MY HEAD throbs every time I hear the term "all-party talks," the Philosophers' Stone which is going to turn the base metal of the North into the glorious gold of peace.
Some few of us have been saying all along: This Is Not So. There is no philosopher's stone. No transmutation is possible. The North is what it is, and all we can do is get along, allowing our different chemical compounds to live in an uneasy peace. Attempts to convert those compounds to gold are not merely doomed to failure; they will inevitably cause those chemicals to become unstable and even explosive.
We have repeatedly had these explosions over the past thirty years.
The modest ambitions of Terence O'Neill to live in public amity with the rest of the people of Ireland were met with resistance from the Protestant hardline, then as now led by Ian Paisley; and beyond the pulpit fundamentalism of the Calvinist right, in which Ulster is a form of Zion, lay the flinty-eyed men with guns and the scruples of weasels, then as now.
Obvious Truth
Can we not see this obvious truth? There is a core of opinion in Northern Ireland which is irreducible in its devotion to Crown, to Ulster, to the Union, and these things cannot be bargained away; far from not being bargained, these items cannot be placed on a table at which they sit. And Protestants who sit at such a table will feel the warm breath of the irreducibles on the back of their neck, and in their hearts they will feel the heat of the denunciations that they are betraying Ulster.
No doubt it pleases us to call such people bigots. No doubt they are. And with equal lack of doubt, that does not advance our understanding of how the problem is to be solved.
There is a reason for this. It is not to be solved. Every single Protestant leader who moved too far away from the irreducibles perished. Look at their political corpses - O'Neill, Chichester-Clarke, Faulkner, Craig. All them failed to keep in touch with the irreducibles in their attempts at solution, and all of them were consumed by the chemistry they had attempted to master.
Sensible, wise unionist leaders like James Molyneux knew that there was no point in attempting compromise to please the IRA. No compromise is possible which will please the IRA - only victory, assured in the medium to long terms will conciliate them. Any attempts at compromise short of that victory are not merely doomed from the IRA's point of view; they are doomed too by the efforts of the irreducibles. They will not talk with the enemy of "Ulster"; and they will not tolerate talks by others of their constituency.
Abusing them is purposeless.. This is the sort of people they are.
Wishing they were otherwise is merely wishing for another, and simpler, problem. That is a natural ambition, when one encounters a problem one can't solve. Very probably the pioneers of alchemy cursed the stubborn nature of lead and its curious insistence on remaining what it was.
Yet cursing it certainly will not transmute it into gold, no matter how bigoted you call the lead, no matter how much you assure the lead it will be so much happier being gold.
Lead Cannot Change
Why? Because the lead cannot change on command; and it was only the frivolously pious alchemists of peace who assured us that such changes were possible and controllable. They are not. Changes happen within societies; but they are not the changes wished for by those who, perforce temporarily, are in charge of those societies. Forty years of totalitarian communism did not diminish Bulgar hatred for Turk, of Polish disdain for Jew. We might command; but we cannot alter. Human nature works in strange and furtive ways, its identities to ensure.
The magic potions of all-party talks, demanded - along with release of prisoners, Brits Out, a United Ireland, Peace, and oh, while you're about it, more jobs, if you please, and pronto - on walls and posters through the North cannot manage the transmutations possible. Only the lubricants of fudge and blather and the happy habits of peace can allow the explosive ingredients of Northern Ireland to settle into relative tranquillity. It will not be peace, but an armed truce; and that is as good as we can get.
The IRA will not disarm short of its objectives. Never. Nice, clever George Mitchell hit, upon a device for getting everybody to the table - disarmament during talks, but it was really no more than alchemy dressed up in another guise; and the IRA ensured that this new, can-do American approach was going to go the same way as all other attempts to turn dross to gold by blowing the heart of the Docklands apart within days of George's report being issued.
Do people not understand that unionists will never, ever, ever, ever, accept an IRA cease-fire unless it is permanent and unless it involves the disbandment and disarmament of the IRA regardless of the outcome of any future all-party talks? Do people not understand at whatever talks might then result, the Sinn Fein representatives would be accorded no more favours than their electoral support justifies? It really will be one-elector, one-vote this time; and see how far that gets them. It gets them to the tea and the choccy biscuits. That's how far.
Dublin and London are putting stiff upper lips on their failure to agree on a new approach to getting the Philosopher's Stone to do its magic. There is no magic to do. All the endless rubbing of this stone can do is to raise hopes; and raised hopes are always the prelude to tears in Northern Ireland.
Celebratory Party
There is always somebody prepared to break up the celebratory party at the least expected moment, for progress. towards paradise is always routed through places like" Dunloy and Harryville and Garvaghy, and there the journey invariably ends. All we can, do is this: insist that those who take life or who plan to take life are locked up.
We know the IRA infrastructure in this State is intact recruitment continues, and bomb-makers are engaged in their own evil alchemy, every bit as futile as that of the round-table philosophers. The duty of this State is to disrupt that infrastructure as much as it can; and we know this State has done no such thing.