How to control Ulster
Robin Evelegh
The central fact of Northern Ireland is the 'nationhood' of the Protestant people of Ulster. I do not know exactly how to define a 'nation' but, however one does so, the Northern Irish Protestants form one. They are different from the mainland British, Whom on the whole they dislike — more different than the Scots are from the English. They are, moreover, quite different from the Celtic Catholic Republican Irish. in the mass they even look different from the Catholics. An Ulsterman, or an outsider who has lived there long enough to develop the right antennae, can usually tell them apart on sight. More importantly the Ulster Protestants feel different to the Catholics. They have the fellow-feeling which derives front nationhood, and are utterly determined to survive as a nation. They are moreover a military people — a warrior tribe. Perhaps because they have been ander threat for so long, they have developed a military flavour to most things they do: in the way they run a hospital, for example, or the way they act in factories. Under threat they coalesce as a natural reaction into military organisations with each street or group 'falling — in', with Platoon commanders and captains seeming to emerge from a sort of instinctive tribal Process. They are by far the most powerful military force in all Ireland having at their disposal, if the British were to leave, the resources of the Territorial Army in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Defence Regiment, The Royal Ulster Constabulary, and an astoniShing level of concealed armaments. They control the only modern industrial °,Mplex in Ireland and the only significant nigh technology in that country. Above all `neY are experienced in large scale man,gernent and in the operations of war. If that were left to itself, I have no doubt mat the outright military victors within a very short time would be the Ulster Protestants and that they are militarily capable of Fleeting the Catholic population from Northern Ireland and of defending the borders against the South. Of course the outcome of such a conflict would be changed by !--iutside intervention; indeed, this is what Ilas happened already. The one main central achievement of the British Army in U Ster in the last 10 years has been the Preservation of a Roman Catholic population in Northern Ireland. Without the presence of the British Army there would not , OW be a single Catholic in that province. 11,nd,ced this is why the British Army were v "°nled when they first intervened in ,719. They intervened at a point when the r testant people were about to crush the minority, ejecting most of them from 0 the province and probably killing a fair number. Although the British Army has always been — in terms of force — weaker than the Protestants, it has been strong enough to prevent this massacre of the Catholics by the Protestants.
Once they realised this, the Catholics stopped worrying too much about their own survival, which was assured in tribal terms if not in individual terms by the British Army, and behind this shield resurrected their republican aspirations to destroy the Protestant nation by absorbing it into Republican Ireland. This policy needed moral respectability, and they found this in the idea that the Protestants of Ulster would be quite happy to become part of Eire and that the objections to such absorption were the false propaganda of various small vested interests who controlled the Protestant working class and purported incorrectly to represent their views. This is a myth. The real heart of the Protestant nation is the Protestant working class. Whenever their leaders, such as O'Neill or Faulkner, have appeared to threaten their existence as a separate nation, they have rejected these leaders and elected such men as Paisley, who represents the views of the bulk of the Protestant nation of Ulster. Over the last 10 years the Catholics have been compelled to re-appreciate this basic fact — the separate nationality of the Protestants.
When they did so, there was a diminution of support for the Provisional IRA, but not because the Catholics disapprove of their actions. 90 per cent of the Ulster Catholics support in principle, if not in execution, the aims of the Provisionals and simply do not wish to be British citizens. Support among the Catholics for the IRA has fallen off only because they no longer believe the myth that the Protestant people can be bombed, assassinated and manipulated out of their separate existence. The Catholics are, therefore, realising that they are suffering for an unachievable objective, and will have to face the corollary of this, which is that they must somehow obtain acceptable living conditions within the British State, in spite of their dislike of it.
In order to understand Northern Ireland, this central fact of the 'nationhood' of the Protestant people of Ulster must be grasped, as must their determination to survive as such. They cannot be removed short of genocide on a scale meted out so far this century to the Jews and certain minorities in Russia. To talk of absorbing them in some federal arrangement with Eire, simply because they live in the same island, is as much fantasy as to talk of absorbing Israel into Jordan because they are both Semitic peoples. Once this has been understood, everything in Northern Ireland makes sense. Until it is understood, nothing makes sense. There is, therefore, little prospect of change in Northern Ireland and very little chance that a 'political initiative' can succeed there.
