Political Commentary

The rough beast of Ireland

Patrick Cosgrave And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— W. B. Yeats Until last week I had not been in Belfast since the Ulster general election of 1969, which produced the stalemate that eventually precipitated the resignation of Captain O'Neill. On the evening of election day, I was sharing a radio studio with Dick Ferguson, then one of the most promising, and most liberal, Unionist MPs, soon after to be driven out of politics by acts of violence and threats of more. The gradually emerging pattern of the returns showed that Captain O'Neill was not going to achieve the victory that would enable him to take firm hold on his already divided and embittered party. Ferguson eventually shrugged and said, in despair, " It's all over. The last chance has gone."

In 1969 the youngsters of the People's Democracy movement, and the Civil Rights organisations generally, were full of righteous hope and, conviction. There was a lot of hate and anger and bitterness and vengefulness in the plate, but there was a lot of positive and constructive energy as well. Now those — like the members of the Alliance Party, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party — who fight most obviously and publicly for peace, for an end to killing, seem essentially defensive, essentially shouting to make themselves heard in a high wind. Few people any longer say, if this, or that, was done, things would be better. All the people whose judgement I most respect await the onset of the civil war, the withdrawal of the British, the establishment of a Protestant statelet in four of the Northern counties, a pogrom of Catholics in Belfast and of Protestants in Londonderry, the driving over the border into the South of such Catholics as escape with their lives, and the accelerated destruction of society in the Republic as well as in Ulster. I do not say that this will necessarily come to pass: but moralising or political judgement is something that seems increasingly pointless in Belfast today. The thugs of the IRA and of the UVF are, of course, ritually condemned: one feels horror at every next explosion, at the assault on Mrs Austin Currie, and the almost simultaneous destruction by bomb of an RUC reserve — an act simply and brutally described in the Irish News headline, 'Reserve PC blown to bits by car bomb' — but the edge of that horror is now dulled. Even slaughter, it seems, becomes boring.

And yet the ordinary people, and the soldiers and security officers, seemed somehow more cheerful, more friendly, more open than they were in 1969. The cheerfulness and the humour is, of course, that of the gallows. As the press waited, shivering, at Belfast airport, for the Prime

Minister, a security officer pointed out a line which they must not cross when Mr Heath arrived, If they did, he explained, guard dogs would be automatically set loose. 'We wash the dogs' teeth regularly," he aded, " but they can't distinguish between Republican and reportorial flesh." There was no humour, however, in the mien of a woman I met on Thursday evening. I was being taken on a tour of the city by a remarkable taxi driver who seemed to know everything, to be wholly without fear, and to be willing to go anywhere. We decided to stop for a drink and pulled up outside a small house. The door immediately opened and, a tiny, fearful, woman came out. "God, mister," she said to me. "There isn't a bomb in it, is there?" We tried to reassure her, and my driver produced his licence to prove our bona fides. She listened, but she wasn't convinced. " You see," she said, "there's a little fella in there in bed, and he's only six. Please don't blow us up, mister."

It is difficult to gauge reactions to Mr Heath's visit. To an English reporter the Prime Minister was at his formidable best. He had a punishing schedule and never wilted. His speech on Thursday was emphatic, full of confidence. He never equivocated or evaded: there was no politician's trickery in his replies to questions. His message was absolutely clear: he had done all the consulting he was going to do, and he now planned to put into effect reforms in the structure of Ulster politics which he and his ministers thought right. There would be a plebiscite on the border, but on nothing else. There would be no quadripartite talks involving Mr Lynch — a statement which caused some dismay in the South. Mr Heath, briefly, smashed what has become fashionably known as the Irish dimension in pieces. All decisions from now on were to be made at Westminster. " He was great," said an Irish reporter in grudging admiration after Friday's press conference, "but it doesn't matter, you know. There's nothing he can do about it."

The first and most important warning Mr Heath gave on Thursday, when he spent out the consequences for Protestant Ulster of a UDI: there were, as one reporter afterwards put it, two hundred million small green paper reasons against it. But he ad libbed a part of his speech, and what he said then was that there could be no question of British withdrawal from Ulster. The Catholic, and Southern, papers emphasised the attack on UDI, and one or two of them chortled unpleasantly over what they took to be a snub to the extreme Unionists. However, the Protestant Belfast News Letter decided that the ad lib was " the message which Mr Heath wished to give to the people of Northern Ireland," and mentioned neither the UDI question nor the Prime Minister's clear assertion of total authority over the make-up of constitutional reforms. And all these reports and selected emphases seemed, to be symbolic of the unpalatable fact that it is impossible for a British Prime Minister to get through to the Irish. Everybody chose to hear what they liked.

And there wasn't very much of that. Despite the natural and occasionally intense interest in his visit, he seemed — and this was no fault of his—outside the concerns of Ulster. He twirled around in helicopters followed by a panting — and carefully vetted — press cops in buses. At one point an angry security officer had to instruct his colleagues to stop watching the press — that Wasn't where the danger was. And as soon as the Prime Minister left on Friday the province fell back into its visceral preoccupation with itself. For the truth is that the people of Ulster, Catholic and Protestant, are much more concerned with one another than they are with either London or Dublin. There is a bond created by hate and fear. The Unionists are now contemptuous and distrustful of the British; and the Catholics likewise of the Dublin government. Nothing is real to them but their own dilemma, and expressions of concern by outsiders are judged base.

