Ulster: never say die

Xan Smiley

Belfast A ghoulish Ulster irony is that one of the few areas of glum agreement among people of widely different tribal and political hues is that many have been• actually wanting Bobby Sands MP to die. A bout of sectarian aggression seems inevitable, though its length and intensity are unpredictable. The sooner it begins (and ends) the better: tensions need release.

Most of those close to Sands believe he has been bent on self-destruction. His own Provisional IRA probably wants its martyr, in the hope that Republican anguish and sympathy in both parts of Ireland and abroad will provoke a cycle of bloodshed — some of it perhaps in England itself — to weaken further the British resolve to stay. Up the Republican Falls Road I was several times told with a mixture of pain and pleasure in the informant's voice: 'It'll be as bad as '73' (the worst year of killings in the past decade). The Protestants have been saying: 'Let him go, if he wants to' — to his Maker, that is. They are happy to lend rare approval to one aspect of Catholic doctrine — that suicide is a mortal sin. 'Of course there'll be riots and that, but we're used to that'.

If — as I write — anyone can snatch him from death, it will be the Pope's personal envoy. But Sands has seemed unlikely to be deflected, and the Provos have already blankly defied the Pope's earlier plea to desist from violence. And I have heard nobody who believes that Mrs Thatcher at this juncture could I be forFturning. The problem of Northern Ireland looks as intractable as ever, and the middle ground, where British politicians have fondly hoped to build their famous (because barely conceivable) concensus, is tiny, but the violence — in terms of deaths — has never been lower since the current wave of troubles and IRA warfare began in earnest ten years ago. Killings of civilians and members of the security forces last year totalled 76 — 76 too many, but three times fewer than the number who perished in accidents on the Ulster roads, and far less than what was often one day's toll at the height of the Zimbabwe war. This year the rate has been lower, and the killings almost entirely confined to West Derry, West Belfast, and the southern border.

Catholics as well as Protestants express satisfaction at the way local police, whose numbers will soon have risen to 12,000 regulars and reservists, have successfully taken on the burden of law enforcement from the army, now halved from its level of 21,000 a few years ago. But the Provisional IRA does not need to exert itself, so long as it can prove that British government in ' Northern Ireland, whether in the shape of direct rule or through Ulster's own institutions, is unworkable. Sympathisers of the IRA clearly believe they have been winning politically, without raising the military stakes. Now, they may think, is the moment to up the ante. Protestants equally feel they are themselves on the political run, that the mysterious Haughey-Thatcher meeting was designed to kick them into the united Irish bogs. These days the grimmest new cant word in Unionist circles is `confederalism' — what Ian Paisley damns as the slide towards a united Papist Ireland `by the back door' and what the Provos equally dismiss as Haughey's `verbal Republicanism' — `an Ireland united in name only, but with the Prods maintaining the right to discriminatory autonomy in the North'.

Even the middle-roaders of the nonsectarian Alliance Party, not to mention the Unionists, are vehemently opposed to any British gestures to the South. They condemn open acknowledgment of an Irish `dimension' or plans for creeping federalism, let alone talk of British disengagement. Though the Troops Out movement in Britain presupposes that British military and administrative disengagement would entail a rapid Republican military and political advance, a large body of liberal Ulster opinioff is convinced that such a policy would precipitate the exact opposite: sectarian unrest and paramilitary activity amounting to civil war, large movements of population, destruction of property, fighting followed by a repartition of the border, maybe granting Derry, Newry and Strabane to the Catholics, and — finally — the establishment of a smaller but truly Fascist Paisleyite state, based mainly on the three north-eastern counties.

Today, as the Sands hunger strike nears its end (the Protestant taxi drivers say he is taking Bovril on the sly) there are ominous reports that all legal and illegal Protestant paramilitary forces have formed an umbrella command structure for the first time in many years. There are growing fears among the non-sectarian lobby groups, whose aim is simply peace rather than Nationalist or Loyalist gratification, that a British commitment to disengage could lead to preemptive military strikes, particularly by the Protestant hardliners. The standard bet in Queen's University is that the Loyalist gunmen would abandon a few chunks of Ulster but would then hold the rest. The biggest regiment in the British army is still the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). All able-bodied men would be enlisted in paramilitary units. Belfast's huge Catholic population would be worse off than ever before. One leader of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) says quite simply: `If a confederal solution is imposed on us, the Protestant paramilitary men become the Provos of tomorrow.'

So the time for British concessions to Irish nationalism is by no means ripe. Yet the dearth of creative ideas is deeply demoralising to all but the gunmen. What is the official British alternative? The bleak answer is to make the best of a bad job — direct rule — and to fumble quietly around in search of that elusive consensus, without making concessions to anyone. Yet even within a British Ulster, the Unionists, let alone the Provos, are loath to share power. Since the high watermark of consensus politics at Sunningdale in 1974, the hopes have ebbed out to sea.

The Republican-oriented but peaceful Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) believes the encouragement of outside involvement — an EEC and American interest as well as a good HaugheyThatcher relationship — is the bestl framework for advance. But so long as there is such a narrow strip of ground common to Northern Irishmen themselves, it is hard to visualise the schemes hatched by, outsiders being merrily accepted by a broad enough spectrum of those who have to live together in Ulster.

