Splintered Sunrise

So, with the elections out of the way, attention now turns to the formation of an Executive. This is due to happen next Monday, and Big Ian is currently involved in a game of chicken with our beautifully groomed proconsul as to whether the 26 March deadline will be met. Paisley says the date isn’t set in stone. Hain says it is, and what’s more the date is enshrined in law.

Actually it matters very little either way. Hain knows that the law can be changed in ten minutes via an Order in Council, and Big Ian will want to push the process past 26 March just to prove that he’s calling the shots. But there likely will be an Executive set up at some point – whether it lasts is another matter.

What, then, will be the shape of the Executive? I’m not talking about personnel here, but about what, if anything, it will do. Some clues are hidden in what the Brits gave the DUP at St Andrew’s, in a significant rewriting of the Good Friday Agreement. Under the GFA, for instance, both “communities” in the Assembly had to vote for the slate of First and Deputy First Minister. That has now changed, so the DUP won’t have to vote for Martin McGuinness. In other words, they won’t have to vote confidence in the very government they will be leading. And this is before you take into account Robbo’s pledge to have a battle a day in the Executive – presumably, if nationalist ministers don’t oblige, the DUP will invent a battle.

The other significant concession at St Andrew’s was that the actions of ministers would be subject to the approval of the Assembly, as opposed to the virtual autonomy ministers had under the GFA. Taken together with the provision for weighted voting, this means the DUP – with 36 of the 108 seats, but the majority of unionist MLAs – can not only veto legislation, but also non-legislative actions of ministers. It doesn’t take a genius to foresee that the DUP would vote against any proposal of a Provo minister, even one they agree with, just out of badness. In other words, we will have the content if not the form of majority rule.

This leads on to the question of what the Executive will do. The proconsul has been holding before the punters a glittering vista of a devolved administration abolishing water charges, putting a hold on the rates revaluation and doing all sorts of wonderful things with the big financial package Gordo is offering us. On closer scrutiny, the water charge and rates revaluation would only be mitigated, not stopped altogether, and on Gordo’s past form, it’s a fair bet that much of the money he announces will be money he’s already announced.

There are incentives, though, for the DUP to get into an Executive, which have less to do with what devolution might achieve and more to do with what it might prevent. First on their list is the Acht Gaeilge. It doesn’t matter that the Brits have already significantly watered down the proposed Language Act – even a symbolic official recognition of Irish is enough to enrage the Prodocracy. But, if devolution is restored, the Acht Gaeilge goes to the Assembly, where the DUP will veto it.

Likewise post-primary selection. Readers will recall that when Martin McGuinness was education minister, just as he was being dragged out the door he signed a directive abolishing the 11+. Ever since, direct rule ministers have faffed about the issue, failing to put into place an alternative system. Now, this school year just going will be the last to have the 11+, so what will a devolved Assembly do? Sammy the Streaker has laid it out starkly – unless the two nationalist parties knuckle under and reverse their opposition to selection, the Assembly will block any proposed non-selective system, thus throwing the secondary sector into chaos and allowing individual grammar schools to set their own selection criteria. This will actually be much worse than the 11+, which is at least a structured system.

So we must ask, what are nationalist ministers, in particular the Provos, going to do in this situation? As I see it, they have two options. One is to join the Executive on the DUP’s terms – at least until Big Ian figures out a way to kick them out – while bumming and blowing about how, by doing so, they are calling the DUP’s bluff. This is what one might term the Andytown News approach. The other option – which could be combined with the first – is to lobby the Brits to impose progressive measures over the head of the devolved administration, because they sure as hell won’t get any through Stormont.

Either way, the argument that a restoration of Stormont will solve all our problems looks thinner by the day.

Provos make out like bandits as SDLP continues its slow death

Moving on to the nationalist side of the fence, there is no question but that this election has been a triumph for the Provos. If the DUP election machine is impressively slick, the PSF machine is space-age. Incredible vote management delivering five out of six in West Belfast; all three Mid-Ulster candidates returned on the first count; Paul “Butch” Butler winning an unlikely seat in Lagan Valley on the back of an enormous turnout from Lagmore. The deployment of the Provos’ small army of election workers in the latter stages – notably an invasion of South Belfast by Shinners from the West – was wondrous to behold. Even their own activists were stunned by some of the results, such as Mitchel the Draft Dodger topping the poll in South Antrim, young Dáithí McKay only a whisker behind Papa Doc in North Antrim, and coming close to a second seat in Upper Bann.

By contrast, the results make grim reading for the South Down and Londonderry Party. The Stoops are now below a quota in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, East Derry, North Antrim, South Antrim, North and West Belfast and Upper Bann. In some constituencies – notably West Tyrone and South Antrim – they have been wracked by internecine warfare that lost them their seat in the former and nearly did so in the latter. In their former fiefdom of South Down the Provos are sitting on their shoulders like vultures. Only in Foyle and South Belfast do they retain anything like a credible claim to be the leading nationalist party.

The SDLP is not quite ready to expire yet. Despite the fact that there is little more to the party than meets the eye – its lack of organisation has been cruelly shown up yet again – there remains a certain sociological base that can keep the party going for years to come. But the prognosis is grim. Anyone familiar with the SDLP will know that for decades it gained support by being a) the leading Catholic party, b) the party favoured by the bishops, and c) the non-violent party. Only b) really applies any more, and to an increasingly limited extent as the Provos have got more respectable. Meanwhile, the party on the ground consists as always of little fiefs – some doctor, solicitor or head teacher who did something in the civil rights movement, has lived off that reputation ever since, and can get elected to the council in his own right but won’t organise a branch for fear of building up a successor. The party may end up literally dying out in some areas before long.

And that’s without mentioning the lunatic electoral strategy of the Attwood brothers, whose approach is to brag about the SDLP’s success in civilising the barbarians, and then expects those same barbarians to vote SDLP. It is more likely that affronted barbarians would vote Provo just to spite them.

