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>
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> www.wsws.org
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> WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Ireland
>
> Fissures widen in Northern Ireland Agreement
>
> By Julie Hyland and Chris Marsden
> 20 August 1999
>
> Back to screen version
>
> The Northern Ireland Agreement has continued to unravel in the
> weeks since the British government was forced to announce its
> “parking” until next month. A review is set to begin in
> September, chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell. But
> Mitchell is said to have been taken aback by reports that Sinn
> Fein may not even participate. A tense meeting of Sinn Fein's
> ruling body is reported to have declined to give the go-ahead to
> the Sinn Fein negotiators.
>
> On Tuesday August 17, Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlem
> announced she would suspend until next week a decision on whether
> Sinn Fein should be excluded from the Northern Ireland Assembly.
> Calls for Sinn Fein's exclusion were made by unionist politicians
> and sections of the media following accusations of IRA
> involvement in the murder of alleged police informer Charles
> Bennett and other killings, as well as allegations of arms
> smuggling.
>
> The problems that now beset the Northern Ireland Agreement were
> inherent within it from its inception. Though it was portrayed as
> an attempt to secure peace and prosperity for all, the British,
> Irish and US governments shaped the Agreement solely in the
> interests of big business. Its purpose was to create better
> conditions for investment by the major corporations throughout
> Ireland and cut the vast military and social expenditure
> associated with the “Troubles”.
>
> The maintenance of divisions between Catholic and Protestant
> workers has historically played an essential role in preserving
> bourgeois rule in Ireland. For this reason, far from seeking to
> encourage a genuine break with the island's sectarian past, the
> Agreement makes religious and cultural differences the
> cornerstone of the new constitutional arrangements. In return for
> ending military hostilities, the Unionists and Republicans were
> offered a power-sharing agreement within an Assembly that
> guaranteed them a virtual duopoly over political life within the
> Province. The Agreement went so far as to stipulate that all
> parties within the Assembly be officially designated as unionist,
> nationalist or other. All legislation must receive
> “cross-community support”, effectively ensuring a joint veto by
> the two camps so-designated.
>
> By itself, this would have set the scene for constant struggles
> between the rival parties over control of the lion's share of the
> rewards of office. The situation was made worse by the
> machinations of the Blair government to get the Agreement signed.
> The failure to get the Assembly up and running was brought about
> by the insistence of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) that the IRA
> must decommission its weapons before Sinn Fein could take
> Ministerial seats in the Executive.
>
> When talks first began, Britain told Sinn Fein that
> decommissioning could wait until after the Executive was
> established—the position actually contained in the Agreement. At
> the same time, however, Blair made a private agreement in a
> letter to UUP leader David Trimble that IRA decommissioning
> “should” take place before hand.
>
> A recent op-ed piece by former Southern Irish Premier Garret
> FitzGerald in the Irish Times showed the extraordinary degree to
> which all the governments involved believed that a few clever
> manoeuvres were all that were needed to get an agreement in
> place. He noted, “What appeared in April last year to have been a
> constructive ambiguity about the relationship between
> decommissioning and the formation of the Northern Ireland
> Executive eventually became a trap which caught the two key
> parties.”
>
> FitzGerald wrote that Blair's letter to Trimble “contained an
> obvious and potentially dangerous ambiguity”, because “such a
> side-letter could not alter the terms of the agreement and the
> use of the ambiguous auxiliary verb ‘should' was obviously
> designed to sound as if it meant more than it possibly could in
> the circumstances.” According to FitzGerald, the dangers of
> depending on “such a flimsy piece of paper” only later became
> clear.
>
> Since then, the unionist parties have made demands for prior
> decommissioning the central plank of their offensive against Sinn
> Fein, designed to ensure continued unionist domination of
> political life in the North. The British government has done
> everything it can to placate their traditional allies.
