Terrorism is back in Northern Ireland

09 September 2009

Paul Bew says that the young police recruits in the province now find themselves facing the sort of armed confrontations they assumed were a thing of the past

This is the nub of the matter. The British government believes that as long as Adams and McGuinness’s position is bolstered, the dissident’s radical Republican ideology will have limited appeal. This is why the Northern Ireland Office is so desperate to see the devolution of policing and justice to Northern Ireland as the final instalments on the payments due to the Sinn Fein leadership for its part in the peace process. Since 2003 — rightly or wrongly — devolution of justice has been central to the negotiations.

The government is well aware that this is the last juicy plum it can offer to Sinn Fein. All the other goodies — such as the release of prisoners or the ‘lustration’ of the RUC — have long since been delivered. In the 1990s, the Northern Ireland Office had a clear plan: make Sinn Fein believe that it was on a path of progress that would lead eventually to the achievement of its objectives.

We are now, however, in a different place. Sinn Fein’s political strategy has hit the rocks. In the last two elections it has gone backwards in the Irish Republic, depriving Mr Adams of his necessary all-Ireland political dimension.

Despite Sinn Fein’s continuing electoral hegemony within Northern nationalism, it is experiencing a sharp diminution in its activist base, both in the North and South. It is now conventional wisdom in Dublin that the current crisis in the Irish economy, significantly deeper than that in Britain, has severely weakened the case for Irish unity. Demographic realities in the North are not those envisaged — with some tacit British encouragement — by Sinn Fein in the 1990s.

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Mike

September 10th, 2009 9:19am Report this comment

Time for a new roadmap for a peace process, and a peace processor, and more Nobel Peace prizes and Congressional Meldals, Amen.

David B. Wildgoose

September 11th, 2009 1:45pm Report this comment

The Irish Republicans are anti-English rather than anti-British - for example their "mainland" terror campaign was in England rather amongst their "fellow Celts" in Scotland and Wales.

Meanwhile the Scottish Presbyterian "Unionists" in Northern Ireland with their "Ulster Scots" language want close links with Scotland, but take great delight in helping New Labour impose draconian 42-day internment legislation on the English.

The answer is obvious.

England leaves the Union, possibly to be replaced by the Republic of Ireland, and then everybody's happy. The "Unionists" are still in Union with Scotland. And the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Irish Republicans no longer have to campaign to rid themselves of England.

And once again we English will be able to look after our own interests in our own English Parliament.

What's not to like?

40 Degrees S

September 11th, 2009 2:18pm Report this comment

What if a series of plebiscites, with foreseen results and under UN or EU supervision, were held in obviously Nationalist areas asking voters to decide on UK or RoI citizenship, and counties or LGAs above a particular percentage for RoI joined the Irish Republic?

Thus, Fermanagh and southern Armagh, for example, would no longer be a “Northern Ireland” problem, and the creeping equal numbers of nationalists v unionists would be redressed - at least, for the time being, till the next plebiscite.

Yes, "Northern Ireland” might be reduced to the counties of Antrim and Down, and there may have to be a population exchange like the Greco-Turkish one after 1923 (but with hopefully less bloodshed^), but wouldn’t it be a more manageable province?

^ not that the leaders of each side in such situations seem to worry about it.

40 Degrees S

September 12th, 2009 1:36am Report this comment

Love your creative thinking about Northern Ireland and Britain, David B. Wildgoose
(11 September 2009 1:45pm): let what a century ago was called the “Celtic Fringe” become a garment of seamless unity among the Scots (Highland & Lowland, RC and Protestant) the Welsh, and the Irish (traditional and militant republicans, RC and Protestant).

As if.

Let’s not forget that an inter-clan feud in 1169 was the reason that the Anglo-Normans from Britain first entered Irish affairs; let’s not recall that more Scots died at Culloden for German George than for the wee Papist sot.

And another thing: more Irish have died fighting for Britain than have ever died fighting against it.

Looking at things from the opposite direction, p’raps Angleterre could reclaim a role in La belle France by reviving its former identity as an extension of the duchy of Normandie. Or became another Land in the German republic as Saxony-across-the-water (although an irredentist Denmark, remembering the Jutes-Jutland connexion, might want a say).

Entirely fanciful though all the above is, alternative histories do have their fascinations, don’t they!

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