A cheering irony from a land of many ironies

Having failed to inform myself on what to expect, the first time I visited Stormont, the home of Northern Ireland’s parliament, I was shocked to see the approach dominated by a massive statue.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Why, Edward Carson,” I was told.

The statue of Edward Carson in front of Stormont Castle

Carson? It seemed extraordinary. 

The year 1910 was a strange one in British politics, because there were two general elections that year. In both the Liberals, for the last time in their history, emerged as the biggest single party in the House of Commons. They didn’t, however, have a majority and depended on the votes of Irish Nationalist MPs to cling on to office.

Irish Nationalist MPs? You may be wondering how there were any of them. Well, Ireland – the whole of it – was then still part of the United Kingdom and it sent MPs to the UK parliament in Westminster.

To retain their support, the Prime Minister HH Asquith had  to go some way at least to meet their aspirations. It had once been the policy of his Liberal Party to grant Home Rule to Ireland, giving it back the Dublin parliament that had been done away with early in the nineteenth century. Home Rule had split the Liberals back in the 1880s and cast them into the outermost darkness where there is waling and gnashing of teeth – in other words, opposition – while the Conservatives enjoyed almost uninterrupted power for twenty years.

Parliamentary arithmetic, however, is parliamentary arithmetic. The Irish MPs had to be accommodated. Painful though the previous experience with Home Rule had been, Asquith was going to have to try again.

As before, there was fierce resistance from the official Opposition in Westminster. But even fiercer was the hostility of one community within Ireland itself. Further back in the past, in the early seventeenth century, the then King James VI of Scotland and I of England, had sent Protestant Scotsmen to settle in Ireland, to strengthen Protestant power over the Catholic majority. Nearly four centuries on, their descendants were still living in Ireland, mainly in Ulster, the north-eastern corner of the island. They even formed a majority in a large part of that province.

Carson had played a major role in setting up the organisation that came to be known as the Ulster Volunteer Force. It smuggled arms into the province, mostly from Germany, ready to use them to resist any attempt to bring Protestants under the authority of a Catholic-dominated parliament in Dublin. Carson was one of those Irishmen who believed that the place of Ireland was to be an integral element of the British Empire, benefiting from being part of it and helping to sustain it. That was the position known as Unionist.

He proclaimed a policy of ‘No surrender’, a slogan taken up by another well-known Irish Unionist nearer to our own times, Ian Paisley.

Now what the Ulster Volunteer Force was doing was illegal. Criminal even. Indeed, when another figure, Sir Roger Casement, tried to smuggle in German arms on behalf of the other side, the anti-Union Nationalists, the British authorities hanged him. But Carson remained an MP and indeed, despite having organised armed resistance to one British government, he became a minister in another. Why, he even became a law officer in that government, holding the post of Attorney General of England, upholding the authority of a system of laws he’d flouted himself.

An amusing irony, wouldn’t you say?

Poor old Carson. He wasn’t an Ulsterman but a Dubliner. However, Unionism was in a minority in the south or west of Ireland. He found himself having to concentrate his energies saving Protestants from Catholic supremacy only in Ulster. Indeed, even in Ulster he had to give up on his initial hope of keeping all nine counties of the province united with Britain. With their Catholic and Nationalist majorities, there was no question of separating three of them from the south and west of the country.

Indeed, there was even a question mark of whether two further counties, where the Protestant majority was thin, Fermanagh and Tyrone, might have to be left out of a union with the British Empire. But they stayed in.

At the end of this protracted and, ultimately, vicious struggle, Irish nationalists had moved away from their old allegiance to parties looking for Home Rule, to Sinn Fein which wasn’t prepared to settle for anything less than full independence. And at the end of 1921, it achieved its aim – in part. That part was made up of 26 of the 32 Irish counties, while the remaining six in Ulster, with their Protestant majority, were excluded and remained with Britain.

The six counties got their own parliament at Stormont, and in 1932, their government erected the statue to Carson in front of the building.

Now, let’s be clear what had happened. Those six counties had a Protestant majority, for sure. But it represented a minority of Ireland as a whole. So what had been achieved was to create a separate territory to manufacture a majority out of a minority. Not, perhaps, what a strict democrat would regard as strictly democratic.