So the Provos have consolidated their leadership of nationalism. But hidden beneath the overall advance of some 2% in the PSF vote, there are some interesting dynamics going on. One is that there is some erosion of PSF support in the party’s traditional working-class base. Some of these people are going over to dissidence, but much larger numbers to abstention. (Actually, my hunch is that those who voted dissident last week were more likely abstainers than direct Provo defectors.) But these losses are more than made up for by to human waves of new voters – firstly, former SDLP supporters, and secondly young voters who have no memory of pre-peace process politics and who vote, when they do vote, monolithically for the Provos.

This sets up a political circle which may be vicious or virtuous depending on your point of view. The Provos will find it exceedingly hard to win back traditional supporters who have lost confidence in them. A return to strident republican politics, even if the leadership wanted it, would tend to alienate the typical Sinn Féin Nua supporter who wants a more aggressive version of the SDLP. Furthermore, the Provos’ shift on policing has ramifications that go beyond the ideological republican’s opposition to a colonial police force or to Belfast Defenderism. One of the main ways the Provos used to reassure a restive base was to go on a spree of punishment beatings, maybe nutting a couple of drug dealers for good measure. They can’t do that any more.

Therefore the Provo strategy – and this makes perfect electoral sense – is to decommission the SDLP post haste. This is desperately bad news for an SDLP that doesn’t know what its function is supposed to be any more. But, as the Provos transform inexorably into a slightly constitutional party – not a million miles from being a less elderly and jaded SDLP – there is an obvious question. The tensions within Northern nationalism are such that a single, monolithic nationalist party is no more possible than a single, monolithic unionist party. If PSF are becoming the new SDLP, where will the new Sinn Féin arise from? That’s of course assuming we would even want a new Sinn Féin, an outcome that I personally would be less than thrilled with. However, there is a smallish but potentially significant space opening up in the old Provo base, and it will be fascinating to watch how different tendencies try to build out of it.

Just a few haphazard thoughts on the election, and on last weekend’s PSF Ard Fheis. Firstly, and I’ll get onto the southern situation in due course, was the Ard Fheis pledge on coalition – which may or may not be academic according to the Leinster House arithmetic. There are of course a lot of yahoos running around the Irish left screaming “No Coalition” as if these magic words will cover up a dearth of ideas, but Grizzly faces a bit of a problem here. The PSF leadership would dearly love to be in government in both states, but much of the southern cadre suffers an allergic reaction to the very concept of coalition with Fianna Fáil. Thusly the Ard Fheis pronounced itself against the idea of coalition with… the Desocrats! As if!

I am also slightly bemused by the euro. Not the currency per se, but if I recall correctly the Provos opposed the Free State’s adoption of the euro, on the quite sensible grounds that the Maastricht convergence criteria would rule out radical economic policies. Yet now we hear the call for an all-Ireland currency, as if the punt still existed. Is this a radical policy of the same ilk as the call for an all-Ireland 12% corporation tax, or an all-Ireland police force – made radical by placing the formula “all-Ireland” before it?

Now, the Stormont election. The counts on tomorrow and Friday will give us some idea of how things will pan out, so I won’t even hazard a prediction. But I do want to have a brief look at the two groups posing as an alternative, the republicans and the left.

The letter from 500 ex-prisoners that appeared in yesterday’s Irish News calling for a vote for independent republican candidates had a couple of interesting features. I noticed that the largest lot of signatories came from Derry, with significant numbers from Armagh and Tyrone but not many from Belfast. Besides, most of the Belfast people I recognised on the list were not Provos but Irps, who you wouldn’t expect to be onside anyway. Another weakness was that the unity of the letter was achieved purely on the basis of opposing the RUC/PSNI, with no signs of a positive alternative. Nonetheless, and although the instigators seem to have been the usual suspects, I draw some comfort from the scale, showing that there are a relatively significant number of republicans who believe we need a republican movement and that the Provos aren’t it. Given the almost total lack of support for a return to armed struggle, there is obviously some kind of an audience for political alternatives.

But, as it happens, I didn’t vote republican and didn’t argue with anybody else to do so. The republican candidates, of course, fall into three categories. There is Gerry McGeough, whose brand of Maria Duce politics is a bit rich for my taste. There are folks like Davy Hyland and Paul McGlinchey, who have only been out of the Provos five minutes and, whatever lines in the sand they may have drawn over policing, haven’t yet shown much sign of being a real opposition. Then you have RSF, who actually are an opposition and have a positive programme of their own. The trouble with RSF is that, despite being good principled republicans, they are also rigid doctrinaires (though Ruairí is much more flexible than he’s given credit for) and a tactical sensibility that I would describe as erratic and a less charitable soul as bonkers.

Nonetheless, although I don’t expect the republican opposition to get many votes, it might not be a bad thing if they did. If they started to look like a credible opposition, then there would be some pressure on them to behave like one.

This does not apply to the far left. I have little confidence in the ability of the left to recognise the real world, never mind reflect and draw serious conclusions. Any votes for these bozos will only encourage them. It is likely, for instance, that the Socialist Party’s campaigning around water charges will bring them some extra votes (their tiny vote base couldn’t possibly shrink further). So, if Tommy Black can raise his vote from 130 to something like 300, which is entirely possible, although that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans the SP will claim it as a vindication of their politics and a sign that things are moving in their direction. And the least said about the SWP’s Ali G politics, the better.

This past wee while has been extraordinarily boring as far as the Norn Iron election is concerned, but as polling day is only two days off I feel it is incumbent on the Sunrise to return to the story. I won’t be making any predictions – that’s a mug’s game. Although many of the results are indeed predictable at this point, there are a few constituencies up in the air – South Belfast for one, and North Down is of course a law unto itself. So it makes more sense to wait for the results of the PR count and do an analysis of the small print.

