Andersontown News, 5. November 2001, http://www.irelandclick.com/ , http://www.dannymorrison.com/
AS I SEE IT - Danny Morrison
The core of the problem
Last month I was at the launch of the Linenhall Library’s CD-ROM, ‘Troubled
Images’- a unique record of the posters, election literature and other images
brought out by all sides to the conflict as part of the propaganda war. Among
those present was Cedric Wilson, an anti-Agreement Assembly member.
He happened to be close to the sandwiches and as I went to satisfy my appetite
we made eye-contact. I began to make small talk but suddenly he swirled around
on his heels so that he was facing the opposite direction. The woman with him
had to do the same, as if they had suddenly decided to do the tango. At first I
found this funny and later, on my way to the wine table, I tried to talk to him
again. But before I knew it I was staring at the back of his head which was
getting smaller as he disappeared down the history aisle.
Just twenty-four hours earlier I had been up at the Assembly watching the debate
on the motion proposing the exclusion of Sinn Féin from the Executive (because
there had been no IRA ‘decommissioning’). The motion fell because it
didn’t have the required cross-party consensus. Listening to the asinine
comments of DUP members William McCrea and Sammy Wilson it was obvious that,
regardless of what compromises republicans make, these people will never agree
to share power with Sinn Féin or the SDLP.
The continuing loyalist attacks against the Holy Cross schoolgirls is only the
ugly face of an ideology which manifests itself in the Assembly in the
shirt-and-tie anti-Agreement unionists who oppose full and equal rights for
nationalists. They will never admit that fifty years of unionist misrule was the
largest single contributing factor to the outbreak of violence in the North.
This week anti-Agreement Assembly members mustered just over 50 per cent of
unionist votes and were able to block the re-election of David Trimble as First
Minister by everyone else. That is, 30 per cent blocked the will of 70 per cent.
They achieved this under rules, with which everyone initially agreed, rules
which were aimed at preventing a unionist veto vis-a-vis nationalist rights.
Today, some members of the Alliance Party, mimicking the Womens Coalition, are
redesignating themselves as ‘unionist’ in order to create the right
arithmetic for Trimble’s re-election and avoid a suspension of the Assembly.
In return, the Alliance Party is seeking changes to the way ‘cross-party
consensus’ is measured. The repercussions are not entirely clear but the
Alliance proposals could be dangerous if they were to lead to a situation where
nationalist entitlements could be set aside by an anti-Sinn Féin/SDLP coalition
which happened to meet any new reduced voting criteria.
Bending the rules, to avoid fresh Assembly elections, is now the name of the
game and though it may well ensure that the Assembly limps along for another
while it avoids the real crisis. That is, that over half of the unionist
representatives effectively reject reconciliation whereas the vast majority of
nationalists embrace that concept. An election, in the wake of the IRA putting
some of its guns beyond use, might see the anti-Agreement vote decrease, but
that seems unlikely. Neither the British government, the Ulster Unionist Party
nor the SDLP favour an election, given that it is anticipated that the DUP and
Sinn Féin would perform handsomely and gain primacy within each community, and
that the DUP would then demand a renegotiation of the Belfast Agreement. That
would result in utter political deadlock.
Listening to the vitriol of the anti-Agreement unionists in the Assembly it is
clear that there is no give, that the unprecedented gesture by the IRA of
putting some guns beyond use has had no effect (though elsewhere universally
welcomed), that the deletion of Articles 2 & 3 by the Irish people were to
be pocketed and unreciprocated.
The question must be asked: do these people take nationalists for idiots? Do
they think that nationalists will meekly go back into their ghettoes and accept
a dilution of the principles behind the Belfast Agreement?
I know that the major concern of the nationalist community is that a political
vacuum is extremely dangerous, as we can see from the nightly pipe-bomb attacks
on Catholic homes. Events could easily take on a momentum of their own and
uncontrollable violence could erupt. It was in the interests of stability and
political progress that the republican leadership did what it did with the great
gamble of two weeks ago, a gesture that will stand in its stead and which it
should have no cause to regret.
Nationalists cannot force the majority of unionists to support the Belfast
Agreement, the Executive and Assembly. But if the institutions cannot work and
they collapse then that fact-of-life has to be faced. The British government
must then admit that ‘Northern Ireland’ is a failed, political entity, and
that their partitioning of this island in 1920 solved nothing but perpetuated
unionist supremacy.