Things will not get worse before they get better
As republican and loyalist violence diminishes in Northern Ireland, there is yet no hope of a political solution, writes Kevin Myers.
THE WAR is lost. The Provisionals have had their Stalingrad and are now reetreating. They have still got a lot of fight in them, and they still number brave and resourceful men in their ranks; but it it only a matter of time before they perform the final ceremonies in their bunker.
They are, of course, not Nazis, and the analogy was not intended in that sense. They are a terrorist force in the literal sense of the word; a minority grouping which does not have general popular backing (though the Pr ovisionals still possess strong localised support) and their continued survival depends a great deal on the fear they have engendered. The combination of these two factors means that the bunkerfest is still a long way off. But it is coming.
This last year has seen a tremendous change in attitude among the population in Belfast. Though still firmly dug into their irreconcilable beliefs they share the conviction that the worst is no longer still to come; it will not get worse before it gets better, and already people are remembering 1972 in the same way that people used to talk about the Troubles of the 'twenties and 'thirties.
The feeling that the worst is over is not merely a psychological one; one thousand British soldiers were withdrawn from the Province at the end of the year. Many towns are dismantling the security gates erected to reduce Provisional bombing raids; and the ramps outside a number of police stations vare being removed. Normality is not yet in the air, . possibly because no one is sure what it is any more; relaxation certainly is.
But the fact that throat-cutting no longer seems to be the Saturday night sport and play for Protestant paramilitaries, and much of the Provisionals' military talk is mere bluster, does not mean that everything is going to be sweetness and light in the foreseeable future.
Even though things are going swimmmingly on the security front for the British, no political purchases expected in the coming year. Following the LynchhCallaghan talks in September, Mr. Mason came up with a series of guidelines for an 'interim' solution, based on a consulltative convention of elected represenntatives working together in committees. Mr. Mason went through the familiar round of talks with party representatives, but the shoemaker's awl failed to peneetrate the hardened hides of suspicious Unionists.
Under the deeper guidance of Jim Molyneux, the 'interim' settlement' they say they want is of three strongly empowered regional authorities - a thought that makes SDLP men blanch. Consider: if Magherafelt Council can get their panty-hose in a twist about a Christmas dinner for pensioners (SDLP for, DUP against) Lord knows how they would discuss the subject of, for example, housing. And Paisley's boys want nothing to do with interim solutions, believing rightly - that the temptation to let the temporary become the permanent would be overwhelming for any British government.
Mr. Mason might try his hand at another election, although he should have learned by this time that every time an appeal is made to the Northern Ireland electorate to produce an ennlightened majority of representatives, the trenches go deeper, the sandbags higher and moderates simply fade away. No, Roy Mason knows that the perrcentage lies in greater security successes, not in trying to assuage obdurate rigidity.
The security figures are a startling indication of what has been happening to the paramilitaries. For the last few months loyalist violence has to all extents and purposes stopped. The UVF has been shattered and cannot even pay benefits to its imprisoned members. The UDA assassination squads have come under terrific· pressure, and those members who have not been locked up are ineffective because they are marked men.
In addition, the UDA daily expects a major purge by the police who, during an interrogation session, were given information by two multiple killers ..
At this moment, Northern Ireland jails hold over 2,100 people (and that does not include the 1,600 prison warders). Over six hundred people are on remand for terrorist-type charges. Over 1,300 people were charged with such offences in 1977 alone, a figure similar to the previous year's. By the end of November, Special Category prisoners had served a total of almost two thousand years in jail - one thousand two hundred by republicans. And the . true scale of the now defunct internnment experiment becomes clear when seen in those terms. Internees served over three thousand years in jail.
The departure of the privileges of political status is being felt by nearly nine hundred prisoners in six 'H' blocks in Long Kesh, who are crowded into tiny cells while the eight hundred or so Special Category prisoners are left to enjoy the spacious bleakness of twelve of the twenty-one compounds still open.
The scale of the security operation has been gigantic. In the last four years there have been nearly a quarter of a million searches of houses - eleven
thousand in the first half of 1977. (That last figure indicates that house raids, so infuriating to the population and an invaluable recruitment agent for the IRA, are becoming more selective). The RUC alone cost the British taxpayer over seventy-two million pounds in the last financial year.
Two consecutive years tell a connvincing tale. In 1977, overall deaths were down by almost two-thirds, commpared to 1976. The number of civilians killed dropped to a quarter of the figure in 1976. Police fatalities were rather more than half those in 1976; civilians injured down from almost two and a half thousand to well under seven hundred. Military casualties were even more greatly reduced, from 260 to about forty. The one figure that remained constant conncerned military deaths; within a week of the new year, twenty-nine soldiers, half of them off-duty UDR men, had been killed - the same figure as for 1976. The number of explosions was more than halved, to about three hundred. And the number of armed robberies was down by a third, to six hundred.