So we shall take a run through the manifestos. I have in front of me most of the election addresses dropped in West Belfast. I am missing the DUP and the South Down and Londonderry Party, which is no great loss – those interested can find the Big Doc’s detailed manifesto here [pdf] and the Stoops’ printed Mogadon here [pdf]. And for some psychedelic fun, check out Rainbow George’s Make Politicians History site.

But on to the literature at hand. One of the things one notices is that “delivery” is the big word amongst the parties. The SDLP want to “deliver real progress”; the Provos claim “others promise, we deliver”. So the Provos’ leaflet – which, by the way, features no less than four pictures of Grizzly (the other candidates, Fra McCann, Paul Maskey, Jennifer McCann and Shell Dockley, are clustered around him like Santa’s little helpers) – is divid up into three sections. Under “Delivering in the Peace Process”, we have bullet points about a “strategy for Irish Unity and Independence” (by administering Stormont), a “new beginning to policing” (well, we’ll see about that) and northern representation in the Free State Assembly, which Bertie has talked about but can hardly be claimed as an accomplishment just yet. Under “Delivering in the Executive”, we do not have any reference to Provo ministers’ addiction to PFI. What we have is their one genuine achievement – Marty’s abolition of the 11+ – alongside claims to bear the entire credit for the peace dividend and various stances the Provos have taken – anti-racism and opposition to water charges – that hardly relate to anything their ministers did. The third part, “Delivering Locally”, is strictly West Belfast parish pump stuff – again, there are worthy causes there, but the actual Provo strategy of “Gissa Grant” would not be apparent to the casual reader.

We turn now to Dan McGuinness of the Alliance Party. Although I am pleased to see Dan going to the trouble of directing messages in Polish and Chinese to the electorate, this is unlikely to help his chances. Aside from introducing the candidate, the substance of the leaflet is given over to the usual Alliance encomia about “partnership” and “sharing” and other apple-pie virtues that Alliance stands for. Dan promises to offer an alternative to tribal politics, although he’s not the only one.

Also claiming to be that alternative is the eternally optimistic John Lowry of the Workers Party. John also witters on about tribal politics, and argues the working class should really stop living in a fool’s paradise and focus on the really important issues of water charges, PFI and the house price bubble. I fully agree with him that these are important issues, though John seems to forget that the sole point of the election is to restore Stormont. Actually he doesn’t – he does call at the end of his address for the restoration of the Assembly and Executive, but how the Assembly is supposed to do all these wonderful progressive things is left unclear. The WP also make a big deal, somewhat incongruously, of opposing imperialism – in Iraq!

Ah dear, what can we say about young Seán Mitchell of the SWP – sorry, People Before Profit? Don’t pay water charges; No to imperialism (in Iraq); Don’t diss the yoof… as usual with the SWP, a liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks and Yos would more accurately capture the tone. Most striking is Seán’s contribution to the policing debate which goes under the rubric of “Poverty is the Issue Not Policing”. The debate around whether or not to endorse the New RUC is hereby reduced to a question of insufficient community development. Bread and youth clubs, one might say. I would love to vote for this, if it wasn’t totally disconnected from what the issues are for the working class, as opposed to what the far left would like the working class to be concerned with.

Next we turn to the address from Geraldine Taylor of Republican Sinn Féin. I am disappointed to see that Geraldine is running on the identikit RSF manifesto adopted by all six of their candidates – as a disciplined party, that is only to be expected, but they could have made some concession to the peculiarities of West Belfast. It appears that RSF are only interested in appealing to people who are already hardline republicans – and even in that constituency, a manifesto based on appeals to the 1916 Proclamation and Éire Nua is only going to have limited purchase. RSF, in many ways the most substantial of the “dissident” formations, seem to have serious trouble behaving as anything other than an introverted sect. I might have expected different from Geraldine, based on the work she has been doing on the issue of anti-social behaviour around Poleglass for many years. To put it bluntly, her appeal would be greatly enhanced if the entirely necessary slogan of “Smash Stormont” was coupled with “Smash the Hoods”.

Finally, for the student of political exotica we have Louis West. Louis is the Official Unionist candidate for West Belfast, in comparison to which Steve McClaren looks like he was born under a lucky star. Strangely, Louis also seems to be rather down on tribal politics, enjoining us to vote for a moderate Assembly on the grounds that “Normal politics will be better than a constant them-and-us battle over ancient squabbles”. If you think this is a rather odd appeal from the representative of Official Unionism, you have hit the target, rung the bell and may collect a cigar or cocoa-nut according to taste. Louis proclaims that the key issues for him are the rates revaluation, water charges and affordable social housing. One is surely entitled to ask, what then divides the OUP from the Stickies and People Before Profit? Or, to put it another way, how are the representatives of the left more radical than those of Trimble Unionism?

Never let it be said that Northern nationalists have lost their knack for street politics. Although they have been fairly quiescent of late, Northern nationalists have a long and not easily forgotten history of voicing their discontents, on occasion inscribing pithy slogans on placards and gathering together in numbers to give off. Thus we see a mass rally being organised for West Belfast next Saturday.

So what is the subject of the rally? Are the proletariat protesting against the restoration of Stormont and the prospect of Big Ian becoming prime minister? No, as far as can be seen most people cling to the vain hope that some deal will be done. Are they, as the left hope, all riled up over water charges? No, although nobody actually wants to pay the charge the non-payment rallies have not been growing – rather the reverse. In fact, the masses are due to rally in support of the promised Irish Language Act.

This is rather revealing of how the peace process works. At the St Andrew’s talks, in exchange for agreeing to whatever Big Ian demanded, the Provos were fobbed off with various small commitments from the Brits, the most visible of which was the promise of legislation to give Irish some sort of official recognition – the details remain vague. There’s nothing wrong with that. It should be a basic democratic position that Irish should get no less official support than Welsh does. And it’s basically a feelgood measure – it gives nationalists the illusion of having their identity recognised without undermining the basis of the Northern statelet. (“Parity of esteem” is the Humespeak term, now widely adopted by all sorts of people.)