That majority remained dominant for decades in the north-eastern corner of the island, the region known as Northern Ireland by the (unionist) community that likes to underline its difference from the rest, but the North of Ireland by the (nationalist) community that wants to stress that it’s still part of the same country.

One person who sticks to the expression ‘North of Ireland’ is Michelle O’Neill, a leading figure in today’s Sinn Fein. And why is she so significant? Because last week she became First Minister. So Nationalist Sinn Fein now holds the top political position in the six counties that were hived off to create an anti-Nationalist majority.

Michelle O'Neill addressing the Assembly at Stormont

Another fine irony.

It reflects the fact that the Protestants’ numerical advantage has been steadily eroding. There are now more Catholics in the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland than there are Protestants. That doesn’t mean that reunification of Ireland is on the cards anytime soon. On the contrary, polls suggest that there isn’t yet a majority for it. But, surely, another significant step has been taken along that road.

And here’s another nice irony. 

Every time Michelle O’Neill drives to work at Stormont, she’ll go past that colossal statue of Carson, the stern upholder of the law who felt entirely entitled to break it when it suited him. And it suited him to break it in order to keep anyone like her well away from the kind of post she now holds.

I hope she smiles and waves to him each time.

Nostalgia: it just ain't what it used to be

It was a pleasure to discover that my youngest son was visiting the family of our daughter-out-law this weekend. That took him to Belfast. And that took me back to some old memories, with feelings a little like nostalgia.

I say “a little like” because the word “nostalgia” suggests more attractive memories than those that came to my mind.

The first time I travelled to Belfast, I stayed in the Europa Hotel, reputed to be the most bombed in Europe. Indeed, when I arrived, one side of the hotel had all its windows boarded up after a bomb attack. To get in, I had to walk through a corridor with a chicane leading to a security area where luggage could be searched. Ironically, the whole cumbersome structure was unmanned, which was convenient since it saved me time, but also unnerving because it didn’t inspire much confidence in the security measures.

My room overlooked the headquarters of the Ulster Unionist Party with its sign, “Keep Ulster British”. That struck me as ironic since I was a Brit and little about the place struck me British.

Normally, alone in a new city, I’d wander out to get the feel of the place and find someone pleasant for a meal. I felt so afraid of those eerily empty streets that I found it hard to take the plunge on my first evening in Belfast. In the end, in order not to give way to simple cowardice, I walked quickly around the block opposite the hotel, saw nowhere that attracted me for dinner, and went back to order room service instead.

Later I got to know the city rather better, and had many of the classic experiences: driving without knowing it within a few hundred of metres of a major attack (the Ulster Defence Association’s shooting of Catholic civilians in a betting shop, leaving five dead and nine injured), asking directions of a flak-jacketed, machine-gun-toting policeman and being surprised by the cordiality of the answer, walking with other civilians through the middle of an army patrol…

A scene from 1971:
how civilians and soldiers mixed in Northern Ireland

I also learned to appreciate many of the ironies of the Northern Irish existence. For instance, the Ulster Defence Association that carried out the betting shop murders, was officially “loyalist”. Loyalty, it seemed, did not require respect for the law or traditions of the country, Britain, to which these gentlemen saw themselves as loyal. But then, outside the Northern Ireland Assembly building there still stands a larger-than-life statue of Sir Edward Carson, the man who raised an illegal army to fight the British government’s moves towards a timid measure of home rule in Ireland. “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”, he proclaimed, and though a lawyer and a Member of Parliament, he mustered forces to support his claim. However, his treason was met not by imprisonment or the rope but by a statue to his memory.

Some years earlier, I had travelled to East Berlin. I landed in the West and took the Underground into the Eastern sector, seeing for the first time the dimly lit ghost stations of the East, closed to passengers and patrolled by armed policemen. When I emerged at Friedrichstrasse, the only station left open in East Berlin on that line, I also had to walk through a corridor with a chicane, but this one was far from unmanned, as I came around a corner nearly into the arms of a young policeman with a machine gun clutched to his chest.

Armed police in a Berlin ghost station

As in Belfast some years later, I was nervous about wandering out into the streets of East Berlin. I quickly realised, however, that East Berlin fulfilled a positively Thatcherite vision of urban peace (Maggie was firmly enthroned back then, made secure by Labour’s decision to equip itself with a leader no one was going to elect Prime Minister – oh, how we learn the lessons of experience): the streets were safe, with more police on view than anyone else. Only near the Brandenburg Gate did I feel nervous again: there was the wall, suddenly blocking off the great boulevard of Unter den Linden, with a small opening guarded by armed men, and the glare of the searchlights in the death strip beyond them.

