POLITICS
Mr Brooke: too clever by half, but not quite clever enough
NOEL MALCOLM
r Peter Brooke, the Northern Ire- land Secretary, belongs with Lord Whitelaw in one of the most select categor- ies of politicians: those who hide their shrewdness under a cloak of old buffer- dom. It is a case of fox posing as ox. Listening to him replying to questions in the Commons on Monday about the killing of three betting-shop raiders in Belfast, I found the illusion almost complete.
All the standard stiff phrases were on parade (It would not be proper for me to comment at this stage', 'The House would not expect me to comment on operational matters', etc), and the extra element of vague, platitudinous uplift was conveyed in a wonderful formula: 'a continuing ad- vance in political development'. Now there is a phrase which can fit all eventualities like a sort of universal joint. It might equally well be 'a political advance in continuing development' or 'an advancing development in political continuation', or any other combination of the above.
The art of governmental rhetoric in Northern Ireland is twofold. It consists of either dressing up the continuation of old policies as the development of exciting new ones, or vice versa. Sometimes — this requires a real master of the genre — it consists of doing both at once, in such a way that no one can tell what the Govern- ment is doing, if anything at all.
That is what Mr Brooke managed to achieve in his widely reported speech in Bangor, County Down, last week. `London-Dublin deal to abandon Anglo- Irish pact', said the front-page headline in one English newspaper, Having now care- fully re-read the text of the speech several times, I can honestly report that every sentence in it is a reiteration of old, familiar government policy: the Govern- ment would like to see moves towards devolved government in Northern Ireland, it believes that this is impossible without dialogue and consent between the major parties in Ulster, it regards the Dublin government as having a legitimate concern for nationalist interests in Northern Ire- land, but it rules out any fundamental change in constitutional status that is not endorsed by a majority of the Ulster people, and so on and so forth. As for the idea that matters transferred to a new, devolved administration would formally cease to be considered by the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, that is not a welshing on the Anglo-Irish Agreement. On the contrary, as Mr Brooke took care to emphasise, it was one of the provisions of the Agreement itself, put there with the express intention of inducing reluctant Ulster politicians to co-operate in a de- volved government again.
So were the headline-writers wildly over- reacting? Not necessarily. It all depends ,what kind of code you think Mr Brooke was talking in. At the simplest coded level, the very fact that he kept protesting that he was saying nothing new was a sign that he wanted his audience to think that he had some major new development to excuse or defend. Or, more subtly, his speech was perhaps designed to make something new happen by suggesting that it did not have to be so very new after all — emphasising, that is, that there was a ready-made welcome for new developments already prepared in the Government's old policies.
When the leaders of the Unionist parties last had formal talks with Mr Brooke in August, their discussions ended on a note of virtual stalemate. They told him that the Anglo-Irish Agreement must be replaced by some other, more acceptable arrange- ment, and insisted that the implementation of the Agreement would need to be sus- pended for any talks about devolution to go ahead. The ball was left in Mr Brooke's court to see if any such concessions could be got out of the two interested parties who actually support the Agreement: the SDLP and the Dublin government.
If either of those bodies had agreed to a major shift in position, they would be admitting it by now (which they are not). Indeed, Dublin has a special reason to favour and publicise new thinking on Northern Ireland: now that Mr Haughey is due to spend his six months as EEC President whizzing round waving his magic wand at the problems of Eastern Europe and the unification of Germany, it will be embarrassing if his government fails to make any progress on the similar but older problems in its own back yard. One senior Unionist politician told me he suspected that, far from softening the ground for a secret Anglo-Irish deal already agreed on, Mr Brooke's speech was designed partly as a blocking move to prevent the Irish from jumping in with some independent new initiative of their own.
But Dublin is not, as Unionist politicians are all too well aware, the prime target that the Northern Ireland Office has in its sights. Mr Brooke and his colleagues have spent the last four or five months engaging in the usual psychological warfare against the Unionist parties. First he tried to bully them towards the devolution conference table with some ill-judged remarks about the impossibility of a military solution. Then he reverted to the traditional North- ern Ireland Office tactic of trying to play off the junior Unionist politicians against their seniors, courting the rising generation of councillors or candidates and encourag- ing them to feel impatient with the intransi- gence of their leaders.
The real message of Mr Brooke's speech was addressed to Messrs Paisley and Molyneaux. It told them, first of all, that their supporters were ready for new prog- ress on devolution, and that only they were holding things up; and secondly, it signal- led that gradual devolution of the kind provided fot in the Anglo-Irish Agreement could be dressed up, if they so wished, as a gradual abandonment of the Anglo-Irish Agreement itself.
With both stick and carrot so expertly applied to them, the Unionist leaders must seem like very stubborn donkeys to remain standing where they do. And yet in private conversation, senior Unionists are surpri- singly open-minded and genuinely willing to give Mr Brooke the benefit of the doubt. What holds them back is not blind stub- bornness but a rational understanding of the underlying nature of the Agreement.
Mr Brooke seems to believe that the Agreement can more or less wind itself up in accordance with its own principles. But that is not what they believe in Dublin. As Mr Peter Barry put it, summing up for the government in the original debate on the Agreement in the Dail in 1985:
Whether or not there is devolution, the Intergovernmental Conference will continue to deal with human rights, justice, law and order, questions of identity and culture: in other words, all the most difficult and sensitive issues in the North.
If Mr Brooke really thinks that fulfilling the goals of the Anglo-Irish Agreement will satisfy the desires of those who want t0 abolish it, he should do the simple thing and abolish it anyway. In these circuity stances, the best sort of 'new initiative' and this at least should appeal to ills, secretly foxy mind — is to get rid of an old initiative.
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