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Certainties
and clarities are, of course, vital to any solid,
workable, and enforceable deal. Especially against
the backdrop of legal mechanisms capable of vindicating
them, clear and certain undertakings are key foundations
to much of socio-political life.
On
the other hand, “trust and confidence” are
elements which, in well-founded agreements, should
in fact not be much required. Put differently - and
using some of the rather few words of I’d ever
quote from Ronald Reagan - wise antagonists should
“trust but verify.” Thus, one ought perhaps
not to trust at all in dealing with an opponent but
should instead have trust and confidence, if at all,
mainly in the recourse available when that opponent
fails to live up to his end of a struck bargain.
Against
this paradigm, Taoiseach Ahern’s above-quoted
statement is troubling. In essence, he seems to be
saying: “We need certainty and clarity that the
war in Northern Ireland is over and Republican arms
are all disposed of, and, in return, we’ll allow
decommissioned Republicans to put their trust and
confidence in the British and Irish governments to
fulfill thereafter the promises of the Good Friday
Agreement.” (Quite clearly and certainly, Mr.
Ahern was not saying: “Our two governments will
now provide Republicans with certainty and clarity
that the GFA is actually implemented in full, and
we’ll put our trust and confidence in Republicans’
then standing down and disarming.”)
Certainty
and clarity on the IRA’s standing down and disarming
are obviously entirely fair elements of any final
deal, but what really is being offered in exchange
therefor?
Even
the Alliance Party’s current leader David Ford
recognizes that what is being offered Republicans
may indeed be illusory: “Any IRA ‘acts of
completion’ and the Hillsborough plan cooked
up to restore Stormont could be wasted, Alliance leader
David Ford warned today.” Chris Thornton, “Alliance
urge vote reform” (Belfast Telegraph,
9 March 2003). In fuller part, Mr. Ford explained
to his Party conference on 8 March 2003 that, after
another election, the GFA’s Assembly might not
even be able to elect new a new First Minister:
It
will be hugely destabilising if we have ‘Acts
of Completion’, hold an election to get the
institutions re-established, and then fail to elect
a First Minister and Deputy First Minister. However,
it appears that the Government can only concentrate
on two problems at one time, and has left the voting
system on the back burner. I am sure that we will
return to it later this year, probably in an atmosphere
of desperation.
With
various systemic “what if” risks like this
one so important and so unavoidable (see also, e.g.,
“The Fundamental Problem Of Non-Constitutional
Law Vis-À-Vis The Northern Ireland Question”
(The Blanket, Belfast: 9 March 2003) and “Republicans’
Big Risk” (The Blanket, Belfast: 17 March
2003)), Republicans’ putting their complete trust
and confidence in the British and Irish governments
to fulfill the promises of the Good Friday Agreement
would reveal, charitably put, more hope than wisdom
… or perhaps just plain desperation.
On
the closely related topic of civil liberty in the
United Kingdom, Simon Jenkins on 21 March 2003 wrote
in The Times (London) - itself not exactly
a hotbed of liberal thought - the following regarding
the limited faith and trust that an Englishman should
wisely place in his own government:
After
an IRA attack in 1974, the supposedly liberal Roy
Jenkins introduced the Prevention of Terrorism Act,
pledging in public that it was a “strictly
temporary measure”. It gave the police extensive
discretion to spy on, intern and deport citizens
without trial. It has never been repealed. It was
just too useful. There is in Britain no supreme
court to demand its demise.
The present Labour Government promised to repeal
the Prevention of Terrorism Act. It did, cynically
introducing one ten times as long and far more draconian.
Under the cover of “9/11” the Home Secretary,
David Blunkett, brought in his Anti-Terrorism Act,
the most extensive restriction of civil liberties
in Britain in peacetime. It included indefinite
internment of “suspects”, expulsion of
foreigners and the right of the Home Secretary to
take any further measures “by decree”
without oversight. Only the House of Lords, to its
credit, demanded the dilution of his more extreme
police-state proposals.
Who knows what Mr Blunkett may be scheming to slip
through under cover of bombing this week. He is
already seeking powers to tap mobile phones and
e-mail messages and pass on such information to
an array of state agencies. He is a shameless enemy
of liberty. Protest such intrusion and you will
be given the excuse of Tosca’s Scarpia and
the East German Stasi: “The innocent have nothing
to fear.”
The most trenchant critic of such control-freakery
used to be a certain Patricia Hewitt, the author
of The Abuse of Power and a civil liberties lobbyist.
“Patricia Hewitt prosecutes the State,”
cries a handout in my file. Ms Hewitt now sits happily
in the Cabinet. There she enforces more severe infringements
of civil liberty than she can have imagined possible
when she wrote her book. That is ambition for you.
Ms Hewitt is another Clare Short.
Such offences against personal freedom are bitterly
fought in the United States, where courts and politicians
regard the championing of liberty as a sacred duty,
not an Opposition hobby. In Britain infringement
seems immune to party and to argument. Labour and
Conservative ministers alike fall in love with emergency
powers.
History
indeed already reveals that various “emergency
powers” have been employed to keep the GFA just
barely breathing over these past five years. If London
deems additional “emergency powers” necessary
in the future for the GFA’s continued survival,
who could doubt that they too would be sanctified
by Westminster? But who could say at this very moment,
with any confidence and certainty, what those powers
would be and what effect they would have? Today, one
might trust in that regard only that those powers
would expediently address whatever political exigency
London felt it was facing in Northern Ireland. “In
any conflict, the true victor is always the State”
is the title of Mr. Jenkins’ above-referenced
writing, and quite aptly so in light of the workings
of the “British Constitution.”
Just
days ago, a credit card company phoned me to inquire
whether I was in fact the proud purchaser of a $5200
watch charged earlier that day to one of my credit
cards; I truthfully replied that I was not, and, happily,
I will pay not even one penny towards that transaction.
Sadly, though, someone not true to his word is now
holding an ill-gotten timepiece, and some conned merchant
is ruefully holding only a worthless credit card slip.
If
a GFA “deal” is now done satisfying London,
Dublin, and the UUP, will any political group, I wonder,
be left holding the bag?
Washington, D.C. lawyer Paul A. Fitzsimmons wrote
Independence for Northern Ireland: Why and How
(1993) (pfitzsim@wrightrobinson.com).
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