Wilful misunderstanding is the biggest problem for anyone trying to write anything serious about anything. Much of this arises from the tribal view so many people take of politics, in which there are two teams and if you don’t support the one, you must support the other. Attack X and you will be accused of supporting Y, even if you don’t and have never said you did.
This is especially troublesome when an Englishman (or in this case a Cornishman) writes about Ireland. An attack on the IRA is assumed to be sympathetic to the ‘Loyalists’. I am not. I loathe the ‘Loyalist’ gangsters and their political front men just as much as I loathe the IRA and their political front men. Disgust at IRA atrocities is interpreted as an apology for or even defence of such events as the Bloody Sunday massacre in Londonderry in 1972. I do not do so.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/sunday-bloody-sunday-a-long-days-journey-into-light.html
I regard Bloody Sunday as a dreadful, stupid error for which we were right to express contrition and sorrow, and feel much the same way about the internment of the same period. In general, my view of Ireland is that some sort of sensible Home Rule arrangement should have been made in 1914, but that the largely Unionist North-East should have been excluded from it. That part of Ireland should have been ruled from London, with no devolved government greater than county or city councils.
It seems to me that the past has shown, and the future will show, that if either of the communities in the North-East part of Ireland has the upper hand, the other will suffer. The Stormont Parliament (as wiser Unionists believed when it was founded) should never have been established, for this reason. The problem was that many in London did not want to set up permanent direct rule over Northern Ireland. The transfer of the six counties to Dublin rule was always in their minds. They wanted to do it, as soon as they could get away with it. By creating the strange anomalous statelet of Northern Ireland (unique in the United Kingdom until the Blair government's devolution), the British elite avoided a permanent commitment, and full responsibility, for the province.
For me, it seemed perfectly possible for there to be loyal Roman Catholic Irish subjects of Her Majesty. All that was need was for Her Majesty to be more consciously loyal to her Roman Catholic Irish subjects, many of whom have a lot of time for her, if not for her ministers. Indeed, it seemed to me to be essential that this should be so, and that they would be given exemplary treatment. But they were not given that treatment under Stormont. They were cheated. And it was Stormont’s narrow, fearful, sectarian rule that led to the explosion of 1968 and 1969. And that led to the panic imposition of Direct Rule which should have been put in place 50 years before, and which should in my view have been permanent, wiping out for good the remaining discrimination against Roman Catholics in housing, education, employment and voting.
If your true concern had been such justice, as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association’s main concern was in 1968 when I first heard of it, then Direct Rule would have been the best possible answer. So, when people ask me what my ‘solution’ might have been, or what a ‘victory’ for my view would look like, I respond by saying ‘permanent direct rule of Northern Ireland from London'. This is not least because I fear that the future will see Northern Ireland’s ‘loyalists’, especially the poorest and least educated of them, suffering discrimination in a United Ireland and reacting badly to it. I have often speculated on the possibility that, in my lifetime, we might see Irish troops on the Shankill Road, ordered there to keep the peace by a Sinn Fein government in Dublin.
But my solution was not to be. A combination of foolish Irish politicians with their insistence on an 'Irish dimension', and cynical American Democratic Party politicians scrabbling to win back working-class Catholic voters who had deserted them over abortion, decided that the Utopian and sentimental goal of Irish unification was in the end far more important than the actual conditions in which the people of that beautiful island shall live. And British politicians, long scornful of people who want to be British, were only too happy to tell Northern Ireland's Unionists that their love for Union was not requited in modern go-ahead multi-culti London.
There. I have now at least partly idiot-proofed what is to come. Total idiot-proofing is just not available, but I have to try.
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The death of Martin McGuinness is an event of great significance. It is not for me, someone who believes both in the immortal soul and in Divine Justice, to speculate about his fate in eternity. I have quite enough to worry about myself, as most of us do. I can quite understand why Lord Tebbit imagines him in Hell. He is just one of many whose lives have been horribly damaged by Mr McGuinness’s cruel and arrogant belief in political violence, and I think his continuing fury at Mr McGuinness is both necessary and understandable.
And I must wonder whether, as the cloudy darkness of approaching death gathered in the corners of his room, even by day, Mr McGuinness perhaps began to see the faces of those whose deaths he had brought about, clustering silently in great numbers round his bedside, perhaps blank and unreachable and frozen in pain or fear, or perhaps accusing him, some from unknown graves where their bodies still lie hidden and unsanctified, with terrible expressions of unassuaged wrath and grief.
I have not heard him express contrition for these things, or seen him reject the prizes, in power and standing, which he gained from these deaths. I do not speak of material benefits. Like many fanatics, the personally austere Mr McGuinness did not enjoy the more obvious fruits of his power, passing on much of his six-figure ministerial salary to ‘the movement’ while living on the ‘average wage’. And so we are left with the rather awkward words of Christ (Mr McGuinness was said to be a churchgoing Roman Catholic) “Take heed to yourselves: if thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him and, if he repent, forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee saying ‘I repent’, thou shalt forgive him” (Luke, 17 ,verses 3-4).
‘If he repent, forgive him’. But if he does not repent? I happen to think this is the most interesting and realistic scriptural reference to forgiveness, which lots of ‘modern’ Christians think is given alike to the repentant and unrepentant, to me a plain absurdity. I do not think Lord Tebbit, or many others who suffered at his hands or at his pleasure, think Mr McGuinness has repented. So why should they forgive him, if he is not sorry? Let us all take warning from that, whilst we are in the way, and can do something about it.
