Westminster got as good a deal as was possible in Northern Ireland
Mirabile dictu. Something has gone right for the government. After long months of debilitation and stress, the problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol has been resolved, and devolved government will return to Stormont. There were long periods when it seemed that intransigence would prevail. “The dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone” were often cited by mainland officials, under their breath. The whole issue was much more a matter of principle and rhetoric than of practicality and substance, but it added to the Prime Minister’s travails, as if he had not been burdened enough. It also aroused suspicion among the “bad winner” wing of the arch-Brexiteers. Sunak’s own Brexit credentials are impeccable yet a dismaying number of his backbenchers seemed to be searching for an excuse to find fault with his handling of Ulster.
In the event, he got as good a deal as was possible, Above all, the reference to an “all-Ireland economy” – which never figured in the Good Friday Agreement – was discarded. That cheered up the Unionists, who were even more pleased when Leo Varadkar signalled his unhappiness and deplored the current government’s pro-Union stance. Anything which upsets him will placate them, as it should.
There is a further aspect to all this which should also please Ulster Unionists. Almost all Tory MPs are staunch Unionists, as they ought to be. But the Labour benches include a sizeable Green wing: tricolour Green, that is. Keir Starmer has no wish to join them, nor to embroil himself in the NI protocol. Indeed, he has declared that if there were a border poll, he would be campaigning for the Union. Yet In Party management terms, life will be much easier for him now that a deal is done and power-sharing has returned. We can confidently assume that should Sir Keir become PM, he would have various ambitions, and might even reveal them to the voters. They would not include involvement in Ulster. As regards policy in that area, the Blair/Mandelson regime would return. Not that this is the limit of their ambitions.
If we are indeed at a new beginning – though there have been a fair few of those over the years – it is worth some historical retrospect. In the Province, it usually is. There is an irony. Almost as soon as David Cameron became PM, Angela Merkel asked him to sort out Eire. Like the rest of Europe, the Irish were in the grip of a banking crisis. Their economy was in danger of collapsing. Would the UK please bail them out? Despite their own difficulties, Cameron and Osborne found their way to lending the Irish £7 billion. To be fair to the Irish, it was repaid.
There is further justification for fairness to the Irish. They recovered much more rapidly than most observers had expected. Here, the Republic benefited from the harsh Puritanical aspects of Irish Catholicism. There was a widespread feeling that the country had been living too high on the hog and therefore deserved to suffer. Harshness brought a further benefit. This brought economic advantages. It meant that when the Irish Government was trying to entice foreign investors, especially from the US, there was the offer of an educated workforce. “The so-called Irish tiger economy and its successor were founded on corporal punishment.” Discuss.
Punishment also featured in Anglo-Irish relations, for there was a period when no good deed went unpunished. After the Brexit referendum, the Euro-nomenklatura changed direction. Instead of helping Ireland, Dublin was encouraged to make life as difficult as possible for the Brits. This helped to sabotage Theresa May’s Premiership by ensuring that she could not get Brexit done.
Time has passed. Apart from some of the last of the Euhicans in the House of Lords, who still take every opportunity to lament Brexit, most Europeans realise that there are more important priorities than punishing Britain. The entire continent is beset by crises. There is indeed a case for flexibility and pragmatism on trade matters. We could all do with higher economic growth for many reasons, especially the need to finance higher defence spending now that ancestral voices are prophesying war.”‘Dreary steeples” fatigue could easily spread from London to Brussels. Varadkar will complain in vain.
History also brings us to the future of Unionism and a long-term culture shock. At the beginning of the last Century, Unionists had many allies in the rest of the Country. By the late Sixties, to their horror, Ulster Unionists discovered that this was no longer the case. Stone-faced men in bowler hats and Orange sashes filled the TV screens with cacophony and Seventeenth Century fulminations. In forty years, England had become a substantially post-religious and certainly post-Protestant society. That was less true of Scotland, but sectarian football conflicts did not assist Ulster’s cause. Nor did Ian Paisley, supreme among fulminators and cacophonists, one of the most prominent evil-doers in British public life.
On the other side, meanwhile, Irish Republicanism drew on a long tradition of sentimentalising homicide and terrorism. The devil had all the best tunes. So Ulster Unionists, who merely wanted to exercise their democratic right to remain British, found it hard to get a hearing. The resulting frustration exacerbated an Ulster Prod tendency to economise on charm.
Although Jeffrey Donaldson is a fine man and a good public servant, he is insufficiently appreciated on this side of St George’s Channel. It would help if Unionism would re-unite and recruit some mellifluous adjutants. But there is some comfort. According to sophisticated polling conducted by the Royal Irish Academy, Unionism would have a twenty per cent majority in any new Ulster border poll.
Apropos sophistication, we shall have to see how well the new Ulster administration performs. Let us hope that it performs better than its equivalents in Edinburgh and Cardiff. The Scottish socialist nationalist government has a terrible record, not least in education. We Scots used to pride ourselves on our educational system at all levels. That is no longer justified. Scotland has been slumping in all the educational league tables.
It must of course be recognised that the Stormont system is at least as much about community psychotherapy as it is about good governance. It would justify another mirabile dictu if it could achieve both. In one respect, all the patients will collaborate. They will all be convinced of the need for more money from Whitehall. A lot of that will now be on its way. So will the Ulster politicians use it wisely? Again, let us hope so – or at least some of it.
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