On the day the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning—the real one, set up within the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, which has acted independently, as distinct from Lord Alderdyce's 'Independent Monitoring Commission' nominated by the two Governments, which acts as their agent—on the day when the real Monitoring Commission announced the completion of arms decommissioning by the Provisional IRA, the Acting Taoiseach, Michael McDowell, made a curious statement in an interview on Channel 4. Asked about his response to General de Chastelain's report, he said:

"It is of significance, but it's not the end of the road by any manner of means"

Question: "What worries you most? The robbery of the Northern Bank, the 26 millions?"

McDowell: "Well, what worries me is that the Provisional movement in its entirety would seek to have the IRA remain in abeyance and apply the proceeds of criminality to its campaign to win seats North and South of the Border. That's not acceptable to me. But, in the meantime, it is, as I say, an important day that the largest separatist movement in Ireland has in a way destroyed its arms and put them beyond use to-day, and that it has said to the majority community in Northern Ireland: From now on we propose to carry on our politics by entirely peaceful and democratic means" (26th September 2005).

The curious thing is not the assumption that democratic means are possible in a political entity which is not a democracy. That misuse of language is commonplace. Northern Ireland is not itself a democratic state (or any kind of state), nor is it a democratic part of the democratic state which holds it. It is something unique in the history of the world: a deliberately arranged undemocratic enclave within a democratic state which is systematically excluded from the political life of the state. Democracy is something which cannot exist in it, if the word is used to mean the election of the Government of the state by the adult population. An actual system of democracy of that kind (and there isn't really any other in modern times) has a multitude of effects on the general functioning of society, and brings about a situation which could not be caused by any other means. The condition of society in the North, which is so piously deplored by the righteous, is proof that there is no effective substitute for actual democracy in bringing about the situation of which the righteous approve. But the righteous—and Acting Taoiseach McDowell is the most righteous of the righteous—are usually locked in to a kind of moral posturing which inhibits thought, and they dare not trace the deplorable condition of the North to its cause—because it is not permissible that Britain should be held responsible for it—and so they ignore causes while indulging in vehement denunciations of consequences. And they use "democracy" as a synonym for "pacifism".

The curious thing about McDowell's statement was his description of the Provos as "the largest separatist movement in Ireland"; and that there was not an immediate repudiation of it by his Government ally, Fianna Fail, or even by Fine Gael.

Sinn Fein is certainly larger than McDowell's party, having about four times the support of the Progressive Democrats. But it is not yet bigger than Fine Gael, and we were not aware that Fine Gael had renounced the separatist ideal which led it to withdraw the State from the British Empire and Commonwealth and to declare it a Republic. However, McDowell, Fine Gaeler though he is in essence, has no brief to speak for that party. But he must be taken as speaking for Fianna Fail. Within the governing Coalition, the tail has been speaking for the dog since the beginning of the year and the dog has allowed him to. So we can take it that Fianna Fail gave him permission to remove it from the ranks of the separatists. A few years ago it deleted "the Republican Party" from its title, and now it lets us know through McDowell that it has ceased to be a separatist party as well.

But this use of language is quaint, antique. Separatism as a distinct political position within nationalist Ireland became obsolete more than 80 years ago, when all other positions ceased to exist. Until about 1920 there were Home Rulers and Separatists. The Home Rulers were dominant until the 1918 Election but, when they lost that Election, they ceased to be Home Rulers. The Local Government Elections of 1920 confirmed the 1918 result, and in the 1921 Elections there were no Home Rule candidates. The Home Rulers were only Home Rulers out of fear of what the British Empire would do to a separatist movement, and they went over to separatism en masse when the independence movement took off. After that (aside from Kevin O'Higgins' flirtation with Imperialism in the mid-1920s) separatism was taken for granted as the general political medium within which political differences developed.

But now the Acting Taoiseach reveals that Sinn Fein is the largest separatist movement in the country, which can only be true if Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have reverted to some pre-1918 position.

