Posted by Jim on February 27, 2018
Sadly, there is no way of ignoring the elephant in the Northern Ireland-room: enduring, deep-seated ant-Catholicism.
But how could it be otherwise since the very top law in England enshrines State-sponsored anti-Catholicism in the British unwritten and un-coded constitution? The Act of Settlement 1701 – the foundation stone of the Royal Family—forbids a Catholic from ever being Monarch. And this is the provision to which the Unionists/Loyalists/Protestants give their ultimate allegiance —not just to the British Throne, but to Protestant succession to the British Throne, as the historical record abundantly proves…. It’s morally and legally equivalent to having a provision in the US Constitution forbidding a Black person ever being President.
The Beloved Community—pending the inevitable re-unification of Ireland— cannot be built up on a foundation of anti-Catholic bigotry and anti-Irish racism.
Anti-Catholic bigotry of many in DUP still significant
‘I wonder how many Northern unionists still hold appalling, near-racist views’
Andy Pollak. Irish Times. Dublin. Wednesday, February 22, 2018
(Andy Pollak is former religious affairs correspondent and Belfast reporter with The Irish Times.)
‘I wonder how many Northern unionists still hold appalling, near-racist views’
Andy Pollak. Irish Times. Dublin. Wednesday, February 22, 2018
(Andy Pollak is former religious affairs correspondent and Belfast reporter with The Irish Times.)
“It is disappointing that the deep and overlapping anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry
of so many DUP-supporting unionists appears to still play a significant role in Northern
life and politics.” Above, DUP leader Arlene Foster. Photograph: Paul Faith/AFP/Getty Images
How much did continuing religious bigotry have to do with the collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive last month? It was clear from Martin McGuinness’s resignation statement that the row which led to that collapse was not only – or even mainly – about the Renewable Heat Initiative fiasco.
McGuinness accused First Minister Arlene Foster of “deep-seated arrogance” and the DUP of rejecting his attempts to reach out to Unionists, of “shameful disrespect” to women, gay people and ethnic minorities, and “crude and crass bigotry” to Irish language speakers.
In a follow-up RTÉ interview, McGuinness said there were many people in the DUP who “hate anything to do with Irish nationalism and Irish republicanism.”
As somebody who began studying the DUP more than 30 years ago (in the course of researching a biography of the late Ian Paisley), I recognize the truth in all these charges. I had hoped that their antiquated prejudices would have begun to diminish as a realization that they had to share their divided little society with their nationalist neighbours started to dawn on Unionists in a new century.
It is disappointing that the deep and overlapping anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry of so many DUP-supporting unionists appears to still play a significant role in Northern life and politics.
Inherently superior
Back in 1986, I wrote about the people who followed Paisley as follows: “They believed they were inherently superior to their Roman Catholic neighbours because of their religion. They were ‘born again’ Christians, living in the ‘light’ of pure Protestantism, free men who communed with God without the interference of priests or man-made rituals. Catholics, on the other hand, were benighted and ignorant souls who were enslaved by the ‘darkness’ of Roman superstition, the idolatry of the Mass, and the rule of the papal anti-Christ.
“Such a view tallied perfectly with the superiority they felt anyway as the descendants of the people who had ‘civilized’ Ulster. Thus the underprivileged position of Northern Catholics was nothing to do with injustice: quite the opposite – it was living proof of God’s justice in rewarding those who followed the true religion.”
I wonder how many Northern unionists of the DUP persuasion still hold such appalling, near-racist views. Too many, I suspect, although friends tell me that such bigotry is far less prevalent among younger DUP members (and I have at least one young DUP councillor acquaintance who bears that out).
A politically-minded Belfast Protestant minister told me recently that about a third of DUP Assembly members were old-fashioned conservative evangelicals – some might call them fundamentalists – who continue to oppose Roman Catholicism as non-Christian, and to look down on its followers.
This kind of anti-Catholic Protestantism also remains a significant factor in the North’s largest Protestant denomination, the Presbyterian Church. Its younger ministers are overwhelmingly conservative evangelicals, and many of its congregations are closed off from wider society, with a pietistic belief system that has little to say about issues of sectarianism and social justice.
As the outspoken former moderator, the Rev John Dunlop, says,anti-Catholicism.
Religious nightclubs
Church attendance in Northern Ireland, as everywhere in Europe, is in decline. Belfast is no longer a city where nothing opens on a Sunday and the only entertainment on that day is of the soul-saving type – “a city of religious nightclubs”, to use Methodist leader Donald Soper’s memorable phrase from the 1950s.
