A walk through Ireland’s bloody history in Wicklow’s peaceful mountains

Posted on Wednesday, 31 July, 2019 by andypollak

Last month I went on my annual longish summer walk through the Irish hills and countryside. This year I decided, as a change from my usual cross-border itineraries, to go far away from the North to the deep south-east. I walked for three days along the less-frequented southern section of the Wicklow Way, from Glenmalure – my favourite glacial valley in the country – to Clonegal, a gentler landscape where counties Wicklow, Wexford and Carlow meet. This is a marvellous walking route, unusually well signposted (for Ireland), and starting to become well-known internationally (I met walkers from the US, Canada, France, Belgium and Holland along the way).

South of Glenmalure, across Slieve Maan and Carrickashane, must be one of the most remote areas in the whole island (despite its relative proximity to Dublin), a bleak upland wilderness of bog, heather and Sitka spruce. It did not help that I chose probably the rainiest day of the summer to walk its 22 kilometres. It was one of those classic Irish days when the walker, however well protected, gets thoroughly soaked in the first half an hour and remains soaked for the following six. I met one person in the entire day: a woman from Quebec doing the same mountain traverse. I was never so grateful for my arrival in Margaret Coogan’s hospitable and comfortable (with superb drying facilities!) Kyle farmhouse in Moyne, near Tinahely.

However even in the rain Wicklow is beautiful. I saw the strange, almost sacramental rings tramped out by sheep on the side of Croaghanmoira; tantalising glimpses of eastern Ireland’s highest mountain, Lugnaquilla, through gaps in the deluge; and several of those marvellously-tended green meadows carved out of the mountainside by the herculean efforts of generations of hill-farmers (the most picturesque of them surrounded by purple rhododendron hedges). And the soft, windless rain of an Irish summer doesn’t disturb the deep peace of the mountains.

On the second day I walked the ring of hills surrounding the pretty town of Tinahely; stopped for a drink in one of Ireland’s quaintest country pubs, ‘The Dying Cow’ at Stranakelly (so-called because when gardai arrived to find the then owner serving locals on a Good Friday in the 1920s,  she pleaded “sure you wouldn’t summons an old woman – these men were only helping me with a dying cow”); and walked onto the ‘big house’ village of Shillelagh.

This is a glimpse into Ireland’s colonial past in all its antedeluvian grandeur. For this was the home of the Earls Fitzwilliam, who once owned an estate of over 90,000 acres, a fifth of County Wicklow. One ancestor was Thomas Wentworth,  Charles I’s effective but ruthless Lord Deputy in Ireland, who became the king’s chief counsellor and whose execution in 1641 was one of the events which precipitated the English Civil War. Another was the liberal Viceroy Earl Fitzwilliam, whose sacking after only two months in 1795 dismayed those who were seeking Catholic emancipation and turned many of them towards the revolutionary methods of the United Irishmen. [A modern relative by marriage is the oddball far-right MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson’s Leader of the House of Commons.]

Here Irish history trumped any effort to get away from my obsession with the difficult North for a few summer days. Because it is a relatively little known fact that this beautiful wilderness area of south Wicklow saw some of the bloodiest confrontations of the 1798 rebellion: they were often confrontations between Irish republicans and British loyalists; and some of the fiercest of those loyalists were in this part of south Wicklow.

Wicklow was possibly the most violently disturbed county in Ireland during that revolutionary year, and certainly the one where the rebellion lasted longest.¹ The country’s untypically large loyalist community  faced 14,000 United Irishmen, the biggest force (although not all of them turned out) in Leinster. When the early phase of the Wexford rebellion drew to a close after the defeats at Vinegar Hill in June and Ballygullen in July, the rump of the rebels retreated to the mountains and waged one of Europe’s first guerrilla campaigns. Their remote stronghold was the area around the Lugnaquilla massif I had just walked across, and their commander-in-chief was a Protestant small farmer and builder from near Roundwood, Joseph Holt.

Wicklow had the largest Protestant community outside Ulster (over 20% of the population) who were well integrated into local society. A significant small number of the rebellion’s leaders (and followers) in that county were Protestants: small farmers, miners, textile workers and army deserters. Holt has been unjustly written out of the history books, partly because of a posthumous and disingenuous 1838 autobiography saying he had been forced to become a rebel, and partly because he was overshadowed by Michael Dwyer from the Glen of Imaal, who fought on until 1803 and whose life was dramatised in a colourful but inaccurate work of fiction in the 1850s.

However the presence of several Protestant United Irish leaders should not blind us to the fact that in Wicklow, as in Wexford, the conflict was in danger at some points of turning into a Catholic ‘peasants revolt’, targetting loyalists and landlords in particular. This was often provoked by the violent loyalism of many of the locally recruited yeomanry units. The tolerant and effective British General John Moore (later to gain fame in the Peninsular War in Spain), who worked hard to curb the excesses of extreme loyalists and to offer amnesties to the rebels, said it was their “harshness and ill-treatment that in great measure drove the peasants and farmers to revolt.” The Viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, while recognising their role in defeating the rebellion, lamented that they had taken “the lead in rapine and murder and every kind of atrocity.”

There were several massacres of rebel prisoners by the Wicklow yeomanry, notably at Dunlavin on 24 May on the first day of the rebellion, when at least 43 men were taken from the jail, bound together on the fair green and shot dead. This incident was mentioned as one of the justifications for the notorious burning to death of around 120 loyalist prisoners at Scullabogue in Wexford on 5 June.

Joseph Holt’s surrender on 10 November effectively ended the rebellion, although Michael Dwyer was to fight on in the mountains with a tiny band of men for several more years. The previous July Holt had taken command of the last serious rebel force in the field, at least 300-400 insurgents, at remote Baravore in Glenmalure, vowing to fight on until the arrival of the French (who landed the following month hopelessly far away in Mayo).

The Wicklow rebellion in 1798 was largely Irish fighting Irish, sometimes heroic, often savage, and ultimately futile given the hugely superior British forces. But I would argue that it was distinctly less tribal and sectarian – despite occasional excesses – than its Provisional republican equivalent nearly 200 years later in the North. One could make the case that on every front the United Irishmen were led by Protestants: Henry Joy McCracken in Antrim, Henry Munro in Down; Bagenal Harvey in Wexford; Joseph Holt in Wicklow; William Aylmer in Kildare (a descendant is chair of my Dublin Unitarian Church) and Bartholomew Teeling in Mayo.

Contrast this with the Provisional IRA and its counterpart groups in modern times. In the 23 years I spent (off and on) in Northern Ireland as a journalist and a promoter of cross-border cooperation, I came across precisely three active Protestant republicans: an IRA man from Portadown whom I prefer not to name for obvious reasons; Ronnie Bunting, a Belfast INLA activist killed by the UDA in 1980, and Sinn Fein councillor and MLA Billy Leonard from Coleraine.

¹ Details of 1798 events (and quotes) are taken from Ruan O’Donnell, The Rebellion in Wicklow 1798 (Irish Academic Press, 1998)

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland, The island environment | 8 Comments

A bit more complexity in Northern Ireland: the rise of the ‘Neithers’

Posted on Tuesday, 16 July, 2019 by andypollak

In last month’s blog I was complaining about the simplistic views of many people in the Republic on the complexity of demographic change in Northern Ireland. Too many of them insist on holding to the ill-informed belief that when Northern Catholics outnumber Northern Protestants, we will move rapidly towards a Border Poll leading to Irish unity (mistakenly equating being Catholic with being Nationalist). This month I am going to add to that complexity.

I have been reading an academic article by the superb Brexit researcher, Dr Katy Hayward, and her Queen’s University Belfast colleague, Dr Cathal McManus, on what they call the ‘Neithers’: those people in the North who do not feel either Unionist or Nationalist.¹ Their research into the findings of the 2017 Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) survey, conducted annually by Queen’s University and the University of Ulster, shows in that year 45% of those surveyed did not identify as being part of one of the traditional political blocks in the North. In the comparable 2018 survey this had risen to 50%.

Think of it: half of a representative sample of people in the North told this authoritative opinion poll they did not consider themselves either Unionist or Nationalist! That seems to fly in the face of all received knowledge about the ‘tribal’ politics of a region which often seems trapped in immutable sectarian blocks represented by the parties of (formerly) armed republicanism and reactionary unionism.

