‘Dr
No says yes’, reported Channel 4 News, as
Paisley – famous, or infamous, for shouting
‘Ulster Says No!’, ‘No surrender
to the IRA!’ and various other slogans with
the word ‘no’ in them – agreed
to work side-by-side with Sinn Fein in a power-sharing
Assembly that will kick off on 8 May. Many seem
pleasantly shocked that the political stick-in-the-mud
Paisley has ‘put aside’ his hostility
(towards both Sinn Fein and Catholics in general)
in the name of moving Northern Ireland forward.
Some even imagine that the picture of Paisley
and Adams sitting side-by-side will help to usher
in world peace. ‘With luck [the photo] could
inspire other divided but war-weary communities
to embrace the compromises of politics’,
gushed Michael White in the Guardian (1).
Behind all this premature speculation, all the
widespread talk of history having been made, the
fact is that the latest deal is built on the rubble
of politics in Northern Ireland. In recent years,
it is not only the IRA’s weapons that have
been decommissioned – so has politics itself,
as genuine debate has been buried and put verifiably
beyond use. Today’s peace process, and its
latest expression in the new Paisley/Adams Assembly,
is premised on the disarming of political debate.
History hasn’t been made in Northern Ireland;
it has been frozen.
Both Paisley and Adams have been congratulated
for putting their political differences to one
side in the interests of the ‘greater good’:
Paisley is praised for rising above his ‘Biblical
not-an-inch Unionism’ and Adams for refusing
to allow his Irish nationalist desires for a United
Ireland to stand in the way of finding a peace
deal (2). In reality, both
the political traditions of Unionism as represented
by Paisley and Irish nationalism as fronted by
Adams died long ago. Paisley and Adams did not
‘put aside’ their political beliefs
– they simply no longer have any. They met
face-to-face less as the representatives of great
opposing movements than as the ghosts of politics
past, the physical remnants of long-gone traditions.
Many have wondered out loud what possessed Paisley
to sign up to power-sharing with Adams, a man
he has been denouncing as an IRA commander and
spokesman for the past 20 years. ‘Perhaps’,
ruminates one commentator, ‘somewhere within
that roaring chest there is a whisper of conscience
after all’; another wonders if old age (Paisley
is 80) has tempered the Orange loudmouth’s
mindset (3). Searching for
explanations for Paisley’s latest move in
his moral make-up or date of birth, even in his
‘roaring chest’, is typical of a British
commentariat that has long loved to hate Paisley
and naively holds him responsible for every injustice
and stalemate in Northern Ireland. In the real
world, Paisley’s sit-in with Adams confirms
the end of old-style Unionism as a political force.
Traditional Unionism has been in decline since
the Troubles in Northern Ireland exploded in 1969.
A combination of British initiatives aimed at
defeating the IRA and pacifying the Catholic-nationalist
community, and shifts in the balance of forces
in Northern Ireland, has had the effect of undercutting
Unionism – both the traditional variety
represented by the Ulster Unionist Party and the
more cranky variety represented by Paisley’s
Democratic Unionist Party. For all the claims
that Unionists like Paisley have effectively been
holding British officials hostage, forcing them
to stay in Northern Ireland against their will,
in truth the British have been more than willing
to stuff the Unionists in the name of strengthening
their domination of Northern Ireland.
In 1972, at the height of the conflict, the British
government abolished Stormont, the parliament
through which Unionists had governed Northern
Ireland on Britain’s behalf since 1922,
and instituted direct British rule instead. That
had a devastating impact on the old Unionist ruling
class. A decade later, in 1985, the British and
Irish governments signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement,
a document which gave the Irish government a largely
token advisory role in the governing of Northern
Ireland. Unionist politicians, in particular Paisley,
viewed it as a ‘gross betrayal’; Paisley
said the Unionist people would ‘never, never,
never, never’ accept the Agreement (again
with the negatives). The Downing Street Declaration
of 1993, published by then British PM John Major
and Irish PM Albert Reynolds, declared that Britain
had no ‘selfish, strategic or economic interest’
in remaining in Northern Ireland, but would nonetheless
stay until a majority of people desired otherwise
(4). Even though this guaranteed
Britain’s continued presence in Northern
Ireland – which was founded in the six north-eastern
counties of Ireland precisely to ensure a Protestant-Unionist
majority – Unionist leaders balked at Britain’s
declared lack of ‘interest’. ‘They’re
just not interested in us’, came
the complaint (5).
