NI POLITICS: The logic of the surrender process
And on the fifth anniversary, it didn't rise again
Look who’s winning now
The misplaced political choreography of the last fortnight really ought to have left an awful lot of journalists with a fair old volume of egg on their faces. Yet, oddly enough, there haven’t been too many mea culpas from the fourth estate as regards their coverage of political non-developments in Ulster. This in some ways is an unfair criticism in that in cultures instantaneous for the broadcast, and 24-hour for the print media, there isn’t much scope for reflection, still less, a capacity for the same. There’s preening self-regard, and exquisitely wrought self-examination, but actual reflection of what was said yesterday, and how that will bear up tomorrow, given what happened today, well, precious little is evident. In consequence, and regardless of the themes, personalities or ‘issues’ involved, the mass media are always inherently absorbed by process of any sort. That’s what they do, and if they didn’t, why then they’d stop being what they are today: an unblinking, unthinking eye. But of course they don’t really see everything, and far from understanding what they do, their continuous gaze obscures as much as it reveals. Or in a line: the press don't know that the Provos surrendered five years ago, but they’re about to find out.
What was supposed to happen, now two weeks ago? After President Bush visited the Province, Downing Street, with the Irish government as their proxy, expected that at last Sinn Fein would face up to their obligations under the Belfast Agreement, and begin to disarm. From their — the Republican’s — point of view, as the Governments all saw it, this was to be sweetened by still further provocative (to Unionists) concessions (by London), and by facilitating the Provos getting their first big televised stunt out of the way well in advance of the Stormont elections. With this, the elections would proceed, and, it was hoped, the Ulster Unionists would do just well enough, in a world were Sinn Fein/IRA manifestly was getting rid of its murder weapons, that David Trimble could continue to lead a coalition with them firmly in it. That the specific rules of the Assembly (the weighted majorities and so forth) would yet again have to be casually perverted to achieve this was a given. And since the massed ranks of respectable opinion never even chirruped when, much in the fashion of an enabling act, elections to Stormont were set aside in the first place, simply in order that they shouldn’t inconvenience the Government, what was there to worry about?
Sadly for Mr Blair, and not quite as much, Mr Ahern, and hardly at all, one way or the other, as far as Mr Bush was concerned, there was a problem, and this was that, oddly enough, Sinn Fein are consistently bad at politics. So they fluffed their chance. Since, however, it is a conceit of the media to claim that Messrs. Adams and McGuinness are political genii, this wasn’t the way things were presented. That the leadership of Sinn Fein are as adept at constitutional politics as you would expect largely illiterate, generally psychopathic, mostly gunmen to be is in fact the case. This being true whatever help they receive from a handful of prison-educated sub-Marxists and, and this at least is always and everywhere a mentally nimble class, the more professional gangsters in their midst. Generally this sort of rhetoric is eschewed (I suspect due to patronising snobbery more than anything else), save when David Trimble is one of his more purpleish moods, but that it’s entirely warranted can instantly be demonstrated. Imagine people the calibre of the Sinn Fein leadership engaged in democratic politics — bluntly, try and see them on telly — without them having a gun behind them. They wouldn’t really pass muster, would they now? You’d be a sorry political party that felt the need to have any of the prominent Shinners as your public face.
Which brings us to rule number one, observed even if unacknowledged: Sinn Fein, not being a ‘normal’ political party, are not treated (by the media, or anyone else) like one.
This (the special treatment), since they are in no sense a ‘normal’ political party, being an integral part of a terrorist organisation, has been entirely to Irish Republicanism’s benefit. By possession of an apparently civil aspect, the Republican movement has been allowed, of late, to participate in democratic politics on an equal footing with actual political parties - them being outfits which aren’t integral parts of terrorist organisations. In large part the failure to adequately asses the performance of Sinn Fein/IRA stems from this duality: political commentators insist on judging their performance by political standards, even though neither Republicanism’s goals nor their techniques are, as conventionally understood, political.
Thus, although every Northern Irish political dynamic that the press has been enthusiastically reporting on for the last God knows how many months is, to all intents and purposes, floundering solely thanks to Republican miscalculation, this hasn’t been written up as such. Again, in part this is due to the intentional bias of much of the media. As one pertinent example: during this current ‘crisis’, caused by the refusal of Sinn Fein/IRA to proceed as directed by all the other players, how often have you heard or read that, by having done this, Sinn Fein are ‘obstructing the peace process’, or, still more egregiously, ‘standing in the way of peace’? The answer is not once. But should your interest in this subject extend back to any time when, for example, the UUP was playing odd man out, well you’d have heard the charge made against them often enough (the first cited instance was Kirsty Wark to Jeffrey Donaldson during the last meeting of the UUC, the second by Jon Snow to the same, at the same time). In other words, and despite the fact that there is only a ‘peace’ process because there was a murder one for thirty years before that, there is, for virtually every journalist who turns their mind to this question, no sense in which Irish Republicans could fundamentally be ‘opposed’ to peace. But mere bias is only part of the story.
