Ireland (2)
What chance moderation?
Constantine FitzGibbon
In the closing stages of the second world war a friend of mine was sent to Greece as member of a politico-military mission taxed With the discovery of 'middle of the road' individuals fit to control that devastated country as it lurched into civil war with the withdrawal, or expulsion, of the Germans. He returned in a chastened mood. The only Greeks with political pretensions, he told me, who could be described as 'middle of the road' were those who were sprinting across it, dodging bullets; from one political extreme to the other. Now, and for the last few years, we have been and are hearing similar, plaintive appeals from the British with reference to Northern Ireland (and here any Greek parallel ends).
We are told, ad nauseam, that the overwhelming majority of the people in Northern Ireland wish to live in peace, to grow rich if industrious and if not to enjoy the lavish doles handed out by the British welfare state, and to stop being murdered or bombed, themselves, their friends or their children. This is, of course, a truism.
It is also totally irrelevant to the situation in Belfast, Derry, Strabane, NeWry and elsewhere,, and has been for at least the last 370 years. At no time have the pistol and-bomb extremists been more than a tiny minority. Only rarely have circumstances turned a potition of the masses into a mob.
It is a commonplace that for most people, in most places, life continues more or less normally even during periods of violent revolution, in Paris 1793 as in Belfast 1973. When the situation, as in Northern Ireland today, is only marginally and potentially one of revolution—that is to say, precisely, that only a few score Marxists and anarchists wish to canalise other emotions into the destruction of the existing society — why do 'the people' allow this misery and beastliness to go on, year after year? Where, the English wonder, sometimes 'in tones of contempt, sometimes with pity, but usually in a bleating, baffled manner, where are the leaders of the moderates?
Now, pace Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien and others who learned their political ABC from believers in the teachings of the Third International which had denied but failed, save in Russia, to realise the failures of the Second, social or economic revolution is a comparatively rare manifestation of ' mob ' emotions. Patriotism is a far stronger lever. We may not like our allies, but we can and do hate our enemies, and in so small a community as the Six Counties, the enmity becomes tribal.
To the Dorset man, even to the Kerry man, the inhabitants of the Falls Road or of Sandy Row may appear as indistinguishable the one from the other as do the tribes of Uganda to the man from Cairo or Cape Town. Not so, to one another. For over three centuries those Ulstermen who accept the various Reformed Churches have been determined, and have periodically attempted, to expel their fellow Ulstermen of the Roman Catholic faith. These have been repeatedly driven out and have as repeatedly seeped back into a province where the Nonconformist and Church of Ireland majority has at least as deep historical roots as have the inhabitants of the State of Maine or of the Carolinas, perhaps more. In Northern Ireland, it is tribal, and it is conquest. The fact that the belligerent minority involved, on both sides, in the present civil war, look alike, talk alike and behave alike, does not diminish this fact. But still, ask the British, where are •the leaders of the ' moderates ' who loathe all this rubbish?
The answer is that, North and South, the Irish 'moderates ' do not really require or want any leaders at all, since the Fuehrerkonzept is historically linked with foreign (tribal or national) domination and exploitation. Only in periods of political apathy can a Redmond or a Lynch provide the sort of leadership that an apathetic majority wants. When the bullets start to fly, or even look like doing so, such admirable men rapidly disappear into limbo. So they do in England, though size of the country and the deep-rooted nature of British democracy require major crisis before a Churchill replaces a Chamberlain. Except in extreme circumstances such as 1940, an alternative government, which will play the rules, is usually in existence. Compromise, even National Governments, are viable. In Ireland, on • the other hand, the historic division is not between two parties who will each bow out when the electorate prefers the other, but between patriots and traitors, each definable to taste. Only since the end of the Civil War in Ireland as a whole, in 1923, has democracy struck roots, fairly sturdy, but lacking a twoparty system in the Republic in any meaningful sense.
