J 1 S ter (2)
Which shade of green
Lawle Knox
AS H. F.4 arold Wilson talks to Liam Cosgrave this hon,"claY, one hopes that the Westminster Cos—ework is neatly up-to-date. Only last week
; grave re-emphasised in Dail Eireann that,
• any future Northern Ireland administration, rwer sharing between the two communities the Irish dimension" were non-negotiable. Bon, "1 London and Dublin, he said, were firmly s`cuntnitted to those principles. His doggedness tilt.Prised some observers who reckoned that
e last two elections in the North had flung 1:19Wer sharing out of the window, to land on the
Isearded wreckage of the Irish dimension. s,Coagrave was saying no more than he had to a'it His government last week faced the Dail hi er a summer recess during which various of Ns Ministers had made statements on the OM showing that within the Fine Gael-La Ur coalition the whole unappetising Ulster atliateful was being redigested. Garret FitzGerthm' the Fine Gael Foreign Minister — one of sse who had been thinking aloud during the
— took things further when the Dail — took things further when the Dail
sa• vened by saying that it Might be neces4'l to consider revision of the constitution pi out the agreement of the opposition pint1,4 Fail; and no one doubted he was ci;,:"going into the starry Article Two, which it; for the Republic at least theoretical "t,'Isdls iction over all Ireland's thirty two co-,u‘nties, The Cosgrave government in fact is thZ`e;naplating — and perhaps no more than it -",or the moment — practical ways in which
RUght allay the professed fears of such Unionists as Paisley and Craig so as to make them, for the first time, look upon a united Ireland as a future possibility.
For Dublin politicians this is a political step down a very dark treet. Already the Cosgrave government is being both genuinely and deliberately misunderstood, at home and by foreigners who believe that Irish republicanism is still what it was in the 'twenties. Fianna Fail, which for two generations has clamoured for the British to get out of Ireland without ever giving a decent thought as to how to get the Unionists in, is busy re-dyeing the green of its bonnets. The government has been clumsy enough tricking out its own policy. But it is absurd to try to impugn the patriotism of men like Cosgrave and FitzGerald and Conor Cruise O'Brien — absurd to anyone who knows them. They are the first Irishmen, North or South, for a very long time who are in power and thinking about the fusion of all Irishmen. If they. prefer to attempt a dialogue with the million Protestants of the North rather than with the raggle-taggle of gunmen who still snipe Without either god or purpose behind their trigger-fingers, good luck to them. They will need it. They will also need Harold Wilson to say with less than his usual prevarication, that if the proposed constitutional convention in the North does condemn both power sharing and the Irish dimension, the British will withdraw their promise that Northern Ireland may remain part of the United Kingdom so long as a majority there vote to do so. Because of that, you can hardly blame the Irish for rioting once in a while. Before the prisoners burned down Long Kesh and MacGilligan three weeks ago, London had taken no notice of Northern Ireland for months. Worse still, from a Republican point of view, Dublin had taken precious little. (Some Dubliners got warmish under the collar about a northern objection to Radio Telefis Eireann sounding the Angelus twice a day, but they missed the point as usual. As I remember Eddie Marum's pub in Naas, where the radio plays all day, everyone rose to his feet as the Angelus rang, and took off his cap and put down his pint. In quite a few northern bars that's a procedure that could lead to some confusion). The elections had told Northerners nothing they didn't know already, for it makes little difference here who is prime minister across the water. Significantly, very soon after the elections those bestial, seemingly casual murders began again in Belfast and the executioners, to begin with, were Protestants. Plenty in Dublin, of course, and not a few in Belfast, will tell you the killings were the work of the British Army plain clothes men. There
will always be Irishmen to say that and, since the Army has bungled too many of its special
operations, not only Irishmen to believe them. On this occasion both the British Army and the UDA agree that the latter was warned by the former that if the murders continued there would be more Protestants pushed into the ruins of Long Kesh. That means nothing to those Irishmen who believe the Army to be more Machiavellian than does anyone who's ever been in the army, but west of the Bann, where Catholics and Protestants live in fairly equal numbers, the Catholics reckon they know what's happening. The belief is that the Belfast Protestants always hold the Catholics there to ransom against the good behaviour of the rest of the Catholic community. Neither UDA nor UVF have kept such a rein on their men lately as they would like the public to believe. The established Unionist politicians have always said•that, given a free hand, they would finish off the IRA; it is the same politicians who regard the recent vote as having given them a free hand. The tactic of making life so hazardous for Belfast Catholics that they themselves persuade the IRA to call off the fight has been tried before, sometimes with success. At the moment it is only provoking retaliation, and on increasing scale. That is what makes time look so short.
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