It’s time for the next step in building good Northern relations

AN INTRIGUING aspect of the talks in St Andrews is that there has been no mention of resolving partition.

This distinguishes the current talks from most of those over the last century when the partition question inevitably overshadowed all Anglo-Irish negotiations.

It was the great red herring that was used to obscure some of the greatest political failings and thus distort and poison our politics for much of the century.

Eamon de Valera, who led the fight against the 1921 Treaty that culminated in the civil war, recognised the necessity of partition even before the Treaty negotiations began. He warned members of the Dáil on August 22, 1922 that if they refused to recognise the rights of Unionists, Irish nationalists would lose international support and the British would be given a free hand in Ireland.

He explained that he would favour giving the right of exclusion to the four counties with Unionists majorities, if the British recognised the rights of the rest of the island. Later, when challenged to suggest an alternative to the Treaty, he produced Document No 2, which contained all the partition clauses of the Treaty.

De Valera privately admitted that the election results of June 1922 demonstrated clearly that the majority of Irish people favoured the Treaty. But he considered it expedient for Republicans to abstain from the Free State Dáil, because they could not be effective there, as they would be greatly outnumbered.

“Our presence at the meeting would only help to solidify all other groups against us,” he wrote privately.

Publicly, however, he said their abstention was because it was a partition parliament. He was on course to become the embodiment of revisionism.

He harped so much on partition, he managed to generate a whole series of myths about the issue: that it was the cause of the civil war; that the 32 counties were one, united “nation from the dawn of history”; that Britain was totally responsible for partition; that the issue had nothing to do with religion; that a united, politically-stable Ireland would result if the British withdrew from the Six Counties.

In seeking to highlight the partition issue, de Valera was one of the few politicians anywhere to oppose the 1928 Kellogg-Briande Pact, which sought to outlaw war.

He objected to the pact because, he contended, Britain would use it to hold people in subjugation by insisting that signatories of the pact should not support struggles of national liberation within the British Empire.

“We want to be disassociated from any form of reply that would imply that we recognise Great Britain’s right either to hold this country or any other country,” he declared.

In short, he was insisting that the Irish people should have the right to resort to war to bring about Irish unity, if necessary.

Over the years de Valera complained about the discrimination against Roman Catholics and that the incorporation within Northern Ireland of a nationalist minority was much larger than the Protestant minority in the whole island.

The two largest counties — Fermanagh and Tyrone — each had a nationalist majority. If the unionists of the North were entitled to partition, the nationalists there had an even greater right to re-partition.

While de Valera was in power, however, he never asked for the transfer of those two counties or the other contiguous areas in which nationalists were in the majority.

He was content to abandon those people and those areas in order to perpetuate a legitimate nationalist grievance, and thus keep the partition issue alive.

De Valera desired a united Ireland but only on his own terms.

He made no effort to alleviate legitimate fears of Catholic discrimination against Protestant values on matters like birth control and divorce. In diplomatic circles he quietly suggested what is now called ethnic cleansing, by advocating that those Ulster unionists unwilling to accept the 1937 constitution should be transferred to Britain and replaced by Catholics of Irish extraction from Britain.

At the start of the second world, de Valera contended that the existence of partition left his government with no choice but to remain neutral. But in 1940 when the British offered to declare Irish unity in return for the use of Irish bases, de Valera showed no interest in the offer.

When European unity was being discussed after the war, de Valera decried any Irish interest in becoming involved.

“I am sure,” he told the Council of Europe, “you can understand with what a cynical smile an Irish citizen would regard you, if you spoke to him about uniting into a huge state the several states of Europe with their diverse national traditions, so long as he contemplates his own country be kept divided against his will.”

He had made such an issue of Irish unity over the years that the National Coalition made the ending of partition its primary objective. But its efforts came to a grinding halt when it seemed to hand over power to the Catholic Church during the Mother and Child controversy.

If the coalition government had been serious about ending partition, de Valera told a meeting in Drogheda on February 28, 1954, the British ambassador would have been expelled and all trade with Britain severed.

As he had never tried that himself, this was tantamount to admitting that he had never been serious about ending partition.

“There is one policy which we can pursue,” he said, “a policy of trying to establish decent relations between the people of Britain and the six counties and ourselves.”

He added that he did not wish to make partition “a political issue, because I do not believe there is any one of the parties who has got the solution for it.”

It was one of the great tragedies that he was not prepared to recognise this openly 40 years earlier. He had made no real effort to bring about a normalisation of relations but just exploited the issue for his own ends and so left a distinctly unstable situation after him. Although Seán Lemass and Jack Lynch tried to normalise relations, the green wing of Fianna Fáil resorted to de Valera’s old tactics when the Northern troubles erupted in the late 1960s.

“It is now necessary to harness all opinion in the State in a concerted drive towards achieving the aim of unification,” Captain James J Kelly wrote to the Minister for Defence on 23 August 1969.

“This means accepting the possibility of armed action of some sort, as the ultimate solution.”

Only the Dáil was entitled to declare war, but this man got the backing and active support of Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney for ideas that were as treacherous as they were hare-brained.

“If civil war embracing the area was to result because of unwillingness to accept that war as the continuation of politics by other means, it would be a far greater evil for the Irish nation,” Captain Kelly wrote. That was the thinking that led to the Arms Crisis and set the clock back 30 years.

It was not until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that nationalist Ireland recognised unambiguously the right of the people of Northern Ireland to a separate existence, as long as the majority there desired it. This was a major step in establishing decent relations with the majority in Northern Ireland.

Hopefully another step can be taken in the coming weeks, in the interests of all.