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Observing
the events of this week, as our political class continue
to finger point and wallow in affected self-pity trying
to persuade the rest of us that their virtue was in
some way defiled, it is tempting to cast the mind
back to that occasion some years ago when Bill Clinton
referred to the bar room boozers who each time they
reached an agreement to leave the pub fell back in
through its doors again. They simply could not bring
themselves to do the business, knowing that no matter
how empty their pockets were, or how boring their
drunken discourse sounded to all around them, somebody
would buy them a drink just to keep them quiet for
a while. How many times since Clinton upset the pseudo
sensibilities of those who seek to rule us has this
dreary debacle been re-enacted? And they don't even
grace us with different actors. It is symptomatic
of the staleness of our political culture that we
have the same old faces, some of them for decades,
muttering the usual profanities and inanities. Collectively,
did we all do something in a previous life for which
we are now condemned to a Northern Irish Hades where
Sisyphus-like we push the political class towards
accommodation only to have it reach the top and then
roll back down on top of us just to start the uphill
process all over again?
In
any event, the people who are asked to vote by the
once every four or five years men - the only occasion
we see them in our deprived estates - are left to
hold their noses and approach the political dunghill
to enquire of it what went wrong. Many will wearily
resign themselves to concluding that the dance of
deceit has been performed one more time. For some
Trimble got his guns and then screwed Adams. For others
Adams got his election and then shafted Trimble. But
is it all as simple as the either/or perspective would
have it?
If
those supporters of Trimble within the unionist community
to whom I have spoken are right, Adams certainly did
not shaft Trimble. When asked 'did Sinn Fein behave
dishonourably?' the answer was a concise 'no'. In
addition a unionist source told the Guardian that
Trimble and his negotiating team felt that for the
first time republicans were ‘playing straight’
with them. According to this view, Trimble clearly
wants to do the deal and is wholly committed to the
notion of a devolved government which is as inclusive
as possible. His choices were, faced with an election
he could either fight it having secured a deal which
the unionist electorate would be satisfied with or
alternatively, if the deal wasn't good enough, he
could resort to the fallback mode of pocketing the
gains such as an improved verbal commitment from republicans
that would narrow the gap between the cold war position
of today and the no war position demanded by unionism.
Coupled with a significant act of IRA decommissioning,
he could then claim to the unionist electorate that
he had compelled republicans to admit that the end
goal of republicanism in any structural sense was
an internal solution; after that republicans could
aspire to and work for a united Ireland on the same
terms that Fianna Fail, the Workers Party and the
SDLP had done in the past - exclusively peacefully
and within the parameters of the consent principle.
Clearly, in this view, the leap of faith Trimble made
- because he got nothing from republicans on paper
- did not make for a soft landing so he aborted short
of impact and now lives to fight another day. Logical
- except for one point. It fails to explain why a
beleaguered Trimble was facing an election to begin
with which compelled him to take decisions to either
deal or cut and run. The only reason the British had
postponed the election from the outset was to secure
a deal which would add wind to Trimble's sails when
the time came for him to navigate his course through
choppy electoral waters.
So
did Trimble screw Adams? In electoral terms, the UUP
leader would have been a fool to accept the Sinn Fein
offer. But he seems not to have made this entirely
clear to Sinn Fein, the corollary of which was an
inflation of both media and public expectation. Despite
maintaining that republicans were well aware of the
'transparency and clarity' needed by unionists, at
the end of the Sinn Fein-UUP negotiations he appears
to have left with penumbra rather than precision in
relation to the matter of transparency. By their own
admission senior UUP figures failed to 'nail down'
this issue as firmly as might have been expected.
Arguably, Trimble had firmer assurances from Sinn
Fein on actual IRA decommissioning in November 1999
when he decided to jump first and Adams never jumped
at all which caused the collapse of the then executive.
Most likely, this time, he calculated that Sinn Fein
needed the institutions more than the unionists did
and would not therefore send the UUP into an election
with a poor hand. This logic was captured by Martina
Purdy: ‘given that republicans regard themselves
as the mother of the peace process, and that they
love the agreement more, it is republicans who are
more likely to make the sacrifice and save it.’
But as Roy Garland concluded, the outcome for unionists
was that ‘we could not see it, estimate it, itemise
it and the internal and external enemies of Ulster
Unionists had a field day exploiting Trimble's anguish.’
Strategically,
Sinn Fein while not setting out to screw Trimble ended
up with an outcome that made little difference. If
the party lusts for institutional power as strongly
as some of us suspect, then, by denying transparency,
why did it hole below the waterline the one vessel
that alone seems capable of bringing Sinn Fein into
Port Stormont? As Martina Purdy succinctly put it.
‘does it do the Republican Movement any good
being right, if they lose the prize to the DUP?’
Possibly the party felt, given the hobbling of both
Donaldson and Empey at the last UUC conference, that
Trimble had foreclosed any short term leadership challenge
and had subsequently created more space in which to
manoeuvre. If so Sinn Fein were hardly alone in reading
it this way.
Trimble's
real negotiating strength lies not in his personal
character but in his structural weakness as leader
of the Ulster Unionist Party. Conversely, the unchallenged
hegemony of Gerry Adams within the republican constituency
has always meant that republicans were considered
to have much more freedom to compromise on central
tenets. And such compromising has characterised the
Sinn Fein game plan to negotiations for years. The
posse of 'sell-out' seekers snapping at the rump of
Adams were more like pesky flies than the pack of
wolves that have persistently bared their fangs at
Trimble. With Trimble's opponents in a temporary but
certain state of disarray, the British and Irish governments,
not to mention the UUP leader himself, may all have
calculated that more risks could be taken. Why otherwise
would Blair and Ahern risk another punch hole in their
already well-franked season tickets just to come back
for one more scoreless draw which would inevitably
be followed by a further replay? In such circumstances
it would be tempting for Sinn Fein to feel that the
Adams announcement backed up by an IRA statement claiming
that the Sinn Fein president accurately reflected
the military body's position followed by an act of
decommissioning, was close enough to Trimble's needs
to allow him to make up the difference to his constituency
through the powers of persuasion.
If
neither the Sinn Fein nor UUP leaderships set out
to trump each other and the difference between the
two sides is as David McKittrick contends ‘presentational
rather than a problem of substance’ and as Brian
Feeney states ‘no point of political principle
remains to be dealt with’, did the British then
bounce Trimble into the failed deal as some unionists
claim? If so it can only be because they, more so
than the unionists, were happy to pocket IRA guns
without transparency regardless of the consequences
for the resumption of devolution. They more than anyone
else have gained from the peace process, having obtained
an end to the IRA campaign - the one consistent objective
of British state strategy since 1970. The Good Friday
Agreement is secondary to such an objective, being
a mere docking bay in which the British can anchor
their victory over the IRA.
Ultimately,
the one certainty to emerge from this week's debacle
is that the ambiguity and fudge that has characterised
the peace process from the outset, has yet again been
the cause of suspicion and institutional malfunctioning.
Rather than being the lubricant that has made the
wheels go round it has become the grit that derails
them every time. Meanwhile, the rest of us are meant
to sit and watch but ask no questions while our collective
future is left in the hands of people so absorbed
in themselves that they are oblivious to Ken Livingstone’s
insight into the public view of politicians that 'there
is such a general presumption that we are all crooks
that the public is prepared to believe the worst about
any of us'.
Now
why would anyone over here think that, Ken?
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