THE IRISH DEBATE Hugh Macpherson

When it comes to dispensing reassurance there is no better politician in Christendom than Mr Reginald Maudling. The most amiable of men — as well as one of the most intelligent in the business — when he chooses to be at his most reasonable, his charm is well-nigh irresistible.

So, at the beginning of Wednesday's debate on Northern Ireland, he poured oil on every tiny eddy of troubled water, The Northern Ireland TUC was warmly congratulated, so were Catholic cardinals, Mr Gerry Fitt and the British army. The Northern Ireland Labour Party was accorded a kindly word and Mr Harold Wil son's Downing Street Declaration of 1959 was placed firmly in the same category as the ninety odd theses of Martin Luther.

" An historic point in history " said Mr Maudling, and Mr Wilson sat and looked suitably historic.

But pouring oi: on troubled waters is an unproductive exercise when the affairs of Northern Ireland are under discussion. It is a straight invitation for the bhoys to set it alight. After reciting the impressive list of reforms the present government have taken over from their predecessors, and dropping the broadest of hints that the Westminster government are ready to introduce proportional representation, Mr Maudling stumbled over the question of internment.

He told the House, and no one doubted him for one moment, that he regarded in ternment as hideous, but not as hideous as a campaign of murder and terrorism. "The object of internment," he said, " was to hold in safety, where they can do no fur ther harm, active, members of the IRA," and he concluded, "People say that intern ment should stop ç once. Do they say that we should release a large number of the IRA to rejoin the organisation?"

But the House was not so concerned about whether known gunmen should be released but whether old scores were being paid off by slapping worthy people behind barbed wire without trial. Before long Mr

Wilson was quoting a Sunday Times In

sight piece which said that a seventy-seven years old man is in detention, practically blind and has to be helped to the lavatory.

Of course the trouble with anything to do with Irish affairs is getting at the truth at all. Whilst the debate was going on, Miss Bernadette Devlin was assisting at a protest meeting in an upstairs committee room of some relatives and friends of the detained men. She told me, as we walked down the corridor, of an army raid on a house in her home town of Cookstown to arrest one Desmond Gourlay in the course of a detention exercise. When they could not find him at home, Miss Devlin claims that they said that they would take one of his two brothers. She alleges that when the older brother volunteered, the younger one, John Gourlay, was taken instead. Farther down the corridor, Paul Rose, the young Labour barrister and member for Manchester Blackley, sat ruefully examining a file of reports on such incidents. He naturally exercises extreme legal caution over atrocity reports, but says that there must be adequate examination of the claims made by Ivan Cooper, the Stormont MP and Civil Rights leader, that his study of 167 detainees shows that fifty three were not the original people sought.

A little further down the corridor an Ulster Unionist MP was telling me that these claims were a load of nonsense, He had spoken personally to Mr Faulkner, only a day or two before, and the Ulster Prime Minister had assured him that before authorising any detention, he examined every single case, and that there was no doubt about the involvements and motives of every man behind barbed wire.

The best that Mr Maudling could offer in the way of reassurance over detentions was to announce the appointment of a new member of the appeals body which examines the cases of detainees, Mr P. M. Dalton, an English Roman Catholic and former Kenya High Court judge, whom the Labour government had invited to serve on the Immigration Appeals Tribunal.

Mr Wilson went on at considerable, indeed almost interminable length. But at the tail-end of his speech he suddenly produced a series of embarrassing questions for the government. Who had initiated the move for internment? Who had drawn up the list of detainees? Had it all been endorsed and controlled by the British government? If so, then surely the Ministers must be accountable to the House for the whole operation and for the charges made of political selectivity?

The stern lecture from Mr Enoch Powell which followed on the ' enemy ' in the 'war' being waged in Northern Ireland, the need to secure the borders, to arm the police, and to issue identity cards, was received with quiet calm by a House which is well accustomed to his more apocalyptic utterances. Even by Mr Heath, who smiled warmly at Mr Thorpe and shook his head when the Liberal leader asked if Mr Powell approved of the Prime Minister's conversations next week with Mr Lynch.

The real question had been raised by Mr Wilson. No British government is happy about imprisonments without trial. Oppositions are even less happy. And Labour MPs in the corridors were demanding a vote at the end of the adjournment debate, Mr Maudling's oil was burning brightly, too brightly for comfort.

Mr Crosland drew attention in a Fabian pamphlet last week to the fact that, if tax relief is regarded as a subsidy, then owneroccupiers receive a great deal more help from the state than council house tenants. There is nothing new in this observation and it was part of the stock-in-trade of many a Labour candidate at the last election. The actual figures are difficult to assess accurately since some council house tenants, certainly more than the number of owner-occupiers, will be receiving other forms of state assistance. Put baldly the 1970-71 Exchequer subsidies for housing amounted to about £157 million with rate fund contributions to the housing revenue accounts amounting to around £65 million. During the same year tax relief in respect of loans for house purchase was estimated at around £300 million. That is not a bad debating point in a television dust-up on hanging subsidies. Mr Crosland, however, commits the unforgivable error of suggesting some merry remedies including the restoration of schedule A tax; tax relief only for new buildings; or perhaps abolishing tax relief and giving a standard state subsidy; or even better a bit of means testing to see what kind of subsidy the owner ought to have.

Apparently, assiduous readers of Fabian pamphlets in the Conservative Central Office could not believe their good fortune. What Mr Wilson said when Mr Jo Haines brought a copy of the pamphlet in with the digestive biscuits is probably unprintable for apparently it did not occur to Mr Crosland that there are nine million owneroccupiers in Britain among whom are the middle ground which the Labour party has to capture if it is going to win the next election.

It recalls the medical student in one of Dr Richard Gordon's works who triumphantly delivers a papier-mâché babY from a model with such splendid vigour that the tutor hands him a hammer and counsels him to hit the father over the head so that he can say he has slaughtered the whole family.