John Bruton’s view of NI peace process begins to make sense
NOW we know why John Bruton, when he was Taoiseach, got such a pain in the face every time he was questioned about the interminable Northern Peace Process negotiations. You’d want to have had the patience of Job, considering the talks to end three decades of tribal murder and mayhem were always and ever moving at an infuriatingly glacial pace.
Back in 1995, Bruton had only been a few wet months in the top job and already he’d been stripped of all necessary endurance with the endless bickering and nit-picking that still characterises every contested political issue there.
Asked by a radio journalist in Cork about the ongoing peace talks that would result three years later in the Good Friday Agreement, he said he was ‘sick answering questions about the f ****** peace process’.
Obviously, the irascible Bruton (at least he was that day) should have been more diplomatic, but over the years, experience has persuaded us to be a lot more forgiving of his outburst, considering the hellish, zero-sum political quagmire Northern Ireland still is.
TWENTY-FOUR years after the historic Good Friday Agreement they still can’t get on with doing the business, the hard political yards, day in and day out. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. This time it’s the Irish Protocol made necessary by Brexit. And all this is underpinned by a residual but significant resistance in hardline Unionism to having any Catholics at all about the place.
The growing sense of abandonment and rejection among some unionists, represented in the main by Jeffrey Donaldson’s DUP and, more particularly, by Jim Allister in the increasingly popular Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), will have been heightened (if that is possible with regard to unionist alarm about eventual nationalist advance) by the spectre of Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill becoming first minister in their Stormont.
Even the most cursory game-play of the current impasse suggests another long, dreary period – perhaps even stretching out for years – of Northern Ireland being without a working government.
Donaldson says they won’t nominate a deputy first minister to O’Neill in the big job; the British government is moving to scrap ‘offending’ parts of the Protocol; the EU will respond with reciprocal amendments to the Withdrawal Agreement.
And so we will have a trade war of some shape or form to disrupt business and heighten tensions – and the marching season that stokes up sectarian hatreds on an annual basis (not that such hatreds ever needed stoking) is just around the corner.
IN THAT scenario, Sinn Féin would be entitled to point to yet another example of the British political establishment acting as partisan in support of unionism, such bias having the downstream effect of depriving nationalists and republicans their right to lead government, at the very first time of winning it. Hardly the full delivery of the promise they’d been given for engaging in constitutional politics.
The biggest sign of progress to emerge from the Assembly elections was the performance of the centrist Alliance party, which more than doubled its seats to 19, with 14% of the vote. This has obvious implications for Sinn Féin’s pet proposition, a border poll on unity, and if common sense prevailed, would encourage unionists to win centrist support North – and particularly South – of the border.
The more people in the South hear about a border poll and about the implications, in the event of unity, for the architecture of political institutions and symbols, such as the national flag, in this new Ireland, the more they’ll be persuaded to hasten slowly.
Unionists like Donaldson still haven’t realised, to their cost, that their best chances are with the less-fervent strain of nationalism in all of Ireland, such as that of Taoiseach Micheál Martin and most others in the pragmatic Fianna Fáil. Looking for a bailout from a manifest trickster such as Boris Johnson is a mug’s game.
Meanwhile, the interminable wrangling continues, public services and the interests of regular people in the North are compromised and most of us are forced to keep our inner John Bruton under lock and key.