Perhaps the word "separatist" is fused with the words "physical force" in his mind. That would be understandable on the part of somebody who dwells so much on the political lineage of his family, going back to the days when Britain governed Ireland and treated the mere advocacy of separatism as seditious. The advocacy of a separate state, let alone the achievement of it, could only be undertaken by people who were prepared to maintain themselves as an organisation in a relationship of warfare with the Government. Separatists were compelled by British policy to set themselves up as a secret state within the State—as were similar groups of people in the Tsarist Empire at the same time, and under the Nazi State a generation later. The separation of Ireland from the British Empire was something which the undemocratic British State declared that it would not concede to peaceful agitation, and would prevent by the use of military power. There was therefore a close practical association between the Irish separatist ideal and the organisation of a physical force movement to achieve it. And that remained the case, even when the British State raised 200,000 soldiers in Ireland to make war on the Germans and the Turks by declaring that its purpose was to establish democracy and the rights of small nations as foundations of a new world order, and gave an apparent sign of earnestness by democratising its own electoral franchise by the Reform Act of 1918.

But, when the Irish electorate took the war propaganda in earnest and voted for the establishment of a separate Irish State, it found that the newly-democratised British Parliament took no heed of its vote and that it would have to fight in order to gain what it had voted for. The practical equation between separatism and physical force was still maintained by Britain. But the terms of the relationship had changed within Ireland, by reason of the vote. The people had not come out in support of Young Ireland in 1848, or of the Fenians in 1867, but in 1919-21 they came out in support of what they had voted for in 1918. Britain had gained their support for its Great War in 1914 by means of a confidence trick—a spurious commitment to democracy and the rights of small nations—but the Irish refused to accept the confidence trick as a good practical joke, and in 1919-21 they fought Britain for the same thing that in 1914-16 they thought they were fighting Germany for. And the 1921 Election showed that the entire national community had become separatist and was prepared to bear the physical costs being inflicted by Britain. And Irish national politics has been separatist ever since. At least we cannot recall that a party committed to restoring British rule, or even British hegemony, in Ireland has ever won a seat, or even contested an election.

Granting that there was once a practical equation between separatism and physical force, and that the one word might be used for the other, that still does not explain the Acting Taoiseach's description of Sinn Fein as the largest separatist movement in Ireland on the day when it was confirmed that the IRA had disarmed, having previously made a commitment to pursue its aim by non-military means. Sinn Fein is now a separatist movement dissociated from physical force. It is therefore a movement of the same general kind as Fianna Fail and Fine Gael (at least, as they used to be prior to McDowell's revelation), with the difference that it operates in the North as well as the Republic. It is also a Northern party which has successfully entered the political life of the Republic, whereas the other two are 26 County parties which over the decades have tried without success to influence Northern affairs for the better from the outside. Through the 1937 Constitution they asserted sovereignty over the North, and yet they remained substantially disengaged from it—and there are other forms of engagement than military invasion. And they are now greatly disturbed by the fact that a party generated out of the Northern situation has put down roots in the politics of thee Republic. They do not know how to deal with a party which means the things that they only say.

One of their expedients is to declare that Provo Sinn Fein does not recognise the 26 County State as legitimate, and considers itself to be the legitimate government of all Ireland. But that is patently not the case. The Provos are a highly practical and resourceful movement, generated out of Northern realities, and unrestricted by anti-Treatyite taboos.

There is of course a traditional Republican organisation which keeps alive the spirit of anti-Treaty Republicanism and disputes the legitimacy of the Free State, even as amended by Fianna Fail in the 1930s and by Fine Gael in its revivalist Republicanism of the late forties and early fifties. And it is in the circumstances a good thing that a Republican body of that kind continues to exist, and to act as the conscience of the project that was launched on the basis of the 1918 Election. That body aligned itself with the Provos 35 years ago, but parted company with them a generation ago, recognising that the Provos were something else.

Back in 1998 we reviewed a review by Martin Mansergh, in the [London] Times Literary Supplement of a biography of General Maguire, the last surviving member of the original Dail, by Rory O'Brady. Mansergh's article brought it home to us that O'Brady was performing a useful function in the ideological life of the Free State/Republic by continually harping on fundamental matters. Though he is Fianna Fail's intellectual, Mansergh said things in that article which undermined the historical basis of Fianna Fail, and he has done so again in recent weeks in letters to The Village. Like his father, Nicholas, he takes the Treaty to have been a democratic settlement, which raises great problems about the origins of Fianna Fail. But what it was reasonable for his father to do, as a highly-placed servant of the British Empire, is not reasonable for Martin to do as a highly-placed member of Fianna Fail. And, since those statements have not been taken issue with by other highly-placed members of Fianna Fail, we concluded that Rory O'Brady had a useful function to perform in the life of the State whose legitimacy he disputes.

