24 JULY 1971, Page 7

IRELAND

How to betray Ulster

T. E. UTLEY

Mr Mallory's article on the Irish Question in last week's Spectator, for all its seeming objectivity, is directed to the single object of convincing the British people that they have no morally binding obligations to the people of Ulster. In effect, its argument is this: Britain must dispose of the Northern Irish problem; it can effectively dispose of it only in one of two ways, either by expelling Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and leaving it to fend for itself, or by persuad ing (that is to say by coercing) the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland to enter some kind of political association with the South, inevitably destined to become increasingly intimate until it reaches the proportions of constitutional unity.

Anyone familiar with the processes by which British opinion is prepared for the dishonouring of British obligations (and these processes constitute one of the commonest operations in British political 'life) will find Mr Mallory's forensic techniques boringly unoriginal. The first step is to establish (in Mr Mallory's case, by insinuation rather than assertion) that those to whom the obligations are owed have, by their persistent misbehaviour, renounced the right to have them respected. The whole vast programme of reform undertaken in Northern Ireland in recent years is thus dismissed with the single, unintelligible epithet "sub-emancipatory." Mr Faulkner offers the constitutional Opposition in Northern Ireland a degree of participation in the actual formulation of policy certainly far greater than anything ever enjoyed by the Opposition at Westminster; he is denounced by Mr Mallory for having offered them "democracy in an annexe." The Northern Irish government proposes two reforms, the establishment of a Public Prosecutor and majority voting on juries (only one of them, incidentally, is a reform in Mr Mallory's sense of being designed to weaken the authorities); we are told, however, that these suggestions cannot be chalked up to his credit because they were announced in the Governor's speech at the opening of Parliament and must therefore be presumed to have been dictated from Whitehall, a proposition which reveals a complete misunderstanding of the constitutional relationship between the Governor and the Government at Stormont; his Queen's Speech is, of course, written by Mr Faulkner, not by Mr Heath.

That the whole structure of government in Northern Ireland, central and local, is today in process of being reformed at breakneck speed is a fact that Mr Mallory merely ignores. Indeed, why should he do otherwise — for these reforms are "subemancipatory," in the sense that they fall short of permitting the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland to alter the limits of the State in order to ensure that the Protestant majority shall itself become a minority.

The next step in setting up the intellectual credentials of an act of betrayal is to convince the British people that the obligations which they are about to renounce are not quite so definite as they have been generally taken to be. It is an error, Mr Mallory implies, to suppose that the Home Office has anything ultimately to do with the future of Northern Ireland. This, he says, is really a matter for the Foreign Office, which has for long treated Ireland as an entity. Let him ask Dr Hillery what form this treatment has taken on the comparatively rare occasions on which he has been vouchsafed interviews with the British Foreign Secretary. Dr Hillery must now be reasonably well accustomed to being told that Northern Irish affairs are not his concern. Whatever the current attitude of the Foreign Office, however, the Government of Northern Ireland Act of 1949 remains on the statute book, and with it the clear undertaking given by Attlee, and binding on his successors, that the status of the Province will not be changed without the consent of its people.

No campaign for the repudiation of a duty so precisely defined would be complete without the suggestion that those who are about to be abandoned would, of course, be much better off if left to themselves. The notion that the Northern Irish economy would benefit vastly from the severance of the connection with Britain — which would of course involve the end of British subsidies — is a little too quaint to warrant refutation. The argument of the half-crown has been almost as important as the argument of the Crown in Irish politics for many years. Suffice it to say that I recall an illuminating conversation on this point a year ago with one of the members of Mr Lynch's kindergarten of avant-garde theorists of Irish Unity. The difficulty of depriving Northern Ireland of the benefits of the British welfare state could, he said, be overcome in a United Ireland by the expedient of extending those benefits to the South. The British taxpayer would be glad to undertake this burden as a means of getting rid of the tiresome and costly need to keep an army in the North, and as a method of salving his conscience for a deviation from strict legal pedantry in his treatment of Stormont. That suggestion, if formally conveyed by Dr Hillery during his next interview, might stimulate even Mr Heath's interest in Irish affairs.

None of these arguments will of course suffice without the aid of the last, irresistible appeal to British empiricism — the proposition that, however much we want to do our duty, it is now physically impossible to carry it out. The stage has been well prepared for this denouement.

Those who recall how, during the war, the British deprived Mihailovitch of arms, and then sacked him for not fighting the Germans, will not be unduly surprised by British policy in Ulster as it developed under Mr Callaghan. A few relatively trivial disorders, run mainly by undergraduates and other amiable people, began; from the first they were sedulously encouraged and increasingly controlled by those pledged to the forcible overthrow of lawful authority in Northern Ireland, that is to say by the IRA and, to a lesser extent by those forces of international revolution which trouble the life of every capital in the Western world. The response was not coercion but concession; every institution concerned with the preservation of law and order in the North was immediately exposed to public inquiry; Stormont was told that it would not get military support in Britain until all its own law-keeping forces had been fully deployed; it was then fiercely condemned for deploying them by using the volunteer B-Special force to suppress riots. Mr Callaghan and the British army came in, not to uphold order, but to hold the ring between government and rebels; the police were disarmed, rebel enclaves were allowed to establish themselves and rebel leaders treated as honourable enemies with whom the army could suitably negotiate. Deprive Stormont of the means of governing in order to demonstrate that it is incapable of governing and order the army to pull its punches in order to prove that a military solution is impossible — that, I believe, was the conscious purpose of Mr Callaghan, and is the foundation of the bipartisan policy now being maintained by Mr Maudling, partly from inertia, partly from incomprehension and partly from a determination not to unite the Labour party over Ireland just when it has become so blissfully divided over the Common Market. The logical consummation of that policy might well be Mr Mallory's constitutional conference with the South, an expedient which would either be fatuous and inflammatory, leading only to a re-definition of existing positions, or would be used, as Mr Mallory plainly wants it to be used, as a means either of forcing Ulster into political association with the South or of providing a 'moral justification' for Britain's abandonment of Ulster. Happily, there are those on the Tory backbenches who have seen through all this• and do not like it, and there are even eight Ulster Unionist votes at Westminster which the Government may not be able to despise next October.