Editorial: Ireland—is it all over? (1998)

Editorial from the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A wit once claimed that he asked an Ulster Unionist if it was true that the political vocabulary of Unionism was confined to the word “no!” The angry Unionist replied "no. it isn’t!" But before and since the referenda on the Good Friday Agreement the word “democracy” has been peddled so much by Paisley and the hard-line unionists as their justification for opposing the Agreement that it could now be thought to have taken over from the bitter "no!" which covered the policy of all the Unionist parties for three decades.

It should be explained that "democracy” to the Unionists traditionally means that the state of Northern Ireland, tortuously carved out by the British government in 1921 to ensure protestant hegemony, contains about 20 percent more protestants than catholics, which according to the Unionist interpretation of democracy—should allow the former absolute and total political control over the latter. Whatever else, the Agreement demonstrated that the Unionist majority now doubts that this particular definition of democracy is a truly sustainable one.

Appeals to higher authorities and principles than the hatred, violence and competition that have characterised Northern Irish politics have not been confined to the Unionists though. Despite its image, the IRA has always had a moral and legal formula which it claimed gave it the right of a national army to wage war in defence of the Irish Republic. The Republic, in the IRA's view, was established in 1916 at the outset of the Easter Rising and given a mandate by the majority vote of the people of the entire island of Ireland in the elections of 1918—the last time such an all-Ireland election was held. This theory served as a moral platform for the IRA, a Catholic organisation whose individual members are normally obedient to the strictures of their church. Now, for the first time since 1918, the all-Ireland referenda showed an 85.46 per cent vote in favour of the Agreement and thus removed the quasi-moral and legal contention that has supported the argument for Irish nationalist violence.

Not that anyone can be sure that the violence has really ended or that the life of the working class in Northern Ireland is going to hugely improve. The referenda proved that the majority do not want violence but then again, the majority have never wanted violence. The real test applies as ever to the paramilitary groups on both sides, now ever more entwined in more "conventional” forms of illegality, from protection rackets to drug-dealing.

The dispute in Northern Ireland has always, at root, been a turf war. Whether this continues in the form it has previously taken we shall see. But one thing is for sure—until such competitive turf wars have ended there can be no guarantee of a peace worthy of the name in Ireland or, for that matter, any of the other “trouble-spots" which pepper the political map of world capitalism.