Ulster
The rumble in the bog
Rawle Knox
It can be discerned throughout the Irish twilight that a rescue operation is on the way to save the Sunningdale agreement. As yet there can be no prediction about its possibility of success. The various charities concerned are, not without precedent, disunited.
Dublin, for instance, had been distracted by the Bill, into whose course the Vatican threw an offhand spanner, about the control of contraceptives. Ironically, that was a proposition which would never have seen the light of Dail Eireann had it not been for the wish to placate the religious(?) feelings of Ulster Proteatants. But by the time all the motions had been gone through in Dublin, nobody in the north was bothering about who sold contraceptives to whom in the south — it being recognised that the whole attempt at the legislation was a fair bit of cod anyway.
The British, who should be making the greatest effort to promote Sunningdale — it was, after all, one of the few things within living memory that all British political parties have agreed upon — lately had their minds more upon their pockets than on the Irish. There is nothing new in that, the Irish would say, and they'd be right. To which the British would reply: "Why should we always have to be bothered about five million people who can never agree with each other anyway?" On which I would comment that if you are able to give succour to any single soul, it is your job to do so. The British have spent far too long not bothering to look at Ireland, which was once totally and is still partially (remember?) under the jurisdiction of Westminster.
-Merlyn Rees has however, spoken a few brave words since he took on the Belfast burden, and they have visibly encouraged Brian Faulkner and his minority rump.
Dublin has helped by soft-pedalling on the introduction of a Council of Ireland (which doesn't at the moment look like getting its booked seat in the old Bishop's Palace at Armagh, because the Church of Ireland had been making political noises). Faulkner is having cold feet about the Council because Ian Paisley and his fellow propagandists have built a conception up to look like a gilded crucifixion image, in the worst Roman Catholic ornamental style, hanging doomfully over Protestant Ulster. Dublin has taken note, and been tactfully silent of late about the Council of Ireland, realising that the first vital job is to get the Faulkner-SDLP coalition Executive in Belfast on a recognisable footing. But tactful politics are frequently not popular and so cannot be publicised, with the result that even the beneficiaries don't always see what's going on. The Dublin newspapers are still beefing for a Council of Ireland and Paddy Devlin, an SDLP Minister at Stormont, has said that if the Council doesn't come he will be out of his seat of office and downstairs quicker than the lift — indeed, given his size and the nonvacuum of Stormont, that drop is a possibility. Devlin's colleague John Hume, usually quick to see what's going on, said in Dublin that he hoped Sunningdale would have eventually led to a United Ireland, in which Ulster Unionist beliefs would have and play a fair part; and the next day in Belfast that he believed every new move of the Stormont Executive was a bomb amid the ranks of the terrorists. It takes some courage these days for any politician to go on record in Dublin and Belfast inside twenty-four hours, and though Hume has been maligned, he made brave attempts.
Once again it's time we don't have — at least, time in the right dimension. Ireland
mulls over every minute of its thousands of years of slaughterous history, and won't think an hour ahead. Even the history isn't up to date. A Catholic girl from the Derry County Council was 'asked the other day by her father, a traditional, though peaceful, republican, "Are there many Catholics on the Council novir?" She answered that most of the bosses were Catholics. "I never thought I'd live to see the day," said the parent. Well, he has lived to see it, and he hasn't recognised it. : That tells you something about Ireland; and suggests something more about the north.
There's a lot of talk in Belfast about the Protestant working man looking for his rights at last, and realising he has been misled by the landlord class for its own benefit for half a century, but that doesn't mean, whatever you may read about mysterious gettings-together of the UVF (illegal Prod) and IRA (illegal Teague), that the workers of the divided sets are yet uniting. The diehard Protestant leaders have caught on to what's happening — that political power-sharing inevitably leads to workaday job-sharing: they don't say this out too loud, because that would make them sound the sectarians they say they are not. There is in Northern Ireland a tradition of not saying what you mean. Anyone who speaks his mind is reckoned to be out of his. But politicians know that the realisation is reaching the factory floor that the job is for me and mine or him and his. You can close a shop in the name of religion just as easily as in the name of a craft.
That is the basic reason why the Sunningdale agreement needs rescuing. When a Protestant says, "No surrender" nowadays — and you hear that rallying cry often enough — he is not thinking of the wars of Derry nor of his ancient faith, but of his job. No one sitting in on that last night at Sunningdale really followed his thoughts all the way through to the factory or the farm, nor could you have expected him to — unless you happened to be one of the workers on the factory and the farm who make up the great majority of Northern Ireland's one and a half million. They each expected a settlement that suited him personally, here and now, and such a mass of expectation was of course unfulfilled. Heaven help the Marxists if they ever have to plan for Ireland. Contrary to much British relief, the Irish prefer talking to fighting, though if the conversation finally displeases them they are
not afraid to fight, especially. on a Friday night. That seems to me a fair attitude to
living — and dying — but it does mean that London and Dublin will have to provide a lot more talk with some proof attached, to stop the Irish fighting. The proof has to be of the Protestants keeping their jobs and the Catholics having some say in the directing of welfare — not easy, in the present economic climate but such is, in fact, happening, in the teeth of the unbelievers. Unemployment in Northern Ireland was always more than in the rest of the United Kingdom, but it is proportionately less now than it has been for years; and Catholics are at work in Stormont. Bob Cooper, the only member of the Executive who is from the Alliance Party, has said that he would resign if the Executive were not working: but that it is working.
In Ireland you don't have to pay rent if you take the roof off your house. The.roof is still
over the Stormont Executive, bu '1,Tiany don't know it is there and tao' Man others are trying to pull it down. So it's diffkult to give the public enough, in cash or in metaphor, to pay the rent. The Irish are very good when others try to understand them and, like us all, become piqued when they are unnoticed. The agreement at Sunningdale marked the first time in fifty years that the British had made any real political contribution to Northern Ireland. If that is not to be forgotten, the rescue teams need to show more energy.
Previous page