These initiatives show that the British elite
has had few qualms about riding roughshod over
the Unionists in order to find new ways to justify
and repackage its rule in Northern Ireland. The
very fact that Paisley’s politics has been
based on saying ‘No!’ to political
developments shows that he has not driven events
in Northern Ireland but rather has tried to slow
or stunt the pace of change. British-led developments
served to weaken Unionism and cause division and
disarray within its camps. As then senior Unionist
statesman Robert McCartney wrote in 1995, after
20 years of deals that tended to sideline old
Unionists and as the ‘peace process’
was taking hold: ‘[There is] an ongoing
deterioration in the quality of ideas, energy
and representation within Unionism to the extent
that it is now reaching a stage of terminal stagnation
with a dying and ageing membership.’ (6)
The absence of the IRA threat, and of Irish nationalist
demands more broadly, has driven the final nail
into the coffin of traditional Unionism. The IRA
ceasefire of 1994 robbed Unionism of its defining
justification, its raison d’etre,
which was to defend the Union between Northern
Ireland and Britain from its enemies. Without
those enemies, what was the point of Unionism?
Paisley’s big, brash, unapologetic brand
of Democratic Unionism was hit particularly hard
by this development. Those who hold Paisley responsible
for everything forget that he founded the DUP
in 1971, two years into the Troubles, in response
to the outbreak of conflict. That is why his rallying
cry has been ‘No surrender to the IRA!’
– his was a reactive, defensive, negative
politics, based on standing up to the threat posed
by the IRA to the Union between Northern Ireland
and Britain. Without that threat, Paisley has,
in the words of one observer, been reduced to
‘inventing disaster so that he can oppose
it’ (7).
The demise of traditional Unionism is captured
best in the spectacular collapse of the Ulster
Unionist Party (UUP) over the past five to 10
years. For most of the twentieth century, the
UUP was the establishment party in Northern Ireland,
intimately tied to every major institution in
society: business, the military, the civil service,
the church, the Orange Order. In the 2005 General
Election, UUP leader David Trimble lost his seat
to Paisley’s DUP, and the UUP’s showing
in Westminster fell from five seats to a face-reddening
one; meanwhile, the DUP increased its representation
from six seats to nine.
Many claimed that the increased vote for Paisley’s
DUP represented a return to ‘extremism’
in Northern Ireland. In fact, as shown by Paisley’s
grinning photo-call with Adams yesterday, his
policies did not differ very much from the UUP’s:
both parties believe that power-sharing with nationalists
is the way forward. Rather, the DUP vote is an
expression of discontent and alienation, a feeling
of marginalisation amongst Unionists in Northern
Ireland. People voted for the DUP, not because
it said very much that was different to the UUP,
but rather because it more clearly articulated
that sense of discontent and grievance.
That is how Paisley arrived at the talks table
with Adams – not as a result of a change
of heart or the onset of senility, but as a result
of massive shifts over the past 20 to 30 years.
It is the emptying out of Unionism that means
even a firebrand like Paisley now puts all his
eggs in the power-sharing basket, and it was the
collapse of the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party
that allowed Paisley to win enough votes to call
some of the shots in the setting up of the Assembly.
Both his preparedness to talk to Adams and the
strength of his mandate are the products, somewhat
ironically, of the collapse of Unionism. Paisley
enters the new Assembly as the shadow, rather
than the voice, of Unionism.
At the same time, Sinn Fein has renounced its
political beliefs, too. Indeed, even though much
of the response to the latest developments has
focused on Paisley’s big change in position,
Sinn Fein has, if anything, given up even more
than the DUP. The Assembly will guarantee that
Northern Ireland remains a formal part of the
United Kingdom, a state of affairs that Sinn Fein
and the IRA fought against for much of the period
between 1969 and 1994. Sinn Fein now accepts that
Northern Ireland is part of Britain until such
a time that a majority in Northern Ireland decides
otherwise. In short, it has abandoned its historic
claim that only the people of Ireland as a whole
can decide their affairs, in favour of adapting
to the fatalistic ‘politics of birth rates’,
whereby the people of Ireland will just have to
wait until Catholics outbreed Protestants in the
north before they can enjoy their democratic rights
in an independent sovereign state.