So who are these ‘Neithers’? According to Hayward and McManus: “The ‘typical’ person identifying as Neither is more likely than either Unionists or Nationalists to be young, female, of both British and Irish identity, to have lived outside Northern Ireland, to have some qualification (especially at the highest levels), to have gone to a mixed school, to be in paid employment and to have a high income.” In other words, they appear to be the North’s more educated and middle class people; 61% of them are women.

Looking in detail at these people who “conscientiously say that have neither Unionist nor Nationalist identities, reveals above all else, the complexity of Northern Ireland society and the inadequacy of the ‘two communities’ thesis,” the researchers conclude. It is notable that the largest category for national identity among the ‘Neithers’ is “equally British and Irish.” Similarly, devolution within the United Kingdom is the favoured constitutional option for ‘Neithers’, generally three times more so than Irish reunification.

Does this mean the non-sectarian Alliance Party’s time has come? Alliance leader Naomi Long’s unprecedented 18.5% first preference vote in the recent European elections might suggest its time is at least beginning. But Hayward and McManus warn that the explanation for the rise of the ‘Neithers’ may lie elsewhere. For it is not only in Northern Ireland when political institutions do not appear to people to be reflective of the social and economic reality of their lives, that political apathy sets in. This may be the case in the North, with its cycle of endlessly suspended institutions, failed government interventions, repetitive ‘agreements’ that run into the sand, and corruption and impropriety by local politicians. Hayward and McManus believe the ‘Neithers’ are “not turning away from politics entirely, but merely [showing] a frustration with the current state of the political system in Northern Ireland.”

However the statistical picture is even more complicated. Firstly, despite what some poorly informed commentators might assume, there is a trend since 1998 for Catholics to increasingly identify as ‘Neither’. “The data from 2017 indicate that almost a half of Catholics now identify as Neither, compared with just under one in every three Protestants.”

Another assumption is that younger people are most likely to say ‘a plague on both your houses’. However the data also shows that “Neithers predominate among the middle aged. The age group 45-54 constitutes a larger portion of support for Neither than it does for either unionist or nationalist designation.”

Another striking NILT finding is that between 2017 and 2018 the percentage of Protestants identifying themselves as ‘Neither’ leapt from 31% to 42%. In contrast, the proportion of ‘Neithers’ among Catholics and those declaring themselves to have no religion barely changed. Does this mean that since Brexit Protestants are becoming disillusioned with unionism? A Nationalist with rose-tinted glasses (or tunnel vision) might think so. The Southern media tend to seize on such figures to come to this conclusion.

But wait a minute. The NI Ireland Life and Times survey also shows that between 2016 and 2018 the proportion of Protestants who considered themselves ‘British not Irish’ grew from 41% to 53%. This appears to contradict hearsay evidence that the chaos over Brexit is making some Protestants doubt the UK union, and thus feel less British. Could it be rather that while many Northern Protestants feel more British than ever, they feel less traditionally unionist because of the traditionalist DUP’s hard line over both Brexit and liberal social issues such as marriage equality and abortion?

Of course, nothing is ever simple when it comes to people’s responses to opinion polls. Survey data may be an accurate representation of what people say in response to a particular question, but what they actually do when faced with an electoral or referendum ballot paper can be very different. After the inaccurate predictions of the pollsters in the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum and US presidential election, opinion polls have to be taken with a tonne of salt.

However if they serve to make nationalists think twice about Sinn Fein’s headlong drive towards unity as soon as possible, they will serve a purpose. Perhaps even supporters of that party are having second thoughts about the wisdom of this. I was at a seminar recently when a young Northern woman who introduced herself as “a Republican and an activist” expressed doubts about how an effective health service would work in a united Ireland, given the contrast between the almost dysfunctional HSE in the Republic and the much fairer and more efficient NHS (even if it is being cut back) in the North.

Speaking of Sinn Fein, I fear that the inter-party talks at Stormont are doomed once Boris Johnson steps into 10 Downing Street. He has pledged to take Britain out of the EU by 31st October if he does not get the Irish backstop removed from the Withdrawal Agreement – which the EU have made clear won’t happen. That will mean the Irish border will become the external frontier of the EU, a true ‘hard border’ enclosing the European Single Market. So are Sinn Fein going to go back into government in Belfast in order to implement what one Northern business acquaintance has called “the second partition of Ireland”? I very much doubt it.

¹ Katy Hayward and Cathal McManus, ‘Neither/Nor: The rejection of Unionist and Nationalist identities in post-Agreement Northern Ireland’, Capital & Class, 1-17, 2018

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329632203_NeitherNor_The_rejection_of_Unionist_and_Nationalist_identities_in_post-Agreement_Northern_Ireland

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | Leave a comment

The simplistic engagement of people in the Republic with the complexity of the North

Posted on Monday, 24 June, 2019 by andypollak

Earlier this month I attended a session of the Dalkey Book Festival entitled ‘Who’s afraid of a united Ireland?’ It may be difficult to credit, but in nearly 40 years of living (mainly) in the Republic, this was the first time I had ever come across a public, non-party meeting to discuss Irish unity (and as readers of this blog will attest, this is a subject in which I have a burning, if sometimes unorthodox, interest – in traditional Irish republican parlance, I am definitely not ‘sound on the national question’!).

The speakers were the eminent UCD historian and Irish Times columnist Diarmaid Ferriter, the Northern novelists Eoin McNamee and Martina Devlin, with (as moderator) the Northern Ireland-born British TV presenter and journalist Andrea Catherwood. It was poor stuff – one distinguished audience member with an intimate knowledge of both Irish jurisdictions called it ‘an ungenerous, badly chaired shambles’. The lack of a unionist voice (while Catherwood is from that background, she is now every inch the cosmopolitan British media personality) weakened the panel from the off. Devlin and McNamee adhered to the traditional nationalist view that unity was the solution; Seamus Mallon’s proposal to wait until there was broader unionist support for unity was wrong; its cost was greatly exaggerated, and the unionists could be won over by gestures like changing the flag, anthem and other symbols.

Ferriter talked truthfully about the past century of disengagement of politicians and people in the Republic from the North. I would say it is not exactly disengagement, but rather very limited and ignorant engagement based on old nationalist verities and shibboleths that are utterly unhelpful in the present difficult climate of Brexit and political deadlock in Belfast. An example of this was the round of applause from the large, mainly elderly audience for Devlin when she told the well-worn story of her young parents being denied the vote in Northern Ireland local elections in the 1960s  because of the ratepayer requirement – an injustice that was remedied in 1972. Catherwood wondered if anybody other than Sinn Fein had a worked-out plan for moving towards unity (Do Sinn Fein have such a plan? It’s certainly not in their latest 2016 discussion document Towards a United Ireland).

It’s a pity that my friend, the well-regarded Belfast social researcher Paul Nolan, was not on the panel. He would have provided a complex but necessary antidote to the simplistic solutions being voiced by these writers and journalists. In an article in last week’s Belfast Telegraph,¹ Nolan outlined in some detail why Northern nationalists’ belief that demographic trends are leading inexorably towards a nationalist majority in the North and thus Irish unity through a Border Poll is based on flimsy premises.

He noted that the latest Northern Ireland Labour Force Religion Survey, published in January, showed that the Protestant/Catholic balance continues to tilt towards the latter community, with the proportion of Protestants over 16 in the labour force dropping dramatically from 56% to 42% between 1990 and 2017 while the proportion of Catholics rose from 38% to 41%. ‘It now looks like the Catholic community will be the larger community by the time of the next census [2021], but that’s not the same as being a majority, if by majority we mean over 50%.’

The real growth, he pointed out, has been in another category, ‘those who do not self-identify as either Catholic or Protestant’. The proportion of the population classified as ‘other/non-determined’ has nearly trebled, from 6% to 17% over this period, and in the 16-24 age group it has more than trebled, from 7% to 22%. ‘If this trend were to continue it may block the Catholic community from crossing the 50% line; Catholics may emerge as the largest of the three main population groups, but still not be a majority.’

Nolan then went on to point to ‘a dangerous elision’ that is often overlooked in self-serving forecasts of inevitable nationalist majorities (even the Dalkey Book Festival website claimed that ‘demographics point to a Catholic/nationalist majority in the next decade’). He was at pains to stress that ‘not all Catholics are nationalists’ (my italics).’If past voting patterns provide any guide to future electoral behaviour, then despite the increased number of Catholics, a nationalist majority is very far off indeed. ‘

‘The long-term trend shows little or no growth. In June 1998, in that optimistic period immediately after the Good Friday Agreement, the combined nationalist vote (i.e. the SDLP and Sinn Fein vote taken together) stood at 39.7%. In the most recent Assembly elections in March 2017 that percentage had remained more or less static at 39.8%, and in the local government elections last month the total nationalist vote, including both the new Aontú party and independent nationalist candidates, dipped to 37.7%. In fact, over the past 21 years the nationalist vote has only occasionally tipped over the 40% line, and seems unlikely to exceed the magical 50% in the foreseeable future.’

