To the Christmas miracle workers of the Stormont House Agreement – thank you

Posted on Friday, 26 December, 2014 by andypollak

Those of us who still believe that the Northern Ireland peace process, for all its faults and frustrations, is an extraordinary work in progress, received a surprise present two days before Christmas: another last minute, crisis-defusing, expert-defying, all-night final session agreement between the five main parties and the two governments.

Its broad outlines are well-known: nearly £2 billion in new British government cash and loans to cover a range of things like reforming the public sector and paying off thousands of civil servants, ‘shared education’ and other cross-community projects, supporting victims and survivors and dealing with ‘Troubles’-related killings; reducing the future size of the Stormont Assembly and the number of NI Executive departments; a new Historical Investigations Unit to inquire into ‘Troubles’ killings; a commission to enable people privately to learn how their loved ones were killed; an oral history archive; a commission to report on flags and identity within 18 months of being established; devolving responsibility for parades from the Parades Commission to the Assembly. These last five proposals owe a great deal to the recommendations of US diplomat Richard Haass 12 months ago.

Some of this may work, some of it may not. The important thing is that the widening cracks in the institutions of the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements have been papered over for the present. The parties of Protestant unionism and Republican nationalism are pledged to work for another period in government together in a province where peace without reconciliation has now become normal. The astonishing, if sometimes deeply uneasy, alliance between those two extremely shrewd (and extremely different) political leaders, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, will continue. Democratic power-sharing lives to fight another day. And the forces of darkness and violence, never far below the surface in Northern Ireland, are kept at bay once again.

Not for the first time in the past two decades, one reaches for words like ‘miraculous’. However in the eyes of secular liberals like this writer, miracles are not created by divine intervention but by the sheer bloody hard work of politicians and civil servants: the exhausting and seemingly endless hours of negotiation; the trying to put yourself in your adversary’s position; the writing, parsing, finding the right phrase that all sides can live with, the minute wording of the compromise text, the rewriting; the return to the negotiating table, the writing again, the meeting again, the compromising again. If there was ever a graphic illustration of Samuel Beckett’s saying – “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” – it is the Northern peace negotiations over more than two decades. So let me pay tribute to some of the leading participants, many of whom I, like so many ‘hurler on the ditch’ commentators, spend a lot of time criticising.

I pay tribute to Peter Robinson, Nigel Dodds, Jeffrey Donaldson and the other DUP negotiators for their courage in facing down the backwoodsmen (and Jim Allister) who are still too numerous on their party’s back benches. These people would still much prefer that Ian Paisley had never taken the unheard of step of going into office with the loathed and feared party of the Provisional IRA and that they were back in their comfortable cots of Protestant supremacy and victimhood.

I pay tribute to Gerry Adams, Martin McGuiness, Gerry Kelly and the other Sinn Fein negotiators for their willingness finally to compromise on their deep reluctance to accept British-style welfare cuts which will particularly affect the poorer Catholics who are a core part of their constituency (and make their position as the leading anti-austerity party in the South more difficult). It is all too easy to see Adams as a brilliant and sinister modern-day Irish Machiavelli, moving the pieces on the Irish political chessboard to fit with his vision of a united Ireland ruled by Sinn Fein and its allies. However he has also been hugely influential in persuading both the IRA to give up violence for democratic politics and ordinary Catholics to begin to cast off their age-old addiction to self-definition as victims of injustice and oppression.

I pay tribute to Mike Nesbitt, Alasdair McDonnell and David Ford for pointing out where the Stormont House Agreement falls short but continuing in government to work it. As the agreement itself points out, the time may not be far distant when one or more of their parties will go into opposition and turn Stormont into a more normal political assembly.

I pay tribute to Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan and and British Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers. These two neophytes came out of their first dip into the cauldron of Northern political negotiations surprisingly well. The former’s personal commitment to peace was shown by the extraordinary 90 meetings he came to Belfast to chair and participate in during the 11 weeks of these latest negotiations. The latter showed real mental toughness and determination after she was ridiculed – not for the first time – and accused of ineptitude and lack of preparation in allowing David Cameron walk out of the talks two weeks ago.

I pay tribute to the civil servants: to Adrian O’Neill, Niall Burgess, Emer Deane, Shane O’Neill and their colleagues in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, whose patient, tireless commitment to the hard legwork of peace and stability in the North I have always greatly admired. And to Malcolm McKibbin and all the OFMDFM,  Northern Ireland Office and British Foreign Office officials whose names I don’t know for their equal contribution. They had every right to go home exhausted to their families at Christmas happy with a job well done. The great indifferent public in Ireland and Britain hasn’t an inkling about the vast amount of thankless work they have put into this latest push for peace.

And finally to Tommie Gorman of RTE and Gerry Moriarty of the Irish Times – the two main Southern media representatives at Stormont – who insisted on believing that the latest phase of the process would reach a happy conclusion, and kept an almost totally uninterested Irish public informed of this latest crucial development in contemporary Irish history. I will come back to the role – or rather lack of role – of a ‘switched off’ population in the Republic of Ireland in a future blog.

P.S. This column marks a small personal milestone. It is my 100th monthly blog on North-South and Northern Irish issues since September 2006, when, as director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, I wrote my first ‘Note from the Next Door Neighbours’.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 4 Comments

Give us more women in politics, North and South

Posted on Thursday, 27 November, 2014 by andypollak

In preparation for this blog, I carried out a totally unscientific straw poll of the Irish people on my email address list, asking them who was the person in politics they most admired on the island, North and South, over the past 25 years. Around 50 people responded and – allowing for the left-of-centre, largely non-republican and non-unionist bias of that list – the results were not surprising. Mary Robinson topped the poll in the South and John Hume in the North, with Mary McAleese second in the South and David Ervine and Seamus Mallon joint second in the North. That’s two women in the top five.

Overall, of the 15 politicians nominated, one third were women. The others were all Northerners: Naomi Long, Monica McWilliams and Baroness May Blood.

That’s pretty good when one looks at the proportion of women in the parliaments of the two Irish jurisdictions, which are among the worst in the world. 19% of Northern Ireland Assembly members are women, the lowest in the United Kingdom (it’s 23% in the House of Commons, 35% in the Scottish Parliament and 40% in the Welsh Assembly).

