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With
another so called crisis looming on the horizon, those
terminally bored with the plutocrat's pantomime up
at Stormont, can only sigh as they mutter 'here we
go again'. As if there is any chance of the legions
of gravy train travellers willingly forcing the gravy
train off its tracks. With more staffers required
to run our ‘White House’ than the US president
needs to run his, such a powerful mutual interest
group knows what side its bread is buttered on. And
it would take some strength of a revolution to prise
their grip from the goose that lays the golden egg.
Indeed, the story goes that one civil servant, who
once observed them as they pretentiously sniffed and
then guzzled their red wine at a banquet, commented,
’the only way to ever start a rebellion in this
country again is to try and shift those people out
of Stormont.’
True,
they could yet surprise us all, but it would be in
spite of themselves and not out of any sense of doing
what is right for their constituents. As Monroe Jackson
wrote:
You're
not convinced. You figure that politicians are decent,
honourable people who care about the public good.
You figure that the amount of money involved is
insignificant. Yeah, and I'm the tooth fairy!
In
their view, we are there to service their needs. And
they respond to us if they think we might no longer
sustain them. Ever ready in packed chambers to pounce
on each other over flags and rarely seen at cancer
services debates, how many times have they bolted
out of the traps running - like Belfast City centre’s
doomsday merchants, wrapped in their sandwich boards
- to proclaim pending doom? And on how many occasions
have the British Government responded by issuing yet
another ultimate deadline by infinite postponement?
If the edifice was allowed to fall and the wages of
the fat cats who wallow in its slush funds were redirected
into the ramshackle health service would we really
be worse off?
One
of the issues being supposedly fought over tooth and
nail at present is the appointment of a ceasefire
auditor. The suggestion for an international monitor
was made by the Alliance Party to the British at Hillsborough
on the 4th of July. Their reasoning appeared to be
that if Mitchell, De Chastelain, Ahtisaari and Ramaphosa
have all played a role at different points in the
peace process, with republican approval, one more
international cook was hardly going to spoil the local
broth.
It
is a difficult one for Sinn Fein to win. The unionists,
supported by the British, and adopting the dictum
of Kevin Myers that ‘it's amazing how the certainty
of consequence can change behaviour’, are finding
it all too easy to steal the moral high ground. It
is cumbersome to argue against Trimble who manages
to sound eminently reasonable - even if his motives
are what republicans allege them to be - when he calls
for the post of monitor to go to a person of "unimpeachable
integrity" who could give "an absolutely
independent assessment". Likewise, John Reid
has not made it easy for his critics by stating that
there was no reason for people to be frightened of
any mechanism which puts more information into the
public domain.
On
this, they are backed by the United States special
envoy to the North, Richard Haass who claimed an independent
auditor could have a positive input to public debate
and have the potential to do ‘more good than
harm‘. Monitoring would ‘put sunlight on
the full range of paramilitary activities’ and
such transparency could play a part in the public
debate and would ‘likely serve a useful function.’
The
IRA, as expected, have dismissed the suggestion:
Firstly,
there have been no breaches of our cessation. Suggestions
to the contrary have come from the British military
intelligence agencies. This misinformation has already
been seized upon by elements within unionism, and
the creation of an auditor would be the latest example
of the British Government pandering to their demands.
Sinn
Fein too have strongly opposed the appointment, with
party Chairperson Mitchel McLaughlin describing the
proposal as:
a
retrograde step, clearly outside of the Good Friday
Agreement and designed to pander to those unionists
so opposed to change … I believe that this
proposal will not only undermine the peace process
but will also be used by those within the British
system who are totally opposed to change and who
want to bring the Good Friday Agreement down.
The
problem for McLaughlin lies in finding anybody who
believes the IRA, or at least in producing somebody
credible who would share the IRA’s interpretation
of what a ceasefire breach is, apart from Mo Mowlam.
Although Gerry Adams states that an auditor wouldn't
tell people anything they didn't already know the
problem is precisely that what people say they ‘know’
is at the centre of dispute. Some ascribe the status
of ‘knowledge’ to their assertions that
the IRA were involved in Colombia or Castlereagh.
Others claim to have ‘knowledge’ that this
was not so.
And
while the IRA asks a very relevant question ‘who
will monitor the forces of the crown?’- who have
been involved in attacking nationalists, the fact
that the IRA had to decommission and the state forces
did not means that the IRA has eroded the very ground
on which such a question enhances its own validity.
Having legitimised state force while delegitimising
its own, questions like that raised by the IRA are
all too easily relegated to the status of ‘whataboutery.’
Moreover,
Sinn Fein’s own arguments do not add up. Protesting
that the auditor proposal is either outside the Good
Friday Agreement or amounts to pandering to unionists
is all too easily dismissed as a mere rhetorical strategy
aimed at creating the illusion that what is going
on is anything more than a sham fight. Neither consideration
prevented party councillors Margaret McClenaghan and
Eoin O'Broin in August demanding that:
The
US Consulate must use their influence where possible
to help bring this loyalist campaign to an end.
We called on them to support the idea of outside
monitors at the interfaces in order to provide independent
verification of events on the ground. This would
enable us to move away from the blame game and expose
those responsible for the current violence.
Why
such persuasive logic should no longer have any currency
within Sinn Fein goes unexplained. With Mitchel McLaughlin
already claiming that Sinn Fein will embrace the RUC
‘only when we have a Policing Board that can
hold the Police Service totally to account’,
republican beliefs that the IRA should be accountable
only to itself are hardly going to carry far, adding
only weight to the view of Alliance leader David Ford
that 'there is an assumption that uncomfortable truths
are being swept under the carpet for the sake of political
expediency'. Coupled with Fintan O’Toole’s
observation that nothing fuels paranoia more effectively
than evidence that your own government is trying to
hide the truth from you, the logic tending towards
the appointment of an auditor takes on the appearance
of being a reasonable step.
In
June of last year Gerry Adams was saying of the British
Government that he ‘didn't know whether to believe
them or not.’ It is a fair point but one which
is balanced by the presence of a lot of people who
don’t believe republicans. How then, in a situation
of mutual suspicion, is the judgement call to be made
sans an outside arbiter? In any event what would a
democratic republicanism seeking to empower rather
than control people have to fear? Ultimately, as Des
Wilson has argued ‘Democrats … never lose
anything by telling people too much rather than too
little’.
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