Ulster's middle-grounders are as sad as white southern Africa's and sharply reminiscent of them. They are terribly nice, they base their arguments on reason and decency, and hate to accept that the equations that matter are founded on blind emotion and brute strength. The Alliance Party, for instance, loathes Paisley probably more than the Republicans do, just as white Zimbabwean liberals were more outraged by Ian Smith than were the guerrillas. They underestimate the depth of irrational gut nationalism, be it Green or Orange. I suspect they underestimate the depth of Catholic sympathy —mingled, as in all unconventional war, with fear — for the IRA itself.

According to the liberals, the vote for Sands in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, where over 30,000 people turned out for the IRA to pip the Unionist by a thousand votes, demonstrated a Catholic determination merely to keep an unreconstructed Protestant supremacist out rather than to put a Provo tlanketman' in. But in any event the election showed the difficulty of staking political territory in the non-tribal limboland. 'It was the last nail in the coffin of the middle-class consensus ideal', said a mildly Republican writer.

The local government elections in three weeks' time will be crucial in revealing whether the centrist parties of consensus can still count for anything. They did well last time, in 1977, when Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) scored only 12 per cent, though it won 30 per cent in the EEC election under two years ago. Yet even if the SDLP and Alliance Party score respectably, the issue of the Irish dimension will drive a wedge through plans to share power. And if the tribal parties perform better than the liberal ones, enough consent for another power-sharing effort will seem even less likely.

The place to look for change may well lie not in the middle-class anti-sectarian soft centre but among those few politicians whose capacity for capturing a tribal vote is proven but who are also, paradoxically, genuinely seeking a coalition — rather than consensus — of powers. The two most interesting figures in this context are Glenn Barr, once a key UDA figure, now Chairman of the New Ulster Policy Research Group, and Paddy Devlin, another trade unionist, formerly an SDLP man but now an Independent Socialist with large Catholic support in working-class Belfast.

Barr, the articulate Derry trade unionist who orchestrated the unbeatable '74 strike against the Sunningdale Agreement, believes in an Ulster totally independent both of Britain and Eire, with a complex system of checks and balances under a President. He strongly rejects federalism right now, but says: 'If in 30 or 40 years our children want to join a state to the south, they should do so.' Not in the end 'Green' enough for the SDLP, Devlin nonetheless believes the need for Irish unity will gradually be enhanced by economic factors but is also interested in Barr's ideas of a presidential ; autonomous Ulster.

Both men understand tribal politics and Barr, in particular, believes they have to be catered for — initially, at any rate — rather than abolished, as the liberals would prefer. They both believe that direct rule perpetuates (and albeit controls) sectarianism by preventing people from working together.

Whitehall and Dublin have two imperatives. The ambiguity of last year's HaugheyThatcher meeting, presumably deliberate, has become dangerous, and may even stimulate extremism on either side. In particular, Haughey's subtle hints that he is still quietly but deeply committed to the 32-county concept — a united Ireland — is bound to egg the IRA on to use the gun, because they have been led to believe that a Fianna Fail government in Dublin will always in time of crisis give them succour. Conversely, as George Gale argued in these columns last week, the invocation by Mrs Thatcher of the Northern Ireland Act of 1973 (no cutting of the British link without the consent of the majority) has given the Protestants the idea that they have a permanent veto over Britain's possible withdrawal and can thus wreck any powersharing scheme with impunity.

If Haughey firmly denied that the oneIreland concept was inviolable and if Mrs Thatcher dropped the British guarantee to the Protestants, the two tribal military factions in the North might be less certain that their nefarious activities would be tolerated.

After the expected election in Dublin, the expected post-Sands rumpus in Belfast and the local government elections throughout Northern Ireland, it will be time for Britain to start exploring ideas again. Despite fear of a pre-emptive Protestant plot, the possibility of gradual withdrawal should be discussed. It is time, also, to replace the well-meaning Humphrey Atkins, 'Humpty-Dumpty' as he is known in the province, with a stronger personality. A story — maybe apocryphal — illustrates his reputation. Looking at a tribal/religious , map of Northern Ireland, where a patchwork of areas is composed of a mesmerising variety of shades of colours, from deep green (in heavily Catholic areas) to brilliant orange, for heavily Protestant, he inquired politely which denomination the bright blue blob in the centre of the province denoted. An embarrassed official explained that it depicted the inland waters of Lough Neagh.

Of course, the job is soul destroying. Direct rule cannot be abandoned overnight, nor perhaps for many years. But that does not alter the fact that it is a highly unsatisfactory method of government. The possibility of alternative government structures must be explored.

Far-fetched though the analogy may seem, as a devotee of African tribalism I cannot but help instinctively feeling that the Protestant Unionists exude an almost eerily Rhodesian flavour, and that history must likewise be against them. Many, indeed, are from the same tribe — resourceful, Presbyterian Scots, like Smith, with a capacity both for a warm-heartedness and cruel bigotry. Some of Rhodesia's Catholic priests, many of them Irish, had a remarkable facility for excusing acts of guerrilla violence.

The pre-emptive Paisleyite state sounds as logical a development as Smithy's UDI, and I do not believe it would last. The same old economic boycott would operate. Argyll would hardly serve as a sanctions busting depot a la South Africa. And I remember white Rhodesian soldiers asserting that if the blacks took over, the white troopies would 'become terrorists themselves'. I am aware that the IRA are not exactly black-skinned. All the same, I would put my money on a united Ireland, albeit whiteish, creeping into existence by the end of the century, perhaps even after a spasm of UDI.