In the South it’s even worse, with only 16% of the Dail’s members being women. This puts Ireland 88th in the world, behind such paragons of democracy and women’s equality as Burkina Faso, Gabon, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates (the US is barely any better at 16.8%). Ireland comes 25th out of 28 EU parliaments. And that woefully low figure – 16% – has never been exceeded in the 96 year history of Dail Eireann, which must have Countess Markievicz, the first woman elected to both the House of Commons and the Dail in 1918, turning in her grave.

However change is on the way in the Republic. A report to a parliamentary committee by Labour Senator Ivana Bacik (like me a member of the small Czech-Irish community) in 2009 led to a change in the law in 2012 which laid down that from the 2016 general election any party that does not have at least 30% of its candidates of each gender will see its state funding cut by half. This quota will rise to 40% in 2023.

The Bacik report found that there were five main barriers to women’s greater participation in politics in Ireland: childcare – women are far more likely to have this responsibility; confidence – women are less likely to put themselves forward as candidates; cash – women do not have the same access to finance (including from business) and other resources as men; culture – a culture that discriminates against women is prevalent, even in left-wing parties; and, most importantly, candidate selection procedures, which are secretive and stacked against women.

In its reform, Ireland has gone for ‘electoral gender quotas’, which require that a stated percentage of candidates nominated by parties must be of each gender. These are now in place in over 100 countries. They have led, for example, to the percentage of women in the Spanish parliament rising from 28% to 36% in the eight years up to 2008, and the proportion of women in the Belgian parliament rising from 5-10% before 1990 to over 23% in 1999.

But why do we want more women in our parliaments, apart from the need to tackle the glaring injustice that more than half the population should not have a miserable 16-19% representation in their legislatures? My personal answer is that male-dominated governments and parliaments have made such a mess of politics in recent years, women can’t but do better. It is said that women shy away from the tough, confrontational arena that is contemporary parliamentary politics. But who’s to say that the more holistic, consensual and outcome-focused (and less adversarial) approach that women bring to everything they do, would not also work in politics? The experience of other, more emancipated parliaments shows that vital issues like education and childcare move up the agenda when there are more female members. And women politicians’ skills in conflict resolution certainly contributed – through Mo Mowlam and the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition – to the peace process in Northern Ireland. As the former Fine Gael minister Gemma Hussey says: “Women bring different life experiences, priorities, knowledge and a different style of decision-making.” (There are exceptions in the last of these areas, of course: Margaret Thatcher springs to mind!)

Monica McWilliams, former leader of the Women’s Coalition, says that even when the structural barriers are largely removed, the overwhelmingly male culture of politics will probably remain. She recalls the humiliating treatment she and her colleagues received at the hands of many in the traditional parties, notably the Ulster Unionists, during the inter-party talks in the 1990s (barbs about going back to the kitchen, accusations of having affairs, even ‘mooing’ at them as if they were cows). She believes that even today many male politicians in Northern Ireland don’t realise how unacceptable and harmful this kind of behaviour is. And she notes that unlike in the Republic – where, for example, we now have women in all the top justice and security jobs as Minister for Justice, Chief Justice, Attorney General and head of the Garda Siochana – in the North there are now fewer women in key public positions than 10 years ago.

In politics the problem remains a common all-Ireland one. Look at the leadership of some of our political parties. Would we prefer to see Arlene Foster or Nigel Dodds as the next DUP leader? – in a reactionary party like the DUP a talented woman like Arlene doesn’t stand a chance. Or Mary Lou McDonald replacing the old warhorse Gerry Adams as leader of Sinn Fein in the Republic? – there is precious little chance of that happening either. Is Fianna Fail weaker for the way it has relegated a superb politician like Mary Hanafin to the sidelines? Wasn’t Joan Burton a better choice as Labour Party leader than Alex White or any other man in that party?

In the next Irish election I will be voting for candidates who espouse the values of care and compassion, community engagement and climate justice and who try to curb the voracious beast of contemporary finance capitalism as far as is compatible with maintaining a relatively prosperous society. For these reasons I will be looking for women candidates to support.

One final North-South observation. Isn’t it interesting that there are now twice as many Protestant women cabinet ministers (Jan O’Sullivan and Heather Humphreys) in Dublin as there are in Belfast (Arlene Foster)? There’s something for sectarian, sexist and anti-Irish unionists – and there are still plenty of them around – to think about.

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I prefer good art and archaeology to bad politics

Posted on Thursday, 23 October, 2014 by andypollak

Sometimes the sheer badness of politics in Northern Ireland takes my breath away (badness=bad faith, lying, incompetence, being mired in the past). Take the third week of October, for example. Peter Robinson boycotted the opening meetings of the British government initiated all-party talks he had himself called for to deal with the deadlock between the DUP and Sinn Fein on a wide range of issues which has led to the North being largely ungoverned for the past year. The DUP also reneged on an agreement to allow a Sinn Fein MLA to take up the role of Speaker of the Assembly.

Meanwhile Gerry Adams ran into a real storm when he had to defend himself against charges from a young woman from one of the IRA’s ‘first families’, Mairia Cahill, that he had done nothing after she informed him she had been raped by an IRA man and then subjected to an IRA ‘kangeroo court’ at which she was forced to confront her assailant. Adams is a far more adroit politician than Robinson, but because of the constant requirement to defend the IRA as noble freedom fighters whatever evil deeds they have perpetrated, he will continue to get dragged back into the ugly past by bombshells like this.

In that week I came across two extraordinary small books that gave me some reason for hope: a book of satirical paintings launched at the Ulster Museum and a 30 year old pamphlet from an eminent archaeologist pleading for sharing and common ground. I say extraordinary because they were both humorous and open-minded and optimistic, grounded in history in its broadest sense, and emphasising the humanity, complexity and essential Irishness of the North’s divided history.

The book of paintings was by the Belfast artist Rita Duffy (whose studio now straddles the border between Fermanagh and Cavan) and was called ‘Thaw’ – because she believes art can play a role in thawing the great, icy mass of sectarian fear and hatred in her native place. The paintings feature satirical food product labels which poke fun at the folly and pretensions of iconic leaders and movements in recent and contemporary Irish history.

