Two angry men and a Taoiseach

Wee-hooo. There was me yesterday, highlighting the cross-border meeting in Limavady, and later in the day there was Martin McGuinness doing a very public parade of his grievances against the DUP generally and Peter Robinson in particular, and all the time even-tighter-than-usual-lipped Peter standing by his side and Brian Cowen kicking the wall in the background.

It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. The way it was supposed to be was the way it was at the start of the meeting between the three men – all handshakes and chuckles. Then Martin decided to (verbally) empty both barrels into his colleague in government. So why did he do it?

Well, Sinn Fein’s Francie Brolly gave the answer. It’s to do with how long Sinn Fein’s support can go on settling for no signs of real progress. Despite what republicans have conceded – acceptance of the PSNI, acceptance of eleven rather than seven super-councils, acceptance above all of the principle of consent – that the north of Ireland will stay a part of the UK until the majority of Nordies decide they want things otherwise. With that growing sense among republicans that they were doing all the giving while the DUP kept backing away from giving, Sinn Fein needed a dramatic sign that they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it any more. Yesterday in Limavady, Martin provided that sign.

Will it make any difference? It’s certainly provided an unexpected kick in the pants (or even in the softer parts) not just to Peter but to Brian as well. This was supposed to be a nice distraction from economic meltdown for the Taoiseach – he was to have appeared as the peacemaker, the man working for peace in the north while at the same time showing that Fianna Fail hasn’t forgotten its republican roots, its concern to smooth the road – literally and metaphorically – between north and south. There was nothing in the script about one of the power-sharing parties denouncing his colleague in government as a man given to doing solo runs and showing little sign of honouring the pledges made at St Andrew’s.

So having fired the verbal artillery, will Sinn Fein walk in January, if nothing is delivered? It's a close call but probably not, because something will be delivered, because nobody really wants a Stormont meltdown. Chances are there will be a deal that’ll save faces all round. Peter won’t give in to anything pre-Christma but will finally issue a cautious date come, say, mid-January, announcing that the DUP will go with the devolution of policing and justice around, say, Easter or maybe early Summer.

That should postpone the political divorce, although it won’t satisfy everyone. Jim Allister will use any such move to label his former colleagues as traitors to the unionist cause. And a lot of republicans will see devolution of policing and justice, not as a victory for republicanism but another act of betrayal.

Stand by for increased Real IRA activity in 2010.

Big talk in a small town

Stand by. Big important meeting due today in LImavady. Brian Cowen is coming up to meet P Robinson and M McGuinness to, among other things, attempt a resolution of the DUP-SF stand-off that’s threatening the collapse of the Executive. It seems Robbo won’t move before Christmas (how could he and still get support from the DUP backwoodsmen, some of them MPs?). But the word is that something will be happening shortly after New Year, which will allow Robbo to save face and at the same time bring about the required devolution that will please Sinn Fein. I suppose that’s a more or less satisfactory outcome for all, but it may lead the DUP to conclude that when SF says ‘There must be movement before Christmas’, it’s OK to defy them. I think even SF and certainly a lot of the wider public would be surprised and dismayed to know how many republicans (and nationalists) are fed up with the DUP stonewalling and how widespread is the belief that the GFA has got FA for nationalists/republicans.

As if by way of evidence for this belief, Brian Cowen has declared in advance of the meeting: “The North-South Ministerial Council has its 10th anniversary this month and the meeting is an opportunity to reflect on all that has been achieved in those ten years”. There’s a temptation to fall back on the couch and emit screeches of laughter. What has been achieved through the N-S Ministerial Council in the last ten years? Not bloody much. Not anything. You think of anything? I can think of nothing. Yet Cowen can say that with a straight face and no one jumps up and shouts ‘Boiled bunkum, Cowen!’ We were told – by Sinn Fein – that the GFA was a vehicle that would take us towards a united Ireland. Either the wheels have come off or it’s travelling so slowly movement is imperceptible to even the sharpest naked eye.

Two funny women

Even the darkest debates have a ray of sunshine. The child abuse debate – well no, it’s not a debate, it’s an avalanche of criticism – has been brightened by the entry of that well-known guardian of Irish morals, Sinead O’Connor. Apparently she is upset about the reaction of the Catholic hierarchy and she’s calling on people to boycott Mass. She’s also a bit annoyed at the Irish government: ‘I also demand that brian cowan step down for his having no testicles in the matter.’ The lower case initial letters for Cowan’s name are hers, not mine. In fact her entire email is full of sentence fragments and odd punctuation errors. She’s a funny woman, but funny-peculiar, not funny-ha-ha. The last thing Sinead is is funny- ha-ha.

