POLITICS
Peter Robinson's prank and Douglas Hurd's prize
T.E.0 TLEY
It is of course notoriously difficult for Englishmen to keep a sense of proportion about Irish affairs. Nevertheless, I never cease to be surprised at our astonishing success in failing to do so.
Consider the two running stories about Ulster which now occupy the British press and British politicians. One of them is the renewed campaign of the IRA against everybody who renders any service, for the repair of damaged police stations to the delivery of sausage rolls to UDR canteens. This campaign seems to be having a certain amount of success and its potentialities for harming security are obviously immense. At the very least, it could oblige the security forces to expend much manpower and immense amounts of money on provid- ing the services which civilians are too frightened to provide. It could also add greatly to unemployment in the Province. It is a shrewd and alarming move.
But it seems to me to have got little attention compared with that lavished on Mr Peter Robinson's prank in leading a force of Protestant zealots across the bor- der to the village of Clontibret in order to demonstrate the truth that the Anglo-Irish Agreement has so far failed to improve cross-border security.
It would, of course, become a great nuisance if these return trips became fashionable. But I doubt very much whether they will. Now that Mr Paisley is back from his transatlantic preaching holi- day, Mr Robinson's hour of glory will soon be over. At the very least, the Doctor will insist that any future excursions of the same kind and any other bids for modest martyrdom should be led by him; but the Doctor is a cautious man and is not likely to have much stomach for such exercises.
Now, I am offering no defence for Mr Peter Robinson; I am simply trying to define the nature and assess the degree of his offence. In fact, that offence comes in a very familiar category of Protestant crimes — not sectarian murders (though there have been plenty of these), not ruffianish attacks on Northern Irish policemen (though unfortunately two Southern Irish policemen were roughed up in the course of the outings), but something much more typical of the Protestants. The adventure was one of those romantic Boy's Own larks in which Mr Paisley, when feeling particu- larly courageous, himself sometimes in- dulges. These demonstrations are to be seen psychiatrically as the protests of dep- rived children who think that their parents are about to desert them. Pappie King and Mammie Thatcher, they believe, are going to have them adopted or even sold like Joseph into slavery. If these Unionists only had a different coloured skin and lived in inner cities, how strongly we would feel that they were 'in need of help'!
There is an even more remarkable fact, however, than the disproportionate atten- tion given to this affair. It is the surprise which it seems to have caused. There is, indeed, an occasion for surprise in Ulster's affairs today. It should arise from the fact that the Province is not already in a state of irredeemable chaos. Nothing else that has followed the Agreement is supris- ing at all.
In the last 17 years, there have been several British 'initiatives' designed to 'solve' the Ulster problem. They have all been well-intentioned and have all failed; but that mounted by Mr Hurd and con- tinued perforce by Mr King is unique in one respect. It seems to have been precise- ly and delicately designed to frustrate all the purposes which it was ostensibly in- tended to serve. Suppose the Spectator had run a competition offering a prize for the blueprint of a policy for Northern Ireland which would be bound to make it harder for the British to govern the place, to make it more difficult for the government of the Republic to co-operate in effective security measures, less tempting for the moderate Catholic Nationalists in the North to par- ticipate in constitutional government there and, above all, calculated to extinguish every spark of ecumenical generosity in the Unionist mind. Can you doubt that Mr Hurd would have won the prize?
Consider these counter-objectives in order. It is now more difficult to govern Ulster because whatever we do, however reasonable, is assumed to have been done in conspiracy with the Irish Republic, which has been given (or thinks itself to have been given) in international law a right to be consulted in the management of Ulster's affairs. It has become more diffi- cult for the government of the Republic to co-operate effectively over security be- cause it is under constant suspicion from its own Opposition (and particularly Mr Haughey) of having put itself behind the British security campaign in return for absolutely nothing; nor is it at all clear that the British Government can offer Dr Fitz- Gerald anything at all substantial to assuage these fears: anyone who thinks that permitting some street names to be advertised in Gaelic will enable Dr Fitz- Gerald to do something strongly pleasing to the Unionists is an idiot.
Your prizewinner would have had no difficulty in meeting the requirement to stop the SDLP (moderate Catholic Nationalists) from making any power- sharing arrangements with the Unionists on the basis of devolved government for Ulster: just dangle before the SDLP the prospect of an Anglo-Irish condominium over the North, and they will go for that rather than power-sharing, particularly if you add that whatever a devolved govern- ment is appointed to do will immediately be withdrawn from the remit of the Anglo- Irish Intergovernmental Conference, and will, therefore, cease to be a matter on which the Republic has to be consulted.
As for the last requirement of your competition — how to alienate the Union- ists almost beyond reprieve — nothing much more needs to be said. It should be pointed out, however, that, in anticipation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Official Unionists (Mr Molyneaux's moderate but timid lot) valiantly brought out an enlight- ened pamphlet called, reverberatingly, The Way Forward, in which they said that they were perfectly happy to give the National- ist minority the chance of exhibiting its cultural identity in innocent ways. This might well have run to street names in Gaelic. That proposal, however, is now quite likely to spark off a revolution, since it will be assumed to have been accepted under dictation from Dublin. Yes: Mr Hurd gets the book token, quite apart from considerations of literary merit, on which he would certainly have won. I cannot award the second prize to Mr King — a less intellectually accomplished though more straightforward competitor — as I think that, of necessity, he cribbed.
And why does the Government carry on like this? Because, I believe, it thinks that the better part of valour is to let the Northern Ireland crisis work itself out in the half-conscious hope that the final catas- trophe, which could also be the final solution, will happen when another gov- ernment is in power.
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