What fundamentally distorts political coverage of Sinn Fein is a profound inability by journalists to measure how that organisation has fared by light of its own objectives. As the incumbent leadership of Sinn Fein has known since at least the early 1980s, Sinn Fein/IRA has not been faring very well. Or to put that another way, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness knew (in the latter’s case, almost certainly from the late 1970s on) that they were losing, and thus they spent most of the 1980s preparing their movement for the moment when they could tell they British government that, yes, indeed, we’ve lost. That’s what the Hume/Adams talks process amounted to, and the surrender process for the Provos ended with their infamous back-channel statement that, ‘the war’s over, all we need you to do is tell us how to end it’. Everything the Sinn Fein leadership has done since before the IRA’s first, formal and abortive ceasefire, has been an effort to sustain Republicanism in a political environment toxic to both the cause, and most of its followers. In this limited sense, and it only, Adams and McGuinness have put in a creditable performance, in that they’ve, on the basis of phantoms and pensions, taken a united Republican movement this far. Time has though run out on them, and for the reason why, since neither London nor Dublin was going to make things difficult for Sinn Fein, we have of course to look to Unionism.
In the end (which is where we are for Irish Republicanism in any meaningful sense), Irish Unionism, or at any rate, its Ulster variant, has proven to be the implacable force.
Zero sum games
By times it seemed as if both factions in Ulster, after thirty grim years, were in a race to surrender. That Republicanism blinked first, won’t in retrospect (though, what, in retrospect, ever does?) surprise anyone, but that appreciation of this is still only dawning is truly astonishing. Let us then look at this last fortnight and see how exemplary it is: how it shows what even a modicum of Unionist fortitude can wreak on the designs of three governments, and therefore how immanently strong the Unionist position is as compared to weakness of the Republican claim. One faction being in possession, the other merely covetous.
We should begin with the make-believe world of the BBC, where, for instance, the late Pat Finucane was obviously a martyred human rights lawyer, rather than say, a Provo capo, killed in a war of his own devising. We’re staying with the realm of perception, as opposed to that of stark, unarguable reality (stuff like, are the six counties in the UK, or the Republic?) for just one moment longer as it’s important to realise that British media cupidity on matters Northern Irish is not due to serious partisan engagement. The cause of ‘Irish freedom’ is not dear to the hearts of many of the journalists who have been in clover recently with the publication of the Stevens report. For instead, in a watered-down version of the American prototype, what Ulster, as nuclear power, as women in the military, as gay priests in any mainstream church, as any issue under the progressive sun, all go to show is how villainous ‘the man’ over here would be, if ever the media, after seeing him off at some point in the indeterminate past, ever relented in their constant vigilance, and allowed the old repression to reassert itself.
That is why, weirdly enough, when Jon Snow and his friends came to that most loaded of things, am official report from, horror of horrors, a copper, its contents were accepted tout court without one peep of traditional ‘can this government publication totally be trusted? (of course not, fool, it’s by the state)’ rhetoric. The product of the Stevens Report was congenial to the purposes of most of the press, so even though these selfsame men and women would normally find themselves intensely suspicious of such a thing at any other time and in any other circumstance, scepticism was suspended, and complete credulity was the order of the day. To repeat: when matters specifically Northern Irish intrude into national politics, virtually every time it is as an adjunct to national political point-scoring, and not because of any qualities intrinsic to the matter formally at stake. Northern Irish Unionism has the misfortune to be primarily identified as a ‘right wing’ cause, and accordingly, national media hostility towards unionism has more to do with Big Media’s left-liberal orthodoxy than any principled following of the tenets of Irish nationalism.
There is one determinedly ‘real’ consequence of all this though, and that’s this: in any scenario hostile to unionism, media-led political pressure can be guaranteed by a dynamic of focused interest being sustained. Whereas, as current events amply demonstrate, when Republicans stray, although pressure might well remain, media interest abates, and they contribute to it not a jot. How much this matters varies clearly from governmental mood to governmental mood. The present combination of Blairite self-confidence and Unionist inertia is, as I will hope to demonstrate, not causing the climacteric victory of Unionism in its thirty year war, instead it simply reveals faster what was already the case.
