A MATTER OF GOVERNANCE
Internment in Northern Ireland had become a necessity if the attempt to preserve some degree of order in the streets of Belfast and Londonderry was to be sustained. A ban on all marches and processions had seemed, for many months now, to be most eminently desirable to reduce the amount and quality of the provocations and affronts spat from each faction into the faces of the other. When last Thursday the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Mr Faulkner, flew to London with Lieutenant-General Tuzo to discuss the deteriorating situation in Ulster with Mr Heath and Mr Maudling, the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland gave its permission for the Government of Northern Ireland to introduce internment provided that marches and processions were banned also. As package deals go, this one makes sense of a kind.
No one, however, has any business whatsoever to congratulate himself or anyone else on this package deal of necessity. Both parts of the package are acts which can only be justified in time of war. Internment — arrest without trial, the suspension of due process of law and of habeus corpus, the turning of criminal prisons into political concentration camps — is the chosen implement of all totalitarian societies of left' as of ' right.' Freedom of assembly, except for the docile followers of the ruling elite, is also intolerable to totalitarian rule. In accepting the necessity for internment and the desirability of banning processions and marches, we are accepting a rule in Northern Ireland -in the territory of the United Kingdom — which is in part totalitarian.
That rule is sustained very largely by British troops. They are there in the traditional military role of support for the civil authority. In the communal strife within Northern Ireland the troops have endeavoured to interpose themselves to restore order and to pacify the place. Originally welcomed by the minority for the protection of their presence afforded them against the majority, the troops have now become regarded by the extremists within the minority as their principal enemy. A state of guerrilla war exists now between the Irish Republican Army and the British army, which renders the other tasks confronting General Tuzo and his troops of upholding civil order and keeping the factions apart at times insuperable. The physical, political and even moral conditions under which the troops are operating, within the United Kingdom and subject to its laws, conventions and expectations, and under the fullest glare of publicity, are unavoidable and appalling. Had General Tuzo demanded the reintroduction of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act with its powers of internment, then it would have been both impossible and wrong for either the British or the Northern Ireland government to have denied him. Mr Faulkner appears to have acted with the acquiescence rather than upon the recommendation of General Tuzo, and with the reluctant consent rather than at the urgings of the British government itself. None of this, however, conceals the public fact that it is British troops, and not Ulster policemen, who are doing the interning. Also, lagging behind, but following each new violent step taken by the guerrillas, the Army has perforce become more violent : and violence breeds rapidly. The effect is that not only is the rule in Northern Ireland in part totalitarian. It is also in part martial.
It is quite obvious that, even if the quasi-dictatorial powers now being exercised in Northern Ireland have their intended effect of reducing the amount of violence and terror in the streets (and so far there is no sign that this will happen), they offer no long-term or even mid-term solution. Their only justification — for such powers and their use are contrary to the practices and the spirit of that broad central tradition of good, just, tolerable and equitable governance which has been one of this kingdom's chief assets — is in the reduction of violence and the restoration of order. If they succeed in restoring peace to the streets, then well and good. A breathing space will have been achieved. But nothing more than this can be hoped for; and not as much as this can be reasonably anticipated.
The use of these powers, and their implementation by British troops, in any event marks a further degeneration in the political condition of Northern Ireland. And — for there is no point in mincing words — since Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, the political conditions of the United Kingdom as a whole suffers from that degeneration, just as a body suffers when a limb turns gangrenous. Northern Ireland is now, and has been for several years, in a politically diseased condition. The governments of a ruling party which has been in power continually since the formation of the province, which after fifty years of office is confronted by the necessity of introducing quasi-dictatorial powers and having these enforced by British troops, are governments which have failed, of a party which has failed.
It may be that no party and no government could have made a success of Northern Irelahd, and that Ulster is ungovernable. It may be that better men could have succeeded where successive Stormont governments have failed — and are seen to have failed in every bomb that explodes, in every fire deliberately started, in every riot, in every shooting, and, now, in the reintroduction of internment and the banning of free assemblies. It may well be that the present government of Northern Ireland, as those in the past, commands the support of the majority of people in Northern Ireland. But governments can only rule well if they do so not only with the assent of the majority but also by the consent of the minority. Civil wars, guerrilla wars, revolutions are not made by majorities. They are made by the minorities — just, indeed, as governments and armies and police forces are made by minorities. Majorities wish for peace and quiet : and it is the job of politicians, and particularly of rulers, to so arrange matters that they provide the people with peace and quiet by retaining the support of the minority without driving a minority, or a minority within a minority, into insurrection. It is not necessarily a matter of right or of wrong. It is a matter of fact. That fact is the self-evident failure of Stormont to produce good government. It is a matter of governance.
British governments, for very understandable if not unduly laudable reasons, have sought to keep the matter of Northern Ireland at arm's length. Despite the presence of the British army, now fighting a guerrilla war in the midst of a country on the edge of civil war, the British government does nothing and gives the impression of not knowing _what to do. The governing of Northern Ireland is as much the responsibility of a British government as is the governing of Scotland, Wales and the counties of England. That responsibility cannot any longer be shirked. The Stormont regime has failed. The power in Northern Ireland is the power of the British army. The responsibility in Northern Ireland is the responsibility of the British government. As a matter of good governance, the time for direct rule has now arrived.
Previous page
