PRC-UTE
30th March 2008, 17:01
Pretty decent article in many areas.
Today, the truism that Sinn Fein leaders are ministers of the British crown is the
commonsense discourse of the conversing classes. The true believer, securely but
hardly safely corralled into the self-referential and intellectually challenged
world of the peace process, alone dissenting from the obvious.
Sinn Fein, the sole members of the Freedom 2016 lonely club, now profess to believe
that a united Ireland is only eight years away. Fewer in number, head so burrowed up
their own fundament that they can't smell the other crap they are duly fed, their
adherents still harbour the intoxicated opinion that the war was, in the words of
Joe Cahill, really won. But then let us be careful not to blaspheme. St Joe after
all is, according to one documentary, the patron saint of the peace process. Who are
we mere mortals to question the divine? Still, strange, that one of the secularly
sinful, the ungodly Newton Emerson, on Joe's passing, should note that the late IRA
chief of staff was survived by his wife and ... one million Protestants. Emerson's
quip was as sharp as it was barbed. The consent principle, the bane of republicans
who challenged it with the coercion principle , for long the sole fulcrum on which
the British presence in Ireland hinged, as manifested in the wishes of those million
Protestants, has triumphed over the existence and purpose of the IRA. Apart from the
one Protestant the nationalist writer Jude Collins knows who favours a united
Ireland, the million continue to support the union with Britain. The IRA now
embraces the consent principle, the only thing seriously sustaining that union and
which legitimises in the absolute the British presence in Ireland.
Still, an orb takes a long time settling in to the land of the flat earthers, the
evolutionary adaptability of the eye to its surroundings being a slow and often
torturous process. It is not a peculiarly republican malaise as is evidenced by the
strange belief elsewhere that our entire world is a mere 6000 years old and was
created 1000 years after glue was invented by the Sumerians.
In that type of inverted Newtonian universe where apples shoot upwards the moment
they fall from trees, IRA decommissioning did not in fact happen, and Hugh Orde and
Ian Paisley stood poised to lead the nationalist multitudes over the orange hill and
into the bright green fields of a united Ireland that would also be socialist. On
one issue alone have they been wrong - Peter Robinson will now lead them to Irish
unity. He is younger, has more energy and will therefore get them there even
quicker. Michael Ignatieff seemingly got it all wrong when he said of cynics like
myself: they have a healthy awareness of the gulf between what people practice and
what they preach.
The origins of the Provisional IRA explain much about their leaders' acceptance of
their lot as British micro ministers in a Paisley led government. Although much has
been made of the republicanism of the Provisional IRA it was in fact more
Provisional than republican. The Provisionals were much less the unbroken thread of
republican tradition stretching back to 1798 than they were a conjunctural response
to post 1969 British state strategies. Whatever their ideological moments, many of
which were intense such as 1981 when the H-Block hunger strikers died with such
courage that the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher felt moved to comment
on it, the Provisionals were in essence the cutting edge of an insurrection against
not the British presence per se but against the manner in which that presence
conducted itself. The Provisionals did not mushroom into a mass movement because the
British were in Ireland. They did so in response to British behaviour while in
Ireland.
The strategic logic of this was simple if anyone astute enough existed within the
British establishment to take cognisance of it. Britain did not have to withdraw
from Ireland in order to take the wind out of the Provisionals sails. They merely
had to change the terms on which they stayed.
For long British state strategy was predicated on securing the defeat of Provisional
republicanism through the application of strategies of exclusion and
marginalisation. Republicans and republicanism were regarded as an indivisible
ensemble that had to be excluded in its entirety from both the discourse and
projects that were functioning to shape an eventual solution to the range of
problems that plagued the North. At a certain point in the latter half of the 1980s
some element of British strategic intelligence questioned the indivisibility of
republicans and republicanism and began to prise an opening. From that point on
British strategy moved from the old realist model of behaving like a billiard ball
that endlessly knocked the Provisional IRA from one end of the strategic table to
the other while in turn being relentlessly cannoned itself. And in its place it
opted for the more pluralist model of creating cobwebs. It reached into the
Provisionals, simultaneously pulling threads to it and knotting others less pliable.
By the early 1990s strategy was clear.
The defeat of Provisional republicanism would be secured by the twin strategic
prongs of excluding republicanism but including republicans. The British
establishment identified who it needed from within the ranks of Provisional
republicanism to work with. Above all else the British moved to secure the continued
hegemony of the Adams leadership. Trimble could fall but not Adams. Today
republicans, if they may still be termed such, are on the inside but sans all
republican tenets which now seem to belong exclusively to the outsiders - dissident
republicans.