Thinking back today to those two experiences, of Belfast in the Troubles and Berlin in the Cold War, made me realise that nostalgia will soon not be what it once was. The nastiness of those days had a quality of drama, inspiring many a novel or film: how often have you seen floodlights on barbed wire in spy films based in Berlin, or blacked-up British troops patrolling past IRA murals in films about Belfast?

Whereas today’s ghastliness has replaced drama by farce. People who don’t know what they’re wishing for have elected an unstable moron to the White House or voted to take Britain out of the European Union, without understanding the wound they’re inflicting on themselves.

On the other hand, the farce is a dangerous one. An unstable moron with his fingers on the nuclear button? Sheer slapstick, for sure – but hardly a laughing matter. 

I preferred the old nostalgia.

Bristol and reminders of colonialism

Bristol, in the West of England, has a distinctive accent with, as a particular characteristic, a tendency to add an ‘l’ to words that end with a vowel. “Africal,” they apparently say there, “is a malarial areal.”

It was fun to be there this weekend, partly because we saw friends I liked already but whom I shall miss even more after the wonderful time we’ve just spent with them. But the visit was also a success for allowing me at last to get to know the city well: I’ve been there at least a dozen times, but usually on fleeting visits, for work, turning up in the morning and clearing off again in the evening.

Not this time. We walked around the place, we sat on the top floor of an open-top bus like any tourists, we even took a boat trip around the harbour. Boat tours are particularly striking because they give such a lovely view of a city, from below, but also in the case of Bristol, because they show the might of the city as a port. It was seagoing trade that made Bristol great, as it did those other fine cities, Liverpool in north west England, or Nantes in western France – and predominantly in the same kind of trade: slaves. So many suffered and died in the past to make some wonderful cities today.

Edward Colston commemorated in Bristol
as a humanitarian and philanthropist
Thanks for a fortune made by enslaving Africans

What struck me most, though, was the guide on the bus, who spoke with the unmistakeable local accent. Though what touched me about that accent wasn’t hearing it there, but the memory it evoked of a time I heard it once before.

For many years, I travelled regularly to Northern Ireland for work. It was the time of the troubles and, though I never witnessed an attack, the atmosphere was strongly moulded by the threat: police stations were fortified, police looked like soldiers, soldiers were out doing police work. I became friendly with a particular taxi driver who regularly picked me up from the airport and ran me back at the end of my trip, and he would show me around the place too, including some districts which he entered with some reluctance, and left with equivalent alacrity.

One night, as he was driving me back to Aldegrove, Belfast International airport, out in the country south of Belfast, we were stopped by an army patrol. At least, I assume it was a patrol, though we only saw one soldier.

It was dark and the road was deserted. As he came over to the driver’s window, the soldier, helmeted, flak-jacketed, with a machine gun on his hip, looked the model of the arrogant warrior. But then he crouched down and we could see his face. He must have been nineteen. And then he spoke.

It was that accent. Bristol. Pure and round and unmistakeable.

And all I could think was, “what on Earth are you doing here? Young, totally uninvolved in these troubles, from a place not that many miles away but in a different world, policing an emergency in which you have absolutely no interest. Out on a dark road, at night, a figure of oppression to the opponents of a power exercised by people you’ve never met, and a target yourself.”

I’ve never felt the tragedy of colonialism more strongly.

British soldiers at a Northern Irish roadblock in 1988
Doing a favour to few, least of all themselves

Responding to the Brussels attacks: how to get it wrong

It’s Brussels this time. At least another 31 deaths and over 200 injured. Harrowing, dismal events, and the latest in a series of them.

The scene at Zaventem airport, Brussels, soon after the explosion

That’s bad enough, but then it gets worse. As usual, our own reaction will magnify the damage and give the terrorists a victory they’ve done nothing to merit.

The Belgian government, for instance, will go way over the top with security measures, making life much safer but far less convenient. People will have to leave earlier to get to work on time, earlier to catch a plane. So as well as the tragedy inflicted on the families immediately involved, the terrorists will leave a lasting mark on the economy of a major European capital, making it more difficult to run.