How Gerry and Martin got to where they are today
In the hermetically sealed world of Irish Republicanism, even a Today presenter wouldn’t imagine that leadership is won and lost quite as in other [sic] political parties. The ascendancy established by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness is thus as blood-stained as any of their other escapades. And as the Stevens Report almost but not quite tells everyone, albeit not in the fashion commonly imagined, they’ve had a little outside help in clambering to the top of their gory pole.
The substance of the Stevens Report we can surely dispense with pretty quickly? Sean O’Callaghan, when spying inside the IRA’s Southern Command, found himself enmeshed in operations where even he couldn’t spike the guns of every murder he was close to. Equally, the running of agents inside the Loyalist terrorist groupettes was subject to the same law of diminishing returns from any too-successful agent. Brian Nelson’s relationship with the UDA is, supposedly, different in nature because unlike British and Irish Provo agents, hopefully aiming to ensure ‘least harm’ was done, he was engaged in an intentional campaign of assassination. The usual objections present themselves here: if ‘rogue elements’, still more, the ‘State apparat’ as a whole, intended to eliminate Republicans, was this really the best means they could have found? Common sense, given the disparity of force available, tells us that no serious effort was made by the British state to decapitate the Provisional IRA. After all, achieving such an end would hardly have been difficult. Whether there should have been a shoot-to-kill policy is one of those things men of good humour will always have to agree to differ on, weighing the condescending pleasure of not even bothering to fight against the fact that low-level terrorism dragged on for needless decades, gradually killing thousands.
Bad tactics rather than evil strategy is the verdict anyone can plainly give to the events Sir John Stevens spent 13 wasted years chasing after. Such interest as this event has for us lies in the murky bits round the edges. Grubbiest by far is the role of MI5, who with this have finally landed a blow on Army Intelligence commensurate with the smearing of the old RUC Special Branch engaged since the end of the Cold War (in as blatant an exercise in agency self-interest as you’re likely to see outside of Washington DC). Yet despite the suspension on full pay of Brigadier Gordon Kerr (head of the Army’s FRU [Force Research Unit], and thus Nelson’s handler) from his current job in the Beijing embassy, one really does have to wonder how far all this is going to be allowed to go.
A constant complaint, from Charles Guthrie’s time onwards, has been the politicisation of the (Army’s) General Staff, for which read, the resentment of unaccomodating soldiers from before about 1999, and of the other two services still, that a cadre of generals exists who can work well with the regime. In line with this, some wonder if an unconscious decision hasn’t been taken, right up to the level of Mike Jackson (the present CGS) to write off Kerr et al. I wouldn’t count on it, unpopular as both FRU and sundry other of the army’s secret people in Ulster were and are with the rest of the ‘mainstream’ army. That, to be sure, is just my reading of Sir Michael Jackson, but what I feel to be much more certain than, where, factionally, does this or that general stand, is the near-impossibility of securing successful convictions over most of Stevens’ imminent allegations. Add this to the certain fact that no Government, not even one as foolish as this one, is going to want to push the assorted Gordon Kerrs in their employ too far and the suspicion has to be that this is — ordinarily enough — going to be played long, very long.
One device to ensure this would of course be to convene a ‘Bloody Sunday’-style inquiry, which has had a remarkably deadening effect in terms of media interest in this case, even if it has done nothing to ameliorate the feelings of those more immediately involved. But I suspect not. No more than we got our very own Ulster-based ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ (and wouldn’t it have been grimly instructive to see how speedily media interest would have fallen away from covering a catalogue of murders with inexplicably unappealing victims: to wit, soldiers and policemen?), will we have an intelligence-derived circus. The Truth and Reconciliation shtick ran aground because, preposterous as any equation of soldier and ‘runs into house, shoots farmer watching television with his children’ Johnny is, the Provos declined to admit any guilt which needed reconciling. Should Number 10 take a notion that washing intelligence in public makes sense in the tightly-corralled circumstance of mid-80s Ulster, there’s now a good six years of stuff that assuredly doesn’t need to see the light of day. So don't worry about Gordon Kerr, but what of his wards, Gerry and Martin, and the solicitude he encouraged his UDA goons to feel for them?
Bubbling away at the margins of Northern Irish punditry is the Province’s very own take on Westminster’s ‘Tony Blair has AIDS’ routine, namely ‘Martin/Gerry/whoever is a British spy, and has been since 1976/1986/whenever’. This has been creeping ever more determinedly into coverage of the Stevens report, with coat-trailing anti-Stevens comment pieces smirking about some Provo ‘super-agent’ clearly being protected by the state for some mysterious reason, and ‘who wants to talk about that, eh? Come on then’ and etcetera. As ever, little is complex: of course the state has had a vested interest in compromisers of the stripe of Adams and McGuinness, and that’s because the dominant tendency within the state itself was equally towards compromise. If you wanted to settle the troubles by fudging a deal, you needed people to fudge with, and no better fudgers were on offer inside Sinn Fein/IRA than this pair. This was screamingly apparent from the late 70s on.
