EUROPE	JANUARY 26, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4
	A Celtic Archipelago A deftly crafted plan offers a little something to all in Northern Ireland By ROY FOSTER bout thirty years ago some Irish historians innocently got themselves into trouble when they started to write about the culture, commerce and even politics of early medieval Ireland, especially the northern region, as part of an "archipelago" taking in Scotland and parts of northern England. There was a brief storm, but it quite quickly became uncontroversial. Tony Blair's latest blueprint is oddly reminiscent of that "archipelago" view; will it find a similar level of acceptance? Previous suggestions have offered very little to anybody; Mr. Blair has decided to throw in something for everyone. Most surprisingly, perhaps, he has proposed an "intergovernmental council to deal with the totality of relationships," or Council of the Isles, representing Britain, the Republic, Northern Ireland, and newly-devolved Scotland and Wales, meeting twice a year "at summit level." This Council of the Isles sounds appealingly Braveheart, but it represents something new. The Unionist buzzword last time around--"sovereignty"--goes carefully unmentioned, but a hardliner could see it as threatened. On the other hand, an overarching "Council of Ireland," the North-South body which made the 1974 "Sunningdale" arrangement unacceptable to diehard Unionists, has been watered down. All very Blairite: new words, new buoyancy, new bossiness. So is the flair in the presentation, with Northern Ireland Secretary Marjorie "Mo" Mowlam bustling into the notoriously insecure Maze prison to persuade loyalist paramilitaries ("lucky she found them in," a cynic remarked) and Mr. Blair on the telephone at all hours from Japan. The question that remains is whether the package is alluring enough to make both Unionists and Republicans give up their maximalist demands. Unionists gain from the supersession of the hated 1995 Anglo-Irish agreement, and what is on offer is very far from a United Ireland. North-South links will strengthen in tourism, energy, agriculture and security co-operation, but this would have happened anyway, and is already happening as a result of Europeanization. The new generation of Unionists are prepared to go to Dublin, shunned by their predecessors as a kind of Sodom and begorrah. They know the future requires talking to ancient adversaries much nearer home--the newly-political operators of Gerry Adams's Sinn Fein. But they have also declared that the Council of the Isles safeguards the principle of the Union. Sinn Fein, on the other hand, has so far held its silence. It is not hard to see why. Gerry Adams has been cliffhanging for nearly four years, using political flair and blatant doublespeak to convince hardline Republicans that peace-process-talk can deliver something near to the traditional desideratum of a United Ireland. The most brazen example was when he wooed West Belfast into celebrating the August 1994 ceasefire with champagne, as an outright victory for the I.R.A. Even the dogs in the street knew it was actually a temporary victory for common sense and some idea of the limitations enforced by reality. It was doomed by the impossibility of meeting the old Republicans' expectations: even as Adams glad-handed Clinton in Belfast, the Canary Wharf bomb that exploded the truce was being moved into position. Can he now persuade his old I.R.A. comrades that power-sharing, with a strong Irish dimension but within a continuing six-county unit, is an acceptable substitute for a virtual-reality, all-Ireland, Green-'n-Gaelic, Riverdancing Republic? Put another way, can he persuade his supporters that the people they must come to terms with are their neighbors, not the anachronistically demonized "Brits"? This has been explicit since November 1990 when the then-Secretary, Peter Brooke, stated that Britain had no economic or strategic interests in staying in Northern Ireland and would accept any democratically endorsed arrangement that allowed them to leave: an opening seized, and brilliantly exploited, by John Hume on behalf of constitutional nationalism. Sinn Fein found it, for obvious reasons, less easy to accept: but such an acceptance may have silently taken root. While Republican spokesman Mitchell McLaughlin says there can be no "wholly internal settlement," the point about the current proposals is that they are not "wholly internal." Nor are they anything like a United Ireland. But the Republic's ready acquiescence in them shows that Dublin no longer puts much store by the irredentist claim on "the North"--even when, as now, the dominant party in power is the traditionally "republican" Fianna Fail. They may, indeed, be the only party who could drop it, and get away with their collective political skin. The next phase may see them do exactly that. There are certain hoary cliches which anyone writing about Northern Ireland should be forbidden to use. One is Churchill's statement about the "dreary steeples" of Fermanagh and Tyrone, and the "integrity of their quarrel" surviving all the global convulsions of World War I. Another is the apocryphal story of the Irish countryman who, when asked for directions by a traveller, replies "If I were you, I wouldn't start from here." The new proposals suggest, at last, starting from somewhere else. If the archipelago idea works, it may do so by diluting the nationalisms of both sides and envisioning Northern Ireland within a framework as much European as British--or Irish. But it all hinges on the question of whether the new "propositions" can also suggest a new lesson: the wisdom of each side giving up a little in order to gain a lot. Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University and author of Modern Ireland 1600-1972.
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