Splintered Sunrise

You often hear these days about the modernisers and pragmatists in the DUP. Chief among these are the husband-and-wife team of Cllr Peter Robinson MP MLA, the party’s deputy leader, and Cllr Iris Robinson MP MLA. Like most of the DUP “pragmatists”, how they got this reputation boggles my mind, although it doesn’t take much to be relatively pragmatic in comparison to Papa Doc.

Although he has been a Westminster MP since 1979, Robbo has never really taken to the Big House – his real love is his little fiefdom of Castlereagh Council. What he would like Castlereagh to be known for is having year on year the lowest rates in the North, a result of the money-spinning Dundonald Ice Bowl combined with services pared to the bone. What it’s actually better known for is being a kind of loyalist North Korea. Council meetings are marked mainly by non-DUP members squirming as Peter and Iris coo at each other across the chamber. The recent trend for Robinson children to get onto the council only promises to make this worse. And then there’s Peter’s egocentric crusade to get every street, public building and edifice in Castlereagh named after himself.

In recent years the Robinsons have been portrayed by the media as being on the “pragmatic” wing of the DUP. This seems to come less from their actual politics – they have faithfully served Big Ian for decades and have given no sign of changing their minds on anything – than their style. The Belfast-based Robbo faction is much less likely to Bible-bash than rural Duppies like “Singing” Willie McCrea. Plus, there are the makeovers, suggesting that Trinny and Susannah might have had a quiet word with them.

Peter has had laser eye surgery, removing the steely glint of his specs. He’s also replaced his traditional cowlick with fashionably tousled hair, and developed a taste for loud ties. Can designer stubble be far behind? Iris, meanwhile, has ditched her wee hard woman look in favour of cultivating a softer image, and has been styled and coiffured to within an inch of her life. She has been sexed up to the point where she now, I suppose, counts as the resident milf in a notably glamour-starved party – so much so that I would only be mildly surprised to hear she was doing Playboy.

Given Iris’s carefully cultivated soft-focus image, it seems to have come as a shock to come people that she would stick the boot into integrated education, following direct rule education minister Maria Eagle’s refusal to consider funding Rowallane College, a new integrated school in her constituency. It has certainly annoyed the Rowallane parents, who, like many parents in similar circumstances, have invested a lot in giving their kids a non-sectarian education. Plus, Norn Iron is full of dopey do-gooders, many of them in the Alliance Party, who believe integrated schools are the key to the Province’s future. How could Iris be so uncharitable to these perfectly harmless institutions?

Anybody who is shocked by this obviously hasn’t paid much attention to the utterances of the DUP’s education spokesman, Sammy “The Streaker” Wilson. Sammy has consistently and articulately defended the traditional DUP position of support for the status quo, or better still the status quo ante. That means retaining the 11+, defending the grammar schools, keeping “vocationally” oriented secondary schools for the great Prod unwashed, and allowing Catholics to have separate development. And it remains important symbolically that the state sector should stay “Protestant”, as Iris herself has been saying for ages. Integrated schools, which rock the boat in a very mild way, annoy the hell out of political unionism, the OUP as well as the DUP.

In fact, anybody with a progressive bone in their body should be arguing for a unified and secular education system in the North. Since the days of the old Stormont, this has been one of those issues where unionism can find common ground with the almost equally unlovely forces of Catholic reaction. Doing down both would be a cause worth fighting for, and if it exposes the very real sectarianism of “modernising” unionism, so much the better.

I know this has taken a while, but it’s difficult to know what I can add to the acres of discussion about the O’Loan report – the Police Ombudsman’s report into Mount Vernon is available here (pdf) and readers might also be interested in this article by Liam Ó Ruairc of the IRSP. Although I’m not in total agreement with Liam – among other things, I’m dubious about his description of Henry McDonald as a “reputable journalist” – he gives a good overview of the situation.

The first thing to say is to pay tribute to the courage and tenacity of Raymond McCord, without whose determination to see justice done for his son the investigation probably wouldn’t have happened. Also this represents good work by Mrs O’Loan herself, in the face of persistent and long-term obstruction by a force in which RUC officers still rule the roost, and where the prevailing culture is that the cops are under no obligation whatsoever to be accountable to anyone for anything.