Irish nationalism is also a shadow of its former
self. A key shift in Sinn Fein policy over the
past 15 years and more has been its redefinition
of the republican movement’s goal. Instead
of pursuing the objective of Irish independence,
republican strategists argued for ‘parity
of esteem’ with Unionists, for equal treatment
and respect within the state of Northern Ireland.
Sinn Fein and the IRA once claimed to be the ‘legitimate
government’ of Ireland, the true heirs of
the 1916 declaration of an Irish Republic. Now,
as amply demonstrated by Adams’ enthusiastic
signing up for power-sharing with the DUP, they
accept their position as just another political
party playing a role in the ‘peace process’.
Like Paisley, Adams enters the new Assembly denuded
of his earlier political beliefs, as effectively
a politics-free politician who can be called upon
to manage Northern Ireland’s general affairs.
The ‘peace process’ is built not so
much on the compromise of Unionists and nationalists,
as on their defeat and degradation. Few people,
and certainly not I, feel any nostalgia for the
passing of the old political blocs that dominated
Northern Ireland for so long. The problem today
is that the peace process, far from trying to
give birth to anything new, makes a virtue
of this death of politics, of the end of politics
and debate. It institutionalises both the lack
of political vision in Northern Ireland and its
lingering sectarian tensions.
The various Assemblies that have existed in Northern
Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998
have been based on the ‘politics of consensus’
– that is, on the idea that every measure
must have the backing of Unionists, nationalists
and all the other tiny cross-community parties,
too. This is profoundly anti-democratic, and it
elevates political stalemate over Northern Ireland’s
future into a positive, where anything that causes
strife or disagreement is pushed to one side while
everything that wins a nod of approval from all
sides is pushed through. The Assemblies have also
institutionalised sectarian divisions. They have
demanded that ‘at their first meeting, members
of the Assembly will register a designation of
identity – nationalist, Unionist or other
– for the purpose of measuring cross-community
support in Assembly votes’ (8).
This freezes Northern Ireland’s different
identities in law, which has had the effect of
further sectarianising politics and life in general
across the statelet (see A sectarian peace,
by Brendan O’Neill).
Where republican parties such as Sinn Fein once
had the noble goal of uniting ‘Catholic,
Protestant and Dissenter’, they now rush
to support an Assembly that requires the separate
identification of Catholic, Protestant and ‘other’.
The failure to overcome divisions in Northern
Ireland is transformed into a positive ‘celebration
of cultural identity’ under the peace process;
the failure to resolve political clashes one way
or another has given rise to a supine politics
of consensus where disagreement just gets buried;
and the failure by any of the parties, or the
British and Irish governments, to come up with
a new vision for Northern Ireland means the old
representatives of Unionism and nationalism get
to stalk the political landscape like toothless
dinosaurs.
There was little ‘historic’ about
the agreement between Paisley and Adams. Rather
it is the removal of history from the agenda,
the denigration of politics and democratic debate,
that has allowed this unholy marriage between
a former loyalist firebrand and a one-time republican
activist.
Brendan
O’Neill is editor of spiked.
Visit his personal website here.
(1)
A
message for the world, Guardian, 27
March 2007
(2) Blair
may finally have seduced Paisley – but that
still leaves Northern Ireland as divided as ever,
Independent, 24 March 2007
(3) Blair
may finally have seduced Paisley – but that
still leaves Northern Ireland as divided as ever,
Independent, 24 March 2007
(4) Downing
Street Declaration, Wikipedia
(5) Downing
Street Declaration, Wikipedia
(6) Robert McCartney, Belfast Newsletter,
7 March 1995
(7) See ‘Divided Loyalists’, Brendan
O’Neill, Living Marxism, June 1995
(8) See A
sectarian peace, by Brendan O’Neill
reprinted
with permission from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3011/
