BLIND TO THE OBVIOUS TRUTH

Geoffrey Wheatcroft argues that Westminster and Dublin seem incapable of realising that partition is the least bad solution to the Irish question

THIS SUMMER is the 25th anniversary of the disorder in Northern Ireland. On any possible view this is the worst failure of British government since the war: there have been more than 3,000 deaths, nearly 20,000 British soldiers are tied up in Ulster, the conflict costs the Treasury £3 billion a year. And it has no resolution in sight: one town after another in Ulster is blitzed, the City of London is made into a fortress and, whatever ministers say to the contrary, good judges reckon that the IRA are winning.

Not that there is a shortage of proposed solutions, in London and Dublin if not in the Province itself. Last week, Dick Spring, the Irish foreign minister, floated a plan of joint sovereignty over Northern Ireland, to be worked out by the British and Irish gov- ernments. The British Government isn't really in a strong position to denounce Mr Spring. His plan was summarily rejected by Sir Patrick Mayhew, as Mr Major had con- demned a similar scheme leaked from a Labour Party document; and yet joint sovereignty is only the logical conclusion of the principle which Mrs Thatcher's gov- ernment conceded in the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. With a fine disregard for democracy in Northern Ireland, Mr Spring wants his scheme to be validated by an all-Ireland referendum and implement- ed if necessary over the heads of the Ulster parties; and yet 'the British Govern- ment proposal for home rule for Northern Ireland', as the Times predicted last year, with asinine approval, 'will be imposed if it is not negotiated'.

Behind all this lies something else. There is a general belief that Northern Ire- land is a 'problem' which must therefore have a 'solution'. And there is as well a very widespread belief — sometimes con- scious, sometimes semi-conscious, some- times expressed, sometimes not — that the root of the 'Ulster problem' is the partition of Ireland.

Partition dates from Lloyd George's 1920 Government of Ireland Act; the Act was rejected by the Irish Republicans, who continued a policy of both passive and vio- lent resistance, but partition was accepted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 which created the 26-county Free State. The one part of Ireland where the 1920 Act became effective was the six-county Province of Northern Ireland which enjoyed, if that is the word, its own devolved parliament for half a century until Stormont was suspended in 1972.

Quite soon southern Irish politicians denounced the partition they had been obliged to accept in 1921. Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, first introduced by De Valera in 1937, claim formal sovereignty over the whole island, in antic- ipation of the 'reintegration of the nation- al territory'. Two years ago, the Supreme Court in Dublin ruled that this reintegra- tion was a 'constitutional imperative', and last April Albert Reynolds, the Irish Prime Minister, said that reunification remained his government's ultimate objective.

He isn't alone. A united Ireland is the policy of the American Democratic Party, at least when elections come round. On the Labour benches at Westminster, apart from the Northern Ireland spokesman Kevin McNamara with his plan for 'joint administration', there are Gerald Kauf- man, who argues that uniting Ireland is the best way to defeat the IRA, and Tony Benn, who thinks that partition was 'a crime against the Irish people'. But then across the political spectrum Lord Gowrie, once a Northern Ireland minister in Mrs Thatcher's government, believes that par- tition was 'not a good thing to happen to a country'; while a list of those who have publicly advocated a united Ireland includes Neal Ascherson, the Duke of Devonshire, Paul Foot, Max Hastings, Richard Ingrams and Peter Jay, showing if nothing else that this is not a question which divides people on neat political lines.

They might all be right. Partition might be a crime and a bad thing and the root cause of violence. Or possibly the reverse might be true; that the cause of the conflict is not partition but the refusal to accept it, a refusal to see the nature of the case so strong as to suggest the psychiatric notion of 'denial'.

Denial goes back a long way. The story of Anglo-Irish relations in the 19th century is English politicians' refusal to see that the Union of 1801 had failed. It had been rejected by the mass of the Irish people in three provinces, partly because, as every schoolboy used to know, Union wasn't accompanied by Catholic emancipation; the campaign for Catholic emancipation elided into the campaign for Home Rule; changes in the franchise, and notably the secret ballot, meant that more than 80 Irish Nationalists sat at Westminster; Home Rule was defeated in the Commons in 1886, in the Lords in 1893, and introduced again in 1912.

All this time, with a doggedness which now seems quite remarkable, none of the players in the drama would even contem- plate the possibility that partition could be a way out of the impasse. If Mr Benn's use of the word 'crime' suggests intention, mens rea, malice aforethought on the part of English politicians, then it is quite false. Through all the successive Home Rule crises, Unionists resisted partition as dog. matically as Nationalists. Ulster was no more than a device. When Lord Randolph Churchill had spoken of 'playing the Orange card' in 1886, it was a very apt metaphor. One card is played to win the

other three, in this case to keep all four provinces of Ireland in the Union. When Carson became leader of the Irish Union- ists in 1911, he said (in his native Dublin), `If Ulster succeeds, Home Rule is dead'; dead for all of Ireland, that is. And as late as 1914 the Unionist leader, Bonar Law, insisted that their position 'on that ques- tion [exclusion of Ulster, or partition] has never been in doubt. We always said that we are utterly opposed to Home Rule, with or without exclusion.'

