Ireland (1)
Votes are not solutions
Rawle Knox
The other Friday I was standing outside Bishop Gate, in the old walls of Londonderry City, waiting for a bomb to go off, or rather, hoping that it wouldn't, because it was planted in the shop of a friend of 'mine. The army had closed the passage to keep people out of the area. Three schoolgirls, about twelve years old, were standing with their backs pressed against the stone of the gateway, hissing a conversation, with side-flicked glances. " She shouldn't have done it. "She should never have done it." "She had no right to do it." Of course I asked them.
They said that a military policewoman at Butcher Gate had told them to remove the Sinn Fein badges they were wearing, and they were mad because . . . At that moment an elderly, total drunk weaved his way between us and clawed at the steel netting of the gate, demanding to be let through. The young soldier the other side, with laconic tolerance, refused. " Ah come out this side of the fence, Tommy. Stop hiding behind there and come out and fight and I'll show you . . ." The soldier shook his head and smiled. The drunk went on yelling. A sensible-looking woman in a sensible pot hat who had just come up the street from Bogside looked at us all. "The weekend's started," she said. Then the bomb went off.
Weekends so often start like that in Northern Ireland — more violently perhaps on Belfast — when the pay packet begins dissolving in the drink. The children are going home to a weekend of nothing but throwing stones at the soldiers, and the people who don't want to get involved, with nowhere to go, will be sitting and watching, on the telly, children throwing stones at soldiers. The soldiers on duty, very much not at home, knowing that the drink brings out the bombers and the snipers, get more crotchety and tense than usual. Prayers for peace rise from the churches, who also bury, with full military honours, the latest dead. During the week everyone says how awful it was, and the army and the various rebel groups blame each other for " provoking " whatever happened.
So Londonderry has its 'Bloody Sunday' and Belfast its Bloody Friday '. The referendum in the north, you will note, takes place on March 8, a Thursday, and the election in the south was this Wednesday.
Politics may not yet be violent in the south, but tempers still rise at the weekend. No politician would be fool enough to campaign seriously on a Saturday night, but the big speeches are made on Sundays, at noon after Mass (patriotic exhortations), and in the evening after the football matches (the real dirt). During the week the candidates tend to redefine their positions, and complain of having been misquoted in Monday's papers. All this gives an odd, stop-go appearance to the Irish political scene. When Jack Lynch plumped for a general election, every commentator in Dublin admired his shrewdness, even if there were hints that it might include a touch of sharp practice. He was going to the people on a law and order issue — a magic cloak Fianna Fail had nicked off the opposition Fine Gael — and was doing so just before the 18-21-year-olds, who, their elders might think, would not be so solid for law and order, were to be given the vote, Moderates in the north thought ie a fine election that would show decisively the Republic did not want unification of the country by force. It hasn't quite turned out like that. Few of the candidates for the next Dail have so far made Ulster an important issue. Of course there was always Neil' Blaney, over in Donegal, thrown out of Lynch's cabinet for his alleged part in that notorious arms conspiracy busi ness. Standing •as an Unofficial Fianna Fail Republican candidate, Blaney, said he didn't give a damn about the Official Secrets Act, recalling that Lynch told a cabinet meeting in 1969 that he wouldn't risk anything "we have down here for those people up there." That's good stuff in Donegal, where they still call their Republic the "Free State," and tend to vote for Dev against Michael Collins rather than for Jack Lynch against Liam Cosgrave. But through most of the Republic's twenty-six counties the voters have asked sharp questions about prices, which have risen alarmingly, especially since the early introduction of VAT. Certainly the explosion of one or two bombs in Dublin scared that city stiff (to the undisguised amusement of Belfast), but the remainder of the twenty-six counties have shown little interest in Dublin's security problems.
Meanwhile in the north, the referendum on whether the citizens wish to retain the British connection or go with the south is still on. William Whitelaw first announced it to please the Unionists, who then all appeared to be wearing roughly the same uniform. Let 'em vote for staying with ! Britain, Whitelaw seemed to be saying, 1 and then we'll produce a White Paper telling them on what terms they'll be staying. Since then various Unionists have ! been trying out different costumes, and some have emerged feeling so different that they've spotted the snag in the referendum. William Craig's latest ploy, an independent dominion of Ulster, would have no place in the referendum questions at all.
Craig, who has always been a fast-dyed loyalist (to the Crown, it now emerges, not to Westminster) nicked his idea from another Unionist, John Taylor. But the speed with which Mr Gerry Fitt and the Social and Democratic Labour Party welcomed Craig's initiative has already scared whole streetfuls of Protestants who had begun to think of independence from Britain — and of course from the dreaded Irish Republic as well — in terms of real and perhaps profitable politics.
"If Mintoff can do it," one of them put it to' me, "why not us?" But when Davey O'Connell, vice-president of the Provisional Sinn Fein, down in Dublin, talked of Craig's proposals as having fruitful promise for a new Ulster in a new Ireland, that same optimist got cold feet. It's certainly hard to see how Craig, if he can't get the Ulster Parliament at Stormont he wants out of the British, is going to get it out of the SDLP and Sinn Fein. Of course, Brian Faulkner, still the Unionist Party leader, has his peace plan as well, but so far it hasn't embraced any Catholics. Both his manoeuvre and Craig's look all too much like yet another engagement in the cagey war the two men are fighting for the future leadership of whatever Ulster there may be to lead.
So we have had two frail looking peace saplings planted in the north, plus a referendum to come, and this week's general election in the south. That should be enough politics for anyone, but at the moment it looks as though none of them will solve anything at all. It's all very like the weekends and the weekdays again, and though Craig or someone else may always lose a weekend and come up with a totally new idea, one fears again for what will happen to it during the week. The only constant feature is the monotonous insanity of the IRA, which remains as much of a threat whether it is loosing off its d.esultory bullets and bombs or grandly contemplating a ceasefire — a far greater threat to the Catholics than to the Protestants, if only the Protestants could grasp the fact. The Prods are only having their shops blown up and suffering a few slight cases of murder; the Teagues are losing their souls.
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