AND ANOTHER THING
How Blair is applying Balkan-style ethnic cleansing to Ulster
PAUL JOHNSON
I reject both these criticisms. My charge against Blair is inconsistency. If he is so strongly opposed to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, why is he permitting it — indeed positively encouraging it _– in Northern Ireland? For, make no mistake, to cleanse Ulster of its Protestant people is the object of the IRA and the Irish Republican politi- cians who support them. And Mo Mowlam's actions, as Secretary of State, are helping the IRA's long-term aim. By giving Mowlam his backing, Blair has become an ethnic cleanser himself.
The term ethnic cleansing is recent, but the process it describes is probably the most ancient form of geopolitics: the disposses- sion of one people for the benefit of anoth- er. The Old Testament is full of it, beginning with the Israelite conquest of Canaan. The Celtic fringe of the British Isles has been shaped and reshaped by ethnic cleansing. When foreign journalists come to see me to have 'the Irish Problem' explained to them, the first thing I do is to get out my big atlas and show them how close Northern Ireland is to south-west Scotland. Until the 19th cen- tury it was closer, in a sense, than it is today, for there were virtually no roads and travel was almost entirely by boat. The sea, far from separating Scotland and Ireland, in Practice linked them. The Scottish High- lands were settled from Ireland, the original inhabitants being cleansed, just as Ulster Was settled by Lowland Scots in the early 17th century, and the Glasgow area of the Scottish Lowlands settled by Irish immi- grants in the 19th century. Religious practice In variably reflected ethnicity and reinforced it. Sometimes the cleansing was conducted quickly by force, sometimes more slowly by higher birth rates. As an example of the sec- ond process, Liverpool, a strongly Protestant English mainland city as recently as 1900, has long since been cleansed by Catholics.
Ireland has been a theatre of ethnic cleansing since the mid-12th century. In 1155, Pope Adrian IV issued a bull, Laud- abiliter, inviting the English King Henry II to occupy Ireland and cleanse its Church of Celtic and schismatic elements. Fifteen years later, the invasion began in earnest. It proved possible to cleanse the Church but not the native population. Celtic tribesmen were dispossessed, but the English settlers who replaced them tended to go native, adopt the Irish language, laws and customs, and employ harpists and poets. In 1366 the English crown forced the Irish parliament to pass the Statutes of Kilkenny, a system of apartheid designed to keep the races apart by forbidding 'alliance by marriage, gos- sipred, fostering of children, concubinage or amour'. The English were forbidden to sell Irishmen horses, armour or 'any man- ner of victuals in time of war'. A cleansed territory, or Pale, was delineated around Dublin, and the Celts, legally designated `Irish enemies', were forbidden to hold property or live within it.
These rules of apartheid, though ineffectu- al, were confirmed many times and not repealed until 1613. By then, the ethnic lines of the Catholic-Protestant struggle had been set, and the Protestant presence in Ireland was being strongly reinforced by the ethnic cleansing of the Ulster border and its reset- tlement by Scots Lowland farmers, who spoke English and professed Presbyterian- ism. Each time the Irish rose in revolt and were put down, the confiscated lands of the rebels were redistributed among Protestant settlers. The last large-scale cleansing started in the 1650s after Oliver Cromwell had reconquered the country, when the English Parliament passed a series of Acts of the Set- tling of Ireland. This legislation removed the Irish Catholic gentry and landowners into the `Sony, we're still not ready for you to land ... just keep going round in circles.' west of Ireland, resettling their lands with soldiers from Cromwell's New Model Army, the so-called 'Black Protestants'. The Irish, it was said, could go 'to Hell or Connaught'. After the Battle of the Boyne in 1689 con- firmed Protestant rule, the cleansing process was reinforced by a series of penal statutes reducing Catholics to second-class status and creating what was termed the Protestant Ascendancy.
This system of cleansing and apartheid failed, as did the 1800 Act of Union uniting Ireland to Britain. The Catholic Irish remained the majority and, from the 1820s, they developed a modern form of political nationalism which used parliamentary meth- ods as well as force. Slowly but surely they reversed the entire cleansing process, by par- liamentary obstruction at Westminster, and house-burning, boycotts, murder and threats in Ireland. The political breakthrough came in 1920 when the Government of Ireland Bill created, in effect, a sovereign parliament in the South. Ethnic cleansing of Protestants by Catholics could then begin in earnest.
At that time, Protestants constituted 20 per cent of the population. They are now an insignificant remnant. The South having been cleansed, the process of cleansing the North began in the late 1960s and has con- tinued ever since. At one time the cleansers thought Catholic birth rates would do most of the work for them, reducing the Ulster Protestants to a minority, making reunifica- tion democratically possible and so putting all power in Catholic hands. But younger Irish Catholics will not breed any faster than their Protestant opponents, so force is used instead.
The so-called peace process, as seen by the Protestants, is the beginning of a new phase in ethnic cleansing, which leaves the Irish Catholic mafia, or IRA, in full possession of all their arms and with the funds to buy even more powerful ones. These arms will be used not so much against the British army, a van- ishing presence, as against the Protestant majority. The open expectation of the IRA and their Republican backers in the South is that enough Protestants will take the hint, see the portents and emigrate. The remnant will submit, and then all Ireland will become `a Catholic country of a Catholic people'. Is that how Tony Blair wants to go down in his- tory — as the man who made possible the most ruthless and successful act of ethnic cleansing in modern European history?
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