A channel for their loyalty

John Biggs-Davison

A Place Apart Deryla Murphy (John Murray £5.50) Dublin from Downing Street John Peck (Gill & Macmillan £6.25) A Place among the Nations: Issues of Irish Foreign Policy Patrick Keatinge; (Institute of Public Administration, Dublin £11.55) Deryla Murray must have something of the devil-may-care courage of Lady Hester Stanhope. But whereas the latter settled down among the Druse, Miss Murray is more of a Bedou. She has inspected Ethiopia, albeit not then an admitted exponent of Red Terror, from a mule and on foot.

It is now the turn of the tribes of Ulster. An accomplished listener, Miss Murphy investigates with perception and true sympathy. If some passages in A Place Apart betray a certain gullibility, they are outweighed by the honesty of this 'tough woman in trousers', as the authoress was described in a bar on the Border.

Exactly a week after 'Bloody Sunday' in Derry, the 'scenario' for which might have been taken from Mai ighella's Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, troops and Civil Rights marchers glowered at each other in Newry with mutual apprehension. Fortunately, all ended with little more than a 'Noble Duke of York' to and fro in the Derrybeg housing estate. I crossed the barricades to chat to a demonstrator. I asked what civil rights were now lacking in Northern Ireland. Examples were given in reply of discrimination against Catholics; they were culled from the 1930s! Miss Murphy suggests that devotion to the 'fight against terrorism' obscures and breeds indifference to grievances and injustice that are 'causes of that 'terrorism': In fact, the injustice and grievances that concerned the decent members of the Civil Rights Movement, a number of whom for a time were Unionists, and were grist to the subversive mill of NICRA's Communist leadership and of its IRA manipulators, have long been remedied, — 'long' by an English, not an Irish, computation of time.

Unrighted wrongs can provoke violence. It does not follow that all those who resort to violence have justice on their side. This assumption is often made in a Western World of compromise and appeasement Where a morbid sense of guilt has replaced a healthy sense of sin. The West accepts its enemies definition of such terms as 'imperialism', 'liberation', 'oppression'. Yet it is the terrorist who is the tyrant. The guerrilla is a folk hero is many lands. h'ilss Murphy brings out, from exchanges in

South Armagh and elsewhere, how this is pre-eminently the case in Ireland. The tradition is such, and the songs are such, that the old and the new, the historical and the spurious, are easily confused and the latter-day IRA are seen in the same light as the famous heroes of past troubles. The truth is thus subtly but grossly distorted.

Miss Murphy also misunderstands the role of the Army in Ulster. It is not a 'Peace Keeping Force' serving as a buffer between tribes and factions. Northern Ireland is not Cyprus. The Army is acting in support of the civil power whose civil police are bringing the gangsters to book with increasing success, without regard to the colours they brandish and smirch. Miss Murphy was persuaded that the troops 'often mis behaved'. Yet it is not only in South Armagh that 'accuracy does not always flourish'. There is no propagandist like an Irish republican. Senator Conor Cruise O'Brien observed in 1972 that 'it naturally was, and is, the practice of Sinn Fein to build up any instance of bad behaviour by a British soldier into as big an atrocity as possible'.

Miss Murphy blames Protestant intolerance rather than Nationalist intrans igence for the disaffection of many North ern Catholics who refused to acknowledge the old British sovereignty as loyalists in the South accepted, however sadly, the new sovereignty in Dublin. At least Carson set the right example. 'Let us take care to win all that is best among those who have been opposed to us in the past.' In the "bad old days" of Unionist ascendancy only two fifths of the total Catholic vote would be cast for anti-Partitionist candidates; and Unionists came close to winning an absolute majority in the strongly Catholic Counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh and Londonderry.

George Wyndham, the Chief Secretary of Land Purchase, complained that the Irish had too seldom been given a channel for their loyalty. In my first political speech in Northern Ireland and on latef occasions put it to Unionist audiences that Northern Irish Catholics should be given 'a channel for their loyalty' at all levels of their party.

Miss Murphy recalls attempts to bring this about. They failed. The late Brian Faulkner told the Victoria Unionist Association in 1972 that Catholic citizens must be persuaded that they were wanted not just as voters but as candidates and public representatives. He appointed a Catholic to his Cabinet; but Dr Newe is not a party man.

The Orange Order, with which Miss Murphy deals critically but kindly, is not the only factor causing Catholic Unionists to lie low. Many have found a non-sectarian and pro-Union niche in the Alliance Party. This however resembles the Liberal more than the Conservative Party, and Bernadette Devlin, among others, has ruefully noted the conservative convictions of the Catholics. These are considerations important to the future of that Unionism which history and philosophy have allied to the Conservative and Unionist Party on this side of the water.

Miss Murphy understands the peculiar Ulster quality common both to Catholics and Protestants. It is older than Partition, older too than the Plantations. It goes back not to Carson but to Cu Chulainn. Sir John Peck, too, grasps that Ulster is special. What he modestly calls 'a hurried review of Irish history' is admirable. But he loves, and lives in, the South of Ireland; and, alas, does not seem to love the North.

Six options for a Northern Ireland 'solution' are examined. Sir John favours an Anglo-Irish Council, which could include Northern Ireland representatives. The Common Market is extinguishing the Border as an economic frontier. It remains the frontier of the United Kingdom. Sir John's European zeal carries him away. He sees direct elections to the European Parliament leading to the progressive integration of the member states of the European Community, the surrender of 'more and more of their traditional sovereignty' and a virtual 'federal solution to the Northern Ireland — Britain-Republic relationship'.

Sir John does not claim that this would solve the question of partition; so the argument is not clear. Neither Benelux nor the EEC has much affected the problems of Fleming and Walloon, or of Corsica. A 'Europe of regions' is a theoretical proposition; the European reality is the nation state. So the basis of 'Anglo-Irish' cooperation is mutual recognition of the two sovereignties within the British Isles.

A Place among the Nations is a more striking title than Dublin from Downing Street; but it makes less lively reading. Dr Patrick Keatings is a lecturer in political science at Trinity and there teaches international politics. He traces the evolution of Irish foreign policy from the Free State, whose statesmen played a notable part in the formulation of Dominion equality one with the other and with the United Kingdom, to the Republic whose representatives have already taken an important role in the shaping of the European Community. Dr Keatinge also sets out the mechanics of his country's eXternal relations.

At the end of his useful book he briefly discusses the notion of a British Isles Confederation which, in various forms, has appealed to men as different as Joseph Chamberlain and, in our own day, William Craig. Whatever the future of the Community — and it would be well to think less of the political unity of Europe than of Ireland — a special relationship between Downing Street and Dublin will remain necessary to both.