Add to this Alliance and the Green Party’s surge in the local elections and Alliance leader Naomi Long’s nearly 19% vote in the European elections, and suddenly the Northern political landscape looks a lot less binary. The growth of a moderate, centrist constituency – anti-Brexit and wanting, above all, a return to power-sharing government at Stormont – appears to undermine the absolutist positions of both the DUP and Sinn Fein: that there is no solution between a seamless maintenance of the union with Britain and rapid movement, via a Border Poll, towards a united Ireland. We have to start looking again at new and complicated models of governance and sovereignty for Northern Ireland which are not the simplistic options offered by the two main parties.

Let us pray that this is among the subjects for discussion between the two governments and the parties in the current all-party talks. I hope my government, in particular, are not so totally taken up with Brexit that they can use the considerable intellectual resources of the Departments of the Taoiseach and Foreign Affairs to come up with some imaginative new ideas. But I am not at all optimistic about this.

However I am cheered that the Institute of British Irish Studies at University College Dublin, whose former directors include wise political scientists like Professors John Coakley and Jennifer Todd, people with a deep understanding of Northern Ireland, have initiated an ambitious three-year research project, in collaboration with a number of UK universities, called ‘Constitutional Futures after Brexit’. This will explore constitutional and political change in Ireland and the UK, including possible outcomes such as Irish unity, the break-up of the UK, and other ‘in between’ futures.

¹ ‘So are we going to have a border poll or not?’ 17 June

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 1 Comment

Are Northern nationalists in danger of becoming the Most Ungenerous People Ever (MUPE)?

Posted on Friday, 7 June, 2019 by andypollak

Northern Ireland Protestants and unionists get a universally bad press. They are portrayed as narrow-minded, bigoted, right wing and often racist. They have had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept the modern concepts of power-sharing democracy, social equality and parity of esteem. Much of this is true; some of it is the product of a world-class Irish republican propaganda machine.

Northern Catholics and nationalists, on the other hand, have usually been presented as being on the side of the angels: cut off from their fellow-Irish people by an arbitrary border drawn by British imperialists; discriminated against and downtrodden by their unionist rulers; struggling bravely for their civil rights. Much of this is also true, although it tends to leave out the support many of them gave to a ferocious 30-year-old terrorist campaign by the Provisional IRA against the Northern Ireland state, its defenders and many of its ordinary citizens.

So I was depressed – although not completely surprised – by the ungenerous reaction of leaders of that nationalist community to the generous offer by Seamus Mallon in his just-published book, A Shared Home Place (of which I was co-author) that Irish unity should wait until a majority, or at least a significant minority, of unionists could be persuaded to support it – ‘parallel consent’ he calls it. This was in striking contrast to the warm response the book received from nearly all quarters south of the border.

The rottweiler columnist of the nationalist Irish News, Brian Feeney (himself a former SDLP councillor), went for the jugular. He focused on pouring scorn on the mechanics of Mallon’s specific proposal of how ‘parallel consent’ might work in a referendum (admittedly one of the book’s weaker elements). This he dismissed as ‘absurd and ridiculous, damaging and daft.’ Mallon’s proposals, he said, are ‘carefully designed to make Irish unity a practical impossibility.’¹

There was no attempt to go beyond the jugular to the whole body of Mallon’s argument: that a premature Border Poll might deliver a narrow and completely unworkable majority for unity, reversing the historic situation of Northern Ireland so that a ‘united’ Ireland would capture a similarly sullen, alienated and potentially violent minority. He urged political leaders to seek some better way to quantify consent so that it reflected true parity of esteem – one of the cornerstones of the Good Friday Agreement – between unionists and nationalists. This would require generosity from a Catholic and nationalist community whose growing numbers mean it is moving into the ascendant. This generosity could take two forms: first, by not pushing for unity until there is a wider and deeper acceptance of it among unionists; and second, by a willingness to put forward an arrangement more congenial to unionists that is some way short of a unitary state.

Brian Feeney is one of those extremely unwise nationalists who wants unity as soon as possible – and damn the consequences. He foresees a nationalist ‘voting majority’ in a mere four years², a contention that is totally unsupported by the demographic evidence.

Former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams is a shrewder observer. In his review of the book in the New York Irish Echo, he clearly understood Mallon’s main point, although, extraordinarily, he claimed that Mallon, far from being one of the main architects of the Good Friday Agreement, was ‘not a big fan’ of that historic accord.

He went on: ‘The thrust of Mr Mallon’s argument is that a united Ireland born out of a unity referendum with a narrow majority risks a re-run of the past with the boot placed on the other foot. That nationalists and republicans would do to unionists what was done to us for generations. His argument is spurious and offensive. I know of no nationalist or republican who believes for one instance that we are so stupid, so narrow-minded, so bigoted, so driven by hatred, as to do that.’³ A Northern Protestant response might be: that didn’t stop the republican movement killing many hundreds of Protestants, in uniform and out of it, during the 1968-1998 ‘Troubles’.

But the most dispiriting message following the publication of the book came from a Northern nationalist acquaintance whom I know to be a thoughtful and highly intelligent man. He said Mallon was ‘way out of touch’ with nationalist thinking. ‘He belongs to a kind of “cap doffing” era of nationalism where unionism impressed their opinions on doormat nationalism. They [nationalists] had to fight for the political crumbs.’

‘Not any more. For those in the nationalist community these days are long past that. They want the cake. There is a growing number, anecdotally at the very least, which wants to know the logic of the argument that if 50% plus one is enough to maintain the union, why is it not enough to achieve a united Ireland? Are nationalist votes of less importance than those of the unionist community?’

‘The DUP’s arrogance has changed moderate opinion. Most well educated nationalists are not “crocodiles”. They are pissed off by the DUP attitudes to Brexit, by its disrespect to the Irish government and the Irish people, and so much more. You can feel it in everyday attitudes. Unionists can talk about their “precious union”, but nationalists talking about unity is threatening.’

This man said he got a call recently from a former SDLP councillor who called Mallon ‘a green unionist’. He concluded by stressing that he was ‘on the record as an admirer of Seamus Mallon.’

In a follow-up message he said: ‘The DUP arrogance and disrespect in regard to Brexit has been a game changer for many “civic nationalists”. At the Waterfront Hall in Belfast about four months ago “suit and tie” nationalists – solicitors, teachers, middle managers – gathered and the anger in the room was palpable. That has to be addressed in some way.’

A mixture of anger and entitlement is always a dangerous thing. Northern nationalists are angry, ‘they want the cake’ of Irish unity and won’t settle for anything less. That is a powerful and alarming message to Ulster unionists. It also reveals a striking lack of generosity and unwillingness to compromise with their unionist neighbours and fellow-citizens in order to help them come to terms with an eventual ‘new’ Ireland.

The slightly mocking epithet – MOPE (the Most Oppressed People Ever) – was invented by a Queen’s University Belfast historian, Liam Kennedy, to describe the deep and enduring sense of grievance felt by Northern nationalists. Maybe MUPE – the Most Ungenerous People Ever – would be a more appropriate way of describing many in that community’s response to Seamus Mallon’s generous attempt to open up debate about the road to unity.

¹ ‘Mallon’s numbers game doesn’t add up’, Irish News, 29 May 2019.

² ‘Brexit lights touch paper for next firestorm – the push for Irish unity, Irish Times, 23 April 2019.

³ ‘Unity is about more than a numbers game’, Irish Echo, 23 May 2019.

Posted in General, Irish reunification | 1 Comment

The courage and generosity of Seamus Mallon: a book introduction

Posted on Friday, 17 May, 2019 by andypollak

This is my abridged introduction to a new book, ‘A Shared Home Place’ by Seamus Mallon (with Andy Pollak) which is published today by Lilliput Press.

Courage and generosity: those are the two words that come to mind when I think of Seamus Mallon. Courage because for twenty-five years between the 1970s and 1990s he spoke out ceaselessly against violence from whatever quarter it came, republican or loyalist or state forces. As a result he suffered constant threats (including death threats); physical attacks on him, his family and his home; intimidation and vilification. He vowed that he would attend every funeral in his Armagh and Newry constituency, whether the victim was civilian, IRA or security force member, and frequently took face-to-face abuse from victims’ families for that brave stand. He publicly condemned every IRA and loyalist killing in the harshest terms.

