WHEN The Secret Army, J. Bowyer Bell's study of the IRA, was first published, the depth, range and detail of its knowledge was said to have astonished even - perhaps especially - members of the "movement". More than two decades later, the man who is probably America's best informed expert on Ireland has turned his analytical gaze on the Protestants in the North. It is not a detailed, factual account of their political, cultural and religious evolution, rather a meditation which seeks to answer the question: Who do they think they are? The Northern troubles have generated so many books that, as the author points out, "there are bibliographies of bibliographies". But he and his publisher agreed there was no satisfactory, accessible study of how the Protestants see themselves and the rest of the population on the island. After years of grumbling about this gap in the shelves, he decided to undertake the task himself. He describes the result as a "tract", but it is not sufficiently polemical for that. It is more a contemplation of the Protestant case against "the great national dream of a united Ireland". The book comes out of a longstanding concern that so few in the Republic understand that case. But unless the Protestant case is recognised and accommodated, there will never be a united Ireland.
The Protestants have their own dream, which Bowyer Bell calls "British Ulster". It is a country of the mind, like the as yet unachieved united Ireland. Space can be found for both dreams in the real world, he argues. It would be, as he himself puts it, a case of "squaring the circle". He admits that "such an Ireland, not united, not for ever partitioned, not British but incorporating British Ulster, is in detail difficult to imagine but in concept possible". In squaring the circle, the Protestants "must be given a means of defending British Ulster greater than the union".
But as this most honest of authors admits, it is "a most improbable aspiration" because loyalty to the union is the great magnet that holds the Northern Protestant population together.
He argues, however, that this loyalty has always been conditional, because the union is a means, not an end, for defending British Ulster, that haven for all Protestants who seek to be free of Rome rule and safe from a united Ireland with a Catholic majority.
London would end its "symbolic sovereignty" over British Ulster - though not its subsidies - and Irish nationalists would agree to put unity on hold until the Protestants gave their consent to it. The Protestants would gain because republican subversion would come to an end; republicans would profit because Tone's "connection with England" would be broken and there would be a long term prospect of voluntary unity. There would even be advantage for Britain because she could claim to have brought the ancient quarrel to a peaceful and decorous conclusion.
Bowyer Bell calls it "a grand accommodation" and compares the settlement to the Egyptian Israeli pact, which was only possible "because the Egyptians thought they had won the war and the Israelis knew they had not".
It is not necessary to agree with his faintly sketched out scheme in order to approve the spirit in which he approaches the problem. For once we have an historian who sees the big picture and thinks on the grand scale - isn't that what we pay them for? Could Northern Ireland become the equivalent of West Berlin during detente? The author acknowledges many of the arguments against his grand plan, particularly from an Ulster Protestant viewpoint. He agrees that "Ulster Says No" has been a broadly effective policy for the Protestants. But he points also to their growing isolation on the international stage as well as the demographic gains by the Catholics, now numbering 645,000 to the Protestants' 855,000. The intelligent and far sighted Ulster Protestant, he suggests, should be taking the long view to see how best to protect the old ways and traditions in a new and indifferent world. "British Ulster has few friends and each year more enemies." All was changed, changed utterly, by Easter 1916 and Bowyer Bell argues that the peace process is having a similar effect. He is tentative in outlining the new situation: the Troubles as we have known them for a generation are over, the question is whether we have entered an end game, or a prologue to another generation of strife.
"Yet the Irish arena has changed," he writes, "because no one, not the gunmen nor their mothers, not their friends, not the bigots nor the ideologues can any longer easily accept killing for a dream, for an ideal, however valid." Bowyer Bell, through his work, has come to know Irish gunmen and gunwomen better than most. Up to time of writing, the "secret army" he wrote about had not fired a shot at a soldier or member of the police in Northern Ireland for two years, whatever it may have been doing in London, Manchester and elsewhere. As he writes: "There is room to manoeuvre, do something, do the same thing, do a little, do a lot.
In the process of building his case for a British Ulster which would be "in but not of Ireland", the author delivers himself of a litany of observations and apercus about not just the Ulster Protestants but also the nationalists, both "advanced" and merely running in place; the British, who are addicted to waiting and delay; and many others. He also has a great deal to say about how history itself is edited and shaped by each generation to suit short term political needs.
The arguments in Back to the Future are subtle, the writing allusive. It's not an easy read, but worth the effort. The author is planting seeds in our minds, not browbeating us into submission (shame there's no index). For all his learning, his tone is modest and self deprecating and, despite the title, he reminds us that the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."