Mark Cousins
I grew up in Northern Ireland and was 16 when hunger striker Bobby Sands first refused food. His action electrified Belfast’s Catholic enclaves like the Falls Road, where my mum grew up and my granny and uncle lived. I remember the frozen spine of the streets on those days. The warmth of my granny’s welcome, her homemade soup, Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks on the telly are sutured in my memory to the sound of women banging bin lids on the streets in protest. This was our ululation, our way of piercing the air.
Bin lids, whispers that the “Shankill butchers” pushed out the eyes of their victims and stuck rosary beads into the sockets, fear of the feral aggression of parts of the IRA: these things came flooding back when I read Susan McKay’s brilliant new book of interviews with those touched by the war in Ireland, Bear in Mind These Dead. I loved its even-handedness (my dad was a Prod). I remembered when I first moved to Scotland: being on Stirling University’s leafy campus at night, walking past a parked car. I became convinced it contained a bomb—as kids we were told to stay well away from parked cars. Blood rushed to my head. I imagined the car exploding beside me, my arms blown off and my chest pierced by shrapnel. I thought I was going to faint. I started to cry.
Imagery was part of the problem of such panic attacks—I’d seen loads of car bombs on the news—but also part of the solution. As I’ve said before, cinema was like Valium for me during the war in Northern Ireland. It calmed my nervous system. I tended to body-swerve war movies—coals to Newcastle—but sought out almost every other genre. Then, in 1982, the year after the hunger strikes started, I saw Neil Jordan’s film Angel, which was set right in the world I knew, but was about the relationship between a saxophonist and a mute young girl. Here was my grey war married to jazzy, sensuous scenes of strange poetry and pink lighting. I loved it. It remains the first great film about the Troubles. Seven years later, Alan Clarke made the almost wordless featurette, Elephant, which rigorously followed gunmen as they travelled to kill. Clarke had excised everything good about Northern Ireland—the homemade soup, as it were—except the shooting. He rubbed our nose in our own murderousness. The result was the second great film about Northern Ireland.
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David Trimble
In his article, “What I learned in Belfast” (May 2008), Jonathan Powell denies that the British government deliberately sacrificed the moderate centre of Northern Ireland politics. I have never claimed that Tony Blair deliberately sacrificed the centre ground. But the centre did lose out, because of several factors which require more careful consideration than Powell gives. The same applies to the global lessons of the conflict.
Powell says that he and Blair wanted to build from the centre, “but we were stymied by the refusal of the SDLP to move ahead without Sinn Féin. John Hume had sold that pass in the 1980s when he began talks with Gerry Adams.” That is a travesty of the facts. The 1998 Good Friday agreement was made by the centre ground—the SDLP and Ulster Unionists. In the final phase of the talks, Sinn Féin put huge pressure on the SDLP to resist an agreement with us. On Good Friday, Sinn Féin did not vote for the deal, it abstained. But one lesson that Powell should have noted was that after the agreement, there was big movement on the republican side, because of the firmness of the centre ground and of the British and Irish governments.
Powell is right to say that such a breakthrough “counts for little if the parties do not apply themselves to implementing it.” But the British government was among those who should have implemented it. On Good Friday, Blair signed a letter to me which concluded: “I confirm that in our view the effect of the decommissioning section of the agreement… is that the process of decommissioning should start straight away.” The government made no real effort to implement that section of the agreement.
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Jonathan Powell
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The tenth anniversary of the Good Friday agreement has produced plenty of self-congratulation about peace in Northern Ireland (NI), but it has also smoked out a critical analysis of the deal by people like Charles Moore, Dean Godson, Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips and Max Hastings.
This right-wing critique, lightly caricatured, is that the Blair government sacrificed the moderate centre of NI politics and gave in to the demands of terrorists rather than defeating them militarily. The compromises necessary to make peace gave power to the two extremes. We would be better off with the moral clarity of the Troubles. Above all, they argue, the peace process in NI should not be seen as a model for peace talks elsewhere in the world.
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Sean Swan
In Prospect’s November issue, Dean Godson claimed that he has “yet to meet a single politician, mandarin, policeman, soldier or spook who has examined in any depth why internment failed once on the island of Ireland in the 20th century, in 1971″ having succeeded in the 1956-62 IRA campaign. This is perhaps because the answer lies in the realm not of security but of politics. The IRA’s 1956 to 1962 campaign (”Operation Harvest”) was an exotic import into Northern Ireland originating from a small group of idealists in the south. The extent to which it was a southern venture is demonstrated by the fact that even the Torr Head incident in north Antrim—in which an IRA party was ambushed during an attempt to destroy the radar station at Torr Head—was carried out by southern units of the IRA; a fact confirmed to me by Tomas MacGiolla and Mick Ryan, both senior members of the IRA at that time. Ryan himself took part in the Torr Head affair and told me that, “We didn’t know where we were and we could hardly understand the locals because of their accent.”