At the same time he denounced collusion, harassment and sectarian bias by the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment, and demanded their reform or abolition. In the face of British government and unionist resistance and hostility, he demanded justice and equality in the actions of the police and the courts for the nationalist people of Northern Ireland, who had long been treated as second-class citizens at best and dangerous subversives at worst in their home place.

It is also often forgotten what an important role he played in the extremely difficult negotiations leading to the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement. Garret FitzGerald, not his favourite Southern politician, said after the Agreement was signed that Mallon’s ‘will be amongst the names to which history will pay tribute. Throughout this negotiation his steadiness, clarity and rationality have won universal respect in complementing John Hume’s long-sighted vision.’ Senator George Mitchell noted that he was ‘an important and influential figure’ in those talks who was ‘liked and respected on all sides for his intelligence and integrity.’

However, he was the opposite of a soft touch. The loyalist leader David Ervine described his negotiating modus operandi: ‘He was skilful, incisive and brutal. He could take somebody’s scrotum and slice off their balls – it would be over in a second; they wouldn’t know it was done, such was his skill.’ Former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, John Reid, once said Mallon was the only politician he had ever met who could ‘make “Good Morning” sound like a threat.’

Sean Ó hUiginn, the senior Irish diplomat who was one of the architects of the 1990s peace process, summed up Mallon’s importance: ‘He personified the decent, put upon strand of Northern nationalism in a wonderfully attractive way. People in the Republic would say that if this good, honourable man is complaining, there must be something to his complaints. He thus had a very important and under-appreciated role in keeping the benign elements in the South engaged to some extent with the North during the Troubles, rather than falling back into the easy distancing mechanism that all Northerners were as bad as each other and were impossible people who could not be talked to or reasoned with.’

Despite his sometimes dour self-presentation, it is difficult to find a Northern politician of any stripe to say a bad word about Mallon. Ulster Unionist deputy leader John Taylor called him ‘a good friend who will work for the good of Northern Ireland’. For Rita O’Hare of Sinn Féin he was ‘a tough negotiator, a formidable opponent, but always honest and honourable.’ The surgeon and senator John Robb said his main strength was ‘his simple, absolute, complete integrity.’ ‘I would trust Seamus Mallon with my life. I wouldn’t say that about many other politicians on my side or the other side’, said Ulster Unionist security spokesman Ken Maginnis.

Unlike John Hume, who was to some extent insulated from the surrounding violence as the uncrowned king of nationalist Derry, Mallon had to live in and represent an area in which the murderous activities of republican and loyalist paramilitaries, along with rogue elements of the security forces, pushed the inhabitants of both communities into a savage internecine war mindset. In Armagh he personally witnessed the Northern conflict at its most depraved and sectarian.

Generosity because he has always been sensitive to the fears and needs of the unionist community among whom he grew up. Even today he sits comfortably sipping coffee in a Protestant-owned cafe in his native village of Markethill, surrounded by evangelical pamphlets and biblical verses on the wall. This makes him unique among Northern nationalist politicians, with the possible exception of Gerry Fitt (who never called himself a nationalist anyway). Mallon remains a proud nationalist who believes in the long run only Irish unity can solve the deep historical divisions that have blighted Northern Ireland.

But he believes with equal passion that his unionist friends and neighbours around Markethill, personified by the farmer and murdered police reservist whom he calls ‘Jack Adams’, have as much right to live in peace and without fear in Ireland as the community he led with such distinction over the years. And he believes his nationalist community, now they are moving into the ascendant, must show the generosity to unionists that was sadly absent from the way in which they were treated by the unionists during fifty years of one-party rule at Stormont.

Courage and generosity are there in abundance in Seamus Mallon’s central proposal in this book: that Irish unity must wait until there is a majority – or at least a substantial minority – in the Protestant and unionist community prepared to support it. This is what he calls ‘Parallel Consent’ for unity. He knows he will be damned from the heavens by most nationalists, who will say that just as the prospect of a numerical majority for unity – based largely on the demographic growth of the Northern Catholic community – is within sight, he has proposed moving the posts so that their long-dreamed-of goal of a united Ireland is pushed further into the future.

Equally, he knows there will be little welcome for his proposal in the fearful and begrudging minds of many unionists, who will see it as an excuse to dig their heels in for another generation rather than as a new and nobler way to come to terms with the medium-term prospect of unity by genuine consent. However, he believes that there is another unionist constituency, those who voted for the Good Friday Agreement and against Brexit, who are open to looking at unity, or at least a greater accommodation with the South, in a new way after nearly a century of division and conflict.

Above all, he stresses the importance of generosity between the Northern communities. After several centuries of the United Kingdom being a ‘cold house’ for Irish nationalists, the independent Irish state being feared as a ‘cold house’ for unionists, and Northern Ireland being a ‘cold house’ for Northern nationalists, he hopes his own community will demonstrate a new generosity to their unionist neighbours as the prospect of Irish unity becomes visible on the horizon. Thus he hopes (against hope, some might say) that unionists and nationalists can eventually be united, after centuries of fear and conflict, ‘in all the diversity of their identities and traditions’ in the ‘harmony and friendship’ of the post Good Friday Agreement amendment to the Irish Constitution.

At this late stage in his life Mallon is proposing this dramatic reconfiguration of the traditional nationalist demand because he knows that a simple majority for unity in a Border Poll in the foreseeable future can only be a narrow one: probably little more than the bare numerical majority laid down as a blunt instrument in the otherwise marvellously nuanced 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Unusually among nationalist leaders, he knows his unionist neighbours intimately; he knows what they are capable of when they feel coerced or threatened, and he knows this will probably mean a return to, and possibly an intensification of, the inter-communal violence of the 1968 to 1998 period.

He knows from his own experience of the darkest years of murder gangs and counter-murder gangs in Armagh in the 1970s and 1980s, and of being Deputy First Minister during the most terrifying Drumcree confrontation in 1998, that at times of political instability – and there can be no deeper instability than the period following a narrow vote for unity – Northern Ireland is always in danger of going over the edge into outright civil war. He has also seen the new and angry divisions opening up in Britain following a narrow Brexit referendum vote.

Mallon is careful to position his proposal to require the Parallel Consent of the two Northern communities for unity firmly in the context of a pre-Border Poll Review of the Good Friday Agreement, insisting it should be seen as an evolution of that Agreement. He also proposes a new version of the 1992-93 Opsahl Commission to initiate a wider public discussion on whether and how Irish unity can be brought about as peacefully and consensually as possible. He believes this double process should lead to the redefinition of the simple majority consent principle contained in the Good Friday Agreement, so that an eventual referendum on unity can gain as wide a measure of consent as possible.

Such a deliberative process should also work to resolve the hard questions that will be raised in the event of such a vote for unity, and which are almost completely absent from political and public discourse in today’s Republic of Ireland. How and over what period of time will the British element in the governance of Northern Ireland be replaced by an Irish one? Is some kind of joint authority or joint sovereignty feasible during a transitional period? What parliamentary, consultative, public administration and public finance structures will be put in place both during and after that transitional phase? How would justice, law and order be guaranteed during the probable breakdown of law and order that too precipitate a transition could cause, with the danger that revived loyalist paramilitaries would violently resist it and revived republican paramilitaries seek to enforce it? What guarantees will be put in place so that the proud British identity of the unionists will be protected, cherished and incorporated into the institutions, ethos and symbols of the new state? Would that identity be better protected under a separate Northern regional administration? What kind of continuing British government involvement will this require?

All these issues need to be thrashed out in as mutually respectful and open-minded a manner as possible. It will take a considerable time. The peace process that started with the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, whose high point was the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and which dragged on until the devolution of policing and justice in 2010, lasted almost seventeen years; or twenty-two years if one dates its beginning from the first Hume-Adams talks in 1988. Mallon suggests it could take even longer to prepare for the complex and potentially destabilising consequences of a Border Poll that might lead to unity.