With regard to the physical force movement (in the sense of a military organisation not under the control of the Government in Dublin), we would say that it has had no real function in the political life of the 26 Counties since 1945.

The Treaty was not a democratic settlement in any reputable sense of the term. Even Professor Foster concedes that it was signed under duress, in response to the British ultimatum about immediate and terrible war. A case can be made for submitting to the British ultimatum, but it is not a democratic case. The Treaty system was imposed by force after the spurious election of 1922, though not by the Parliament returned by the electorate. The anti-Treaty Party was defeated by a Free State force authorised and supplied by Britain. The British political system started to fall into confusion in the Autumn of 1923, just as the Free State was becoming operative. This led to a return of the electorate to the 1918 position, from which it had been driven by the threat that the infinite military resources of the Empire would be deployed against it if it voted wrong. The Treatyite Government spun out its existence until 1932 by authoritarian measures of its own, not dictated by Britain. When it lost the election in 1932, the great question was whether it would relinquish power peacefully. It did. But the condition in which it did so was the presence of a strong military force which it did not control and which backed Fianna Fail.

De Valera had created Fianna Fail out of a secession from Sinn Fein in the mid-1920s, but he had kept up an informal relationship with the IRA—which had met defeat in 1924 by dumping arms and ceasing to fight, but had not surrendered or disarmed. It was therefore not within the authoritarian discretion of the Treaty Party in 1932 whether to admit the electorally victorious Anti-Treaty Party to the power of government or to deny it on the grounds that its objects were in breach of the Constitution. Denial would have resulted in a genuine Civil War (unlike the affair of 1922-3). And the Treatyite power across the water was not in 1932 what it had been in 1922. Those were the circumstances of the peaceful transition of 1932.

With the IRA in the background, Fianna Fail gained effective control of the apparatus of state, as well as the formal offices of government, and held in check the Fascist movement developed by the Treatyites.

The final use of the physical force movement in the political life of the 26 Counties was in the World War launched by Britain in 1939. Battle-hardened Republicans, who could not quite accept the Free State, even in its amendment by de Valera into a "dictionary republic", placed their experience at the service of the State for the duration of the War for the purpose of deterring, or meeting, a British invasion.

(Under the Treaty, the army of the State, the Defence Force, had the function of suppressing internal dissent and enforcing British policy. It was disabled from becoming an Army capable of meeting an external enemy in war, because the only external enemy was Britain. De Valera tried to overcome this disability but was thwarted by British influence in the world. Churchill, who demanded that the Irish State should make war on Germany, was one of those who had ensured that Ireland should not have an army capable of making war on anybody. Insofar as there was in nationalist Ireland an actual capacity for waging war, it lay elsewhere than in the Defence Force. (And that was a potent factor influencing developments in 1969-70.)

The credible Emergency preparations for meeting force with force (secretly reported to Churchill by his spy, Elizabeth Bowen) saw the State through the World War in safety, and there has never since been a function for a physical force movement in the 26 Counties.

Fine Gael reverted to a strong Republican position during the war, and when it returned to Office in 1948, in Coalition with the Labour Party and recently-retired Chief of Staff of the IRA Sean MacBride, it declared that the State was a republic and took it out of the Empire and Commonwealth (in whose affairs it had played no part since 1932), and it launched a great Anti-Partition agitation at home and around the world. That agitation helped to reinvigorate the IRA, and the invasion of the North followed in 1956. (That event was a formal invasion from the South, with little or no element of insurrection accompanying it in the North.)

Fianna Fail could not stand idly by while the 1948 Coalition worked up an Anti-Partition agitation. It joined in the agitation, and De Valera went on a speaking tour in Britain. At a meeting in the English Midlands he was asked if he thought the IRA had exhausted its historical function. He replied that he did not think so. This comment was ignored by John Bowman and others when making up a sanitised version of Dev in the 1970s.

