The vile

The vile £1.3 billion bribe (Derry News, 29^th November 2004)

The DUP and Sinn Fein are sending out signals at the moment in relation to the sweeteners that they’re attempting to squeeze out of the British government for all of the people of Northern Ireland. The SDLP, UUP and Alliance Party are also reputed to be helping to arrange this money, but it is the DUP and Sinn Fein who will probably lead the government.

There’s a great deal of money involved apparently. The talk is that it is well over a billion pounds. Now shouldn’t we be glad to hear that?

Shouldn’t we be glad to hear that the two parties, to quote Mark Durkan, who have given us the worst of our past are now attempting to give us the best of our future? The British are now attempting to bribe us with a large sum of money into behaving ourselves and settling for a deal which will have all the hallmarks of instability and moral bankruptcy.

I say instability because it is self-evident that these two parties at polar opposites of the political spectrum will have difficulties working together.

I say moral bankruptcy since neither the DUP nor Sinn Fein has ever acknowledged that they have been as destructive as they have in the past, and neither has ever repented of their past. Let’s face reality: around four thousand people have died in this conflict and countless other people have been mutilated largely because of the political posturing of these two delinquent parties.

Take the Sunningdale Agreement, where Sinn Fein supported the IRA’s decision to keep on killing, and the DUP supported the strike to bring the Agreement down: it is apparent that they wouldn’t allow the rest of us an agreement until they were leading the process.

Sunningdale apart, the thinking processes of these two parties are deeply flawed.

For example, Sinn Fein tell us that they believe in a united Ireland, and yet they supported the carrying out of murders for a generation that would postpone any chance of that unity for the foreseeable future.

It is important that people read between the lines when they assess the contributions of the DUP and Sinn Fein to this conflict. You cannot be a serious thinker and regard either the DUP or Sinn Fein to have made anything other than significant negative and highly dangerous contributions to politics on this island.

You cannot assume, for example, that Sinn Fein is a pro-Ireland party for I think the case cannot be made for that on the evidence. The evidence points to Sinn Fein being a pro-retribution party, engaging in revenge during the course of the Troubles and encouraging tribal divisions, the killing and dying for those divisions, and causing destruction on a massive scale. Sinn Fein in many senses are a party which made an attempt to encourage members of its community to seek retribution for the years of Stormont misrule.

The DUP saw itself having a different purpose. It saw itself as attempting to save Ulster from even the most minimal change that might result in a Papish government of Northern Ireland. Its analysis was flawed since the more it attempted to protect the North of Ireland from change, the more rigid the North became and the more likely large-scale change would come about.

So lateral thinking is required when contemplating the influence of Sinn Fein and the DUP. While Sinn Fein destroyed the North as acts of revenge against mistreatment, the DUP destroyed the North because they were seemingly unwilling to allow change. Ultimately, because Britain was in the background, the damage caused by Sinn Fein was limited and the North may even have emerged stronger despite the DUP. So both these parties may even have caused the opposite effect to the one they intended.

From the forecast receipt of one billion plus pounds it seems that Britain is still well and truly in the background, attempting to encourage these two parties not to fail to come to an agreement. That they need a bribe is undoubted. That the bribe is but a spit in the ocean in comparison to the damage these two parties can cause over a period of years is undoubted too.

It’s not that they’ll negotiate too small an amount from the British government for any amount will create problems for the republican analysis. Sinn Fein have in agreeing to this extra British subvention given the DUP a considerable victory over nationalists. The DUP can now say that they negotiated £1.3 billion reasons for Northern Ireland remaining in the UK.

Yet again Sinn Fein demonstrate that they don’t think strategically about a united Ireland, only about how they remain popular and in power. I suppose it’s not for nothing that they’re called the “We Ourselves” party.

*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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