A nice place to visit…

National Review, March 16, 1992 by Andrew Gimson

NORTHERN Ireland is an excellent place to go on holiday. The people are some of the staunchest and most civil in the world. Much of the coastline is miraculously beautiful. Above all, there aren't many tourists.

Except potilical tourists, who put the others off by sending home tales of barbarism. The political sector of the industry has flourished since the late Sixties, when the present troubles broke out. It declined in the first half of the Eighties (when the number of deaths from terrorism fell to a quarter of the level of a decade before), but has since revived.

Special events are arranged for political tourists. On the night I arrived in Belfast, there was a controlled explosions outside my hotel, a scruffy establishment near Queen's University called the York, in order to prevent a four-hundred-pound IRA bomb from going off.

The following morning I walked round the corner to Sean Graham's betting shop in the Ormeau Road. It was shut. A pile of half-wilted flowers lay on the pavement outside, in memory of five Roman Catholic civilians who were murdered when two Protestant gunmen walked in. A wounded survivor sais: "It was like a butcher's shop in there. There was blood everywhere. They just came in and opened up on everybody."

This atrocity was committed in revenge for the massacre by teh IRA of eight Protestant workmen in County Tyrone the previous month. There have been over thirty deaths from terrorism this year, worse than in any equivalent period since 1976. It is worth bearing in mind that the population of Northern Ireland is only 1.5 million.

To get to my next appointment, I took a taxi driven by an ardent nationalist. He claimed the British government would have to start talking to the IRA, who, he said, represented the Irish people's views much more accurately than the party of constitutional nationalism in the North, the SDLP.

I said this was interesting, but, if true, why did the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, gain such a derisory vote (in low single figures) in elections in the Irish Republic? The taxi driver agreed with sadness that this was so: "Nobody's got a good deal of confidence in the Republic. To be honest with you, I think they're sitting on their hands. They don't really want anything to do with us."

From my own visits to Dublin, I can confirm this to be the case. People in the South retain a strong emotional attachment to a united Ireland, and their constitution still lays claim to the whole island, but most of them would be horrified if they looked like getting it. As early as 1974, the then Prime Minister of the Republic, Liam Cosgrave, observed that violence in the North was "killing the desire for unity."

Even if the British withdrew, it is improbably that unity would result. There would, instead, be a civil war in the North which would make the present trouble look trivial, and would probably destabilize the whole island. That apart, Southerners have two other motives for hostility to a united Ireland. One is that in order to accommodate a million Northern Protestants, the Irish Republic would have to become a much less Roman Catholic and (would-be) Gaelic state. The other is that the North's economy would collapse without the large annual subsidies paid by Britain.

So Irish unity is in practice out of the question, however logical it may seem to politicians in London or Washington. This is disappointing for Northern nationalists, but their distress is mirrored by the sense of betrayal felt by unionists.

For if Dublin does not want Northern Ireland, neither does London. The province's unionists know that the British government wishes, in its heart of hearts, it could wriggle out of its obligation to maintain the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. London and Dublin are at one in wanting to have as little to do with the place as they decently can.

For the unionists, the most grievous betrayal in recent years was the signing, in November 1985, of the Anglo-Irish Agreement between London and Dublin, which for the first time gave the Republic a formal, albeit largely nominal, say in the affairs of the North. The unionist's political leaders, supported by a clear majority of the province's population, were implacably opposed to this development. They were ignored.

The message to unionists was clear. Political activity was useless. The British government had introduced the Agreement as a concession to constitutional nationalism, because behind the nationalists lay a group of dedicated terrorists, the IRA. The unionist cause would have to receive similar backing or it would remain disregarded.

The Agreement promotes such calculations by terrorists on both sides, and must therefore be blamed for the marked resurgence of violence since 1985. It is a fatally ambiguous document which tries to satisfy the aspirations of nationalists and unionists, and therefore satisfies neither. A middle-class unionist told me it was "gutless, mealy-mouthed, a constitutional monstrosity, like giving the Mexican government a formal say in the affairs of California."