No longer is there an atmosphere of cold war between Irish (and British) Protestantism and Catholicism, the kind of atmosphere that saw the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1953 denounce “the oppressions and denials of just liberties which lie at the door of the Roman Catholic Church”.
Relations between the churches have improved hugely since then. In 2004, the Rev Ken Newell, that year’s courageously liberal (and peacemaking) Presbyterian moderator, incurred the wrath of conservatives by inviting the Catholic primate, Cardinal Seán Brady, to its annual General Assembly for the first time.
This invitation was not repeated, although there have been other high-level gestures, such as Archbishop of Armagh Eamon Martin’s attendance at a Presbyterian conference on 1916 last year.
Even 30 years ago I estimated that as many as 80 per cent of DUP members would have been Catholic-fearing fundamentalists. A lot has been done, but there is still a lot to do to overcome religious bigotry and fearfulness in the Protestant North.
Posted by Jim on February 25, 2018
Hardline Brexiters want to sacrifice the 1998 peace deal on the altar of their ambitions. But soon they will learn that the Belfast Agreement puts tight limits on Britain’s options
Fintan O’Toole. The Guardian .England. Saturday, 24 Feb 2018
The culmination of the referendum campaign was the BBC’s live Great Debate from Wembley on the evening of June 21, 2016. It lasted for two hours. After an hour and a half, someone finally raised the question of Britain’s obligations under the Belfast Agreement of 1998 (often called the Good Friday Agreement) that brought an end to the longest and most vicious internal conflict in the history of the United Kingdom. Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC [ Trades Union Congress], spoke passionately in a tone of pleading desperation: “Many trade unionists in Britain and Ireland worked together for many years to support the peace process in Northern Ireland and it took a lot of hard work. And we’ve supported the Good Friday Agreement ever since … The Irish prime minister has said that if we come out of the EU, there will have to be border controls and, let me tell you, the way that is seen in Belfast and Derry, I worry for our future.”
It fell to Boris Johnson to reply to O’Grady on behalf of the Leave campaign. “I remember vividly,” he said, “when the EU was given the task of trying to sort out the tragedy in the Balkans…” For those who had suspected that, for most of the Brexiters, Ireland might as well be Montenegro, here was literal confirmation. Johnson spoke for two minutes. He did not address O’Grady’s point at all. He did not manage even the most facile of cliches about the Belfast Agreement or the benefits of peace. He did, admittedly, raise the question of violence on the streets: “I do worry about our security on the streets of this city.” This city was, of course, London. The UK cities that O’Grady had mentioned – Belfast and Derry – were neither here nor there.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are very much “there” – a foreign place barely glimpsed even in peripheral vision. Johnson has been utterly consistent in this. In his big Brexit speech earlier this month, delivered as foreign secretary, he said about the Belfast Agreement exactly what he said in June 2016: not a word. There is some irony in the way he has implicitly adopted the great vernacular slogan of people in Northern Ireland during the Troubles: whatever you say, say nothing.
The consequences of Brexit for the Belfast Agreement have always been, for the most ardent Leavers, the thing that must not be seen or spoken. And in the way of such things, the whole Brexit process has been haunted by the return of the repressed. The EU has refused to pretend that there is no Irish problem. It has not gone along with the British government’s airy assurances that “there will be no return to the borders of the past” on the island of Ireland because everything is going to be frictionless, seamless and marvellous. The EU insisted, in the first phase of negotiations, on turning these airy assurances into solid commitments.
This week, Brussels will publish its draft withdrawal agreement, a legally binding text under which the UK will, in effect, commit itself to keeping Northern Ireland in the Single Market and Customs Union, unless a future free trade deal or a magical technological solution manages somehow to avoid a hard Border. It will also bind both parties to recognizing in all negotiations the “paramount importance”, as Theresa May wrote in her Article 50 letter, of the Belfast Agreement.
This has enormous repercussions. The sleeping beauties on the Tory right, for whom ignorance of Ireland was Brexit bliss, are finally waking up to these implications. A fog of denial and self-delusion is beginning to clear and they can at last see what should have been obvious all along: you can have a hard Brexit or you can have the Belfast Agreement but you can’t have both [Emphasis added]. And it is increasingly clear which choice they want Britain to make: throw the dead weight of the peace process overboard so that the Brexit balloon may soar into the blue skies of its triumphant future.
