The World Today
May 1998

Lifting The Burden

By Robert Kee

History, whose hand Tony Blair felt so vividly on his shoulder as he flew in to engage in the last critical phase of the Stormont talks on Northern Ireland, had understandably become a 'burden'  by the time those talks reached their conclusion three days and little sleep later. It was a burden from which he hoped we could now all begin to escape. For all his professed contempt for 'sound bites' these two concentrate the mind wonderfully on what the problem of Northern Ireland is all about.

History was the single most important participant in the talks, for a start reminding us that they have to be about 'Northern Ireland' and not about 'Ulster'. If they had been about Ulster there would have been no problem: the nine counties of the traditional Irish province of Ulster, as opposed to the six of 'Northern Ireland', contain a nationalist majority favouring a united Ireland. Some such thought is never very far from the Unionist sub-conscious with its strong determination to stay within the United Kingdom and permanent awareness of being a majority in the North but a minority in Ireland.

But how otherwise do these talks relate to what has happened before? And what realistic hope is there that their slightly tentative conclusion may finally relieve us of history's burden?

 

Home Rule

You don't really need to go back seven hundred years, and face the complication of majority Irish national feeling in support of English monarchs like Charles 1, James II and even Queen Victoria. Modern Irish nationalism really starts towards the end of the last century in a peaceful democratic demand by the vast majority of nationalists for a Home Rule Parliament in Dublin, with initially limited powers.

Gladstone's bill to that effect passed the House of Commons in 1893 but was thrown out by the House of Lords. Another Liberal government introduced another Home Rule bill in 1912 and after curbing the power of the House of Lords, got a single Parliament for all Ireland onto the statute book with royal assent in 1914.

But it was immediately postponed until the end of the war, which had broken out the month before. In that war, large numbers of Irish nationalists fought alongside Unionists in the British Army, as they thought,  for 'the rights of small nations', their particular right being, as they thought, Home Rule. But the war ended and there was no Home Rule.

 

Brave rebellion

At Easter in 1916, a very small and quite unrepresentative group of extreme republicans who had long and ineffectually existed on the fringes of Irish nationalism rose in a brave but isolated rebellion in Dublin, and held out for a week. Unpopular among the Irish people at the time, they began in retrospect to touch a certain emotional national chord as the prospect of Home Rule faded.

At the General Election of 1918 a hitherto small democratic nationalist political party, Sinn Fein ('We Ourselves') amalgamated with republicans to win more than two thirds of the Irish seats in the British House of Commons. This was still the only democratic structure available for the Irish. Instead of going to Westminster, they sat themselves up in Dublin as the first Dail Eireann, or Irish

Parliament, of a self-styled Irish Republic. They were tolerated as slightly absurd for a few months by the British Government but then suppressed. They went, anything but absurdly, underground.

The violent element in Sinn Fein took over behind the scenes, orchestrated by men like Michael Collins, a democratically elected Minister of the Dail, into an increasingly effective Irish Republican Army (IRA). This fought the British Army and a reinforced Royal Irish Constabulary not to victory but to a painful and bloodily deadlocked standstill morally embarrassing to the British Government.

Far too late, in November 1920, Britain presented a Government of Ireland Act offering only two separate limited parliaments, North and South, while the IRA were in arms for an all-Ireland republic. It was a deadlock, to which the only answer -- as now -- could be a truce and negotiation.

This provides the first significant analogy with the recent Stormont talks which have at least arrived at a potential new beginning. For although today's IRA is very different in history and moral substance from that of Collins' day, it has succeeded in making itself unbeatable by British authority in Northern Ireland. Today's IRA with Gerry Adams and Martin Macguiness as a political wing have, like Collins, succeeded in bringing to the negotiating table a British state unable to contain terrorist violence at mere nuisance level.

Collins' negotiation of 1921 ended in the Anglo-Irish treaty which gave 'Ireland' the constitutional status of Canada. From this the Parliament of the six northern counties was given the right to opt out after a specified interval. During this period the new Dublin Parliament's powers over it were 'suspended'.

The Northern Parliament opted out as everyone knew it would. The other twenty six counties eventually developed, after many long and often painful years, into a sovereign democratic Irish Republic.

