IRELAND

The gelignite headache

LESLIE MALLORY

The latest innovation in the brisk street life of Belfast is a military device known as the jelly-sniffer. It is a portable backpack with a cylinder of the inert gas argon and an amplifier which buzzes like an enthusiastic Hoover at anybody who has been in contact with gelignite in the previous twenty-four hours. While inert gas is not to be spurned as a symbol of much Stormont oratory about the just society, it is the behaviour of the gelignite that is more to the point. It is virtually identical with the behaviour of Northern Ireland itself.

If you have to handle either for long it gives you an appalling headache. Both have a limited effective life. As they age they become more and more unstable. Towards the end of the decay process gelignite begins to sweat and exudes clusters of highly dangerous bodies which are so sensitive and unpredictable that the slightest friction may explode the lot. Thawing it may restore it to a kind of pseudo-equilibrium, but this is a risky way of buying a little extra time; all too often, far from deferring the ultimate bang, it has blown up the temporizers. To complete these similarities, I recall that among the shattering vintages of Nobel, Polar Ammon and Hercules there even passed through my military care a brand that came in an orange-coloured wrapper. As gelignite ,headaches go, the Six Counties crisis has developed from the acute to the chronic. After this summer, unless something tips us all out of the hammock, it will be into its fourth year. It has already occupied a period longer than from Dunkirk to Alamein, equal to the Spanish civil war, and shorter by only a few weeks than the trouble of the 'twenties up to the Anglo-Irish treaty.

It affects the relationship of three populations totalling almost sixty millions, within which may be found a spectrum of moral response ranging from a willingness to be killed to the shrugging blankness of the Hitlerian haus frau.

The Faulkner package of reforms presupposes a further long period of patient evolution, in which the rate of democratic demands is not to exceed the speed at which the Unionist fabric would begin to break up. This is like trying to synchronize a snail and a Chinese cracker. It will take more than a saline drip of sub-emancipa tory promises to make the Falls and the Bogside believe in Santa Claus. The three new committees (for social, industrial and environmental services) would allow Opposition members to have more participation in planning, but not in the central decision process: what it amounts to is democracy in an annexe. The law reforms, including a Director of Public Prosecutions and majority verdicts by juries in criminal trials, were not proposed by the Premier; they came in a Queen's Speech read by the Governor, a pointer to London origin. A senior conservative recently asked an Irish political editor in London: " Will it work?"

"It might," said this seasoned scrutineer, "if the opposition goes along with it, and if Faulkner can get it through, and if Paisley and Craig don't pull him down, and if the Provisionals give up their grip on the streets, and if the army .

" I am afraid," said the SC, "that you are being highly over-optimistic."

Along the Shankill Road this summer the Red Hand flag of Ulster outnumbers Union Jacks. When Terence O'Neill dismissed William Craig from his Cabinet he cited among other reasons Craig's UDI notions. And although Craig has now slid rather behind Paisley as the hard men's idol, there is without doubt some build-up towards a go-it-alone mentality in the poorer Orange quarters. They are unlikely to carry matters to the weird lengths of 1913, when they threatened to fight Home Rule by transferring their allegiance from England to some foreign Protestant prince (the Kaiser was sounded out and actually asked Carson to lunch in Hamburg). But while the UDI aspiration sounds ridiculous, it is perhaps a more genuine manifestation Of the unbiddable northern character than the Unionist middle class and its unending stress on being British. There was once a time when Belfast Protestants annually celebrated Bastille Day, and there is a stream of the Orange mind which muses still on revolutionary independence rather than provincial status. Come to that, I am not so sure that two independent Irelands would have been a worse interim formula than the ramshackle compromise that was wished on the island. I asked a friend in the City what the economic horizon might be if the North were to set up shop on its own.

"They'd be in a very nice position," he said. "So would we. We'd get a new export market which would help to balance our trade figures. They'd be able to offer foreign industries the same incentive as Dublin, which they can't do at the moment." A current survey in the Bow Group quarterly Crossbow applauds Dublin's remission of corporation tax on export sales as a key factor in making the Republic, together with the Mezzogiorno region of Italy, the best bet in Europe for direct investment. It will be interesting to see what happens to such groundbait schemes when Britain goes into the Market, for she dislikes them. And though she has sought endless reassurances on retention of sovereignty, she is also a great one for insisting on sporting rules, e.g. that all the chaps must play with the same size of bat.