Because of the growth of the Catholic population in Northern Ireland, the theoretical possibility of a narrow majority for unity in a Border Poll is perhaps only twenty to thirty years away. Now is the time to begin thinking deeply about the consequences of this huge change for the happiness and harmony of the people of Ireland. Sinn Féin, fiercely dogmatic in their demand for ‘accelerated reunification post-Brexit’ – in party chairman Declan Kearney’s words – are incapable of leading that thinking. We can only hope that wiser and more generous nationalist leaders in the Seamus Mallon mould will emerge to engage in meaningful and empathetic negotiation with unionism.

In the meantime the wisdom of Mallon’s words about the two traditions learning to share their common home place, Northern Ireland, should be listened to. That is the only way forward to a new Ireland based on the twenty-first century challenge of how to bring together diverse peoples, with all the major complications that implies, rather than the nineteenth century nationalist obsession with the unity of territory.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | 3 Comments

On local election day give the DUP and Sinn Fein a bloody nose: vote for someone else

Posted on Thursday, 2 May, 2019 by andypollak

This blog is not in the business of telling people how to vote. But after the utterly predictable responses by the DUP and Sinn Fein to the two governments’ announcement of new talks to try to restore Stormont (following priest Martin Magill’s anguished plea at Lyra McKee’s funeral last week for the politicians to take urgent action to work to that end), I believe it’s time to teach them a lesson. And today’s local elections, about the bread-and-butter issues that affect ordinary voters the most, are just the place to do it.

Of course the tribal politicians in Northern Ireland don’t ‘do’ bread-and-butter issues. How depressing it is to hear Arlene Foster’s wearily familiar warning about unionist divisions in these elections leading to the danger of strengthened republican demands for a Border Poll. And how dispiriting to hear Mary Lou McDonald and other senior Sinn Fein figures repeating endlessly that ‘now is the time to talk about unity.’ The ultimate hypocrisy is Sinn Fein’s demand, failing agreement with the DUP, for the Westminster parliament to legislate for their so-called ‘equality’ agenda – abortion rights, same sex marriage and an Irish Language Act – when they absolutely refuse to take their seats in that legislature.

Today is not the time to talk about Irish unity or Brexit or any of the other major obstacles to peace and political progress in the North. Today is the time to talk about community relations and poverty and planning and the environment and housing and health and education and all the other issues that local authorities are struggling with (even though in many of these areas they have few if any powers) in the absence of a devolved Executive and Assembly.

Even when they were in power for 10 years the two big tribal parties failed to pump the money required for health, education and job training into Northern Ireland’s poorest urban areas, typified by the Creggan in Derry where Lyra McKee was shot dead. As Eamonn McCann has pointed out, 54% of people in that area have low or no qualifications. 40% of them don’t even bother to register for welfare benefits. They are ‘literally a lost generation’, says McCann, young no-hopers who are perfect cannon fodder for the murderous fanatics of dissident republicanism.¹

So if you’re going out to cast your vote in the local elections today, show your disgust at the inertia and bloody-mindedness of the two main parties and give your vote to another party. If I were still in the North, as an old social democrat and moderate nationalist I might be voting SDLP. However, if you are protesting against the stalemate of tribal politics, I suggest you give your vote to Alliance or People before Profit (depending on your ideological preference), or even to the Greens.

As climate change and environmental sustainability start to dominate so much political debate internationally, the tiny Green Party in the North is getting more ambitious. They already have two out of 90 members of the suspended Northern Ireland Assembly (a higher proportion than the Southern Greens, with two out of 158 TDs). They only have four local council representatives at the moment, but are putting up 26 candidates, with the aim of tripling their number of seats. In West Belfast they are running Ireland’s first transgender candidate, Ellen Murray.

The Green Party leader, Clare Bailey, shows a face of Northern Ireland which we in the South rarely see. Born into a ‘two up, two down’ house in Belfast’s Falls Road, her family moved to Antrim when she was seven. In 1981 – a year when the republican prison hunger strike pushed the North close to civil war – she and her sister were among the first entry of 28 pupils to the North’s first integrated secondary school, Lagan College, on the outskirts of east Belfast, requiring a three hour round trip every day. She jokes about being ‘almost bilingual’ because of the amount of time she spent accompanying her mother as part of a reconciliation group taking children from divided and deprived areas to Holland to get a holiday away from the Troubles.

She strongly rejects accusations that the Greens, with their strongest bases in South Belfast (which she represents in the Assembly) and North Down, are a middle-class party. She tells of canvassing in Belfast’s loyalist housing estates in the Village and Belvoir, and seeing a 5% rise in the Green vote in the latter after a particularly effective canvass in 2017. She says that as somebody who started life with no bathroom and an outside toilet, and who had been homeless and a single parent, she identifies strongly with disadvantaged people and passionately wants to represent them. ‘The Green Party is not just about climate issues; the environment to me is also about the well-being of communities. It is about creating a space for young people, in particular, to develop and expand into a new kind of politics that is relevant to their needs. Young people take seriously the International Panel on Climate Change’s dire warnings about catastrophic climate change in 11 years. We should be future-proofing our social and economic policies rather than bringing up the bogeyman of Irish unity and other historic obsessions at every election.’

Bailey emphasises her party’s commitment to community development. She sees it as a sign of hope that Belfast City Council has recently appointed a Resilience Commissioner to plan for future crises in areas like over-stretched infrastructure, climate change and cyber-security, which the city – in common with cities throughout the world – will face in coming years. She identifies problems like lack of clean water, green spaces and good schools in the city at a time when the council is trying to attract back tens of thousands of people who left it largely because of the Troubles. Air pollution is another issue she highlights, with childhood asthma a growing problem. She talks about the lack of action to deal with the mental health crisis which has seen more people committing suicide in the 21 years since the Good Friday Agreement than in the 30 years of the Troubles.

As a former campaigner for abortion rights, she is also strong on equality and human rights issues. The Greens were campaigning for marriage equality before Sinn Fein discovered it as an issue; they were joined by that party in introducing the first Assembly motion calling for such equality in 2012. When out canvassing Bailey says she finds a surprisingly high proportion of DUP voters who are in favour of both abortion rights and gay marriage.

She believes in North-South cooperation in the environmental area. ‘If we’ve got 11 years before we arrive at the point of irreversible climate change, then I don’t care about Brexit or Border Polls or people’s constitutional identity because change is coming and it’s not coming in the way they think. It’s called climate catastrophe and it will force us to renegotiate all our relationships on this island and in these islands. Because those floods and storms and food and pollution crises are not going to stop at any border.’

This impressive youngish woman – she is in her forties – could be one of the bright new faces of politics in Northern Ireland. In her office I met two equally impressive young Green candidates in the Belfast elections, Áine Groogan and Brian Smyth. If you live in Belfast, give them a vote today. Vote for the future, not the past.

¹ ‘Everybody knew there was going to be bother’, Irish Times, 27 April

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, The island environment | 3 Comments

A kind of tribute to Lyra McKee: the need for a new conversation

Posted on Monday, 22 April, 2019 by andypollak

What more can one say about the marvellous young journalist and human being who was Lyra McKee, and about her killing on Good Friday eve by the murderous losers of the so-called ‘New IRA’? As a former journalist from Northern Ireland I feel I should venture a few thoughts as a kind of tribute.

Lyra was an activist for LGBT rights whose compassionate understanding of human nature was very unusual for one so young. Selected by Forbes magazine as one of their ’30 under 30 in media in Europe’ three years ago, she was destined for great things. In a recent TED talk, she told the story of visiting a mosque in Orlando in Florida which, despite Islam’s opposition to homosexuality, had condemned the 2016 mass shooting in the Pulse gay nightclub in that city when some Christian churches were refusing to bury the victims because of their sexuality.  She said at the age of 16 she had rejected religion,and decided she no longer wanted to talk to religious people, because religion had shaped how gay people are treated in the world, and told them that their sexuality was evil, often to the point of driving them to take their own lives. She recounted how as a teenager in north Belfast she had bargained with God, asking him not to send her to hell because she was gay.

After her experience in Orlando she had realised that she needed once more to converse with people of faith: not to berate them, but to take on the Sisyphean task of trying to persuade them that traditional church thinking on homosexuality was wrong. She needed to have ‘difficult conversations’ with such people, ‘to fight for the hearts and minds of those who oppose us.’ She said that anybody she had met of formerly extreme views – anti-gay, neo-Nazi – who had changed those views had done so as a result of a conversation with an erstwhile opponent.

