23 FEBRUARY 1991, Page 6

POLITICS

How not to build sandcastles in the air

NOEL MALCOLM Every time an IRA atrocity is commit- ted, any attempt to treat it as a rational political act can only seem like an exercise in bad taste. Hardly a day passes without commentators on the Gulf conflict remind- ing us that war is politics conducted by other means; but at the same time we are constantly assured that terrorism is terror, and nothing more.

Some of the reasons for this blinkered approach to terrorism are good ones. In the legal order, an important principle is at stake. When the trial is eventually held of the people who planted the bomb in Victoria station this week, they need not be charged with any special 'political' crime: they are to be tried as criminals, not as political opponents. And at the level of politics itself, talking about terrorism as a form of political action may send out all the wrong signals. It may suggest that to be subjected to a terrorist campaign is a sign of failure, that we should have found a 'negotiated settlement' through 'political means', because `political problems' re- quire 'political solutions'. The Govern- ment heard all these mynah-bird phrases over the invasion of Kuwait six months ago, and rightly came to the conclusion that there are some problems which cannot be solved just by being polite to the problem-causers round a negotiating table.

And yet it is foolish to deny that IRA terrorism has both a political context and political effects. When the Government says that terrorist actions will make no difference to its policy in Northern Ireland, we have to remember that undermining the terrorists is the main aim and preoccupa- tion of the policy itself. So Mr Brooke, the Northern Ireland Secretary, gets on with his task of constructing an elaborate new scheme for devolutionary government, and naturally denies that terrorist outrages will interfere with what he is doing, rather like someone building a giant sand-castle in a strong wind, who insists that the gale will not put him off his work. Perhaps it won't; but he seems to forget that the shape of the building is being moulded and determined by the wind willy-nilly, and that the main reason for building it was to shelter from the wind in the first place.

The political effects of IRA terrorism are not quite the ones intended by the terrorists, however. A member of the IRA 'Northern Command' summed up their intentions as follows, in a recent interview in Republican News: 'The strategy is very clear. At some point in the future, due to the pressure of the continuing and sus- tained armed struggle, the will of the British Government to remain in this country will be broken.' That is aiming too high. No British Government is going to withdraw from Northern Ireland — that is, eject Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom — against the wishes of the majority of the people who live there. But, more subtly, the British Government's will can be modified, rather than broken: it can be persuaded to change the way in which it remains in Northern Ireland — and, there- fore, the way in which Northern Ireland remains in the United Kingdom.

If a new campaign of IRA bombing (and mortaring) claims more victims in Britain, it will inevitably put more pressure on Mr Brooke to produce the breakthrough he has been hinting at for so long. `Break- through' is the right word here, because what he is trying to do is inherently impossible, and for it to happen something has got to break. He is trying to set up a devolved Ulster government in such a way that two conditions will be satisfied.

The first, set by the Unionist parties, is that creating this government will have the effect of suspending or abolishing the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The second, set by the SDLP and the Republic of Ireland, is that Dublin's special interest in Northern Ireland will continue to be recognised, and indeed that Dublin will have a hand in designing the devolved government. Hence the form of the stalemate over the last eight months: a dispute about the order of priority of two sets of talks, inter-party talks in the North, and talks between North and South. The Unionists wanted the inter-party talks to decide the nature of the devolved government first, without interference from the North-South talks; but Dublin, naturally, wished other- wise. Throughout these months, Mr Brooke has been repeatedly and publicly humili- ated by the Irish Government, which has forced him to cancel one promised announcement after another. So if his patience is wearing thin and his need to produce a 'breakthrough' is growing stron- ger, the logical thing you might expect him to do now would be to ride roughshod over Dublin's objections and push ahead with the creation of a devolved government as a purely internal, Northern Irish affair.

Unfortunately, logic does not have much say in the matter. The illogical reasoning behind the Anglo-Irish Agreement still has the final word. And what it says is that the way to defeat terrorism politically is to make such a large concession to the people who share the same long-term aim as the terrorists that they will begin to think that terrorism is unnecessary. The ultimate aim is a unified Ireland, governed from Dublin; so the Anglo-Irish Agreement gave Dublin a sort of shadow-governmental role in Northern Ireland. And the instinct at the Northern Ireland Office is still to respond to terrorist nationalists by making more concessions to the nice, non-terrorist nationalists — in Belfast and in Dublin — who share the same final aim. The Agree- ment was a classic example of the 'political solution' which solves nothing and makes the problem worse. No doubt it was ancestors of those officials at the Northern Ireland Office who thought up Danegeld as a 'solution' to the problem of being robbed by the Danes.

Terrorism is not just throwing bombs. It is throwing bombs for a political purpose. British governments have put a huge amount of effort into opposing the activi- ties of the bomb-throwers, but have made pathetically little attempt to oppose their political purpose. And the way to oppose it is to insist that Northern Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom, to treat it as such, and to show all those who live in that province what the benefits of belonging to an integrated United King- dom can be. More than a million Irish Catholics have voluntarily come to reside on the mainland of Britain, and seem to live more happily in Bolton or Bourne- mouth than their cousins do in Belfast. And why are they happy here? There may be many reasons, but the existence of an Anglo-Irish Secretariat in the suburbs of Bournemouth is not one of them.