The British government has added to the mix by advising against travel to Brussels. I have no particular reason to go to Brussels at the moment, but fear of terrorism wouldn’t stop me: the place is going to be one of the safest on earth for the new few weeks or months. Just a pig to get around.

In any case, it would be nonsense to fear Brussels, since I commute into London. That city has to be facing a risk of terrorism at least as high as at any time since the IRA campaign of the eighties. But I still feel I’m much more likely to be involved in a traffic accident than caught up in a terrorist outrage; since I’m not going to stop crossing roads or driving a car, it makes no sense avoiding London.

Besides, refusing to be deflected denies the terrorists an easy win.

There are other, still more vital ways, of denying them. One of the most important is to resist the urge to bomb them out of existence. It was that kind of thinking that got us into our difficulties in the first place: an illegitimate, unnecessary war in Iraq spawned ISIS. The Syrian civil war has become a proxy for East-West clashes as well as tensions inside the Middle East, that are wreaking havoc in Libya and Yemen too. We’ve brutalised a great many young men, and not a few young women, and given them something to avenge.

Staffan de Mistura, UN Special Envoy on the Syria crisis, told the Guardian that, following the Brussels attacks:

The message we are drawing out is that we need to end the fires of war. We need to find a political solution in Syria to make sure we can all concentrate on what is the real danger, in the world and in Syria.

Take away the underlying conflict, and you take away its expression in other countries – in Turkey, which suffers more often than most, but also in Europe.

Going a step further, we also have to resist the temptation to blame the outrages on Islam or Molenbeek, the district of Brussels from which the attacks against both Brussels and Paris came. Donald Trump is naturally attacking immigration itself as the source of such terrorism, trying to blame entire populations for the work of a handful of people; in Britain, the far-right UKIP attacks open borders in Europe, ignoring the fact that Salah Abdeslam, who led on the logistics of the Paris attack, was stopped at the Hungarian-Austrian border in September 2015, but was allowed to drive on. The failure wasn’t due to the Schengen group’s open borders but to lousy intelligence.

Stigmatising a European Muslim population of several million for the actions of a tiny minority simply creates more enemies for us; targeting Molenbeek would be just as counter-productive, since what makes the district generate aggression so easily is precisely that it’s so poorly assimilated. 30% are out of work. One in three of the population is foreign. Increasing its pain will do no one any good.

The IRA campaign in Northern Ireland was waged by a few hundred activists. Behind them, however, there were probably many thousands of passive supporters who provided the active members with information and shelter as necessary.

Eventually, once Westminster had woken up to a more intelligent approach to the province than military repression, huge sums were invested into Northern Ireland to revive the economy. A long campaign led to reasonably fair access to jobs, housing and education for Protestants and Catholics. The effect was to drain the swamp that gave the activists their support.

At the same time, intense and highly competent intelligence work enabled the security services to break up IRA groups and thwart attacks. After all, if the IRA had to depend on many thousands, it was impossible not to have leaks to the police, and good intelligence took advantage of them.

It’s clear, if only from the fact that Abdeslam escaped arrest in Molenbeek for several months, that there’s an extensive passive support network there too. Again, there must have been leaks. But were the security forces set up to take advantage of them? Belgium is, for instance, coming to terms with the fact that the police force has far too few Arabic speakers.

Whatever Trump may say, Molenbeek doesn’t demonstrate a failure of the Community, merely a failure of Community policing.

Will we be smart enough to apply the lessons of Northern Ireland elsewhere in Europe? To respond to the latest attacks not with increased repression but with investment and highly-competent intelligence work? To help all our sad little Molenbeeks, across the continent, out of their misery rather than drive them deeper into it?

Which boils down to one simple question: will we avoid giving the terrorists yet another undeserved victory?

Combating terrorism: we know what works and what doesn't. So why do we keep choosing what doesn't?

There’s no simpler solution to complex politics than war.

That’s because all war requires is the willingness to spend a lot of money, sacrifice a number of lives of your own people and, if things go to plan, a lot more lives of another people. Mostly nations of the prosperous West have little difficulty working up the necessary will. So, for instance, the Fench reaction to the Paris attacks, to mount bombing raids on ISIS in Syria, is a simple, not to say simplistic, response.