The IRA Standing Orders for Harvest included the stipulations that (1) there were to be no attacks in Belfast for fear of provoking loyalist attacks on nationalist areas, and (2) the part-time (and 100 per cent Protestant) “B” Specials were not to be fired on. This refusal to engage the “B” Specials during Harvest gave the campaign a quixotic quality, as the “B” specials were the front-line in the state’s defences against the IRA. A military campaign to bring down the Stormont state—an obvious implication of the IRA’s attempt to create a united Ireland by force—which refused to engage the state’s main defenders was as idealistic as it was impractical. By 1971, in contrast, the attacks on nationalist areas had already happened and violence by the UVF and other loyalist paramilitaries had already begun, giving the IRA a role as community defenders that had been absent in Harvest.
As the IRA itself quickly became aware during Harvest, the border campaign had little relevance or root among the social realities of Northern Irish nationalists. The clearest illustration of this point is the republican vote in Mid-Ulster in 1959, which saw the republican candidate, Tom Mitchell, defeated by a margin of two to one, having won his seat in both the previous election in 1955 and in a subsequent by-election.
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John Murray Brown
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According to the historian Roy Foster, after centuries of misfortune, the Irish have finally got lucky. On most weekends you can see some of the luckiest at play at Ireland’s big racetracks—rough-handed farmer types, wads of notes at the ready, who arrive by helicopter with their well-dressed ladies and are as comfortable in the owners’ enclosure as in the company of the other punters pressed against the rails. On my last visit to the races, I saw one such man emerging from a corporate marquee, flute of champagne in one hand, pint of the black stuff in the other. It was a fitting image for Ireland’s new rich.
For the first time in Irish history, some of these racegoers have become, almost overnight, part of a big, indigenous moneyed class. In a population of just 4m, there are, according to Bank of Ireland, more than 30,000 euro millionaires—up from a few hundred 20 years ago—and at least 300 people worth over €30m. Almost all are self-made, and much of the money has been made in only a decade or so.
This new class is a creation of the country’s extended economic boom and an associated leap in property values. The country entered the 1990s with an unusually benign combination of a growing, well-educated workforce and strong demand for labour, the latter the result of high levels of inward investment, much of it from the US, attracted by low taxes and light regulation. At one point it was said that every fifth job created in the EU was in Ireland. Average annual growth of 7.2 per cent over the past ten years has encouraged Irish expatriates to return home, and more recently Poles and other immigrants have maintained the growth rate of the labour force. All this has helped to give Ireland the second highest per capita income in Europe (behind Norway), well ahead of Britain and the US. But if there is broad consensus about the causes of Irish economic take-off, there is less agreement about the people in its vanguard—Ireland’s new rich. Are they leaving a permanent mark on business life, or are too many of them just speculators? How philanthropic are they? What are they doing to Irish society, and to Ireland’s view of itself?
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Dean Godson
Why should anyone still care about the Ulster Unionist party, the Orange Order or, for that matter, Northern Ireland itself? The UUP, the ruling party for the first half century of Northern Ireland’s existence, from 1921 to 1972, is about as healthy as Ariel Sharon—nominally alive but, to all intents and purposes, a goner. The Orange Order seems destined to enter one of its extended periods of quiescence, such as it went through in the 19th century. Even the novelty of Ian Paisley’s danse macabre with Martin McGuinness has attracted less attention in Britain than might have been expected.
The reasons for this apparent indifference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact by the Lagan aren’t hard to fathom. Northern Ireland isn’t news any more because the second IRA ceasefire is now a decade old. And many in Northern Ireland believed all along that mainland opinion only ever cared about the ending of full-scale violence. With vast amounts of British taxpayer and EU money still flooding into the place, Ulster seems to have reverted into its complacent, parochial, pre-Troubles self.
And yet, like the proverbial tar baby, Northern Ireland won’t let go. In their own peculiar way, the Troubles and their aftermath became the defining national security experience for the postwar generation in Britain—much as the first world war was for Eden and Macmillan, or the second world war for Heath and Callaghan. Of course, most of the dramatis personae this time round never donned a uniform. But this squalid little war, conducted over the constitutional status and governance of the most cussedly unfashionable part of the Kingdom—and which seemed utterly sui generis for much of the time after the start of the Troubles in 1969—has suddenly become a trendy template for conflict resolution across the world. There is now something of an “international ideology of Northern Ireland.”
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Aarathi Prasad
When I moved to Northern Ireland in 1989, you could buy a terraced house in certain rough parts of Belfast for £3,000 or £4,000. Today, one of these “artisan houses” (as estate agents call them) would cost you £150,000.
The process that got us these staggering price rises started with the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and culminated on Tuesday 7th May 2007, with the coronation at Stormont of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as first and deputy first minister respectively. While the ceremony was surprising for its excess—the enthusiasm of these representatives of loyalism and republicanism for one another’s jokes, after 40 years of murderous rancour, was frightening—the accommodation it heralded was not. We’ve been waiting for this for years, and money, which invariably runs ahead of politics, has been flooding into the province in anticipation.
