Ulster
Belfast: IRA and Orangemen
Richard Cox
The red and white flags of Ulster bearing the red hand of the O'Neill at their centre are flying all over the province this week as the Protestant marching season begins. Wednesday this week was Orangemen's day, celebrating the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Large crowds gathered in Belfast in the rain to line the route of the procession.
A month from now, on August 12th, Londonderry will stage its traditional apprentices's march, the event out of which the trouble started three years ago. The weeks between the two marches will be tense.
Nonetheless, on Wednesday there was still quite an air of festivity, with the great embroidered banners of the Orange Lodges borne through the streets, drums beating and fifes piping. It is easy to see why four years ago Catholics used to join the jubilant crowd. But along with the usual 1690 slogans, this week's rosettes carried the new message "No surrender." For all the massive army strength deployed to keep Belfast calm it has been an IRA demonstration that preempted the headlines and caused the Defence Ministry to fly in twelve hundred more troops in addition to the six hundred commandos brought from Scotland last weekend. At nearly seventeen thousand men the garrison is now at its strongest since the emergency began. The demonstration was the Belfast Provisional IRA's breaking of the cease fire last Sunday. Added to this came news which horrified. the Unionists — namely, that on the previous Friday Mr William Whitelaw, the Northern Ireland Secretary, had actually met six IRA representatives in London. Indeed the SDLT leaders are almost equally disenchanted by this, since it was they who had negotiated the cease fire as go-betweens before, and it is they who are the elected leaders of the Catholic community. The skein of negotiations between any revolutionary movement and any government is always hard to disentangle, even years later, as witness the relation between the Labour Government and the National Liberation Front in Aden in 1967. The interim period of the cease fire in Ulster has been no exception to this rule. Clearly, Mr Whitelaw had to extract advantage as quickly as possible from the cessation of fighting that the Government's initiative had finally achieved, and even now he remains committed to reconciliation if possible. The snag about negotiating with the SDLP was that in Ulster Chairman Mao's dictum about power coming out of the barrel of a gun is all too true; and it is the IRA who have the gun, not the SDLP. Hence the need to talk to them directly. In April Mr Whitelaw had said "I do not think any British Minister can have meetings with gun-men who are continuing to fire at and kill British troops." The cease fire changed this situation. So, on Friday July 7 six IRA leaders flew to London and back, aided by an RAF helicopter which whisked them away privily from Aldegrove Airfield on their return. Any unionist who did not anticipate something of the sort should reread post war colonial history.
As history would suggest, the IRA demands put to the British Government through Mr Whitelaw were unacceptable.
They had been foreshadowed by the demands published in Dublin immediately after the ceasefire, prompting the with drawal of British troops and a federal Ireland. The former could not be implemented without a real risk of Civil War. Nor has Mr Whitelaw's steady release of detainees fulfilled the IRA's wish for a general amnesty for all political prisoners ' in both Irish and British jails — a definition that would cover those responsible for blowing up the Paratroop Regiment mess in Aldershot in March.
It has looked very much as though the purpose of the IRA cease-fire was to make a show of meeting the widespread longing for peace among the Ulster population, thus displaying the IRA as a responsible organisation. At the same time, the Provisionals could re-group militarily in the virtually certain knowledge that Mr Whitelaw could not meet its demands, and so it would, when ready, be able to say "The British have no intention of meeting Irish aspirations. We must take out our guns again." In the meantime, negotiations might have gained certain political points, like the release of detainees, upon which further advances would one day be made, if negotiations were resumed. To suggest this is not to criticise Mr Whitelaw, who must mike the most of every opening. Nor is it unduly cynical. It merely reflects the recent history of revolutionary political movements. This is the way the game is played internationally, and there is no reason to suppose that the IRA will abandon its struggle unless it is either defeated militarily or gains enough politically to retire with grace. The word ' defeat,' of course, covers withdrawal of support of the population, which Mr Whitelaw has long been playing for.
Unexpectedly, the Belfast Provisionals did not even stick to this game. Quite apart from whether the Dublin political leadership had genuinely intended to Maintain the cease fire or not, the Belfast Provisionals broke it before the British Government had time to reply to the demands of the seventh.
Despite over 1,000 shots being fired Fit the army in the twenty-four hours that followed, and sporadic gun battles since, there has not been the wholehearted return to fighting that might have been expected. Nor apparently has the official IRA taken up arms again. No doubt the situation was helped by the rigid security imposed by the army on Tuesday in preparation for Orangemen's Day. Troops sealed off central Belfast and, unlike last year, there was not a single explosion in the City on the eve of the march. At the same time the Protestant Ulster Defence Association though making threatening noises, was slightly less prominent than in recent weeks. The extreme Protestants invariably relax a little when they see the army engaging the IRA. As a result there was hope in some quarters of a return to the ceasefire, and although the army had perforce to abandon its 'low profile,' it has continued to act with great restraint.
It seems just possible that, by breaking the cease fire over an obviously staged incident, the Belfast Provisionals have made a political blunder that could help Mr Whitelaw. However, the marching season will present constant dangers of clashes between the two communities which the break in the cease fire could inflame. Furthermore, it has resulted in the three IRA barricades that had been removed in Londonderry being restored with steel and concrete.
It was to the ending of the no-go areas that Mr Whitelaw was particularly addressing his attention during the cease fire. So long as these remain they will be an incitement to Protestant violence. In the long run, the key to the Ulster situation lies not so much in Belfast as in London Jerry.
Richard Cox is defence correspondent of the Daily Telegraph
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