Northern Ireland Elections cancelled; the 'process' continues

Submitted by AWL on 3 June, 2003 - 12:14

By Jack Cleary

The Northern Ireland elections, due under the Good Friday Agreement, have been postponed indefinitely. Since last October the power-sharing government in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland has been suspended, and there is no immediate prospect of it being restored.

Thus, five years after the Good Friday Agreement, the Six-Counties-level political structures which the Agreement created, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the government based on it, have ground to a halt. Northern Ireland is now without province-wide political structures.

The Belfast government was suspended because the Provisional IRA’s refusal to cease all activity and disband, five years after the Agreement, threatened to undermine the credibility in the Protestant community of David Trimble’s pro-Agreement Unionists, to the benefit of the Paisleyites who did not support the Agreement.

The elections have been “postponed” because all indications suggest that if an election were held on schedule then the “extremes”, Sinn Fein on the Catholic-nationalist side and Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party among the Protestant-Unionists, would emerge as, respectively, the biggest Catholic and Protestant parties. On the Catholic side Sinn Fein is already level pegging with the constitutional nationalist SDLP.

Under the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) there must be a majority in both communities for a new government, so after such an election power-sharing would depend on agreement between Sinn Fein and the Paisleyites. Such a thing, while not entirely inconceivable, would as far as we can foresee be very unlikely. Elections now would therefore be only another route to the end of power-sharing government.

In fact the late-2001 restoration of the Belfast government suspended last October was done in defiance of the letter of the Agreement, because the pro-government groups, the Trimble Ulster Unionist Party and the UVF-linked PUP, had, through defections, already ceased to be the majority in the Protestant camp.

But a post-election government based on Sinn Fein, the SDLP and a clear-cut minority, perhaps a small one, of Unionists, would be a different proposition, even if it could be concocted. It would probably trigger serious extra-parliamentary action by the Paisleyites and others of the Unionist majority.

The previous power-sharing government, from January to May 1974, which was based on the SDLP and a minority of Unionists, was brought down by such agitation, culminating in a general strike in May 1974.

Many things have changed in Northern Ireland. The Protestant community has been battered by the long civil war — partly smothered and kept under a degree of control by the British army and the RUC — with the Provisional IRA, and by the decline of Northern Ireland industry.

Fifty-one per cent of Protestants voted for power-sharing after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. A much smaller proportion of them would vote for it now, or vote for the pro-Agreement parties, were the elections that five years ago were scheduled for now to be held.

Many more would be alienated by a power-sharing government consisting of a Catholic-nationalist/Sinn Fein majority, seeing it rightly as a reversion from the Good Friday Agreement to the system of 1974.

By not having the election, the rulers hope to avoid such a comprehensive destruction of the Good Friday Agreement and keep open the possibility of getting the Good Friday Agreement system back on track at a later date.

The Good Friday Agreement depended on what they called “creative ambiguity”. The different sides understood the Agreement differently and had different expectations, sometimes strongly opposite expectations, from it. But, so the theory of it went, the fact of engagement and evolving adaptation would over time render the contradictions unimportant, or less important.

The Catholics benefited most from this ambiguity because the British government was above all else in the business of buying off the IRA.
Protestants had expected a quick end to the IRA.
In practice the IRA and Sinn Fein acted as if nothing other than their ceasefire had been agreed. Every subsequent step had to be negotiated anew. The British made concessions to the Republicans — such as the release of prisoners early on in the “peace process” — for things that were esssentially mere tokens, such as the two destructions of IRA weaponry.

On their side, anti-Agreement Unionists used the contradiction between Protestants’ expectations from the Agreement and the very limited satisfaction of those expectations that the IRA was willing to grant to undermine support for the GFA.

Over five years, Protestant support for the Agreement has been seriously eroded. In the absence of an IRA declaration that it was disbanding, the scheduled elections would, so London calculated, by the coup de grace for the Six-Counties-level power-sharing aspects of the Good Friday Agreement.

Will the present stalemate result in a resumption of the Provisional IRA war? In so far as Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA control it, it will not. The ceasefire and the “peace process”, on one side, and the Six-Counties-wide political structures of the Agreement, on the other, are distinct and separable things.

The Catholics have done well out of the “peace process” and the Good Friday Agreement, and they know it. A massive majority of Catholics, both SDLP and Sinn Fein, voted for the Good Friday Agreement five years ago. Since the ceasefire nine years ago, Sinn Fein has become a growing force not only in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland but also in the Twenty-Six Counties of the south. They now hold six seats in Dail Eireann, the Dublin parliament. The “peace process” has worked well for them.

They would find it difficult to carry the Catholic population with them into a resumption of the war. Probably not impossible — a new Provisional IRA military offensive would lead to British military and Protestant paramilitary activities that would, as in 1971 when the Provisional IRA war started, push Catholics behind Sinn Fein. But the Provisional IRA leaders have no reason to resume the war, no reason to believe war would promote their cause and their interests more than the “peace process” has or, they expect, still will.

What can the dissenting, militarist, traditional Republicans do to regenerate the conditions for war? They failed resoundingly to do it immediately after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. The slaughter which the “Real IRA” brought to Omagh in 1998 blew its perpetrators out of any position to participate as a shaping force in events.

Undoubtedly they and the Continuity IRA would grow if the Provisional IRA were to disband. That is one reason why Adams and his comrades do not want to disband the Provisional IRA. As Adams put it to the former Labour MP Roy Hattersley: “What is the point of disbanding the IRA when a new one would arise to replace it the next day?”

