Ulster

Meeting is such fleet sorrow

Rawle Knox

Last week's abortive meeting between representatives of the Ulster Defence Association, the most influential Protestant gunman

group, and the Social and Democratic Labour Party, easily the strongest, by the last recorded vote, of the Catholic political parties was a first meeting, and to judge by the unfriendly statments of the participants as they dispersed, threatened to be a last. No one was prepared to admit, for the record, that his views had changed an iota.

There have been in the past not a few secret meetings between hard-line Protestants and Catholic groups, of both political and violent leanings. Mostly they have been arranged in an attempt to define areas, of theory or of gunplay, in which each can operate without bumping too damagingly into the other. It might be unfair to read too much into last week's rude break-up of the first overt conference. It might be unfair, . . but for the background. The UDA has been tentatively seeking a firm date with the Provos for some time. Among its Motives is the hazy but comprehensible idea that if a truce can be patched together under its auspices, any further violence can be shown to come from outside the UDA and Provisional whose members now interned without

trial in the Maze prison should then be released. Internment remains the one sore, so often touched upon, that produces a common yelp of anguish from both Protestant and Catholic areas of discontent. Also running strongly in LJDA thinking is the desire to upstage the Ulster Volunteer Force, with which it has for months been in bitter conflict for armed control of the major Protestant districts, especially in 13east. The struggle between the two gangs led to. the UDA withdrawal from the weird coordinating committee of 'loyalist para-military groups' and the Ulster Workers' Council.

In mid-June the West Belfast officers of the

tiDA called for a meeting with both wings of the IRA. A full session of UDA leaders, after sounding out Protestant workers' opinion more widely, shied away from this idea. Yet at the il?xford conference, organised early last month

Y the Anglo-Irish Society, Harry Murray, the Belfast UWC leader said he would like to talk to tile Provos, though only after they had laid down their arms. For this outspokenness he w, as made to resign from the UWC secretary

On his return to Belfast. Nevertheless the up, A, which likes to think of itself as the military protector* of the UWC, and certainly gave it some strong-arm assistance during the ‘8,trike, thought it worthwhile to withdraw from 'r?e 'co-ordinating committee' a fortnight ago, aft er announCing itself willing to talk with Catholic groups (excluding the Provos, with wh

om, h.dwever, there might be a written

!x . change of views). Quite clearly, and one can ,:luacern this in conversation, UDA leaders felt I ere was enough Protestant will for peace, Pnvately expressed, for them to make the bold r'eoll of cautious advance towards the Catho

s. The West Belfast UDA officers are not, at all, isolated men. Harry Murray is a lay Preacher and a shop steward, apart from hay

?en been elected to high office in the UWC. 4he United Ulster Unionist Council (for didread almost all the old-line Unionists)

t like what the UDA was doing at all. The

,,J,,t,JU has laid down that there be no tallp at °41 with the other side" until the proposed convention at which all parties are to have a

bash at shaping a future constitution for Northern Ireland.

The old Unionists — I speak of their politics, not of their age — have been working hard of late, considering that this is the season in Ulster for only banging drums and old theses. They have turned up dutifully at Westminster to help the Tories chew pieces off the Trades Union Bill; that was because they want support for their demand for more Northern Ireland seats at Westminster, and they don't expect to get it from Labour. They have been working on the UWC, trying to find out what really goes on behind those locked dockland gates during working hours in Belfast, so that when the time comes they will be able to say the right things to get the votes again. They have been putting what spokes they can into the UDA's rather wobbly political wheel, and that was reflected in the number of times the UDA-SDLP talks were postponed before they made their brief squib-like appearance. • But with the UDA and UVF, both of whom continue to make disparaging remarks about the aristocratic antecedents and/or money connections of the old politicians, the UUUC realises at last it can make little headway. Hence its cry for a "20,000 strong home guard," billed as Ulster's answer to the IRA but planned as a force (its nucleus is already there in the form of those Loyalist Defence Volunteers) which will take the place of the politically suspect UDA and UVF. Hence the sudden discovery of the Orange Order that communism may be lurking in unsuspecting Protestant homes as well as having been for so long openly fostered in the ranks of Rome.

Have we gazed upon this scenery before? Well, Ireland is a small island and contains few untrodden ways, though quite a number on which some dare not venture or are just too idle

to attempt. The one largely unexplored feature, sitting as smug as Alice's Duchess at the end of every political pathway, is the UWC. It shares with The Lump, on the English side of the water, a solid laconicism, a supreme apolitical importance, that appear most un-Irish. No other labour movement seems to have made any accurate survey of the UWC. The Northern Ireland Labour Party, a sad, deserted little group nowadays, since Harold Wilson allowed his favours to fall on the SDLP, flouting historical background, had a shot at it when a spokesman said, in welcoming the UDA-SDLP talks, that the UWC were not fascists and the SDLP "must stop kidding themselves they can sell the Protestant working classes the idea of a United Ireland."

Stanley Orme doesn't seem to have appreciated this at all; at last report he was reckoning the Northern Ireland Protestant working class would divide itself as disastrously as did the bourgeois Protestants last year. Yet I shan't forget Harry Murray answering a rather jejune television reporter after the Oxford Conference. What did Murray think of the chances of a United Ireland? For a Belfast man, Murray was almost jovial: the British Isles should all be together; certainly Dublin would be welcomed back into the United Kingdom. Desperately the tellyman tried to put his question together again: but a united republican Ireland? Murray looked at the ground for a split second: "Niver," he said. And he's the man who had to resign for suggesting talks with unarmed Provos.

There. is, as Andy Tyrie, "supreme commander" of the UDA, discovered last week, a long way to go. He and his colleagues appar.ently demanded for a start that the SDLP give up its all-Ireland aims and accept Ulster's position within the United Kingdom. A rough beginning, but then they've had a rough five years. And they have begun to try. Meanwhile the UWC, hand on the strike lever, will listen to the voice of whoever suits it best. The Council is on record as wanting peace.

Rawle Knox, the distinguished foreign correspondent, now lives in Londonderry and writes regularly from there for The Spectator