But that isn’t how unionists have seen things. Any official recognition of the Fenians, no matter how innocuous, is guaranteed to get unionist backs up. The OUP have got stuck into the DUP for letting this dangerous proposal see the light of day. The Orange Order have taken the headstaggers and included the Language Act as part of their long list of grievances. The DUP, whose position in the past has oscillated between “English Only” and the odd semi-serious attempt to demand parity of esteem for Braid Scotch, have belatedly woken up to the fact that this small gesture to the Fenians is going down like a lead balloon with the Prods. And, while the Brits seemed to have made an ironclad commitment to the legislation, suddenly the proposal finds itself back on the table and gradually sliding off the table. Such is the dynamic of the peace process.

This in turn has started to sink into the nationalist psyche, and a march and rally are necessary to demand something that was supposed to have been a done deal. It’s also interesting that there are two overlapping constituencies involved here. There are in West Belfast many serious and devoted Gaeilgeoirí who are genuinely annoyed about the Brits’ vacillations. But there is also the luvvie wing of Sinn Féin Nua, many of whom know no Irish except “Ba mhaith liom deontas”, but whose beady little eyes lit up like Scrooge McDuck’s at the prospect of a well-funded Gaelic subsection of the grantocracy. Parity of esteem is one thing, but the prospect of those juicy grant cheques vanishing concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Am I being unduly cynical? Possibly. After all, the Language Act is a worthy cause no matter the motivation of the march organisers. It wouldn’t make much practical difference, but Gaeilgeoirí with some experience of activism behind them appreciate the value of even a small victory. But it’s worth noting nonetheless that imperialism can give and take away with equal facility. It’s the old old story – the only rights you have are the ones you can win for yourself.

Or rather, it doesn’t. One has so far failed to detect a wild upsurge of electoral enthusiasm from the broad masses of West Belfast. Nonetheless, the parties are well into the swing of things, and Grizzly’s mug beams down in Big Brother style from every lamppost.

In fact, if Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney is running in six constituencies, one might say that Grizzly is running in all eighteen. This time more than ever, the Provos are running a determinedly presidential campaign. So, although they are standing a five-person ticket in West Belfast – they should have four safe seats out of six, and last time out weren’t far off a fifth quota – the other four may as well be anonymous. Of course, Sinn Féin Nua do have a slight problem in that their other proven vote-getter, Twinbrook’s Michael Ferguson, is inconveniently deceased. Plus, putting Sue “Shell Dockley” Ramsey on a poster might actually lose them votes.

The main problem the Provos are facing in the West is apathy. Those who bother to vote still vote more or less monolithically for Gerry and his crew, but turnout has been plunging in recent years. Such has been the problem that, when it turned out a few months back that thousands of West Belfast residents had dropped off the electoral register, the Provos flew into a panic and launched a registration campaign that extended to free registration forms being given away with copies of the Andytown News. Now the registered electorate is back up to healthy levels, but the “Who gives a toss?” tendency is growing markedly.

Republican Belfast has been much easier for the Gerryites to control than those restless areas out in the sticks, and mooted republican challenges haven’t gained much momentum. Early moves to draft Brendan Hughes as a candidate ran up against Brendan’s poor health, so the only republican challenger in Belfast is RSF’s Geraldine Taylor, who has a certain profile in her native Poleglass. Geraldine is a tough old lady and necessarily so for somebody who annoys the Provos to the extent she does. But I suspect if Geraldine does manage to pull in some votes – and the odds are against her – it will be less because of her dogmatic republicanism and more because of her hard line against the hoods. Everyone in West Belfast knows that the place is a den of criminality, and this is unlikely to be improved by Gerry’s endorsement of the RUC. In fact, the Provos joining policing structures would just make the West an even closer approximation of Sicily. West Belfast people are fairly pragmatic folk, and there is a substantial body of opinion in favour of beating the shit out of the hoods.

This will not help the South Down and Londonderry Party, who are struggling to hold onto their single seat although, with heroic optimism, they are putting up two candidates and will have to rely on super-efficient transfers. The SDLP’s major pitch is that they were right to endorse the cops in 2001 rather than 2007, and the voters should be thanking them for blazing the trail the Provos are now following. Alex Attwood should ask himself whether that pitch has worked in the recent past. Trouble is, the classic Provo mix of crony capitalism and low-level vigilantism was remarkably popular for a long time, and, while there used to be votes to be had in being the anti-violence party, vying with non-violent Provos on the grounds of being fanatically in favour of the rule of law puts the SDLP on a hiding to nothing.

On the other side, the DUP’s Diane Dodds will monopolise the Shankill vote and be in strong contention to retain her seat. The OUP are running some anonymous numpty and the PUP, despite Hughie Smyth’s years of service at City Hall, aren’t running at all.

Which leaves the odds and sods. I’ve written about the SWP – sorry, People Before Profit’s Seán Mitchell already, and I’ll return to the far left presently. But there is some morbid interest to be had in the Workers Party’s masochistic participation. Every election, you think the WP’s once substantial vote can’t sink any lower, and every time you’re proved wrong. Is it physically possible for the long-suffering John Lowry to get fewer votes than last time? Will we actually see him dip into negative figures?

As part of this blog’s self-appointed brief is to look at debates among Irish radicals, I thought an overview of the republican press would be in order. This will help us orient ourselves a little and may be of interest to readers outside the republican milieu. At some later point I’ll probably take a look at the Irish left press to balance things out.

It’s important to realise that things have changed in recent years in terms of the republican media. It used to be, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, that you just had to pick up Republican News every week and you’d get an overview of what the Provos were saying. There was no other journal of significance, indeed hardly any political tendency of any significance. In the days before the peace process, when republicans didn’t have much access to the mainstream media, a weekly read of what was effectively the Voice of Grizzly was invaluable for knowing what the boys were up to.