The British state has emerged as the conflict's one clear winner. Over the course of
its strategic success it certainly ceded a lot of credibility in terms of government
ministers and civil servants. They seemed publicly at any rate to buy into the
bollix that Sinn Fein stipulated as being indispensable to the party leadership's
strategy of deception employed against its own grassroots. And so Downing Street
became the engine room for the endless processing which has characterised the
northern Irish political landscape for more than a decade and needlessly prolonged
instability.
Nevertheless, for all the meandering of rivers they invariably reach the sea. The
British got there. In assisting the Sinn Fein leadership bring about the demise of
the Provisional IRA as a serious anti-British entity the British government ceded
not one key tenet. The border is still here, as is partition, and the Unionist veto,
whereby those who favour the union with Britain can ensure its continuity so long as
they command the numbers to do so. Northern Ireland's British police force is
supported by the party who previously gave unambiguous support to the killing and
bombing of its members. There is an Irish dimension but this was allowed for by the
Tories as far back as October 1972 when it struck some of them that an Irish
dimension would be a valuable asset in prosecuting the war against the Provisional
IRA. Intellectually, the British state perspective that the dispute was primarily
one that could be analysed through the prism of an internal conflict model has
prevailed and is manifest in the outcome we have today. Who now remembers the
Provisional assertions that British imperialism was keeping the country divided for
its own malign reasons? As surely as the Provisional movement has been locked into
the structures of the British state of Northern Ireland the very act of locking them
in has unlocked the British state from the accusation that its role in the ring was
something other than referee.
The North of Ireland today is a site of political parsimony rather than generosity.
Consequently we have a power splitting rather than a power sharing executive. The
two dominant parties are led by a theocrat and an autocrat respectively. Their
mutual interest in pursuing their own separate totalitarianisms within a state
system that protects them both from political opposition begs the question of how
great now the democratic deficit within Northern Irish society.
Ian Paisley has now pledged to resign. His long history of broken pledges will not
alter the outcome of this particular promise. Catholics rejoice - Sinn Fein will not
now nominate him as pope.
London, 17 March 2008
Today, the truism that Sinn Fein leaders are ministers of the British crown is the
commonsense discourse of the conversing classes. The true believer, securely but
hardly safely corralled into the self-referential and intellectually challenged
world of the peace process, alone dissenting from the obvious.
Sinn Fein, the sole members of the Freedom 2016 lonely club, now profess to believe
that a united Ireland is only eight years away. Fewer in number, head so burrowed up
their own fundament that they can't smell the other crap they are duly fed, their
adherents still harbour the intoxicated opinion that the war was, in the words of
Joe Cahill, really won. But then let us be careful not to blaspheme. St Joe after
all is, according to one documentary, the patron saint of the peace process. Who are
we mere mortals to question the divine? Still, strange, that one of the secularly
sinful, the ungodly Newton Emerson, on Joe's passing, should note that the late IRA
chief of staff was survived by his wife and ... one million Protestants. Emerson's
quip was as sharp as it was barbed. The consent principle, the bane of republicans
who challenged it with the coercion principle , for long the sole fulcrum on which
the British presence in Ireland hinged, as manifested in the wishes of those million
Protestants, has triumphed over the existence and purpose of the IRA. Apart from the
one Protestant the nationalist writer Jude Collins knows who favours a united
Ireland, the million continue to support the union with Britain. The IRA now
embraces the consent principle, the only thing seriously sustaining that union and
which legitimises in the absolute the British presence in Ireland.
Still, an orb takes a long time settling in to the land of the flat earthers, the
evolutionary adaptability of the eye to its surroundings being a slow and often
torturous process. It is not a peculiarly republican malaise as is evidenced by the
strange belief elsewhere that our entire world is a mere 6000 years old and was
created 1000 years after glue was invented by the Sumerians.
In that type of inverted Newtonian universe where apples shoot upwards the moment
they fall from trees, IRA decommissioning did not in fact happen, and Hugh Orde and
Ian Paisley stood poised to lead the nationalist multitudes over the orange hill and
into the bright green fields of a united Ireland that would also be socialist. On
one issue alone have they been wrong - Peter Robinson will now lead them to Irish
unity. He is younger, has more energy and will therefore get them there even
quicker. Michael Ignatieff seemingly got it all wrong when he said of cynics like
myself: they have a healthy awareness of the gulf between what people practice and
what they preach.
The origins of the Provisional IRA explain much about their leaders' acceptance of
their lot as British micro ministers in a Paisley led government. Although much has
been made of the republicanism of the Provisional IRA it was in fact more
Provisional than republican. The Provisionals were much less the unbroken thread of
republican tradition stretching back to 1798 than they were a conjunctural response
to post 1969 British state strategies. Whatever their ideological moments, many of
which were intense such as 1981 when the H-Block hunger strikers died with such
courage that the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher felt moved to comment
on it, the Provisionals were in essence the cutting edge of an insurrection against
not the British presence per se but against the manner in which that presence
conducted itself. The Provisionals did not mushroom into a mass movement because the
British were in Ireland. They did so in response to British behaviour while in
Ireland.
The strategic logic of this was simple if anyone astute enough existed within the
British establishment to take cognisance of it. Britain did not have to withdraw
from Ireland in order to take the wind out of the Provisionals sails. They merely
had to change the terms on which they stayed.
For long British state strategy was predicated on securing the defeat of Provisional
republicanism through the application of strategies of exclusion and
marginalisation. Republicans and republicanism were regarded as an indivisible
ensemble that had to be excluded in its entirety from both the discourse and
projects that were functioning to shape an eventual solution to the range of
problems that plagued the North. At a certain point in the latter half of the 1980s
some element of British strategic intelligence questioned the indivisibility of
republicans and republicanism and began to prise an opening. From that point on
British strategy moved from the old realist model of behaving like a billiard ball
that endlessly knocked the Provisional IRA from one end of the strategic table to
the other while in turn being relentlessly cannoned itself. And in its place it
opted for the more pluralist model of creating cobwebs. It reached into the
Provisionals, simultaneously pulling threads to it and knotting others less pliable.
By the early 1990s strategy was clear.
The defeat of Provisional republicanism would be secured by the twin strategic
prongs of excluding republicanism but including republicans. The British
establishment identified who it needed from within the ranks of Provisional
republicanism to work with. Above all else the British moved to secure the continued
hegemony of the Adams leadership. Trimble could fall but not Adams. Today
republicans, if they may still be termed such, are on the inside but sans all
republican tenets which now seem to belong exclusively to the outsiders - dissident
republicans.
The British state has emerged as the conflict's one clear winner. Over the course of
its strategic success it certainly ceded a lot of credibility in terms of government
ministers and civil servants. They seemed publicly at any rate to buy into the
bollix that Sinn Fein stipulated as being indispensable to the party leadership's
strategy of deception employed against its own grassroots. And so Downing Street
became the engine room for the endless processing which has characterised the
northern Irish political landscape for more than a decade and needlessly prolonged
instability.
Nevertheless, for all the meandering of rivers they invariably reach the sea. The
British got there. In assisting the Sinn Fein leadership bring about the demise of
the Provisional IRA as a serious anti-British entity the British government ceded
not one key tenet. The border is still here, as is partition, and the Unionist veto,
whereby those who favour the union with Britain can ensure its continuity so long as
they command the numbers to do so. Northern Ireland's British police force is
supported by the party who previously gave unambiguous support to the killing and
bombing of its members. There is an Irish dimension but this was allowed for by the
Tories as far back as October 1972 when it struck some of them that an Irish
dimension would be a valuable asset in prosecuting the war against the Provisional
IRA. Intellectually, the British state perspective that the dispute was primarily
one that could be analysed through the prism of an internal conflict model has
prevailed and is manifest in the outcome we have today. Who now remembers the
Provisional assertions that British imperialism was keeping the country divided for
its own malign reasons? As surely as the Provisional movement has been locked into
the structures of the British state of Northern Ireland the very act of locking them
in has unlocked the British state from the accusation that its role in the ring was
something other than referee.
The North of Ireland today is a site of political parsimony rather than generosity.
Consequently we have a power splitting rather than a power sharing executive. The
two dominant parties are led by a theocrat and an autocrat respectively. Their
mutual interest in pursuing their own separate totalitarianisms within a state
system that protects them both from political opposition begs the question of how
great now the democratic deficit within Northern Irish society.
Ian Paisley has now pledged to resign. His long history of broken pledges will not
alter the outcome of this particular promise. Catholics rejoice - Sinn Fein will not
now nominate him as pope.
London, 17 March 2008