Northern Ireland (2)
The war that isn't
Rawle Knox
It's the ill-luck of the Irish that just when. one has come through the predictable possibilities of trouble with little more than common or street-corner rumpus, the unpredictable sneaks up with a blackjack. The Battle of the Boyne and the Wee Twelfth '(at which the Protestants take to themselves the honouring of all the dead of the Ulster Division at the Battle of the Somme) and the Apprentice Boys' Parades all passed uneventfully by; as, more or less, did the anniversaries of the start of internment and Operation Motorman and the Feast of the Assumption (the poor blesses Mary gets dragged into politics too). The holidays helped of course. They are taken so seriously that we didn't have a bomb blast in Derry for a whole fortnight. Then — wham! — we had the Littlejohns and the comments of the coroner at the inquest on the
I will bet some experience that the Littlejohn affair was the jolly brainwave of
titled amateurs at the top of Britain's defence pile — it has all the hallmarks — that gave the solid professionals down in the middle cold Shivers. The extension of the affair by enthusiastic Dublin reporters has now convinced a considerable body of articulate southern Irish opinion that the British were indeed responsible for the bomb blasts in Dublin eight months ago — which is what
that opinion always wanted to believe. That any intelligence organisation considering such a Plan as the Dublin bombings would go through with it after weighing the political disaster that discovery would bring, I strongly do h
°,-,t; even more I doubt that any Dublin government would try to suppress a police report on the affair, since the greenest Dublin Politician knows by now that it's not a city in Which. you can suppress anything. Still, the damage to Anglo-Irish governmental relations has been done.
As for the comment of the Derry coroner, Major Hubert O'Neill, that the British Army committed sheer, unadblterated murder on 'Bloody Sunday;' he only said what he had to, and indeed what he had the right to say. He is a Catholic, living on the edge of Derry's Bogside, and he has after past jury verdicts forthrightly condemned killings by the Provisional IRA. He did not say, as the Provisional Sinn Fein immediately tried to interpret him, that the Paratroops' shooting was done by direct British government order as preventive murrler to discourage civil have and he reaffirmed that he was proud to nave served in the British Army. A tougher .„man, Major O'Neill, I would say, than the Unionists in Belfast who demand his instant dismissal; and probably nearer the truth than Widgery or the Provisional Sinn Fein.
As a postscript one might add that on the
day the coroner's remarks were published, the Provisional IRA sent a "get well" message to a Young girl, about to be married, whom in error they had shot and seriously wounded during one of their haphazard affrays in Strabane. "In guerrilla war," read the statement in part, "there are bound to be civilian casualites." So there are; civilian casualties caused by both sides. But you Would hardly realise that if you read what the Provisional Sinn Fein (and some Dublin newspapers) "say about Bloody Sunday.' It isn't only the Dublin newspapers I crib about We are in Ireland and in Britain in a very strange situation. Both countries run 'Mon what is virtually a two-party system of clemocracy, and each within itself, despite ancient enmities from which wounds still remain open, arrived at a bipartisan policy on Northern Ireland. That policy aims at peace, the retention for the time being of British tkr_OoPs in Northern Ireland, and consultation .tween London and Dublin (and most cer`41,nlY Belfast) about the political future. Even 'evy years ago it would have been hard to Tagine such progress. In the most recent elections both in Britain and Ireland the lectorates knew what. the policies of both the `,..en governments and oppositions were about Ulster. Therefore, tacitly at least, the huge Major the city of voters in both countries supported L,d ommon grounds which Conservative, u°or, Fine Gael, and Fianna Fail have reached not without some sweat and tears, %pecially on the Irish side. Yet the Irish and the Irish Press (though both would tuoubtless quote sober and reasonable edirZials at me) present the situation to their Eiarclers as though it were war. Radio Telefis n',enn, despite the rows between its news s4—
"on and the government which is sup
sed to control it, isn't far, if at all, behind. aaiel Irish Independent, Dublin's other major stoY, has realised that a large circulation can 10_4 be maintained by playing the troubles in
w.key and doing a crescendo on the fat stock prices.
British press reports vary, in some papers according to the political emotionalism of the reporters, in others to the political and circulation requirements of editors. All however see the problem of Northern Ireland basically as a confrontation between the British Army and Irish nationalism, with occasional odd irruptions of Protestant extremism, which are harder to explain because few newspapermen, British or southern Irish, have been able to discover much about the Ulster Protestant. There I don't blame them; he's a very tough nut to crack. Dublin newspapers have even made the enthusiastic, though wildly inaccurate error of believing that when the Belfast Protestant gets too irritated by Whitehall he will welcome the salve of Dublin.
The British and Irish governments, and their respective oppositions, have concluded that the first priority is not war, nor anything like it, between their two countries. It is the business of getting the people of Northern Ireland, as at present constituted, to live together; though that's much easier said than done, as Mervyn Rees remarked the other day. Still, it's got to be done, and the continued sniper's sneer at the British Army doesn't help. The Army of course still does things, more from lack of plain common sense than of humanity, that it shouldn't, and it must be the job of every journalist to comment sternly as to when and where. But even the SDLP, Her Majesty's most reluctant opposition ever in the new Northern Ireland Assembly, is trying to mute its innate resentment of all the army is and does. Major O'Neill's coronerial comments understandably aroused it to say that the army is not at all the answer to policing Northern Ireland. It isn't — and you've only to talk to any soldier to discover, briefly and in acid, what he thinks of it. But during this very dicey period the great majority of people in Britain and Ireland are agreed that the Army has to stay. For critics, of course, the Army is physically a much safer target than the IRA; but it's a time when the pissing has to stop.
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