Not so these days. Readers outside Belfast may not realise this, but it’s much more important to read the Andersonstown News, which, together with its local satellites, fulfils a very specific function. Now, I know that the Andytown News is not formally a Provo paper. That’s the beauty of it. Máirtín Ó Muilleoir and his little media empire are able to fly kites over sensitive issues, thus giving Gerry some plausible deniability while at the same time campaigning among the base for the route Gerry wants to take. It could therefore best be described as the Ghost of Grizzlyism Future. It has, for example, been pushing for the best part of a year for endorsement of policing, which, given that Máirtín wouldn’t wipe his bum without permission, gives the lie to Gerry’s claim that he only made up his mind two months ago. I don’t like the Andytown News – it tends to remind me of the Sunday Sport without the tits – but it’s worth a look for that reason alone.

Republican News, on the other hand, I tend to read on and off – you don’t see it that much in the North. It too has a specific function, being aimed at the PSF cadre, and in particular the southern cadre. That explains why it is usually quite militant in its language, having a more strongly republican and leftist coloration. That would reflect the Provos’ southern base better – while the Andytown News perfectly fits the consciousness of the cynical ward-heelers in Belfast, the PSF membership in Dublin contains not a few people who think of themselves as radicals, even revolutionaries. I often think that being a radical in Sinn Féin Nua must cause a body a severe case of cognitive dissonance, but you can see what Republican News does for these people. It reassures people who thought they were joining a radical movement that they are indeed in one. Therefore, if the Andytown News forges ahead, Republican News tends to lag behind what the leadership are actually doing.

Actually, I prefer Republican Sinn Féin’s Saoirse, and, as I hear it now has a bigger circulation than Republican News, so too seemingly do quite a few others. I’m not a supporter of RSF, and it’s a very long time since I would have been a republican in the sense that RSF comrades would understand it, but I find Saoirse comfortingly familiar. There is never any doubt you’re reading a republican paper, and, if you ignore the improved graphics, you could almost be reading a copy of An Phoblacht circa 1975. You won’t read stimulating new ideas here – not that you’ll find them in Republican News either – but that’s not the point. This is good old-fashioned principled republicanism, just like the politics we used to know, to warm the cockles.

Now we turn to the Starry Plough – which only appears sporadically and can be hard to track down – and I’m sorry to say that, after thirty-plus years to get it right, the IRSP still haven’t mastered the art of producing a readable paper. It has varied down the years, though, and more recently there has been noticeably less of the Shining Path and Kim Il Sung stuff the Irps were so keen on in the 90s. Strange to say, you can actually find reasonably intelligent articles in the Starry Plough, though I have serious doubts, based on the entire history of the Irps, of their ability to translate a good paper position into operative politics.

It is at least a better read than the Sovereign Nation, organ of the Real Republicans. This paper’s content can best be summed up as follows: Down with Gerry! Armed struggle – yo! Punishment beatings – yo! Apart from the occasional nod to “sovereignty” in the Wilsonian sense, you will be hard pushed to find any political content. This is militarism pure and simple, and it’s more than a little wearying.

Finally, it’s worth taking a look at two more open publications. Fourthwrite, which emerged from the “republican recomposition” discussions following the 1994 ceasefire, has wide recognition and a stable circulation, and manages to provide an arena where opponents of the Gerryite strategy can debate. The magazine is patchy – generally there will be a couple of excellent articles, a couple of really awful ones, and a couple that leave you scratching your head – but is essential reading nonetheless. Fourthwrite’s strength, I would say, is its weakness – while its openness is to be commended, its lack of a well-defined line means it has trouble really taking the lead in a “recomposition” project, with contributions varying between strident opposition to the Good Friday process and willingness to remain within the Big Tent, and a consequent lack of focus.

The same could be said of Forum, publication of the Dundalk-based New Republican Forum group. Forum has a less attractive style than Fourthwrite, but makes up for it with rather heavier articles. Like Fourthwrite, the politics are basically republican, vaguely leftist, undogmatic and showing a welcome willingness to think about alternative strategies. There is indeed some political thinking going on amongst republicans, it’s just that you have to dig a little to find it.

So, the Provos’ Extraordinary Ard Fheis has voted by over 80% to endorse the ard chomhairle’s blockbuster motion on policing. This marks a further qualitative stage in the transformation of the Provisionals into Fianna Fáil Mark II. It’s hard to say whether this is the point of no return – so many Rubicons have been passed that it’s difficult to believe that anybody still gives credence to the Provos’ claims to be any sort of radical force. But what does the Ard Fheis decision mean?

First off, regular readers will be aware that I’m not in favour of accepting policing. The reasons for this are very simple. I’m not claiming that the current PSNI is exactly the same as the old RUC, although the changes made to policing practice are not half as significant as the PR would have it. Basically, any northern police force cannot but be a pillar of imperialism, and cannot but be a sectarian force. RSF correctly pointed out that the old RIC had lots of Catholic officers, but that didn’t stop it being a British force pledged to uphold British rule. I would add to that the point that non-sectarian policing in the North is impossible for the same reason that you can’t have non-sectarian unionism; that since partition, the Northern state has been based on the maintenance of sectarian privilege, and the armed wing of the Northern state must by its very nature enforce that state of affairs.

Now, the main argument put for joining the policing structures is that you can influence policing in a positive direction, making real, far-reaching changes instead of just taking a few rough edges off the old RUC. That is essentially the argument put by the SDLP in 2001, and Grizzly only differed in setting the bar slightly higher in terms of reform. This is quite persuasive, if you think the Northern state is reformable. Leaving aside the ludicrous Ard Fheis claims that supporting policing would undermine partition, that really is the key point. For decades republicans, and the majority of socialists, have taken the view that the North was irreformable. Against that was the Humeite view that sectarianism was a mere excrescence on Northern politics, and it was possible to have a Six-County state where genuine democracy and equality could exist. That is the view that the vast majority of Ard Fheis delegates have embraced.

