Northern Ireland (1)

A catalogue of trial and failure

J. Enoch Powell

"These were basically the same people with the same problems. ' You know. Mr Paisley,' I said, ' we are all the children of God.' 'No we are not, Mr Callaghan,' he replied. ' We are the children of wrath.' That flummoxed me."

These few sentences from Jim Callaghan's description of his first meeting with Ian Paisley in Belfast in August 1969 might stand as a summary of the tragic incomprehension of Westminster politicians which has prolonged the violence in Ulster from 1968 to the present moment without prospect of alleviation. The whole book, in which the Labour Home Secretary records his encounter with Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1971, might serve as an extended commentary on those sentences.* Of course. Mr Paisley's theology was right and the Home Secretary's was wrong, which incidentally reinforces the lesson: don't appeal to the Bible if you don't know what it says. But Mr Paisley's political analysis was right too and that of the Home Secretary, who had been "deeply shocked by the pas-.

sions I had seen in Belfast between what were , basically the same people," was wrong. No wonder he was flummoxed; but in the long

run he was to learn. "Up to the time I left office I felt confident that the battle [to win the hearts and minds of the Catholic popu lation and to prevent them from falling into the despair that would give the terrorists their chance] could be won, but events in the summer of 1970 and later dispelled that hope."

The honesty of that sentence is typical of the book. It is an unvarnished account, valu able for the two years between the demon strations in August 1968 and the change of Government in 1970, of a Home-Secretary's eye view of Ulster events. The syllogisms,

held not only by one side in British politics, seemed , at the outset convincing enough.

"The disturbances and violence," they ran, "were caused by grievances; therefore when the grievances were identified and removed, they would stop." Then later, and down to the present moment: "The disturbances and violence are due to unfulfilled aspirations; therefore they will subside if a way is created to realise the aspirations."

Those who knew Northern Ireland knew that these seemingly self-evident statements were dangerously false; but for almost the whole of the previous forty-five years Northern Ireland had been a quiet backwater of British politics. When it suddenly ceased to be sO — the timing of the eruption, if not the underlying reasons, owed much to the wave of novel violence which swept round the world from 1966 onwards — it was not surprising that British ministers and MPs should have to learn step by step, through a process of trial and failure which still goes on. Mr Callaghan's book is a candid catalogue of part of that trial and failure.

He clearly finds that certain moments gain significance in retrospect. In October 1969 in Belfast he calls for an end to "this nonsense in the streets." "1 regretted the phrase as soon as I had said it: it sounded so typically British, for I knew only too well that the troubles went far deeper than that." Of the riots at Easter 1970, "we did not know it at the time, but those riots marked the emergence of the Provisional IRA as a separate force." Through all the vicissitudes since then, it has been the Provisional IRA. — "the falling house which never falls." — that has set the pace of events. With the emergence of the Provisional IRA the illusion of a civil rights issue faded: "as regards the border, I admitted [February 1971, when the first soldier was killed] that it had now become an issue once again. In 1969, during the riots, I had uttered a remark that was to be often repeated: that the border was not an issue .. • but of course the border is and always has been an underlying irritant at all times, and as 1970 wore on it had come to the fore once again." A month later, in Belfast in March 1971, "it was clear to me that these determined and fanatical young men [the Provisional IRA] could and would take control of the situation, despite the lack of sympathy among many of those in their community."

Because the writer's narrative is detailed and personal, it gives a very fair impression of the pressures and limitations under which those in office operate in such a situation as that of Northern Ireland. Whatever insights experience and reflection open to the directlY responsible minister, his actions and (much more important) his words must conform tO the theory of events and the analysis of the problem which was adopted when it was first encountered. By dint of repetition it has soorl become impossible for him to substitute the very different theory and analysis at which he has inwardly arrived. He is a prisoner — and alone. So he struggles on as best he may, with successive acts of administration or policy in which in his heart he disbelieves.

Even opposition, though it brings alleviation, does not often bring release. When on the eve of a grave deterioration Mr Maudling in mid-February 1971 "announced that the reform programme had done much to reduce sectarian tensions " and that" it was the very success of the reforms that was provoking extremists to violence," the ex-Home SecretarY recognised language which he himself knew to be totally illusory. But his own contribution had to be equally or even more illusory — the call for an allIreland Council.— and sure enough, two years later, the Conservative government come forward with that illusion too.

In the end the man who has seen with his own eyes and learnt against his own will falls back on nothing but platitudes:

1 recognise that the South has been long separated from a large part of the North by religion, bY education and to some extent by culture, and that before unity can he more than a dream. North and South will need to develop the habit of working together on matters of common interest. If as a result they learn to trust one another, each coat munity may see the other in a new light. So, at the end of the day, 1 would like to see Ireland come together again. If and when it does, it will be a signal to the world that the people themselves have freely entered into a new compact because they are at peace and at ease with one another and recognise how much they have in common.

Why, that was the very hope that "events dispelled," the very error against which Paisley warned — to suppose that men are "all children of God "when they are" all children of wrath." The true humanity in politics is to forbid imagination to masquerade as reality and refuse to pretend that men and women are as we would like to think them. But that, all too often, in Ulster above all, means saying the unsayable.