Ulster
Clouds over Stormont
Rawle Knox That unwelcome document, the Northern Ireland Convention's Constitution Bill, landed In Westminster this week; as it did so all the old storm clouds began thickening again over Stormont, and perhaps only the eye of faith (thoughLord knows what faith) ever' Perceived any slight break in them. If you can find a man in the Belfast street who doesn't say 1 told you so," you are a patient seeker indeed. All the predictions made before the Convention ever met are being trotted out again with ,1°011ny relish, notably that Westminster will have to reject the recommendations of the United Ulster Unionist Coalition and that this will be the signal for the Provisional IRA to go off at full blast again in its campaign to bomb, burn and shoot the British out of the North. A Warning has already been sounded from the Provisional Sinn Fein headquarters in Dublin. Belfast's relapse into the accustomed cornPan,1°]uship of its own misery has dulled it even t, . toe significance of the expulsion of Bill Craig avnd his few remaining followers in the „anguard Party from the UUUC. It was indeed r.,`"e culmination of a personal battle between Craig and Ian Paisley, who has made remarkable Inroads into the Unionist camp over the Past few years (the more remarkable in that his sree Presbyterian Church damns the established Church of Ireland, Presbyterians and Methodists as wordily as it does the Catholics); and who saw in Bill Craig the one strong °PPonent who needed to be shot down. But it was more than that, for Craig had become a late convert to the realisation that if the Ulster he Was brought up in, and which he would like his hIldren to live in, is to continue, then its 1.nstituti005 will have to be accepted by all the
Inhabitants of the six-county state. Paisley says that the minority must accept the will of the
majority because that is what democracy is all .:,thOut. It is always difficult to know what tlalsley really believes, because he says so many he things to so many different people, but nt..e. has certainly managed to convince most of tui..ls Unionist colleagues that the constitution they Propose, with opposition parties particiPatinft s in committees but not sharing in bc'vernment, gives the Catholic minority all the safeguards that it needs.
What are in fact saying that they know better hat is good for the Catholics than does the °PPosition SDLP,. for which the great majority
Of Catholics voted. It was there that Bill Craig, who is a realist as well as being a good Unionist, 13_.arted company. He reckoned that Westminster could not possibly wear it. The Unionist Coalition justified itself for expelling Craig by saying that popular feeling was utterly opposed to any suggestion of 'power-sharing' with the Catholic minority. That is indeed the truth, since nothing has ever been done by any Unionist politician, save briefly by Brian Faulkner and his followers, piping in very low key, to try, to explain to Ulster Protestants what advantages such co-operation might produce. Craig's volte-face. was too late and too sudden to carry anyone else's conviction but his own and that of a few close followers. The mass Protestant feeling is still that which produced the general strike of May last year, a willingness to cut one's own throat rather than have anything to do with Dublin, or with people who look to Dublin.
John Taylor, a loyal Unionist who nevertheless opposed the ostracism of Craig, said last week that his colleagues who played for the easy and popular way out now, would earn the wrath of "thinking Unionists" in the months ahead, when they wouldn't be able to deliver to the North what they had promised.
From this you might imagine that nothing ever moves in Ulster. There is in fact a bus service, but those who should be 'passengers persist in using an out-of-date timetable, or hopping off because they don't like the sound of the destination. The Ulster Workers' Council strike last year made a profound impression on southerners, and from that time Dubliners seriously began to examine the prospect of some future form of Ulster state, whereas previously it had been blasphemy to speak of anything short of a thirty-two-county united Ireland. But the UWC was so heady with the scent of its own triumph that it never noticed the change of wind in the south.
Ian Paisley did notice, but it only made him thunder more loudly to preserve the empire he was so successfully building in the north. Again, the brief power-sharing experiment of the Brian Faulkner-Gerald Fitt government made northern Catholics just begin to think in terms of Ulster as an entity, whereas they had been brought up strict believers in the aim of a united Ireland. The UWC destroyed that government before Catholic hopes had time to take root, and it is too much for them to expect that the present Convention's guarantees will offer anything better. There have been some grudging words of 'loyalist' praise recently for Liam Cosgrave's determined stand against terrorism in the Herrema kidnap case, but no realisation that Cosgrave could only carry the public with him in his firmness, because his is a government by consent. The kind of firmness many 'loyalists' wish to use in order to exterminate the IRA in the north, would bring out the entire Catholic population at once against them. There is that suspicious bit about 'devolved security' in the UUUC constitutional recommendations, yet it remains impossible to have an effective police force in Northern Ireland without real Catholic participation in the running of it.
Just as real debate was disappearing in the North, ground into the sands of Paisley's peculiar logic, contention was suddenly revived by noises down in Dublin. Fianna Fail, opposition party in Dail Eireann, announced its demand that Britain declare a commitment "to implement an ordered withdrawal from her involvement in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland." The call was not unexpected, of course. The more simplistic-minded national wing of the party had been baying for months at their leader's moderation on the northern issue. Jack Lynch had agreed with the premier, Liam Cosgrave, on a bi-partisan approach to northern troubles and Lynch had contented himself with an appeal to the British to -'encourage the unity of Ireland." Though he now says that the new declaration is only a "logical sequitur" from Fianna Fail's earlier policy, the government front bench greeted it with a hard silence that felt anything but bi-partisan. The Soldiers of Destiny do not want to stay put back in that closet; they are moving towards a tricky by-election in West Mayo, and the government knows it too well. Fianna Fail apologists say quite truly that their party has only returned to its old position, and that its re-establishment of Ireland's claim to rule all her thirty-two counties takes the initiative in that fight away from the Provos. At least one cynical Irishman observed that Irish politicians were always asking the British to do what they couldn't do themselves — and that's what they couldn't stand about the British.
Northern 'loyalists', especially those who, I suspect, might feel a twinge of conscience at the way the UUUC recommendations were trampled through the convention, reacted with an exhalation of venomous relief. Dublin was behaving just like Dublin, and right on time. Worst sufferers were the SDLP, so often in the past accused by 'loyalists' of collusion with Fianna Fail, this time never even consulted before the declaration was made. Their leader, Gerry Fitt, said at once what he has said before: that any premature withdrawal by the British would "leave the way open for a take-over by the men of violence" — would, in fact, leave the Catholic community in Belfast unprotected. It was a most awkward time for him to have to repeat himself. Finally, Rory O'Brady, of Provisional Sinn Fein, in a "we won the war" statement, accused Fianna Fail of "climbing on the backs" of northerners, now that a British withdrawal had been made certain by the Provos.
In Ireland at the moment, Fianna Fail and Pandora look like two of a kind. Merlyn Rees and Garrett Fitzgerald cannot have had an easy meeting in London this week. Dublin had lost its bi-partisan Ulster policy and the British government had been handed by the UUUC a Bill of No Surrender, which would need a lot of tactful re-talking through, sometimes line by line, with the 'loyalists' who had passed it. But now those "thinking Unionists" of whom John Taylor wistfully spoke would have their heads filled with defiance of Republicanism and all its works. Storms do sometimes blow away in Ireland, but before you can welcome the sun, they are on you from another direction.
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