I won’t waste too much time on the speeches from the ardán: since the latter-day Provos have developed a political culture whereby lying is held to be the height of sophistication, there is only so much you can take. I have a theory that when Elvis shot the TV, Mitchel McLaughlin was on. But to briefly recap the lowlights, Grizzly did his usual language-mangling turn, replete with all sorts of references to issues that push republican buttons but are of dubious relevance to the actual debate; copious backslapping of his intelligent and well-informed audience; and lots of gobbledegook about this concept of “civic policing” he has been pushing recently. Gerry Kelly was Grizzly without the folksiness, and I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse; the god-awful Mary Lou McDonald offered up further evidence that she never really left Fianna Fáil; and Marty McGuinness gave his well-honed “Is mise an Ghluaiseacht” speech.

And of course the delegates lapped up this tripe. Even the few dissenters loudly pledged their support for party unity. There was no walkout, which was disappointing but hardly surprising. In fact, not even the margin of victory was surprising, for a number of reasons. Most obvious of these is the arm-twisting that went on at cumann level in the run-up to the Ard Fheis. More importantly, there aren’t many ideological republicans left in Sinn Féin Nua: many have left, others are keeping a low profile, and there are many many people in the Provos who have basically stopped being republicans in anything but a Platonic sense, if they were ever republicans in the first place. There is a whole generation of party members, especially in the South, which believes itself to be radical (and that can cause the Gerryites some problems, as over a possible coalition at Leinster House) but has had zero education in principled politics. And finally, the leadership remained united – there was simply nobody of any stature willing to challenge Gerry, nor is there likely to be in the foreseeable future.

And this leaves us with the question I keep getting posed – what’s the alternative? A glib response would be to say that I wouldn’t have got myself into this position to start with – it’s difficult for me to put what PSF supporters would see as credible alternatives, because we aren’t arguing from the same premises. A better question to ask might be, what force could pose as an alternative pole of attraction? No easy answers to that one, but it at least allows us to look at the dynamics of the republican base, and the strengths and weaknesses of the tendencies that might aspire to be an alternative.

PS. I spy in today's News Letter an opinion piece by Malachi O'Doherty urging Big Ian to stand firm and not be taken in by Gerry's honeyed words. At least, that's what I think it says underneath the tangled syntax. Thus does Norn Iron's leading progressive intellectual find himself to the right of Peter Robinson.

I happened to catch Grizzly’s oration to the broad masses at Clonard last night – you may have seen it on the telly. This is the latest and biggest of the mass meetings the Provos have been holding all over the shop in order to reassure their base ahead of the Ard Fheis vote to embrace the peelers. Even though the meetings have been carefully staged, the publication of the O’Loan report – I’m reading it now and will write something presently – hasn’t helped the apparatchiks, and widespread discontent at the base has been evident.

Gerry, though, was at his smoke-blowing best. I’ve had occasion on this blog to write about the various Machiavellian manoeuvres and rhetorical tricks that our boy uses to hoodwink the base, and they’re on full throttle at the minute. Most prominent at Clonard was the backslapping ploy. Gerry made a point of remarking how intelligent and sharp and politically engaged the West Belfast community was, and that’s the giveaway. When Gerry protests loudly that nobody can pull the wool over West Belfast’s eyes, it almost – but not quite – distracts you from the knitting.

It took me back to some of the spin-mongering tactics that Gerry used between the late 70s and mid-80s to outflank his opponents within the Provos. If you want to know the military gossip, you won’t get it here, so go and read Ed Moloney. In any case, control of the army is straightforward – the North dominated the army, Belfast dominated the North, the Ballymurphy mafia dominated Belfast, and the Murph was Gerry’s personal fiefdom. With that setup, all you need to do is invoke military discipline – and a lot of volunteers weren’t terribly political in the first place. No, Gerry’s big problem was with Sinn Féin, which was allegedly democratic and as strong in membership terms in the South as the North. This is an important distinction, because while in the North (pre-H-Block at least) SF was little more than a support network for the army, in the South it consisted of political activists who had a well-defined programme – the various iterations of Éire Nua – and were building around that programme.

So to turn what was a relatively serious political party into a cynical personality cult, it was necessary to undermine the programme and sideline those closely identified with it. Thus it was that, almost from the moment the Cage 11 boys made their pitch for the leadership, one could hear wild talk of a new generation of young, hungry radicals, influenced by Marxism forbye, challenging the old, tired, out-of-touch rural conservatives (not only Dáithí and Ruairí, I should point out, but almost the entire elected leadership of Sinn Féin). This spin was promoted heavily by Eamonn McCann, but lots of other people who should have known better fell for it. The reaction from the old guard, who the spin was intended to infuriate, is what caused Gerry to make his famous statement that there was no Marxist influence in the republican movement. For once Gerry came passably close to the truth. I do seem to remember Bangers Morrison describing himself as a Marxist-Leninist, but I strongly suspect that Danny was extracting the urine. Same goes for Tom Hartley’s infatuation with Fanon – few people read his essays, and I’m not sure even Tom took them that seriously. No, Gerry was right, the new ideology was not Marxism – it was Grizzlyism.

The point about the “left turn”, which so many people still seem to think was real, was that it was a means to an end, the end being the grabbing of power. I don’t know, and I really don’t care, whether Gerry and his satraps were still sincere republicans at that point. But they played silly buggers with politics for the sake of their own advancement, and playing silly buggers with politics always carries the danger of turning you into an unprincipled cynic. Most of the leftist posing of that period (opposition to standing for election, for example) was simply that. Ruairí is fond of saying that a militant slogan is no substitute for a worked-out programme, and whether or not you agree with Ruairí’s programme the argument still holds good. Having got rid of their established programme without putting anything substantial in its place, the Provos were left with an ideological vacuum, and as we know nature abhors a vacuum. Nonetheless, the ultra-radical posturing served its short-term Machiavellian purpose, and that was all that mattered to the Gerryites.

