POLITICS
In the Anglo-Irish kingdom of the cock-eyed
FERDINAND MOUNT
Agood debate. A first-class debate. Very passionate, very Irish, but not in a nasty sort of way. Sober but not too sober, if you know what I mean.
When we go around saying this sort of thing to each other, as we did on Tuesday and Wednesday evening last week, then watch out. It may all sound like harmless fun. Unfortunately, in order for us to be diverted for an hour or two, certain liber- ties with the truth have to be taken, tedious chunks of history have to be truncated, concertinaed or omitted.
The O'Booby Prize for Intellectual Sloth goes to Mr Edward Heath for giving us his time-honoured view that 'we English can- not understand any of the Irish'. But the myth of the inscrutable Irish was pretty universal, largely because speaker after speaker put things back to front. In the kingdom of the cock-eyed, the future is jolly hard to read, and the past is invisible.
`I was not prepared to tolerate the situation of continuing violence.' Mr James Molyneaux, the leader of the Official Unionists, claimed that this 'fatal sentence' of Mrs Thatcher's at the signing ceremony `made my blood run cold'. The IRA would take the credit for the British concessions in the agreement and would 'renew the onslaught' and press on to victory. Almost everyone in the debate, pro and anti, assumed that the coming together of Lon- don and Dublin was, at least in part, the achievement of the IRA. It was the pros- pect of further violence that had forced the agreement.
But it is nearer the truth to reverse that assertion. Since the early 1960s, it has been the prospect of an agreement that has forced the extremists to resort to violence. Memories seem too short to recall the series of steps, at first tentative, then growing bolder, following the first meeting between Captain O'Neill and Mr Lemass in 1965. It was this imminent threat of a lasting rapprochement between North and South that first brought Ian Paisley to prominence and provoked the resurgence of the IRA under the cover of the Civil Rights campaign.
Similarly, it is not, as most English members hoped, the agreement which has made possible the lessening of the vio- lence; it is the lessening violence in the province which has made the agreement possible, just as it did 60 years ago when Baldwin, Craig and O'Higgins signed the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1925.
Mr Harold McCusker triumphantly quoted the 1925 agreement to demolish Mrs Thatcher's claim that this is the first time the Republic has solemnly recognised in international law the legitimacy of the state of Northern Ireland. De Valera claimed that this recognition was extracted under duress, Mr McCusker went on, and had O'Higgins murdered. Ergo, no good can come of parleying with the Republic.
Now I don't think anyone knows to this day exactly who shot Kevin O'Higgins on his way to mass on 10 July 1927, but it would be fair to say that de Valera was not wholly displeased by the event. The point is rather that de Valera did not represent an unchallenged version of Irishness; far from it. Even ten years later, he was still finding it uphill work to establish in Ireland his kind of Hispanic theocracy.
Dev's 1937 Constitution, which contains the notorious Article 2 claiming 'the whole island of Ireland', only squeaked home in the referendum by 685,105 to 526,945 (31 per cent of the electorate did not vote). Even then, it was not until 1949 that Ireland was explicitly declared a republic. There then followed 23 glorious years (for Dev) in which the Republic was, in theory, utterly foreign to the United Kingdom, until our simultaneous accession to the European Community brought us back into uneasy communion.
Over and over again in the debate, the politicians swallowed the theory whole: `for the first time in our history, the minister of a foreign government will...' etc. But Ireland remains obstinately not quite Abroad. It is true that Irish national- ism defines itself, can only define itself in terms of being anti-English — so do Welsh and Scottish nationalism — but that is not quite the same as being foreign. It is not the difference between Portugal and Spain, sharply separated by race and language and history.
The traditions of moderate Irishness and moderate Britishness are not to be silenced by a Gresham's Law of nationalism, that the most monomaniacal form of patrial feeling is always bound to drive out the more affable and approachable form. The impulses which led to Sunningdale and Hillsborough are not signs of a weakening British will, but rather the reawakenings of a long-standing wish for concord between all the races in these islands.
I am not tilting solely at Mr Enoch Powell, although there is an especially blatant inconsistency in his position — or positions, viz: Powell Assertion A — that people of Northern Ireland ought to be governed in all respects like the people of Berkshire; if half a million of them would rather be governed from Dublin, bad luck, they must simply shut up and knuckle under. Yet Powell's assertion B is that 'it is a question of numbers', that a nation cannot 'harbour' more than a certain pro- portion of aliens without ceasing to be a nation; parts of mainland Britain where a third of the population is black are already passing the point of no return. But then if more than 30 per cent of the people in Northern Ireland would prefer to be `Irish', surely Northern Ireland must be an utterly hopeless case of an ex-province in the sense of Mr John Cleese's ex-parrot. Will it work? Or was Hillsborough a brave attempt five years too early? Or something that should never have been tried at all? (One final cock-eyed assertion, this one from Jim Prior: 'We cannot go on as we are.' Yes we can, and there is a strong case for doing so.) Or is this as good a moment as any to try — the hesitant conclusion of the present writer? Contrary to the inscrutability myth, I believe that history suggests several things fairly clearly: ever since that hasty and chaotic partition, both the British and Irish nation, have never ceased to hope for some arrangements for amity and loose associa- tion; neither the IRA nor the militant Unionists can make any such arrangements unworkable unless they have a lever on the machinery of government (in the case of Sunningdale, the power-sharing execu- tive). The 1925 arrangements were undone by the murder of O'Higgins and by de Valera's accession to power. If Dev and not O'Higgins had been murdered, would there now be an Irish problem?
It tends to be the fall of governments Lloyd George's, the Cosgraves' (father and son), Heath's — which does most to destabilise or destroy such arrangements. The course of opinion polls in the South over the coming months will be no less crucial than the manoeuvres of the Union- ists in the North. For it is Dr FitzGerald's government which is the shakiest leg of this particular piece of political furniture. That is why Mr Tom King really must watch his language. His tactless claim in Brussels this week that Dr FitzGerald had now con- ceded 'there will never be a united Ireland' was not merely a departure from the agreement's wording. It was a breech of the oldest rule in politics: never say `never'.
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