Even the dissidents have now spawned their own heavily armed dissidents. The bomb defused by army experts at Forkhill this week was the work not of the Real IRA but one of its own breakaway groups, Oglaigh na hEireann. The bomb was bigger than the Real IRA bomb in Omagh which killed unborn twins, six men, 12 women and 11 children. It brings into sharp relief the problems now facing the security services.
Another illustration of these problems came last month. In the village of Meigh in south Armagh, near the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, a police car encountered seven heavily armed terrorists — they even had a rocket launcher with them — operating a vehicle checkpoint and handing out leaflets telling locals not to co-operate with the security services. The police, who were lightly armed — and, it was later rumoured, undertrained in firearm use — beat a hasty retreat. As one website put it, ‘PSNI patrol flees from Real IRA roadblock’. To make matters worse, within a few days of the incident, a leaked internal Police Service of Northern Ireland report appeared which was severely critical of the functioning of the organisation.
Both events have combined to contribute to a certain jumpiness in the public mood. The authorities respond somewhat wearily, pointing out that no one ever believed that the Belfast Agreement meant the absolute end of Republican terrorism in Ireland. The prompt action of the police in Meigh prevented civilian casualties, they say. And even in the old days, RUC patrols did on occasion back away from confrontation with armed republicans. Naturally, many of the pensioned-off members of the RUC take a different view.
As for the leaked report, the official version is that it was merely the outcome of tough, shrewd self-criticism, in anticipation of the arrival of a new chief constable of the PSNI to replace Sir Hugh Orde. Sir Hugh has just completed his seven-year stint, during which time he has seen the Catholic percentage of the force rise from 8 to just under 30, and Sinn Fein take its seats on the policing boards of the province.
The fact remains, however, that significant UK intelligence resources — originally intended to deal with other international threats — have been shifted back to Northern Ireland. Only Islamist terrorism receives more attention from the security services. The recent arrest of the Irish republican Michael Campbell, currently in jail in Lithuania after allegedly offering undercover British agents £8,000 for arms — has also set off alarm bells. The community style of policing currently favoured by the PSNI may also have to be abandoned if more constables are murdered, as Stephen Carroll was earlier this year, in the course of investigating an apparent domestic dispute. But the very last thing the government wants is a return to a more traditional style of policing: still less, the return of the army to the streets of the province.
One thing is already clear: young PSNI recruits, who have been trained in arguably the most sophisticated human rights policing culture in the world, find themselves facing challenges which they had imagined to be a thing of the past. Of course, the dissidents remain weak in terms of absolute numbers, and their political support groups — of which éirígí (‘For a Socialist Republic’) is the most impressive — do not yet have anything remotely approaching the credibility of the Adams- McGuinness leadership of Sinn Fein.
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.
Sinn Fein’s response has been predictable. Mr Adams’s rhetoric has become noticeably more militant, and he continues, as always, as if the pro-consent clauses of the Good Friday Agreement — which link Northern Ireland to the rest of the United Kingdom — do not actually exist. More worrying is the strategy of tension on the streets. The recent closure of a police station in east Belfast led to a Sinn Fein public meeting — a weird kind of ceremony of thanksgiving — which was topped off by a ferocious anti-police riot which led officers to reply with plastic bullets.
This cannot mask the evidence of a broad-based malaise within Sinn Fein. The government’s obsession with delivery of policing and justice, while understandable, obscures the fact that the problems of the Adams leadership are wider and deeper. But the obsession remains.
In 2007, the government was confident that devolution of justice would be achieved before the end of 2008. We are now in the autumn of 2009 and the government claims to be equally confident that it will occur in the next few months. An implicit deal has been done between the DUP and the Sinn Fein leadership which will soften the controversial impact of such a move by handing the new ministry to the moderate Alliance party until at least 2012. Nonetheless, the DUP’s internal consultations tell it that its members are very jumpy on this issue and many would rather leave responsibility for these matters with the United Kingdom government, rather than pressurise local politicians of whatever hue.