What’s disappointing about the O’Loan report – at least the published part – is that it doesn’t fundamentally tell us anything we didn’t already know. Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knew that the peelers were running gangs of loyalist killers for decades. What the O’Loan report does, though, is lay out enough evidence to make the strategy impossible to deny – not that that has stopped unionists from trying.

What transpires is that, during the dozen years that Mark Haddock was a police informer, he was involved in at least 16 murders, 10 attempted murders and scores of other crimes that we know about. And over these years the cops gave him £80,000. Now bear in mind the Mount Vernon death squad was one small section of the UVF – an investigation into Robin Jackson and Billy Wright’s activities in Portadown would almost certainly reveal the same scenario on a bigger scale. What this means, in effect, is that for decades on end the Brits had a small army of Fred Wests and Dr Shipmans running around, doing their dirty work on the state payroll. And in fact the state actively covered up for them, as O’Loan details when describing the phoney interviews and destroyed evidence. This of course is totally consistent with Jonty Brown’s description of the Special Branch modus operandi.

Now let’s look at the “security” justifications. This comes into play because former RUC Special Branch boss Chris Albiston, latterly head of the colonial police in Kosovo, stated in the Telegraph that mere laypeople (and implicitly, especially not uppity Catholic women) couldn’t judge operational decisions. But the main justification for running informers is to protect the public from worse crimes that might be committed – allowing informers to commit mass murder is hardly consistent with that. Again, the relationship between handler and informer means that any informer can be called in at any time and ordered to turn Queen’s evidence, but that seems never to have occurred to Special Branch. Not to mention that the Mount Vernon UVF was so riddled with informers that it could have been closed down at will.

The affair also points up the key difference between republicans and loyalists. It is true that informers in the Provos, some at a very high level – and who really thinks Scap and Donaldson are the end of that story? – were left in place for a long time and allowed to get away with all sorts of murky deeds. But the Provos were ostensibly a revolutionary movement aiming at the overthrow of the northern colony, which is why informing was a capital offence. The loyalist gangs, on the other hand, saw themselves as a “gloves-off” extension of the state forces, and it is clear that the feeling was mutual.

Probably more interesting is the political reaction. Unionism has reacted in the predictable way – Jeffrey Boy Donaldson referred to a handful of bad apples, and that view was echoed by the DUP’s Policing Board representatives under the leadership (I use the term lightly) of Ian Óg Paisley. The OUP, meanwhile, in the persons of Lord Ken Maginnis and Dirty Dave Burnside, has been even deeper in denial, protesting about the apparent “witch-hunt” against Special Branch. This is of a piece with the OUP’s recent and not entirely unsuccessful efforts to outflank the DUP on the far right.

Nationalism, meanwhile, has proclaimed that “that was then, this is now”. The SDLP of course is covering it ass, pretending that its membership of the Policing Board since 2001 has forced radical changes. The Provos, on a parallel track, have argued that the O’Loan report demonstrates why they should join policing structures in order to, um, force radical changes.

Here’s why I think this approach lacks credibility. The sealed part of the O’Loan report is probably much more interesting than the published part. Most commentators’ guess is that this part deals with the role of MI5 and its influence over Special Branch. People with any kind of attention span will have noticed that MI5 is due to take over anti-subversion responsibilities in the “Province” later in the year. To this end, it is building a whopping great new headquarters outside Belfast, which should itself cast doubt on the Gerryites’ boasting that British withdrawal is on the cards. Not to mention that MI5’s Norn Iron operation is stuffed full of, you’ve guessed it, former RUC Special Branch officers.

That was then, this is now? More like plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

One of the debates running through the Irish left in recent years has been on the question of “democratic centralism”, which is alleged to be a system of organisation derived from the writings of VI Lenin. Actually I think Lenin’s approach to the matter is very poorly understood, but let’s run with this a while.

There are on the Irish far left several organisations claiming to be Leninist and adhering to democratic centralism. Most leftists who aren’t in these groups are deeply anti-Leninist, not usually because they have a worked-out critique of Lenin’s political thought but rather because they don’t think much of the organisations that claim to adhere to it. A good example is the vociferously “anti-Leninist” Irish Socialist Network. Most of the ISN’s members have a background in the Workers Party, and they have a few younger activists who come from the SWP. Well might one protest that those groups are not democratic centralist but simply centralist – the experience of ISN members leads them, quite understandably, to react against loud proclamations on the virtues of “democratic centralism”.