Duffy spares no sacred cows. Here you will find Ulster Vinegar (“100% Matured Vitriol Vinegar…produced through a historical process of slow fermentation of pain, anger and grievance”); a chocolate covered AK 47, “all romantic freedom fighters’ chocolate of choice”; Padraig Pearse Pasta Sauce, made from “tomatoes grown by the young men of ’65 and ’67 coming to their miraculous ripening”; Edward Carson’s Covenanters Marmalade (“What answer from the North? My friends, it’s Marmalade. We perish if we yield.”); B Special Honey to get rid of the bitter taste from the marmalade; and Peace Line clothes pegs as a way of domesticating the horrible ‘peace line’ security fences that tower over the washing lines of houses in many poorer parts of Belfast. These products are soon to be available on tee shirts from www.thawfactory.com or rita@ritaduffystudio.com

Duffy tells us that when politics fail, we always have art, not least to remind us of the unpalatable and absurd ‘narcissisms of small difference’ that are what is left of our ancient Irish quarrel. It is noticeable that in Duffy’s paintings women usually loom large – although women, the rulers of the kitchen and scullery, are largely absent from these posturing male food labels. As Catherine Marshall, Head of Collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, points out in her introductory essay: Women have the power “to replace the language of division by an agreed language of commonality.” I hope and pray it will be so (although in next month’s blog I will explore why brilliant Irish women are so poorly represented in our politics).

The second little gem I came across was a 1984 pamphlet – ‘Ulster: The Common Ground’ by the distinguished geographer and archaeologist E. Estyn Evans, a man from the Welsh borders who graced the world of Irish scholarship until his death in 1989. He was a scholar who would be listened to even more closely today, with his emphasis on the whole human environment, including the earth, as the shaper of humankind.

Evans puts our little contemporary squabble into the context of 5,000 years of Irish history. He notes that during the Bronze Age, “this corner of Ireland was among the most advanced, culturally and technically and commercially, of all regions not only in Ireland but in the British Isles.” The archaeological evidence shows that this was because “people of different origins and cultures had learned to live together, to mix, to quicken each other. So Ulster, which is best known to the English today as a place of unrest and civil strife, is thought of by British archaeologists as the place where they had that brilliant Bronze Age.”

Evans, brought up in England by Welsh-speaking parents and who spent most of his adult life in Northern Ireland, urges that we should pay more attention to archaeology. This would show that “the clash of native and newcomer has been repeated over and over again, and we should try to discover how at various times they have not only come to terms with themselves but produced great blossomings of culture. I think you will find that it is precisely this clash of native and newcomer that struck the sparks in Irish culture.”

He also noted the way successive waves of newcomers had become absorbed into Ireland – even though some of them “still obstinately refuse to call themselves Irish.” He stressed that “you cannot send those of planter stock back across the water, any more than you can recall millions of Irishmen from America.” And he pointed to “a very paradoxical figure: an Orangeman from the Bannside, waving a British flag and pouring scorn on the Englishman because he can’t get his tongue around a good Gaelic place name like Ahoghill.”

So when we get depressed about the dismal state of the North’s politics, we should comfort ourselves with the Buddhist thought that all this is impermanent. The violent sectarianism of the northern part of Ireland is a mere two centuries old, the colonisation which gave rise to it is only four centuries old, and in another two, three or four centuries – if the earth survives – they will be remembered as nothing more than a temporary aberration in the six or seven millenia history of people on this island. Isn’t that a comforting thought of a kind?

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Why Sinn Fein preferred a No vote in the Scottish referendum

Posted on Thursday, 25 September, 2014 by andypollak

One of the most thought-provoking (and to an Irish audience, most relevant) articles on the Scottish independence referendum appeared on an inside page of the Irish Times two days before the vote (i). It was an interview by Northern editor Gerry Moriarty with John Brewer, Professor of Post Conflict Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, a distinguished sociologist who has written widely on peacemaking, conflict and religion in Northern Ireland.

Professor Brewer was of the opinion that contrary to the received wisdom – that Sinn Fein would have liked to see a ‘Yes’ vote in the Scottish referendum for all the usual reasons of undermining unionists and reinforcing demands for a Border poll – the republican leadership would be happier with the relatively narrow ‘No’ vote that was the eventual outcome.

His argument is a compelling one. Firstly, “a marginal No vote is going to cause the London-centric, Westminster bubble politicians to devolve greater powers.” Secondly, Sinn Fein’s electoral ‘long game’ involves the party attracting a middle class vote in both parts of Ireland so that eventually it will either be in power or in a position to determine who will be in power in both jurisdictions.

Brewer pointed out that with four out of five jobs in Northern Ireland either in or dependent on the public sector, Catholic civil servants, teachers, lawyers, police officers, social workers and the like – in common with their Protestant counterparts – know who ultimately pays their salaries: the British exchequer. And those salaries go to support a very attractive lifestyle: he points to the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the Belfast middle class, with its plethora of theatres and concert halls, riverside apartments and up-market cafes and restaurants. He calls these people the “Catholic economic unionists”.

Brewer noted that Sinn Fein has already mopped up most of the working class nationalist vote in the North and in the May local and European elections made major inroads into working class constituencies in the Republic. Sinn Fein has to keep convincing the Catholic middle class to vote for it in the North, and this means no return to violence and playing down the rhetoric about a united Ireland, with all the risks that might bring to their comfortable livelihoods. “Being so politically astute, Sinn Fein have to realise that a Yes vote in the Scottish referendum will require them to up the stakes on a united Ireland. That runs the risk of alienating middle class Catholics.”

The key task for the party now, he believes, is to persuade the Southern middle class also to vote Sinn Fein, a much harder task. If Sinn Fein can demonstrate it can be a credible party of government in the North, more people in the Republic will start believing it can do the same in Dublin. One of its problems is that middle class Southerners don’t want a united Ireland, whatever they might tell the occasional pollster: they don’t want to take on a dysfunctional economy almost totally dependent on a subsidies from London and they don’t want to inherit the sectarian and often violent mess of loyalist flags, parades and worse.

