NI POLITICS: Who agreed to the Agreement?
Why Nationalists are to blame for all Ulster's ills
ERO's editorial comment
Once upon a time the mess we're in would have been called — you can easily imagine the banner headlines — 'a crisis in the Peace Process'. Nobody talks about the 'peace process' anymore, not even to put it in sceptical quotation marks. What does this tell us? The optimists would argue: "peace has been achieved - we're now in the middle of a permanently political process. No matter what disagreements we might have, we'll thrash them out by constitutional means". To which the realist will reply: "hogwash". In a country where inconvenient elections are cancelled the last thing we can be accused of is conventional constitutional politics. No, we do face a crisis, but it's not the crisis everyone thinks it is.
Poor, battered pro-Agreement Unionism knows what the problem is: it's that their sceptical Unionist kin are, frankly, too dim to know when they've won, and that this irrational fear is disrupting the great achievement of the Agreement, which is to have firmly cemented Northern Ireland within the Union. If only, so the story goes, anti-Agreement Unionists would realise that what the Agreement amounts to is, not to put too fine a point on it, the surrender of Nationalism's core objective of 'Irish unity'.
This analysis — that Agreement-sceptical Unionists are the cause of the current instability — is, naturally, the preferred explanation of the mainstream British left — you know, The Guardian, the BBC, people like that. In fact, however, instability is inherent in the Agreement itself because the central thing it does not do is exactly what pro-Agreement Unionism claim for it: it does not signify Nationalist consent to the continued existence of Northern Ireland as part of the UK. The Agreement does not, therefore, constitute a settlement.
That the Agreement is meant to be a partitionist settlement, there can be no doubt. What is incredible is that anyone thinks that it is presently serving this purpose. From Gerry Adams to Mark Durkan ("the united Ireland the SDLP believes in will be built upon the solid foundations of the Good Friday Agreement") political nationalism is agreed on just one thing: they have no interest in making Northern Ireland work. Consider the way the Agreement has been implemented. Everything that could be reasonably or unreasonably extracted from Unionism has duly been extracted. Murderers free from prison? The RUC abolished? Terrorists made government ministers? Sure, go for it: doesn't matter whether it's in the Agreement or not. Whilst all the time Republicanism has failed to do the solitary thing required of it, and get out of the terrorist business.
What, in return, has Irish nationalism given up, in keeping with this great spirit of compromise? Not one single thing.
Apologists for Nationalism will tell us that, in order to achieve our agreed and stable Ulster, they've 'given up', oh, the riches of the earth, and all sorts of other things too painful to mention. What this turns out to mean is three things. The first is that the IRA have grudgingly agreed to stop murdering people, which would be awfully sweet of them, save for the fact that consistently since 1998 they've . . . kept on murdering people. Not as many as before, and now almost exclusively working class Catholics, but even so, even to ERO, this doesn't smell like progress.
For the second great concession of Nationalism, we have the changes to the Republic's constitution, and the dropping of the irridentist claim — all of which was good of them, though since they lack entirely the means by which to effect this fantasy, you'd have to wonder what the fuss was about. And, in truth, you'd have to wonder how much friendlier the new version is to Unionism. 'It is the firm will of the Irish nation . . . to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland' requires an inventive mind to read as an admission of the legitimacy of Unionism. We, after all, don't claim back at them, 'it is the firm will of the British people that the Free State should stop carrying on, and get back in the Union right this moment'.
But the most ludicrous supposed Nationalist 'concession' is, the abandonment of — well, here things become fuzzy. Either the notable thing Nationalism has done is that it has stopped parroting Trot-speak deeming Northern Ireland an 'illegitimate, undemocratic entity' — or, alternatively, that Nationalism has actually given up its ambition to rip Northern Ireland out of the UK and affix it to an Irish Republic that doesn't want it and couldn't cope with it. Either of these would be wonderful and sensible developments, but neither of them has happened. It is a challenge that will not be met, if the demand is made for the name of a single Nationalist politician who truly accepts the Agreement as a settlement.
What causes political chaos, and terror, in Northern Ireland is what has always caused these things. And the people doing it haven't changed either. The Agreement pretended to square the circle of Nationalism's lack of consent to the state. It has failed. Pursuit of this chimera should accordingly cease.
ERO, July 14, 2003 10:32 AM