How to live with a discontented and insurgent minority, prone to support terror ism, while maintaining the structure of a Western liberal constitutional democracy is a problem that extends beyond Ireland.
One only has to look at the USA, France, Belgium, Canada and so on, to see that such dissident minorities are endemic to con stitutional democracies. Although they exist under dictatorships they are less obvi,. ous, and the methods used to control them by totalitarian states are, and should be, quite unacceptable to real democracies. Clearly the best way to cope with such dissident minorities is to meet their demands, but this is often no answer, because each fragmentation reveals a new minority.
It is reasonable to see the ending of the Act of Union and the independence of Eire as an attempt to meet such demands by allowing a dissident minority to break away from the United Kingdom, but then a new dissident minority appeared: the Ulster Protestants. Unending 'balkanisation' will only produce a 'Balkans' and all the chances for conflict and vulnerability to outside conquest which, experience shows, derive from such fragmentation. Constitutional democracies will be like the elm trees, magnificent structures which collapse and die at the touch of one particular disease, unless they learn to cope, within their principles of political conduct, with insurrection and terrorism by dissident minorities. They must on the one hand avoid doing nothing to control terrorism or they will end like Uruguay, which followed this course, under a tyranny which came to power on the promise of restoring order. On the other hand they must not themselves degenerate into tyrannies by simply adopting the practices of the tyrants.
What steps, therefore, should Mrs Thatcher'ssovernment now take to achieve the foregoing laudable aims in Ulster? There is no way, within the measures acceptable to our sort of society, that terrorists can be prevented from killing relatively 'soft' targets such as Lord Mountbatten or ambushing a certain number of soldiers each year. What can be done is to remove all purpose from such activities, in which case they would gradually peter out. To this end, Mrs Thatcher's government should make a renewed statement that it has no intention of withdrawing the British army from Northern Ireland, but that, if due to international pressure they were compelled to Withdraw, then they would leave the province with its own defence forces. Since such a Protestant army, unchecked by British forces, would mean the end of the Catholic people in Northern Ireland, it would put the IRA in a 'no win situation', an expression which the American Irish might understand.
At a level of security policy, Mrs . Thatcher's government should announce that the days of flexible law in Northern Ireland are over. Flexible law has been the curse, the flaw, in security policy in Ulster for the last 10 years. Again and again enforcement of the law has been adjusted for reasons which seemed at the time politically beneficial. Examples of the law being exceeded were the Falls Road curfew, and interrogation in depth. Examples of the law not being enforced were the `no — go' areas of 1972. Short term political benefit may have derived from each 'adjustment of the law', but in the long run such flexibility has destroyed confidence in impartial justice in Ulster and destroyed its role of providing a framework for society; law there has become just another element in a kaleidoscope of variables. If the Catholic people of Northern Ireland are to be reconciled to living quietly under an alien and disliked regime, the first thing they must have is confidence that they can get justice — blind, impartial justice. They must know that a leading Protestant politician, the General Officer Commanding, and a Ballymurphy corner boy will all be treated exactly the same by impartial courts in the face of known and unadjusted laws. The spark which lit the embers in Ulster this time, for example, was a grotesque piece of injustice over Council housing which the Courts did not or could not redress. How to rectify this is technically far from simple but an announcement ending direct political influence over law enforcement by the executive, as opposed of course to changes by Act of Parliament, would go a long way to making life in the United Kingdom acceptable to the Ulster Catholics and to restoring a coherent structure to social life in that province.
There are also technical security measures that shougi be taken both to restore controlled legality to Security Force opera tions in Ulster, and to make these forces more effective than hitherto. The manage ment of the government's security cam paign in Northern Ireland is still as chaotic as it was when I first went there seven years ago. This is because there is no system of 'line' management, no system of general management to coordinate and control the efforts of all departments of government, police, military, economic, and so on. If one accepts that insurrection on the scale of Northern Ireland is a malaise of the whole of society, then it can only be countered by bringing together to that end, in one coor dinated effort, all aspects of that society — particularly those of government. At the moment, the various departments are left at each level without a 'boss' to direct and coordinate them. As a result they spend much of their effort jockeying for position.
