My Articles to the Newspapers

Plan B is valid despite Tom Haden's pessimism

Tom Hadden’s article on “Plan B” or joint authority (Fortnight, April 2006) will have made depressing reading for many Nationalists. For he smugly, I might suggest, reminds us that the unionists have it all sown up so far as the constitutional position goes because the British are the only ones who can really afford us in the foreseeable future.

Professor Hadden raises other “serious issues” which he feels may be insurmountable in achieving joint authority, but the main one is finance. He bluntly and contritely attempts to end the dream of many Nationalists to be treated with justice on their own island. For many Nationalists, there really is only joint authority left after the debacle of the last eight years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Fein and the DUP have combined to end the Good Friday Agreement and in truth why should we have expected otherwise? They are not social democrats by nature and so they were never going to grasp the need for idealism to bring this major compromise to fruition.

If the Good Friday Agreement was flawed from its inception, it was flawed because Sinn Fein and the DUP lacked an understanding of the need for an element of Christian idealism in their approach to it. Christian idealism would have ruled out taking eight years to decommission – with the associated vulgarisation of humanity that went with the giving up of some weapons on several separate occasions, supposedly to keep their own troops on board. Christian idealism would have gone a long way to preventing the DUP from taking advantage of the UUP with false and empty claims that they could do better than Trimble at key moments.

But Christianity won’t die with the Good Friday Agreement. I have argued in this magazine (Issue 416, September 2003) for repartition instead of the endless destruction of social democratic principles that was going hand-in-hand with the destruction of the 1998 Agreement. I was not taken seriously but I was deadly serious. It was for me painful to see an SDLP agreement being surgically assaulted on two fronts by parties that hadn’t earned the right in my opinion to be political parties, and who would not be political parties in any other context. Indeed they have created niches for themselves on the back of motivating the rawest and least noble political ideals known to mankind:- flag-waving and hocus-pocus, semi-religious claptrap that passes for ideals. How easily the people are fooled!

But repartition and joint authority are very alike in my mind. First of all, they give hope to Nationalists that they are to be treated as equals in any new arrangement. Secondly, they give Unionists the right to be equals in any new settlement for it is – or at least it must be – a burden to any people to have the constitutional position balanced in their favour on a very flimsy basis. The very flimsy basis is that their sponsoring government is afraid to pull the plug on them because there would be a civil war or because the nightmare of violence would resume. One day, after decades of this fruitless involvement in the North, the United Nations would surely become an option for the British government.

So I favour joint authority or repartition on the basis that it contains an element of proper equality for Nationalists that even the Good Friday Agreement didn’t have. Our tradition in Ireland would be more respected if there was either joint authority or repartition rather than having the present approach that pays lip service to the absolute right of Nationalists to have political authority where they are the majority – mainly in the border regions.

Unfortunately for people of my persuasion, Tom Hadden has poured cold water on the possibility of joint authority. But he hasn’t made a persuasive case against it. He has merely repeated the time-honoured unionist cry that Nationalists are trapped in the UK because they can’t afford “to pay the ferryman”.

The reality will dawn on Tom Hadden – as it will on even the most thran of unionists – that there is a way around the question of funding for joint authority. It is really a solution that is staring us all in the face and has done for a long time. Rather than the British going back to fighting the IRA at some future date after the collapse of the Good Friday Agreement and the consequent bad feeling that that will engender, perhaps the British could be persuaded to pay for joint authority.

If violence ensued from a nightmare scenario, then the British government would be paying far more than they would if they continued to fund essential services in the North while promoting joint authority. Remember that the British – through their bad stewardship of the North from the time of the Plantation – owe a debt not just to unionists but to nationalists as well.

But British funding for joint authority could be negotiated on a reducing scale basis which would mean that it could be phased out over, say, a century to a level that was proportionate to the British segment of the population.

If the British don’t fund joint authority you’re going to continue to get smug unionists telling impoverished Nationalist communities that they are trapped in a state that thinks so little of them. This is a very important point. Unionist discrimination over past generations continues to be felt in large Nationalist areas and Tom Hadden, like many unionist commentators, has the sheer audacity to come out with his time honoured unionist cry that “you can’t afford to be equal”. Unionists caused the poverty in many areas and it is not for them, as the abusers in the situation, to remind anyone of what they can or cannot afford. It is certainly not their role to act as supremacists when their own community has been bolstered heavily by the British exchequer for many decades.

In my opinion Nationalist equality will mean prosperity, as instanced with the Celtic Tiger, and would both transform the economic prospects of the North and render the need for a subvention from the Republic (and possibly even from the British) redundant. If only unionists could face equality with the same hope and expectations! Isn’t that the real problem, Tom? Won’t equality threaten them most?

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*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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