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On
a train back to D.C. in February 1994—following
a large National Committee on American Foreign Policy
gathering in New York, famously attended by Gerry
Adams—another person who had also attended chanced
to sit next to me. He was, I learned, a lay member
of a major U.S.-based Catholic group tangentially
involved in the Northern Ireland question, and, in
the ensuing conversation, he mentioned his group's
frequent frustration at being unable to get straight
answers to straight questions posed to various Northern
Catholics.
During
the past decade, I've often shared that feeling, though
by no means exclusively because of dealings with members
of that one Northern group. Those years have taught
me well that—notwithstanding stereotypes to the
contrary—many Northern Protestants are no less
able to dodge, weave, cover their ears, and close
their eyes when they feel it suits them to do so.
Exceptions in each camp of the North's intelligentsia
have, in my experience, been well outnumbered by those
who illaudably follow that general rule.
Yet,
the costs of such evasions may be high, including
not least their leading astray politicians who often
look to those bright lights and big thinkers for direction
on difficult Northern Ireland issues.
Apparently
in that vein—and following the recent debacle
described as a promised D-Day for the peace process
instead materializing as a political Dunkirk—Prime
Ministers Blair and Ahern have again gone valiantly
into the breech to announce, for at least the fifty-seventh
time, the dogmatism that the future for Northern Ireland
is the Good Friday Agreement, the whole Good Friday
Agreement, and nothing but the Good Friday Agreement,
so help them God (with perhaps just a few small tweaks
soon to be expertly crafted and effected in order
to get the lights back on at that long-dark "only
show in town").
To
one of those announcements, anti-Agreement Unionist
politician Robert McCartney responded:
Like Henry Ford, who once said "You can
have any colour of car you like as long as it is black,"
Tony Blair is telling the pro-Union people: "You can
have an election but, regardless of the result, you
will be unable to change the flawed institutions of
the Belfast Agreement."
Indeed,
whereas Henry Ford offered, in black only, simple
cars which actually worked, the British and Irish
premiers—aided and abetted by too many political
pundits—seem now to be mandating that Northern
Ireland can and will have only an unduly complex,
Stormont-colored Sunningdale Mark II which does
not work and which will never work.
"Which
does not work" is a conclusion very easy to reach
accurately, given that (a) the five-year-old GFA's
Assembly and Executive are now into their second year
of their fourth suspension and (b) Northern Ireland
is just barely scraping into an overdue election which
no one can reasonably hope will shortly yield a functioning
devolved government.
"Which
will never work" is a conclusion that, while also
correct, is tougher to reach, requiring indeed an
honest look at the big picture in Ireland and Britain.
A
couple of decades ago, it was fairly obvious that,
from Britain's perspective, a happy result in Northern
Ireland could be achieved through either an outright
military victory over militant Republicans or a settlement
with them. Thereafter, the overall battle reached
a stalemate point, something short of outright British
military victory, whereat many of the principals in
Ireland and Britain sought to cap the socio-political-paramilitary
conflict through some form of agreement. Years of
well-intended effort in that direction wrought the
GFA, but additional years of still more effort have
left that GFA a body without breath, leaving many
to speculate on whether its spirit has already departed
permanently.
Why
oh why, people so often now ask, is a settlement broadly
and even desperately desired on both sides of this
divide nonetheless so difficult—maybe even impossible—to
achieve finally and implement fully?
Decommissioning—more
plainly known as disarmament—is, of course, the
most conspicuous stumbling block in this regard. Militant
Republicans' objectively strong disinclination to
commit to anything approaching a firm timeframe for
completely abandoning their weaponry is often ascribed
to their subjective—and, thus, merely putative—unwillingness
to be "humiliated." As I earlier stated in the online
discussion group Slugger
O'Toole, however, there may be more reasonable
grounds for Republicans' stubbornness on this point
than their supposedly delicate sensibilities:
I tend to think this simplistic and pervasively
accepted "humiliation" point, as well as the related
"we don't want to hurt their feelings unduly" response,
is a bit of a fraud. Perhaps that ostensible emotional
aspect to the decommissioning issue is but a veil
for an actual and rational ground for Republican reluctance
(a ground few in Ireland and Britain want to discuss
aloud): namely, [the underlying "constitutional mercies"
problem].
That
"constitutional mercies" problem is my term for a
theory based on the inability of Northern Ireland's
Republicans to enter into any settlement, other than
one involving their complete capitulation, which is
reliable and enforceable within the United
Kingdom's immutably fluid "constitutional" system.