I was on BBC Radio Ulster’s ‘Sunday Sequence’ this morning, with another funny woman (funny ha-ha in this case): Nuala McKeever. We were talking about child abuse again and Nuala castigated me lightly for having suggested reform and a widening of the democratic element in the appointment of bishops in Ireland. She ended by saying that what was needed was the Church run by ‘women and children’. I pointed out to her that this was sexism, but she didn’t seem to notice. I didn't point out that the remedy sounded if anything worse than the disease.

We had Fr Vincent Twomey and Breda O’Brien on as well, from Dublin. They’re both pretty bright, informed people, but when I left I was more impressed by the ability of people to jumble things together than their capacity to tease out and identify. The whole question of recidivism among paedophiles wasn’t touched on, nor was the motivation of Catholic bishops when they moved abusing priests from parish to parish. Did they hope that the abuse would stop? Was that a reasonable hope? There was much talk of reform in the Church, but again, the extent to which we were talking about reforms aimed at eliminating abuse by clerics or reforms aimed at a more democratic Church wasn’t clear. I think people are so intent on expressing their horror that they're incapable of thinking logically.

Come together?

Why are there two nationalist parties? Why are there three unionist parties?

Some would say the big dividing line between the SDLP and Sinn Fein was the question of violence. Sinn Fein’s links to the IRA were always anathema to the SDLP who, like Daniel O’Connell in the nineteenth century, didn’t believe that Irish independence was worth the spilling of one drop of Irish blood. Sinn Fein disagreed and so the gulf between the two was established.

But that was until nearly fifteen years ago. Now the IRA appears to be truly a thing of the past, why aren’t the SDLP and Sinn Fein uniting to present a common front at, say, the next elections to Westminster? Three reasons, probably: one, few smaller firms want to be taken over by a bigger firm. Second– and perhaps more importantly – the SDLP are a middle-class party. They live in middle class areas, they put forward middle-class candidates (lawyers, doctors, accountants) for election. Sinn Fein’s core is working-class and their candidates tend to be the occasional teacher but more commonly men and women who look, sound and are working-class. The third reason the SDLP and Sinn Fein stay apart has to do with power. If you’ve got machinery and organization in place, it’s hard to dismantle that, because the new dispensation will mean change and change is always a threat.

As for unionism, the Alliance Party don’t want to merge with either of the two other parties, because it sees itself as a cross-community beacon of hope. Besides, they’re more refined than the rough-and-tumble DUP or even the slightly less rough-and-tumble UUP. And what about the DUP and the UUP – might they come together? Only yesterday there was a call from Ian Óg Paisley for an agreed unionist candidate in South Belfast and Tyrone and Fermanagh. “Think of the major boost it would be to the confidence of the unionist community to see Gildernew turfed out in Fermanagh/South Tyrone and Alasdair McDonnell given his marching orders in South Belfast” he says. Mind you, Ian Óg’s daddy built a political career by running against majority unionist parties, so it’s a bit rich for Ian Óg to now wring his hands at the effects of a split unionist vote.

So why is he doing it? Because the DUP in general is worried that it may suffer at the Westminster election in May, particularly at the hands of Jim Allister’s TUV. And because Ian Óg in particular is worried that he may suffer in the Westminster election at the hands of TUV top dog Jim Allister. Don’t forget, Allister plans to stand in North Antrim – the constituency currently represented by Ian Paisley Snr and long thought of as Ian Óg’s rightful inheritance.

Say the Word

Was Gerry Adams in the IRA? He says he wasn’t but most people believe he was. As it’s now some fifteen years since the IRA were active, it seems an odd point to get excited about either way. But Liam Clarke sounds excited. He says for Gerry Adams to appear in a Channel 4 programme about Christ’s forgiveness would be unacceptable while he continues to deny he was in the IRA.”That would be a lesson in hypocrisy, not repentance and healing” Clarke says. Appearing on the same Channel 4 programme is Alan McBride, whose wife and father-in-law were killed in the Shankill fish-shop bombing. He recently met with Gerry Adams and while he appreciated Mr Adams’s empathy and concern for the pain he had suffered, he told the Sinn Fein leader that this "doesn't justify at all" 3,500 murders, 40,000 people injured and the many young people who were incarcerated for involvement in violence.

It’s the use of the word “murders” that shows us what is going on here and makes us aware of the bigger, unspoken questions behind the demands for Gerry Adams to say he was in the IRA and apologise for the IRA’s violence. No one would say that the RAF flew missions over Germany during the Second World War and ‘murdered’ Germans, just as no one says that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were ‘murdered’ in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or that Maggie Thatcher ‘murdered’ over three hundred Argentine sailors on the Belgrano. That’s because those killings, ghastly though they were, happened in a time of war, and violent acts in a war are seen as qualitatively different from violent acts carried out by a private citizen for his or her own ends.

