Politics
Unionists prepare for the endgame
Published 15 May 2000
It is highly possible that, within the lifetimes of most Northern Ireland leaders, the province will become part of the Irish state
Three years ago, during the marching season, which is about to begin this year, I met Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, leaning up against a wall in Derry watching (through a screen of the Royal Ulster Constabulary) a march of the Orange Lodges and the Apprentice Boys. He was relaxed, like a parent at the zoo, watching the animals pace about their cages.
I asked him for his thoughts on the state of Unionism. It was not in bad shape, he said, but it needed a strategy. What kind of strategy? "It needs a Unionist de Klerk," he said. "And the tragedy is, it hasn't got one." Not Trimble? "No. He's an extremist: he won't make a deal."
I thought then that his comments were self-serving and wrong - not only about Trimble, but about the comparison with South Africa, where the whites were a small minority within "their" state, and a divided one at that. To align the IRA with the South African liberation movement was to flatter the IRA. But I now think that, though he was demonstrably wrong about Trimble, McGuinness's parallel with the last years of National Party rule in South Africa may not have been so far from the point. It is one explanation of what is really going on in Ireland, North and South: that, like the whites in South Africa, the Unionists accept that their time is up; that what we are now seeing is an attempt to achieve the best possible short-term security in a hostile environment; and that both the Dublin government and Sinn Fein understand that they negotiate from a position of strength in which time is on their side.
Next year, the ten-year census will be taken; it will show, again, that Catholics have increased proportionately to Protestants in the province. How much will be crucial. The Catholic birth rate is falling, but it is still higher than the Protestant; anecdotal evidence suggests that more Protestants, especially young ones, leave the province for the mainland or elsewhere, and stay away. There are now more Catholic than Protestant students at the province's universities, including Queen's in Belfast.
Some Catholics vote Unionist, but not many. It is hard to see many more voting Unionist now - paradoxically, because continuing peace lessens the need to take sides against what many Catholics felt was a murderous republicanism and a temporising nationalism. Thus, if voting trends roughly accord with confessional strengths, nationalist parties in one shape (Social Democratic and Labour Party) or another (Sinn Fein) could well form the majority in the Northern Ireland Assembly within the next decade.
The Belfast ("Good Friday") Agreement that overarches the crawl towards peace is quite specific about this: that once a majority of the province's voters want to unite with the Irish Republic, then their will is the British government's command. It is thus possible that, well within the political lifetime of most of the leaders in the assembly, the politics of running the province will change into the politics of fashioning it into part of the Irish state. No responsible leader of Unionism can fail to have this at the back of his mind. It means, inevitably, that the deals and the compromises made - on both sides - are contingent, temporary and ambiguous.
The same undoubtedly applies to the announcement from the IRA Army Council that it is prepared to open weapons dumps to inspection. The commitment to decommissioning is not a commitment to disarm. On the contrary, to invite international inspectors to review arms dumps periodically is to say that the arms will be retained. Yet the announcement has been greeted with rapture by Peter Mandelson, the Northern Ireland Secretary, and with more restrained joy by the Official Unionist leadership, including John Taylor, Trimble's deputy, who acts as a drag anchor on the leader when he looks like leaving a majority of the party behind.
The IRA has moved, all the same. The language of the statement, especially in the clause that says that "Irish republicans and unionists can, as equals, pursue our respective political objectives peacefully" is far closer to the language and spirit of the Belfast Agreement than anything to which the IRA has previously put its name.
The Unionists are thus faced with a vast dilemma. The army council statement ties the IRA into a cessation of terrorism (except against the allegedly errant in the estates it controls) more overtly than ever before. But it also implicitly rules out any prospect of arms being handed over. If Trimble accepts the statement, he will certainly give up the principle; in return, he gets the probability of peace.
Why has the IRA done this? Its army council is famously opaque, but the word from insiders is that two things happened. First, its most obdurate and powerful member, Brian Keenan, was told in the strongest terms by Gerry Adams and McGuinness that he would have to agree to a form of words acceptable to the Unionists if the movement was to stay together. Second - according to the Boston Globe, a paper with good contacts in the republican communities - Keenan was won over by Cyril Ramaphosa, the former secretary-general of the African National Congress (and one of the two inspectors agreed for the arms dumps) who, old guerrilla to old guerrilla, told him that at some point you had to realise you had won, and that bullets were no longer appropriate to the task in hand.
If Keenan has been corralled, then Adams and McGuinness have some room for manoeuvre. It is, however, far from clear water. Keenan will not have shifted much from his conviction that, as he put it once, "the only thing that should be decommissioned in Northern Ireland is the British state".
In this, he seems to have the partial support of the Irish foreign minister, Brian Cowen, who, according to a leaked Northern Ireland Office memo, believes that "beyond the constitutional acceptance that Northern Ireland remained part of the UK, there should be no further evidence of Britishness in the governance of Northern Ireland".
So what will the Unionists do? They will ask for a price: that, at this stage, the British state should not be wholly decommissioned. Mandelson has already said that he is minded to keep the crown on the Royal Ulster Constabulary's crest and that, when the name is changed to "Northern Ireland Police Service", the words "incorporating the RUC" will go in brackets after it.
But important questions remain to be answered. If the deal is accepted, can the British government ever again suspend the Belfast Agreement, and with it the provincial assembly? How many dumps will the inspectors be allowed to see? How can they know how much of the total arsenal the dumps represent? Will the IRA demand an "equality" of British (Army and RUC) arms dumping, as their officials have often claimed they would? Is there at least an implicit deal to withdraw the British Army, and cut the size of the RUC (Mandelson denied it in the Commons)?
There may not be clear answers to all these questions, or to any of them. This is, remember, the territory of necessary ambiguity, where nods and winks are the currency of temporary understandings - which may or may not really be understandings, and which may be undermined at any time.
The difficulty of the game can never be overstated. The two sides, enemies for three centuries, their militants still armed, confront each other on unstable, narrow ground. The majority tradition may be turning, slowly but inexorably, into the minority - and there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Unionists who will be bitter if that happens. The minority tradition may lack the patience or the skill to allow the Unionists to come to terms either with republican participation in government or with republican rule from Dublin.
Yet this is the game that must be played to seal peace in Northern Ireland.
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