Noting that the rise in the Catholic population means that one day Sinn Fein will become the North’s largest party, Brewer went on: “Being in government, perhaps even having a First Minister, will demonstrate to voters in the South that it can be a responsible government, and I think that will have huge implications for the way people in the South view Sinn Fein.”

Meanwhile we have a crisis in Belfast which may bring down the institutions (although you wouldn’t know it from the scant coverage in the Dublin media). Peter Robinson says deadlocked decision making at Stormont is no longer fit for purpose and wants the British (although not the Irish) government to step in again. Sinn Fein seem to agree that power-sharing is no longer working, having refused point blank to accept any English-style welfare cuts despite the likelihood that this will lead to reductions (£87 million this year and rising)  in Stormont’s block grant from London, making the North increasingly hard to govern. The two governments have announced new all-party talks.

The smart thinking is that Sinn Fein and the DUP will stagger on until the Westminster elections next May. If John Brewer’s thesis is correct, it is very much in Sinn Fein’s interest to do so. He argues that the prospect of more devolved powers – for example, the power to reduce corporation tax to the level in the Republic – could be the incentive that persuades the parties to return to a properly functioning Executive. However he concedes that nobody in London is going to give greater powers to dysfunctional politicians who clearly can’t manage the ones they have already.

Sinn Fein, of course, are always thinking long term. They won’t mind too much if the latest imbroglio leads to London becoming even more ‘sickened’ with Northern Ireland, which will certainly be the case if the institutions collapse and with a heavy heart the British Government has to impose Direct Rule on a temporary basis once again. The Unionists, as usual, have more to lose. Will that be enough to persuade them to risk the wrath of their hard-line Orange followers and compromise on their age-old shibboleths of flags and parades? I doubt it.

i. Would a tight No vote in Scotland best suit Sinn Fein? The Irish Times, 16 September

Posted in General, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

Is this the least known historic village in Ireland?

Posted on Sunday, 31 August, 2014 by andypollak

I come from Kells – not Kells in County Meath, nor Kells in County Kerry, but the twin villages of Kells and Connor in County Antrim. The fact that my father was Czech, that I grew up mainly in London and have lived for many years in Dublin probably excludes me from citizenship in the eyes of most of its inhabitants. But I still consider Kells and the nearby town of Ballymena to be my home place.

These two villages have suffered, in the words of one resident, because “they were on the road to nowhere” – deep in the County Antrim countryside, well off the main road from Belfast to Ballymena. In an introduction to a 1989 booklet, local historian Dr Eull Dunlop called them “the forgotten villages.”

It was not always so. Kells and Connor have a proud place in the history of Ulster and Ireland. As its Heritage Trail booklet (beautifully produced by the Kells and Connor Community Improvement Association) outlines in fascinating detail, St MacNissi, a disciple of St Patrick (who is believed to have tended sheep on nearby Slemish mountain during his first period of slavery in Ireland), built a monastery here. By the 11th century Connor boasted a Romanesque cathedral richly decorated with Celtic carving and standing at the centre of a populous settlement led by the Ó Floinn family, part of the Uí Thuirtre confederation, who had successfully resisted the Norman invaders for many years.

Connor continued to thrive under the Normans. An Augustinian abbey was built and in 1178 a Norman, Reginaldus, became Bishop of Connor. Its ‘golden age’ ended when a Scottish army led by Edward Bruce, who had recently declared himself High King of Ireland, defeated an Anglo-Norman army before sacking this then strategically important town in 1315. It was never to recover its previous significance.

In the early 17th century Kells and Connor were part of the Ulster Plantation, and were settled mainly by Scottish Presbyterians. They were to become two of the North’s most predominantly Presbyterian villages (they still have no fewer than four Presbyterian churches of various denominations). The religious revival which was to sweep Protestant Ulster in the late 1850s began in a school hall near Kells.

In 1798, while Henry Joy McCracken was attacking Antrim, 500 men from Kells and Connor successfully attacked and took nearby Randalstown. One source states that “they were almost to a man engaged in the rebellion.” In the aftermath of the defeat of the United Irishmen, a guerrilla campaign was waged in the nearby glens and several local leaders were captured and hanged.

Meanwhile the twin villages were becoming part of the Industrial Revolution. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries numerous woollen and linen mills grew up along the Kellswater River. In 1780 Francis Dinsmore came from Donegal and in 1796 set up what was to become the Old Green Woollen Mill, which would thrive, under successive Dinsmores, liberal and progressive employers, until the mid-1980s. Dinsmore Textile Solutions, with a headquarters and a dyeing and finishing plant in Kells, and factories and offices in England and Russia, is now an internationally successful company in finishing and trading fabrics.

In 1912 Kells and Connor, like so much of Protestant Ulster, came out massively in support of the Ulster Covenant. In 1914 the local Church of Ireland minister’s car was the first to arrive to pick up guns at Larne harbour during the Larne gun running.

Now there is no more British village in Northern Ireland. Last week, nearly two months after the ‘Twelfth’, its streets were festooned with Union flags (or bristling with Union flags? One’s use of words often depends on one’s political viewpoint). It boasts four Orange lodges, the oldest dating back to 1810. Anybody who continues to doubt the existence of two radically different and mutually uncomprehending Irelands (Do such old-fashioned nationalists still exist?) should spend a couple of hours in Kells and Connor. People here, when they think of the South of Ireland at all, consider it to be a foreign country.

Yet if you strip away the politics and turn a blind eye to the flags, Kells looks and feels like scores of suburbanised Irish villages, with its Supervalu supermarket, its Chinese and Indian takeaways (God bless the leavening element brought by the hardworking Chinese, Indians, Poles and other immigrants), its computer shop and its post-1990 housing estates.

As this all-too-brief outline makes clear, Kells’ history is deeply entwined with the story of Ireland. Yet how many people south of the border know or care about its fascinating and multi-faceted history, or that of similar northern villages? Situated as it is in the heartland of Ulster Unionism, is it perhaps the least known historic village in Ireland? For the vast majority of Southerners the beautiful and historic lands of Antrim north of Belfast are terra incognita, an area that they rarely if ever visit and which is ‘beyond the Pale’ in a host of different ways.