The two major political parties in the Republic have passionately supported the Common Market because within it, they believed, lay the best hope of better relations, and eventually reunification, with Northern Ireland. In an interview at the end of June, however, Faulkner accepted "complete economic co-operation" with the Republic as a possibility, but flatly ruled out political co-operation — ever.

Ministers and senior civil servants in Dub lin are accustomed to take such declarations in their stride, particularly when made for public and party consumption, as this was. They understand Faulkner's knifeedge position and they ,know that doors are not always slammed quite so loudly in their more confidential contacts with the North. Optimism has carried them on. "We will go in. We will work it out. The North will see, and we will move closer together."

But in the last few weeks there have been growing signs that Jack Lynch's government may have to face a difficult struggle to wring approval from their own population for joining the EEC. The goahead depends on a national referendum due next year, and on the last two occasions when an issue was put to the country — the abolition of proportional representation — the vote was No. Now comes a public opinion poll survey published by the Dublin magazine This Week which shows a downward slide in favour of Market membership from 55 per cent of the voting population in 1969 to 48 per cent last February and 47 per cent at the moment. The main opposition has been cleverly assembled by the Common Market Study Group, which includes businessmen, university figures and some leading Republicans. The government will have to move fast with a counter-campaign if it is to diminish this influence. In the meantime there is no open indication of what Lynch's fallback policy on all-Ireland reunification may be if Market entry is voted down. Concentration on EEC preparations over several years has had the effect of making many formers of Dublin policy extremely foreign-orientated. This smashing of insular moulds has valuable implications in the search for a Six-County settlement, as I shall show. But it also encourages a certain blindness towards the domestic social problems of the Republic. Pressure cones are appearing throughout the South in reaction to the main volcano in the North, and some of them are hissing away in a most menacing fashion. Housing, wages, strikes, contraception, the role of the Church, armed guerrilla raids on banks, IRA explosions, Paisleyite explosions are all part df the pattern. Police powers are being reinforced, to an extent that worries many people, by a new Forcible Entry Bill and a re-introduction of the harsh Criminal Justice Bill. But here again, these measures are provoked by the existence and activities of extreme Republican movements which would virtually disappear in a reunified Ireland.

What then is the likelihood of a straight military solution to at least the immediate disorder in the North? I should say very little. And that estimate covers too the situation that would prevail if Faulkner were to fall and direct rule from Westminster were imposed. The streets do not change their shape or their nature because a proclamation is signed in a distant city. The ratio of security forces to population is already something like one to 130, which is about the same as in German-occupied Belgium in the 'forties. To increase that much further would be to make some woefully embarrassing admissions in the face of world and European opinion. "If you look at the geography of narrow streets in a highly built-up city, you will understand how difficult it is for police or army quickly to get to them," Faulkner said this week. "I couldn't give you a straight answer as to where the cash and the arms are coming from."

That, of course, is an acknowledgment of an intelligence failure, and it is not surprising. Since the army is more identifiable and more visible than the guerrillas, it is at an espionage disadvantage from the beginning. The ghetto-siege character of the Provisional strongholds makes them an almost impossible target for strangers to penetrate. Every IRA man I have ever met speaks at least some Irish, which is a foolproof medium for passwords and recognition signals, though a closed book to the British. The intelligence services in Northern Ireland have drawn heavily on their Aden experience: it must surely have equipped them to realize that you cannot out-spy the 'eye of the city,' that network of waiters, doorkeepers, drivers, porters who can tag a person across town without moving beyond the telephone. Nor is it easy to think oneself into the enemy's shoes in a place like Belfast. Training officers admit that students on intelligence courses are prone to have rather too British a viewpoint. They have a psychological resistance to foreign instructional material, and unless it is presented to suit their own tastes it does not get through to them effectively.

It is an odd thing, but it was out of British intelligence failures in Ireland in the 'twenties that service thinking was changed. Two majors, Colin Gubbins and Joe Holland, returned from that shambles convinced that regular troops could never beat a determined force of guerrillas unless they could "think guerrilla." It took them, naturally, decades to get anyone to listen but the end result was SOE, the Special Operations Executive which Gubbins commanded in 1940-45.