Conversation between opponents is what needs to happen now again in Northern Ireland. In 2015 Sinn Fein published a booklet entitled Uncomfortable Conversations, which featured a number of prominent Protestants, and the occasional unionist. It is now time for Sinn Fein to take the initiative again, to reach out to the DUP, to a more urgent uncomfortable conversation that would lead to the resumption of power-sharing government in the North. Because for all its many faults, nationalists and unionists working together for the common good of Northern Ireland – with the extremely difficult unity question postponed for the present – remains the only way to peace, prosperity and the beginning of reconciliation there.

As Seamus Mallon writes in his forthcoming memoir, A Shared Home Place (to be published by Lilliput Press on 17th May): ‘This is the great conundrum of this small patch of earth, a place which two different groups of people love and treasure as their common home, but neither of which have yet found a way to define and describe so that it includes the other as a co-equal partner and thus becomes a truly shared home place.’

Before we even begin to talk about Irish unity, we need a Northern Ireland which is starting to come to peace with itself. Lyra McKee’s tragic killing could open an unexpected door. Arlene Foster and Mary Lou McDonald standing together in solidarity with the people of Creggan on Good Friday was a good start. Now it is time for the two governments to step in. Given the lack of competence of the present Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, there is a particular responsibility on a skilled senior politician like the Tánaiste, Simon Coveney, to give a lead; to use the window of opportunity opened up by the six month delay in Britain leaving the EU to press hard for a resumption of inter-party talks to get Stormont restored.

If the main issues between the DUP and Sinn Fein are those which led to the breakdown 14 months ago – an Irish language act and marriage equality – they are surely not insurmountable (and by all accounts, Sinn Fein was at its most open and flexible in the weeks before that breakdown). Coveney needs to be on the phone to Karen Bradley as soon as the Easter break ends, with a proposal for new talks to begin once the local and European elections are over on 23 May.

Over the past two decades, the Department of Foreign Affairs has shown that it can be a good listener when it comes to the views and fears of grass roots unionists, whether in the form of small grants from its Reconciliation Funds or regular invitations to conferences and round-table meetings in the South. In this it has been ably abetted by the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation and the Kennedy Institute for Conflict Intervention at Maynooth University.

Now we need to fill the perilous vacuum that Northern nationalists’ fears of a new post-Brexit border and the absence of any agreed regional government have inevitably opened up –  and which the violent madmen of dissident republicanism are always keen to move into. The Irish government and its highly regarded diplomats – among the best in the world, former EU commission head José Manuel Barroso told the British Irish Association last year – need to step up to the plate and persuade the British once again to work with them on a renewed peacebuilding mission.

We desperately need the politicians to begin talking again. If necessary they must lead their reluctant grass-roots where they don’t want to go; that is what courageous leadership is about (they should take their cue from Gerry Adams, David Trimble or even the late Ian Paisley). Remember the Good Friday Agreement required 22 months of talking. With a bit of luck it won’t take that long this time. I have absolutely no illusions about the difficulties involved given the lack of trust between the two communities and their leaders. But wouldn’t the greatest tribute to the brave and brilliant young woman who was Lyra McKee be a resumed power-sharing government in Belfast by October? I may be a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

 

 

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 1 Comment

Letter from Virginia: a time is coming when Ulster Protestants will have to be brave and smart

Posted on Friday, 12 April, 2019 by andypollak

I have just returned from a stay in the US state of Virginia, mostly in the town of Lexington in the county of Rockbridge. Rockbridge is one of the two American counties which claim the highest proportion of inhabitants descended from the 250,000 Ulster Presbyterians who settled in the USA in the 18th century.

To borrow W.B.Yeats’ phrase about another kind of Irish Protestant, these were “no petty people”. They have provided America with no fewer than 17 presidents, from Andrew Jackson to George W.Bush; military greats like John Paul Jones, Ulysses S. Grant and ‘Stonewall’ Jackson; business titans like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller; frontiersmen like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett; and writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Washington Irving.

The so-called ‘Scotch-Irish’ (named because they were Scottish ‘planters’ in Ulster from 1610 onwards who left for America after 1717 because of economic depression, rack-renting and religious persecution) were notable, in particular, for their role in spearheading migration into the uncharted territories south and west of Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas. In his book The Winning of the West, future president Theodore Roosevelt wrote:

‘That these Irish Presbyterians were a bold and hardy race is proved by their at once pushing past the settled regions, and plunging into the wilderness as the leaders of the white advance. They were the first and last set of immigrants to do this; all others have merely followed in the wake of their predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters; they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a divine right the election of their own clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic.’

These adventurous and combative people were no friends of the native Americans. They were determined to seize the rich lands of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and beyond. Many of them became famous (now more likely to be infamous) as Indian fighters. James G. Leyburn, author of the authoritative modern work on the Scotch-Irish, called them ‘quick-tempered, impetuous, inclined to work by fits and starts, reckless, too much given to drinking. No contemporary observer praised them as model farmers.’¹

However, when it came to providing warriors for the American Revolution and War of Independence, they were ‘the very backbone of Washington’s army’. Another historian described them as ‘rebellious against anything that in their eyes bore the resemblance of injustice, we find these men readiest among the ready on the battlefields of the Revolution. If they had their faults, a lack of patriotism or of courage was not among the number. Amongst them were to be found men of education, intelligence and virtue.’ They showed themselves to be able soldiers: ‘rough, ingenious, adaptable, ready to endure hardship.’

Because of their Calvinist religion, these were conservative revolutionaries. They may have embodied the American values of individualism, adventure and risk-taking, but once they settled in a place like the Valley of Virginia their old-fashioned, Bible-believing Scottish Presbyterianism (and its ministers) led, in Leyburn’s words, to ‘stability, viable institutions, community control of morality, amenities of social intercourse, decency and order, the worth of tradition.”

There is now no more settled place in the US than Lexington, Virginia: a prosperous town of 7,000 people. It has two universities (the Presbyterians, with their emphasis on literacy so as to read the Bible, were also in the lead when it came to setting up schools and universities): the Virginia Military Institute, among whose graduates is George C. Marshall, chief of staff of US forces in World War Two and creator of Marshall Aid to reconstruct Europe in the aftermath of that war; and Washington and Lee, once presided over by Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces in the American Civil War. It has numerous well-attended churches, lots of handsome old houses and a large population of retired people. Both Robert E. Lee and fellow Confederate general Stonewall Jackson are buried here.

Despite its Confederate past, Lexington is proud of its commitment to racial equality and local democracy. Another graduate of Virginia Military Institute is Jonathan Daniels, seminarian, civil rights activist and Anglican martyr, who was shot dead in Alabama in 1965 by a white extremist vigilante while trying to shield a 17 year old black girl. On my first afternoon in the town I was in the audience at a public discussion at Washington and Lee between its black professor of history, who had started in the university as a 19 year old janitor, and a young white Methodist minister who was a descendant of Robert E. Lee, about racism and his ancestor’s white supremacist beliefs, which he called “American’s original sin.”

That evening I attended a meeting of the town’s planning commission in a local school, listening to arguments for and against its residents being allowed to keep chickens in their backyards. The commission, made up of local citizens (including my friend John Driscoll, founding director of the formerly Armagh-based and cross-border International Centre for Local and Regional Development), heard from a dozen people for and against – including a 12 year old girl – before making a recommendation to the town council. It was a civilised, tolerant, occasionally sharp-tongued exchange that was an admirable example of local democracy in action.

It all made me think of my Presbyterian home place, Northern Ireland, where  democracy (with exceptions at a very local level) is currently suspended, and where inter-community relations (our version of race relations) are once again turning toxic. It made me wonder what the courageous Ulster pioneers who were so crucial to the birth and expansion of the American nation would have made of the present situation in the North, 21 years after the Good Friday Agreement held out a brief, fragile hope of peace, prosperity and reconciliation.

My thoughts led me to three conclusions. Firstly, Brexit has shown once again how the political leadership of Ulster Unionism has an uncanny ability to get it wrong. Rather than identify with the British mainstream, which favours as soft an exit as possible from the European Union, the DUP opted to line up alongside the small group of hopeless reactionaries in favour of crashing out without a deal. Now that a soft Brexit is the most probable outcome following the six month extension of Britain’s EU membership, the largest unionist party needs to get back urgently to the business of restoring devolved power-sharing government at Stormont. Perhaps under a new leader like Jeffrey Donaldson it will be able to find enough generosity within its fearful soul to give way on the relatively marginal issues – the Irish language and marriage equality – that blocked agreement 14 months ago.