Roy Mason does not have to turn to Gradgrind facts to allow himself a little preen. He had two major hurdles to contend with in 1977, and he vaulted them without his gruff, tough noononsense (how he must love those desscriptions) Yorkshire miner's voice giving any sign that it might become tremu10. The first was that the. Paisley strike in May, which had the backing of all the Protestant paramilitary organizations and which was intended to force a resstoration of 'law and order' and Protestant rule from Stormont. It had massive backing to start off with - more than the 1974 stoppage had until its final
stages - but it failed because it lost the propaganda war, which, in 1974, the Ulster Workers' Council had won with consummate ease. This strike had not the backing of the electricity workers in Larne, and because the policy at which it was directed was not susceptible to the local loyalties of the power sharing administration of three years earlier.
Two men came out of the strike well. Roy Mason, who showed the world what a tough, no-nonsense, etc. character he is, and Ian Paisley, who, as he so ineffably does, went on to inncrease his party's poll in the local government election which followed. But Paisley did miscalculate, although not disastrously; Andie Tvrie , the head of the UDA erred grossly and the UDA has been picking up the pieces ever since. So has the UVF. A party of its cut-throats were arrested by the police during the strike as they manned a picket line in West Belfast. An enterrprising Special Branchman had taken the one Catholic survivor of their activities - his neck had not been properly cut - around the loyalist picket lines of the city in an unmarked car until he identified everyone of his assailants. It was the world's biggest identification parade. One of . the men now accused had a criminal injury claim pending at the time of his arrest. It seems he had been crimminally assaulted one drunken night in a taxi. As a consequence he developed a bright red nervous rash - from ear to ear.
Roy Mason's next hurdle was the visit of Queen Elizabeth to the Proovince. It was a time for Catholics to stay in bed during that mad month when every possible historical event associated with Northern Ireland was to be celebrated. It was an act of gross supremacism, and her visit was welcomed as an extension of the British dimension. The Irish quality of the place she was visiting was evident only in the number of guns that surrounded her. When she sailed into Belfast Lough, Bangor, for all the world, could have been Bournemouth Indeed, she probably wished it were.
The Provisionals promised mayhem, and the world's newsmen gathered to witness it. Apart from a paltry riot, swiftly and efficiently dealt with by troops, and an explosion where the Queen . had been some hours beforeehand, the IRA showed· itself to be leaden footed. indeed. One soldier was killed during the visit, but, preesumably his killing was in retaliation for the killing of a member of the Fianna while engaged in a petrol bombbing mission.
Fingers do not just point to the royal visit. They point also to South Armagh, where the IRA has been strangely silent since the arrival of the SAS. All' right, . off duty and aged members of the UDR living in lonely hill. farms have been shot, and indeed, a young female mem ber of the regiiment was murdered as she slept beside her infant. Just as shocking to many people were the ages of her alleged killers; two fourteen-year-olds, a sixteen-year-old and an' eighteenold. But British Army regulars have remained strangely untouched.
One way or another, Roy Mason presided oyer a turning point in the last year, albeit not one of his own making. He was fortunate, because he inherited the last bequest of the Peace Movement before it became absurd. That was the awareness in .the dimly lit ghettoes on each side of the sectarian divide that the people on the other side didn't like what was going on either. The difference, of course, reemained, but an awful lot of people learned through the Peace Movement and the bravery of its leaders, that the scattering of one another's intestines was not the way most people thought their differences should be reconciled.
And an important thing happened, namely a change of consensus - cerrtainly in Catholic ghettoes, 'Our boys', the IRA, were no longer the arbiters of social morals. Reinforced by the manifestations of strength shown for the Peace Movement on the streets, people who had felt uncertain about the ethical inviolability of IRA rules suddenly realised they were not alone. Lots of people felt the way they did. Men and women realised they could break ranks from the ghetto ethic, and did. That the Peace Movement is dead is certain; their heritage, however, is not. It has a simple name: the Confidential Telephone.
The Peace Movement has been of undoubted assistance to Roy Mason. Even the Provisionals, who, let us not forget, were not the cause of this war but the consequence, are begrudgingly admitting that it is going to be a long war. (Perhaps even an imperceptible one in the future?) Times and feeling have altered drastically in the last few years, and the taste for yet more scatterred intestines has gone.
But it would be hard to say that Northern Ireland is not run by a colonnial administration through the serrvices of something like a police state. Anyone who does not believe that terrible excesses have occurred in police interrogation centres is either a fool or illiterate. Some might judge these excesses to be worthwhile if the general effects of terrorism are thereby abated. But it is not in the nature of authorities to relinquish attitudes and powers that they have become used to in times of pressure, least of all on this island.