THE LONG MARCH TO VIOLENCE
Confrontation at Drumcree was not unexpected, says Clifford Smyth. The nationalists wanted it to happen and London ignored all warnings
ON 3 May this year, I addressed the Car- lingford History Conference on the subject of Ulster's Orange Order. My comments to a largely southern Irish audience were unwelcome. Nevertheless, I felt myself to be under an imperative to warn of the dangers that lay over the horizon. In a press release timed to coincide with the conference, the opening line had read: 'The majority of British and Protestant people living in Ulster are in an increas- ingly dangerous and volatile mood; this is a very unnerving situation.... '
I was not alone in this realisation. Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien is to be commend- ed for the prescience of his many articles which foresaw that the London-Dublin agenda would play into the hands of the IRA. Appeasement could only provoke a reaction from the deeply alienated Protes- tant population.
The first significant warning of dangers to come can be found in Robert Moss's book, Urban Guenillas, published in 1971. Moss had numerous connections with what is termed the 'intelligence industry'. Some of his thinking is uncomfortably up to date. With the decision taken after Drumcree by John Hume and the SDLP to absent themselves from Northern Ire- land's newly elected Forum, we are reminded of Moss's comment 25 years earlier: 'When the crisis of 1971 erupted, the SDLP and other opposition deputies walked out of Stormont [the old Northern Ireland parliament, later to be prorogued] and left the Government to fight a duel with the IRA. That action suggested that the only two genuine political forces in Ulster were the Orangemen and the ter- rorists,' Later in the same chapter, Moss sketched out with impressive accuracy the
I keep thinking I'm not being followed.' strategy which the Provisional IRA would follow. The final denouement would be 'the unresisting absorption of Ulster into a united Irish republic'.
Throughout the last few days, commenta- tors, especially those with broadly nationalist sympathies, have reiterated the point that the Orange stand-off at Drumcree has set the Province back 25 years. Moss, however, had already identified in his chapter on Ulster unrest both the cause and the conse- quence of these most recent events. Ulster Orangemen feared that the British Govern- ment was secretly pursuing an Irish national- ist agenda which could only result in their 'absorption' into a unified Irish state. The popular uprising among the Unionist popu- lation was not only an attempt to break free, but a revelation that if the British Govern- ment was not prepared to defend them against the most fanatical revolutionary army in western Europe, then ultimately Orange- men and loyalists were willing to shoulder that burden themselves.
It was, however, from the late spring of 1996 that clear signs began to emerge of Protestant unrest. Although these signs were both widespread and unmistakable within Northern Ireland, it is now evident that neither the security forces nor the British Government appreciated the gravity of the situation. Possibly their error arose from the fact that on the level of their respective command structures, the loyalist paramilitary groupings were locked in the peace process. Another explanation could be that the Chinook helicopter crash on the Mull of Kintyre last year had wiped out the RUC's intelligence-gathering infra- structure within the loyalist ranks.
In May, a two-and-a-half-hour video appeared, mysteriously entitled 'Sellout and Surrender'. According to Ed Moloney of the Sunday Tribune, the video 'claimed that the Ulster Volunteer Force has been in secret dialogue with representatives of the nationalist community for up to two years before the ceasefire'. The video stoked loyalist uncertainty. Moloney's in- depth report ended with the chilling words of a hooded figure who had commented on some very cleverly edited television footage culled from an amazing array of sources. The masked figure in combat fatigues said, `True Ulster loyalists, you have to take a big decision right now. . ..' The video received widespread circulation in Ulster. Only a day before, a much more reasoned insight into the pressures on the majority population had been given by the Belfast Telegraph's correspondent Eric Waugh. Under the headline, `London and Dublin's late-colonial vision is setting the wrong agenda', Waugh warned that `already embattled Unionists will look to their ram- parts'. At that point the stand-off at Drum- cree was less than four weeks away.
It has been an axiom of Irish nationalist ideology that the 'injustice' of partition will only end when a British government faces down the Unionist population and uses the authority of the British state to impose its will upon them. All factions and parties committed to Irish nationalism make intense efforts to create the political cir- cumstances in which this historic conflict between the authority of the British state and Ulster's colonial settlers will take place. Part of the role of the Provisional IRA was to bring about such a confronta- tion between the Unionists and Westmin- ster. Orange parades are the focus of pro-British and Protestant sentiment in the Province. Orangeism is controversial because it embraces both lines of cleavage on the island of Ireland: religion and eth- nicity. Orange Order parades therefore became central to the nationalist strategy of creating a showdown between the authorities and the Ulster Unionist rank and file. The trap had been set.
On 22 June, The Spectator published a detailed analysis of the Northern Ireland situation by Peregrine Worsthorne in which he warned, 'Ulster will fight.' Worsthorne foresaw that if the ideology of Irish nationalism was not soon challenged then it had the potential to 'return the whole of Ireland to the savagery of the 17th century'. Apparently, the last of many warning voices went unheeded at RUC headquarters, Knock, and in No. 10 Down- ing Street; the Orange confrontation at Drumcree was now only 15 days away. Writing in the British Journal of Sociolo- 8Y in September 1981, Christopher Hewitt Concluded his revisionist analysis of North- ern Ireland's civil rights movement with fbe,observation that 'lack of understanding concerning the nature of the Northern Irish problem, combined with a bias against the loyalist majority and in favour of the Catholics, helps explain the failure of British policies'.
A non-aggression pact needs to be estab- lished between the two warring tribes. The vast majority of Ulster's Roman Catholic and Protestant population do not want to loll each other, but in circumstances of deceit, manipulation and folly, atavistic forces can be unleashed beyond even the control of governments. If the loyalist cease- fire holds, despite isolated reports of the ethnic cleansing of Protestants in remote areas, then that is a positive feature of an otherwise grim situation. It was the nation- alist determination to force a historic con- frontation between the British Govern- ment and the Unionist population which brought us to the present pass.
Tragically, for all the people on the island, north and south, Roman Catholic or Protestant, neither ideology compre- hends the political realities. Irish national- ism is suffused with a parochial Gaelic mythology which is romantic rather than rational, while Ulster Unionism is inarticu- late and anachronistic and posits an unlikely partnership between Ulster's ancient Britons and the deracinated West- minster Establishment. Britain should adopt a role of genuinely neutral arbiter between the tribes. The government of the Irish Republic should be challenged as to why it feels no obligation to adopt a paral- lel stance of neutrality.
Clifford Smyth is the author of a political biography of Ian Paisley.
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