Dev did not expand or explain his opinion. He did not need to do so. Not many years earlier he had broken, within the 26 Counties, the Republican section which had declared war on Britain in an anti-Treaty spirit. He had dealt with the Treaty as much as it was necessary and practical to deal with it, and he would not tolerate the IRA as a rival to the official state. But he would not say that its existence in the North was unnecessary and should be ended. (At least that is how we recall it.)

Dev had an acute sensitivity for political realities, and therefore he would not say that the IRA had no proper business in the North. He neither encouraged it nor denounced it: he simply made a realistic observation relevant to the political condition of the North: undemocratic, unstable and unworkable. And that is how we saw it twenty years later. Having enacted partition, Britain devised a catastrophic mode of political existence for the North. And there is little sense in making moral judgments on the basis of democratic norms, and issuing denunciations accordingly, for a situation which is not ordered by the powerful democratic structures of the state, and which is inherently catastrophic.

We went further, and tried to get the 6 Counties incorporated into the democratic structures of the state which held them. Dev did not do that. But, only on the basis of an excessive rationalism, beyond the scope of practical politics, could he be criticised for not doing so. Statesmen cannot rise above the interests of the states which they lead. They are tied to their states, whatever altruistic postures it might be fashionable for them to strike. They either serve their states well or badly. It is hardly conceivable that Dev did not see that the 6 Counties might have been governed in a way that did not generate communal antagonism as a matter of course, but it would not his business to urge that they should be integrated politically into the British state. And, if he had done so, his proposal would have been rejected by all parties in the 26 Country state, without being heeded by Britain, which had set up that atrocious system in the North for an ulterior purpose, and not because it did not know what it was doing. Dev concentrated on the affairs of the State of which he was leader, and he achieved its independence.

Primary responsibility for the condition of the North rests with the British State, which set up the 'Northern Ireland State', which nobody in the 6 Counties had demanded, instead of governing the region within the structures of the British democracy. Secondary responsibility lies with the Unionist Party, which settled down to a routine of communal dominance within the system which it had opposed in the first instance. The Catholic community bears no responsibility for failing to engage in 'normal politics' because there was no normal politics for it to engage in. Insofar as a third party bears substantial responsibility for exploding the situation in 1969, that party is the Taoiseach of the time, Jack Lynch, with his inflammatory speech in mid-August, with its hint of invasion, and his crude volte face under British pressure the following Spring.

The cycle of events set off by Lynch in 1969 has now come to a kind of conclusion. The net outcome in the 26 Counties is the political demoralisation and disorientation of the parties which were there in 1969, and the re-appearance in a new form of the oldest party of the State, Sinn Fein, which was thought to be obsolete in 1969. So, like it or not, the Republic is at a point of new departure. And all the old parties can do is denounce the new party, declaring it to be a force of evil.

McDowell is Acting Taoiseach on the basis of a 4% electoral vote for his party. But he deserves the position which he has usurped. If he did not deserve it, he would not be able to sustain it. What he says is incoherent, but at least he tries to say something, while his colleagues in Government and Opposition cannot even rise to the most modest level of pretentious incoherence on the basic issue regarding the fundamentals of the State which the re-emergence of Sinn Fein has sprung on them. He speaks for them all, since they have nothing to say.

He speaks as a Prophet:

"Even if I were born of different parents, I believe I would nonetheless hold to the same vision of Irish republicanism that I have, in the course of my public life, sought to realise for my country".

He is what he is, and he would be what he is, even if to the outward eye he seemed to be somebody else. Some higher force, beyond the ordinary course of events, shaped his destiny. His parents had nothing to do with it. And yet he lists his earthly antecedents in all their Republican rig-out: parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles (both Treatyite and Anti-Treatyite). And "All of them were nation-builders" (see Monochrome Vision Of Irishness Is Unhistorical, Sunday Independent, 5.9.05). He asserts that:

"there is a radical and fundamental difference between Irish separatism on the one hand and Irish republicanism on the other"

although

"Republicans in Ireland since the time of Wolfe Tone have been separatists".