I have my doubts about the ISN – especially about their great claims to having no leadership – but there’s something to their position. Groups like the SWP and the Socialist Party do have a tendency to treat “democratic centralism” as a magical fetish, and anyone who has been on the rough end of those groups’ regimes will know how much democracy is involved. My view is that if you strip down democratic centralism to its essential elements – you take a decision democratically, the majority rules, you carry out the decision in a unified way and minorities are given room to loyally collaborate – it has a lot going for it. Certainly there is nothing intrinsically evil about it. And you’ll notice that the form of organisation doesn’t necessarily correspond to a revolutionary Marxist party – you could just as easily run a cricket club on the basis of democratic centralism.

Nor, and this is important, does the idea contain any intrinsic political virtue. This may come as a shock to, say, SWP members who are immensely proud of their “Leninist” regime and believe that it guards them against political sin. But Fianna Fáil is organised on the basis of democratic centralism, and it has no fixed political principles at all. What’s more, despite a pronounced cult of the Infallible Leader, FF is a good deal more democratic than the SWP.

Consider this. If you want to be on the FF National Executive, all you need to do is get some party body to nominate you, and then do the rounds of the cumainn and comhairlí ceanntair trying to drum up some votes. It isn’t easy to get elected, but it’s easy enough to get nominated, and once nominated, you have as fair a crack of the whip as anyone.

By way of contrast, how does the SWP elect its Political Committee? What happens is that at the annual conference – usually right at the end of proceedings – the outgoing PC will nominate a “slate” of 10 or 12 names to be the new PC. Most of those names don’t change from year to year, but there are normally a couple of new faces to give the impression of fresh blood.

It’s important to realise that the slate, once proposed, can’t be amended. If you, the conference delegate, would like to remove Kevin Wingfield and substitute Paul O’Brien, you can’t propose that. You have to vote for or against the slate as a whole. Or else you can put forward an alternative slate, meaning you have to twist people’s arms to see if they’ll put themselves forward against the existing leadership. Given the SWP’s absurdly draconian restrictions on members associating with each other, which make it impossible to organise opposition outside the conference, actually getting an opposition together over the 48 hours of the conference itself is beyond any but the most energetic factionalist, and almost certainly more trouble than it’s worth. Not to mention that any member suspected of being an oppositionist will quickly find herself an ex-member.

This anti-democratic procedure explains how a group of “leaders” with scarce any experience in leading anything but their own small sect get to hold seats on the PC on a more or less permanent basis, sometimes for decades on end. There is no fresh blood except for a select few promoted by the permanent leadership, who invariably become clones. There is no fresh thinking except that coming from the papal curia in London, which itself is “elected” on the same basis, and with the same results. I know most of the Irish SWP leadership reasonably well, and while there is undoubtedly talent there, there is nothing that justifies anyone holding a leadership position for 25 or 30 years unbroken. In a proper political party, many if not most of these people would have been out on their ear years ago.

SWP members who are interested in the health of their organisation – and they do exist – might be well advised to ponder whether the slate system, which is also used for such purposes as electing conference and NC delegates, is really all it’s cracked up to be. They might also consider the question of term limits or compulsory rotation for leading members. A spell at the grassroots might do some people good, especially Kieran.

Shortly the massed ranks of the DUP’s Assembly candidates will gather to have their candidacies formally ratified by the party and to receive the benediction of their Supreme Spiritual Leader, Pope Ian. But what will surely be played as a triumphant event has been a little overshadowed by well-sourced reports about the “contract” prospective DUP candidates are having to sign, which looks more like a contract on the candidates. It certainly sheds some light on the mafia-style tactics Papa Doc uses to rule the misnamed Democratic Unionist Party with a rod of iron.

The fines are a case in point. It has been reported that fines up to £20,000 may be imposed on MLAs who vote against the party whip. Various Duppies have protested that fines are a well-established part of their party’s disciplinary system. This is true – one often hears of DUP representatives having to fork up fifty or a hundred quid for missing a meeting without a good excuse. But, even bearing in mind the generous salary package for a Stormont MLA, twenty grand seems a bit steep.

