Ulster Letter
The unloved intruders
Rawle Knox
On Thursday before Low Sunday they descended on Northern Ireland. The bombers for once lay low, but Harold Wilson, Enoch Powell and a BBC-NOP survey, broadcast with solemn trumpeting, all arrived at once. Of the three, Enoch Powell made most sense, but his logic was not that which his Orange listeners wanted to hear. Wilson repeated his Government's promise that the 'men of violence' would not be allowed to blast their way to the conference table; he was clearly in Belfast to revive the morale of Brian Faulkner's confused Unionist Rump. The Prime Minister was not at his most confident, nor even his glibbest. He did manage to convey that, though his government stood four square behind the Sunningdale Agreement, that agreement might possibly be squeezed to a slightly different shape. That was not merely Wilsonian; it was prudent. Sunningdale is beginning to look very sick from here. The Premier's bedside manner was hearty enough to satisfy Liam Cosgrave down in Dublin; and also to encourage Roy Bradford, one of Faulkner's more steadfast men, to hope that the Council of Ireland, as envisaged at Sunningdale, would undergo some surgery. There was little new in all that, and though, after Wilson's visit, some in Belfast look forward to tougher security measures, they also remember Stanley Orme had told them there could be no military solution. Here lies a paradox. If there can be no parleying with the IRA, and no military campaign against it of sufficient ferocity to ensure real victory, then the IRA must (and does) feel that the best policy is to carry on as before. Of course there is talking going on behind the scenes; but the IRA feel no pressure painful enough to make it soften demands which the British could never accept. This is a campaign such as the IRA has not fought before; a campaign without political goal, because there is none. It aims at laying waste the commercial structure of Northern Ireland, in which it has no interest, and in capturing the adolescent emotion of Catholic youth to such an extent that the young become ungovernable. The IRA has not the power to achieve the first, though it can weary and exasperate both Ulster Protestants and British troops into political folly. The second they have accomplished, with the counter-effect that in many Protestant areas youth is in the same case, ranged on the other side. Trampling around this murky jungle we have the British army, restrained, whatever Merlyn Rees may say, by political considerations that range from the safety and amity of the local population to the likely reaction of Dublin and even Washington. The only reinforcement provided for victory is a war-horse named Sunningdale, ridden by Harold Wilson, bred and trained by Edward Heath. Less and less does it look the horse for the course.
Sunningdale certainly doesn't carry Enoch Powell's money, but in Belfast he too found himself up against a paradox. The Orange Loyalists still fervently wish to remain subjects of the Queen, but just now they are not at all in love with Westminster, or Whitehall, or the forces of the crown serving in Northern Ireland. Recent Protestant press comment about the British Government and its soldiery has been as damning as anything an Irish Republican could have written. Though it is the IRA that still shoots at the British troops on the streets, it is the Protestants now, far more loudly than the Catholics, who demand that the army withdraw, so that 'loyal Ulstermen' can finish the job themselves. Enoch Powell wisely ignored that trend. He was roundly cheered when he savaged Edward Heath's Irish policy, but less enthusiastically followed as he called for Ulster to share in 'the undivided sovereignty' of a central British Parliament. In essence, he was saying that Northern Ireland should be an integral part of Britain as are Scotland and Wales, but that is not the way the Ulster Protestants want it; indeed, they would be happy to see Scotland and Wales each with a tight little Assembly run as Stormont was in the days of Unionist content.
The BBC-NOP survey showed, not surprisingly, that a majority of Protestants would like to see Stormont back as it used to be. It showed a lot of other things as well, but nothing so convincingly as that the people of Northern Ireland are still a very muddled lot. For once I agreed with Ian Paisley, who said that he never set much store on opinion polls, even when they favoured him. If seventy-four per cent of the people of Northern Ireland approve of power-sharing in the Executive. I would like to have their definition of the words 'power' and 'sharing'. There are plenty of Protestants, for instance, willing to share power with Catholics who are not Republicans, but that leaves precious few Catholics.
In Northern Ireland now, there are not so many neat compartments into which people can be fitted and labelled. Even Enoch Powell's fond audience contained Unionists of different and changing persuasions; changing because there is no certainty for them any more, only a guessing game as to which is the best leader to follow. At the other end of the scale there is something close to anarchy. A quite amoral society exists for which there is no political solution; it needs either a prophet or a military governor. In the middle, people have stopped talking about Sunningdale except in the genuine sorrow one has for the good departed.
The army, Harold Wilson said, will stay in Northern Ireland. Since it is to do so, it would
assist both the ordinary soldier and the government's political problems in Northern Ireland if the military intelligence were to conduct its operation with more intelligence. (I include the police Special Branch.) There are those in the Catholic community, even in the heavily saturated IRA areas, who are still arguing that killing Offen's god cannot be the answer. It takes a lot of courage and a power of conviction; but because there is much courage and conviction in Ireland they are listened to. On Easter Sunday a Coldstream Guards officer, in flamboyant costume that someone hoped would look tourist-style, was taking photographs in Bogside of the traditional Sinn Fein procession. He was spotted by some of the marchers, chased, cornered and shot well within view and rifle range of British soldiers on the Derry city walls. The soldiers didn't know there was an officer on plain clothes duty down there. I was talking to a Creggan woman of the craziness of the orders that sent that officer into Bogside (and on his bravery) and she said But even so, they should never have taken a life". Then she started in on the case of Lennon, found dead in that Surrey lane on Easter Saturday. "Now," she said, "we haven't any argument against the Provos left. If we say they play dirty tricks, they say 'look what we're up against with the British'." The impact of the Lennon case amongst those few who are trying to talk a sick community back to sense cannot be exaggerated. Already, as one Protestant newspaper columnist wrote, 'a majority of those north and south' believe there is much truth in the Littlejohn confessions. That is true, I think, though Littlejohn is a convicted criminal and presumably has little to lose by lying. Lennon made his deposition after he was acquitted of a crime, and before he was murdered. That is a great difference. Even a man who was giving me a convincing exposition of how Lennon must have been killed by the IRA, finished by saying "but what does it matter? In England the police are investigating the police again, and no-one here will believe them."
You discover in a society like this that people who are busy being against the authority still have a basic respect for the law, but when they can convince themselves and others that 'they' are playing just as foul as 'us' all that respect goes.
People in Northern Ireland talk about the dirty tricks, when they are not talking about money. They do not talk about whether they expect a United "Ireland in the foreseeable future (note that NOP survey), but about what to do for the sister's nephew who is on the run from the police, or the delay in Government compensation for the shop that was blown up eighteen months ago. And the dirty tricks. Some of that will have filtered through to Harold Wilson and Enoch Powell (if not to NOP) though perhaps less than enough. The whole province needs a breath of fresh air, which can only come from beyond however weary the lungs of Dublin and London may be, together, truly together, they might achieve a gasp sufficiently powerful. There was nothing new in what Harold Wilson or Enoch Powell had to say, though the latter obviously had more scope. There was nothing new in• what the NOP told the Northern Irish it thought they were thinking The six counties need other ideas and are toc tired to produce their own. It is not difficult tc fly across from England and make an inspec tion, a speech or a survey. It is wearing to thi bone to live in a limitless atmosphere of sud den death, even if one has not been personall■ threatened. I was a prisoner of war to tilt Japanese and we never knew when o whether we would get out. For those will can't emigrate, it feels like that in Northen Ireland now.
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