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A
week after the Ulster Unionist Council convened and
the discursive effects of the fall out continue to
vibrate throughout the world of print. Whether they
will have any impact greater than the disturbance
caused by last week’s English earthquake is another
matter.
David
Trimble whether through accident or design is - by
pointing to his lack of internal space in which to
manoeuvre - preparing the way to increase his external
bargaining power with the British Government. Needless
to say, those with substantial scope for manoeuvre,
republicans, will come under considerable pressure.
A leadership that can sell its grassroots virtually
any abandonment dressed up as the taking of new ground
would be perceived in the centres of establishment
power as ripe for a bit more squeezing. This also
holds true of America where, complained the Irish
Voice, Richard Haass ‘listens only’ to British
Secretary of State John Reid when it comes to the
North,
Even
if such squeezing failed to produce the desired response
and the Agreement were to collapse what alternative
template is there in the mind of the British establishment
- the ultimate power broker in the North of Ireland
and which, to draw on Schattschneider’s memorable
phrase, has the ability to ensure that ‘some
things are organised into politics, while others are
organised out‘? From the moment of any collapse
the beast that produced the Good Friday Agreement
will be in heat again and ready for impregnation by
British ministers. It is in its very nature. With
Provisional republicanism’s proposed solution
- upon which it fought and lost a war - reduced to
a discursive objective there is, as supporters of
the Agreement say, no other establishment show in
town.
Having
long since abandoned its anti-systemic challenge to
establishment logic coupled with a jettisoning of
any notion of becoming a radical body of opposition,
Sinn Fein must fear a reversion to direct rule. Its
leaders can only feel, rightly, that such a course
blurs the vision they project of their strategy once
adumbrated by Martin McGuinness - ‘you could
have a situation where Sinn Féin is in government
in the North and Sinn Féin in government in
the South. The logic is that the division of the country
will have to end’- as knitting together the two
parts of the country. It is not a question of Sinn
Fein being asked to ‘Save Dave’ as Gerry
Adams likes to put it. Any movement by Sinn Fein presented
as a generous gesture to ‘save Dave’ is
a ruse to camouflage the fact that Trimble is merely
the loop through which the lifeline travels on its
way back to Adams. Sinn Fein more than anybody need
the institutions to proceed.
In
the same vein the unionist demand for a border poll
and Sinn Fein’s fear of it, exposes the soft
underbelly of the party’s project. It shows it
to be little other than a reformist and gradualist
strategy tarted up internally as revolutionary or
insurrectionary on the evidence of nothing other than
unionist unease. Sinn Fein inflates the value of its
project by telling its base that demographically nationalists
are breathing down the necks of the unionists. But
because the Sinn Fein leadership know only too well
that while virtually all unionists will vote for the
union not all nationalists will vote against it. A
border poll revealing a gap that would not be bridged
by the mythical ‘freedom 2016’ year would
convey two things. Firstly, to republicans, that there
is a certain permanence to partition and that references
to transition are rhetorical devices aimed at giving
legs to the illusion of forward movement; secondly,
and more importantly, to unionists, that the union
is nowhere nearly as insecure as some of them believe
thus displacing much of their unease and consequently
depicting republicans as confidence tricksters.
In
is against this backdrop that David Trimble devalues
his own achievements when calling for the IRA to surrender,
and in doing so gives voice to the dog that has perpetually
failed to bark, Jeffrey Donaldson. The latter has
stipulated that the IRA ‘must disappear’
and that its organisation, structure, weapons and
threat must all go’.
In
all of this it seems that a silencer has been placed
over the fact that the IRA has surrendered the principle
of consent. And after that what serious threat does
it pose to the terms on which the British state has
based its presence for the last three decades that
would be radically different from that posed by the
Worker’s Party? The organisation no longer exists
to challenge the union as maintained through the consent
principle. Consequently, as Paul Bew explained in
the Financial Times, ‘essentially, voters
would be asked to tolerate devolved government with
Sinn Féin ministers as the most practical way
of sustaining the Union.’
And
what conclusion does this point to? That which suggests
that the safe money will be placed on Sinn Fein ensuring
that the Assembly’s fat lady will not be singing
any swan song.
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