Rephrased a bit, Republicans may just be unwilling
to abandon their weapons entirely and then rely ever
after exclusively on Westminster's tender constitutional
mercies regarding the long-term maintenance of this
GFA regime.
That
overall theory I have set out in, among other places,
the Slugger O'Toole group, where I addressed
my comments in one instance to group participant Trevor
Ringland, who is both active in the Ulster Unionist
Party and a staunch GFA supporter. There I argued
that—from a legal/constitutional viewpoint—the
Good Friday Agreement is, put very bluntly, "an obscenity
because it is in fact no 'agreement' at all." Also
stated in that note, to date unanswered by its addressee,
was my prediction that few would take on, head-on,
this challenging theory regarding this half-decade-long
impasse:
Mr. Ringland: While the above-referenced Scotland
on Sunday article quotes you as saying "I am
fed-up with the way republicans' response to this[
weapons] issue has determined the relationship between
parties in this process," the Press Association
yesterday reported another statement by you at that
same meeting which I think is ultimately more important:
"[P]ersonally I am fed up with unionists who talk
about problems and do not talk about solutions."
There's one rather large problem, though, that
damned few Unionists, and damned few others in Ireland
or Britain, will address publicly. Here's how I
recently described it to a friend who knows little
about the Good Friday Agreement and who asked me
recently what the main difficulty was with it:
Let's say you've a house to rent, and
I want to rent it. I propose the following agreement:
I'll give you $1000 per month to rent the house,
but we have to agree that, after I've moved in,
I can change that amount in any way at all that
I'd like, and you can do nothing thereafter to put
me out of the house against my will.
My friend responded: "That's not an agreement.
That's an obscenity."
The problem with the Good Friday Agreement is that
it is quite similarly a "constitutional" obscenity,
and hot off the presses this morning is yet another
manifestation of the obscenely inequitable nature
of that ostensible "Agreement."
[Further discussion there involved Britain's proposed
GFA "monitoring body," citing a related article,
"The
Fundamental Problem Of Non-Constitutional Law Vis-�-Vis
The Northern Ireland Question" (The Blanket,
Belfast: 9 March 2003).]
Again, Mr. Ringland, as demonstrated by the often
embarrassing and sometimes plainly ignoble history
of the GFA over all of its five-year life, that
Agreement is an obscenity because it is in fact
no "agreement" at all. As you may not have seen
an earlier posting in this group, I'll again repeat
some related thoughts:
As a card-carrying Taig myself, I actually have
a lot of sympathy for both sides regarding this
current impasse.
Unionists have a very strong point in maintaining
that they shouldn't have to deal with a political
party in government while its militant wing yet
exists.
However, as demonstrated in small articles �
including "Republicans'
Big Risk," I think the constitutional climate
in the United Kingdom is so execrably poor that
Republicans are bound to get constantly screwed,
right and left, if they voluntarily accede completely
to all that Unionists would require of them.
That impasse, within the GFA context, may be
unavoidable, as suggested by events during the
past five years.
If, with all due respect, you are in fact "fed
up with unionists who talk about problems and do
not talk about solutions," you yourself might indeed
take an honest look at this situation and try to
think wisely, and then talk bravely, about a genuine
solution thereto, even if that solution might need
to be a radical and difficult one.
Fair warning, however: your doing so would necessarily
call for a healthy amount intellectual honesty,
a commodity which seems not to be in superabundance
in Northern Ireland's socio-political arena.
Regards, Paul Fitzsimmons August 31, 2003 05:32
PM
In an effort to exemplify this constitutional difficulty,
I more recently responded as follows to another Slugger
O'Toole participant who suggested the Republican
leadership might now speedily push through disarmament
largely in order to safeguard their own positions in
history:
[H]ow's the following as a possible tail
end of a history book discussion of Gerry Adams?:
"Unfortunately, a few years after Mr. Adams successfully
prevailed on militant Republicanism to stand down
completely and disarm fully, the government led by
Prime Minister John Smith, Tony Blair's successor,
decided peremptorily to end the U.K.'s devolution
experiments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Mr. Adams thereupon retired permanently, under heavy
guard, to Donegal, to write rather melancholy poetry
which thereafter found a rather small audience."
The
Northern Ireland peace process is, it seems, just
too frail a creature—and the truth surrounding
it just too hard and indelicate—to allow Republicans
to come out and say openly something like: "We'll
be retaining indefinitely some adequate part of our
paramilitary capacity because we know the British
Constitution gives Westminster the full legal power
to yentz us in this settlement, and we really don't
want to get yentzed."
(Of
course, this entire "constitutional mercies" theory
could be immediately and dispositively proven utterly
wrong by militant Republicans reliably destroying
or turning over all of their weapons and overtly standing
the IRA down to "old comrades association" status
exclusively. Alternatively, Northern Unionists, if
acting in sufficient numbers, could obviate any supposed
"constitutional mercies" problem by straightforwardly
announcing that they will tolerate the existence of
a Republican paramilitary rump for perhaps decades
to come. All the leading wire services will, I am
quite confident, promptly report such historic events
as those, though I'll not be sitting on the edge of
my chair awaiting that news.)
In
sum, the experience since that historic Good Friday
1998 seems at least to suggest, if not establish,
the following five points:
(a) That, although the GFA devolution scheme
is generally acceptable to most Republicans, the overarching
"constitutional mercies" risk remains a substantial
concern to them, as implicitly indicated by the decommissioning
issue itself. Indeed—putting aside that genuine "constitutional
mercies" legal impediment and Republicans' herein-hypothesized
concern thereon—the decommissioning issue is unarguably
counterproductive from their viewpoint, virtually
to the point of irrationality, as a great many Republicans
are expressly interested in the powersharing system
offered by and through the GFA. Because the Republican
leadership does typically appear to be quite rational,
the decommissioning hold-up is, thus, inadequately
explained by what appear, conversely, to be pretextual
claims and assertions regarding "humiliation" (or
even the ostensible bogeyman of more IRA splits).
NB: Were some other broadly tolerable
political settlement fashioned that did not contain
this "constitutional mercies" risk, militant Republicanism
would have a clear opportunity to demonstrate whether
they were in fact mere warlords and racketeers trying
to hide behind a fa�ade of democratic desires and
aspirations.
(b) That the risk of seeing the GFA largely or
completely fail seems less important to Republicans
than the risk of their getting thoroughly shafted—sometime
after full IRA disarmament and disbandment have
taken place—as a result of Westminster's unavoidably
unreliable "constitutional mercies."
(c) That militant Republicans will, as a result
of that risk-weighing, seek to retain some paramilitary
capability into the indefinite future as a "counterbalance"
to Westminster's legally unchallengeable powers
concerning the devolved GFA government (i.e., those
Republicans want to have, at the ready, an illegal
force to wield should they ever again regard use
of that force necessary).
(d) That most Unionists—like Fianna F�il to
the South—will no longer permit in government
a political party with a potent paramilitary wing.
(e) That, if Republicans were kept out of a devolved
administration based on that not-unreasonable Unionist
position, the GFA would no longer be acceptable
to them, whereas—completing this circle—the
GFA structure would yet be acceptable to Republicans
were the decommissioning issue somehow once again
"backburnered" (see points "a" through "c"
above).
Thus
does the "constitutional mercies" theory at least
potentially describe accurately why this impasse within
the GFA context is permanent: this dire circle, like
all other circles, cannot be squared.
Frankly,
and unhappily, I've not succeeded in getting this
specific issue adequately onto Northern Ireland's
political radar screen, where it belongs, notwithstanding
various earlier efforts. Some other commentators have
raised the rather obvious point that Republican militants
look like they may never go away altogether, e.g.,
Prof. John Murphy, Sunday Independent, 26 October
2003:
There may be no question of the Provos going
back to war, but do they really mean to go out of
business? Or do they intend to hang on indefinitely
to enough arms to enable them to impose their will
on local communities, engage in nefarious activities
and flex influential political muscles? For power
continues to come out of the barrels of guns even
when they are silent.
Yet
the notion that those militants' real yet unspeakable
reason for sticking to their guns might indeed have
an understandable basis, in light of the United Kingdom's
inherent constitutional deficiencies, has not been
at all well discussed by, inter alia, the Northern
Ireland punditry.
Relatedly,
and also frankly, if the pro-Agreement intelligentsia
is resolutely unwilling to address—squarely,
vigorously, and publicly—the difficult socio-political
questions arising from this "constitutional mercies"
impasse theory, then those elite may themselves constitute
a bigger part of the overall Northern Ireland problem
than they realize or, perhaps, would care to admit.
Therefore,
I'd hereby expressly and respectfully take this opportunity
to solicit consideration by, and thoughtful comment
from, Northern Ireland's "opinion-formers" on the
following thrown-down gauntlet: Is this "constitutional
mercies" theory of the GFA settlement impasse correct
or is it in error?
Naturally,
I hope this very specific challenge will be taken
up broadly, as there seems quite little reason to
believe that adequate political trust will ever develop
in Northern Ireland if forthrightness there among
those freest to speak is itself in unduly short supply.
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