A similar point could be made about the infamous “grey document”, introduced by Gerry into a discussion on the updating of the programme. Written by a Provophile British Trotskyist, this little squib was a mess of wild ultraleftism completely unsuited to Irish conditions. The most notorious provision of the document was for nationalisation of the land, with farmers only having “custodial ownership”. This went down like the proverbial lead balloon with republicans in places like Donegal and Conamara, who had been having some success agitating among small farmers in impoverished rural areas. More than that, it cut at the very base of the southern Shinners, many of whom actually were small proprietors. But then, Gerry never intended the “grey document” as a real contribution to the republican programme. Having served its purpose of outraging the “conservative” southerners and burnishing the Gerryites’ radical reputation, the mad ultraleft proposals were quietly buried.

Then there was the Women’s Department. It was nearly impossible to argue against a Women’s Department, especially after the role played by prisoners’ families during H-Block – but then that was the point. To a big extent, the Sinn Féin Women’s Department served as a playpen for feminists, many of them former members of Peoples Democracy, who could bum and blow to their hearts’ content about women making their mark on republican politics and refusing to accept their traditional tea-making role any more. Its other functions were to wind up traditional republicans, who believed they had joined a revolutionary movement and not a consciousness-raising group, and to provide a loyal cadre of Gerryite hatchet-women. While Provo political correctness ensured that lots of women, some of them hilariously inept, got to fill prominent positions, none of them achieved any real influence, let alone transforming republican politics. (The same goes in more general terms for the PD defectors, who quickly found out who was boss.)

One of the great examples of this sort of legerdemain was of course the abstention debate in 1986. I don’t propose to go into the gerrymandering of the Ard Fheis, or the unconstitutionality of what was done at it, or even the pack of lies fed to delegates by McGuinness, Doherty, Maskey and the rest of the stooges. What’s more interesting, for the purposes of this discussion, is how the debate was cast in rhetorical terms. A shining vista was held out of “revolutionary TDs” holding the balance of power in Leinster House and lending invaluable support to the armed struggle. From today’s vantage point, it’s enough to make a cat laugh. But do you see what they were doing? Accepting the institutions of the Banana Republic was supposed to be the radical, even “revolutionary”, position, while revolutionary opposition to the southern state was “conservative”. I’m not an abstentionist, but even I knew at the time what a load of cobblers this was. Gerry’s “revolutionary” position was reformist to the core.

The point being that you can get away with this sort of thing for a long while – as John McAnulty says of David Ervine, it is indeed possible to fool most of the people most of the time. And if your rhetorical tricks are good ones, you can keep on using them to good effect for decades. But there comes a time when concrete reality rudely interrupts and the good old smoke and mirrors don’t work any more. My sense is that, at least for a significant number of people, the policing issue is that time.

If you got yesterday’s Irish News (subscription required) two items will have caught your eye. On the front page, Grizzly was offering to meet dissident republicans to discuss their concerns and attempt to win them round to support for the peace process. Inside the paper was the text of the resolution the Provo leadership are circulating for support ahead of the Extraordinary Ard Fheis. Taken together, the two provide a small illustration of the Gerryite modus operandi.

To take the second item first, it was striking that the leadership couldn’t put a simple yes/no question on endorsing policing. Instead there is a huge blockbuster resolution containing a condensed version of the entire Provo programme, reiterating support for a united Ireland, the equality agenda, justice for victims of collusion etc ad nauseam. The reason for a rhetorical ploy like this is simple. A yes/no vote on the issue of policing would have posed all kinds of trouble for the Gerryites. Obviously there are the increasing signs of dissidence in the sticks; also, even though Belfast and Derry City are easier to keep a lid on, getting support for the New RUC past the Bloody Sunday families or Relatives For Justice, not unimportant parts of the base, might have taken some doing. The advantage of the blockbuster resolution is that you can either support the leadership or reject the programme as a whole. It’s a bind, and deliberately so.

Another obvious trap is Gerry’s offer to meet the dissidents. He’s pulled this trick a few times in the past, and it’s a good one. If they refuse Gerry’s reasonable offer, the dissidents risk looking so rabid and fanatical as to deter any wavering Provo supporters from going near them. On the other hand, if they agree to talks behind closed doors, such is Gerry’s history of mendacity that they’re even more fucked. The smart play in this situation, the jiu-jitsu move, would be to say that, while they have no desire to sit down around a table with Gerry, they are perfectly happy to meet him in public and debate the peace process in front of an audience. They may or may not win people over, but at least the Sleekit One would be out in the open where you could see him.

There are a couple of other classic Gerry strokes we might expect to see in the next month or two. One will be the wheeling out of hunger strikers, dead volunteers’ families and various heroic figures from republican history – at least the airbrushed version where Brendan Hughes was never on hunger strike and Billy McKee didn’t defend St Matthew’s. It’s a pity that the late Joe Cahill is no longer available to give one of his “I stood at the foot of the gallows for Ireland” speeches, but there must be a fair few of those on tape.

The other Gerry manoeuvre to watch for, especially now that several Stormont candidacies are going begging, will be a high-profile role for selected military men. These will be figures who are totally loyal to the Gerry agenda, but whose military careers will give the impression that our boy has a bunch of fearsome hardliners breathing down his neck. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly have both played the role to perfection in the past, so don’t be surprised if Brian Keenan starts popping up giving speeches all over the place. It’s a stroke that would be characteristic of Jack Lynch circa 1969, letting the optics suggest unbending republicanism while in fact doing the opposite.