Then there are the pre-signed resignation letters. This is the silver bullet – any MLA who seriously incurs Big Ian’s displeasure can simply be divested of their Assembly seat. Apparently the tactic has been used on at least two previous occasions, and at least in part explains the DUP’s impressive disciplinary record. I have a sneaking feeling this scheme may have been borrowed from Ross Perot – in his book Better Than Sex, the late Hunter Thompson relates how in the 1992 presidential election he wanted to be a Perot delegate to the Electoral College, though he didn’t plan on voting for Perot. The little weasel sent HST an undated resignation letter to sign before he could be considered as a delegate.

The background to this is the emergence of candidates trying to challenge the DUP from the right, analogous to the dissident republican challenge to Grizzly. Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney is the leading light here, although his habit of losing friends and alienating people tends to militate against a united slate. Nonetheless, challenges to the DUP there will undoubtedly be.

I suppose the DUP could be considered a victim of its own success. During the late 90s the party’s electoral gains came at the expense of the flotsam and jetsam of independents and micro-parties abounding in unionism at the time, the wreck of the McCartneyite Hesperus. Then a few years back it cleaned up as the Donaldsonite wing of the OUP defected wholesale. This, as it happens, has simply relocated the OUP’s internal contradictions into the DUP. And now the other wing of the influx is turning around to bite Ian’s bum. Who says there’s no such thing as poetic justice?

Update 10.02.07: The twenty grand fine seems to have been a bit of an embarrassment for the DUP. MLAs now face a fine of a mere £2000 for breaking the party whip.

Last Friday night, Orange Order bigwig Drew Nelson gave an oration to the broad masses of Newtownards on how, to use loyalism’s favourite phrase of the moment, Norn Iron was becoming a “cold house” for Prods. In other words, the Fenians are getting everything and we are now the oppressed people. (Not, of course, that the Fenians were oppressed in the first place, and, even if they were, it’s no more than they deserved.)

Unfortunately, the News Letter’s website isn’t the most navigable, so I haven’t yet been able to find a link to the big spread the Voice of Bigotry did on Saturday morning on the theme of how God’s Wee Ulster was being steadily de-Orangeised. Bro Nelson’s main complaint, among many, was that the DUP had failed to secure as part of the St Andrew’s talks the Loyal Orders’ statutory right to have coat-trailing marches in areas where they weren’t wanted. And that really is what the Orangemen mean by the “right to march” – anybody with the misfortune to live in a Protestant area will be well aware that Orange marches are far from being an endangered species.

Bro Nelson, though, had a few other strings to his bow. There was an entirely predictable gripe about the promised Irish Language Act, which the Prodocracy seem to think will be the end of civilisation, while conversely the luvvie wing of Sinn Féin Nua are almost orgasmic with expectation. I do wish people would have a look at what the Welsh Language Act has (or hasn’t) achieved before getting their knickers in a twist about legislation which could well be a good deal weaker.

One notable thing was that Bro Nelson got fairly stuck into the new Sexual Orientation Regulations. Unionism is on a bit of a homophobic binge over this harmless bit of legislation, which for some perplexing reason it sees as specifically “anti-Protestant”. In the debate on the regulations in the Transitional Assembly it was noticeable how the 39-39 tied vote broke down. In favour of equality were the SDLP, the Provos, Alliance and the late David Ervine. Opposed were the DUP, the OUP and, with supreme bathos, Paul “Sports Massage” Berry. Not a single representative of mainstream unionism was prepared to accept that the gay community had a right to equal treatment. This was carried over into the House of Lords debate, where the assault on the regulations was led by the DUP’s Maurice Morrow (surely proof that Mr Tony will dish them out to anybody).

There has been some discussion on this blog about whether unionism is necessarily sectarian. This poses the interesting question – is unionism capable of comprehending the concept of equality? You see, it is possible to imagine an ideal non-sectarian unionism. The “civic unionism” touted around the op-ed pages by the Cadogan Group and Cream Bun McCartney, with its copious references to the “modern” and “multicultural” UK state in opposition to the “backward” Banana Republic, is of this ilk. But when you take a look at actually existing unionism, the picture is a lot less pretty. Bro Nelson’s view that equal rights for gays is anti-Protestant seems of a piece with Cllr Ruth Patterson’s statement after the anti-Chinese pogrom in South Belfast that the Chinese were compromising the “Protestant character” of the area.

I also look forward to seeing what Steven King and Jeff Dudgeon have to say on the matter. After all, it’s not for nothing that these boys have propagandised so fervently for “civic unionism”. Speak up! All those closeted gays in the Orange need all the moral support they can get.

I don’t intend to make a habit of bigging up the Daily Mail, but I think readers may well enjoy this excellent article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Blair’s faith-based premiership. On this evidence, I would guess that Geoffrey’s forthcoming book, Yo Blair!, will be quite the read, and certainly a lot more fun than Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? Of which you can read much informed comment over at Aaro Watch.

Many thanks to the White Queen for helping to plug a bit of a gap. I promise, the O’Loan report is coming soon.

I’m extremely gratified that my old friend Splinter has chosen to broaden out the Sunrise by inviting in guest contributors. At least, he says it’s a broadening and an attempt to bring in different perspectives – I suspect there may be some slacking going on. Anyway, I’m indebted for the platform and will endeavour to live up to the high standards of this blog.

I am an occasional reader of the Socialist Democracy website, having found that, despite a rather dour style, the Grumpy Old Men of Irish Trotskyism do produce consistently useful material. One thing that caught my eye recently was this article by Andrew Johnson on the Moriarty Report into Charlie Haughey’s corruption. It’s actually not a bad article, giving a decent recap of the essential points and trying to put the whole corruption issue in some sort of historical context. This makes a welcome change from the history-by-character-assassination practiced by yahoos like Stephen Collins, who would have you believe Charlie was the root of all evil in Irish politics.

The article, however, and this is what I don’t like about the left press, is marred by quite a bit of schematic dogmatism. This seems to be the SD house style – they don’t make many concessions to the reader who isn’t immaculately versed in their politics, and there is a tendency to conclude with their entire programme. What I would particularly take issue with is Johnson’s historical account of “the rise of corruption”, which is written in a telegraphic manner that fails to take into account some of the nuances of 26-county politics. Perhaps that can be forgiven in somebody writing from the vantage point of Belfast, but for the southern reader it’s a little jarring.

For instance, Johnson makes big play of the “de-republicanising” of Fianna Fáil in response to the explosion in the North in 1969. But FF didn’t simply ditch the First Aim of its Córú and proceed in a political vacuum. Rather, the old policy, laid down in the New Departure of 1926 which established FF as the constitutional republican party, was replaced by a new policy, enunciated by Jack Lynch in 1970 and endorsed at the 1971 Ard Fheis. This new policy, which Lynch passed off in typically opportunistic fashion as the old policy retooled for new conditions, was in fact the old Cumann na nGaedheal policy from the 1920s.

Johnson is also more than a little hazy on the divisions within Fianna Fáil in those years. It is true that, in the 1960s popular imagination, Charlie was the exemplar of Homo Mohairicus, but things were more complicated and much more interesting than that. Neil Blaney was often characterised in those days as a Mohair Suit Man, but Neil may have been, along with my mentor Kevin Boland, one of the last honest men in Fianna Fáil and a good traditional republican. Conversely, if there was one man in the FF leadership who took the lead in ditching the party’s time-honoured ideology, it was the ostentatiously old-fashioned George Colley. The events surrounding the Arms Non-Crisis are usually and correctly held to be a precursor to the 1985 split (and it was no coincidence that the “retired” Jack Lynch became the Desocrats’ éminence grise), so a more in-depth analysis would not go amiss. The politics of Ireland in recent decades has been ill served by radical historiography, and may provide more fertile grounds for research than yet another paper on 1798 in Roscommon.

I have genuinely mixed feelings about Charlie. Of course he was a shocking old reprobate and I wouldn’t want to defend his crookery for a second. But there was no doubting his extraordinary ability and I’m in no doubt that the tofu-eating South Dublin neo-democrats (© Splinter) hated him not for his failings but for his better points, most notably his populism and his residual (in fact largely rhetorical) republicanism. This I think is why so much of the spiteful commentary on his decline and fall leaves a bad taste. Charlie probably deserved a spell behind bars, but he didn’t deserve to have his epitaph written by those who never did the nation any service at all.