HISTORY IN THE RE-MAKING

There was great consternation at government buildings on the day a few weeks back when Albert Reynolds, as he saw it, welcomed Gerry Adams into the constitutional fold as the de Valera of the 1990s.

That wacky woman who chirrups and trills about religion in O’Connell Street on Saturday afternoons and never misses a public meeting or mixum-gatherum in Dublin had smuggled herself into the middle of the media pack and was all set to erupt out onto the steps and into the camera shots even as Albert and Gerry and John clasped hands in tripartite pan-nationalist harmony, which, had she succeeded, would have detracted disastrously from the dignity of the occasion and, worse, given the world a chance to smile in wry amusement at the way quaint and colourful religiosity still intrudes into Irish affairs, even at the most inappropriate moments. But the wraith with the rosary beads was shooed and hustled swiftly away, so no harm done.

Then again, maybe it wouldn’t have been entirely inappropriate if the silver-haired lilting ecstatic had managed to insert herself into the picture and blessed the occasion with a verse of an oul’ hymn or a decade of the rosary as gaelige. De Valera himself, when it suited him, made no sharp distinction between the political and the religious in the public life of the land.

De Valera. Now there was a man with a will o’ the wisp way with words. Nobody ever asked him for clarification of his pronouncements, possibly because they didn’t want to be confused any further. Excruciatingly articulate and precisely vague. Not that he was subtle when he saw no need. He once announced that he would wade knee deep through Irish blood before he would accept the Treaty which established the 26-County State. Then, he waded knee-deep through Irish blood before and then he accepted the Treaty and the 26-county State. These were among the epistemological talents which took him from terrorism to the top of the tree.

Many Republicans will have shuffled uneasily from one metaphorical foot to the other when Reynolds, speaking on the Sunday after the Handshake, at the annual Liam Lynch commemoration, made explicit his view that Adams was indeed following directly in de Valera’s footsteps. The Long Fellow ranks high among hate figures in Republican eyes, precisely on account of his acceptance of the 26-County State and the subsequent cold determination with which he put down old comrades who had held onto their arms and tried to stay straight on the Republican road.

The de Valera path may not be the route Republicans want to take, or believe they are taking, but it is clearly the path Reynolds thinks he has enticed them along, and he is determined they won’t stray off easily into the outback again.

This is what Reynolds will have meant when he said that the Republican ceasefire and the political realignment it prompted was “the pinnacle of my career.” He was likely referring not to the achievement of “peace” but to his success – where de Valera, Lemass, Lynch and Haughey had all failed – in bringing Sinn Fein and the IRA to an acceptance of the legitimacy of the Southern State and of the consequent right of the government of the State to be seen as the legitimate leader of all Irish nationalists. In historical terms this is a real gain for the Southern State and its government. So far, it’s the biggest gain anyone has made from the Northern Troubles.

Commentators who have argued that Reynolds was moving dangerously fast in inviting Adams to meet him within a week of the ceasefire and then authorising a meeting between government officials and a Sinn Fein delegation are missing the point or contriving to confuse it. Reynolds wanted Adams into Government Buildings without any delay so as to have it publicly made clear that Sinn Fein now accepts the authority of the Dublin government. He knows, or at least his advisers do, what an enormous move away from Republican orthodoxy this is.

I’m taking it that it was because Adams was wary of how this would be received in his own ranks that he insisted on Hume being present as well. Had he gone in to see Reynolds alone, and emerged for the photo-call with Reynolds alone, the occasion might too easily have been seen as the Republican leadership formally relinquishing something which the Movement had always regarded as a core belief. The inclusion of Hume made the picture presentable as three nationalist leaders conferring together, rather than one conceding legitimacy of leadership to another.

It is worth mentioning, too, that – whether or not this was made explicit during the talks in Belfast last month between Sinn Fein and the US delegation led by former Congressman Bruce Morrison – the goodwill of what we might call “official Irish America” towards the Republican Movement is now effectively conditional on the Republicans getting and staying on-side with Reynolds.

US visas for Republicans, and access to centres of power in the US, are essentially the gift of the Reynolds Government. The Provos have been put on their best behaviour and Albert Reynolds to be the judge of their behaviour.

By their “best behaviour” I don't mean solely or most importantly the ceasefire. Political behaviour of a more general kind is relevant, too. Republicans in the time ahead will not be minded to challenge the authority of the Southern State in negotiating the shape of a new constitutional arrangement and could become rather more chary than heretofore about challenging authority in the Southern State over economic and social issues too.