French air strikes.
Simple. Powerful. Effective? Who knows.

Almost as simple is rounding up people. It’s more difficult if you take the trouble to arrest real suspects, against whom you can mount a case. If you just go after people who might be supporters, without pedantic concern for, say, evidence, that’s as easy as bombing raids. You might, like France, just round up the perpetrators’ families.

Not that I’m particularly criticising France. Other nations behave as badly. Consider reactions to the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, carried out by a team which was predominantly Saudi. The leader of the organisation behind the attack, Al Qaida, was also Saudi. Much of the funding was Saudi.

It still made some sense to attack Afghanistan, if only because the Al Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, was living there. But it made no sense to attack Iraq next. Iraq? There was no suggestion of Iraqi involvement in 9/11. So the justification for the Iraq invasion became weapons of mass destruction. Absence of evidence, the hawks would tell us, isn’t evidence of absence. However, once we were able to establish facts on the ground, it became clear there was plenty of evidence of the absence of those weapons. And hence absence of any justification for the war.

To try to give it some kind of retrospective appeal, the invading forces decided to rebuild the country along new, improved lines. Unfortunately, they used the army to do the job. Armies are designed to destroy, not to build. So the effects were as disastrous as might – ought – to have been expected.

After years of downright oppression, the Shia majority of Iraq took power. Like most people previously downtrodden, they leaped at the opportunity to do some treading down themselves. The West, which had casually disbanded the Iraqi army with its Sunni leadership, took no steps to protect Sunnis from the rule of their enemies. New Sunni resistance movements emerged, fell under the control of religious fundamentalists, and from that toxic fusion, produced ISIS.

Doesn’t the French reaction, so far, to the Paris attacks remind you of the US/UK response to 9/11? Force first, and repression, rather than thought, self-analysis and careful consideration of the consequences of action.

Self-analysis is badly needed. It’s emerging that both Iraq and Turkey warned France of the impending attacks. That they weren’t forestalled is a major intelligence failure. Analysing that shortcoming is far harder than despatching aircraft or arresting suspects. Besides, many people – some of them individuals I’d previously regarded as sensible – are clamouring for heavy handed action. “Close the borders!” they call, “lock up the imams! Kick out the refugees!”

That last call is particularly curious. Many refugees are fleeing the onslaught of ISIS, the very foe we face in the West, and which the West created. More Syrians are killed every day than in the Paris attacks that so stunned Europe. Close the borders to them? That’s like eating a starving man’s meal and then refusing to let emergency supplies through.

What’s worst about the demand for repression is that we saw what happened when we took that approach towards Iraq. It heightened tensions. It attracted recruits to the insurgent cause. It led to the unleashing of the forces we now have to combat.

Curiously, we also know a different way of behaving and know it works. When the troubles broke out in Northern Ireland, Britain’s initial response was also repressive. The consequences were Bloody Sunday, the Guildford 4, the Birmingham 6, a whole litany of other miscarriages of justice, murders, bombings and misery.

Eventually saner spirits prevailed. They understood that an insurgency only survives with the support of a disaffected population. So steps were taken to stop the disaffection. Housing, job opportunities and education were improved for the previously oppressed nationalist communities. Military action was maintained but at a lower level, while the accent moved more firmly on effective intelligence work, until the IRA was so penetrated that its decisions were being communicated to British security services in near real time.

Out of all this came the Good Friday peace agreement. There have been setbacks, but by and large it’s held. The result, for anyone who remembers Belfast before, is spectacular. It used to be a city under siege; today it’s vibrant and exciting. 

That approach works, and we know it works. Against ISIS, we may have to use more extensive brute force, to defeat it militarily. But we’ll also need far better intelligence work than France has produced so far. And we’ll need to support the communities that produce the terrorists.

The last step’s counter-intuitive. It means investing in the very people from whom the insurgency emerges. It means making them prosperous and tolerating their cultures and faiths. For those in France who are sickened by the Muslim veil or beard, and are saying so loudly since the attacks, that will be a hard pill to swallow.

Trust me, guys. It really works. Far better than repression, which is what ISIS wants – repression generates the oppressed, disaffected Sunnis who made it strong in the first place. ISIS hates the idea of well-off Muslim communities in the West, peacefully coexisting Shia and Sunni Muslims in the Middle East. 

