Coveney needs a crash course on the real peace process

CONOR Cruise O’Brien was a prophet without honour in his own country and the fire which destroyed his former Howth home seemed symbolic of his current marginal status.

For me, however, he is still the greatest Irishman of my generation.

He correctly predicted that John Hume’s pannationalist policy of using Dublin and London to pressurise unionists would end with the Sinn Fein/IRA wolf rampant inside the Irish Republic’s fold.

Telling the truth has never been welcome in nationalist Ireland. Nor any challenge to the saintly status of John Hume.

O’Brien was guilty of both. Contrary to tribal propaganda, he believed Hume was a good man.

But as O’Brien observed: “A good man giving bad advice is more dangerous than a bad man giving good advice.”

The policy differences between O’Brien and Hume still dominate our dealings with Northern Ireland and can be summarised thus:

O’Brien believed the only path to reconciliation and ultimate unity was to stop tormenting unionists about a united Ireland, make common cause with unionist democrats against Sinn Fein/IRA, and let time do its healing task.

He correctly predicted the IRA’s political wing would use the peace process as a Trojan Horse to gain entry to the Irish Republic and turn our politics into a tribal tool for ramping up a perpetual state of tension in Northern Ireland.

John Hume, to the contrary, wanted to draw Dublin deeply into the politics of Northern Ireland and in concert with London to pressurise unionists.

From Sunningdale in 1974 to the Hume-Adams talks of 1993, he never deviated from this pan-nationalist strategy.

Seamus Mallon, while welcoming the peace, believed the IRA played Hume for its own ends.

What ends? To give Sinn Fein kingmaker status in southern politics.

As O’Brien predicted, Northern Ireland got a kind of peace but the Republic will now have to pay the price — most likely starting after the next general election if Sinn Fein holds the balance of power.

Simon Coveney was thus the perfect choice to deliver the John Hume lecture at the MacGill Summer School.

As a disciple of Hume and the late Peter Barry, Coveney sees himself as the guardian of the green side in Northern Ireland.

The predictable result has been to undermine unionist confidence in the peace process and erode the goodwill built up by Charlie Flanagan.

So far, Coveney has made a dog’s dinner of Northern Ireland. Last week, Newton Emerson, the most moderate of commentators, asked why Coveney “was keeping the pot boiling”, referring to a series of cack-handed stances.

But Coveney is not solely to blame. The buck stops with Leo Varadkar who weakly and wilfully gave him the job that Charlie Flanagan was doing well.

The Taoiseach should clean up the mess he created by telling Coveney that Sunningdale taught Garret FitzGerald the dangers of pan-nationalist posturing.

FitzGerald was finally forced to face the truth of O’Brien’s belief that what was good for Northern nationalist extremists was never good for Dublin.

Coveney needs a crash course on the positive role played by revisionists like O’Brien in educating the Irish Republic to the realities of relating to Northern Protestants.

From the foundation of the State, Irish nationalists refused to face the reality of unionist opposition to a united Ireland. Only nine of the 338 published pages of debates on the Treaty of 1921 were about Northern Ireland.

For 77 years the Irish Republic rode roughshod over the political wishes of Northern unionists by persisting with a constitutional claim on Northern Ireland.

But in 1998, by a massive majority of 94pc, those who voted for the Good Friday Agreement in the Irish Republic suddenly gave up that claim.

How does Coveney think such a sudden sea change came about? Does he believe Hume and Barry’s pannationalist pressures were responsible?

Far from it. Two things changed the political mind of the Irish Republic between 1970 and 1998.

First, the intellectual impact of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s States of Ireland in 1972 which slowly convinced even opponents in the Republic’s political class of the crucial importance of unionist consent.

Like most of the political class, I, too, at first I resisted what I saw as O’Brien’s retreat from republicanism to unionism.

But slowly, and somewhat begrudgingly, I realised it was actually an advance to real republicanism.

The second reason for the Republic’s change of heart was the growing moral revulsion against Provo IRA atrocities such as the Kingsmill Massacre.

That sectarian mass murder left an indelible impression on the psyche of the Irish Republic. We were revolted by RTE’s pictures of the pathetic traces of the 10 slain workers — bloody false teeth, lunchboxes, workmen’s helmets.

The proof of that moral impact was the Republic’s mixed reaction to the 1981 H-Blocks crisis.

John A Murphy refused to stand in silence in memory of Bobby Sands at a Munster Hurling final — and survived.

By 1981, Jack Jones, Ireland’s leading pollster, pointed out that IRA violence had created a major revulsion in the Irish Republic against the IRA and against Irish unity.

Like many northern nationalists John Hume seemed to feel betrayed by this shift in southern sympathy.

In a 1981 interview with Seamus Deane, he complained:

“Also I resent the concern evinced so frequently by Southern ‘liberals’ for the unionist position alone, without reference to the rest of the Northern community. They are one of the most right-wing forces in Europe — nobody else would stand for them, anywhere.”

In spite of Hume’s strictures, David Trimble courageously signed up to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Asked to address a UUP Conference (but never asked to address the MacGill school) I put my misgivings aside and called the agreement “an amazing grace”.

David Trimble, always open-minded, never tribal, gracefully accepted some suggestions from me for his Nobel Prize speech.

The most quoted is his remark that Northern Ireland was “a cold house for Catholics”.

But the full paragraph is far more balanced: “Ulster unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And Northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.”

The Good Friday Agreement and the Irish Republic’s removal of the constitutional claim on Northern Ireland should have allowed Northern Protestants to relax in peace.

But noxious Irish nationalism never sleeps. As recently as 2008, Gerry Adams told a fundraising dinner in New York: “Few human beings of my acquaintance are as petty and mean-spirited as those in the Afrikaner wing of unionism.”

Arlene Foster is no Afrikaner. Gerry Adams is no Nelson Mandela. Can Coveney tell the difference?