Secondly, if it can’t be generous, the DUP should at least realise that unionism’s self-preservation depends on it working day and night to persuade the North’s Catholics that for the foreseeable future their best interests continue to lie as part of the UK. This will not be an easy task, given the disillusion with the Brexit disaster and with the DUP’s record in the post-2007 partnership arrangements among many in that community. Unionism has already lost its majority in Stormont. In the foreseeable future it will almost certainly lose its demographic majority. It only has a few short years to show the wisdom and generosity required to make Northern Ireland a ‘shared home place’ (the title of a forthcoming memoir by Seamus Mallon) before the stark facts of population change take that opportunity out of its hands.

Thirdly, an extremely difficult and historic turning point may be approaching which will require it to think hard about some kind of accommodation with the Republic. That state, led by the ultra-pragmatic and diplomatically skilled Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney, is open for such an accommodation. Varadkar has made clear on a number of occasions his opposition to forcing Northern Protestants into a united Ireland through a narrow majority in a Border Poll. Equally, he has ruled out any coalition with Sinn Fein in a future government in Dublin. His government’s tough stance on the backstop to prevent a hard border was necessary to defend peace and prosperity on the island of Ireland (I fully accept that now, given the chaos and incompetence in London, having earlier been critical of its unwavering line).

Once that issue is settled – as I believe it will be as part of agreement based on or around a new UK-EU customs union – he will be free to turn his attention to the North. That will be the time for a courageous unionist leader to open a back channel to the Taoiseach and his government, perhaps around a proposal for an eventual confederal Ireland incorporating a new form of half-British province in the North. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Would those pragmatic Presbyterians of 18th century Virginia have approved of such an approach? I don’t know. They were smart deal-makers as well as brave frontier people. And it will take immense reserves of smartness, as well as bravery, to ensure that the next phase of Irish history is not another collapse into renewed violence.

¹  The Scotch-Irish: a Social History (University of North Carolina, 1962)

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Views from abroad | 1 Comment

Mutual contempt and ignorance are no way to build relations between peoples (especially in Ireland)

Posted on Sunday, 24 March, 2019 by andypollak

As the crisis deepens in Britain, the old negative stereotypes are back. The right-wing British press is full of fury at the treacherous role of the Irish in the ‘backstop’ to keep the UK hobbled and handcuffed indefinitely to the EU, thus depriving it of huge opportunities to strike its own trade deals around the world. Here in Dublin the consensus is that Britain is not just arrogant and untrustworthy but now also utterly incompetent, and the only way to keep the old imperial enemy in check, and thus to avoid a hard border, is to tie her down in the backstop’s legal knots. Mutual suspicion and contempt seem, once again, to be the flavours of the season.

For somebody who watched (and occasionally played a tiny part in) the blessed work of the past two decades of ensuring that relations on this island and between these islands were as warm and mutually beneficial as possible to maximise peace and reconciliation in the North, this is heartbreaking. The change for the worse is, of course, almost entirely down to the 2016 referendum. I was struck by a recent article by a Leave campaign staffer, Oliver Norgrove (I wonder if he is related to the Protestant republican Norgrove family who participated in the 1916 Rising) in which he admitted that ‘the big Brexit dream was brought to its knees thanks to one of the UK’s most persisting political ailments: its tendency to ignore the interests of Northern Ireland.’ He admitted to being ‘immensely disappointed and rather ashamed’ of the Leave campaign’s ‘huge failing…simply not to think about the impact of the Border on the merits of leaving the EU.’¹

Since I am writing this five days before the original 29th March ‘no deal’ deadline – now extended to 12th April – and will tomorrow escape to the heart of Trump’s America for a fortnight, that’s all I plan to say about Brexit for the moment. Except to repeat that this toxic issue has poisoned both British-Irish and North-South relations to an extent I have not seen for over 30  years.

For the 18 years up to 2016 we were in a good place, as the Dublin and London governments worked together, within the overlapping frameworks of the Good Friday Agreement and the EU, to manage the running sore that is Northern Ireland, while the new Northern institutions just about managed power-sharing, however flawed, between the ancient foes. Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK’s permanent representative to the EU until he resigned in 2017,  said in Dublin last week: “Anglo-Irish relations before this [Brexit] process got under way had been the best they have been in my professional lifetime, maybe the best they have been in several generations, if not centuries…I think the mutual animosity over the backstop question and how it’s been handled by the respective capitals has soured the mood…It has become a really neuralgic issue.”²

If British-Irish relations have soured, relations between Dublin and the unionists have frozen. Last August former First Minister and DUP leader Peter Robinson described a pre-2016 atmosphere of friendship, conviviality and comradeship between Dublin and London, and unionists and nationalists working “within a framework of relationships…with mutually beneficial outcomes.” A combination of the DUP, led by its most paranoid, ‘little Britisher’ elements, holding the hapless Theresa May to ransom, and Dublin’s unwavering insistence on the backstop and nothing but the backstop, has put paid to that.

There are other unionists in Northern Ireland who were among the 56% of people there who voted against Brexit. However we in the Republic rarely if ever hear from them. The Southern press and media simply do not feature sensible, moderate and intelligent unionists – pro-European and open to much closer relations with the South – discussing this existential topic (or any other topic).

Here are some prominent Northern people with unionist views and those attractive characteristics whom I know personally but I never see nor hear in Dublin: the pro-Remain independent unionist MP Lady Sylvia Hermon; Mike Nesbitt, former Ulster Unionist party leader, and his MLA colleagues Steve Aiken and Doug Beattie; John McCallister, former UUP deputy leader and senior farmers’ union official;  academics Paul Bew, Peter Shirlow and Arthur Aughey; hotelier Howard Hastings and small business spokeswoman Tina McKenzie;  women’s rights campaigner Dawn Purvis; Belfast News Letter journalist Sam McBride, the world expert on the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal; artist and cartoonist Brian John Spencer. And what about party leaders? When was the last time we heard Alliance leader Naomi Long on the Southern media? For my money this working class woman from east Belfast is one of the smartest, most articulate and most courageous political leaders on this island (her courage particularly evident during the 2012-13 Belfast flags protest).

I know that some (although not all) of these people are not particularly interested in having their views heard south of the Border. And that, in the words of one former US ambassador to Ireland, “unionism’s PR is crap.” But is it not part of the remit of a public broadcaster like RTE and a so-called newspaper of record like the Irish Times to reflect the views of all the people on this island, however uncomfortable this may be for the cosy nationalist consensus down here?

This almost total lack of interest in unionist Northern Ireland is evident also in Southern politics. The Oireachtas Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement Committee would have been an ideal forum for moderate unionists like Mike Nesbitt and Steve Aiken to air and debate their views. However for too long it was chaired by the maverick ultra-nationalist Fianna Fail senator Mark Daly, who turned it into a vehicle for discussing how to move speedily towards Irish unity, which meant, of course, that no unionist would go anywhere near it. Daly, like too many in Sinn Fein, is one of those who hold the absurd and archaic view that once we achieve a united Ireland, unionism, as a philosophy passionately espoused by 900,000 people, will simply disappear.

That most reconciling and pro-Irish of unionists, the former rugby international and anti-sectarianism activist Trevor Ringland, has now declared that with the recent upsurge of divisive nationalist rhetoric in the North, ‘there’s no space in their Ireland’ for moderate unionists like him. ‘Nationalists have become emboldened because of the Brexit uncertainties and the renewed hype around calls for a Border Poll. People are believing their own rhetoric without facing up to the reality that our future is intertwined, and the only way we can succeed socially and economically is by making Northern Ireland work and by great relations across this island and between these islands.’³

Let me leave the last word to one of the wisest analysts of North-South relations, Bob Collins, who as former director-general of RTE and chief commissioner of the Northern Ireland Equality Authority, is a rare public figure who knows both jurisdictions intimately. In a conversation in 2015, Collins said: ‘One of the crucial things that needs to happen if there is ever going to be a united Ireland is that the South has to develop an interest in and understanding of (I won’t say an affection for), but at the very least an accommodation with unionism. I don’t see the remotest evidence that this is likely to engage the interest of other than a very few. And that’s the one essential sine qua non of any consideration of a united Ireland.’

¹ ‘Why Brexiteers forgot about the Border’, Irish Times, 20 March

² ‘Future state of Anglo-Irish relations a ‘major worry’, Irish Times, 21 March

³  Trevor Ringland: No space in new Ireland for me’, News Letter, 23 March

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

Great green ideas to fire a new Irish industrial revolution

Posted on Friday, 8 March, 2019 by andypollak

One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2019 is to write more about climate change and the environment. The reasons are: firstly, this is quite simply the existential issue of our age, and one that our politicians in both Irish jurisdictions largely ignore; secondly, there is only so much one can write about people retreating to their tribal trenches in Brexit-bewitched Northern Ireland; and thirdly, maybe, just maybe, the huge threat of climate change is one that could get both politicians and people on this island working together.