What had been made plain was the truth quietly repeated from time to time ever since, even in this agreement, that the British Government, while guaranteeing the Northern majority the right to determine its own constitutional future democratically, is not on principle opposed to this idea of them being included in a united Ireland. For many Unionists this appears to weaken the oft repeated guarantee about consent.

Certainly after 1921 Unionist sensitivity determined much of the discriminatory and often repressive attitude to the nationalist minority in the 'Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people' which sat at Stormont for the next fifty years.

 

Civil rights

It was the failure of Britain's Westminster Parliament to use its powers under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act to intervene effectively at Stormont which finally led, in the climate of the nineteen sixties, to the development of a very effective democratic Civil Rights movement to whose realistic ideals a then virtually moribund IRA eventually attached itself and, reinvigorated, began increasingly dangerously to manipulate.

This was the situation boldly brought to a head by the Edward Heath Government in 1972 when it swept Stormont aside for ever and worked out with the Irish Government, under Garret Fitzgerald, at Sunningdale in Surrey, an earlier 'new beginning' to remove the burden of history. That settlement was in many ways analogous to the one 'agreed' this Easter.

Sunningdale set up an elected Assembly and power-sharing administration with Unionist First Minister and ministers of other parties including John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). They all actually worked together quite successfully for a few months.

The trouble was that the First Minister, Brian Faulkner, lost the support of the main body of the Unionist party and was dependent for survival on the nationalists and others in the power-sharing coalition.

The chief bone of contention with the Unionists was the Council of Ireland, whose counterpart is the North South Council in the present Multi-Party Agreement. The aim then, as now, was to give the Irish Government some sense of participation in the running of Northern Ireland. Anathema to most Unionists, it finally sparked popular street-level opposition in an Ulster Workers' strike which Harold Wilson's new Labour government felt unable to deal with. The Council of Ireland and the whole Sunningdale Agreement collapsed. But one concrete detail remains symbolically intact.

The Northern Ireland Constitution Act of 1973 which produced the Sunningdale Assembly, is still in place. The new Multi-Party 'Agreement' now intends to repeal both the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 and rescind the 1985 Anglo-lrish Agreement concluded by Margaret Thatcher with the Irish Government over the heads of Unionists. British constitutional power to order things in Northern Ireland and make arrangements for a new Assembly rests on the 1973 Act. What then are the omens for this repeat performance?

 

New climate

The climate is very different from 1974, both among the ordinary people of both traditions who together have experienced 2000 more deaths and accompanying suffering, and among politicians.

David Trimble, the Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, who opposed Sunningdale, now argues for Unionists to support power-sharing and the proposed Council of Ireland. The Council brings the Irish government into Northern Ireland on matters far beyond tourism and fisheries and into politically sensitive areas such as education, health and social security. The party's ruling council voted to support the agreement on April 18 with 72% in favour.

Whatever the reservations of the Orange Order and some of his MPs, opinion polls begin to suggest the public could be on Trimble's side. This may strengthen him in his arguments with his own Unionist subconscious about new police structures and the release of prisoners. Decommissioning of arms is firmly dealt with, at least  in the Agreement agenda, which is probably the safest place for his subconscious to leave it.

Ian Paisley's 'No' campaign has been under way ever since his sizeable, if secondary, Democratic Unionist Party refused to participate in the Stormont talks. However, even some of his

supporters may think twice when they look at the proposed changes to the Irish constitution, replacing a stark claim to all Northern Ireland with honeyed words about harmony, friendship and the Irish nation's affinity with its ancestry abroad.

There will be nationalists in both the Republic and Northern Ireland referendums on May 22 who will be disturbed by these changes, but the real nationalist opposition comes from those with whom Gerry Adams on his side has the same sort of tactical difficulty as David Trimble has with his Unionists.

Adams will not win over anything like all former activists, or even Sinn Fein voters, to accept what he, to his credit, now nominally accepts: that the only hope of achieving a truly united Ireland lies in democratic structures, and that the rest is just self-indulgent blood-soaked pie in the sky. The Stormont talks were never literally going to be a process leading to immediate peace.

There are nationalists, some former IRA, who act on the principle that since violence has brought the whole historical process one notch further with these talks, so violence can continue to speed the process up. There are 'loyalists' looking forward to retaliating. But history is for the time being at least in the hands of a majority of others and on May 22 they have a reasonable chance to make the most of it, remembering that history never just stops there.