After the fine speeches, Northern parties must acknowledge their interdependence, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
HIJACKINGS AND burned-out vehicles in Belfast, Lurgan and along the North-South railway line and motorway this week have just posed the challenge for the North’s new institutions all over again. Arrests and charges after last month’s brutal deaths created no more than a breathing space. Fine speeches and taking the show on the road was what politics called for as a first response. The next bit is harder: it needs all the parties in a shaky edifice to acknowledge their interdependence.
As so often before, disorder is a distraction. A bloody-minded few can create so much disruption with so little effort. Dissident republicanism is a cloth-eared name: in its most idealistic, primitive form Irish republicanism is pure dissent.
Incapable of achieving its primary aims, it is never going to go away completely. The question is how to keep those willing to kill and die for it to the least possible number. The best hope is that ordinary mortals with warm blood who love people more than causes will always outnumber fanatics, working them into corners by making the main stage productive, and fair.
So arrests and charges have to be soundly based, policing as sensitive as possible. Neither is a simple proposition. How to sensitively discourage someone from standing over dying men and emptying an automatic rifle into them? There will be complaints, from people who also claim that they do not support renewed armed struggle, about the remilitarisation of the PSNI as though paramilitary guns shot nobody dead a fortnight ago. A familiar tactic: the Provos worked it for decades. Wreck the place, create terror, then switch the blame to those sent out to clear the roads and dismantle the bombs. It worked because soldiers and police could be portrayed, easily and to a degree accurately, as outsiders with a bias. The dissidents’ first line of attack in the past couple of years has been to try to turn the clock back so the PSNI looks more like the old RUC and to push for troops back on the streets.
In its own streets Sinn Féin cuts a less impressive figure than is healthy for political progress generally. Being haunted by its past is bad enough. The spectacle that Sinn Féin makes in Stormont must be a constant frustration, made worse by awareness that it will only end if others co-operate. Which they must, if the structures are to withstand the strains of renewed violence. Ulster Unionists and the SDLP seem consumed by their own positions as relegated and runners-up. If only for self-respect, might it not be time both spent less energy carping at the bigger parties? For the UUs, that would also include calling halt to the practice of trying to push the DUP into even more truculent expressions of anti-Irishness.
A relentlessly triumphalist DUP seems to see no further than their own backyard and a dread, surely inflated and unrealistic, of their own lone dissident, Jim Allister. The coolest heads must know it is way past time to stop trying to humiliate republicans and start looking for areas of agreement, out of self-interest, if nothing else.
Blocking every move the other makes by force of numbers is no more than a pretence at the ugly old policy of majority rule. As unemployment rises and more cuts in public services arrive it will become steadily more obvious that nobody rules in Stormont. Common sense demands agreement, as soon as possible, on how best to manage the greater recession ahead.
Sinn Féin has the additional problem of facing its own past in new confrontational form. Its Stormont representatives say the dissidents have no mandate, no strategy. Every other party North and South, and the bulk of the population, thought the same of the IRA. Hijackings certainly would not advance the cause of Irish unity, said one youngish Belfast Sinn Féiner indignantly on Tuesday. Behind closed doors, does anyone in her party profess to believe that taking part in Stormont debates is bringing Irish unity a day closer? Everyone else is supposed to forget that Sinn Féin leaders once called white black but they made the right decision in the end. Talking, born of war-weariness, made slow headway. It produced a settlement nobody thought ideal, but the killing and destruction tapered off. The dissidents can slow, or halt, the transformation in the North’s society by obliging all sides to man barricades again. Politics has to stop that happening.
But maybe Northerners should also hang on to a wider perspective. Over the past 10 years the leftovers of republicanism have killed significantly fewer than criminal gangs in Dublin and Limerick, who have also inflicted much greater social damage. Drug pushers have no community support. Yet the police and courts cannot end their menace.