Because they’ll snuff ISIS out.

Strange tale of an extremist, a Prince and the not-so saintly Maggie

It was ironic to see the pictures of Prince Charles, tea cup in one hand, using the other for an apparently cordial handshake with Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin leader in Northern Ireland and for many on this side of the water, one of the great bogeymen of all time.

The Prince and the Extremist
Extraordinary cordiality

He repeatedly leaned forward towards the Prince, apparently exchanging not merely remarks, but confidences. This is particularly surprising because they both have bitter history against the other, as Adams made clear yesterday: he blames the British paras for the terrible killing of fourteen people on Bloody Sunday, in Derry, in 1972, and the Prince is the honorary Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment. However, Adams did also recognise that Charles had “been bereaved by the actions of Republicans”, in a reference to the IRA killing of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India and a relative to whom Charles was particularly close (his “honorary grandfather”).

None of this was half so ironic, for me, than the contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s attitude when she was Prime Minister. She famously talked about the need “to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend”. That led to one of the more risible aspects of her long and painful reign: she banned the voices of extremist organisations being heard on British TV.

This meant that for six years, we could see Gerry Adams on our TVs, we could see his lips forming the words he was pronouncing, but we couldn’t hear his voice pronouncing them: instead, an actor would dub them in over the picture. Exactly the same words, mind you. The “oxygen of publicity” denial didn’t affect his message, only his voice.

This is one of the less well-remembered aspects of the Thatcher years. I always remind her fans of it, when they present her as some kind of secular saint, as they regularly do. It was an entirely pointless act, and damaged only Britain: you can imagine how difficult it made it to argue against freedom of speech limitations in other countries.

The ban kept running after Thatcher fell, perhaps out of deference to her memory. But finally, in 1994, her successor John Major dropped it. The only people who regretted its passing were the actors who were called on to dub the voices: it had been a nice little earner for them.

Today, that same Gerry Adams met and chatted for a few minutes to the next in line to the British throne. With every appearance of cordiality. No actor was on hand to repeat his words for him. And the earth didn’t fall into the sky.

In fact, what the incident did was to strengthen the growing bonds between erstwhile adversaries in Northern Ireland, as the Queen herself did three years ago, when she met Adams’ colleague and the current Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuiness, and shook his hand.

Rather underlying the fact that if you want to bring peace anywhere, it’s a lot more effective to come to terms with your resentments, however deeply held they may be, however justified, and listen to your adversary. A lot more effective than spreading further hatred by labelling him a terrorist and extremist. And then trying to shut him up.

And if it turns out you actually can't, it’s laughable as well as ineffective

In praise of Blair the Peacemaker

What a disappointment it would be to meet one of the great figures of our time and find they didn’t live up to their reputation.

Imagine meeting George W. Bush (Bush the lesser, that is, or perhaps I should say, even lesser) and find him suave, witty, insightful?

Meeting Robert Mugabe and finding him gentle, cordial and sensitive?

Meeting Maggie Thatcher and finding her self-effacing, diffident and open to the ideas of others?

Equally, it would be horrible to discover a Tony Blair unafraid to admit his errors, happy to share credit for his achievements and prepared to atone for, or at least admit to, his untruths.

Tony Blair showing how foreign self-satisfaction is to him

So it was wonderful to see Blair writing in the Guardian about his ‘pain, passion and empathy’ and what he’s learned about peacemaking. His article is a fine tribute to his efforts as a peacemaker, making it quite unnecessary for me to sing his praises. It is also a glorious example of the use of the truth to deceive. 

It’s true that the Good Friday agreement which brought a measure of peace to Northern Ireland, was Tony Blair’s greatest achievement. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t celebrate it, and in this article he does little else. It’s also true that he speaks highly of the Irish players in the drama, including the then Prime Minister of the Republic, Bertie Ahern. He even gives credit to the Americans, Bill Clinton and George Mitchell, but then he never suffered from any failure to behave obsequiously towards leaders from the United States.

What he doesn’t mention is any of the British involved in the process. Mo Mowlam, for instance, gets no mention, but then she was an independent-minded woman not unwilling to tell Blair when she disagreed with him. Nor does he mention John Major, his predecessor as Prime Minister.