The Tory right has never been fond of the Belfast Agreement, even though it was John Major who (with considerable courage) prepared the way for it by explicitly removing any British claim over Northern Ireland other than the democratic wishes of its people. In The Price of Peace, Michael Gove’s pamphlet for the rightwing Centre for Policy Studies, published in 2000, he characterized the entire peace process as nothing more than a capitulation to the IRA which he likened to the appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s. But this hostility lapsed over time into mere indifference – until, very late in the day, Brexit’s true believers began to understand that they have an Irish problem.
Hence, as the EU prepares to publish its draft legal text, [there is now] what seems like a concerted campaign to clear the greatest moral and political obstacle from the path to Brexit glory. The Belfast Agreement must be made not to matter.The failure of attempts to re-establish a power-sharing executive in Belfast opens up the opportunity to say that the whole 1998 deal is no longer worth bothering about.
And so the former Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson tweeted that “The collapse of power-sharing in Northern Ireland shows the Good Friday Agreement has outlived its use”. Labour’s staunchest Brexiter, Kate Hoey, follows up by declaring the agreement “unsustainable”. The leading Tory intellectual, Daniel Hannan, in his Daily Telegraph column, dismisses the agreement as nothing more than “a bribe to two sets of hardliners” in Northern Ireland. He claims, rather astonishingly, that it did not bring peace because Northern Ireland was already at peace: “The Belfast Agreement was a consequence, not a cause, of the end of terrorism.” And to crown the campaign, Jacob Rees-Mogg, also writing in the Telegraph, announces that this whole Irish business does not really exist – it is an “imaginary problem” caused by the Irish government.
The Belfast Agreement is not holy writ and the collapse of the power-sharing talks between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party does, indeed, point to the problematic nature of one part of it – the internal arrangements for the governance of Northern Ireland. If the context were less febrile, the 20th anniversary in April of the Agreement would be an apt opportunity for a thoughtful review of those structures.
But let’s not kid ourselves. These attacks on the Agreement are not coming from a sudden interest in the minutiae of devolved government in Montenegro – sorry, Northern Ireland. They are all about Brexit. The real subject here is not a deal made in Belfast in 1998. It is the deal Theresa May signed in Brussels in December to conclude the first phase of the divorce negotiations. Bizarre as it may seem, many of the leading Brexiters seem not to have understood that deal or the radical implications of the commitments May made in it, commitments that, she concurred, “must be upheld in all circumstances, irrespective of the nature of any future agreement between the European Union and United Kingdom”.
It is worth recalling that when May did this deal in December, the first instinct of the Brexiters was to characterize all the language in it about Ireland as just more meaningless verbiage to stop the Irish from whining on. The Brexit secretary David Davis told Andrew Marr: “This was a statement of intent more than anything else. Much more … than it was a legally enforceable thing.” This was entirely untrue – as we will see this week, the deal will be turned into a legally binding text – and Davis quickly reversed himself and claimed to have been misunderstood. But his claim revealed a deeper mindset: an inability to grasp the underlying reality that the Belfast Agreement sets very tight limits on the UK’s final arrangements with the EU.
The problem for the Brexiters is that, in December, May signed up to two different things, apparently without grasping the connection between them. The first of these is that the Belfast Agreement effectively demands that there be no hard Border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Thus, whatever else happens – even if there is an ultra-hard, no-deal Brexit – the British will “maintain full alignment with those rules of the internal market and the customs union which, now or in the future, support North-South co-operation, the all-island economy and the protection of the 1998 Agreement”.
This is a big commitment in itself, but it could be implemented in a way that had relatively little impact on post-Brexit Britain by, for example, creating customs borders between the two islands of Britain and Ireland rather than within Ireland. Except that this kind of arrangement is anathema to the DUP, on whom May depends for her Commons majority[Emphasis added]. So, in desperate need of a deal, she also gave the DUP what it wanted: an equal commitment that there will be “no new regulatory barriers” between Northern Ireland and Britain. The mathematics of this are quite simple. Northern Ireland has to remain fully aligned with the Republic, which is to say with the customs union and single market. Britain has to remain aligned to Northern Ireland. So Britain has to remain aligned to the customs union and single market. Exit hard Brexit pursued by the Belfast Agreement.
