The truth is that Stormont is no more than a sideshow now
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Version 0 of 1. What’s the best definition of an Ulster oxymoron? A Unionist strategist. Related: David Cameron should suspend Northern Ireland devolution now | Malachi O’Doherty And so it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry, or simply be befuddled, by the latest antics of DUP leader Peter Robinson bringing his own house of Stormont into collapse. What, after all, is the point in bringing down the roof on your head if Stormont is the only roof, the only political forum, you will ever have? Indeed, the only “parliament” you can ever even dream of? How do you save something by destroying it? For Northern Ireland’s Protestants, even the buildings of Stormont, with its proto-fascist architectural grandeur, its sweeping grand vistas, are the very embodiment of their exceptionalism within the United Kingdom; a hubristic monument to the rightness of the Protestant cause and the decades of unbridled rule from the 1920s to the 1970s, in defiance of Dublin and Westminster. A Protestant parliament indeed for a Protestant people. The post-Good Friday agreement Stormont, with its complex constitutional arrangements, is of course a very different political place. But the grand titles, “first minister”, “executive this and that”, MLAs, ministerial cars, policy advisers and the lavish salaries, all swollen on British taxpayers’ cash, at least allow those inside the building to seriously pretend they are doing something meaningful as they administer a province whose population, at 1.7 million, is a third the size of Yorkshire’s. Robinson’s thin excuse for his act of political hara-kiri is the sudden re-emergence of the IRA in the killing of a former IRA assassin Kevin McGuigan – a “green on green” killing. Robinson has a point. In a democracy, political parties such as IRA/Sinn Féin should not have a hit squad of retired assassins they can instantly call upon to bump off their enemies. But in Ulster they do. In hardline republican districts in west Belfast, IRA/Sinn Féin still rule their own communities with a gangsterish grip. And to further rub salt into the wound, if they weren’t on the payroll as MI5 informers in the first place, many ex-IRA “combatants” are now on the government books as “community workers”. It is all part of the lavish bribes of peace. Breaking this IRA grip is deemed more trouble than it’s worth. As Robinson well knows, IRA/Sinn Féin, and the loyalists, have been cynically given a kind of immunity to narrowly police their own communities as part of the political bargain. And in this calculus, McGuigan’s isolated murder by republicans will be offset against the more important reality that the same IRA gunmen who killed McGuigan are no longer plotting to murder policemen and blow up the City of London in pursuit of a united Ireland. The IRA’s war is over, at least for now. Robinson is right to feel embattled, even if he is looking in the wrong direction. His republican enemies are gathering their forces against him for the next stage of their struggle for Irish reunification – the coming Irish general election. The real battleground for the future of Ireland has shifted back to where it all began in 1916, on the streets of Dublin Conveniently for Gerry Adams, the general election comes slap bang in the middle of the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. In state pageant after state pageant, the rebels of 1916 will be canonised and venerated as the founders of the republic on TV, radio and in print. Sinn Féin will be staging a few pageants of its own, and Adams will read out the Easter proclamation on the steps of the Dublin General Post Office on Easter Sunday, just as Pádraig Pearse did 100 years before. The symbolism, laid on with a shovel, will be there for all to see and wonder at. Trapped by history, the republic’s established parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, are flailing to counter Sinn Féin’s siren call that they and their leader Gerry Adams are the true inheritors, the true followers of Pearse’s mythic republic. Adams is playing for bigger stakes than Peter Robinson could ever dream. Standing up against welfare cuts in the north, in the south Sinn Féin, the only trans-border party in Ireland, is presenting itself as defender of the poor and the true guardian of the republic. Like the SNP, it plans to cruise to power on a simplistic but alluring nationalist message. Adams hopes he can double, perhaps triple, Sinn Féin’s current 14 seats in the Dáil, and force his way into coalition and power in the next Irish government. Maybe not taoiseach but perhaps deputy prime minister. In this far wider political struggle the fate of Stormont is an irrelevance. The real battleground for the future of Ireland has shifted back to where it all began in 1916, on the streets of Dublin; and that is where it will end. |