Ulster's Uneasy Election
JACOBSEN, J. K.
THE PRIOR INITIATIVE Ulster's Uneasy Election by j.k jacobsen Belfast Ater six years in futile pursuit of a military solution to the conflict in Ulster, the British government is cautiously...
...The first British experiment at power sharing, in 1973-74, was sabotaged by a Protestant strike after five faltering months...
...In practice, Prior's attempt to play fair arbiter may be akin to a lion tamer trying to put a rabid pride through unfamiliar paces from a chairless and whipless post outside the cage...
...In theory, the Assembly will first form advisory committees to the Departments of Education, Commerce, Health, Agriculture, Finance, and Environment...
...Budget and security matters will remain firmly in British hands...
...To their credit, the British did forcefully scuttle the Protestant extremist Reverend Ian Paisley's attempt to mount a similar stoppage in a bid to impose Loyalist majority rule in 1977...
...After sifting through a plethora of schemes, he announced rolling devolution last April 5. Prior coaxed an emergency aid infusion of $153 million out of London as well, in the hope of bringing a "degree of prosperity" to the six desperately depressed counties...
...While the principal Catholic party, the Social and Democratic Labor Party (SDLP) responded to rolling devolution enthusiastically, the two Protestant groupings, the Official Unionist Party (OUP) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), were wary...
...ic crisis would yield easily...
...In sum, whatever the outcome of the election, at the moment James Prior's plan does not appear to be a panacea for Northern Ireland...
...But this prompted the SDLP to proclaim that it will contest the election and that its members will not take their seats in the Assembly...
...It prefers to press for a more appealing alternative in future Anglo-Irish Councils...
...But neither the political noreconomJ. K. Jacobsen, a new contributor, is assistant professor of political science at the University of North Carolina...
...The Unionists' action, enforced in some instances by intimidation, was curiously unopposed by the British Army and the police...
...The Catholics were also heartened by Prior's response to Paisley's bellicose rhetoric...
...According to Cooper and Lybrands Management Consultants in London, United Kingdom firms invested $2.2 million in Ulster over the last five years, compared to $97 million in the Republic of Ireland...
...Secondly, the plan's "Irish dimension" all but disappeared...
...Based on various "possibilities" mentioned by the Secretary, it had hoped for a guarantee of proportional representation in the Executive that the Assembly would eventually appoint...
...departing for less turbulent climes...
...If Catholic and Protestant members can concur on a plan—and Prior, and then the full British Parliament, deems it fair and workable—the Assembly will begin to take over actual administrative authority...
...Prior subsequently clarified the plan in a way that placated the Loyalists...
...Further, an Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council established through summit meetings in 1980-81 seemed to open a possible forum for trilateral negotiations on a solution for Ulster as soon as the new Assembly was formed...
...Prior responded testily, stating that Britain would "spare neither blood nor money to fight criminal terrorism," but would not "b .'dictated to by Protestant bully-boys.' 0\ er the past summer, however, the SDLP became disillusioned...
...Last November, in the course of a Loyalist protest that followed the Provos' assassination of a Protestant MP, Paisley vowed to make Ulster "ungovernable" if the British did not take harsher security measures...
...Yet the SDLP represents the Catholic moderates ("collaborationists," in IRA parlance...
...Prior came to Belfast in September 1981, after Thatcher ousted him as Employment Minister for being too soft on trade unions...
...Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (political adjunct of the INLA) and the People's Democracy, one of the pioneer Catholic civil rights groups organized in the '60s, convened recently and agreed to mount street demonstrations after the election to pressure the SDLP into honoring its Assembly boycott pledge...
...Prior's outline, despite its thoroughly studied ambiguity, raised Catholic hopes of a shift in the wind...
...Instead, he granted several of the protesters' lesser demands and declared his determination to revive and reform the North's dormant political institutions...
...Once relatives finally broke down and permitted authorities to save the remaining comatose prisoners, Prior wisely eschewed the chortling of some of his Tory colleagues...
...Prior could not deliver it...
...Forty per cent of the jobless have been on the dole for a year or more...
