Northern Ireland: stuck forever at the crossroads

Forty-five years ago, when I was starting out in journalism in Belfast, the Troubles were approaching their most ghastly phase. Bloody Sunday had unleashed the full fury of the Provisional IRA, and the response of loyalist organisations was to murder Catholics wherever they could find them. 

The international community (meaning mainly Irish America and the travelling circus that is the foreign press corps) was shocked and horrified. The British Government threw troops and money at the problem. The Irish Government wagged its finger at London and Belfast, but by and large kept its distance.

Finally … finally … after 28 years of unremitting violence, the Peace Process came along, culminating, we thought, in the Good Friday Agreement and the establishment of a power-sharing Executive at Stormont. For a while, this worked, introducing the world to that oddest of odd couples, the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, as First and Deputy First Ministers, otherwise known as the Chuckle Brothers.

But that was then and this is now. Five hundred and ninety days ago, the Executive, led by the DUP’s Arlene Foster and the gravely ill (and soon to die) McGuinness, on behalf of Sinn Fein, fell apart. The democratic vacuum that opened up, in which existing legislation is stuck in aspic and the province is effectively run by its civil servants, has been filled only by angry words. Members of the Stormont Assembly continue to be paid and claim to be hard at work on behalf of their constitutents. But the period without a functioning executive constitutes a new world record – one that is unlikely to be beaten any time soon.

Lest we forget, the immediate cause of the rupture was an absurd renewable heat incentive scheme, since labelled “cash for ash,” introduced by the DUP, that ended up costing the taxpayer an estimated £500 million. But the real, underlying cause was that the DUP and Sinn Fein couldn’t stand the sight of each other.

They still can’t.

Both parties claim that they want to work together for the common good. They don’t.

Sinn Fein wants to pass an Irish language act that, as they see it, transforms the North into part of the Irish cultural continuum. The fact that less than two per cent of Catholics, nevermind Protestants, speak or understand Irish is neither here nor there. They may be reviving a corpse, but the body has been booby-trapped. In time, the courts, the police and all public authorites would be forced to operate, at least in part, in a language known only to its proponents, nearly all of them staunch Republicans. Street names would be changed; felons could demand the right to be heard in gaelic; political pamphlets would have to appear in both “official” languages. Do not doubt that this is the objective.

When the bomb goes off, the longer-term plan is that Gerry Adams (now an aspiring cookery writer) will join Daniel O’Connell and Padraig Pearse in the pantheon of Irish heroes, leading eventually to statues in public places in which, with his book of recipes under one arm, he shakes his fist at 800 years of British injustice.

 Oh yes, and Sinn Fein also wants to introduce abortion rights (which until recently it opposed) as well as legislation supportive of same-sex marriage and the LGBT community. It favours these reforms because they are “modern” and “normal,” but above all else because they are sticks with which to beat the DUP. In the meantime, any charges of rape or sexism levied against former IRA men are to be dismissed as Unionist propaganda.

 The DUP, on the other hand, regards Northern Ireland as more British than Finchley. The party’s cartoon-like claim to Britishness cannot be overestimated. Its elected representatives talk about almost nothing else. They wake up each morning thanking the Lord that they are British, and they go to bed cursing Sinn Fein.

While it may no longer be the case that the Free Presbyterian Church, founded by Ian Paisley, is the DUP at prayer, it remains true that evangelical Protestantism is at the core of the party’s considerable self-regard. Arlene Foster refused to meet the Pope during his trip to Ireland. She would have felt dirtied and damaged by such an encounter, and even if she didn’t, thousands of her supporters would. As far as they are concerned, William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution that followed the Dutch king’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 are the absolute bedrock of Britishness. No Surrender is their battle-cry, and never, from now to eternity, will they bow the knee to Dublin.

 For the last 590 days, with many more to come, the two sides have been dancing round each other, sniping and whining. Each blames the other for everything. Neither accepts any blame for anything. They would rather die than admit that they ever got anything wrong.

 The problem is that the two communities occupy the same tiny speck of a country, jostling for space and preferment, desperate to elbow each other out of the way. It is no coincidence that one side supports Israel, the other, Palestine. If you are looking for hope, you need to look at the educated middle class, which knows the value of money, and at their millennial progeny, who by and large regard their political masters with contempt. But rationality and tolerance, though on the increase among the young, has a long way to go before it overtakes the old school attitudes prevalent among older people and the working classes on both sides of the divide.

 As I see it, the political impasse will continue much as now until the demographic shift favouring Catholics and nationalists finds clear political expression, which could happen as early as 2025, or by 2035 at the latest. At that point, Unionists will have to choose between retreating, Boer-like, into the laager, emigrating to England or accepting the inevitable – Irish unity, with themselves as a diminishing minority in the new Republic. I don’t play down the difficulties, and the potential for civil unrest, involved in the latter outcome, but I cannot see any long-term alternative.

 Unionists, and some Conservatives, like to believe that there is a silent minority of Catholics out there who are actually small “u” unionists, loyal, as they used to say, to the half-crown, if not the Crown. And there is truth in this. But times are changing. The UK is becoming unpredictable. Brexit is a significant new push-factor in the debate that is unfolding. The parallel pull-factor is that the Republic of Ireland is not only more secular, more open and more inclusive than ever, but per capita one of the richest of the EU’s member states. Among northern Catholics there is a feeling that history is at last on the move and that this could be their time. Tiocfaidh-ár-lá (Our Day will Come) is not only Sinn Fein’s mantra, it is increasingly a statement of cultural intent.

 But that is for the future – a place Northern Ireland has traditionally found alien. For now, the stalemate that is politics at Stormont just drifts on and on, ugly and aimless. The British continue to throw money at the problem while Dublin looks on, wondering when and if it will be left to carry the can. The good news is that life goes on and that there is less violence on the streets in Belfast than there is in London. We should celebrate that.

 And note, I haven’t even mentioned the Border!