I will be expanding my coverage of our imperilled island – and imperilled world  –   through interviews with a range of leaders of opinion in this vital area. I am starting with the Green Party leader in the Republic, Eamon Ryan. It is wonderfully refreshing to meet a political leader who is so idealistic, hopeful in the face of apparently insurmountable obstacles, and fizzing with new ideas.

Ryan believes the one thing the Irish government – a disgraceful laggard in European terms when it comes to climate change action – can do immediately is to agree to People Before Profit TD Brid Smyth’s bill to stop the government issuing any more oil and gas exploration licences off the Irish coast. This is currently in committee stage in the Oireachtas despite the government’s determined opposition.  ‘We know that four-fifths of already discovered fossil fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground if we are to avoid runaway climate change’, says Ryan. ‘There have been 140 attempts to drill for oil and gas in Irish waters, up to 200 miles out into the Atlantic, at a cost of around €100 million a go, and only three small pockets of gas have been discovered. We should be spending those sums on investing instead in renewable energy – wind and wave –  bringing it ashore on the west coast, and using it to build new industries there.’

He concedes that stopping this unsuccessful and expensive policy won’t help Ireland meet its immediate carbon reduction targets. ‘But it will send a signal, internationally and to the Irish public, that we know that in the next decade and a half we have to stop the use of of fossil fuels and replace them with a more earth-protecting alternative.’ He wants the money saved on stopping oil and gas exploration to go towards three major projects, and he is nothing if not ambitious.

Firstly, there is offshore wind, which he says is now competitive in price. Here he proposes a major offshore wind farm in the Irish Sea (similar to the General Electric-owned farm off Arklow but bigger), that would also connect, through the Isle of Man, with the British grid. Secondly, he wants the government to support investment in the kind of very large floating wind turbines in the Atlantic that have been pioneered off the coasts of Norway and the north of Scotland (and in the US, China and Japan). ‘Our sea area is 10 times as large as our land area, and we now know, with reasonable certainty, that over the next 10-15 years we could deploy and become good at this kind of large-scale technology.’

Thirdly he wants the electrification of the heating systems in the million Irish homes with oil-fired central heating through the installation of heat pumps. Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to pull heat out of the air and ground to heat a well-insulated house or other building, and can also be reversed to cool such a building. Ryan stresses that this is not a small or cheap project, with a cost of €40,000 per house for such ‘retrofitting’. But over time it would greatly reduce the €6 billion per year we currently spend on importing oil and gas from faraway places like Russia and Saudi Arabia. He estimates the cost of retrofitting every social house and public building (notably schools and hospitals) in the country at €50 billion. Ireland would be one of the first countries in the world to tackle energy efficiency in buildings on this enormous scale. And we are starting from an extremely low base: only around a hundred houses every year are retrofitted at present, with even the not very ambitious National Development Plan saying this must rise to 45,000 houses per annum by 2021.

He also has radical ideas about transport. ‘We need a total change from the car-based, urban sprawl model. Electric cars are not a complete answer because even their manufacture consumes a large amount of resources. We need to radically improve and increase the cycling infrastructure, with a first priority being the ability of every child to cycle safely to school. We have to aim to emulate cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen; in the latter 30% of all trips are by bike, with the aim being to reach 50%. The figure in Dublin is 4-5%, so we need a tenfold increase in the amount of cycling.’ This will lead, among other things, to a major reduction in congestion in our car-clogged capital (a recent survey showed that Dublin drivers travel at the slowest city centre speeds in the world) and major health benefits for its inhabitants.

Ryan dreams of an Irish version of the Green New Deal, the policy programme American Democrats are currently debating which aims to wean the US off fossil fuels, curb greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time provide well-paid jobs in clean energy industries. He points out that his proposed retrofitting programme would require thousands of builders, engineers, electricians, plumbers and carpenters over the next  20 years to convert hundreds of thousands of houses. This will lead to a huge demand for skilled labour at a time when so much work is unskilled, precarious and threatened by automation and robotics. Because much of this new building work will be outside Dublin, it will not worsen the already overheated labour market in the capital’s construction sector.

He foresees young people from Kerry and Limerick and Galway  and Donegal being attracted back from England and Australia to work on retrofitting projects in their home places and being able to afford to move back to those areas to live. He would like to see such a retrofitting programme start with social and rural housing, to convince people of modest means and living in isolated communities of its value for them.

The Green Party leader admits that to have any chance of beginning to see his dreams turn into reality, it needs to double its 2-3% electoral support so as to hold the balance of power and thus force the larger parties to take on at least some of its visionary programme. This is what the German Greens have done successfully, so that they are now winning 18-20% of the vote in states like Bavaria and Hesse, and forming part of governing coalitions in nine of Germany’s 16 state legislatures.

Ryan believes this is partly because they are listening to rural voters’ concerns, and making sure, for example, that farmer-owned local energy collectives get high prices for the wind and solar energy they produce. [‘That’s a very small example’, says a friend who knows Germany well. ‘The German Green vote is mainly an urban one and attracts those who are cosmopolitan and internationalist, but not neo-liberal, and who believe important questions like climate change, refugees and organised crime can best be dealt with by international organisations, above all the EU’].

Green parties vary markedly from country to country, but agree on one thing: ‘they have to make the new green economy a positive ‘we’ story that is both about quality of life and strength of community,’ says Ryan. However he recognises that the ‘Yellow Jackets’ – the people left behind by economic progress who can’t think beyond next week, let alone 12 years into a future of climate crisis – represent a real challenge for the Greens, as for all established political parties. ‘We have to listen to them, rather than look down on them, unlike a classic liberal elitist like Macron.’

He accepts that winning over the farming community will be a particular hurdle in Ireland. But he maintains that the current system based largely on meat and dairy is not good for its producers, with beef farmers, for example, earning an annual average wage of just €13,000. He has faith that a future Common Agricultural Policy, focused on protecting biodiversity and water quality and storing carbon, will serve the interests of the farmers rather than – at present – those of the big supermarket chains. As a non-expert, I remain a sceptic in this area.

The greatest challenge is for young people. The youth climate strike, in which Irish schoolchildren are playing their part, is the inspiration of the moment. The British environmental writer George Monbiot says the youth strikers need a short, simple story which goes something like this: ‘The world has been thrown into climate chaos, caused by fossil fuel companies, the billionaires who profit from them and the politicians they have bought. But we, the young heroes, will confront these oligarchs, using our moral authority to create a movement so big and politically dangerous that our governments are forced to shut down the fossil economy and restore the benign conditions in which humans and other species can thrive.’ It’s a big ask for schoolchildren and teenagers, a drastic reversal of the roles of caring adults and cared-for children. Ryan adds that young people will be concerned about more than the environment. They want to know about a safe and benign future, asking not only ‘What will I be doing in 12 years when I am living in an age of floods, drought, extreme heat and poverty?’ but also ‘What will I work at? How will I get a home? How will I have a family?’

For him too it is about the economy as well as the environment: ‘The old ways which saw Europe buying in resources from the rest of the world are at risk now: from China in manufacturing and the US in software development. Europe is in danger of doing nothing but consuming. We have to create new industries, particularly in the green economy, which are hyper-efficient and low carbon. Europe has a real opportunity to take a lead here.’

The Greens, as an all-Ireland party, also have a strong North-South dimension, and it is a constructive and practical one. Ryan reminded me that during his time as Minister for Energy and Natural Resources between 2007 and 2011 he worked with Nigel Dodds and then Arlene Foster to develop an all-island electricity market, an all-island grid and a single all-island supply company, all with minimum controversy.

One can see how he worked well with DUP ministers. ‘My vision of an electricity system balanced between variable renewable energy supply and variable demand won’t work if we try to do it on this island alone – it has to be on a larger scale, involving inter-connectors with Britain and France. In the Brexit talks, we are stuck on the border issue, the sovereignty issue. Nobody is stuck on energy. Nobody disagrees that we must continue energy cooperation. Britain, whose energy prices are 50% higher than the EU average, knows that the only way it will keep its electricity prices down is through an inter-connector with the continent. We are equally pragmatic, and also know that most of our gas comes from the UK.’

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