The people who are not being listened to nowadays are up in Manchester University, which has placed its department of war studies under the canopy of the social sciences, on the sensible grounds that war is a social aberration. There Major Michael Elliott-Bateman, with the. Burma and Malaya veteran 'Mad Mike' Calvert as a research fellow, is explaining how guerrilla troops tick — and that how to fight them is to develop formations in which Military and political awareness are integrated down to the lowest level. Among the models they are using are IRA classic routines from 1920.

So the circle turns, and the old lessons are ignored by commanders who imagine that a military solution must precede a Political one. Well, at the start of all this I met a captain who was rehearsing his gun and mortar teams on a breezy morning in County Down. Very fast, they were. But he stared morosely at his recoilless Worn bats and said, "What's the use of all this modern firepower? We all know bloody well we're never going to use it here." Shortly afterwards he volunteered for service somewhere in the Middle East in the hope that he might get a bang at less restricted marks. I believe he chose Trucial Oman. It could not have been Aden, for that inhospitable place is long emptied of his countrymen who believed in a military solution.

At the end of May John Whale of the Sunday Times, in a most human and perceptive article, wrote : "It is time to think the unthinkable in Ireland." The idea he canvassed was that of a constitutional conference among the leaders of Northern Ireland, the Republic and Britain.

Let us take that idea further and liken it to recent approaches to the problem of nuclear limitation. The rationale of the SALT talks was not to arrive, ''room, at comprehensive success. It was to explore what could be agreed about. It was to achieve the recognition of reality, short of agreement. It was a conference of probing. If this excellent formula were to be applied to a first-phase constitutional conference on the future of Northern Ireland, who would probe for England?

Few major news stories of our day have been so loutishly and superficially reported as this running crisis. As a consequence, there is a widespread assumption that the principal department of government concerned with a settrement would be the Home Office. This is a misapprehension tied in with the delusion of the military solution, the restoration of a state of grace called Law and Order by gritty folk-heroes in blue. The Home Office, however, is not empowered to negotiate with foreign countries, any more than the army is. It is not, contrary to popular thought, Reggie Maudling who would be chief British spokesman in a crisis and, hopefully, a conference so deeply involving the government of the Republic.

That role will fall to the Foreign Office. And for the past two years and more the Foreign Office has come to regard Ireland as an entity, a single rather than a double problem. I personally find this outlook encouraging and reassuring, for it at least is a guarantee that those who in time approach the discussion table will be obliged to do so in the spirit of statesmanship rather than as bouncers placating a rural mob.

In the autumn Jack Lynch will have seen Edward Heath and discussed the way forward. The Irish tragedy occupies the British Prime Minister's thoughts to a far greater extent than is generally realized; practically his first act on assuming office was to call for a full situation estimate on it. The two men should get along. They have many problems in common, apart from this one. Inflation in the Republic is rising at much the same dismaying rate as in Britain, and both leaders stand to lose popularity unless they can produce a gratifying coup outside the bread-andbutter area of domestic politics. Heath's long negotiating experience in the initial EEC days would harmonize quite well with that of the Dublin foreign affairs officials who have been engaged in similar dignified wrangling abroad. In such a context, it would be Faulkner who would be low man on the totem pole. Stormont, because of statutory limitations, has no power to conduct external policy of state, and thus of course no experience. This restriction may well have played its gloomy part in inducing the paranoid, locked-in viewpoint which in our time has made it so disappointingly hard for the North to get along with its political neighbours in the Republic.

A standing constitutional conference could be one way to undo these effects and establish a more enduring trust. A problem which has lasted for most of this century is not to be resolved in a one-shot meeting. After all, what is any Parliament but a continuing conference? It is in no way ' beyond the resources of the three governments to institute such a long-required mechanism. It would serve many of the ends which would be achieved in the more distant and hypothetical concept of a formal federation.

Were Northern Ireland to refuse to take part in such an experiment, an exasperated world would then be free to draw its own conclusions. For, in the last analysis, it is no longer the cohesion of an already fragile Unionist bloc that matters most; it is the unity, friendship and prosperity of the sister islands that a sane community must see as paramount.