One way to deal with this is heroic denial. The Brexit minister Robin Walker told MPs on Thursday that the text agreed in December “is not talking about full alignment” – even though “full alignment” is exactly what it says. The other is to dig out the root of the whole problem, the Belfast Agreement itself. In a sense, this is the more honest approach, not least because it implicitly acknowledges that the driving force in Brexit is a specifically English nationalism for which the rest of the UK is ultimately dispensible.
But even then there is a problem for the zealots. Their whole vision of a glorious post-Brexit future is based on Britain’s ability to do great trade deals and be a trusted partner on the world stage. Yet, to get there, they now have to start by tearing up two of the most important international deals Britain has signed in its recent history, both of them legally binding. They have to renege on the pact May signed in December, that placed the Belfast Agreement at the centre of the Brexit process. And they have to pull out of the Agreement – which, contrary to what they seem to believe, is not an internal British deal but a binding international treaty between two sovereign governments registered with the United Nations and effectively underpinned by both the United States and the EU.
They would have Britain stand before the world, knee-deep in shredded treaties, and say, “Sign here, trust us!” One can but wish them the best of British luck with that one.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with The Irish Times
Posted by Jim on February 24, 2018
Fallout from Stormont talks hasn’t played well for DUP or its leader
John Manley. Irish News. Belfast. Saturday, February 24, 2018
You suspect Arlene Foster may regret putting the kibosh on the Stormont talks last week. The fallout over the past 10 days has not played well for the DUP or its leader. There has been a catalogue of inconsistent and contradictory accounts of where the negotiations had reached and what was on the table. With every revelation Mrs Foster’s authority diminishes, while the party once regarded as monolithic and professional suddenly appears at sixes and sevens.
Sir. Jeffrey Donaldson’s claim that he was unaware of any deal between Sinn Féin and the British government to release money for Troubles legacy inquests beggars belief. As the DUP’s ‘go to’ man on legacy issues, it appears incredible that the Lagan Valley MP was unaware of this apparent side deal – and even more so given that one week earlier Mary Lou McDonald told a Stormont press conference that Sinn Féin had struck a separate deal with the British government. Again, it points to a gaping disconnect between the DUP negotiating team and the rest of the party.
Mrs. Foster’s short statement yesterday further muddies the waters. She did not refute knowledge of a deal per se but said no one in her party was aware of inquest funding being progressed “in the absence of an overall agreement”.
The former first minister said it was common knowledge that Sinn Féin were in discussions with the British government over legacy matters but that it would be “astonishing” if the funds were released without a deal to restore devolution. It is equally astonishing that Sir Jeffrey was kept completely in the dark.
The glee with which Sinn Féin negotiator Gerry Kelly outlined the details of how matters were agreed highlighted the degree to which his party appears to be enjoying the DUP disarray. But while the exchange made captivating television, it only serves to drive deeper divisions between the two prospective partners in government.
Whether by accident or design, Republicans have emerged from the events of the past fortnight on the front foot. It often appears Sinn Féin has only a modest appetite for returning to Stormont and in the time since Valentine’s Day the DUP has gifted Republicans the perfect riposte to its critics in The South who hoped to gain advantage by pointing to dormant institutions north of the Border. The proposed deal itself may have been comparable to a score draw but it’s clear republicans have run rings around the DUP in the aftermath of the talks collapsing.
Yet, sadly, all these shenanigans simply sets the process back further and makes the prospect of agreement any time soon increasingly remote.
Posted by Jim on
Allison Morris.Irish News.Belfast. Friday, February 23, 2018
A GROUP of 50 Northern Ireland lawyers have signed a letter expressing concerns at the “vacuum confronting victims and survivors seeking access to justice”.
The solicitors, specializing in legacy cases, represent a range of law firms. They have said it is “unacceptable and intolerable” that the legacy mechanisms agreed in the Stormont House Agreement more than three years ago, have yet to be implemented.
They have also expressed concerns at growing calls by a number of Conservative MPs for a statute of limitation to prevent any further investigations into the actions of British soldiers while serving in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The lawyers include Patricia Coyle, Niall Murphy, Kevin Winters, Pádraig Ó Muirigh, Patrick Fahy and Peter Madden.
They have signed a letter carried in today’s Irish News saying they are committed to a “human rights compliant approach to addressing outstanding legacy issues”.
“We also note the delays which many families have recently been notified of, in respect of pending reports by the Police Ombudsman, as a result of recent litigation by the Retired Police Officers Association.
“The maxim that justice delayed is justice denied could not be more appropriate in the circumstances.