>
> Last weekend, the Northern Ireland Parades Commission gave the
> go-ahead for loyalist Apprentice Boys Parades to march through
> Derry and Belfast. The decision provoked a sit-down protest in
> the Lower Ormeau Road area of Belfast on Saturday morning, when
> Republicans attempted to block the route of a parade through this
> largely Catholic area. Riot police violently attacked the 200
> demonstrators, injuring several people. Lower Ormeau Concerned
> Citizens spokesperson Gerard Rice described the Royal Ulster
> Constabulary (RUC) offensive as a brutal two-hour attack: “I saw
> an RUC man deliberately break a bottle on the road, deliberately
> trail people over that bottle. I saw an RUC man deliberately jump
> on people to try and break them.'' Throughout the rest of the day
> nationalist youths attacked the RUC and a number of lorries and
> buildings were set alight.
>
> Prior to the Apprentice Boys march, the RUC issued several
> inflammatory statements asserting that there was a danger of
> “Republican violence”. This was used to justify the huge police
> operation mounted against the counter-demonstration.
>
> The security forces maintain that the IRA are responsible for
> five murders in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement
> was signed. These include Andrew Kearney, 33, who was involved in
> a pub brawl with a north Belfast IRA commander; Eamon Collins,
> 45, an ex-IRA man turned informer; and two Newry drugs dealers,
> Brendan Fagan, 24, and Paul Downey. 33. All those killed were
> Catholics. The killing of Charles Bennett—the nephew of
> Bernadette McKevitt-Sands, head of the dissident Republican “32
> County Sovereignty Committee”—occurred following the Agreement's
> “parking”.
>
> The focus for media debate has thus become whether the IRA could
> be said to have broken its cease-fire. (Since Bennett's death,
> Richard McFerran, who owned a crane hire and haulage business,
> was shot once in the head as he parked his car in Dundalk, Co
> Louth. He is understood to have known Downey.)
>
> In response, the IRA issued a statement insisting its cease-fire
> was still in place. It said, "The Army Council has not sanctioned
> any arms importation operation. There has also been speculation
> about the killing of Charles Bennett. Let us emphasise there have
> been no breaches of the IRA cessation, which remains intact."
>
> Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, said: "When the
> IRA called their cease-fire, they said they were calling a
> complete cessation of military operations to enhance the peace
> process. In my view, the cease-fire is intact. That's all we need
> to say about it" (emphasis added).
>
> The issue of whether the IRA cease-fire had been breached ended
> up doing more damage to the British government than to Sinn Fein,
> because it threw additional light on the actual character of the
> Agreement. When pressed on the matter, everyone from the RUC, to
> the UUP and the Northern Ireland Office declared that, strictly
> speaking, the IRA statement was correct.
>
> Vincent McKenna of the independent Northern Ireland Human Rights
> Bureau (NIHRB)—which campaigns against punishment beatings and
> shootings—rang the Northern Ireland Office seeking clarification
> last Friday. He said he wanted to know if this meant that
> murdering working class people was not a breach of the IRA
> cease-fire. An NIO spokesperson is said to have replied: "Off the
> record, Vincent, the Secretary of State [Mo Mowlam] has to decide
> whether an incident is an internal housekeeping matter to the
> terrorist organisations or an attack on the entire community,
> i.e., the Omagh bomb, before making a determination of their
> cease-fire."
>
> McKenna said that the government's response, which he taped but
> is being denied by the NIO, suggested that if the IRA just killed
> Catholics, or the loyalist terrorists murdered Protestants, they
> were not breaching the cease-fire. This interpretation was
> subsequently confirmed by the remarks of the head of the RUC, Sir
> Ronnie Flannagan. He stated that the IRA's own definition of a
> "cessation of military operations" covered bombings and attacks
> on the RUC and Army, but not the murders of alleged informers, or
> of drugs dealers. UUP spokesman Ken Maginnis also acknowledged,
> “The cease-fire was about not shooting soldiers and policemen,
> but it wasn't about not shooting members of the Catholic
> community.”