Some of this cash has been released by the improving security situation, and some has been brought by Ulster exiles returning now that we have peace, anxious to send their children to grammar school. Along with the rise in property prices, the money has brought bathroom shops, interior decorating consultants and, in the not too distant future, it will bring Ikea to Belfast too. It has also catalysed a vast improvement in the city’s social life.
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Mick Fealty
Ian Paisley has been the single most disruptive figure in Northern Ireland’s unionist politics over the last 40 years. Yet at the end of March, the veto-wielding “Dr No” agreed to end a conflict that has claimed almost 3,700 lives and stained British and Irish life for two generations. In early May, the 81 year old will become first minister in a new Northern Ireland power-sharing executive. As if to underline the painstaking political choreography that lay behind the final deal, it was clinched with a photo opportunity the precise details of which took several senior civil servants many hours to agree to the satisfaction of both Paisley’s Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and Sinn Féin. A week later Paisley was in Dublin, warmly gripping the hands of the Irish taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.
It was all very different in the early 1960s, when Paisley—always a striking presence at 6′2,” with his booming voice and well-groomed appearance—was first emerging on the political scene. In those days the Irish republic was still introverted and poverty-stricken, with a per capita income almost one third below Northern Ireland. At this time the north was still a relatively prosperous outpost of Britain, with its strait-laced, hard-working Protestant unionist majority and still largely acquiescent, semi-excluded Catholic minority. The southern and northern prime ministers were recognised as social and economic modernisers. But when the taoiseach, Seán Lemass, travelled from Dublin to Belfast to meet Terence O’Neill in 1965, Paisley and his supporters assailed him with a flurry of snowballs.
Underwriting northern prosperity were the heavy industries of shipbuilding and aircraft manufacture, manned almost exclusively by the Protestant working class. As Steve Bruce, in The Edge of the Union, notes, “Until the 1960s, Protestants saw themselves as superior. In so far as [they had] advantages, they merited them. Catholics were a joke. Their country was backward, their industry non-existent and their farming hopelessly antiquated. Then, apparently out of nowhere, the Catholic minority acquired skilled, articulate politicians… who were young and clever and knew how to court public opinion.”
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Eric Kaufmann
The loyalist riots which convulsed Belfast this September brought a level of violence to the streets not seen since the height of the Drumcree conflict in the mid-1990s. Do they signify a new phase in the evolution of unionism?
The conventional wisdom, both in the media and among loyalists themselves, is that aside from the short-term factors relating to the re-routing of marches, the real reason for the violence is “Protestant alienation,” especially within the loyalist working class. This has been caused by de-industrialisation, unemployment and a sense of having been defeated by an increasingly self-confident nationalist community.
No one can deny the strength of feeling among the loyalist working class, but these sentiments are not new. The entire history of Northern Ireland since the late 1960s has been one of Protestant “loss”: de-industrialisation, British-driven political reforms aimed at including an Irish/Catholic dimension and a decline of Protestant privilege. “Protestant alienation” has been a cliché since the 1980s. Yet until recently, the unionist reaction to this loss has been intransigence but rarely violent protest. In short, organisation as well as angst was necessary for the recent rioting to occur.
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Richard Bourke
The 2005 election in Northern Ireland has wiped out the centre ground. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist party trounced the Ulster Unionists, who had dominated the politics of the province since 1920. When the Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998, supported by a narrow majority of unionists, the UUP held ten of the 18 Westminster seats allotted to Northern Ireland, while the DUP held two. Today, the DUP has nine MPs while the UUP has just one.
Every other vehicle of electoral moderation on the Protestant side seems equally stalled or bust: the moderate Alliance party barely made a showing at the polls; the Progressive Unionist party, which offered crucial loyalist support to the Good Friday agreement, didn’t even stand a candidate; and the Ulster Democratic party, which had represented the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association and also backed Trimble against Paisley’s rejectionism, disbanded in 2001.
Polarisation is almost as sharp on the other side of Northern Ireland’s divide. There was a time, during the early 1980s, at the height of the IRA’s campaign of violence, when the advance of Sinn Féin to a mere 10 per cent of the Catholic vote north of the Irish border used to alarm the southern government about the prospects for militant republicanism on the island. Today, by comparison, the fact that the SDLP held on to a bare three seats in the Commons alongside the five which fell to Sinn Féin gives the Dublin government grounds for comfort. Still, there can be no doubting the trend. After the next British election, Sinn Féin could win all the old SDLP seats. At the same time, in the south of Ireland, Sinn Féin may in due course hold the balance of power in the Irish parliament. With such possibilities ahead, Sinn Féin is not disposed to find common cause with its unionist enemies in Northern Ireland. And the IRA itself has no pressing motive to clarify its ultimate intentions. Under these circumstances, it will be hard for the UUP to claw back the support it has lost to the DUP, which at least promises to hate republicans with a lot more vehemence than the UUP.
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