POLITICS
Ireland: the toughening of the South
FERDINAND MOUNT
There was something familiar about the man in the dinner jacket in the second or third row. The face started out of the shimmer of shirtfronts: foxy-jowled, saurian-lidded, still not a face to be met up a dark alley yet somehow diminished now, some of the stuffing knocked out of him, sitting there glumly, seeming indifferent almost to the ferocity of Barry McGuigan's assault on poor, brave, gangling Cabrera. A failing fight promoter forced to attend a rival's world title contest? A big punter who had taken a beating at Leopardstown? Or some more desperate character from some rougher walk of life? Why yes, we know him well. It is Charles J. Haughey, once and would-be future Taoiseach. What's eating him?
This side of the water, when our thoughts turn to Ireland, they tend to revolve around the Paisley Question. In Ireland, it is the Haughey Question that matters. In the North, it has been the fashion among Unionists to pretend other- wise. For political purposes, all Republi- cans must be presumed to be the same, all hopelessly alien, all fiercely devoted to the Pope, to dud methods of birth control (if any) and, above all, to that unspeakable claim of the 1937 Constitution to 'the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas'. Only Englishmen are so foolish as to believe that there is any real practical difference between the cultivated Garret FitzGerald and the crude character of Mr C. J. Haughey. Indeed, we are told, it is Dr FitzGerald who is the more dangerous to the Union, because his mild, hesitant manner conceals so well his un- yielding devotion to the cause of a united Ireland. For Unionists to concede that a change of Taoiseach could make any effec- tive difference is to imply that some good might perhaps, one day, come out of intercourse with the South. And that is treachery.
All of a sudden, these tactical certainties have begun to erode a little — not because, or not directly because of the Anglo-Irish agreement, but because of Mr Desmond O'Malley. It is, I am afraid, indicative of how little interest we really take in the politics of Ireland that Mr O'Malley's breakaway from Mr Haughey's Fianna Fail has passed with so little comment.
Progressive Democrats (or Progos) are attracting a quarter of the voters in the most recent opinion polls. Dr FitzGerald's Fine Gael is trailing in third place. Mr Haughey's party is scoring 42 per cent, scarcely less than in the last general elec- tion. But it is Mr Haughey — not, as some British newspapers have said, Dr Fitz- Gerald — who is suffering the real dam- age. For O'Malley's only conceivable op- tion is to go into a coalition with Fine Gael and the Labour Party (between the three of them attracting 52 per cent). If Dr FitzGerald loses even more support, it is likely to go to Mr O'Malley, not to Mr Haughey. It is hard to see how the three `modern-minded' parties can be outvoted by Mr Haughey and the heirs of de Valera. Romantic Ireland's not quite dead and gone but it's looking decidedly peaky.
Nor is it entirely correct to compare the Progressive Democrats with the Alliance over here. Mr O'Malley is a tough egg, a hard anti-IRA Minister of Justice in the last Fianna Fail government and not one for indulging illusions of any sort. He falls more into the Mrs Thatcher-Dr Owen type than into, say, the Francis Pym-Shirley Williams class. The crucial difference therefore, is that in Ireland the new attrac- tion is a hard centre, not a soft one. There is a rough, 'un-Irish' directness about the political manners of the South now. On the eve of Mrs Thatcher's talks with the Unionist leaders this week, Peter Barry, the Irish foreign minister, lambasted them with a ferocity only equalled by that of his attack on the 'green racism' of the IRA. All very different from the old, charming, elusive Somerville-and-Rossishness of Jack Lynch and even Charlie Haughey.
So much so indeed that even the Union- ists have had to take cognisance. The Revd Martin Smyth, MP for Belfast South and former Grand Master of the Orange Order, has conceded that the support for Mr O'Malley 'must contain a certain de- gree of rejection of the triumphalist repub- lican attitudes of Mr C. J. Haughey' and may be 'a sign that the electorate in the South is ready to enter a proper attitude of neighbourliness with Ulster'.
There was also something interesting to be gleaned from the reaction of Mr Peter Robinson, Dr Paisley's pint-sized lieuten- ant, to the Irish government's declaration of intent to sign the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism this week — and so, in theory at least, assist the extradition of IRA suspects to Britain. It was the firm stand of the loyalist commun- ity, Mr Robinson asserted, and not the hated Anglo-Irish agreement which had extracted this concession from Dublin.
Well now, perhaps so. But the pure Unionist line is that no serious concession can ever be extracted from Dublin. So if extradition can be squeezed out of them, why not eventually the abhorrent territo- rial claim of the 1937 Constitution?
Seen from Belfast, all this may look like moonshine and blarney. Surely the reali- ties we ought to be looking at are the looming breakdown of civil government in the province, the withdrawal of all Union- ists from the district councils, the revival of the Protestant paramilitaries and the batta- lion of troops being flown in to control next week's 24-hour general strike.
Seen in this light, the Anglo-Irish agree- ment already looks as good as dead, even if it is not formally buried in the near future, or perhaps ever. Unionist hopes are match- ed by Dublin fears. On both sides of the border, there is no shortage of people saying that the Hillsborough agreement Is being unstitched in the same way the Sunningdale agreement was. I am not sure. The time for unstitching is not yet. So long as there is a Tory government under Mrs Thatcher in Lon- don and a coalition led by Dr FitzGerald or indeed Mr O'Malley in Dublin, the essen- tial political pressures operate in the other direction. The Unionist leaders still do not seem quite sure what to do next. Mr Paisley and Mr Molyneaux were met by a hot blast of anti-Agreement feeling on Tuesday evening when they returned to Belfast after seeing Mrs Thatcher and hastily cancelled their cautious expressions of interest in round-table talks. But unless they have seats at some table from which they can stalk out, their only weapon is a prolonged general strike — which may not be so easy to organise as it was with Sunningdale, where they had a visible target of pressure in their own `comniun- ity', namely, Brian Faulkner and the other Unionists in the power-sharing executive. This Anglo-Irish agreement is an agree: ment between governments, and, for all the fine sentiments about it being for the Ulster people to choose their own future' the survival of the agreement depends. 00 the will and strength of the siatories. True, neither of them looks ingn exactly i tip-top condition at the moment, but that s all the more reason for them to drive the agreement forward before they are driven back by the mob. It is a fascinating contest between high politics and low politics --- and there sitting in the second or third row: you will still see the unnerving figure of Mr Charles J. Haughey, waiting.
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