>
> This week the NIHRB issued a list of reported terrorist activity
> since the Agreement was signed in April last year. As well as
> naming the five people allegedly murdered by the IRA (that have
> been repeatedly cited in the British press), the list notes 61
> punishment shootings and 152 punishment beatings by the
> organisation over the same period. What has received less
> attention are the figures pertaining to loyalist violence. Three
> people have been killed, 71 shot and 171 beaten by unionist
> thugs. “The type of paramilitary activity covered by our list has
> increased some 400 percent since the first IRA cease-fire in
> 1994. The reason is that without a full-scale conflict, the
> various groups want to keep a social grip on their respective
> communities,” McKenna commented.
>
> Despite attempts to make political capital out of the IRA's
> activities, both the British government and the UUP have made
> clear that this should not—at least at this stage—provoke a
> breakdown of the Good Friday Agreement. This points to a key
> aspect of the new relationship that the Agreement sought to
> establish between the British government and both the Republican
> and loyalist terrorists.
>
> Though decommissioning has featured heavily in discussions
> surrounding the Agreement, it is common knowledge that Ireland is
> awash with arms on both sides of the sectarian divide. A recent
> article in the Irish News noted that RUC statistics document
> 139,588 licensed weapons in the hands of the unionist community:
> one gun for every seven unionists. This figure includes 12,090
> handguns of a type banned everywhere else in the UK. Licensed
> weapons held by unionists increased by 861 between 1997 and 1998.
>
> The proclamation of “peace” referred solely to a truce between
> the paramilitaries and the RUC and British Army. In return, the
> rival sectarian groups were given de facto control over their
> respective communities. On this score, the IRA has no serious
> challenger, but there has been a brutal turf war between rival
> loyalist groups since the Agreement was signed. The leader of the
> pro-Agreement Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), David Ervine,
> recently told the press that he had received six death threats in
> the last six months, five from loyalist sources. The PUP is the
> political wing of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which has been
> battling with the Loyalist Volunteer Force, Ulster Defence
> Association and the Ulster Freedom Fighters for control of
> Belfast's Protestant estates. Sharp disagreements exist between
> the UUP and Ian Paisley's anti-Agreement Democratic Unionist
> Party, over the UUP's support for Sinn Fein remaining in the
> Assembly during the Mitchell review.
>
> Though the British government may now insist that some of the
> worst excesses have been curtailed, the activities of the
> paramilitaries do not run contrary to the spirit of the
> Agreement. The higher profile activities of the sectarian groups,
> such as murder, has so far been related to internal disputes or
> drugs. But punishment beatings are the method favoured by the
> paramilitary groups for policing social breakdown in areas of
> high unemployment, poor housing and deprivation, and are
> particularly directed against young men. This is especially the
> case on predominantly Catholic estates, which are virtual “no-go”
> areas for the RUC; so this type of “rough justice” is given tacit
> support by the government and the security forces.
>
> The attempt to incorporate the paramilitary organisations into a
> new framework of rule points to the undemocratic character of the
> Northern Ireland Agreement—just as the reliance on double
> bookkeeping and deceit regarding decommissioning epitomises the
> entire “peace process”. Despite the convening of referenda on
> both sides of the border to endorse the Agreement, there has been
> no genuine reference to the concerns of working people. Power and
> decision making remain the exclusive province of the
> representatives of corporate interests and sectarian formations.
> Against this self-appointed cabal, only a united, independent
> movement of working people based on the struggle for democratic
> and social equality provides a way forward.
>
>
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> -------
>
> Copyright 1998-99
> World Socialist Web Site
> All rights reserved
>
>
<<And while Tony & Bill Jeff 'solve' the Yugo problem, there
remains that pesky little problem on the north of Ireland. Q:
should Tony call in the Balkanians to resolve this issue (as the
Balkanians were the recipients of Tony's assistance)? >>
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