Let’s face facts, the Good Friday Agreement is failing
amon de Valera, the father of Irish independence, had three ambitions for his new state: it should be Catholic, economically self-sufficient and Irish-speaking. Happily, he had little success with the second or third, and Ireland has flourished in the internet age as an Anglophone market economy.
Readers in Great Britain might struggle to understand why the parties in Northern Ireland have fallen out over an issue as abstruse as the status of Irish – a language spoken at home by less than a quarter of one per cent of the population. After all, the power-sharing deal collapsed last year over a wholly unrelated renewable energy boondoggle.
In fact, all sides see the legal position of Irish as political. In the Republic, that beautiful tongue is nowadays most often heard in relation to state offices. In Ulster, the republican leaders who can manage a few phrases often utter them in what is sardonically called a “Long Kesh” accent, meaning that they studied the language while interned in the Maze.
Unionists tetchily point out that Irish already receives financial support, and is taught in schools across the province. Their concern is that it will end up becoming obligatory in the public sector. As The Guardian (no friend to unionism) puts it, “Sinn Féin has chosen to weaponise the language question for political ends, less to protect a minority than to antagonise unionists”.
The DUP, duly antagonised, responded with all the grace and agility of an elephant confronted by a mouse. Northern Ireland has had no government for 13 months. Direct rule seems inevitable – and that is no bad thing.
The Belfast Agreement is often spoken about in quasi-religious terms – literally, for it is more widely known as the Good Friday Agreement. But its flaws have become clearer over time. The original deal represented a bribe to two sets of hardliners who, having opposed power-sharing, came to support it when they realised that they would be the direct beneficiaries. For 20 years, Sinn Féin and the DUP have propped each other up like two exhausted boxers in a clinch. A permanent grand coalition leaves them free to reward their supporters with subsidies and sinecures.
“Well, that’s better than shooting each other,” say well-meaning people. But the Belfast Agreement was a consequence, not a cause, of the end of terrorism, and there are less corrupting ways to guarantee civilian politics. I’m all for power-sharing. Indeed, being of Ulster Catholic origin on one side and Scots Presbyterian on the other, I feel something of a personal stake in it. I don’t object to the Belfast Agreement on orange or green grounds, but on democratic grounds. It’s unhealthy to have the same people in office all the time.
The language row has exposed the limits of the current dispensation. British ministers should start working with their Irish counterparts on improving the system. Northern Ireland deserves an effective government. It will get one only when it also gets an effective opposition. Outlander:
On my way to record Any Questions in Nairn, I visited the battlefield at Culloden, where the last stand of the clans is commemorated in grim stone monuments. The TV drama Outlander has revived the romantic appeal of Jacobitism – an appeal invented by the novelist Walter Scott. To this day, we are misled by the aesthetics: Bonnie Prince Charlie’s dashing escape across the heather, the glinting claymores of the loyal men, faithful Flora MacDonald. A mist of glamour shrouds the reality that this was a French invasion, led by a French-speaking autocrat who would have extirpated parliamentary government.
What explains the appeal of an absolutist creed at odds with modern values? Do we so elevate victimhood that we automatically sympathise with the defeated? Do we see the Highlanders as a tribal minority whose customs should have been preserved from our modern notions of liberty and equality? I’d rather celebrate the way those clansmen, the “hardy and intrepid race of men” whom Pitt the Elder called into service, became our foremost soldiers. The wars they went on to fight – against the Bourbons, Bonaparte, the Kaiser and Hitler – were wars worth winning. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion