Bleak question that Blairite analysis missed

In the course of reviewing Tony Blair's memoir in 2010, the former Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, emphasised the peculiarities of the Blair operation.

"I remember vividly being asked by Gerry Adams, in the margins of a Downing Street meeting, to sit down with him on the stairs of No 10.

"Adams began to berate me about the suggestion that the IRA was involved in ongoing criminality. I, of course, stuck to my guns... about their crime network and money laundering. This was before the Northern Bank robbery, needless to say.

"As things were hotting up, Cherie Blair came home, pushing baby Leo in a buggy festooned with shopping. Quick as a flash, Adams broke off, jumped up and embraced Cherie with a birdie on each cheek. I was left shaking my head in disbelief."

Younger readers may well ask how it came to pass that the heavy lifting was left to one of Kevin O'Higgins's successors in the home of a British PM whose immediate predecessor had nearly been killed in these very same halls?

Jonathan Powell's various recapitulations of the Blairite analysis have made for fascinating reading since 2007, and his latest book, Talking to Terrorists, is no different. In brisk tones, Blair's former chief of staff explains the essence of New Labour's thinking on Northern Ireland.

If one were to condense Powell's analysis, one might say: violent capacity plus community following plus political grievance equals a necessity on the part of the democratic state to negotiate.

To the extent that the IRA roughly met these criteria by 1997, then protracted negotiation was inevitable, even morally desirable. (Powell once publicly invoked the sentiments of a former head of the Israeli Shin Bet who insisted that any meaningful attempt to shorten war was always per se ethical).

The Blairite equation sounds plausible, even prescient in the abstract, but it screens out important problems. The characterisation of IRA violence, for example, always tended to focus on front-page events such as the Brighton bomb, the mortar attack on John Major's war cabinet, or the gash the IRA put in the hide of London's financial quarter. The Blairites usually could detect some rough rationality at play here.

They never talk about the violence sketched in Henry Patterson's important book on the IRA's campaign against rural Protestants on the border, Ireland's Violent Frontier (2013), a campaign that had a distinctly sectarian, even sadistic streak that bore little plausible relationship to gerrymandered city councils, British Army atrocities or "anti-imperialism".

The Blairites rather struggled, too, to make sense of the relationship between the paramilitaries and their 'host' communities. By and large, they tended to use the tired and comforting fish-in-water model from the Vietnam era. There was little interest in exploring the applicability of Ernie O'Malley's chilling insight from the revolutionary era.

John McGahern reminded his readers once that O'Malley "believed the people should be led and coerced if necessary. A small band of committed militants could bring about the conditions of revolution through isolated military actions designed to show the authority as ineffective. The people could then be manipulated by ways of a process O'Malley defined as inspiration, intimidation, and provocation."

This cynicism comes awfully close to the depiction of the IRA's hold on certain sections of the nationalist population as penned by Sean O'Callaghan and Eamon Collins.

But the Blairites' preferred focus was on the macro-level, on "containment" and military "stalemate". And as to political grievance then, Powell's analysis does not really help us resolve the central puzzle of the armed struggle, namely the fact that the IRA called it off, having achieved precisely none of their stated goals, except for the amnesty.

The British refused to be "persuaders for Irish unity." Bertie Ahern did not want free-standing cross border bodies with executive powers, or joint authority, or any kind of federation between the Republic and Northern Ireland. And he insisted that unification be the subject of not one, but two vetoes, namely two interlocking majority votes, north and south.

If the IRA's actions are assessed within this context, a bleak question looms into view, a question that cannot be accommodated by Powell's equation: was the armed struggle ever about these formal political demands, or was it really driven by the more primal and appalling forces that Patterson sketched along the border?

Dean Godson's landmark biography of David Trimble suggests the Blairites had too high a regard for ideologues like Michael Farrell whose book The Orange State was once seen on Blair's own desk. That explains the abstraction.

Sunday Independent