The mistake of the conspiracy theorist is to assume the existence of some omnipotent authority (presumably a notion born out of the delusion’s roots in over-weaning vanity — the afflicted, and he alone, has had the intelligence to realise what’s really going on). In Ulster, this is generally, amongst both British and Irish sufferers, Whitehall, for devious purposes of its own; though some, and sadly High Tories have been known to be among their numbers, posit the Americans as the requisite demon kings. When self-evidently what there is in any situation like Northern Ireland during the troubles is a set of competing and interacting players. What separates the British government from all the other players is both that it is the biggest, and that it could, if provoked enough, up-end the entire board and bring the game itself to an end. Hence the permanently calibrated level of outrage during the troubles.
What this means in relation to the twilight zone just beyond the Stevens Report’s public persona is that, for instance, there near-certainly are ‘super-agents’ inside the Republican movement, but they’re not to be found among the telly-appearing classes — they’ll be drawn, as almost by definition a super-agent would have to be, from among the faceless men behind them. And even then such is the woeful incomprehension of the game being played that even were any of these names somehow suddenly revealed, they’d be habitually misunderstood as being Irish Republican Oleg Gordievskys: good, brave men, ‘betraying’ a heresy. When the way such people should be understood is still very much as players.
If you accept (as for more than thirty years it has been reasonable to do) the current, semi-lawlessness of Ulster, as far as you personally are concerned, as the default setting in human affairs, then this is the environment you attempt to operate within. And it is exactly the sort of environment where, for reasons of personal advantage, one rat will seek to rat other rats out, and the best way to do that is by playing a dangerous double game with the cat. This is hardly to say that ‘useful’ Republicans have become enamoured of the British state, rather it is to argue that such is their acceptance of its very permanence (but equally their belief that it will only go so far and no further in its actions against them), that individual Republicans will treat with it as they would any other player amongst their terrorist peers.
In short, and to change our beastly metaphor, such plentiful intelligence assets as Britain possesses amongst Irish Republicanism are best viewed neither, within their own context, as ‘traitors’, nor as virtuous double-agents, but as small fish contentedly manoeuvring within their small pool. It would require a transformative change — of the sort that is upon us — in Britain’s attitude towards Republicans for this prism to become invalid.
Things are moving
To contend that the chaps (the ‘security bureaucrats’, as the lovely twosome might put it themselves) who talent-spotted Martin and Gerry were no better at ‘picking winners’ than any of their more public contemporaries on e.g. the National Economic Development Corporation were in the late 70s and early 80s is to enter into arid historical debate. The case can be made, indeed it’s hard to see what evidence there is against it, that by thinking oneself into the mindset where settlement could only be reached by compromise, then by hell or high water, that was the only way it would be. But whether or not terrorism was there for the beating as soon as it started is, as I say, an irrelevance: we’re in the world where those long-ago decisions have left us, and still we’re heading towards the result too many clever people a generation ago deemed impossible — one-sided victory.
One telling sign of what’s ratcheting into place isn’t arcana like Stevens but Bertie Ahern’s treatment of that esteemed border gentleman farmer, and oil trader, and quondam Provo ‘Chief of Staff’, Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy. This pertinent little saga has Mr Murphy being investigated surprisingly vigorously by the Republic’s Criminal Assets Branch, and also in on the act are the Revenue Commissioners (the equivalent of the Inland Revenue) and Customs & Excise. Terribly tedious matters like substantial ‘underpayment of VAT’ are being broached, and, hilariously for a patriot you’d have thought, the Dublin government has even seen fit to let it leak out that Mr Murphy’s lawyers have argued, in lieu of various demands for tax, that the poor sod is a non-resident of the state.
