ASPECTS OF ULSTER
By CYRIL RAY
T0 reach Belfast by way of Dublin is to be tempted into unfair comparisons. The industrial town built by Victorian business- men—a town not so much actively ugly as passively tasteless—after a capital city built by eighteenth-century aristocrats ; the grandiose Banker's Georgian of the Northern Ireland Government buildings at Stormont after the graces of Leinster House ; you look sourly at Ulstermen for the one and think kindly of "Free-State " Irish for the other, and must think again to remember that each city in its varying degree is an English—and a Protestant—creation. It is not a reflection of the difference between Catholic and Protestant, between Eire and Northern Ireland ; it is a difference between period and between classes, the difference between Bolton, say, and Bath.
Yet it is revealing, all the same, to take the indirect route to the North, rather than to reach Belfast from Liverpool or from Glasgow, exchanging one industrial centre for another much the same. There is the border to cross, for one thing, with its customs men on one side anxious to prevent your denuding a creditor State of its consumer goods, its customs men on the debtor side demanding coupons and purchase tax, as well as plain, old-fashioned duties. One reminder, there, of what is the key to Irish politics, North and South—the border—and a reminder, once you are across, of what is wrong with Northern Ireland politics, when you see that the men of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, unlike those of the Garda Siochana, Eire's Civic Guard, wear pistols at their belts.
In Eire they have done away with the pistols and would do away, too, with the border. (Or so they say. You wonder, sometimes, sincere though the desire is for a united Ireland, how genuinely Dublin's politicians would welcome a new, intransigent minority of almost a million grim Protestant Unionists, a textile and a ship- building industry based entirely, and precariously, on imported raw materials, nearly 3o,000 additional unemployed.) In the six counties they mean to keep the border, and the pistols are outward and visible signs of the powers that the Northern Ireland Government has enjoyed for almost a quarter of a century (under the Civil Authorities [Special Powers] Act of 1923) and still enjoys—powers that were the subject of debate in the Imperial Parliament only a couple of months ago and which Stormont shows no sign of giving up.
It is easy enough, once you are in Belfast, to understand why the young Northern Ireland Parliament in 1923 gave such powers to its executive: powers to prohibit newspapers, to ban political parties, to intern without trial, to arrest and to search without a warrant, even to arrest " suspected witnesses." Easy to understand, if not, for an Englishman, to excuse. Any Ulsterman will explain the real fear there was then of the terrorists of the I.R.A.—and later history shows the fear to have been well-founded. It is not so easy to understand why the Government will not now give up the powers, will not even arrange for them to be reviewed annually by Parliament, as was suggested at Westminster by Sir Hugh O'Neill, an Ulster Unionist, and at Stormont by at least one non-Nationalist M.P. Leading Unionists in Belfast will tell you privately that the I.R.A. is dead and announce publicly that the powers are needed lest the I.R.A. strike again. Mr. Warnock, the Northern Ireland Minister for Home Affairs, told me that he would have the Act repealed tomorrow if he could be sure of getting it back on the Statute Book in a week's time ; that he fears there might be an appeal to the Privy Council against a new Act, as ultra 'titres, holding it up for six months when it was needed most. Yet there has never been any such appeal against the existing Act.
It may be that the Northern Ireland Government is too set in its ways, too sure of its everlasting power ; the Unionist Party has been in office since the Parliament was founded—a quarter of a century. As far as anyone can see, it always will be in office. It need not listen to the handful of Nationalists in the House of Commons at Stormont, where an Attorney-General could announce, only six months ago, that the Act will not be repealed " until there is a complete change on the part of a section of the population in their attitude towards this Government." This is, at worst, to shake a fist, at best to cock a snook, not at the I.R.A., but at the third of the population of the six counties that is Roman Catholic and Nationalist. " The Catholics won't co-operate " is the burden of the Unionists' complaint. (At one time Ministers were saying, at public meetings, "The Catholics are disloyal.") It is not hard to understand why. A third of the population has reason to believe itself threatened by the executive's undemocratic powers, to be dis- criminated against in the matter of jobs, done out of its rights in local government by the open rigging of electoral boundaries and of the franchise itself. What is surprising is that political life in Belfast is as temperate as it is.
For not only is the I.R.A. dead. Nationalist members of parlia- ment take their seats now at Stormont—and it may well be that their abandonment of the policy' of abstention has had something to do with the death of the I.R.A.; when the voice of Irish Nationalism is heard publicly and constitutionally there is that much less room for the gunman. And the tone of the Unionists has changed, too. Sir Basil Brooke, the present Prime Minister, was interested to know that I had been with Mr. De Valera a couple of days before, and complimentary in talking about him, in the very room where his pre- decessor, five years ago, had thumped his table at me and said, " I wouldn't meet him; I wouldn't speak to him. That's the man that am- bushed the Sherwood Foresters! " Partly it is that a younger genera- tion is entering politics. Apart from the Nationalist newcomers and the three or four Labour members, there are Unionists too young to remember the fears and hatreds of a quarter of a century ago, and young Independents such as Mrs. Irene Calvert, a University member, temperate, tolerant and anxious that politics should concern itself not with religious differences but with social conditions. Partly, :.4=ain, it is that the Unionist Government, traditionally " loyal " to Westminster, speaks soft lest a Labour Government across the water, alert to accusations that Northern Ireland is a denial of democracy and to the claims of Irish Nationalism—a British Government that has quitted India and Egypt—throw Ulster Protestants to the Papist wolves across the border.
Unreal as politics are in Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland politicians are that much aware of the politics that go on outside. It is for similar reasons that the Ulster Nationalists fight shy of attacking Northern Ireland's tiny (and divided) Labour Party ; there may be favours to come, they think, from the bigger Labour Party in power next door. The Labour members at Stormont, meanwhile, are free to attack Unionists and those "green Tories," the Nationalists, alike ; the pressure of events gives them, they feel, the promise of the future. But they must sit on the fence in the meantime on the question of the border ; the promise will be implemented all the sooner if neither Protestant nor Catholic working-class votes are lost to them by ill- timed party pronouncements. They must watch wryly, though, the spectacle of a Unionist Government, committed to extending Britain's social services to the citizens of Northern Ireland, passing Labour measures whilst offering its support to Nationalists, as it has done recently, I am told, to keep out a Labour candidate. Perhaps a Marxist would understand even that, but it is there that the ordinary observer gives up. There is a point beyond which only Irishmen can understand Irish politics.
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