All this is a dilemma for those of us who insist on thinking of Ireland as one island and one country, whatever the political and constitutional barriers. A leading Belfast community worker with a loyalist paramilitary background was once described to me as “politically British and culturally Irish.” That’s how I see the forgotten villages of Kells and Connor. It makes me sad because I believe that any non-violent solution to the age-old imbroglio of Ireland and Northern Ireland has to accommodate the ‘British Irishness’ of places like these. And I can’t see how that is going to happen – unless perhaps a new non-sectarian Northern Irish identity can be allowed to emerge.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 8 Comments

What happened to the North’s Progressive Presbyterians?

Posted on Friday, 1 August, 2014 by andypollak

My summer reading in recent weeks has been a fascinating book called Dissenting Voices: Recovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition1, by the former head of the Simon Community in Northern Ireland, Roger Courtney. It features short biographies of 300 ‘progressive Presbyterians’ from the north of Ireland over the past four centuries.

Courtney, like me, is from that freethinking, left-of-centre Presbyterian tradition which has largely disappeared in the past 50 years as Northern Irish society and politics have become more polarised than ever between the extremes of unionism/loyalism and nationalism/republicanism. I think this is a real tragedy for the cause of non-sectarian and progressive political thinking (defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as “favouring or implementing rapid progress or social reform”) in Ireland.

This volume contains a treasure trove of democratic, liberal, radical, socialist, feminist and strongly anti-authoritarian voices. It is an enlightening corrective to the narrow and fearful pieties of much present day Presbyterianism and its usual political expression, Ulster Unionism. However the great majority of these refreshing voices are almost totally unknown today.

Of course the ‘men of 98’ are here: Henry Joy McCracken, William Drennan, Jemmy Hope, Samuel Neilson et al. That radical United Irishmen tradition was clearly still alive well into the mid-late 19th century, as evidenced by the hundreds of Presbyterian ministers who were active in the Tenant Right movement – demanding fair rents, fixity of tenure, free sale and tenant ownership – from the 1840s to the 1870s.

Take1850: in that post-famine year Rev. John Rutherford told a monster meeting of 7,000 people in his home town of Banbridge that it was time for “an oppressed and poverty-stricken people” to rise up and abolish “the white tenant slavery of the North of Ireland.” Rev. Nathaniel Brown from Limavady led a Northern delegation of 10 Presbyterian ministers and four Catholic priests to set up the National Tenant League. Rev. John Rogers from Comber, Co Down, told a meeting in Kerry: “Presbyterian Ulster is not Orange. Presbyterianism is incompatible with, and destructive of, Orangeism. Orangeism is Toryism, and the genius of Presbyterianism is utterly antagonistic to such a despotic creed.”

Then there was the small but significant number of Presbyterians who joined the Home Rule and Land League struggles in the 1870s and 1880s. People like Rev. Isaac Nelson from Belfast, who ministered in Donegall Street before becoming a Parnellite MP for Mayo; James Bryce Killen from Kells, Co Antrim, a co-founder of the Land League with Michael Davitt; John Ferguson from Belfast, a close friend of Davitt’s and leader of the Home Rule movement in Scotland; and John Pinkerton from Ballymoney, who was MP for Galway City for 14 years.

The third group highlighted are the people from a Presbyterian background who played an important role in the development of socialism, trade unionism and women’s rights in Ireland in the early and mid-20th century. These ranged from Christian socialist ministers like Harold Rylett, Albert McElroy and Arthur Agnew; through working class trade unionists such as Jack Beattie (one of the leaders of the 1932 Outdoor Relief movement which united Protestants and Catholics in a successful campaign to force the Stormont government to double its miserly payments to the destitute unemployed), Alexander Bowman, Victor Halley, Bonar Thompson, Billy McMullen (one of the founders of the left-wing Republican Congress in the 1930s), Harry Midgley, Jack McGougan and Harold Binks; to suffragists like Isabella Tod, Elizabeth Bell and Elizabeth McCracken (who helped burn down five unionist-owned buildings after Edward Carson reneged on his promise to include the franchise for women in the establishment of a Northern Ireland parliament).

Finally there are the people – particularly in the last century – who have given the lie to the claim that the Ulster Presbyterian tradition has produced no poets and writers.This long list includes poets like W.R.Rodgers and Robert Greacen; playwrights like Gerald MacNamara (Harry Morrow), Rutherford Mayne and John Boyd; and novelists like Helen Waddell and Sam Hanna Bell.

Presbyterianism is still the largest denomination in Northern Ireland. But the once powerful voice of radical Presbyterianism has been largely stilled. The long, seemingly irreversible movement to the conservative right, starting with the rise of Ulster Unionism in opposition to Home Rule and ending with the fundamentalism of Rev. Ian Paisley and the DUP, has seen to that.

Presbyterians these days seem largely unconcerned that, along with their fellow Unionists of other Protestant denominations, they are counted among the world’s most reactionary ‘frontier’ communities: the whites of South Africa; the Southern whites of the USA; the Israeli right.

But in this new, relatively peaceful era – albeit with sectarianism entrenched in the North’s institutional structures by the Belfast Agreement – is it wishful thinking to wonder if a renewal of this progressive element of Northern Protestantism might be contemplated? Presbyterians’ historic commitment to democratic structures, as reflected in their church governance; their former championing of civil and religious liberties; their now largely forgotten identification with those groups who because of poverty or oppression did not have a voice in society (which for several hundred years included Presbyterians); their promotion of tolerance and reconciliation at home and abroad: 150 years ago these were characteristic of many Irish Presbyterians. Is it impossible that this attractive radicalism might be re-discovered by a new generation of younger people from this important Protestant tradition?

There are a very few politicians, religious and community leaders – people like Naomi Long and Duncan Morrow of the Alliance Party, Rev. John Dunlop and the late David Stevens, the surgeon John Robb and Baroness May Blood and Jackie Redpath in the Shankill Road area – who continue to personify the radical, dissenting tradition of Irish Presbyterianism. Their congregations and communities – “terrified of Irishness” in Michael Longley’s phrase – have to find new ways of asserting that most fundamental Presbyterian virtue, independence of mind, so that they can end their economic, cultural and psychological dependence on ‘the Mainland’ and engage in the difficult task of learning again to play their part as a valued, if uniquely different, group of people who live on the island of Ireland.

1Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian tradition. Ulster Historical Foundation 2013.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | Leave a comment

International Cooperation 28, Cooperation on the island of Ireland 1

Posted on Thursday, 26 June, 2014 by andypollak

I was looking through the Government’s 2014 spending estimates the other day (as one does) and noticed that spending this year on international cooperation (i.e. cooperation with countries in the developing world) will be €481.5 million, down from €629 million two years ago. This represents 0.47% of Ireland’s Gross National Income, not bad by international standards, but well below our nearest neighbour – whom we love to characterise as isolationist and right-wing – which, under a Conservative government, last year became the first G7 nation to reach the United Nations target of 0.7% of GNI spent on development aid.

In another spending category under the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade I noticed how much the Government is spending this year on ‘reconciliation and cooperation on this island’. This amounts to just over €17 million. Most of it will go on the North South Ministerial Council and the seven North/South bodies and companies set up under the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

That represents 28 euros spent on aid to the developing world for every one euro spent on the cooperation and reconciliation process in Ireland. I’m not criticising this imbalance – in fact, I believe Ireland should be following the UK’s lead and increasing her aid contribution to 0.7% of Gross National Income. But is does show where on the scale of government priorities peace and reconciliation in Ireland comes.

Compare this to the recent news – unreported by the Southern Irish media, as far as I can see – that the EU have awarded €463 million to Northern Ireland and the Irish border region under the PEACE and cross-border INTERREG programmes for the period 2014-2020. This is only very slightly down on the amount these two EU programmes spent in the northern part of the island in 2007-2013, despite warnings that the PEACE programme in particular, after nearly 20 years in existence, and with the EU in poor financial shape, would be very small this time round.  It brings to more than €2.5 billion the total given by Europe to this small region since the mid-1990s. Congratulations to the Irish Government and the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB), under Pat Colgan and Shaun Henry, for negotiating another extraordinarily generous deal.

Whatever about the Department of Foreign Affairs’ negotiating skills, it is noticeable that once more the great bulk of funding for peace initiatives in Northern Ireland and cross-border cooperation between North and South comes from Europe. The British and Irish governments put very little of their own money into such work (apart from the 25% national government match funding that is required by the EU in order to draw down its money). It is also deeply ironic that this largesse by the European Union to the island of Ireland is almost totally unappreciated here. Indeed, the euro-scepticism of the Unionist parties and Sinn Fein has, if anything, increased. The strong antipathy towards the EU from the ‘little Britons’ of the DUP and UUP was particularly striking during the recent elections to the European Parliament.

A new emphasis in the post 2014 PEACE programme will be on children and young people, with the ‘shared education’ agenda espoused by the ruling parties at Stormont in line for significant funding (whatever happened to integrated education, one might ask). On the INTERREG side, there will be a strong emphasis on research and innovation, which will benefit both business and higher education institutions (although the latter have hardly been trail-blazers for cross-border cooperation up to now).

The SEUPB have also managed to find a useful home for the €17 million in EU money that wasn’t spent on the abortive Carlingford Lough bridge project. As somebody who believes in rail as an environmentally preferable option to road, I’m delighted that this money is now being spent on improvements to the venerable Drogheda railway viaduct and upgrading the carriages on the Belfast-Dublin Enterprise express.

You probably won’t have read about any of these important developments in the national press in Ireland. Northern Ireland and North-South relations are simply off the agenda as far as the mainstream media is concerned. When I listen to lively debates on RTE about the nation’s finances, education, health service or mother and baby homes, I realise that in the 16 years since the Good Friday Agreement, the hugely important issue of relations between the different – and historically opposed – groups of people on this island has never even entered the mainstream of debate in the Southern jurisdiction. Apart from the occasional flare-up caused by contentious parades, the North is now ‘out of sight, out of mind’ as far as the vast majority of citizens of our Republic are concerned. Which leaves the all-Ireland field entirely in the hands of Sinn Fein, with dangers I have outlined in previous columns and will return to in the future.

Let me end on a personal note. The reason I became interested in Ireland’s record on development cooperation is because I have recently completed a review of a couple of Irish Aid development education projects. I bid for this work because, disappointingly, there seems to be little or no research into North-South cooperation at the moment. There is actually very little new work in North-South cooperation at all, although a couple of interesting ‘baby steps’ (in the words of one official) have emerged in recent months: an InterTradeIreland led North-South steering group to maximise the island’s take-up of EU research and innovation funding under its Horizon 2020 programme, and an inter-governmental committee to plan a joint bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup.

But is there any cross-border research going on?  I have expertise in cross-border governance, education, health, business, trade unionism and community development. A year after retiring from the Centre for Cross Border Studies, that expertise is still relatively fresh – in two or three years it won’t be.  This is an unashamed pitch for work. Without wanting to appear immodest, it seems to me a pity that 14 years of knowledge of how to do cross-border cooperation in Ireland and leadership of  the highly successful Armagh-based CCBS can’t be put to some use in researching and developing new ideas for this still vitally important area of peace and reconciliation in Ireland.

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General | 1 Comment

Will Irish unity be back on the agenda after Sinn Fein’s triumph?

Posted on Wednesday, 28 May, 2014 by andypollak

Perhaps it marks the beginning of some kind of democratic revolution. The overwhelming victory of Sinn Fein, hard left and independent candidates in the Republic’s local and European elections “could mark the end of party politics as we know it”, said Stephen Collins, the Irish Times’ political editor. The class divide was striking, particularly in Dublin, with a massive swing to Sinn Fein and other left-wing parties in the poorer areas hit hardest by six years of austerity, while the Fine Gael vote held up reasonably well in the less-affected leafy suburbs.

Sinn Fein trebled its number of local council seats. Its major competitor for Irish working class votes, the Labour Party, with a tiny 7% first preference vote, was decimated to the extent that there must be real fears for its future. The ‘two and a half parties’ mould that has dominated Irish politics for more than 90 years looks like being replaced by a ‘three and a quarter parties’ version, with Sinn Fein as the new power-broker. The outspoken Fine Gael transport minister, Leo Varadkar, put it bluntly (if not completely accurately, given Fianna Fail’s surprising resilience) when he said the choice in the future would be between a Fine Gael or a Sinn Fein-led government.