This is not to suggest that rank-and-file Republicans would accept instructions from Reynolds on how to campaign on a number of the issues most immediate to them on nationalist rights in the North, border roads, harassment, miscarriages of justice. They have their own agenda and their own constituency to answer to, and Reynolds has people around him sensitive to their position on their own ground.

But the Fianna Fail leader must be confident that, if it ever comes to a crunch, he has the whip hand. He could snatch away from them, in an instant, all, or almost all, that they have gained in terms of political standing and international credibility. The suggestion, on offer in the Irish Independent from Conor Cruise O’Brien’s grand car-boot sale of shop-soiled notions, that the Republicans have Reynolds on the run and are in the process of pushing the Southern State towards military conflict with Britain is all the more ludicrous for its crude mis-handling of history.

Reynolds would turn on the Provos with implacable viciousness rather than let an open conflict between his State and the British State come about, and he’d have the support of the entire Southern establishment in doing it. If it came to a choice between the interests of the working-class Catholics of the North and the stability of the Southern State, Reynold’s would, in a twinkling, don the mantle not of de Valera circa 1923 whom he held up to Adams as a role model, but de Valera circa 1943. The barbed wire would be up around the internment camp on the Curragh before sunrise.

Of course, nothing like this may ever happen. So we need different ways of looking at things, whereas one of the most depressing aspects of politics since the announcement of the IRA ceasefire has been a paralysis of the imagination of almost epidemic proportions.

The impression is widespread that the Catholic areas of the North which have formed the bedrock of Republican support have been faced with a choice between a continuation of the armed struggle and an alliance under the leadership of the Reynolds Government. But there are many who never supported the strategy of armed struggle in the first place, and are certainly not nostalgic for it now, but who are also opposed to hitching the fortunes of the North to the interests of the Southern rich – which is all and exactly what Reynolds represents.

It is only a minority, of course, which thinks along these lines. In the immediate euphoric aftermath of the ceasefire announcement it was hard to find an audience in Catholic areas for advocacy of any alternative to what the nationalist alliance had put on offer. But we live in fast-changing times, and there’s an undertow of uneasiness, too, about where we are headed and a dawning realisation that the prizes which were promised if “the violence” was called off may be longer in coming than was anticipated, and may glitter less brightly than the PR sheen initially led many to believe.

I wrote in the Frontline section of the last issue that I hold to the belief that working-class unity is the way forward. An old feminist friend asked me how on earth (actually, “How the fuck” was her formulation) I had arrived at that conclusion. But it’s not my conclusion. It’s my starting-point. Because it seems to me to be obvious. And also because it provides more solid ground to stand on than ground which could be taken from under us at any moment by Albert Reynolds or a successor who will be essentially just like him.

As little as ten years ago virtually everyone who wanted an end to the sectarian State up here was at pains to explain that they were not out to extend the remit of the South across the whole island, that, on the contrary, what was wanted was a New Ireland altogether, fundamentally different from society as it stood on the other side of the border. Even “pure” Republicans who had no time for quaint notions like class struggle pitched their appeals to Fianna Fail at the “grass roots” of the party, and implicitly urged revolt against a leadership perceived as being class-biased against the poor and having sold out.

That pitch may have cut little ice with most Protestants, but at least it focused attention on the social content of the society which was envisaged as emerging from the Troubles. It put the Falls in a position, potentially at least, to discuss with the Shankill what sort of society might suit both. But all that’s right off the agenda of the process through which we are now going. It’s taken for granted that what suits one community will discommode the other.

Any advance which the Catholics do make in the North will be measured against the position of the Protestants. That’s not a prediction. It is the way things are seen already on the streets. The triumphalism in Catholic areas widely noted in the media has been a little forced. But to the extent that it’s real, it’s expressed as referring to triumph over the Protestants rather than over the British.

The rioting on Protestant working-class streets in Belfast reveals that Protestants see it the same way. To be sure, there have been loyalist paramilitaries stirring the violence up, motivated by murderous hatred of Catholics. But in the background there’s also the fact that the Protestant working class here have been deserted by Britain, and have been told, almost in so many words, that things will likely get worse for them now, not better, especially as compared with the Catholics.

There are very big problems in all this which are not being addressed because they cannot be addressed within the framework of an alliance led by forces characterised by social conservatism and belief in a free market economy.

The heartfelt welcome rightly given to the IRA ceasefire should not prevent critical analysis of the strategy the Republican leadership has chosen as an alternative. Taking the de Valera road leads nowhere except up Albert Reynolds’ garden path, and there’s nothing there to make life meaningfully better on either the Shankill or the Falls.

Don’t believe all those rave reviews in the British press of Sinead O’Connor’s new album. It’s better.