“The loss suffered by many families in our recent conflict has been compounded by the failure of the justice system in the past to acknowledge the wrong done to them.
“If we are to restore confidence in the justice system and rule of law it is imperative that the reasonable expectations of the victims are implemented without any further delay.”
The lawyers confirmed they will also be joining with victims’ families and campaigners at a march this Sunday in Belfast.
Participants in the Time for Truth march will assemble at noon at two separate locations in the city; the McGurk’s Bar memorial in north Belfast and Divis Tower in west Belfast before making its way to Belfast City Hall.
Posted by Jim on
William Scholes.Irish News. Belfast. Friday, February 23, 2018
A casebook of mysteries has emerged from the soutane recesses of the square brackets débâcle.[As in this square bracket, the text of the Stormont Agreement, or lack thereof, was peppered with sqare brackets. Hence Mr. Scholes’ lampooning-use of square brackets in next paragraph].
These include questions over Arlene Foster’s [lack of] leadership and the length of time it will take the DUP to [inevitably] sign up to the [modest] Irish language commitments it has [already] negotiated with Sinn Féin, and thus restore devolution.
Sinn Féin must also explain why, having droned on and on and on for month after month about “no return to the status quo”, it was prepared to embrace a deal that appeared to offer such little progress on so many of its cherished issues.
Yet instead of Sinn Féin being on the back foot because it was going to buy tickets to a status quo tribute act, it is the DUP – as well as unionism more widely – that finds itself rocked back on its heels.
This is, in part, because of internal DUP dynamics and Mrs. Foster’s own cloddishness. Once again, she has approached a political problem with the delicate poise and quiet self-control of a sideboard stuffed with crockery being shoved down several flights of stairs
But it also reflects a wider malaise in DUP-dominated Unionism and the way it has shaped itself and the political landscape in recent years.
A siege mentality and an increasingly parochial outlook are its hallmarks as the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, mere weeks away, limps into view.
There is a fixation with defining Britishness in a very particular way that is not only alien to the British on ‘the mainland’ but also, with its orange and green, them and us narratives, corrosive to citizens in Northern Ireland.
Even when it has got a good deal for its voters, as the latest sensible compromise appears to have been, 21st century Unionism is incapable of talking about it without looking like it is sucking a lemon or sounding like the end of the Union is nigh. It is just a coincidence that ‘nigh’ is Ulster-Scots for ‘now’.
Mrs. Foster’s latest difficulties show a more worrying development, not least for her own position.
Struggling to persuade your voters about the merits of the latest deal with the Shinners is one thing, but being embarrassed into denying its very existence by your own MLAs and MPs is a shambles of an altogether different, bewildering order.
The spectre of internal party opposition is one with which Mrs Foster ought to be very familiar.
While in the UUP, she was among those who felt that David Trimble had sold out Unionism through his support for the Good Friday Agreement.
With others, she eventually left the UUP in 2003, though not before helping sow the seeds of Trimble’s demise, that party’s decline and confirming the notion that Unionists don’t know a decent political deal when they see one.
Fast forward, and it is Mrs. Foster who now finds herself in the isolated position of being out of step with much of her party because of the Irish language elements to the [draft] deal she negotiated with Sinn Féin.
A strong leader can get away with being a step in front of their party. But Mrs. Foster is anything but a strong leader, as demonstrated by the speed and manner with which matters at Stormont unravelled last week.
The gap between her own public pronouncements on the Irish language, crocodiles included, never mind those of comic turns like Gregory Campbell and Sammy Wilson, and the reality of the negotiations with Sinn Féin was simply too wide to be credibly bridged.
And at no time had the DUP signaled to its voters what it was prepared to agree to on the Irish language.
Nor had it the wit to indicate that it was cooking up a good deal for Unionism and that Sinn Féin had dropped its red lines.
When, for example, did you last hear Sinn Féin say Mrs. Foster couldn’t be first minister, or agitate over RHI and Nama? And where has reform of the Petition of Concern and same-sex marriage gone?
After meeting Theresa May on Wednesday, Mrs. Foster again insisted that she was not contemplating an Irish Language Act with impressive sincerity for someone who just days earlier was, erm, contemplating an Irish Language Act.
The consensual optimism of the Trimble era has been obliterated. If Unionism is to have a long future, then it will need to find confident leaders who can articulate a vision fit for a modern, shared society without begrudgery and casual offensiveness.