...THE PRIOR INITIATIVE Ulster's Uneasy Election by j.k jacobsen Belfast Ater six years in futile pursuit of a military solution to the conflict in Ulster, the British government is cautiously returning to the political arena...
...Without this assurance, the Nationalists feared the body would become a staging ground for the restoration of the Protestant ancien regime (something the British are hardly likely to allow), or would simply waste away in the role of a "talking shop...
...But even so the Assembly could serve as the foundation for more solid arrangements only if accompanied by an improvement in the economy, and by a rapprochement between Thatcher and Charles Haughey's Dublingovernment...
...Although the Provisional Sinn Fein, the Provos' political arm, will field candidates on the 20th, it remains committed to a spokesman's pledge to greet election day "with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite [rifle] in the other...
...To protect the Catholic Nationalist minority, all Assembly legislation must either be judged (again by Secretary Prior) to have "broad cross-community support," or garner a 70 per cent majority...
...Last year 19 new British firms located in the South...
...two in the North...
...If Prior cannot accomodate them, his prospects are dim for treating with the more militant factions...
...Unfortunately, the economy is rapidly withering...
...The province has been ruled directly from Westminister since Commons prorogued the Northern Ireland Parliament in March 1972...
...He reaffirmed his intention to "move slowly and methodically" ahead once the bridge of the elections is crossed...
...Anglo-Irish relations deteriorated over Dublin's refusal to join the European Community embargo on Argentina during the Falklands War...
...Next, the delegates will audition, as it were, for Prime Minister Thatcher's Northern Ireland Secretary of State James Prior...
...The following month he benefitted from the collapse of the dreadful Maze Prison hunger strike...
...On October 20, Northern Irish voters will elect a78-seat Assembly—the first stage of a "rolling devolution" that aims to cede power to the local political parties as rapidly as their good behavior permits...
...In June, moreNorthen-ers were out of work (120,000) than were employed in the entire manufacturing sector (110,000), and the future is not promising...
...On the Protestant side, OUP Leader James Molyneaux has warned the British against rejecting a devolution accord backed by 90 per cent of "those who took their seats" in the Assembly...
...The unemployment rate in Ulster is 21.5 per cent—and more than twice that among Catholics...
...Prior took the news philosophically: "There is no way in which I can satisfy either Nationalist opinion, which will accept nothing less than an immediate power sharing alternative, or Unionist opinion, which will have nothing to do with it...
...In late July, the Irish Ambassador in London was sharply informed that Britain was under no obligation to consult the Republic on Northern Irish affairs...
...Mallon resides in the North...
...Prior has set up an Industrial Development Board, but it can do little good without a cessation in sectarian unrest...
...Westminster apparently concluded that it was far easier tocombatafew hundred angry Nationalist guerrillas than to coerce a million Protestants to play fair politics with the minority...
...SDLP Leader John Hume bargained with the Northern Ireland Office in vain, and in August the party made its decision to boycott the Assembly...
...Nonetheless, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and an equally fierce splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), had won stunning propaganda victories when Bobby Sands, one of the strikers who died, was elected to Whitehall and two other inmates were voted into the Irish Republican Parliament...
...Dublin, meanwhile, has come to regard devolution as a strategy in which it has no say and less faith...
...Private investment has evaporated with companies like Cour-taulds, British Enkalon, Goodyear, and International Computers Ltd...
...It is still not inconceivable that Prior will somehow manage to persuade the SDLP delegates to take their seats without at the same time causing the major Protestant parties to vacate theirs...
...Molyneaux, in contrast to his usual shrewdness, has of late joined the notorious Unionist MP Enoch Powell in uncovering sinister plots to reunify Ireland hatched collectively by British bureaucrats, the IRA and the CIA...
...The disappointment was exacerbated when Prior declined to waive a 1975 law that bars SDLP Deputy Leader Seamus Mallon from standing for the Assembly because he occupies a Senate seat in the Republic...
...During that 217 day ordeal, 10 men died inside H-Block, and 64 people were killed in violence ouiside the walls...
Vol. 65 • October 1982 • No. 19
