POLITICS

The Irish question: as good a time as any to ponder the rules of disengagement

MATTHEW PARRIS

A. a possible hung parliament looms, there is a sense in the Commons this week of a new readiness to listen to the Ulster Unionists. It must justify the contempt they feel for us.

In seven years as a government back- bencher I do not think I encountered more than a handful of MPs on either side who cared much what happened to Ulster. That excludes the Northern Ireland Members themselves, of course, but we did exclude them. We rarely spoke to them, nor they to us. They were United Kingdom MPs in name but not in behaviour: come not as parliamentarians but envoys, to belabour us with their concerns. They kept to them- selves. We hardly dined with them. One should have made an effort, I suppose, but the truth is they were not much fun and their separate status seemed comfortable to both sides.

As for the handful of mainland MPs who took an interest, most were for the Union. They would privately apologise for the sourness of their Ulster protégés but explain that outlooks do grow bleak in a minefield, and these people behaved better when they felt secure. We would nod sym- pathetically. It reminded me of my boy- hood in Africa, when my mother would try to take her black nationalist friends to white dinner parties.

Most of the rest of us went along, more or less, with the policy of her Her Majesty's Government, whatever that was — 'not giv- ing in to the men of violence' or something. But we tended to find, when Ireland was debated, that we had other things to do.

Plainly there was something amiss, not in Ireland — we knew something was amiss there — but here on the mainland. Here was a problem towards whose solution we were voting enormous sums and sending soldiers to die, and somehow we couldn't focus on it. Here was a provincial economy being run, hopelessly, upon theories which did violence to every tenet of our own party's beliefs, and we didn't care to discuss it. Here was living proof of all that Enoch had told us about the folly of trying to impose 'an alien wedge' upon an ancient race — and Enoch was representing the wedge!

I came to the view that if our Leader, Mrs Thatcher, had announced it as her opinion that Ulster must make its own way, there were around 50 colleagues who would protest, 50 who would bite their lips, and more than 200 who would confess it was what they had always thought but never liked to say. I stick to that assessment now.

I also concluded that nobody, including me, was going to be the first to voice such thoughts.

And so it was that, though from the day I entered Parliament I never had the slight- est doubt that Britain both must and even- tually will disengage from Ulster, I never said so. What would it have achieved? The whips would have bracketed this with the other reckless cause (that of homosexual equality) which I had espoused, and pro- nounced me insane. Insane not because they thought (or think) either cause ulti- mately hopeless, for whips are shockingly grown up, but because to pursue either yet would indicate lack of circumspection: to pursue both, lunacy.

Yet. The other conclusion I reached was that there is never a right time to propose disengagement from Ulster. If you do it during one of those occasional periods of terrorist inactivity and comparative peace when tension is low, people will say, 'For God's sake, we're winning. The terrorists' backs are to the wall. What kind of a time is this to stir things up? It will give the IRA heart.'

And if you propose disengagement now, this week, when violence is in the air, inno- cent citizens are dying and feelings run high, people will call you a coward — a traitor, even — someone who would under- mine resolution when our backs are to the wall and give comfort to the enemy.

I do not know who was the first person to suggest that Calais, which was part of Eng- land, was not worth the candle; or, nearly half a millennium later, that the wishes of

the majority in Hong Kong might not be paramount . . . but each will have had his moment of truth. For Ulster and me it came at Cambridge when an Ulster Protes- tant friend told me that if (as he thought might one day occur) Catholics should ever outnumber Protestants in Northern Ire- land, I must not suppose that the new majority should then rule. It would be nec- essary, he said, to relinquish the counties with the most Catholics, redraw the fron- tier, and carry on the fight.

The fight continues. When our grip upon what we hold is challenged by violence there is a store of analogy and moral rea- soning upon which those who urge us to tighten that grip may draw. We must not be cowards: we must uphold the rule of law, never reward the use of force. We must stand by those we cherish, protect our rep- utation for resolution, never count the cost of principle . . . and so on. These are appropriate to the fight against the IRA.

They were appropriate to the fight against the Mau Mau, and EOKA, Ben Bella, and George Washington. Journals and journal- ists — this magazine steadfast among them — purveyors of quality metaphor and rea- soned argument to the gentry, keep a ready stock.

Against these arguments a rival range of imagery and logic is arrayed. We must yield gracefully what we cannot keep, seek com- mon ground, avert a judgment of Solomon, choose ordered change before chaos, give a little line rather than lose the fish . . . these too are appropriate. Some thought them so when Napoleon, Hitler, Galtieri or Hussein were the enemy. Both ranges of argumen- tation can be used, and were, in every bat- tle we won, and every fight we relinquished. Like army chaplains, they are always pre- sent. They are never the real argument.

For, as the salvos, physical and verbal, are exchanged, quieter intellects stand back, and calculate. What are the costs? What are the benefits? What are the proba- bilities?

I have made my own calculations, for Ire- land. More MPs than you think, hundreds more, have made similar calculations: but very tentatively. They are waiting for a lead.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketch writer of the Times.

Simon Heifer will resume his column next week