Ulster

The great illusion

T. E. Utley

No prizes will be offered for a correct prediction of the outcome of Mr Whitelaw's conference of the Northern Irish political parties at the end of next month. It is predestined, one might almost say scheduled, to fail. Its function is ritualistic. It is designed to meet the requirement that every chance of reaching a negotiated settlement should manifestly be seen to have been exhausted before, as is inevitable, a settlement is imposed by Brittain.

Of course, it meets this requirement only in the barest and most formal way. It is nothing short of fantastic to suppose that a conference of politicians elected in Ulster four years ago is likely to represent current Ulster opinion. Many of these politicians, the whole of the SDLP and Alliance contingents for example, have changed their political labels since they were elected. In the last four years, Ulster has been engaged not only in a bloody civil war but in a passionate debate about the foundations of politics. New parties and new movements have emerged and there have been tentative flirtations between historic enemies. Anyone who really wanted to know what Ulster thought today would wait upon elections.

Mr Whitelaw's solution, however, already exists. It consists of a number of unnallenged assumptions on which the who.e of British policy towards Ulster has for some time rested. The first and most elementary of these (it represents nothing more than a solemn resolution to abstain from doing what it is physically impossible to do) is that the Protestant population of the north cannot be simply handed over to the Republic. This cuts out Irish unity within any calculable period. The second is that the solution must contain no ingredient directly offensive to any of the sacred cows of non-violent Irish republicanism. This means in practice that the settlement must be patently if not professedly temporary, that it must leave the door open to peaceful unification and that it must not, in the first instance at least, return the control of internal security to any assembly dominated by the elected majority.

The one common element in the political programmes of all interested Irish parties (Unionists, Catholic opposition and Mr Lynch) is the existence of some sort of regional assembly. Out, therefore, must also go the logical, Powellite alternative to Irish unity — total integration in the United Kingdom. How many formal gestures of negotiation Mr Whitelaw may feel it necessary to make before his masterly compromise is announced cannot be foreseen; but the terms of the compromise are already plain. There will be no return to the imperial pomposities of Stormont; no more virtual county councillors strutting about calling themselves Right Honourables; but there will be a regional assembly comparable in some ways with the

Greater London Council and charged with substantial duties in such matters as health, housing and education which, with their charming naivety about all things Irish, British politicians regard as pleasantly uncontroversial.

Some sort of intellectual backing for this compromise is supplied by a study just published under the title The Ulster Debate by the Institute for the Study of Conflict*. It is a helpful little book which, without saying anything decisive, gives a courteous acknowledgment to every opinion, wise or foolish, which has been thrown up about Ulster in the last four years. Its only excursion into the realms of sheer political lunacy is given unfortunate prominence in an appendix contributed by Sir Frederick Catherwood who, as a former Director-General of the NEDC, speaks with authority on the pathology of moribund institutions. His quaint little idea is to provide that the new regional parliament shall not be able to enact any laws at all without the approval of a twothirds majority. To do him credit he does envisage the possibility that under such a system the republican opposition would block virtually all legislation. If that were to happen, he would allow an appeal to Westminster. By this means, Direct Rule would undoubtedly be preserved, though in a form rather more productive of administrative anarchy, hostility in Ulster and exasperation at Westminster than the present version has been.

Oddly enough, this strange proposal (from which the group's rapporteur, Mr Moss, politely disassociates himself) appears as the climax to a book which shows real if intermittent understanding of a few crucial facts about Ulster. The first of these is that the civil war is not simply going to end but is going to remain at the very least latent and more probably sporadic for a very long time, a time which it would be more prudent to measure in decades than in years. Just as the progress towards reconciliation and smooth government will fluctuate with the successes and failures of terrorism, so the prospect of containing and subduing terrorism will depend largely on the strength and efficiency of political institutions. What a country in a state of perennial civil strife needs is not the bland assurance that all possibilities are open, that no doors are shut, that discussion is forever open-ended; what it needs is the certainty of political limits which will .be enforced against all comers.

Britain neither wants to provide this framework of security for Ulster indefinitely nor is capable of doing so — two facts again which Mr Moss fully understands. It is unthinkable, for instance, that Northern Ireland could be effectively governed for the next half-century without at least the access to emergency powers, such as the power to create special courts and to intern, which the Republic has always found it necessary to keep on its statute book.

The inescapable Hobbesian inference is that the majority in Northern Ireland must be permitted and equipped to supply its own internal security. Many fear its own obvious capacity to do so; none can rationally doubt it. The premise of British policy must therefore be the need to restore something stronger not weaker than Stormont, something less vulnerable to the weakness, ineptitude, ignorance, mental confusion and political dishonesty of the modern Conservative Party at Westminster as well as to the hypocrisy of the Labour Party and the corrupt bargains with Irish rebels on which that party's electoral strength largely depends.

It might indeed be thought profitable for Britain to grant dominion status plus a handsome subsidy to Ulster and wash her hands of the whole tiresome business. The objection to this course of action is nonetheless valid for being purely moral. We have an obligation to the Catholic minority of Ulster from which neither the violence of a substantial part of that minority nor the propensity of almost all of it to lie about the oppressions to which in the past it has been subjected can absolve us. That obligation can only be discharged by entrenching all such minority rights as are compatible with stable government (including of course the franchise) in statutes at

Westminster. •

This indeed would not be adequate if anything like the past hegemony of the Unionist Party in Ulster were to be restored; but that is already irretrievably shattered. The introduction of proportional representation at elections, the birth of new parties, the internal divisions of the Unionists, all make its re-establishment impossible.

Of course, to this kind of realistic solution there is one overwhelming political obstacle. Would it not amount to reviving something very like the old Stormont? Would it not mean taking sides? Would it not mean positively refusing to add more to the concessions already extorted by violence and civil disobedience? Would it not look something like a return to Metternich and the principle of legitimacy?

For the past 150 years, radicals have successfully sold to the English conservative mind the axiom that no revolution must ever be allowed wholly or even substantially to fail, that victory is only rendered morally tolerable when it is followed by the surrender of the victor. The application of that principle in Ireland today can produce only anarchy and tyranny, but after all it is also being applied in Britain on a smaller scale and with what in the end are likely to be similar consequences. One day we shall deserve and get our Whitelaw.

*The Ulster Debate (Bodley Head, 95p).