In Northern Ireland there have been, quite deliberately and for over fifty years. no democratic roots at all. Asquith was a ' moderate' but when the first world wa: became serious even to English politicians. in 1916, Lloyd George replaced him. A man who who used political parties and emotions as stepladders, unlike Churchill he failed to realise that such a man on a horse' rapidly becomes unacceptable after the crisis is passed. The final act of this pseudo-democrat was the establishment, in 1920, of a pseudo-democracy in Northern Ireland, in an Ulster so truncated as to ensure a permanent, Protestant, Unionist majority. From then until today Northern Ireland has never had an ' alternative ' government, never can, and the casting of votes in local or national elections is only a little more interesting than it is in Russia. another self-styled democracy.
In this dummy state, the only possible 'middle of the road' figure vanished while the clouds, the latest clouds, were still low on the horizon. Lord O'Neill's successor, Lord Moyola, was also not sufficiently extreniist, and no more, on the Roman Catholic side, was Mr Gerry Fitt. How then can the years of mounting violence be expected to produce a climate in which political moderation can take root? Exhaustion, which has led to periods of lull over the past four centuries in Ireland, is visible again, but this is also not a good soil. Small boys who throw rocks, if they survive the bullets of their elders, are soon old enough to fire bullets themselves. Ten years is a good average ' lull ' in Northern • Ireland. If one is about to come again, and if this breathing space is ignored or is regarded by London as a mere return to ' normality ' instead of a departure therefrom, then the blood of the next generation as well as of this will be on the hands of Wilson, Heath and their advisers. To recapitulate, an Irish habit repugnant to the English, when the present troubles became acute Mr Wilson, as Prime Minister enjoying his fair share of the nation's wealth in the Scilly Isles, did not interrupt his hols but merely ordered a veto on the whole subject in the Security Council of the United Nations. Northern Ireland was nothing save an intrinsic part of the United (ingdom, presumably like the Scilly Isles.' He 'thus put Britain firmly on the hook, and bit by bit almost the entire British .army was moved into that 'intrinsic part' of Britain, there to suffer and inflict heavy casualties. AS the situation deteriorated, .i.e. more UK citizens were ,rnurdered by other UK citizens, he sent over a series of judges, mountaineers and other dignitaries to ' investigate,' among other matters, the official use of torture. Meanwhile D-notices fluttered down on Fleet Street like snowflakes, British international prestige reached an all-time low, and the British public was kept remarkably illinformed about what was happening in an 'intrinsic part of the United Kingdom.'
When Mr Heath took office, he managed to distract his gaze sufficiently from his prime aim of destroying his nation's sovereignty in order to announce his intention of sailing Morning Cloud up the Irish Sea, thus solving the problem. After this pronouncement he returned to contemplating the joys of Brussels, the wickedness of the workers, and, presumably, the bottom of Morning Cloud until, early in 1972, he suddenly imposed direct rule on the Six Counties of Ulster — which is odd, since it was already an ' intrinsic,' not a federal part of the United Kingdom — accelerated the arrest without trial of minority extremists, and caused a rapid and enduring deterioration in the entire situation by first of all co-operating with and then alienating the majority extremists. The fatuous and perpetual grin of his proconsul, while men, women and children entrusted to his care are dying at an ever accelerating rate, has been of as much value as Mr Callaghan's remark to the embattled people of the Derry Bogside that they might have called him Seamus. (James, in Irish. Got it? The Irish, all the Irish, Catholic, Protestant, Jew or Hindu, just love being patted on the head by their
English conquerors.) Now a referendum will take place, signing the death warrants of many innocent people, with only the names to be filled in: and civil war will continue until utter, ultimate exhaustion. Ultimate for a decade or so.
Who will preside over the coming lull? Whom will Westminster grab, as he sprints across the road? Not the Government of the Republic, that is almost certain. Can they catch the Rev Ian Paisley, Mr William Craig, Billy (presumably William) Hull? Have they a Provo leader, ready to sprint the other way? Mr John Stevenson, or whatever he calls himself in Irish, fortified by two archbishops, is now eating heartily in the Curragh Camp: perhaps an English nihilist, with such elevated Roman Catholic patronage, would be a thoroughly suitable solution for 1973? Or perhaps there is none, but only the proven palliatives of perpetual hypocrisy, humbug and murder.
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