What is true about Varadkar’s statement is that it shows the success of Sinn Fein’s longer-term strategy for the island of Ireland: to put the party into or close to power in both jurisdictions so that it can ratchet up its demands for Irish unity. That master strategist Gerry Adams would dearly love to be a position where he can claim that Sinn Fein’s ‘mandate’ – the party’s favourite word these days – as the biggest party in the North (with the largest share of the first preference vote in the European and local elections) and the second biggest in the South (which must be its aim in the next general election, now likely sooner rather than later) demands a Border Poll and other moves towards unity.

Whether electoral support for Sinn Fein means popular support for unity in the short term is another matter. It is clear from recent opinion polls in the North that there it does not. Last September’s Belfast Telegraph poll showed that less than 4% of Northerners said they wanted a united Ireland now and 22% wanted it in 20 years. Among Northern Protestants the figures were respectively 0% and 8%.

An Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll in November 2012 showed a typically more ambivalent picture in the Republic: 69% said they wanted a united Ireland and were prepared to pay more taxes for it. This is a classic example of the unrealistic, aspirational political thinking of so many Irish people. As long as unity doesn’t happen for a long time (35% said it would never happen; 15% said it would happen in 50 years and 22% said it would happen in 25 years), they are prepared to pay higher taxes for it. However in the real world of the here and now they are deeply unhappy at paying what citizens in almost every other European country pay:  property taxes and water charges. Could one find a better example of a united Ireland as ‘pie in the sky’?

None of which prevents the Sinn Fein leadership – in their Leninist fashion (democratic when it suits them) – from driving on towards their impossible (in the short to medium term) and deeply destabilising primary goal of a united Ireland.

For those of us who believe that the only way towards any kind of unity is the lengthy and extremely difficult business of trying to bring the people of the island into some kind of mutual regard and understanding, this is delusional stuff which can only lead to a return of violence.

However maybe Sinn Fein’s onward march will serve to ignite some kind of debate about future Irish unity in the South (although I won’t be holding my breath). I could suggest some questions as part of that notional debate: Is there any alternative to Sinn Fein’s view of the future direction of the island – ‘steamrollering’ the unionists into a united Ireland by outbreeding them, outsmarting them and undermining their morale?  Has the slow business of gaining the trust of Northern unionists and guaranteeing the position of Northern nationalists by mutually beneficial power-sharing and North-South cooperation – the policy followed for the past 30-40 years by successive Irish governments  – run out of steam? Do people in the South have any fellow-feeling or identification with the people of the North as fellow Irishwomen and men?  Do they believe, in particular, that those difficult people, the unionists, have any part to play in the future of the island? Where stands the relationship between North and South in the changing circumstances of moves towards an independent Scotland and British withdrawal from the EU? Is the dominant feeling among most Southerners that Northern Ireland should be allowed – with some friendly assistance where needed – to work out its own future (starting with ways to begin to overcome its interminable sectarianism)?

My personal opinion is that the view of the distinguished and sadly deceased political scientist, Peter Mair, still holds, despite Sinn Fein’s electoral surge as the main party of protest in the Republic. In 1987 he wrote: “Any real move to press for Irish unity, be it from within the Republic, from Northern Ireland, or from Britain, is unlikely to be welcomed by the average citizen in the Republic. Unity would be nice. But if it’s going to cost money, or result in violence, or disrupt the moral and social equilibrium, then it’s not worth it. Certainly, politics in the Republic is about nationalism, but for much of the post-war epoch the vision of that nationalism has extended only to the 26 counties.”

Posted in General, Sinn Fein | 3 Comments

British-Irish friendship and the marginalisation of Unionism

Posted on Tuesday, 6 May, 2014 by andypollak

The big international news story about Northern Ireland this week – the first for many years – is Gerry Adams’ arrest and questioning in connection with the Jean McConville murder case. I have just returned from nine days abroad so I hope, gentle reader, that you will allow me to postpone comment on this for the time being until we see what the Public Prosecution Service decides.

Instead I am going to write about Michael D. Higgins’ presidential visit to Britain last month and what it might mean for the Protestant and unionist community. I imagine very few from that community – the one I was born into many years ago – get to read this column (I’ll have to send it to the News Letter to get it noticed). Those that do need to take careful note of what happened in Windsor Castle, Westminster and Whitehall in the second week of April 2014 – because the events surrounding that occasion indicated the dramatic change in British-Irish relations that has been gathering pace in recent years.

This change was first highlighted by Queen Elizabeth’s phenomenally successful 2011 visit to Ireland, and her much remarked upon gestures of reconciliation at the Garden of Remembrance and Dublin Castle. The Queen’s strong personal commitment to peace and reconciliation in Ireland again played a part this time, with Martin McGuinness citing it as one of the main reasons he took part in the proceedings.

The warmth of the language used by the various leaders was unprecedented. The Queen said that the most pleasing thing since her 2011 visit was that “we, the Irish and British, are becoming good and dependable neighbours and better friends, finally shedding our inhibitions about seeing the best in each other.”  President Higgins spoke of the Good Friday Agreement being “a key milestone on the road to today’s warm, deep and enduring friendship.” David Cameron said the UK and Ireland now had “a very special partnership…not just good neighbours, but really good friends and deep friends.” It is a far cry from the deep mutual misunderstanding and even hostility revealed in the recently released UK state papers about British-Irish relations (and particularly relations between Margaret Thatcher and Charles Haughey) during the Falklands War 32 years ago.

It appears that the new ‘love in’ between the British and Irish establishments will even stretch to a member of the royal family attending the commemoration of the Easter Rising in 2016. Foreign Secretary William Hague said all the anniversaries of that year would have to be marked “in a way that helps to bring people together.”

So where do the unionists stand in this brave new world of British-Irish reconciliation? Largely ignored and on the fringes, one has to conclude – not an unfamiliar position for them. But it is nevertheless a dangerous one. David Cameron has said privately that never on his watch will Northern Ireland be allowed to interfere with issues of national UK importance. The British and Irish governments’ exasperation with the unionist parties’ refusal to go along with the extremely moderate Richard Haass proposals on flags, parades and dealing with the past is well-known. The Irish government in particular has said it will be pushing for a resumption of inter-party talks on these issues as soon as the election season is over.