Atthë moment for example, the RUC are in the ascendant over the Army and are happily engaged in taking their revenge for the slights and humiliations they had to endure in the years when they were in disgrace and the Army was in the superior position. A civilian chaiti of command is required down to a third tier, or police divisional level, which could control and coordinate all government departments including the militaiy and police.
The next measure that should now be introduced is a population security census. At the moment there is no list in Ulster usable by the Security Forces of who is who, where they live, their ages and so on. Without this data, it is impossible to be precise. This leads to 'dragnet' type operations in which great catches of the population are trawled in with the hope of sorting out some terrorists from among them. Such operations alienate the uninvolved population, but are unavoidable without a population data base which should now be compiled subject to certain safeguards and controls. This security census should culminate in identity cards. Identity cards would take time to introduce and, if done suddenly, would probably lead to a considerable upheaval. They should be introduced voluntarily at first with an increasing number of government and, hopefully, private services being denied to those without identity cards. Thus shopping and drawing social security would become barred to those without identity cards. As this process developed life would become a great deal easier for those with these cards than for those without them and, when enough of the population had them, they could become compulsory for the rest. Such a security census, allied to identity cards, would allow the security forces to act with precision and do a lot to end the interminable 'mucking-about' of the unfortunate Ulster population.
Mrs Thatcher's government should now, also, introduce a policy of pardons for their crimes for terrorists who defect and aid the security forces. Inside information is the weapon that destroys terrorist organisations. It is totally superior to any information that can be provided by well intentioned outsiders. Moreover it is like a haemorrhage is to the human body. Defection feeds on itself as one defection leads to another, and thus compels the terrorist organisation to turn its attentions more to its own internal discipline and protection than to attacks upon society. It has always been possible to pay for information in Ulster, but this is relatively ineffective unless allied to legal indemnities. Why after all should someone accept £5,000 for a piece of information if he is liable to be jailed for five years for his offences while in the terrorist organisation? It is this lack, allied with the current supineness of the Security Forces and therefore the dearth of new potential defectors, which has currently led to an intelligence situation in Ulster in which I suspect the terrorist organisations may be gaining more from their manipulation of the government through controlled informers, than the government is gaining through this information. The weapon really needed is to be able to say to a 20 year old terrorist arrested in flagrante difecto, 'If you go into Court you will undoubtedly be sentenced to 15 years. You will lose the best years of your life,, your chances of fun and marriage and sex. If you help us, you can escape that grisly prospect'. Chances are high that such a bargain will produce a defection. It has not been lawful hitherto to use this weapon in Ulster, although it was the one that did most damage to the Malayan Communists. Because such indemnities are distasteful and open to abuse, there should be an elaborate system for controlling them. Nevertheless, in spite of the dangers, I believe we are foolish to go on denying this excellent anti-terrorist technique to ourselves in Northern Ireland. The final measure that Mrs Thatcher's government should now introduce is the revival of the Riot Act, which was repealed in 1967, or some similar law. The difficulty that the security forces find in controlling riots and unlawful marches and other street disorders is a legal one. The security forces are now only entitled to 'use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances' in controlling street disorders. But no one knows what is 'reasonable in the circumstances'. No one knows what a subsequent court consider reasonable, and a soldier or policeman who is thought later to have acted unreasonably could end up on a murder charge. The Riot Act gave statutory definition to a riot rather like the 30 mph limit gives statutory definition to speeding on roads. In outline, once its procedures had been followed and the set time elapsed, anyone in the designated area was rioting in law — and the security forces were directed to disperse them and indemnified for the force used in so doing. This gave legal confidence to the security forces, predictability to what would happen as far as the rioters were concerned, and a set procedure for the benefit of public and international opinion. Until some such measure is enacted, uncontrolled public disorder Will continue in Ulster. These are some immediate recommendations; what seems to me important is that Western liberal constitutional democracy Is doomed as a political archetype unless it can learn to live with, and control, dissident minorities within its general social Orinciplcs..
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