Republicans and unionists are united by an antipathy to progress

THE biggest surprise this week was that people were so surprised when the Belfast gathering to announce a breakthrough in the peace process turned into a fiasco.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern were on hand for the announcement that was never made. They were there last April too and they even invited US President George W Bush to witness what turned out to be a similar fiasco. "Fool me once, shame on you," Eamon de Valera used to say. "Fool me twice, shame on me."

Unionists have sought to upstage just about every Anglo-Irish agreement on the North. They may proclaim their Britishness but history has taught them to be as suspicious of the British Government as of the one in Dublin.

When the Home Rule Bill was finally passed in 1914, its implementation was suspended for the duration of the First World War, just to placate the unionists.

Following the Easter rebellion of 1916, David Lloyd George was given the task of trying to implement Home Rule. He proposed to exclude six counties. He assured John Redmond that it would only be temporary, but he told Edward Carson that it would be permanent. In the face of such duplicity, his initiative collapsed.

Legislation was finally enacted in 1920 setting up Home Rule parliaments in Dublin and Belfast under the Government of Ireland Act, 1920. The partitioned area was grossly unfair. Both Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone and more than half of the territory of Northern Ireland had a nationalist majority. Moreover, the minority within the six counties was, proportionately, larger than the unionist minority in the whole

island. The six counties were selected as the largest area that the Unionist could hope to hold.

During the treaty negotiations of 1921, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins

insisted that the nationalist areas on the Border would have to be given the

option of joining the Irish Free State. This led to the Boundary Commission proposal, which was supposed to redraw the border in line with the wishes of the inhabitants in the Border areas.

In the final week of the treaty negotiations Tim Healy, the old home ruler, dined with Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. He told them that partition was "likely to be intolerable to Irish

national sentiment", but Churchill replied that there was no need to worry, because the British Government was ready to appoint a Boundary Commission that would "ensure the transfer to the Free State of the counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh, South Armagh, and (if I remember rightly) South Down, together with the towns of Londonderry, Enniskillen and Newry".

So much territory would be handed over that Northern Ireland would

become unviable.

"Am I to understand," Healy asked, "that that assurance is endorsed by the prime minister?"

"It certainly is," Prime Minister Lloyd George replied.

Collins believed he could use the threat of the Boundary Commission to persuade the unionists to agree to a united Ireland with specified guarantees to protect their rights.

He concluded two different agreements with the Stormont Prime Minister, Sir James Craig, in early 1922, but neither amounted to much, partly because Collins was double-dealing in a frantic effort to prevent civil war in the 26 counties. He secretly provided arms for the IRA in the North, was behind the kidnapping of 42 Northern unionists in February 1922 and he ordered the murder in London of Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, a military adviser to the Craig Government.

Following the deaths of Griffith and Collins, the Boundary Commission turned out to be a fiasco. Even though de Valera persistently maintained that he got into politics to stop partition, he just used the issue. He objected to the treaty because of the oath it prescribed for Irish politicians, but he advised the delegation to blame the North. Subsequently he pretended that the treaty controversy was over partition, even though he had included the treaty's partition clauses in his own alternative.

Throughout his career he shamelessly exploited the partition grievance for his own political purposes. In June 1940, he showed no interest when Churchill

offered to end partition immediately in return for the use of Irish bases in the Second World War. De Valera thereby demonstrated that ending partition was not at the top of his list of priorities. He often complained about the grievance of Fermanagh and Tyrone being cut off, but he never once asked for the transfer of those areas.

While in power de Valera acted responsibly, but in opposition he could be a thorough hypocrite, deliberately stirring up trouble over partition for his selfish political ends. Yet when he got back into power, he would come down like a tonne of bricks on those he had stirred up. In 1957, for instance, on coming to power for the last time, one of the first moves was to re-introduce internment of the IRA during the Border campaign.

Northern Protestants had legitimate fears of the South. We proclaimed a

republic, but we secretly allowed Catholic bishops to exercise a political veto and we turned a blind eye when some of the Catholic clergy behaved in the most despicable manner, sexually abusing young children and virtually incarcerating many unmarried mothers.

The Sunningdale Agreement of 1974, which sought to implement power-sharing in the North, resurrected the Council of Ireland that should have been established in 1921. But the agreement foundered on the hostility of most unionists.

The unionist community as a whole was bitterly opposed to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1984, and Charles Haughey sought to take a leaf out of de Valera's book in trying to undermine the agreement for his own selfish political purposes.

He centred his objections on a clause that had actually been lifted from a joint communiqué that he had earlier issued

following a meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His opposition was transparently dishonest, but he tried to stir up hostility to the agreement in the United States. Of all of Haughey's misdeeds, his resistance to Anglo-Irish Agreement was the most despicable.

The 1984 agreement forced the unionists to face reality and eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement. In over 70 years this was the first Anglo-Irish agreement on the North that the majority of unionists did not renounce, but a vocal diehard unionist minority has frustrated the efforts of David Trimble.

In the light of history, he undoubtedly had good grounds for caution and suspicion.

Gerry Adams has stated that his people are committed to "exclusively democratic and peaceful means", but these so-called republicans have not disbanded their

private army and they refused to tell the people how much of their weaponry they decommissioned. They have no right to hold any weapons, but their obduracy is being rewarded.

The two governments have been dancing attendance on them while the SDLP, the largest nationalist party, has been sidelined and ignored.

This is wrong. It is not only unfair and undemocratic, it is also a perversion of the basis of republicanism, which stands for the rule of the people, not a mere quasi-militant clique that is being pampered while it refuses to comply with the wishes of the people not only of the North but of the whole island.