`If Ulster succeeds': Ulster did succeed, but by using Ulster as a ruse the Unionists had outsmarted themselves in the process. When Salisbury had condemned Home Rule as a 'sentence of exile and ruin', he had specified its victims as 'all who have land and money to lose'. For him, in other words, Unionism meant the sacred cause of property, rather than of democracy, which he despised. And indeed in three provinces of Ireland democracy could scarcely be invoked on behalf of a Protes- tant minority against the mass of the peo- ple. Unionism had to take its stand on the ancien regime principles of legitimacy and prescription.

But in one province of Ireland Protes- tants were the mass of the people. Thanks to the 17th-century plantation, Ulster had acquired an entirely different character from the rest of Ireland. Republican dogma holds, in Gerry Adams's words, that 'geographically, historically and cul- turally, Ireland is one nation'. That is not how it struck intelligent visitors for hun- dreds of years past. The Frenchman Gus- - tave de Beaumont in the 1830s, the economist Nassau Senior in the 1860s, had both found two nations in the same island, in Senior's words, 'among the most dissim- ilar nations in Europe. One is chiefly Protestant, the other is chiefly Roman Catholic . . . the population of one is labo- rious . . . of the other indolent and idle . . . in the one the proprietors of the soil are connected by origin, by interest and by feeling with those who occupy it: in the other, they are, in many cases, strangers, and, in almost as many, enemies.'

The political implications of this didn't become clear until the age of popular nationalism and a broad franchise: once Parnell's party had swept the other three provinces and Unionists were returned to Parliament only from Ulster, 'Irish Union- ism' became 'Ulster Unionism' in practical political terms, however little Lords Salis- bury and Lansdowne wanted that. Even so, resistance to partition continued up to and through the Ulster crisis of 1912-14, and even after. In the summer of 1916, Cabinet decided that the 'permanent partition of Ireland has no friends', and in December 1919 Cabinet defined its policy as 'a united Ireland with a separate parliament of its Own, achieved without offending the Protestants in Ulster'.

Partition came about in the end despite the resistance of all parties, and it came about because history called the bluff of both sides in turn: the Unionists who had tried to deny self-determination to the Catholic majority in Ireland, and the Nationalists who tried to deny it to the Protestant majority in Ulster. And yet no one would accept history's verdict. The Free State, Republic since 1948, kept up an irredentist claim unmatched anywhere else in Europe. Modern Irish nationalism — the nationalism of the original Sinn Fein from which both the larger two par- liamentary parties in Dublin descend, as well as the nationalism of the present-day Sinn Fein and IRA — is based on two tenets: that Ireland is one nation; and that it is a Gaelic nation. These would be mutually exclusive propositions, even if either were true.

Hence Dublin's attitude to Northern Ireland since 1922 has been, and remains, contradictory and hypocritical. It is contra- dictory because it has perennially empha- sised the Catholic and Gaelic character of Ireland — see De Valera's Constitution throughout — while also claiming that the whole island is one nation. Sometimes De Valera said that (in the fatuous words of his hagiographer Lord Longford) the Ulster Protestants were 'all Irish, and equally dear accordingly'. But sometimes he let the mask slip. In 1966, on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, he extolled Ulster as the 'land of the O'Neills, the 0 Cathains, the MacDonnells, the Maguires and the MacGuinnesses'. To Ulster Protestants this was as unambigu- ous as it would be to the Albanians who are now the majority in Kosovo if a Ser- bian nationalist spoke of Kosovo as 'the land of Kobilovic'.

If De Valera could not see the contra- diction of his position, others could. Stephen Gwynn was a Catholic Nationalist of the old school, Home Rule MP for Gal- way. In 1918, while his own brand of nationalism was being destroyed (for largely irrelevant reasons) by Sinn Fein's brand, Gwynn said, 'If Ireland as a nation means what De Valera means by it, then Ulster is not part of that nation.' Three- quarters of a century later, that remains the last word on the subject.

Dublin is hypocritical because most Irish people don't want 'reunification'. Republi- can rhetoric skips over, after all, the fact that Ireland had never been an indepen- dent national state before 1922, and it has never been politically united in its history except under the English Crown. More to the point, most people in the Republic understand instinctively what J.J. Lee says in his monumental history of 20th-century Ireland. Every new country with which independent Ireland was coeval was beset with the same problems of communal con- flict; the fates of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia speak for themselves. Ireland, as Professor Lee says, solved the problems `by the simple device of exporting them to the North'.