If you’re a chess player you’ll know that with time you acquire the ability to predict your opponent’s next few moves. Gerry is a great Machiavellian operator, but he only has a certain number of strokes and after a while you get to see them coming a mile off. It’s a constant source of wonder to me that so many people keep being suckered by the same gambits time after time.

Last week when writing about the Provos’ new stance on policing, I mentioned the trouble Grizzly was having holding on to his assembly party. Things have progressed in the interim, and at least a quarter of Sinn Féin Nua’s Stormont team will not be running again, at least not under the party banner.

Now, it’s true that Gerry can’t be blamed for the loss of the hugely popular Michael Ferguson of Twinbrook, who inconsiderately went and died of cancer a while back. And three others have surfaced, issued proclamations of loyalty and then gone to ground. Tommy O’Reilly says he wants to pursue his political ambitions on the big stage of, er, Fermanagh council, while North Belfast’s Kathy Stanton, a rising star in the recent past, wants to spend more time with her young family. Another rising star, Philip McGuigan of North Antrim, has just announced that he will be standing down from Stormont, though he will remain on Ballymoney council, and given the obligatory vote of confidence to Gerry.

If this doesn’t look unfortunate, deselecting two out of three MLAs in Newry/Armagh begins to look careless. Pat O’Rawe has been quiet, but her colleague Davy Hyland – who was deselected in his absence and informed by text message – is hopping mad, and has said so vocally over the last lot of days. Davy has resigned his party membership and stuck the boot into Gerry over policing. Some Gerryite apparatchiks are claiming he didn’t raise any disagreements before, but the Provo politburo’s habit of lying to its own supporters surely invalidates that complaint even if it’s true. Now Mid-Ulster MLA Geraldine Dougan has entered the fray, threatening to resign her party membership if the upcoming Ard Fheis endorses the Continuity RUC. Both Dougan and Hyland are openly canvassing solo runs at the election.

It is significant, I think, that none of these people have shown hints of dissidence in the past – rather, they are middle-of-the-road Northern republicans. Gerry should know by now that you can’t fool all the people all the time, and policing is a lightning-rod issue that it’s almost impossible to dissemble on. It also strikes at the Defenderist roots of the Northern Provos and raises hackles among people who couldn’t care less about abstentionism or the Second Dáil.

Gerry’s trouble probably won’t end here. There have been consistent reports recently of discontent among the Provo rank and file, both in the party and what remains of the army, although Belfast and Derry City are almost ostentatiously loyal. Most of the rumbling is coming from areas like East Tyrone and South Derry, places with a history of independence and long – and bruising – experience of the Lower Falls Mafia’s organisational practices. Republicans will be aware of the fate of the Antrim cumann, where a whole layer of activists were got rid of and a bunch of heavies from Belfast sent up there to take over. South Antrim’s inability to turn up a local candidate – with first North Belfast’s Martin Meehan and now Derry’s Mitchel McLaughlin being parachuted in – is directly related to this MO. Rural resentment at the Belfast politburo could easily find an expression over policing.

Hopefully it will. The Provo leadership has benefited a great deal from appeals to unity, invocation of military discipline and just outright fear. If people like Geraldine Dougan and Davy Hyland make good on their threats to stand as independents – no matter what the limitations of their programmes may be – it would at least represent some crumbling of the monolith, and that would be all to the good. It would of course leave a lot of questions unanswered about alternatives, and I’ll return to that presently.

If you’ve been following the news, you’ll have heard Grizzly’s remarks at the 50th anniversary Seán Sabhat commemoration down in Fermanagh, which have been hailed as the clearest signal so far that Sinn Féin Nua will be joining the Policing Board following the upcoming Extraordinary Ard Fheis. From the horse’s mouth, as it were. And while I am reluctant to take at face value any words coming out of Gerry’s mouth, the context of his speech indicates that this is in fact the case.

First you have to consider the setting. The Provos have been holding a huge number of these commemorations in the past few months, a good indication that they’re trying to reassure the punters that they are still republicans. Several members of the leadership have also been kite-flying, though Gerry has kept close-lipped. This won’t surprise anyone familiar with Gerry’s modus operandi, which is to stay silent until he’s clear which way the wind is blowing. He would certainly never have gone for an Ard Fheis unless he could be sure of the result in advance. Finally, backslapping of the crowd is always a sure sign that something is going on. When Gerry tells the broad masses they are the most politically astute people in Europe and can’t possibly be fooled, you know an enormous bamboozle is taking place. As Fionnuala O Connor has remarked, the Provo strategy has been to retreat with a swagger and proclaim victory; they have been helped enormously by unionist paranoia and supremacism.

The policing move is of course a requirement of the St Andrews “agreement”, which was arrived at like this: Big Ian told the two governments what he wanted, the governments said, All right Ian, and nobody agreed to anything. But basically, the whole procedure tallied with the Provos’ current politics, their major demand being for Big Ian to go into coalition with them and put their bums on ministerial seats at Stormont. The whole thing accounts for An Phoblacht these days having something of the aspect of the Weekly World News, minus the intentional humour. We read strident demands that that the British make the DUP live up to their obligations and prevent them running away from the peace process. Translated, this means the Brits should make Big Ian prime minister whether he likes it or not.

Will Gerry get away with it? He probably will, if only for lack of an alternative, but not without some difficulty. He has already lost several MLAs, who have either jumped or been pushed, while the dissident roadshow on policing, comprising the IRSP, the 32-County Sovereignty Movement and various independents, continues to draw audiences significant enough that the Provos have felt the need to turn up and argue their case. But the opposition is still desperately weak politically. The deselected MLAs are keeping very quiet, and the dissidents have mainly confined their political stance to lobbying the Provos, in the hope that Gerry will suddenly discover what principled politics are. Unless there is a walkout at the Ard Fheis, it is likely that Gerry will be able to go on bamboozling for the foreseeable future.