This — in my view wholly justified — introversion is all the more intense because it is generalised. Over the years layer upon layer of leadership has been stripped away. " Whatever happened to Bernadette Devlin?" one Dublin newspaper asked last Sunday. And when I inquired about Ian Paisley — who, to many of us in England, has turned, over the last few years, from being a raving lunatic into a potential statesman — I was told that he seemed finished, though one or two people thought he might come again. Did Craig lead the Protestant extremists? No, Craig was a front man. Could Martin Smyth lead them? No, he was too middle class. Did Tommy Herron of the UVF hold the top position? No, he was too stupid. Who, then, did lead? Nobody knew. Even the leaders of the IRA seem shadowy. Day after day the Army round them up. Day after day they are replaced.. I asked if the Army had not been exaggerating its success. I was told no, it was just that the supply of cadres was inexhaustible. The one politician with potential appeared to be Desmond Boal, the formidable rightwing lawyer MP who once coached Paisley but who appears, for the moment, to be resting from politics. And what I heard of Boal was chilling: he was, said the man whose judgement on the North I most respect, the Iago of the situation, whose satisfaction lay in the manipulation of forces arid men greater than himself.

And then I went South. Doubt and questioning and redefinition of identity have begun; and there are a lot of things about themselves and their society which the Southern Irish have suddenly found are unpalatable. When I drove around Dublin, I had a shocked perception. If you took the soldiers, the barriers, the rumble strips — artificial bumps in the streets to stop gunmenproceeding at speed and shooting as they go — and the Saracens out of Belfast, that city would bear a less ruinous aspect than does Dublin, where the property developers have moved in to construct endless successions of faceless office blocks. Ireland is full of symbols; and the one that summarised her present condition most effectively was the parade of small blue notices — I counted seventeen of them — reading ' Consult the experts — Demolition (Ireland) Limited.'

The gradual demoltion of Ireland's hopes and dreams, even of her understanding of herself, has many causes, but the continual exacerbation of the situation in Ulster is the most corrosive of them. People no longer offer solutions for Ulster: they attribute blame, and consider anxiously the effect of Ulster on them, what bits of themselves can be saved from the conflagration. One friend of mine, an extremely intelligent and civilised, but somewhat cynical, man was quite clear that the war in the North had revealed that there was no real communion between Northern and Southern Catholics. When I pressed him on the alienation Northern Catholics were feeling he rarfped out cheerfully, "We don't want those bloody aborigines down here." A much younger man gave an equally brutal reply to my repetition of the Northern case — I had become, you see, much more involved with the plight and feelings of the Northerners, Catholic or Protestant, than I was with the Southerners — when he said, "What do they expect us to do? We can't afford

them!" And a senior Irish Civil Servant, Who did repeat his government's claim to

the whole of Ireland, insisted nonetheless that the resolution of the current war was a British problem — the Brits should clean it up, go home, and leave the Republic to take over. He could not be persuaded to discuss the matter in any other context than the injustice of England to Ireland over the centuries.

And there was worse. Since 1969 a number of moves have been made by enlightened Southerners who want unity, to make changes in their own constitution and society to placate the Protestants, such people honourably recognising that the South was too exclusively Catholic to incorporate a large number of intense Protestants. One of the first moves in this direction is Mr Lynch's intention by referendum to remove from the Irish constitution Clause 44, which states the special position of the Catholic Church in Ireland. A movement has now sprung into being, called 'Defend 44.' It has caused a heated debate about the Catholic and religious identity of Ireland, about defending the country from the corruption of materialist England and reasserting the strength of the old faith, which seems, on the part of those defending Clause 44, to have an importance which transcends Ulster. I could find no one who would say with any confidence that Mr Lynch will succeed in having the clause expunged.

The only decision, it is recognised, that the Irish government can make which has any real relevance to the North would be to crack down on the IRA. This decision may, with the arrest of Sean MacStiofain, b'e in operation. But I found a lot of doubt about its wisdom. True, one IRA leader has said that the detention of three or four of the top leaders could destroy the movement. "But," said one man I was talking to, "there are too many of them. If we get some the others will start blowing us up."

Such selfishness is explicable. I may have over-emphasised both it and the destructiveness of the attitudes I found in the Republic. After all, Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien continues bravely to defy selfinterest and argue for the abandonment of the objective of Irish unity in the interests of peace. But even the bravest and wisest of men — and there are brave and wise men North and South — seemed to me irrelevant to the agony of the Ulster Protestant and the Ulster Catholic, the hundreds of thousands of people, not killers, thugs or self-seekers, who are locked in implacable battle with one another. All that is hopeful is hope itself, and charity. "The personality of Willie Whitelaw," said one IRA man recently, "is the only weapon we fear." Mr Whitelaw has his enemies, but the strength and radiance of his nature has made some small breaches in the wall of hate. And hands do sometimes seem to reach out for one another. Before she was assaulted last week, Mrs Austin Currie wrote a letter to the presenter of a Southern radio programme which had discussed what could be done in the South to help in the North. She said: . . the mothers have so much in common, yet our children are growing up with hate and bigotry. To me there is only one way of achieving this end [peace] and that is a change of heart, and only prayer can bring that about.

A few hours before that letter arrived, Mrs Currie was beaten up and carved. Whether good will of the kind Mr Whitelaw projects, prayer of the kind Mrs Currie begs for, or that spirit of charity which has recently seen a Protestant minister collect money to help ruined Catholics, can prevail or not, is very much in doubt. The hour of the beast seems at hand.