Sunday Business Post Online, September 29, 2002

Analysis:

Limp-wristed response to Trimble will fail

By Brian Feeney

Dublin, Ireland, 29 September, 2002

The SDLP leader Mark Durkan put it in a nutshell when he said that if you give a paramilitary organisation the ultimatum, "You go, or democratic institutions go", it is not difficult to predict what the result will be.

In the case of the IRA -- a movement not noted for its attachment to devolved administration in the North -- there is no prospect that it will accede to Assembly leader David Trimble's demands.

Furthermore, the demands made by Trimble and hardliners such as Jeffrey Donaldson MP and David Burnside MP, in whose camp Trimble is now securely imprisoned, have been carefully contrived to ensure there can be no satisfactory response from republicans.

The Ulster Unionist Party has rejected all the mechanisms crafted in the Good Friday Agreement with which republicans are required to comply, and has substituted itself as the sole arbiter of what is acceptable behaviour from republicans.

There was no mention in the lengthy statement from the Ulster Unionist Council of decommissioning, General John de Chastelain, the proposed violence monitor, or even of the Irish and British governments.

The UUP deliberately set out to exasperate republicans and it has succeeded. Its wish-list includes overturning a crucial feature of the Patten report, the 50-50 recruitment of Catholics and Protestants to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), resistance to any further police reform, a threat to withdraw from the Policing Board and opposition to the return to the North of IRA members `on the run' agreed by the British in August 2001.

Gerry Adams has said: "Even if by some Santa Claus intervention the IRA disbanded by Christmas, it is not enough for unionists. There are that many conditions in this UUP policy it would be impossible unless we ceased to be nationalists."

Perhaps the most ominous phrase in the UUC document is the proposal to enter into talks "to ensure that there is a viable basis for the future governance of Northern Ireland".

This is a clear rejection of the Good Friday Agreement, which a majority of people north and south thought had established a viable basis for running the North. There is no doubt that the objective of a substantial section of political unionism, both UUP and DUP, is the renegotiation of the Good Friday Agreement: the assumption that the present arrangements are unacceptable glares through that phrase.

The limp-wristed response from the government here and from Downing Street has already handed the newly dominant anti-Agreement unionists a victory.

Last Wednesday, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, and the Northern Secretary John Reid met to consider whether to hold elections to the North's Assembly, when Trimble collapses the executive next January.

Fear of those very elections is the driving force behind Trimble's irresponsible behaviour. It is now an article of faith among unionists that to fight elections while serving in an executive alongside Sinn Féin spells doom.

The results of last year's British general election shocked the UUP to the core. They sank from taking 32 per cent of the vote in the 1997 elections to taking 26 per cent, while the DUP rose from 15 per cent to 22 per cent.

Trimble lost three seats to the DUP, including that of Willie Ross, one of the UUP's most irreconcilable opponents of the agreement. As a result, Trimble's troops are jittery.

For a long time, prospective candidates for Assembly elections have wanted the party to dissociate itself from Sinn Féin ministers. Trimble has given every indication that he shares that opinion.

Now Trimble is fast approaching a position where his slate of candidates bears a passing resemblance to a formation of troops to the right of Attila the Hun. Their statements differ from those of DUP members only in being more hard line.

Some of the UUP's most hard-working supporters of the Agreement, including the party's chief whip, have retired or been rejected by selection conventions to be replaced by the party's most vociferous rejectionists: Jeffrey Donaldson, David Burnside, Jim Rodgers, probably Arlene Foster. These are the people whose views now dominate UUP policy.

Some in the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Foreign Affairs argue that, since such a cast of players will never countenance an executive with Sinn Féin ministers, there is no point in having elections. This is exactly what Trimble, the anti-Agreement faction in his own party, the Paisleyites and the UDA killers and pipe-bombers on the streets have been campaigning for all year. If that argument were to prevail, the prospects for the future would be bleak indeed.

There are two sides to every argument and nowhere is that more evident than in the North. Since 2000, the UDA has been relentlessly goading the IRA to break its ceasefire by selecting sensitive spots, particularly in Belfast, for nightly attack with pipe bombs, petrol bombs and a blizzard of fireworks, bolts, bricks, hammer heads, paint and debris broken from anything available.

The locations suffering these onslaughts are `sensitive' because they are full of republicans.

The IRA has come under enormous pressure from its supporters to respond in kind and has at times organised retaliation with stones and petrol bombs.

Only once did the UDA achieve its aim -- when the IRA fired into a loyalist mob attacking the Short Strand in June. Only the fact that the IRA has not disbanded prevented large-scale civil disturbances in Ardoyne and Newington.

Only the IRA's discipline prevented individuals opening fire, as the INLA did in August. Even so, the presence of senior IRA figures from west Belfast has not prevented locals on the receiving end of UDA attacks demanding action and jeering at IRA men for beating back youths bent on striking out at loyalists.

The reason for the IRA inaction was the knowledge that Sinn Féin would be ejected from the executive if there was a `military' response to the UDA. In effect, loyalist terrorists have been the paramilitary wing of anti-Agreement unionists.

The republican leaders kept their eyes on the big picture. Since the end of the `armed struggle,' Sinn Féin's political success has been essential in persuading their hard men to support the peace process. Political success, north and south, has been uninterrupted, culminating in overtaking the SDLP in the North last year and winning six seats in the Dáil this year.

Should the two governments decide that the UUP's fear of elections is more important than the peace process, there is a real danger of destabilising the republican movement.

Dissident republicans have already been saying `I told you so'. Sinn Féin needs politics to demonstrate that politics can work. Allowing Trimble to shut down the political process sends the opposite message.

What is the alternative to holding assembly elections next year? Suspending the working of the Agreement would deliver an even worse message to republicans, namely that the British government can interfere in the exercise of Irish self-determination.

What would the governments intend by postponing elections? Wait until they had decided that an election would produce the result the governments have decreed is appropriate or desirable, namely the forlorn hope that moderate unionism, an oxymoron if ever there was one, will assert itself?

On the contrary, there would be a replay of the collapsed 1976 convention with the mandate of people elected in 1998 beginning to resemble that of members of the second Dáil.

Such inaction would hand a huge victory to loyalist terrorists and anti-Agreement unionists alike, while simultaneously undermining Sinn Féin's political project. The simplest way to show politics can work is to hold an election.