But it is for me, and any member of this society, to object strongly to the reverential mentions of Mr McGuinness in the House of Commons today, mentions made in some cases by people who normally rage and shout about 'evil terrorists' who are 'cowards' and who will be 'hunted down for their crimes'. Not in this case. Mr McGuinness died in a sort of spray of verbal syrup, and had until recently been in receipt of British taxpayer's money in the shape of salary and expenses for his role as 'Deputy First Minister' of Northern Ireland. Meanwhile on the BBC and in many other parts of the media yesterday and today he was equated with Nelson Mandela and praised for his supposed 'statesmanship'', though most managed at least to mention his less loveable side as a Godfather of murder and torture.
We are told what a ‘peacemaker’ he was. This, I am afraid, is a terrible lie told mainly to spare our own shame. Far form being a peacemaker, he was among a small group of men who preferred political violence to peaceful protest, even though he lived in a free society and had no excuse for this grisly attitude. He made peace once he had beaten his enemies. You might as well describe Napoleon Bonaparte as a 'peacemaker' for accepting the surrender of those he had beaten in aggressive war.
I was taught long ago that ‘peace’ was not necessarily a virtue in itself. The peace of the mortuary slab, or the peace of the submissive slave, too scared to speak, are not to be desired. Nor is the ‘peace’ of the toady who silences his true feelings because he is afraid of the violent man who has invaded his home and gets what he wants there by menace.
It is the last kind of peace which we have here. The peace of fear. I have seen several articles over the past few days in which it was said that Mr McGuinness and his IRA accomplices had been the ones who gave up the struggle, settled for half a loaf and wearied of blood. They really should stop emitting this drivel. The exact opposite is true, and can be shown to be true by examining the material status of the parties after the end of hostilities.
In 2002, four years after the blasphemously misnamed ‘Good Friday Agreement’ (hereafter referred to by its proper name of ‘The Belfast Agreement’ or its truthful name of ‘The Instrument of British Surrender’), Mr McGuinness told a Dublin rally that returning to violence then would be a trap, adding ‘It’s a fool that believes we will not succeed in achieving a sovereign independent Ireland’.
Indeed it is. What he meant there was that there was nothing wrong with ruthless violence, but that it had achieved its end. It was now to be put aside, not because he rejected or regretted it but because a pretence of legitimacy would bring the final prize. For, as Mr McGuinness well knew, the IRA’s ultimate goal is buried in the Belfast Agreement, an explosion (like so many the IRA plotted) due to go off long after it was planted. The referendum on unification with the Republic, mandated by a clause of the Agreement whose existence is unknown to many people on the mainland, will one day irrevocably end Northern Ireland.
Look at the rest: British troops withdrawn; British surveillance withdrawn and dismantled; scores of IRA prisoners released; real continuing threats to prosecute British soldiers; a *de facto* amnesty for any IRA criminals as yet not prosecuted ; the abolition of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its replacement by a politically corrected unroyal body with no specifically British characteristics, which could easily be merged with the Republic’s Garda Siochana; the disbandment of the RUC’s Special Branch, especially effective against the IRA; the almost total removal of signs and symbols of British rule, the Crown of St Edward and the Union Jack, from cap badges, documents, official flagpoles and government buildings; the abolition of any kind of oath to the Sovereign for the taking of seats in the Stormont Assembly or the taking of office, and its replacement by an ‘undertaking’ of wondrous vagueness.
And in return? Nothing. Just a ‘decent interval’ between the crisis and the catastrophe, during which even the slowest learners on the Loyalist side gather that their absorption into a 32-county Republic, almost certainly ruled by Sinn Fein, with its unique ability to raise money in the USA and the prestige it will win from this achievement, is only a matter of time. My favourite fact about the Belfast Agreement is that Sinn Fein’s representatives at the talks did not even sign it. Who was going to make them? They had won. They would win even more at the St Andrew’s Agreement eight years later in October 2006, since when ‘dissident’ Republican violence has largely ceased.
And the IRA itself? It hasn't gone away, you know. Nobody, apart from a Canadian General, has ever seen any evidence of IRA ‘decommissioning’ of the great piles of guns, ammunition or explosives supplied to it by Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. None of the ‘dissident’ IRA groups which seem to have access to guns and bombs has ever been disciplined by the Provisional IRA, though it undoubtedly has the knowledge and power to do so, and such action would be in the tradition of Irish republicanism. If the evidence of decommissioning is so persuasive, why on earth is it so secret? And why is no ‘dissident’ outrage, however dreadful, permitted to ‘disrupt the peace process’? We all know that any British Army return in force to Northern Ireland would instantly bring the whole thing down.
You too can work out the obvious answer. If any British government were rash enough to slow or obstruct the steady movement towards total capitulation, we would find out fairly quickly that there are still plenty of weapons in Ireland, and quite possibly on the British mainland too. Not that they will do anything of the kind. They have surrendered, and surrendered armies do not take up arms again. As so often, the most interesting evidence is from dogs that do not bark in the night, rather than from those that yap noisily by day.
So Martin McGuinness died as the victor, the man who beat the British Army and the British state, our conqueror. Here we pose, with our Trident missiles and our troops supposedly ‘facing down Putin’ in Estonia, and our seat on the UN Security Council, not to mention our endless harping on about World War Two, now more than 70 years in the past. But in the end we were brought low by a small and vicious murder gang, and of course by the support it received , first unofficial, later official, from our supposed chief ally and ‘shoulder to shoulder’ best friend, the United States.
That is why this ghastly, bloodstained man was given tributes in Parliament today, why reasonably well-informed people equated him with Nelson Mandela, and why the poor Queen had to meet and shake hands with the person whose organisation murdered her husband’s uncle.
And yet we still cannot admit it. The historian A.J.P.Taylor was very right when he said '‘Countries that have long been great powers shrink from admitting that they are great no longer’ . And so they do. Think on these things.
