Dennis Kennedywrites that attitudes in London and Dublin need to change
BRITISH PRIME minister Gordon Brown's latest essay on government and identity in the United Kingdom includes one astonishing claim: "In these islands we have, over centuries, created the world's most successful multinational state because we celebrate and respect the multiple identities that enrich us all."
That single use of the phrase "these islands" is the nearest Mr Brown comes in a 1,000 word article in the Daily Telegraph newspaper to acknowledging any Irish, or Northern Irish, element in the UK.
If he really believes the Belfast Agreement has solved the Northern problem within the United Kingdom, then why not trumpet it? But of course he does not. He knows it was a deal with the Provos dressed up in fancy language and dodgy institutions that would hang together long enough to ease Northern Ireland off the agenda.
The agreement was sold to a majority in Northern Ireland, including many unionists, on the grounds that it would bring peace and stability, by confirming the province's place within the United Kingdom, and promising parity of esteem to Irish identity and traditions. Yet the lesson from Mr Brown is that Northern Ireland does not fit easily into the UK, and will be increasingly marginalised.
Will that undermine the comparative stability built on the agreement? Almost certainly, unless a way can be found to convince people that the marginalisation is not a slippery slope out of the UK, and that while Northern Ireland is different, the special arrangements for its governance are a means of keeping it in the UK, albeit in a semi-detached way, not of ushering it out.
The job of convincing is made more difficult by southern attitudes and actions. The visit of Queen Elizabeth was presumably intended to assert Northern Ireland's place within the United Kingdom and reassure unionists. But that was fatally undermined by the twinning of the visit with one by President Mary McAleese, which bore all the appearance of an Irish assertion of joint sovereignty.
If London did not see that significance, then Dublin must have, and should have resisted the temptation. Joint sovereignty has long been advocated by some in the south. But it is not in the Belfast Agreement, and efforts to assert it will undermine the agreement.
Mrs McAleese, in her unfortunate political comments, seemed to hint at more than joint sovereignty. Queen Elizabeth, she said, could not visit Dublin until policing and justice were devolved to Belfast. Why not? Because such a visit might imply endorsement of the failure to devolve those powers? But surely the same logic would suggest that Mrs McAleese's visits to the North are a repeated endorsement of the current situation there? Or does she travel there by sovereign right, just as Queen Elizabeth does?
If the fragile balance holding in Northern Ireland is to survive into something more permanent, unionists will have to accept that their province is a semi-detached part of the union. But nationalists will have to remember that the Irish state, still worshipping at the shrine of violent nationalism, offers no welcoming home for those Northern Irishmen who do not share that heritage.