Still, Dublin's policy towards 'the North' is almost a triumph of honesty compared with the policy (if it can be called that) of successive British governments since parti- tion. In practical terms, the 1921 Treaty had superseded the 1920 Act, and the wise course would have been to return Northern Ireland to the status quo ante, governed from Westminster like Yorkshire or Wales. That was how the six counties (along with the other 26) had been governed before 1914, and that was what Unionists said they wanted. Instead, British politicians refused to accept that verdict of history; Northern Ireland got its unwanted Stor- mont statelet, with lamentable conse- quences.

Meantime, the British turned their backs on Northern Ireland, helped by the Speak- er's fateful ruling 70 years ago that the Commons could not discuss the internal affairs of the Province. But the British never came to terms either with the fact of Irish statehood. The official mentality of denial — if not schizophrenia — is well illustrated by the 1949 Ireland Act, passed by the Attlee government in response to the declaration of the Republic (and its departure from the Commonwealth) in Dublin a year before. The Act recognises the existence of the new state, but then goes on to say that 'the Irish Republic is not a foreign country'. And indeed no Westminster government ever since has quite managed to grasp that the Irish Republic might be what it claims to be, a foreign country — and that by the same token Northern Ireland might be part of the United Kingdom, to be treated like any other. (Instead, the Conservative Party campaigns for the vote of Irish labourers in England, but refuses to campaign for British votes in Ulster.) Hence every 'initiative' over the last 20 years has one after another failed, and all of them based on the same false premises. Politicians instinctively think in terms of problems, to which (in their vanity) they suppose they themselves have the answers. Like his predecessors, Sir Patrick Mayhew believes this; he cannot grasp what Conor Cruise O'Brien meant when he wrote, 'What solution to the problem do I envis- age? None. The language of "problem" and "solution" is inappropriate to the case. What we have here is a conflict, which is likely to last as the island of Ireland con- tains both a large Ulster Protestant com- munity and a significant determined minority of Irish Republicans.' In those circumstances, it is not only impossible to satisfy the maximal demands of the extremists of either tribe, dark Green or dark Orange; it isn't even possible to satis- fy the minimal political demands of both tribes at the same time.

The Government's policy is to arrange some form of internal settlement, however much experience suggests that one can't and won't work. If Westminster has its way, there will again be home rule for Northern Ireland, though home rule with a difference, carefully designed to avoid the normal course of democratic elections. At the same time as that, everything is done (in an essentially patronising way, one might say) to ingratiate and buy off the 'minority community' in the hope that they will vote for nice Mr Hume instead of nasty Mr Adams. Hence the huge sums of taxpayers' money chucked at Ulster. Hence Sir Patrick's Coleraine speech in December stressing how 'legitimate' the `aspiration to a united Ireland' is ('We can hardly fail to have a profound respect for men like O'Connell, Parnell and Joe Devlin').

Hence his even more extraordinary interview with the German weekly Zeit in April: 'Many people think that we won't let Northern Ireland out of the kingdom. If I'm honest — with pleasure (mit Hand- kuss).' And the Ulster Protestants are accused of paranoia. Reading the North- ern Ireland Secretary, is the present mood of anxiety and betrayal among unionists really any wonder? And would it be sur- prising if nationalists reading him decided that the rational course was to vote Sinn Fein, or even join the IRA, to give one last push before receiving Sir Patrick's valedic- tory kiss of the hand?

There is only one course British politi- cians refuse to contemplate even as a remote possibility: integrating Northern Ireland and governing it like any other part of the United Kingdom. There is some misunderstanding about this. Inte- gration does not mean saying that North- ern Ireland shall 'never' leave the United Kingdom. All political institutions are temporary expedients, including the Unit- ed Kingdom and the Irish Republic. It may be that one day a majority in North- ern Ireland will want to join the South, and that will be that. There are after all plebiscites taken at regular intervals, known as general elections. The Catholic proportion of the Northern Ireland popu- lation is increasing, partly for a sombre reason: not now so much a differential in birthrate as the exodus of Protestants, especially young people, from the Province, which itself marks a success for the IRA's unstated but unmistakable poli- cy of ethnic cleansing.

'But in view of your previous good character, Mr Hyde, I'm going to let you go.'

Perhaps one day a majority of MPs from Northern Ireland will reject the Union. But, until a majority in Northern Ireland does want to leave the kingdom, the demo- cratic case for partition remains unassail- able, and the pragmatic case for the full integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom unarguable. Integration guarantees both factions what they deserve rather than what they want: the Protestants their connection with, and protection by, the Crown (rather than the freedom to oppress Catholics), the Catholics the equal- ity under the law which their co-religionists after all enjoy in England and Scotland (rather than the right to force a million Unionists out of the country those people want to live in). Partition was not a mysti- cally perfect solution, not the best answer . to the Irish question; only the least bad answer.

In the same way, full integration is not a perfect solution to 'the Ulster question' but only the least bad remedy. It is certain- ly better than colonial direct rule, which the Province has had for 20 years; and it is better than the chimera of devolved gov- ernment which so hypnotises Westminster politicians. It stares the Government in the face; but they cannot, or will not, see it.