By John O’Mahony
Tony Blair’s high-powered negotiations at Leeds Castle, Kent, on the future of Northern Ireland, have broken up in failure.
The Paisley Unionists and Sinn Fein (SF), the polar opposites in Northern Ireland politics, now have the support of most Protestants and most Catholics respectively, and agreement on a new Catholic-Protestant power-sharing Belfast government depends on them.
Yet the failure to reach agreement on that should not be allowed to obscure the most important event in Irish politics since the IRA declared a ceasefire in August 1994.
It appears that, speaking through its alter ego, Sinn Fein, the IRA is now offering to “decommission” all its weapons and, effectively, cease to exist.
It would become something like the “old IRA” — the veterans of the Irish war of independence against Britain (1919–21) — used to be in the South, just an old comrades’ association.
Wait until it actually happens before you celebrate. But if the self-decommissioning of the IRA was offered in the negotiations, then we may be on the eve of a “seismic” shift in Northern Ireland politics.
The Provisional IRA was formed in December 1969 out of a split by traditionalist physical-force republicans from an earlier IRA which had come under the control of Stalinists.
For 35 years it has been one of the fundamental agencies shaping Northern Ireland life and politics.
Much of the energy and devotion of the Provisional IRA has in the last decade been transferred into Sinn Fein’s political organising and campaigning. Yet, as Gerry Adams, the leader of both Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA, once famously said of the IRA — “they haven’t gone away, you know”. Are they about to “go away” now?
Protestant Northern Ireland knew very well that the IRA did not “go away” when the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was signed in 1998. So did the Catholic communities in which the IRA was the sole agency of policing, justice and instant physical punishment.
The continued existence of the IRA undermined the efforts of the politicians to convince Unionist opinion to support power-sharing with Catholic Nationalists - let alone with Sinn Fein, the Provisional IRA in politics.
It provided an issue for incessant agitation by uncompromising Unionist politicians. Sinn Fein, with its illegal private army waiting in the background, could not, they insisted, be regarded as a democratic political party.
In the seven and a half years since the Good Friday Agreement, this agitation has moved many Protestant-Unionists — scarcely more than 50% of whom voted for the GFA in 1998 — from support to outright opposition to the GFA.
That hostility to the GFA and to Protestant politicians like David Trimble identified with it gave the Paisleyites, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) a majority of Unionist votes and representation in the Northern Ireland general election in November 2003.
That effectively put an end to the GFA and powersharing. The DUP calls for a “renegotiation” of the Agreement.
Under the GFA, a resumption of Northern Ireland self-government would be impossible without both DUP and SF participation. But the DUP refuses to even talk to SF at that level. They did not engage face-to-face in the negotiations that have just ended in failure.
They “participated” in the government headed by David Trimble without ever directly speaking to their “partner” Sinn Fein! Such hide-and-seek tactics become impossible now that the DUP and SF are the leading parties in their respective communities.
SF has made tremendous gains out of the GFA and the new-won “legitimacy” in bourgeois politics which it bestowed on them, in the South as well as in the Six Counties. They believe they won the war with Britain and the Northern Ireland Protestants. And they have some right to do so.
They did not win a United Ireland — but they won a British commitment to it, when a majority in Northern Ireland wants it. SF believes that within a reasonable time-scale, the Catholics in Northern Ireland will become the majority — and that when that happens Britain will keep its pledge to hold another referendum on a United Ireland.
Certainly large swathes of Protestants think the Provisional IRA won the war. That has been one of the locomotives that shifted Protestant opinion to Paisley, with his calls to “renegotiate”. Public life in the Six Counties supports such a view — for instance, the way events in the long war are now presented.
For decades, the British Army, the RUC and the British intelligence services in Northern Ireland conducted themselves as people fighting a war. They colluded with Orange murder gangs to assassinate Republicans — like, for instance, the solicitor Pat Finucane. The SAS ambushed IRA members with the intention of killing them. They tortured IRA prisoners to force information out of them. At various times they treated the entire Catholic population as the enemy. They shot down peaceful Catholic civilians — most notoriously on 30 January 1972, “Bloody Sunday”, when they killed 14 peaceful demonstrators in Derry.
