A solution for Ireland

Brigid Brophy

Even Manchester United is no exception. There is nothing sacred, and nothing historically inevitable, about a united anything: not Dairies, and not Ireland.

It's true (and obvious) that the place is an island. Now, however, when telephone and television can cross it at the speed of sound, and aeroplanes at an average of little.less, is not the time to pretend that a circumambient sea must, as a force of nature, lock islanders into a union with all their neighbours on the landward side and cut them off from their near neighbours (some of whom may be nearer than some of their fellow islanders) overseas. In any case, you can always appeal from a single geographical unit to another larger one. The British Isles are themselves a single unit in the form of an archipelago, and that in turn is part of Europe, a unitary bulge on the flank of Asia.

Within Europe, the two most ostentatiously single geographical units are the Iberian Peninsula and the northern coastal depression between France and Germany. Each of those units has, however, been much more satisfactorily arranged, from the point of view of the inhabitants' convenience, since agreeing to conduct itself as two separate polities.

In cases like that, it is rarely a natural barrier of lakes or mountains that dictates a frontier. Partition is much more likely to be enforced by one of the divisions that are natural to humans in the sense of being species-specific to them, and that technology finds it much harder to overcome than mere mountains, namely a division of culture or of language.

Between the two portions of Ireland there is no significant distinction of language. There would be not even the ghost of such a division were it not for the paradox that the very parties and persons who are most ardent for a united Ireland have artificially created an argument in favour of partition by snatching the old Irish language back from extinction and prolonging it on legal and educational life-support systems.

Where culture is concerned, the two portions shew simply no difference whatever. There is something which the inhabitants of both portions often call a difference of religion. By this they mean that they have the same religion. The two sides keep the same days of the week and the same dates in the calendar holy. They practise the same sexual puritanism and misname it 'morals'. They acknowledge the same mythological figures as numinous.

Indeed, it is interesting, from a political point of view, that the most numinous of the religious figures acknowledged by both sides is a personage reputed to have been executeel, in an act of political capital punishment, by an imperialist power. Both sides in Ireland set great store by martyrdom. The only true religious dispute between them is over which side possesses the real, original and uncorrupted version of a church seeded by the blood of the martyrs.

The result of the two sides' sharing a religion though disputing which has the veritable version is that Christianity, which, by and large and with the possible exception of Poland, has been a declining force in the civilised world these last four centuries, is active and, through its clergies, influential in both portions of Ireland and virtually there alone.

Already sharing a religion and a unique esteem for religion, the two portions of Ireland are now coming to share a politics. The North still maintains that its citizens are British citizens and its soil an integral part of the United Kingdom. All along, however, an incautious foreigner who spoke of the people concerned as British or, colloquially, English has been liable to the indignant put-down that, no such thing, they are Irish; and recently (during, say, the past forty years) the Northern Irish have indeed made themselves less and less like the British of the mainland by refusing to move on with the mainlanders from a merely numerical towards a tolerant conception of democracy.

To the northerner it seems that, because the x sect is arithmetically the larger in his portion of the island, democracy gives him a right to gerrymander elections to the disadvantage of they minority and to keep the best houses and jobs away from people of y beliefs. Putting this construction on democracy makes the Northern Irish citizen unlike the mainland Briton but almost indistinguishably like the citizen of the southern part of Ireland, who agrees with him one hundred per cent on the point of political philosophy involved, thinking, as he does, that the numerical dominance of the y sect in the southern portion of the island gives him a democratic right to write the status of the y sect, and some of its tenets, such as its disapproval of contraception, into the very laws and constitution of the southern portion — and of a united island, should he ever attain it. Diverging from the mainlanders on this point of philosophy, the Northern Irish `loyalists' soon found themselves plus loyaliste que la loi and, indeed, in positive conflict with overall British law. This enables them to blame their misfortunes on the people they now incline to call, in common with the southern Irish, `the British'. The southern Irish, of course, rid themselves of the British generations ago.

Happily, however, for the southerners' peace of mind, the Northern Irish bullied the mainland into keeping a connection with a corner of the island. `The British' could therefore remain a useful bugbear in the southern Irish nursery, whence the northerners are now adopting it.

Moreover, the British have been forced to take on more and more resemblance to their bugbear image. They found them selves in the nanny position, which to begin with they were not reluctant to take up.

Centuries of pretending to themselves (no one else was deceived) that their in fact commercialist empire was some sort of educational mission to 'the natives' had made them adept at the statesmanlike, above-the-conflict poses of a 'mature democracy'.

In Ireland, however, nanny was placed between two squabblers contesting which was the big brother and which the little. In reality, both are both, according to the width of your vision, the x faction being the majority in Northern Ireland but the minority if your view takes in a broader slice of the island, and the y faction constituting the majority in the southern portion of the island but a downtrodden minority in the North. With their common admiration of martyrdom, each tries to sidle into the downtrodden role and edge the other into the role of bully. In fact, each has a just and not-to-be-shrugged-off claim to both roles, and in consequence each displays the intractable political characteristics both of a majority (self-righteousness and bullying) and of a minority (self-vindication and paranoia).

Trying to keep normal mainland order between such opponents, nanny from the mainland was baffled and then rattled and finally resorted to violence herself. Dealing with bandits who thought the vengeful acts of a blood feud were noble blows in a just cause, and who conceived that, when a jury was enrolled to try the bandits, it was a patriotic duty to intimidate the jurors, the mainland British were inveigled into using in Ireland devices, such as a strong-arm army and non-jury courts, that are centuries removed from the order normally kept on the mainland.

This disturbed nanny's statesmanlike image of herself, and many high but simple minded mainlanders, unacquainted with the deviousness people develop when they have convinced themselves that they are so unfairly the underdog that all is fair in love of country and guerrilla war, have been gulled into adopting the all-Irish habit of blaming 'the British' for the woes of Ireland.

