating the big lambeg drum. Flushed with his electoral success in the European election, in which he topped the poll again, beating Nobel Peace prize winner John Hume by a couple of thousand votes, he immediately issued a call for the review of the Good Friday agreement.

Not surprisingly, he also claimed that his 60 percent vote clearly indicates that the majority of loyalists are opposed to the agreement.

He scoffs at the fact that more than 70 percent of the island’s population expressed its approval of the same agreement. All that concerns Paisley is what the majority of loyalists want. His vote provided him yet again with the opportunity to claim the role of standard bearer in the tense weeks that are soon to come.

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It is a role that he has faithfully cultivated for more years than most of us care to remember.

There is precious little evidence to indicate that the intransigent intolerance of loyalism has altered in any serious fashion since that summer day at Divis Street in 1964 when Paisley led a marauding band of zealous followers intent on tearing down a tricolor from a "Fenian house."

Whenever peace threatens to break out, there will be loyalists on hand to prevent it from succeeding. The reason is simple enough. There is no possibility of a peaceful solution unless there is some degree of surrender — on all sides.

But the loyalist slogan is "No surrender." We will hear it shouted from the rooftops, see it proclaimed on banner after banner, hear it reverberating from lambeg drum to lambeg drum. The message is that Northern Ireland is not for Fenians.

In the face of such ongoing intransigence, British Prime Minister Tony Blair deserves considerable credit for the role he is pursuing.

During his most recent somber visit to Belfast, he said what had to be said. While he flatly admitted, correctly, of course, that de-commissioning was not a prerequisite for the involvement of Sinn Fein in government, he also emphasized that it had to be part of the ongoing process.

Even more astutely, he emphasized in a speech, remarkable for its bluntness, that nobody could believe that a party like Sinn Fein, so close to the IRA, could not manage to bring about decommissioning.

In a clear reference to the loyalists who oppose the agreement, he argued bluntly that the Good Friday agreement was the only possible answer, the only game on the block.

None who opposed it have any alternative, he rightly pointed out. Firmly, he also promised that if the agreement was not implemented by June 30, the Irish taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and he would have to look for what he described as "another way forward."

The clear inference is that the other way forward is not a Plan B. It is more probably a requirement for both governments to impose an external solution, in the absence of any internal one.

While that may seem rather draconian, the people of the island, north and south, have expressed their fervent wish for peace with their referendum votes. In the absence of any internal settlement, it is clearly the responsibility of the only sovereign governments concerned, the British and the Irish, working in tandem, to implement that clear aspiration for peace.

If this is not done, the probabilities are very grim indeed.

Just how serious it can become is underlined by the new loyalist plan for a "Long Walk" throughout Northern Ireland for seven days, ultimately linking up with their fellow Orange protesters at the Drumcree standoff.

With conscious irony, they have modeled the walk from Derry, through Coleraine, Ballymena, Antrim, Lisburn and Lurgan to Portadown on similar civil rights protests in the U.S. of the 1960s.

With another astonishingly quirky twist, the organizers, including members of the blatantly sectarian Orange Order and official unionists, have dubbed the event as a "Protestant human rights week."

Among other alleged outrages against their coreligionists, they accuse Catholics along the border, especially in South Armagh, of ethnic cleansing.

That is really rich, coming from people planted in Ulster by a British government whose army then drove the original inhabitants of the best land into the poorer highlands and rocky headlands of County Donegal.

Whatever you may think about that particular allegation, the unfortunate truth is that such a "walk" will gather thousands in its wake, perhaps well in excess of 100,000.

Consider the resources that will have to be used to confront such a gigantic assembly at Drumcree and it becomes clear the enormity of the threat facing all of the people on this island.

While the loyalists may attempt to tread the agreement into the highway of destiny, they must be forced to realize that the only thing that can replace it is violence on a much greater scale than any previously experienced.

Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA can, if they wish, take some of the pressure off. They can do it publicly, if only with a statement of intent regarding decommissioning, or they can do it more privately, through Gen. John de Chastelain, under the ‘gis of the Good Friday agreement.

Concession on both sides can go a long way.

Complicating matters even more is the apparent leadership battle looming between John Taylor and Northern Ireland’s first minister, David Trimble. For the last few months, Taylor has adopted a much harder line on the agreement than other leading members of the Unionist Party.

He seems to think that now is his time to strike. And if he succeeds, it will merely encourage the hard-line element within the party, an element that barely hovers on the more rational side of Paisleyism. In turn, because it is how things work in Northern Ireland, this will strengthen the more recalcitrant fringe within the Provisional IRA.

Unless appropriate action is taken promptly by the Irish and British governments with a clear display of unity, Northern Ireland will descend even more deeply into the abyss of its own stubborn making.

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