IRISH MY ERSE!

I've been reading "THE BLAIR YEARS" - extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries,reviews of "GREAT HATRED, LITTLE ROOM" by Jonathan Powell and watched the recent Peter Taylor programme THE SECRET PEACEMAKER on TV which all dealt with the negotiations leading to the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998.Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy (or Spin Doctor) from 1997 to 2003 and Jonathan Powell was Blair's Chief of Staff from 1997 to 2007. The TV documentary maker Peter Taylor interviewed Brendan Duddy, the Derry business man who acted as a secret go-between for many years.

The personalities involved, Reynolds and Major, Hume and Adams,Clinton, Trimble, Blair and Ahern, Senator George Mitchell, Martin McGuinness, Mo Mowlam etc.etc. are well presented. Even the "Celtic Tiger" takes a bow. I would not disparage any of the actors in the drama. But the bigger picture is either unseen, or, if seen, unacknowledged. 

What's missing is the global,  geopolitical context that made the British and their American allies (or vice versa?) amenable to a settlement, which might, just possibly, lead to a united Ireland free from British overlordship.

That context is the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, signalled by the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989.

Thirteen months later, in November 1990,  the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, declared that Britain had no strategic interest in remaining in Northern Ireland.

To quote W B Yeats -all was changed utterly,for from the 12th to century onwards Ireland was of strategic interest to London's rulers.

Henry II of England had established his Lordship of Ireland to forestall any ambition that Norman adventurers already established there would use it as a springboard to usurp his Crown

.Cromwell and William III fought wars in Ireland to scotch the retrieval by the Stuart Charles II and James II of the English Crown.

When England was at war with Spain, or France, or Germany, she had no intention of being snookered by a hostile landing in Ireland.

When the First World War ended it was feared that the next Great War would be between the United States and Britain.The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty allowed the British naval bases in Lough Swilley in Donegal, Berehaven in Bantry Bay, and in Cork Harbour ,covering Ireland's Atlantic coast from the Northwest to the far South.

When Ireland negotiated British withdrawal from these bases in 1938, the then backbench MP, Winston Churchill, a former (and future) First Lord of the Admiralty, condemned the agreement, with great anger, in the House of Commons.

With the emergence of the Cold War in the late 1940s, Ireland's strategic indispensibility to British strategy was as great as ever. 1948 saw the Berlin Airlift, the coming to power of Communists by coup in Czechoslovakia and their feared coming to power by election in Italy.1948 also saw the coming to power by election in Ireland of a disparate coalition, led by the unlikliest of Republicans, John A Costello.

Ireland had adopted a  sovereign republican constitution in 1937 and had maintained military neutrality during the Second World War. But she had not formally declared a Republic nor formally left the British Commonwealth. In 1949 Costello declared Ireland a Republic and the British deemed Ireland to have left the Commonwealth.

The British (Labour) Government responded with  the 1949 Government of Ireland Act which, quite fraudulently, purported to vest the future of the six northeastern Irish Counties in the "Parliament of Northern Ireland." The 1920 Government of Ireland Act placed "every person, matter and thing in Ireland" under the supreme control of the Imperial Parliament in Westminster, and in 1972 that Imperial Parliament blew  the "Parliament of Northern Ireland" away, leaving not a wrack behind. In the UK, Parliament at Westminster is sovereign and no one session can bind its successors. The 1949 Act was a fig leaf to cover the naked strategic concerns of  the British, who, in that same year co-founded NATO to check the presumed predatory intentions of the Soviet Union.

In January 1980, under the 30 year rule, British Cabinet documents for 1949 were made public. One was a Memorandum by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brooke, following the Irish Government  declaration of a Republic, which was taken by the British as a formal departure from the British Commonwealth. The Memorandum was marked "Noted" by Prime Minister Clement Attlee. It said, in part-

"For many years past, members of all political parties here have been able to take the line over partition that there is nothing they would like better than to see a united Ireland, but this is a problem which Irishmen must settle for themselves.

It has been very convenient for the political parties to be able in this way to avoid the responsibility of favouring one side or the other in this controversy.

It seems to me that Eire's new status will make it impossible for any political party in this country to preserve this detached attitude any longer. So long as Eire owes no allegiance to the Crown, and is not a member of the Commonwealth, it seems to me that any United Kingdom government will be compelled to take a positive line in supporting the continuance of partition - partly because they must support the Loyalists in the North,BUT MAINLY BECAUSE IT IS ESSENTIAL FOR STRATEGIC REASONS THAT SOME PART OF IRELAND SHOULD REMAIN WITHIN HIS MAJESTY'S DOMINIONS"

The Memorandum continues that the strategic isssue  was"self-evident and fresh in everybody's mind as a result of experiencein the last war" and advised that in approaching particular proposals being put forward by the Northern Ireland Government at the time, there were "overriding political and strategic reasons for giving these proposals a rather more sympathetic hearing than they might be thought to deserve on their strict merits".

So  the wishes and the interests of Irish people, North, South, East or West, Catholic, Protestant or Dissenter, counted for little in British government calculations.Just as the wishes of the islanders of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, counted for nothing when Britain'sAmerican allies wanted their homes as bases from which to bomb other poor people.

Nor is it a coincidence that the Western Alliance waited for the collapse of the Soviet Union before it made the end of Apartheid in South Africa possible. But for that Soviet collapse, Nelson Mandela and his comrades might still be prisoners on Robbin Island.In fact Nelson Mandela was released from imprisonment within three months of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The following quotation is from analyses of the leaked US National Security Study Memorandum, a.k.a. THE KISSINGER STUDY STUDY OF SOUTHERN AFRICA, which was published in the US in 1976-

"A key element in South Africa's military links with NATO isthe highly sophisticated communications and surveillance center, Silvermine, just north of the Simonstown naval base. This complex system, known as Project Advocaat, is capable of covering 25 million square miles of ocean, stretching from South America to Bangladesh. A despatch in the WALL STREET JOURNAL quoted a South African naval officer that the system at Silvermine is linked to the US via the American communications center in Derry, Northern Ireland......................The extension of the communications facility on Diego Garcia..........................."

It is incontrovertible that the strategic imperatives of the United States, Britain and their allies impinged on the populations of South Africa, Diego Garcia and Ireland and that the interests, wishes, sentiments and human rights  of the peoples of those places counted for nothing with those allies.

(see also "Professional Fouls" a book review I had published in The Irish Democrat in September 1985 and which was copied onto this BLOG on 04 May 2007)

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