Ulster

A lemon among Orangemen

Rawle Knox

The drumming of Brian Faulkner out of the leadership of the Unionist Party was duly sounded and the optimism of the steadfast has been dampened, though it smoulders still. In the end it may prove a good thing that the anachronistic Unionist Council, with its solid block from the Orange Order (acting to a man on the dictate of the Grand Master), its odd flavouring of wives of MPs, its unbalanced voting power among local associations and above all its vicious and sometimes venal lobbying, should no longer have the power to hold Faulkner to account whenever it wishes.

He has a lot of other things to do. Whether they can include building himself a new support from the floor in rural villages, as he promises, seems doubtful. The Unionist Council, despite its strange composition, did probably represent the majority of Protestant feeling when it ousted Faulkner; not because Faulkner had let the Protestants down, but because Craig, Paisley and company have raucously refused to allow them to hear what was up. That is either that the Protestants of Northern Ireland go it alone, which they know they cannot, or that they follow the course prescribed for them by London, in consultation with themselves and Dublin..

If they had taken the opportunities offered by that course to the full, they would by now have had the southern politicians shivering in their fancy shoes. But ever since they were besieged within the Derry walls in 1689, the Prods have believed that defence and defiance comprise a policy.

Brian Faulkner and Roy Bradford and his men have learned to look out beyond the ramparts, but at the moment there is little inspring within their view. For the northern Protestants, clumsy and at times unfeeling as their politics may have been, have now made concessions. At the same time they have watched their businesses being bombed and burned and have provided, at considerable personal risk, the bulk of what there is of a local law and order force. The IRA claims it has forced these concessions, but that is only in small part true. The trouble is that the northern Protestants have made all the concessions.

This was implied in Oliver Napier's open letter to the Dublin government at the end of last month. Napier is the leader of the Alliance Party, very much a junior partner in the new Stormont executive, but nevertheless the only party representing a joint, midway, CatholicProtestant viewpoint. "Your government has given us recognition," wrote Napier, "and that recognition makes a nonsense of those terms in your constitution which claim jurisdiction over our territory . . . Any suggestions by your politicians that the Sunningdale declaration is of no special significance will be taken by the people of Northern Ireland as a grave breach of faith. . ." That is a moderate northerner writing; and he goes on to say: "You must take urgent steps to have fugitive offenders who claim political motivation brought to justice . . . There is something else you could do immediately — make even stronger effotts to prevent border raids on this province."

These points are the heart of the matter as far as northern Protestants are concerned, as Faulkner knows best of all. On the eve of the Unionist meeting that voted him out (in effect; let it be clear he resigned) the Dublin government at last made a move to arrest quite a number of known IRA men in the border counties. "What seems to have happened," wrote the Irish Times naively several days later, "is that news of the raids was published in advance, and when the Gardai arrived, the men whom they sought were no longer at home."

I'll say it was published; a hint or two could have been discerned, without use of a magnifying glass, in the Irish Times. When the guards descended on their quarry in Fahan, across the Foyle in Donegal, not only did the forewarned fellas escape with guns drawn, they locked the guards in the house after them. In the event, of the men the Gardai did arrest, all but one were later released. That was the present of southern cooperation that Faulkner had to offer the Unionist Party when be was really up against it. The news from Dublin of constitutional attempts to block Sunningdale in the courts has hardly helped.

I was back in Dublin again the other week, and got the impression that government officials there thought the British at Sunningdale hadn't done sufficient homework on the proposed Council of Ireland, and from their point of view they are right. The Dubliners seem to have gone rather like an Indian delegation to an international conference, with a whole set of motions plus alternative clauses and sub-clauses ready for various shades of compromise. They found the British just hoping to get the damn council going and willing to wait and see how it would work out. What the British really wanted from Dublin, and the northern Protestants even more so, was some evidence of change of heart.

Garrett Fitzgerald, Ireland's intelligent and articulate Foreign Minister, assured an audience the other day that the future of the whole of Ireland was now in the hands of its own people. It is a true and sobering thought. Sometimes one feels that the British are the only people trying to get the Irish together. Putting that view in Dublin I was told, unmistakeably, that if only the British would shut up and clear out the Irish could settle their own affairs perfectly well themselves. Gandhi once expressed similar views, and the result of a rapid British withdrawal from India was nearly two million dead in Punjab alone. In Ireland the British Army is not guiltless; it's amazing what tension a bad battalion, or a bad field officer in a battalion can create in a tricky area by simple pig-headedness. But the three main political parties of the south, Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour, have all agreed to the unfortunate necessity that British troops are needed in the north for the time being. To hear those who voted for them talking, you would hardly think so.

It looks as though the opposition Fianna Fail, at its spring ard-fheis, will reject Sunningdale. That will be a pity, if only because Jack Lynch's spade work cleared so much of the ground for that conference. The sticking point will be one Napier put his finger on, the recognition of Northern Ireland. Liam Cosgrave would say that no formal recognition has been made, but an agreement is to be lodged at the United Nations, and that is too much for Fianna Fail, with de Valera still distinctly alive.

Rejection, even though Fianna Fail will call it renegotiation, as does Harold Wilson with the Common Market, will place the party in strange conjunction with Craig and Paisley. It will also give infinite encouragement to the IRA.

In the south they are at least regarding Sunningdale as something that happened. In the north, outside Faulkner's Executive alliance, it might have been a lost weekend. Paisley still occasionally talks of complete integration with Britain, and Craig of going it alone. Desmond Boal, an eminent QC who recently resigned the chairmanship of Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, has proposed an Amalgamated Ireland, which would consist of "a Federal Irish Parliament holding the kind of powers which were formerly reserved to Westminster under the 1920 Act together with a Provincial Parliament possessing the powers recently held by Stormont."

This has been welcomed solely by the Provisional Sinn Fein, of all people, which sees in it a reflection of its own Federal Ireland, with assemblies for Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught. There is one unmentioned difference. Boal's Ulster appears to be that of Northern Ireland's six counties; that of the Provos is the old true Ulster, including the predominantly Catholic counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan, now part of the Republic.

You might think from all this that little in political Ireland had changed. One thing has. Almost everyone now is conditioned — in hope or in dread — to some change in form of government. In the north the hope of Faulkner, and indeed of peace, are centred on the Executive showing it can get moving on its social programmes and that it is therefore worth supporting. The Protestants, who have seen so much go up in smoke, still do not want to commit the final hara-kiri of open rebellion, and would welcome any pudding Faulkner can bring to the table. But he will certainly need some kitchen help from Dublin, where they seem to think that all puddings come pre-packed, with the cooking done bY magic.

A letter-writer to a Dublin paper recently suggested that Rory O'Brady, of Provisional Sinn Fein, give up his play-acting on the border and go to live for a long spell in the north, preferably with a good Orange family. The same advice could be given to manY southern Irish politicians. They might find themselves as puzzled around here as the. British.