But Republicans

"have been much more than separatists. They have believed passionately in a concept of Irishness that is not simply Catholic, Gaelic and Nationalist. The true republicans' concept of Irishness includes the Protestant people of Ireland—the Anglo-Irish and the Ulster Scots… Irish republicanism necessarily implies a correlative duty of respect on the part of Irish republicans towards the Anglo-Irish and Ulster-Scots people on the island… The central vocation of Irish republicanism today… is the project of reconciliation of Orange and Green… There was, in the past, at any rate, a curious tendency among some romantic, Irish Catholic nationalists to refer to the Tricolour as the flag of 'Green, White and Gold'—as if… to airbrush out of the portrait of Irish republicanism anything other than Green, Gaelic, Catholic nationalism… There is nothing republican about the project of Green against Orange. Nor is there anything republican about driving forward the process of polarisation and segregation of the two communities in Northern Ireland… Reconciliation is a vocation that calls for civic virtues that are not to be found in the actions, words, tactics and strategies of the Provisional movement… I believe in a united Ireland not as a means of completing the nationalist conquest but as the optimal outcome for all the people of the island and for each of the communities in Northern Ireland. From the point of view of the Protestant, Unionist majority, I believe that a United Ireland makes sense… I believe that the mindset of siege and being beleaguered in one's own country is deeply destructive. It is bound to produce an ever-growing introversion… It must also be said that adjustment in the South of our concept of Irishness to accommodate the Orange tradition is also a pre-condition for any type of genuine Irish unity. And creating a warm place in our State for those of the Orange tradition is not capable of being achieved overnight. A society which is in denial over its Anglo-Irish and Ulster Scots heritage and which doubts the role of those traditions and communities as integral parts of its personality is incapable of genuine unification with Northern Ireland. The project of Irish unity is too important to leave to those who have betrayed the real values of an Irish republic."

Roy Foster has a liking for the term "visionary republicanism", and here, for once, is a political proclamation which justifies it—a piece of wild imagining about the "historic Irish nation" which parts company with social reality at the outset.

A realistic case can be made that Ireland should have been dealt with as a single political entity, as the historic territory of the Kingdom of Ireland, regardless of the national diversity within it. But there is no basis in social reality for the view that the Ulster Scots and the Anglo-Irish formed parts of a single Irish nationality, but were alienated by the "Green and Gold" conduct of the Provos, (McDowell does not mention that the Gold was said to represent the Papacy), or by the precursors of the Provos who are not specified by McDowell.

The historic sequence is that the Irish, as a political body, were broken by the conquest of William of Orange, and that the regime based on the conquest was not even an apartheid system. Its purpose was the obliteration of the conquered people, not their separate development on an inferior level. The Anglo-Irish were not rejected by the Irish. They rejected the Irish and sought to squeeze them out of existence, and then, having failed to do so, they held themselves apart as a superior people—an attitude frankly stated by Hubert Butler in an election address 36 years after the Declaration of Independence.

The Ulster Scots lived substantially apart from both the Irish and the Anglo-Irish for most of a century after the Battle of the Boyne, excluded from the official power-structure in Ireland by the Church of England monopoly, but left to their own devices. Their clergy and gentry were mostly educated in Scotland where their Church was the Established Church. In the 1780s they were active in the Protestant Ascendancy movement which established the independence of the Protestant Ascendancy Irish Parliament, and in the 1790s they launched the United Irish movement with a view to incorporating the Irish into an Irish state as part of the British Empire. When the Irish Parliament outlawed the movement, it became a revolutionary conspiracy. But, when the moment came to enact the revolution, most of them backed away from it, and they supported the ensuing campaign for the Union of Parliaments, either overtly or tacitly, while the Orangemen opposed it. The antagonism of Orangeman and United Irishman withered away in the course of the 19th century on the ground of a common Unionism, and a merger between the two took place in the Ulster Unionist alliance to oppose, by fair means and foul, the establishment of a Home Rule Government—not a separatist state but a devolved component of the British State and its Empire.

Separatism played no part in generating the antagonism between the Irish national movement of the 19th century and the Ulster Scots. Insofar as any Nationalist leader contributed to the development of that antagonism it was Daniel O'Connell, who was neither a Separatist nor a Republican—if a meaningful distinction can be made between the two. And, after O'Connell, in order of responsibility, comes John Redmond, who by the time of the great Home Rule conflict of 1912-14 had discarded Republicanism and Separatism and become a Home Rule Imperialist. But the political complexion of the national leadership really had nothing to do with it: O'Connell, John Mitchel, Gavan Duffy, the Fenians, Isaac Butt, Parnell, John Redmond, De Valera, Collins, Cosgrave—they were all one to the Ulster Scots.

