4 AUGUST 1990, Page 6

POLITICS

The Agreement which Ian Gow would never agree to

NOEL MALCOLM

Once again women have been turned into widows and children into orphans, and to what purpose? There can be no purpose. One of the awful things about today's mur- ders is that there is a kind of perverted purposelessness about those who have done this. We will never, never surrender to people like these.

Those words were spoken by Ian Gow last week, after the murder of three police- men and a nun by the IRA. It was a strange experience, somehow both chilling and heart-warming, to see the film of him speaking those words rerrun on the tele- vision news on Monday, as if in commen- tary on his own death.

No particular act of violence by IRA terrorists will achieve the ends at which they aim: in this sense, the disproportion between the suffering they inflict and the advantage they accrue is so great as to justify Mr Gow's use of the word 'pur- poselessness'. And yet the general purpose of the IRA is clear. It is to wear down the patience of the British electorate and the the British political classes, to the point where their one desire is to get rid of Northern Ireland. Mr Gow himself recog- nised the purposefulness of their cam- paign, when he explained his reasons for resigning from the Government after the Anglo-Irish.Agreement had been signed in 1985:

Our fellow countrymen from Northern Ire- land will perceive — and will not be wrong in perceiving — that the Agreement would never have been signed unless there had been a prolonged campaign of violence. The Agreement will be perceived as having been won as a result of violence.

At least part of this analysis was incon- testably true. The Agreement gave a fore- ign government an extraordinary, unpre- cedented right — the right to put forward 'views and proposals' on the internal affairs of part of the United Kingdon. Such a concession would obviously never have been dreamt of had it not been for the unprecedented violence of the previous 16 years. And the most important concession which the Irish government made in return was a promise of closer co-operation on security matters — again, an obvious sign of the impact of the terrorist campaigns.

But at the same time the irritation which Mr Gow's resignation speech caused to the framers of the Anglo-Irish Agreement is understandable, because they sincerely be- lieved that they had inflicted a political defeat on the IRA. In the short term, the impulse towards the Agreement had come not from IRA violence but from Sinn Fein's electoral success. After the party's adoption in 1981 of the `ballot paper in one hand, Armalite rifle in the other' doctrine, Sinn Fein candidates had won five Assem- bly seats in 1982, 13 per cent of the vote in the general elections of 1983, and 59 seats in the local government elections of May 1985. Such successes threatened to erode the support for the respectable party of Irish nationalism, the SDLP. One of the main purposes of the Agreement, there- fore, was to shore up the SDLP by giving it a new, privileged position of power: hence- forth the Dublin government would act as a sort of agent for the SDLP in Belfast, pressing its claims and promoting the importance• of its leader, Mr Hume. The nationalists in Northern Ireland would feel properly cared for, and would cease lodg- ing their protest votes with the spokesmen and sympathisers of the IRA.

That was the theory, and the SDLP were not the only ones to believe it. Sinn Fein and the IRA were hostile to the Anglo- Irish Agreement, both for this reason and because they felt that the Agreement's somewhat hazy recognition of the present status of Northern Ireland (hazy because that status is recognised without being defined) was a betrayal of the Irish Con- stitution, which claims the entire island as its `national territory'. Mr Gerry Adams described the Agreement as `a disaster'. He and Mr Gow had reached similar conclusions, though from completely opposite directions.

What all this ought to imply is that there is something odd about the explanation which the media have been putting forward this week for the timing of Ian Gow's murder. This atrocity, they say, was in- tended to destabilise the Northern Ireland Secretary's negotiations with Ulster politi- cians and the Irish government about the suspending or superseding of the Agree- ment. Yet if Mr Brooke's plans are fulfil- led, Sinn Fein will find itself closer to the position it held in the early 1980s, able to compete on equal terms with the SDLP for local political power. Why then should the IRA try to knock the British Government off balance at this delicate moment?

Part of the answer must be that such

murders arc not planned with precise regard to the political calendar. Mr Gow's name was on the list of 100 targeted individuals found at an IRA hide-out last year; his death is clearly part of a long-term programme of violence. There is also a kind of operational machismo which makes the terrorists always eager to demonstrate their `capabilities' on the mainland.

But the other part of the answer must be that the Anglo-Irish Agreement turned out to be not such a bad thing after all — for the IRA's purposes. It demoralised the Unionists, loosened their grip on the poli- tical life of the province, undermined their trust in Britain and set them bickering among themselves. Votes for Sinn Fein did not slump; Mr Adams actually increased his share of the vote in West Belfast in the 1987 general election. And of all the conflicting interpretations of the Agree- ment's real meaning, the one put forward by the Unionists — that it was a step towards the unification of Ireland — was the one most widely agreed to be correct.

The IRA are not the only people to have modified their view of the Agreement. Mr Charles Haughey originally opposed it, for rather similar reasons: 'We cannot accept . . . the recognition of British sovereignty over the North of Ireland which is involved in this agreement.' Today, however, it is Mr Haughey who is clinging to the Agree- ment and publicly humiliating Mr Brooke by frustrating every deadline he sets. Mr Haughey has come round to the idea that the Agreement is one step towards Irish unification, and is determined that the next step should be in the same direction. Hence his rejection of Mr Brooke's plan for two separate sets of talks, one on 'internal' matters (the shape of the new devolved government), to be held between the Ulster parties, and the other on 'exter- nal' matters, to be held between the British and Irish governments. That is a distinction which Mr Haughey will no longer swallow.

Mr Brooke has had his bluff called once too often; it is time that he called Mr Haughey's instead. If in the process he ended up abrogating the Agreement altogether, that would be no bad thing. It is tempting to say that Ian Gow's spirit would thereby be vindicated. But then one thinks of the jerry-built `devolved government' which Mr Brooke would put in its place — and of which Mr Gow would also have predicted the eventual collapse.