Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.07.2003, Side 26

- the reykjavík grapevine -26 july 25th - august 7th, 2003
Once upon a time about 800 years
ago in a green and distant isle, a
young clansman called Diarmaid was
having trouble with his neighbours so
he decided to invite one Mr Strongbow
from across the water to help keep them
in line.
Not the 13th centurys brightest idea as
it turned out, the sea in question being
the Irish one and Strongbow a not so
nobleman from England, whose arrival
heralded the beginning of what was to
be eight centuries of colonisation with
all the murder and mayhem that this
implies. After centuries of false start
movements and failed revolution Irish
nationalism got serious at the turn of
the century. The 1916 rising, though in
itself a military fiasco, proved a potent
symbol on which to build a revolutionary
movement and led to the extraordinary
rise of Sinn Fein, who by 1919 was the
largest party on the island with a growing
militant wing. A virtual declaration of
independence quickly led to a war of
independence, evolving into civil war
over the controversial terms of the
peace treaty with the British. The leading
bone of contention was the exclusion of
the northern part of the island from the
fledgling Irish state. Partition of the
country was at the political behest of the
majority Protestant population who, loyal
to the British crown, had no wish to join
a Catholic nationalist state.
After independence the northern
mini state was actively ignored by
successive British administrations and,
ominously for the nationalist minority,
the unionist political elite were left to run
the show. Fast-forward to the swinging
sixties, the smell of revolution is in the air
and northern Catholics, inspired by the
likes of Luther King, take to the streets
to shake off fifty years of dreary bigotry
and discrimination.
The rest of the tale is sadly familiar.
Demands for civil rights lead to civil
strife, and latent Irish Republicanism and
Unionist reaction fuse as the province
slides into war.
Sunningdale, the province’s first
attempt at power sharing in 1974, and
on which the current model is roughly
based, collapsed under the weight of
a massive Unionist strike. There would
be ten more years of dirty war before
the rise of Sinn Fein as the political wing
of the IRA, which, under the direction of
Gerry Adams, set the province on the
long and winding road back to the sanity
of a political settlement.
It is now almost ten years since the
first historic IRA. ceasefire and almost
five since the groundbreaking Good
Friday agreement, the accord that set
out the political future of the province.
After five years of stalling,
suspensions, disputes, court battles and
of course violence and civil unrest the
agreement seems dangerously close to
disintegration and death by a thousand
cuts. Earlier this year David Trimble,
leader of the Ulster Unionists (UUP) the
largest party in the province,
walked out of the power sharing
assembly in protest at continued
IRA activity, most notoriously
an alleged spy ring close to
the heart of government, thus
triggering a return to direct rule
from Westminster. Trimble’s
conditions for a return include
the virtual disbandment of the
IRA, a concession that Sinn
Fein is unlikely, unwilling and
probably unable to make. In
the absence of any agreement
last month’s elections to the
assembly were postponed. Suspicions
that postponement came at the tacit
behest of Trimble, who of all the players
had most to lose by going to the polls,
has not helped the credibility of the
democratic process.
In a province so politically polarised,
where unionists and nationalists vote en
block, the political action is often hottest
within rather than between these divided
communities.
It is these very tensions and the
resulting shifts in power that will shape
events in the months and years ahead,
indeed the next election, provisionally
set for the autumn, will perhaps be the
defining moment for the life or death of
the peace process in its current form.
In the Unionist camp, support for
the Good Friday agreement has ebbed
steadily since it’s signing. Recently,
however, support has gone into freefall.
UUP leader Trimble, one of the architects
of the agreement, is in dire political
trouble. Three years of ceaseless
internal divisions and countless rebellions
from the anti agreement members of
the party have left him critically, if not
fatally, wounded. After surviving another
challenge to his strategy recently
Trimble finally suspended his three
leading tormentors, an action unlikely to
heal divisions in the short term but seen
as vital to retaining Trimble’s credibility
as leader of a rapidly imploding party.
Long the dominant unionist grouping
in the province, its position at the
centre of what is increasingly viewed
as a failed process has seen the Ulster
Unionist Party take a battering at the
polls. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist
Party (DUP) has been the principal
beneficiary and is gaining fast. Were
the not entirely unlikely to happen and
the DUP became the largest Unionist
party at the next election, their publicly
avowed policy of renegotiation of the
whole deal could spell the death knell
of the Good Friday agreement. A further
complication is the increasingly volatile
Unionist paramilitaries for whom the
peace process has been an unmitigated
disaster. Unlike the IRA, loyalist
paramilitary groups never established a
political power base that would give them
a seat at the table when the time came
to talk. Consequently, in the elections
to the new power-sharing assembly
their hastily constructed political fronts
made almost no impact against the UUP
and the DUP. As their marginalisation
increases, so does frustration and it is
no surprise that in recent years loyalist
paramilitaries have been responsible
for much of the sporadic violence in the
province, not only against nationalists
but, even more spectacularly, amongst
themselves.