Now I don’t think anyone can accuse me of knowingly giving a Conservative credit for anything unless I absolutely have to, but the Good Friday agreement didn’t leap from Blair’s brain fully-fledged, like Pallas Athene springing fully-armed from the head of Zeus. It took years of careful preparation, rather longer than the eleven months Blair had between his election and the signing ceremony.

After years of mishandling of the province by Margaret Thatcher, descending to its most ludicrous when she had actors voicing over the words of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in TV interviews (so we weren’t hiding his words, just his voice), John Major put in some serious spadework. It involved both judicious use of intelligence operations and early, secret negotiations. It prepared the ground for Blair’s triumph.

See what I mean? Blair’s right to claim the success, wrong to hide the contribution of others to making his breakthrough possible.

But, of course, Blair’s worst silence in the article doesn’t concern Northern Ireland at all.

When we think of Blair, what is the first issue that comes to mind? Is it really Northern Ireland? Is it indeed peacemaking?

Surely the name of Blair will be forever associated with a another part of the world, and with war far more than with peace. And not any old war: a probably illegal war, waged in Iraq for no better reason than one of the worst American presidents of all time, Dubya, wanted to. It was a war, furthermore, which threw the region into even worse turmoil than before while costing an obscene number of lives.

That’s Blair’s real legacy. And it has given him the reputation for duplicity that haunts him still – deservedly: we’ve discovered from the Snowden revelations that the intelligence services know a great deal more than they should, not a great deal less. A secondary effect of those disclosures must be that they had a good idea there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and so Blair was either unforgivably ignorant of the truth, or recklessly economical with it.

Yet of that he had nothing to say in his article.

Perhaps a second article, a sequel, in which he admits his lying and his errors. Wouldn’t that be a refreshing change? Perhaps a shock though, as completely out of character.

And I certainly won’t be holding my breath.

It's a riot, an evening with the Irish. So why waste it rioting?

I hate expressing a view which is tantamount to racist, but I can’t remember meeting anyone from Ireland who I haven’t liked. Whether they’re from North or South of the border, when I think ‘Irish’, I think of a smile, of friendliness, of wit or more commonly, of both.

So it was wonderful to take advantage of the summer we’re enjoying by having two couples of Irish friends around for a barbecue and a balmy evening in the garden.

Both couples came from a sub-group of Irish people I find particularly amusing: the Irish brought up here in England.

The main thing about them is that you can’t tell they’re Irish. At first. One of the couples spoke in the accents of the English Home Counties; the other, had accents from right here in Luton, our town and theirs.

Those who may not have studied the fascinating subject of Englishness sufficiently to seize those nuances should think, for the first accent, of Michael Caine in Zulu; for the second, of Michael Caine in The Italian Job. If you don’t know either film, you have some entertainment ahead of you.

Neither accent sounds even remotely Irish, so it came as no surprise that both couples expressed a little disbelief about the Irishness of the other.

So they asked exactly where they were from. That triggered the inevitable wandering discussion around Ireland: four sets of parents between them covered eight counties, in a country where counties still count. They quickly identified villages they all knew, indeed pubs or churches or hotels they had all visited. I was a little surprised that they didn’t discover that they’d been at weddings that took place in the same place within hours, or at least months, of each other, or that they had cousins, even if only third cousins of second cousins, in common (and blood does run thicker than water).

At least one of our visitors was from Donegal
Clearly a place people are dying to get to.

Once they’d established the authenticity of their shared roots, the evening could really start and the conversation could truly flow. Because it doesn’t matter how long they’ve lived in England or how English they sound, that bond lets the Irish feel at home so they can let go of their inhibitions. And believe me, that’s worth seeing, since they don’t generally start with a lot of inhibitions in the first place. 

What we then had was that long undulating mix of well-lubricated anecdote and wit for which only the Irish have a proper term: craic. Inevitably, some stories required the repetition of dialogue from across the Irish Sea, and it’s at those moments that you find that English accents are only skin deep in the Irish: they can quickly produce a perfect brogue, far beyond the ability of any true Englishman such as myself.

So our friends retained an unquestionable Irishness despite being born in England and having lived here ever since. Which sounds like perfect assimilation: completely at home in this country, sounding like its inhabitants, without losing their distinct identities. What could be better?