That antagonism was structured into a pseudo-state by Westminster in 1921. And the pseudo-state was blown apart after it had aggravated the antagonism for half a century and all the Queen's men have not got it together again. The Provos are a product of that structured antagonism. It would therefore not be surprising if they were as narrow as McDowell alleges. But, as far as we have observed, they are more advanced in the matter of "civic virtues" than any other party in Ireland today, and that is why they are such a problem for the other parties.

The Acting Taoiseach needs to go back to the drawing-board. We hope that he does. In the country of the blind it would be of great advantage if he could get one eye. And he might explain what is meant by "completing the nationalist conquest" by extending it to the North-East. Did the Irish in the rest of the country conquer themselves?

Long ago, when we were still trying to democratise the 6 Counties within the British State, we tried to explain our view of the matter to him at a meeting in Dublin. It was obviously not acceptable to him. He really is a one-nation man.

His efforts to include the Ulster Protestants in a genuine Republican embrace seem to have consisted of attacking the Provos at a couple of Unionist meetings, while turning a blind eye to the Orange tradition of the nation which was running riot on the streets expressing its heartfelt feelings about Papists, attacking Catholics, and showing general disgust at the fact that peace has broken out.

Not many things in politics are predictable, but the present condition of Ulster Unionism was entirely predictable to anybody who had taken the trouble to understand it on its own ground, and to understand the dynamic of "the Northern Ireland state".

And, if it is under siege, the siege is inherent in its world outlook, and has little to do with the existence of a besieging force. It was under siege when the IRA was defunct in the 1960s; before the Irish Volunteers were formed in response to the UVF in 1913; and before there was any Irish nationalist movement worth speaking of in the mid-19th century. It placed itself under siege by reverting to the mentality of the conquest after more than century of another mode of existence; by de-politicising itself in 1859; by willingly accepting exclusion from the political life of the State and accepting its own pseudo-state as the reward of rebellion; and by ruling out a return to British politics (in which it participated briefly in the mid-19th century) when its pseudo-state was blown away in the 1970s by the insurrection it had provoked.

We proposed 35 years ago that the Orange Order should be regarded as a kind of folk culture, and should be treated with tolerant good humour. It had simmered down in the 1960s into something that might be called a 'tradition'. Our proposal was seen as outrageous by the broad spectrum of nationalist opinion. But establishment politicians in Dublin, at their wit's end, want to treat it as a 'tradition' today, even though it has clearly ceased to be such and has reverted to the militancy of 1689, and has conjured up for itself the realities of 1689, though without the saviour in the offing who will soon arrive and relieve the siege.

The besieging army has disarmed, and the result is consternation.

Professor Bew was David Trimble's political adviser during the years when Trimble was subverting the Good Friday Agreement through pretended participation in it. Trimble warded off the danger that the Agreement would take root, and then made way for Paisley as an outright opponent of it. And now Professor Bew appears as apologist for the DUP. He was on BBC Radio 4 (10 pm News) on 26th September to explain why the DUP's rejection of de Chastelain's report, and its refusal to contemplate negotiations for an unspecified period, was reasonable. He said that, last December, the DUP was supported by the two Governments in setting conditions on Provo disarmament, which would have made decommissioning a humiliating event for the Republicans and a Unionist triumph which demonstrated the effectiveness of Paisleyite firmness as against Trimble's equivocation. But things have happened in a very different way. The Provos have disarmed unilaterally, outside the negotiating process. And the two Governments, who a short time ago were describing the IRA as the greatest criminal organisation in Europe, were now prepared to move forward on the basis of the act of decommissioning and write off the past. And there was nothing in that for the DUP. Indeed, it would be the humiliated party if it accepted the accomplished fact of non-negotiated, unconditional decommissioning and resumed negotiations. It must therefore reject de Chastelain, let a lot of time elapse, and see if it can start again when all this has been forgotten.

Professor Bew had said before this that humiliating conditions should be placed on Provo decommissioning. He has a Sticky outlook. And the Stickies are incapable of learning by experience that the Provos, because they are the resourceful representatives of an actual community, cannot be trapped by schemes like that.

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CONTENTS