Few in the North now espouse the bigger vision that the EU was supposed to offer, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
EURO CANDIDATES on Northern doorsteps peddle themselves and their leaflets. Standard-bearers of competing stripes for the souls of unionism and nationalism and the smaller, no-hope banners of Alliance and Greens all pay at least lip-service to the European record. But the state of today’s EU, as Vincent Browne put it a lot more savagely yesterday, has a low priority in the heads and hearts of most of those pounding footpaths, and those who listen. In the North, there is another twist to the irony.
The fond belief that the European community would develop from a purely economic league into an increasingly unified political unit long ago ceased to be fond, or a belief. The Northern dream of a healing and uplifting Europe was for the most part the work of a single politician, dominant in his day but thoroughly displaced. SDLP leader John Hume used the words Europe and European and repeated the mantra that the French were still French and the Germans still German so often that he set teeth on edge. It was a benign, ambitious vision nonetheless, in a period when politics was dragged down by violence and tragedy.
Hume hoped that loyalty to Europe would transcend – a word he loved – the ancient quarrel, making partition largely meaningless. The UK and Ireland joining the European Union in 1973 might help Northern Ireland to see itself mainly as a region of Europe. Mutually-exclusive and contending allegiances to Britain and Ireland would dissolve as a new Europeanism developed. He even mentioned post-nationalism. Europe would be a huge positive force. It never happened.
Hume’s internationalism certainly made an impact. With the help of clever Dublin diplomats he found fruitful ways to involve London and Washington with Dublin. Where once unionists condemned and resented US interest in “Northern Ireland’s affairs” Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson in turn have delighted in Oval Office photo opportunities. America became a big player on the Northern stage, with acute political antennae. By contrast Europe sent cash, stretches of motorway, bridges and other worthy projects, and generalised goodwill. But after initial Northern controversies about membership and the “impertinence” of fact-finding missions from Brussels, the rhythm of contact settled into a trudge.
In essence, the EU became another of those bystanders of the Troubles, like the church and trade unions – forever on the sidelines, for motherhood and apple pie but determinedly not taking sides. Republicans campaigned against joining, then ignored it. Hume made friends in Europe, and an Irish commissioner employed him as an aide, a practical demonstration of Dublin support for the SDLP. Unionists went on suspecting it as Rome-inspired devourer, enemy of Britishness or hybrid of the two. Ian Paisley in his Martyrs Memorial pulpit interpreted Brussels and Strasbourg as modern manifestations of the Roman harlot, then brazenly stood for election as MEP, taking the votes of supposedly moderate unionists as well as his DUP flock.
He used the fact that he topped the poll to head for evil Europe himself as the voice of Protestant, Unionist Ulster. He shouted at the pope, threw tracts about, and boasted of “milking the cow” of subsidies for his people. The big Paisley European vote was the precursor of the DUP’s eventual emergence as biggest party. Neither John Taylor, the Ulster Unionists’ first MEP, nor his lacklustre successor Jim Nicholson made any impression in Paisley’s rowdy wake – though Nicholson has now been “in Europe” for 20 years. Like the Sinn Féin MEP Bairbre de Brún, he seems lost.
She has the distinction of being the only novelty in the Northern matrix of DUP-SDLP-UUP representation. In 2004 the Sinn Féin Euro vote went from 117,000 to 144,000, testament to the attraction of the peace process, while the SDLP vote crashed by more than 100,000 as the exhausted Hume stepped down. It was the moment the titans departed.
Paisley’s vote stuck to the DUP candidate as the rising republican tide bore up de Brún, no more charismatic than Jim Allister but her party’s good servant. Allister by contrast later went walkabout when Paisley walked into powersharing – unproductive and more nominal than real but still a harsh symbolic reversal of the DUP promise to “smash Sinn Féin”. So Allister has stayed outside all the groups in the European Parliament, knowing his appeal is to ex-Paisleyites stumped by the old naysayer’s last phase, his chief weapon adherence to the lost leader’s lifelong biblical maxim “Come ye out from among them.”
In Europe, but not of it. Wariness strikes chords right across the spectrum. Northern attitudes remain as disparate as they were at the outset; this campaign is not going to change that. The bulk of candidates make pitches largely built on age-old mutual suspicion, though they face a fresh layer of suspicion about politicians themselves. The one thing everyone knows about Europe is that its political class does itself well.