That’s all slightly curious, though. After all, those four are all Catholics, in principle and even, to some limited extent, in practice. Yet they have no difficulty living under the shadow of the Union Jack – the baleful shadow, some of their more nationalist countrymen might say – in a nation whose monarch is still the head of the Protestant Church of England.

They do fine over here, as do those who eventually go ‘back home’, to a country in which they’ve never lived, and settle down just as comfortably under the Tricolour. An experience shared with many thousands of Englishmen who’ve moved across.

So here’s a question. If Irish and English can live under each other’s flags, their religions rubbing along together in general harmony, both here and across the water, just what is it that gets into the bloods of those tedious minorities who make all the trouble in the North of Ireland?

What on Earth does it matter which flag flies over Belfast Town Hall or for how many days of the year? Why should one Community get upset by another Community marching along its streets? Why should that second Community insist on marching along the street knowing that the first will be offended?

As happens nearly every year, when the Glorious 12th of July came, the riots started in Northern Ireland. Men and women, police and civilians have been injured, over matters no other country or community can begin to understand.

Belfast: what a waste of barbecue time
And a missed opportunity for craic

With absolutely no necessity. Believe me, this precious summer weather which we see so seldom, isn’t something to waste on Molotov cocktails and tear gas. Nationalists, loyalists: get the barbies out. Get the friends round – perhaps even some from the other community. Break out a few cans and let the conversation flow. Believe me, with people from anywhere in your island, it just works. And it’s a hell of a sight more fun.

As I experienced again this weekend, it’s a shame to miss the craic.

Enjoying St Patrick's: a cautionary tale

It being St Patrick’s day, I’m reminded of an occasion when I took two doctors from Belfast to visit some US hospitals. Our American hosts had issued us with name badges, and those for my guests were marked ‘Ireland’. Not ‘Northern Ireland’, just ‘Ireland’.

Isn’t that kind of historical ambiguity absolutely wonderful? At that time, there had been some seventy years of pain and bloodshed about whether there was a distinction between Northern Ireland and the rest of the island. Indeed, since the Good Friday Agreement was a long way in the future, we were still caught up in the depths of that misery, the murders, the bombings, the atrocities. So a blissful unawareness of the issues had a certain charm. As I’d found when a colleague of mine due to accompany me to Belfast came to ask about it.

‘Do I need to change money?’ she asked. ‘And will I need my passport?’

I tried to explain to her why the State in which we lived was called the ‘United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland’. But I probably confused her still more by telling her that we wouldn’t have needed passports even to travel to Dublin, although that city really is the capital of an ostensibly foreign country.

‘No passports to travel to the Republic of Ireland?’

‘Nope. It’s probably because we’ve been such enemies for so long. It’s bred a sense of trust in each other.’

As I tell these stories, it occurs to me that they aren’t really a reflection on the people who prepared those name badges or who didn't understand the chaotic arrangements between countries of the British Isles. It isn’t the people who are stupid, it’s the arrangements.

The visit with the Belfast doctors to the US happened, fortuitously, to include St Patrick’s day. And even more fortuitously one of my guests turned up on the day wearing a green sweatshirt. 


A badge marked ‘Ireland’. Green clothing. On St Patrick’s day. In a nation where everyone, but everyone, claims Irish ancestry. Wherever we went, he would find complete strangers coming up to him, seizing his hand and wishing him a happy St Patrick’s day.

Now this particular doctor was no extremist, but he was very firmly a Protestant and a Unionist. He lived in North Antrim, which made Ian Paisley his Member of Parliament and, while he didn’t speak as loudly, thank God, he certainly had much the same accent.

He kept his cool all day. But every time he received those congratulations, he replied with exactly the same words, cooly pronounced in his Antrim voice.

‘We don’t celebrate it.’

The reactions were a delight to behold. A glance at the name badge, at the green sweater; a moment to take in the accent, undoubtedly from somewhere in the Emerald Isle; and then a few seconds to absorb the import of the words. With a shake of the head, the bemused speaker would wander back into the crowd, defeated and disappointed.

It was completely appropriate. We had once more contributed to the sense of total incomprehension which is, above all else, the hallmark of Anglo-Irish relations.

Happy St Patrick’s Day! If you celebrate it.

Best way to enjoy the day. And maximise the confusion