UNLESS by breakfast today Tony Blair is revealed to be a Nazi pederast and Gordon Brown is "outed" as a secret cannibal with a taste for teenage Asian flesh, the British electorate will create the biggest parliamentary Labour majority in history. Nationalist Ireland will rejoice; and nationalist Ireland will be wrong.
For it matters little what government exists in London. There was no real difference between Labour and Tory policies towards the North when the IRA ended its ceasefire in February 1996. Nonetheless those Tory policies were misrepresented by much of nationalist Ireland at the time, most forcibly by Dick Spring - and indeed by his interviewer, Gerry Barry, on RTE radio - in the immediate aftermath of the Mitchell report.
Insensitivity
There was, to be sure, gross insensitivity by the British in not letting Dublin know in advance of its intended response to Mitchell - the creation of an elected forum which we now all accept as a reasonable locus for the parties to meet (and discover how little they had in common) but which was vehemently denounced by nationalist Ireland at the time.
The Mitchell report was issued on January 24th. Contrary to what many have said since - most vocally, most often and most obviously the Sinn Fein crowd John Major welcomed the report, restating his (admittedly absurd) preference for decommissioning before talks. "If not, the second (choice) is to secure a democratic mandate for all party negotiations through elections for that purpose."
All party negotiations remained scheduled for February 28th. The election proposal did not interfere with that; but what we were already getting from those who do not understand unionists was the belief that they could be ordered, inveigled, manipulated, conned or commanded into talks with Sinn Fein, as evidenced by the remarks of the British Labour spokesman, Kevin McNamara, in the Irish Post on February 9th, when he said that John Major would not risk his Commons majority by insisting the Unionists attend all party talks. Insist? How could he insist?
That same day, however, February 9th, Ken Maginnis met and talked to the Sinn Fein chairman, Mitchel McLaughlin, in a radio studio. So far so good. That night the London Docklands disappeared and two men died in a huge IRA bomb attack. End of ceasefire.
What part of that equation then could have been altered by Tony Blair? None. He supported John Major's stand on the forum in the Commons.
What part of the equation now could be altered by Tony Blair, with a vast Labour majority? None. For the belief in the ability of high politics to solve the intractable problems of conflicting social groups is one of the great conceits of the democratic process that if only leaders could get around a table and just hammer things out together, we'd all be living in peace and brotherhood. Not true.
Heroic selfdelusion
It's not true anywhere. It's not true in the Middle East between Palestinian and Israeli, and was demonstrably untrue when the peace accord there was signed. But the illusion was sustained by hope, as the illusion of a permanent settlement was sustained during the entire peace process in the North.
This required heroic selfdelusion; for far from the IRA standing down, it raised its profile in the nationalist areas. Punishment beatings increased horrifically, and the murders of suspected drugs dealers began; and the hopes of democrats soon dissolved into outright pusillanimity when Sinn Fein were not warned, Listen friends, any killing, any killing at all, is a violation of the ceasefire.
Instead, Catholic working class males in nationalist areas suddenly found themselves beyond the protection of the terms of the ceasefire, and 10 were killed by the IRA, without complaint from Sinn Fein (who, of course, recently complained of double standards when loyalist paramilitary groups were not excluded from forum talks after loyalists murdered two Catholic men. Double standards is something they know a lot about).
No doubt this is all familiar territory, but it is worth going over again, because the most dangerous binary combination in Northern Ireland, more lethal than diesel and fertiliser, is that mix of Heady Hope and Utter Disillusionment. HHUD stalks every point of contact between the two communities. Heady Hope powered the peace process" from the beginning. Heady Hope led people to believe that you could bring the peoples of Northern Ireland together in permanent amity; HHUD caused virtually everybody to ignore or forget the street corner by street corner realities of Northern Ireland. Heady Hope permitted us to drift blithely into Drumcree, followed neatly, as always, by Utter Disillusionment.
Prancing charlatan
From tomorrow onwards, nationalist Ireland will be looking towards London, full of Heady Hope that there is some magic wand in Whitehall which will enable Tony Blair change the realities of life on the ground in Northern Ireland. Even if he were not the truly contemptible creature I believe him to be, a prancing, prating charlatan, he could not do so, though his majority in the House of Commons should reach 500. No matter how much hope he invests in the project, he cannot build a radar set out of straw, and he cannot bring about a lasting settlement between the two traditions in Northern Ireland.
And furthermore, the decisive election in this regard does not even occur in Northern Ireland. It occurs in the IRA's general army council, which will vote on war and peace and consult nobody outside its own ranks in the process. The sad but simple truth is that democracies cannot reach enduring agreements with secret, outlaw brotherhoods which regard those agreements as binding only on the individuals who made them. That was true 75 years ago. It is true today, the last day of a Conservative government in the UK.