Britain acted as a state at war, while denying that it was fighting a war and insisting that it was only a police action against “terrorists”. It did not treat captured Republicans as soldiers. It gave them de facto prisoner-of-war status in 1972 and withdrew it in 1977, triggering a prolonged struggle by IRA prisoners to regain the rights of PoWs. That culminated in the hunger strikes of 1981, when the British government allowed 10 Republican PoWs to starve themselves to death rather than concede such things as not trying to compel them to wear prison uniforms.
The contradiction between the war Britain waged and the legal status the British state gave that war has now led to prolonged public re-examinations of such incidents in the war as the Bloody Sunday killings, and the collusion of British intelligence and the RUC with Orange sectarian killer gangs. That is one of the clearest indications to Protestants that the IRA won.
The IRA killed hundreds of Protestants, shooting many of them dead before the eyes of their families — as the RUC-collaborating Orange murderers did to Pat Finucane. Protestants find it intolerable that those who did that can now indignantly complain about similar things on the other side — have their complaints investigated by judicial inquiries. If the IRA and the Catholic population for decades suffered the disadvantages of Britain’s refusal to declare the war they fought to be a war, now the British and the Unionists suffer its disadvantages in having what they did retrospectively re-examined and condemned.
It is right that what the British state did against some of its citizens should be subjected to severe retrospective scrutiny. But it does, as Unionists believe, indicate who won and who lost the war and who is now in the ascendancy.
If the IRA has really proposed to trade its own “full decommissioning” for a restoration of SF to government in the Six Counties, it will have been the majority Protestant voters’ shift to Paisley that forced them to it.
Fundamentally, however, it comes out of the whole trajectory of the Republican movement over the last 10 years — from the shift to politics, which has been so productive of good things for Sinn Fein and, they believe, advances them towards their goal of Irish unity.
Yet “full decommissioning” which, had it been offered three years ago, might have allowed the pro-GFA Trimble Unionists to remain the main Unionist party, may not now be enough to restore power-sharing. When the Paisleyites talk of “renegotiating” the GFA, what they want is to put an end to the mandatory powersharing, in which all parties represented in the Northern Ireland Assembly have a right to participate. They want “majority rule”. The emotional meaning of that cry for Northern Ireland Unionists is — “restore Protestant majority rule”. That will not happen.
For 50 years, until the Belfast parliament was scrapped by the British overlords in March 1972, “majority rule” meant Protestant sectarian rule.
A looser form of mandatory powersharing than the GFA version may well be the only way out of the present deadlock — if there is a way out.
A system of powersharing under which either SF or the DUP — or both — could be excluded from a coalition government of which the Trimble Unionists and the Nationalist SDLP would be the twin pillars.
That would be back to the “Sunningdale Agreement” version of powersharing under which an inter-communal government ruled in Belfast for four months in 1974 before a Protestant general strike brought it crashing down. It would serve neither the immediate party interests of the DUP or of SF/IRA.
If the IRA “decommissions” itself, that will bring things full circle. Everything — except the present rigid and all-inclusive form of mandatory powersharing — that the Provisional IRA has won in its 23-year war was available to the Catholics under the Sunningdale Agreement of November 1973. The intransigent Unionists and the Provisional IRA destroyed it.
If the Provisional IRA offered to end itself, then that is cause for optimism. But, the Paisleyites being what they are, it is not ruled out that the Provisional IRA’s tardiness in “decommissioning” and Paisleyite intransigence, may yet wreck the GFA.
Whatever happens, it is high time that the workers of Northern Ireland, Protestant, Catholic, took their fate out of the hands of Paisleyites, Adamsites, and assumed responsibility for their own future. To do that, they will have to succeed in getting the trade unions in Northern Ireland to form their own working-class party.