The collapse of Six-Counties-wide political structures will not put an end to evolution in the direction Sinn Fein wants. British direct rule is now in practice, for most purposes, joint London-Dublin direct rule, though Britain retains final control. (For example, Taoiseach Ahern wanted the May election to go ahead).

Both Sinn Fein and Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party are agitating for immediate elections. Sinn Fein argues from nationalist theology that a British government has simply no right to take a decision such as postponing an election for any part of Ireland. Both Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party now cry for “democracy” in the Northern Ireland framework.

That is not new for the DUP. Since the British abolition of the old Belfast parliament in March 1972, the hard-line Protestants have cried for “democracy” and “majority rule”, meaning Protestant majority rule. A quarter of a million Protestant workers went on strike in 1972 in protest at that abolition.

For the DUP, elections now are a means not only to advance their party but also to scuttle the Good Friday Agreement (which they say should be “renegotiated”). But Sinn Fein support the Agreement. Why do they want to press ahead with elections which, by depriving them of a credible power-sharing partner on the Protestant side, would make a resumption of power-sharing government impossible under the terms of the Agreement, short of a semi-miraculous change by the DUP?

They want to make electoral advances at the expense of the SDLP and establish themselves as the main Catholic-nationalist party, but more. They want to smash up the political structures on which Protestant participation in power-sharing depends. They want the Paisleyites to down the Trimbleites.

Why? Because they want to throw all the responsibility for resistance to continued power-sharing on the Protestants. They want to make the Protestants, under a Paisleyite majority, politically incapable of participation in Six-Counties-level power-sharing.

They hope that the London and Dublin
governments would then override the Protestants — possibly by a resumption of the 1974 type of unstructured power-sharing, with the SDLP and Sinn Fein forces the majority.

The former SDLP leader Seamus Mallon famously said five years ago that the Good Friday Agreement was Sunningdale (the 1974 system) “for slow learners”. Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA have learned a great deal about politics in the last 30 years!

The Catholics are for the Good Friday Agreement — but the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein have their own version of the “peace process”. They have their own objective, which is a united Ireland as soon as possible.
Britain has said repeatedly, and most recently in the Good Friday Agreement, that if a bare majority develops in Northern Ireland for a united Ireland, then it will legislate for a united Ireland.

The more incoherent and politically helpless the Protestants are, the better for the Provisional IRA’s long-term objective, or so they calculate.
What the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein are, and what game they are playing, is easily seen in their weekly paper An Phoblacht (The Republic).

On some international questions they are in step with the pseudo-left in Britain and elsewhere. They opposed the recent Gulf war. They agitate not only for the Palestinians but also against “Zionism” and Israel. (Here they continue a tradition of anti-semitism that stretches back 100 years to the first Sinn Fein, whose founder Arthur Griffith even supported a small priest-fomented anti-Jewish pogrom in Limerick then). To their credit, they have opposed the vicious chauvinism and racism with which many of the South have responded to the appearance of refugees in their midst.

But their staple is communalist agitation against the Six Counties Protestants. The Protestants’ “intransigence”, “sectarianism” and desire for dominance is “exposed” again and again, and the complaint is that Britain wants to bow to the Protestants who want to oppress the Catholics. One Irish group, the most militantly nationalist, complains to Britain against another group of Irish people!

The approach would have sickened Republicans of the generation that won the independence of the Twenty-Six Counties — Patrick Pearse, for example.

The truth is that the Provisional IRA won their long tussle with the British, though some of the fruits of their victory — most importantly a united Ireland —come as a postdated promissory note (in this case, a demographic shift, to a Catholic majority in Northern Ireland, which those who signed the Good Friday Agreement thought was ten or twenty years down the line).

Much of the Protestant uneasiness and intransigence comes from awareness of that fact. Disappointment with the results of the Good Friday Agreement, and hostility to what they have seen as Catholic-nationalist gains have turned many who voted for the Agreement hostile.

The endless anti-Protestant (anti- “Unionist”) agitation in An Phoblacht is rooted in its commitment to a British-imposed solution — imposed on the Unionists. Its basic demand remains what it was throughout the war: that Britain should come entirely and unreservedly onto the Catholic-nationalist side and “persuade” and override the Protestants.

The shift to Sinn Fein advocacy of “democracy” in the Six Counties framework, the long-time intransigent-Unionist demand, points to the fundamental problem: the unviability of the Six Counties entity.

Majority rule from 1920 to 1972 created a one-party Protestant-supremacist regime. After 1972. Britain insisted on power-sharing or nothing. Yet the Unionist argument for majority rule was formally unanswerable from a democratic point of view. If the Six Counties were a viable unit, why should their majority not rule over the minority?

All the problems that have brought the Good Friday Agreement to the present stalemate come from the attempt to impose another logic on the Six Counties entity other than the logic built into it, Protestant majority rule. Switching to power-sharing 30 years ago, Britain deprived the entity of any logic, and committed itself to the so far hopeless task of erecting power-sharing in defiance of the built-in Protestant majority.

There is no foreseeable solution in the framework of Partition. The Six Counties entity gets in the way of a solution between the Catholic-nationalist majority on the island and the Protestant minority — and forces London and Dublin to juggle endlessly with the artificially created Six Counties Catholic minority and Protestant majority. That has been for 30 years, and is now proving once again, a hopeless game.

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