The DUP’s essential problem is that the European election revealed a decisive haemorrhaging of its support, which meant that its previously poll-topping candidate came in behind both Sinn Fein and the Conservative and Ulster Unionist candidate Jim Nicholson — a shock result predicted nowhere in the local media. It should perhaps not have been a shock. In 2002, a BBC poll revealed that DUP support for a deal with Sinn Fein was entirely nonexistent. It has been the achievement of the Paisley-Robinson leadership to take two thirds of their supporters along the new path. But one third, it appears, are deeply dissatisfied and switched their votes to Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice. Allister’s appeal threatens DUP hegemony, both in the forthcoming Westminster and local Assembly elections, with consequences that could be profoundly destabilising for the structures of the Agreement.
Nonetheless, the DUP leadership gives the impression that it wants to move ahead and complete the deal with Sinn Fein. It hopes, for example, that the expenses issue, which hurt it so badly in the European election, will fade in the mind of the electorate. The party has decided that the voters lost to Jim Allister will not easily return. It is also aware that not to complete the deal with Sinn Fein undermines its entire logic for power-sharing, which lay in the claim that it — not David Trimble — had forced Sinn Fein to accept policing. It wants the UK government, once again, to pay the financial bill for the transition, as the government will probably have to do later this month. It also wants the Ulster Unionists to help boost the confidence of the unionist community on this issue. This is a big ask. The DUP, in the days of its hege- mony, ruthlessly crushed the Ulster Unionists, and feelings remain decidedly sore. Neither the British nor the Irish government — who failed to look after David Trimble — is in a good position to make a moral appeal to the newly strengthened Ulster Unionists, who have benefited from the link-up with David Cameron’s Conservatives.
The Conservatives, however, have made it clear — when consenting to the outrageously rushed legislation in the Commons in March of this year — that they will not stand in the way of this final phase of the devolution process. They are well aware that there are the beginnings of a new narrative in play in which Labour could attempt to blame the Tories for the collapse of the peace process. They are also aware that Irish America has just enough leverage to generate pressure on the Obama administration. It is profoundly in the interests of the Cameron project in Northern Ireland to see the Agreement structures finally bedded down so that the focus can shift on to the key economic and social questions of the future, which will dominate the life of an incoming Conservative secretary of state.
So is it business as usual in Ulster politics? Not quite. The DUP visibly fears the prospect of a Cameron predominance in British politics to the point of actually demonstrating against him on his visit to Ballymena. The party privately hopes that somehow New Labour will survive and leave the tramlines of local politics — the protracted fractious community psychotherapy process at Stormont — undisturbed. Increasingly, the DUP makes it clear that they do not want to see Sinn Fein have to face any possible inconvenience or challenge arising from a conservative victory and, therefore, from an alleged London partiality for any local faction in the province. But the status quo in Northern Ireland means a cocooned political class in Stormont — underwritten ad infinitum by the British taxpayer, the great unsung hero of the Troubles, and playing no role in shaping, or being shaped by, the wider UK debate on public policy.
This already feels like a somewhat nostalgic vision. But there are strong local interests involved in maintaining it. It is, however, now bound to be challenged, because Northern Ireland is, after all, part of the United Kingdom.
Any incoming Cameron government requires the stability of the Agreement and its devolved institutions, but it needs to be able to move on from it in certain respects. The prospects are reasonable. Since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, Irish nationalism has been addicted to the idea that it could progress by doing deals with London which could then be imposed on local unionists. David Cameron has emotionally distanced himself from that part of the Thatcher legacy. Nationalists, as a result, will be compelled to return to the position famously endorsed by Eamon de Valera in the Irish Senate debate of 1939, that of seeking an accommodation with unionists rather than decisive British intervention against them.
The removal of the spectre of an imposed Anglo-Irish Joint Authority, which is effectively what Cameron has done, means that the local parties have no choice but to work within the existing devolved compromise. But it also means that there will be no excuse for a Little Ulsterist failure to engage in the wider public debates of the Westminster parliament.
Paul Bew is professor of politics at Queen’s University Belfast.
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