NORTHERN IRELAND
Perilous distortions
John Graham
Until quite recently at my college in Oxford it was compulsory for the under graduates to attend College Chapel. One day the Dean of the College noticed that one of the freshmen never did attend, and demanded to know the reason. The fresh man explained that he was a Roman Catholic. The Dean said that nevertheless he had to go to Chapel, and if he wasn't there on the following Sunday he would be sent down. A rapid conversion took place.
A similarly rapid conversion of half a million souls would go a long way towards solving the Northern Irish problem, even though it isn't really about religion. So would extermination, deportation, or even a sifting of the population until Catholics and Protestants livedin pure sectional enclaves. None of these' is a ' political ' solution, of course, and things are not yet so bad that conversion or extermination is considered, but deportation and the ' enclave ' approach are mentioned from time to time, however extraordinary and even abhorrent they may seem to English minds.
They are mentioned because people believe there can be no political ' solution, and to a certain extent such people are right. There never has been a political solution in Northern Ireland for the simple reason that politics have never been given a chance. Just as the snipe and the woodcock are considered in the Irish Republic to be Protestant birds — because the Anglo-Irish ascendancy were the only people who thought it smart to eat them — so Stormont is not thought of as a Parliament by the Catholics of Northern Ireland, but as the symbol of the Protestants' feelings of superiority and as the vehicle of Protestant domination. The Protestants encouraged this by their insistence that Northern Ireland could never, and should never, be a two-party democracy. There has never been any move by the Unionist party designed to create a situation in which it was even conceivable that the party would lose control.
The tragedy of this is that the proper subjects of political debate have never been the stuff of Northern Irish politics, as the visits of Mr Callaghan and Mr Wilson have shown. The official reason for Mr Callaghan's journey to Ireland last week was a meeting of people from ' Labour' parties: the British Labour party, the Northern Irish Labour party, the Labour party from the Irish Republic, Gerry Fitt's Social Democratic and Labour party, and so on. They did honour this reason by discussing unemployment, industrial relations and other ' labour ' topics, but the real reason, of course, was to continue the search for a political solution to the troubles.
This is Mr Wilson's reason too, but both these visits have shown how the troubles have stood politics on their head. The Protestants have scarcely a good word to say for Wilson and Callaghan, or for the British Labour party as a whole, and yet the majority of these Protestants are ordinary working-class men who would over whelmingly vote Labour in a British election, if they lived in England. They are members of the Unionist party, however, so they vote Conservative and Unionist.
The leaders of the Unionist party have traditionally been the landed gentry and the hereditary aristocracy — who would presumably vote Conservative wherever they lived — but the community of interest between them and the proletariat is a trick of bigotry and not a real thing at all.
The deception thus played upon Northern Ireland's working man has produced a false and dangerous polarisation: the Protestants see the Tory party as theirs. and the Catholics the Labour party, the big difference being that the Labour party has a chance in England, but the CathOlics have no chance of winning an election in Northern Ireland.
There are, of_ course, some exceptions to. this. Mr Ba's'il Mclyor, the Minister for Community Relations, got a great many Catholic votes at 'the last election; Mr Gerry Fitt got many Protestant votes in his working-class constituency in Belfast. The fairly recent .'Alliance party has succeeded in its aim' to be non-sectarian, but its trouble •is that it hasn't got any politicians. Its leaders. 'make the right noises, and have some constructive ideas, but they are political novices...
So long as this state of affairs cOntinues, so will the division h the country, since the Unionist party will always win and will always be perceived as the party for Protestants. The Government's Green Paper on political: reform issued last month, stillborn though it was, recognised this when it acknowledged that the only long-term hope was ..through the development of non-sectarian parties, but what it failed to do, and what no prominent Unionist politician has so far had the nerve to do, was point the finger at the most intransigent and unreconstructed agent of reaction, the Orange Order.
This is the nub of the gist. The Orange Order is a secret society dedicated to the exclusion of Catholics, and closely tied to the Unionist party. Over the last two months various people have been saying that the Order has lost its power, but last week's demonstrations against Mr Callaghan put a stop to that nonsense. Against the expressed and specific pleas of the government, of the central trade union movement and of the particular unions involved, 20,000 Protestant working men downed tools and held a mass rally protesting the arrival of the member for Cardiff South-East.
There can be no 'political' solution until the Orange Order .is divorced from politics, as indeed many Unionist politicians tacitly accept. Equally there may be no ' political ' solution possible until Stormont is either scrapped or so radically altered that it loses its symbolism. It may sound odd to be talking of symbolism while the bullets still whistle through the blackened streets, hut it is not odd to Northern Irish ears.
But even in the middle of all this absurdity there are men trying to think of new approaches. One of these is Gerry Fitt, whose suggestion for a temporary suspension of Stormont and a conference of all
sections of Northern Irish life has some appeal. It would be horribly difficult to ar: range, maybe even impossible, but it woula at least give the people of the province their first real chance at self-determination. and it might lead to the creation of proPer political parties. Granted that the very fact that this sq' gestion comes from Gerry Fitt makes 11 now and always unacceptable to manY Unionists, there are others who could benefit from it. Gerry Fitt describes him' self as a socialist, and would like nothing better than for politics along lines similar to those in England — socialist vergis conservative, if you 'like — to get going ill Northern Ireland. In socialist ideology he is very close to people like Ian Paisley, er Bernadette Devlin, or even Desmond Boal. There is a surprisingly large area el common ground on what may be cane(' real issues between people who appear: because of the distortion of political parties, to be entirely opposed. One good example of this was the vote in Westminster on entry into the EEC' which made strange bedfellows of Northern Ireland's representatives. It set off pet' fectly one of the real differences between Unionists and Conservatives, and in doing so demonstrated again the perilous dis' tortions of political life in the six counties. If these distortions are not removed one way 'or another, nobody's real interestS, meither Protestants' nor Catholics', will be served.
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