That sort of thing, which could always have happened in the past, and could happen today to a serious volume of patriots, is ominous indeed if you’re, for want of a better term, an ‘establishment’ Republican. Remember, the calculation you’ve made (and it was bitter indeed learning this sum) is that, the war is over, you did your bit, but to no avail. So you, and your family, are jolly happy that blind eyes are being turned to a whole host of stuff, and perhaps even more importantly, because the wife’s mother is terribly fussed with what the parish priest thinks, that’s damned legal money you’re getting from Stormont — and a whole range of gimcrack schemes besides. Because, let’s face it, it’s better than working: for pity’s sake, if you’d been interested in that sort of thing, you’d never have become one of the boys in the first place! You think this, that God weren’t things going wrong a decade ago, but sure look at us now. Who knows when you first started realising it for yourself, that, ten years ago and more, the struggle had gotten as good as it was going to get (and frankly the Brits, if ever they got round to it, could make it a whole lot worse). And aren’t you glad that Gerry and Martin came along? Your uncertain, unspoken urges — that the war was over, and what the hell to do now? — have been transformed by this pair into the magical situation you find yourself in — and best of all, you’ve got away with it, you haven’t had to pay the price for any of it.
And there’s the rub: there is a price, and always was. The wiseacres the of Hume/Adams and Brooke/Mayhew processes (excluding, one has to imagine, Adams) in the late 80s and early 90s, and they included Tory secretaries of state, sincerely believed that, stuff their mouths with gold, and after a while, five years, ten at most, there won’t be a Republican movement any more. There still is — it hasn’t gone away you know, but the promise was held out that it would, and this was the definitional issue on which David Trimble secured Unionist agreement to the final stage of Whitehall’s 15-year house-training of Martin and Gerry. Unionists have waited and waited and waited for this, because once you accept victory on anything less than unconditional terms, the vanquished will inevitably aim to string out defeat. So whilst Unionists have decided to stop waiting, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams are certain that they’re not going to be leading anything back to war, which makes for a tricky situation. Something’s got to give. That something, because of the political ineptitude of Sinn Fein is now no longer likely just to be a reasonably unified Republican movement, but the Belfast Agreement institutions themselves. Thus, not only are they going to be broken, not only are they going to have force their supporters to face up to the bankruptcy of violent secessionist Irish nationalism, but the Sinn Fein leadership is fair-set to lose all of the devolved power-sharing rewards they got for engendering the first two factors.
Why now?
The reason this is all happening now is very simple: the process has run into the wall of unionist resistance. That resistance does not come from David Trimble, it comes from the Donaldson-led UUC victory which pre-empted last year’s suspension of Stormont. There can be little doubt that, if he could, David Trimble would co-operate. He can’t. What then he is playing for? A seat in the Tory shadow cabinet, with Reg Empey, and not the hated Donaldson, regardless of whether or not there is restored devolution, left to hold the reins in Belfast. The problem in all this being momentarily of course, whose shadow cabinet?
There can be little realistic expectation that any deal will emerge that even David Trimble (who, on a personal level, having suffered grievously at the hands of the liberal media for his Drumcree dancing, is determined above all else not to be painted as the wrecker, preferring to leave that instead to the IRA, or Donaldson, or, as a last resort, Paisley) could take to the UUC, and hope to see it passed. Not with unavoidable provisions such as those on Dublin (and Washington) having a formal say in suspending future executives, or the ‘on the run’ terrorists’ amnesty to add to all the others. No, David can’t do it, which brings us back to Sinn Fein.
Perfectly sensibly, since pain deferred is pain avoided, Republicans are being Micawberist about the current situation, but, nothing will turn up. How can it? In a sense, by declining to do the one thing everyone else asked of them in the Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Fein have been Micawbers for five years now, and suddenly, wearily we all have to admit that nothing is going to turn up, no magic is going to be found that squares the requirement of the IRA to disarm (which means disband) with their disinclination so to do. The requirement is a Unionist one, and no longer can the Government deny them its expression. Sinn Fein in return aren’t left ‘to choose’ whether in fact the Provos do disband, but to face up to the fact that their leaders made that choice for them more than a decade ago. That’s the sort of thing that when eventually you do have to face up to, you either change your leaders, or you change yourself. My prediction? Adams and McGuinness will both be dead before the end of next Parliament, and a schist provo-Provo campaign will have fizzled out, much to the belated applause of our American friends. Tony will feel self-righteous as he does it. Who leads the Unionist party in those circumstances hardly matters then, except in terms of tone.
Kit Kildare is ERO’s political correspondent, and this, hopefully, was his penultimate column; his final one — oh, some time later this week — will be on the forthcoming Tory leadership contest.
Crackerjack!
ERO writes: Come May (and June) ERO will offer ‘rolling news’, and, a free copy of Michael Oakeshott’s On History to the reader with the most accurate prediction of who’ll be in the shadow cabinet by the time the fun's all over, and what jobs they’ll have. Entries in by noon, 13th May, please.
[No cash alternative available; this is a game of chance, not skill; David Maclean’s decision will be final.]
Kit Kildare, April 20, 2003 11:43 AM