London and Dublin are right to be impatient with the snail’s pace of movement towards reconciliation. As Paul Nolan says in his latest Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Report: “Failure in Northern Ireland comes cost-free. The whole society may pay, but not particular political actors. When the multi-party talks on flags, parades and dealing with the past ended in failure, none of the political parties had to pay a political price. When the policing costs for contested marches and events spiral into millions, the organisers never receive the bill. The disconnect between the gathering and spending of taxes means no one feels responsible for the shortfall in revenue caused by, for example, not introducing water charges or tuition fees…Devolution, which was supposed to bring responsibility closer to local level, has failed to do so in Northern Ireland.”

Given Sinn Fein’s onward march in the Republic, the unionists have the most to lose from more failure and marginalisation. I have recently been reading Paul Bew, Peter Gibbons and Henry Patterson’s thought-provoking study of political forces and social classes in the North between 1921 and 1996. Two of its most recurrent themes are the lack of interest in London in strengthening the union and Whitehall civil servants’ exasperation with their Stormont counterparts’ spendthrift habits and lack of accountability.

As we enter another ‘marching season’, the atmosphere of political inertia in a tense and directionless society is palpable, exacerbated by unionist paranoia that there is a ‘culture war’ going on aimed at removing their symbols of Britishness. This was indicated depressingly in a Belfast Telegraph poll last month which showed that 67% of young people aged 16-24 saw their future outside the province, and 65% did not believe that peace had been achieved. Of those wanting to stay in the long-term more than 60% described themselves as Catholic, but under 40% said they were Protestant.

In the longer-term, there is a real chance that if the British and Irish governments lose interest – and the former gets tired of paying Northern Ireland’s huge annual subsidy of more than £10 billion – the province could end up like Northern Cyprus or Nagorno-Karabakh: a frozen small fracas that nobody cares to help resolve any more as other more important theatres of civil and international conflict loom large.

That won’t bother Northern republicans too much – with their tiocfaidh ár lá (“our day will come”) mentality – but it is something that unionists concerned about the future of their community on this island should ponder very seriously.

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | Leave a comment

While Britain and Europe’s tectonic plates move, we argue about Orangemen and Ardoyne

Posted on Tuesday, 8 April, 2014 by andypollak

What is the strategic issue causing senior people in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs to lose their sleep these nights?  In the week that Michael D. Higgins pays the first ever state visit by an Irish President to Britain, it is the possible break-up of the United Kingdom and its exit from the European Union.

In September the Scottish people will vote on independence. As Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s advisor on Northern Ireland, wrote in a thoughtful article in the Financial Times recently[1], a Yes vote would open up the constitutional question in Northern Ireland at a very delicate time. The Good Friday Agreement did not settle that question but was rather an agreement to disagree about it and nonetheless to share power. Unionists continue to want to remain in a united British kingdom, and nationalists and republicans continue to seek a united Ireland. Sinn Fein would up the ante in the aftermath of a Yes vote and in the run-up to the anniversary of the Easter Rising by demanding an early referendum on the Border on the same principle as the Scots.

Such a vote would have a particularly destabilising effect on the unionists, whose natural ties are with Scotland rather than England. They pride themselves on their common Scottish Presbyterian heritage, their Ulster-Scots way of talking and their common passion for Scottish dancing and football, and their children go in their thousands to Scottish universities.

The numbers in Scotland are so far not enough to deliver a Yes vote, although the momentum is in that direction. But the real nightmare is the second, related scenario: the issue of Britain’s EU membership. Things would get very complicated indeed if, while an independent Scotland was applying for EU membership (a process that would take some time), the rest of Britain was proceeding to pull out of the Union after the referendum promised by David Cameron in 2017. Would we end up with England, Wales and Northern Ireland outside the EU, and Ireland and Scotland inside?

As Powell puts it: “With borders at both Stranraer in Scotland and South Armagh on the border with Ireland, Northern Ireland would find itself in real difficulties, and not just commercially. What has enabled the free movement of people in these islands, including Ireland, since 1922 is the Common Travel Area, where all the jurisdictions have the same rules on entry from outside. With a patchwork quilt of memberships of the EU, we would have to impose travel restrictions between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and between Scotland and Northern Ireland. The notion of policing those two borders is a nightmare, and that is what really bothers policy makers in Dublin and Belfast.”

Whatever about policy makers in Belfast, this is not something that the people of Northern Ireland and their newspapers are discussing. I looked in vain in recent weeks and months for serious treatment of this vital topic by any commentator in the Belfast Telegraph, Irish News or News Letter. There was plenty of arguing about earth-shattering issues like where and when Orangemen should parade during the coming ‘marching season’, but nothing about the tectonic plates shifting the constitutional relationships affecting these islands and the wider continent of which we are – notionally – a part. The Irish Times – through its former foreign editor and UCD researcher Paul Gillespie[2] – and even faraway Al Jazeera have been discussing these issues, but not the media of ‘our wee province.’

Of course, all this may be academic. As Powell also points out, it looks probable that the people of Scotland will vote to remain in the union and thus will accept the solution on identity found in the Good Friday Agreement: nationalists and republicans can be Irish and still part of the UK. “Trying to be Sinn Féin, or ‘Ourselves Alone’, in Scotland, and raising new borders makes very little sense in the modern world,” is Powell’s opinion.

Whether Britain will go it alone by leaving Europe, as current opinion poll trends seem to indicate, is another matter. What is certain is that that Northern Ireland will be ill-informed about and ill-prepared for such an eventuality. If and when we pick ourselves up after such a huge event, we will probably notice that we are, once again, looking at Churchill’s unfortunately all-too-prophetic and much-quoted words of nearly a century ago: “The whole map of Europe has been changed … The mode of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes…but as the deluge subsides and waters fall, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.”

[1] ‘A broken union would unsettle Northern Ireland’, Financial Times, 5 February 2014 [2] Scotland’s Vote on Independence – The Implications for Ireland, Institute for International and European Affairs, Dublin, February 2014

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Ireland, Europe and the world | 1 Comment