Meanwhile, the more harshly the mainland British behave in Ireland, the more justified the Irish of all persuasions feel in defying the British attempts to impose order and in continuing to kill one another and, often, the British. A further point of political philosophy that is held in common by both portions of Ireland is that violence is much less culpable when committed for argued, if mistaken, political reasons by the Irish than when committed for no political self-advancement by the British, of whom the Irish always expect better behaviour than they do of themselves and their compatriots, on the grounds that the British set out without the disadvantage of being Irish and having Irish history for their heritage.

Having come into political existence by bullying a British government, Northern Ireland has found it profitable to continue that bullying redoubled. In this, too, it has come to share an attitude with the South. Indeed, the utmost threat that Northern Ireland now wields against British governments is that it will copy what the southern Irish did so long ago and declare itself independent of the rest of Britain.

-Thus, for all the estrangements, divisions and aggressions within the island, there is now effectively, though not officially, such a thing as a united Ireland, since all parties pursue with zeal the common politics of threatening, bullying, browbeating, blackmailing and vilifying— not to mention bodily attacking — 'the British'.

What in hell, then, is a British government to do when it is not only blackmailed but blackguarded by both portions of the most fluent propaganda-and-casuistryspeaking nation (both portions having been trained on Christian theology) on earth?

So long as it remains politically connected with Northern Ireland, Britain will go on being branded 'imperialist' all round the world in despite of the fact that, so far from making an imperialist profit, it is paying out millions — and blood — every year. But at the merest rumour that it might withdraw, the obvious course when you are in a situation where you are both on the receiving end of the kicks and on the giving end of the ha'pence, it is accused of breaking its promise that Northern Ireland shall remain 'British' for as long as it wants to.

What to do? Something that comes hard to British governments though comparatively easy to Irish factions of all kinds: something imaginative, unexpected and of propagandist value.

The immediate problem is the hunger strike. It's blackmail. Yes, of course; but we don't live in a fair world. The Bobby Sands case was one where the blackmailed came out of the court of world opinion with worse stains on his character than the blackmailer. What do you do when you're blackmailed in this way ('Mummy, I won't eat, mummy, I'm going to hold my breath, until you give in')? You bribe, of course — but not ingenuously.

To every prisoner in Northern Ireland, republican or loyalist, who claims privileges because of the nature of his offence, you make this offer: 'You can have exactly what you ask for, namely not the name of political status but the privileges of wearing your own clothes and doing no enforced work, provided that, in accepting the pri vileges, you sign an agreement that they shall be withdrawn, with your consent, the next time a soldier or a policeman is murdered, or a bomb is exploded, in Northern Ireland.'

You make the offer publicly. You tell the press before you tell the prisoners, so that your offer, rather than their reply, makes the headlines.

What they reply scarcely, as a matter of fact, matters. How can they accept such an offer? How can they accept liability for what other people and other organisations may do? No matter. Let it be they, for a change, who flounder for an explanation. The point is in the offer, because the offer , points to the acts of violence.

And then, in the long term, what? First, the British government must compute how much Northern Ireland has cost the British exchequer over the last ten years. The figures must be realistic, because in the next step the government, having explained (to the world and Northern Ireland simultaneously) that the right to collect on promises resides in people, not in mountains and heather or even bricks and paving stones, announces that it is prepared to spend elsewhere what it would have spent on Northern Ireland in the course of the next ten years. This money must be made actually available, and an unpredictable fraction of it will actually be used.

Then the Republic of Ireland should be invited to say publicly and specifically what constitution it proposes for a united Irish island, what safeguards it has in mind for the political, medical and educational rights of minorities such as atheists and (for they will then be a minority) protestants, and in what international court the minorities could seek redress should the safeguards fail.

The Republic should be asked to specify what particular economic support it will allocate to Northern Ireland for repairing the damage of terrorism and depression.

Once the Republic has stated or, which would be scarcely less informative, refused to state its proposals, the one and a half to two million inhabitants of Northern Ireland will have a basis of knowledge on which to decide whether to stay put under the Republic's jurisdiction and economy or whether to accept the British government's alternative offer.

That should be made to every householder 'ordinarily resident' in Northern Ireland, and should consist of a resettlement grant (probably in the form of a mortgage to be paid off by the government over ten years) per household, plus fares for family and dependants, for everyone who prefers to leave Northern Ireland and set up instead in one of the areas of mainland Britain (most obviously, the rural and island parts of Scotland and the run-down industrial inner cities of England) which have suffered the twentieth-century blight of depopulation.

You allow a year for debate and decision, after which it remains only to ask the United Nations to supervise the withdrawal of the British army and civil power and the induction of the Republic's equivalents.

If those who opt for resettlement cannot make an economic go of it, it will still cost no more to pay them welfare benefits on the mainland than it did to pay benefits to the large numbers of unemployed in Northern Ireland; but there is a fair chance that, going to places that are actually hungry for people, of whom there is in the British Isles as a whole generally an over-supply at present, they will be able to revivify communities that are now fading away and create work for themselves and others by their need for housing, amenities and communications.

Mainland Britain would, by this method, be honourably out of Northern Ireland within a year of deciding to make the offer, and free of expenditure on its former inhabitants within a decade.

The politics of terrorism, which consist of frightening your opponents into doing what you want (or frightening a third party into frightening them for you) can be outwitted only by giving the citizens of Northern Ireland the opportunity to make a free, informed and actual (not daydreamy) choice between the two great ideals of Irish history. The ideal of a united republican Ireland would be realised; and so would the ideal of a loyal population of British-Irish subjects of the Crown; but they would not be realised on the same small area of land in the Atlantic, which is impossible.