Hillsborough, Co. Down
The castle here, which, despite its name, is really a handsome Georgian house, has seen some changes. It was built for the Marquises of Downshire, who laid out the elegant, almost French village, but sold up at Partition in 1922. Then it became the residence of the Governors of Northern Ireland. Since direct rule began, each secretary of state for Northern Ireland has lived here. ‘Saint’ Mo Mowlam was one, well known for throwing her wig at the staff and shouting, when offered excellent local produce, ‘Go out and get me a f***ing pizza!’ Peter Mandelson lived here too. In his memoirs, he tut-tuts about Mowlam and her drunken guests ‘bouncing up and down on the Queen’s imposing bed’. His own reign, he says, was ‘decidedly sober in contrast’. He loved being at Hillsborough, and soon acquired a golden retriever puppy, Bobby (so named, at Tony Blair’s suggestion, because Peter was vaingloriously known as Bobby Kennedy to Tony’s Jack). A photo of Bobby looking more monarchist than Mo when the Queen visited is on display. Today’s occupant is Owen Paterson, who, with his wife Rose, have been friends of ours for more than 30 years. He took over from Labour’s last man in the post, Shaun Woodward. I notice that members of his team appear slightly dazed by the fact that the Patersons always make sure they are being fed when they escort them to engagements. Words like ‘thank you’ (though, to be fair, Mandelson was an exception to this) were not prominent in the New Labour vocabulary.
In fact, it is a symptom of our sick celebrity culture that a full-length Channel 4 film has been made of the life of Mo Mowlam, with Julie Walters in the lead role. Mowlam courted the terrorists with indecent interest and, it recently emerged, took the job in Northern Ireland without telling the Prime Minister that the prognosis for her brain tumour was such that her capacity was bound to be affected. Why is she made such a heroine? In a better world, there would be a film about the life of Owen Paterson — his heroic struggles to export British manufacturing when he worked in the family leather firm, his mastery of the foot-and-mouth crisis, his insane courage as a horseman, not to mention his longstanding commitment to Northern Ireland. Owen would be played by Pierce Brosnan, or possibly the late Trevor Howard.
In one of the formal rooms at Hillsborough is a framed photograph of Blair and George Bush meeting when Bush stayed here in April 2003 to discuss the subsequently painful subject of postwar Iraq. One reason that Blair wanted Hillsborough for the rendezvous was his desire to make his peace-process Northern Ireland the model for conflict-resolution all over the world, including Iraq. The Americans were sceptical, but polite enough to come and confident enough of the security to let the President sleep here. Even today, the windows are bullet-proof, making the house hot, and cutting one off from the beautiful garden which has the second largest rhododendron in the world. We arrive at the end of a week when the peace has been looking strained. There were four nights of violence in the Ardoyne and elsewhere in which dissident Republicans exploited resentment against Twelfth of July Orange parades. Eight-year-old children were enlisted, and vicious attacks were made on the Police Service of Northern Ireland. All the establishment, including Paterson, support the replacement of the RUC by the PSNI, but I can’t see that this overconciliatory gesture to Republicans has worked. The police, heavily armoured, bravely took a terrible pasting. At one point, a police Land Rover broke down, and the mob tried to open its doors and drag the officers out. So great was the bloodlust, apparently, that if the vehicle’s locks had not held, the police might well have been killed. In Lurgan, a gang poured diesel over a train and tried to set light to it. When a passenger shouted at them that there were women and children on board, they shouted back, ‘Let them f***ing burn!’ The bomb squad is now called out every day.
Paterson, of course, is loyal to the peace process, but to me it seems that the whole thing is constructed to entrench sectarian power. Its logic has disfranchised the moderate parties in Northern Ireland and produced a division of the spoils between the two nastiest — and formerly smaller — parties, Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists. It is not in the interests of either to normalise politics. This vitiates all discussion of the past, with which Sinn Fein plays every possible political game. This week, Owen Paterson has given his first public response to the Eames–Bradley report about how to deal with the legacy of the Troubles. The report’s proposals include the insane suggestion, which Paterson repudiates, that every family who lost a member, even if that member was himself a terrorist, should be paid £12,000 by the state. The wider, underlying problem is that each historical inquiry is treated as a battlefield for blame. Having got all that money spent on Saville’s 5,000 pages, Sinn Fein now want the murder of their lawyer, Pat Finucane, inquired into. In a province where people long to get on with a better life, the idea that hundreds of millions of pounds and thousands of hours of official time should be devoted to such selective investigations is absurd. An appropriately tough response would be to ask Gerry Adams to produce the papers and tapes that the IRA kept in their long war when they ‘tried’ informers and planned killings. There certainly is a need for the past to be laid to rest, but this is surely best done by full, careful history, not by expensive public gestures which are continuations of the long war by other means.
But the slide back to conflict is not complete. On Saturday, we paid a sunny visit to Rathlin Island off the coast of Antrim, where we walked the four and a half miles to the west lighthouse to admire the puffins. On the ferry going out, by chance, was Conor Murphy, a Sinn Fein MP. A few years back, his lot would have been trying to kill Paterson; today the two men wave at each other amiably enough. On the boat back, Paterson and I found ourselves wedged between a charming hen party from Co. Donegal, with the bride to be helpfully wearing a sash saying ‘Bride to be’ and a wedding veil held on by horns, and a mostly male party of merrymakers from Banbridge, armed with a guitar and a lot of beer. The former were tipsy and the latter perfectly drunk, and there was a great deal of singing from the top deck as we pitched back to Ballycastle. Eventually, the bride to be decided to kiss Owen, quite unaware of who he was. I felt that this affecting scene could not have taken place in the late 20th century, and cheered up.
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