The St Andrew's Deal - Coalition Government headed by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness

by greg shields Thu Dec 14, 2006 21:10

Tommy, keep away from the losers. You politics may be sound but your association with serial losers is distracting.

by John Meehan - Campaign for an Independent Left Sun Dec 10, 2006 22:49

The article below, written by Tommy Mckearney, appears in the current issue of Independent Left.

You can discuss it with Tommy and others at the CIL Meeting advertised above.

Flying high on Friday and back to earth on Tuesday was the message being carried by the media newsrooms in Belfast on 17 October. After the exaggerated expectations of a major breakthrough in the northern Irish political situation created by both British and Irish government sources at St Andrews on a Friday, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) restored some reality by the following Tuesday morning. As the camera crews waited for a glimpse of the grand old bear of unionism on his way in to a meeting with the leader of what the DUP still refers to as Sinn Féin/IRA, the set piece fell apart.

Just how much daylight separated reality and fond hopes may be gauged from the tone of an article written by the DUP’s Jim Allister MEP that Tuesday morning for the unionist Belfast News Letter. Denouncing this apparent attempt at detente, Allister criticised the St Andrews document for lacking a mechanism for expelling Sinn Féin from an executive and he also condemned the continued existence of the IRA. And this before Rev Paisley’s meeting with Sinn Féin was to begin.

Not that Ian Paisley and was outdone by Allister. The Free Presbyterian moderator refused even to talk with the Shinners until he receives assurances that Martin McGuinness will publicly swear a pledge to support the northern police and judiciary before his nomination as Deputy First Minister. As Mark Devenport of the BBC said; “ It might not be the end of the process but it is a very inauspicious beginning.”

With years of experience overseeing failed northern initiatives, the governments in London and Dublin recognised the alarm signs. Blair and Ahern’s advisors quickly had their comments ready and were telling us that this was merely a blip and that all was well for a restoration of the ‘institutions’. Well, we’ll see about that.

Sinn Féin is desperately anxious for a return to the executive and will agree to practically anything demanded by Paisley. The Ard Comhairle will undoubtedly call for an extraordinary Árd Fheis and the party will almost certainly endorse both PSNI and judiciary. The problem for Gerry Adams and his supporters, though, is that the DUP may still refuse to cooperate. People who vote Paisley will find it very difficult to accept an arrangement that will have those they despised for years as terrorists, sitting in a Stormont administration. This is what Jim Allister was publicly telling his party leader, though in reality he need hardly have bothered. The old man knows better than anyone what goes down in the mission halls and Orange halls of the unionist heartland and it’s unlikely to involve cuddling up to republicans.

The real problem for Sinn Féin might very well emerge in the aftermath of any decision to endorse policing. With the party having made the definitive transition towards becoming a conventional member of the parliamentary establishment, Sinn Fein may come to be viewed as just one more centrist organisation. The edge it has had among the marginalised and the disadvantaged could melt away and so too its hopes of occupying a spot to the left of Labour. Paradoxically, the party might find that making itself acceptable for coalition with the right – either north or south – could make its ambitions still more difficult to achieve.

Tommy McKearney