Politicians who represent our best traditions

GIVEN their innate decency, it’s not so ironic that the SDLP, Alliance, David Trimble’s Official Unionists and David Ervine’s Progressives (with links to loyalism) are acting in the best tradition of Michael Collins in their acceptance of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), mirroring the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed by the Clonakilty man and formally ratified by Dáil Éireann on December 6, 1921.

What isn’t surprising is that Ian Paisley’s DUP (and Jeffrey Donaldson’s rump unionists) are as hostile to this new treaty, the GFA, as the anti-Treaty forces which brought about civil war through intransigence in 1922.

Speaking to some republicans in Portadown’s nationalist area last year I was repeatedly asked if I thought Michael Collins had been ‘set up’ (presumably in the same way that David Trimble and Mark Durkan have been by Sinn Féin) in taking risks for peace, at cost to themselves, which have benefited the hardliners and those who reap the dividends of the treaty. Even if, in hard cash terms, they merely draw 70% of their salary for refusing to do what they were elected to do in the first place.

What isn’t so clear now is the status of the Border between North and South.

If we tear up the treaty, do we tear up the Border? Judging from the latest studied statements from deputy DUP leader Peter Robinson (who is a lawyer as well as a pragmatist) that may well be the implication. For when we signed away our explicit territorial claim to the ‘six counties’, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which gave the Border its legitimacy, was itself abandoned in favour of the new dispensation.

The pro-Agreement parties (unionist and nationalist) are, like Michael Collins’ pro-Treaty forces, acting in the best interests and the very best tradition of the people of this island. What an honourable and hospitable tradition that is in the shadow of December 6 and the innocence of Christmas.

Richard Dowling,

Coote Street,

Mountrath,

Co Laois.