If Gerry Adams could be persuaded to say he was in the IRA and – more importantly – to apologise for IRA violence over thirty years, that would rewrite the Troubles as unionists have always wanted to: several decades of mayhem perpetrated by republican murderers and psychopaths on an innocent civilian population.

There are two grim truths about the Shankill bombing, neither of which do anything to assuage Alan McBride’s pain and loss. The first is that it fits into a pattern of violent acts that occurred over three decades, when the IRA, in the name of Irish unity and self-determination, fought a low-intensity war with the British state. The second is that the Shankill bomb went off as the result of a blunder. The target was an upstairs meeting of UDA leaders which never happened, and the explosion was triggered prematurely. In short, the IRA probably hadn’t intended that Alan McBride’s wife and brother-in-law or any other innocent people should be killed.

It’s hard for someone like Alan McBride, who’s suffered so much, to see and accept these facts. It should be a matter of professional pride for journalists like Liam Clarke to include them in their analysis of what happened and is happening.

Bonny Ronnie

So – Ronnie Flnagan’s reputation is ‘in tatters’, according to Barra McGrory QC, who’s acting on behalf of the Hamill family. McGrory says the former RUC chief constable lied to the inquiry into the death of Robert Hamill, who was kicked to death by a loyalist mob in Portadown in 1997, and allegedly told a senior civil servant that Mr Hamill’s death could have been caused by his family cradling his head and so cutting off his oxygen. Oh, and he’s also alleged to have said that Hamill’s sister was on a trip to discredit the RUC when she demanded the truth about her brother's death.

The way I see it, if you say something is in tatters, you imply there was a time when it was in undisputed good nick, elegant even. Maybe there was a time when Ronnie had that sort of reputation but I don’t go back that far. This is a man who in 1995 denied that there was collusion between police and loyalists during the infamous Burntollet ambush. He’s a man who was Duty Inspector at the Castlereagh interrogation centre, where (if we're to believe reports) prisoners were routinely stripped, beaten and deprived of sleep. This is the man who was in charge of the Headquarters Mobile Support Units, a shoot-to-kill section of the Special Branch which a lot of people blame for a lot of unnecessary deaths. This is the man who is alleged to have given the Garvaghy Road residents an assurance that there would be no Orange march down their road in 1996 if a token march was allowed in 1995. The residents agreed; in 1996 a march was forced down Garvaghy Road. This is a man whose attitude to human rights groups, especially those who criticize the RUC, is less than positive.

And of course this is the man who was interviewed by Jim McDowell, editor of Sunday Life, as part of a TV series called ‘Straight Up’. McDowell spent the interview apparently trying to enter an orifice of Flanagan's other than his ear, avoiding any remotely hard questions and opting for a cosy, chuckly chat about rugby.

So no, I don’t think Ronnie’s credibility is in tatters; in my book it continues to bump along the bottom of a very murky,very smelly pond.

Over to us

Lately there’s been a lot of hand-throwing-in-the-air and exasperated sighing from commentators and writers-to-the-paper about the incompetence of local politicians. ‘They’re a bunch of no-hopers – couldn’t run a sweety-shop!’ is the general consensus. You hear phone-in contributors saying the sooner they go back to direct rule from London, the better.

I think this is a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. It’s certainly the case from a nationalist perspective that the people in Stormont haven’t achieved an awful lot. Some would say they’ve made things worse, with the 11+ confusion. But that’s to focus on the difficulties we face and to forget the bigger picture. Which is? That if we have self-respect, there’s no choice but to opt for local rule.

Take the man next door. He’s been a successful businessman, his place is always meticulously tidy, his garden is a wonder of proportion and productivity. I’ll bet if I could get a look at his bank balance, in terms of income and expenditure, it’d show as highly commendable. The truth is, he’s almost certainly a better organizer and runner of things than I am. The way he runs his home puts the way I run mine to shame. If he were to move in here tomorrow and start organising my affairs, he’d almost certainly make a better fist of it than I do.

So why don’t I let him? Because I’m grown-up, and for better or worse, grown-up people run their own affairs. It's not a question of which of us could do the job better; it’s a question of whose place it is to do the job. It’s my house, so be that for great or ghastly, it’s my job to run it.

Ditto our affairs here. There is of course a temptation to hand everything over to someone else, leave them to wrestle with the knotty difficulties that keep turning up. The years of direct rule have reinforced that kind of thinking: it was a lot easier to call Patrick Mayhew a fat condescending prat while at the same time allowing him to get on with running the place.

But that’s over and like it or lump it, it’s our job to make decisions for ourselves. We’re not talking easy or hard. We’re talking what do big people do. What they do is, they run their own houses and they run their own country. And even if it were worse than the job the man door might do, it’d still be better.