PROVO HOPES DASHED

The Queen’s University, Belfast speech by Dr Martin Mansergh, northern adviser to three successive heads of the 26-County administration, has endorsed the arguments put forward by Republicans down the years. This is that the cross-Border bodies established under the Stormont Agreement cannot and will not lead to Irish independence and an end to British rule.

In his address on September 30 Dr Mansergh ‘let the cat out of the bag’ in dramatic fashion. “There is no evidence,” he said, “let alone inevitability, from international experience, that limited cross-Border co-operation necessarily leads to political unification.”

The significance of his remarks can be gauged, firstly from his stature as a northern adviser and a secret negotiator with Gerry Adams as far back as the period in office of Charlie Haughey in the early 1980s.

Secondly the importance of his speech can be indirectly measured by the fact that the Irish News in Belfast and the Irish Times in Dublin both omitted any reference to the sentence quoted above from their published versions of his address on Monday, October 2.

This is no mere coincidence given that many of these newspapers’ readers are drawn from the nationalist community on this island who have been fooled by the Provisionals’ claims that the Stormont Agreement is a “transitional stage” towards Irish unity and that the cross-Border bodies will be the mechanism to achieve a united and free Ireland.

Mansergh went on to say that the “constitutional stature of Northern Ireland will not be changed over the heads of the people of Northern Ireland without their agreement and participation”.

In other words the unionist veto initiated in 1921 with Partition is still there and operative. From 1921 the Stormont parliament had the veto on unity and exercised it from 1922 until the fall of Stormont fifty years later.

In 1972 the veto was transferred by the British to the unionist contrived majority in the Six Counties which originated in the gerrymander of Ireland. The Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 saw the unionist veto accepted by the Dublin administration and it was further reinforced by the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and the Stormont Agreement in 1998.

Martin Mansergh is saying what Republicans have said down the years. He is endorsing the arguments put forward by Republican Sinn Féin against the Stormont Agreement and specifically in President Ruairí Ó Brádaigh’s address to Comhairle Uladh on December 12, 1999 which was carried in full at the time by the London Independent newspaper.

The arguments were based on practical experience of such cross-Border bodies in Ireland since 1950 and of European examples.

The bodies would have “no significant function” and would be “account-able” to Stormont, David Trimble said after the crucial meeting with Dublin and London in December 1998. Therefore, they cannot grow and develop into an all-Ireland government.

As Republican Sinn Féin has said, Dr Mansergh stressed that the cross-Border co-operation would “help to underpin peace and stability in Northern Ireland”.

In the report of his speech the northern editor of the Sunday Tribune said Mansergh “openly cast doubt on one of the articles of faith” in the Stormont Agreement expressed by the Provisionals and said that his close association with the current process and the thinking behind it added weight to his remarks.

Mansergh’s remarks dashed the Provisionals’ hopes and completely undermines their arguments. Republican Sinn Féin believes the problem of British rule in Ireland must be faced not on the basis of make-believe and wishful thinking but on the basis of reality.

The reality is that the Stormont Agreement is an attempt to restructure and update British rule in Ireland and extend its support base from the unionists to a large section of the nationalist population in Ireland.

This can be seen through:

• the acceptance of Stormont and administering British rule through it; and
• the attempts to get young people from nationalist families on both sides of the Border to join a new-look RUC to uphold that rule physically.

These are steps backwards, not forwards.

The alternative is the organisation and mobilisation of Irish people at home and abroad based on a truthful analysis of the situation, ie the Stormont Agreement simply updates British rule here and widens its base of support in all of Ireland.

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