In the late sixties there was only one
major political force on the nationalist
side, The Social Democratic and Labour
Party (SDLP), a moderate constitutional
party. The IRA until the late seventies
retained a lofty distain for the workings
of the political process. Then along
came Sinn Fein. Very much the brainchild
of Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein were born of
the horror that was the H block hunger
strikes of ´81 when IRA prisoners
refused food to protest the stripping of
their prisoner of war status by Margaret
Thatcher. In a classic case of winning
the battle and losing the war Thatcher
refused to bend as ten prisoners, one
after another, slipped into a coma and
died. The anger and bitterness of the
protest reenergised a waning PIRA
for another ten years of low intensity
warfare and helped put Sinn Fein firmly
on the political map. Adams twin track
strategy of the armalight and the ballot
box was born.
From a low of less than 8% in the
1984 elections, Sinn Fein have climbed
to almost 18% of the province’s vote,
overtaking the SDLP as the largest
nationalist party in last British general
election. As Sinn Fein considers itself
an all Ireland party, its long hoped for
breakthrough in the Republic of Ireland,
picking up five seats in the last election,
has brought particular satisfaction and
more importantly, vindication for Adams
ceasefire strategy.
As ever Sinn Fein’s relationship with
the IRA is at the heart of the dispute
with Unionism. To fully understand
the current impasse it’s important to
remember the accepted reality behind
the rhetoric. Just as nationalists, without
of course having to say so, were tacitly
accepting the union with Britain in return
for an affairs deal within the province,
moderate Unionism tacitly accepted
that it was not in the perimeters of the
political gift of even Adams to wind
up a deeply ingrained paramilitary
organisation in an instant, and that the
disappearance of the IRA would be a
gradual process. Moderate unionists,
in reality at least, were not demanding
a complete inactivity but, at least, the
appearance of it assuming that Sinn
Fein and the IRA are still committed to
the implementation of the agreement.
Embarrassing fiascos like the arrest
of three IRA members in Columbia that
have made Trimble’s position within
Unionism all but untenable is hardly good
news for Republicans either. However,
there are, one suspects, many devotees
within Republicanism of the zero sum
game theory; that Unionist turmoil
whatever its source is somehow good
news for Nationalists.
This notion of a zero sum game brings
us to the ultimate sticking point on
which this or any other agreement could
well flounder. Because of Unionisms
longstanding dominance in the province
there is an inevitable feeling within that
community that they have everything to
lose and nothing to gain and vice versa
for the Nationalists. Support for the
agreement, holding steady in the high
80s on the nationalist side and now well
below 50% among Unionists would seem
to bare out this perception. And in a
divided community like Northern Ireland,
full of tension, argument and violence,
potential perception is everything.
BELFAST AND THE IRA
The 1916 rising, though a fiasco, proved
a symbol on which to build a revolution
JOH
N
BOYCE
BY
Last February I was sitting in a bar in Belfast when
police entered and said there´d been a bomb threat.
No one got up, they just kept on drinking their pints
as officers looked under chairs and tables. After 30
years of civil war, it takes more than a bomb threat for
people to abandon their beers. But have things really
changed, and if so, can it last?
article
Sinn Fein were born of the horror that
was the H block hunger strikes of ´81
One of countless murals, this one obviously Catholic, decorating secterian areas.
A Belfast police station.
The police still drive armour plated Land Rovers with bulletproof windows.
The peace wall seperating the Catholics and the prods.
Will the real IRA please
stand up?
What with the real IRA, the Provisional
IRA, the Continuity IRA, the Official
IRA and the Old IRA, telling your
nationalists militant groups apart can
be a tricky business.
The Old IRA refers to pre
independence days. Often called The
Good IRA, reflecting a general belief
that Ireland’s violent Independence
movement 1919/1920 had a
legitimacy that the more recent
campaign lacks.
After the disastrous border
campaign of the fifties Republican
militant potential lay dormant untill
the late sixties, when it erupted once
again in the wake of civil rights unrest.
The old IRA network was largely
unprepared for the possibility of armed
insurrection. A year of an escalating
IRA campaign saw the first of many
splits emerge in the Republican
movement. About two thirds of the
movement advocated a ceasefire
followed by political talks.
The remaining members remained
convinced that only a military
campaign would push the British out
of Ireland
The Official IRA, as the majority
became known, quickly faded into
obscurity, while those who split,
containing the likes of Adams and
McGuinness, emerged as the dominant
nationalist paramilitary force, the
Provisional IRA.
Twenty years later, when the
provisional IRA, after secret talks with
the British government, announced
a ceasefire, a small section of the
organisation in true Republican tradition
split from Adams and Co. and declared
their intention to continue violent
resistance to the British presence.
These dissidents, tiny though they
were, managed to split again to form
both the Continuity IRA and the Real
IRA, the latter being responsible for the
biggest single attack of the troubles,
the Omagh bombing which killed 29
people in 1998.