Chapter 10: Ireland
Beneath all the sound and fury of the IRA and Mr Paisley in the early 1980s, two or three constructive trends were in fact beginning to appear in Irish affairs. Unification of the whole island had always been the aim and the stated commitment of politicians in the Republic. In this they agreed with the IRA, but they dissociated themselves with varying degrees of emphasis and sincerity from the IRA’s determination to bring this about by force. None of them, however, before Dr Garret FitzGerald in 1981, drew the obvious conclusion that if force was to be ruled out to coerce Northern Ireland into union, persuasion would have to be used instead. He at least pointed his finger clearly and unequivocally at two of the outstanding barriers to union: the claim in the Republic’s constitution that its territory rightly extended over the whole island, and the subordination of the state to the moral and social dictates of the Roman Catholic Church, and hence, among many less contentious consequences, the prohibition of divorce, abortion and birth control. These two clauses encapsulated the objections of northern Protestants to the idea of closer relations with the Republic — the fears of domination by Dublin and the Vatican. Their removal, after much anguish on the part of backwoodsmen of the Republic, made possible at last a less inhibited dialogue on a future in which material interests, and the realities of the world political and strategic scene, could play a greater part than tribal animosity.
The effervescence of ‘loyalist’ feeling from the end of the 1970s onwards had an effect on British opinion which led indirectly in the same direction. The IRA had failed in their attempt to drive the British out of Ulster by terrorism. But the verbal attacks of Ulster-men against the British Government, for not being prepared to make even greater sacrifices on their behalf, finally succeeded where the IRA had failed, in bringing about a mood of general disillusion on the mainland. Why, it was asked, should British lives be lost to preserve the exclusivity of an ungrateful Protestant community as bigoted as their Catholic opponents, and an international frontier which, by its very nature impossible to control, only made it more difficult to overcome terrorism?
This popular mood gave the British Government greater room for manoeuvre in pressing forward with talks and studies jointly carried out with the Government of the Republic. These had begun cautiously but by 1982-3, greatly helped by sympathetic support from the US presidency, swept on with gathering momentum to the solution of trans-frontier problems of trade and energy, and to the grant of real powers to an Anglo-Irish Council, together with the introduction of parliamentary members as participants in this body. Such terms as federalism between north and south continued to be avoided, but the essence of what was in mind was not very different, and the ultimate goal of a confederation of the Isles of the North Atlantic (for which the happy acronym IONA had already been coined), began to glimmer less faintly on the horizon. This would involve a recognition that once the bitterness of the Ulster confrontation was removed or diminished, the present common interests of Ireland and Britain could at last predominate over the hostility of the past, and a subsystem within the European Community could begin to take shape. The Netherlands and Belgium had had their moments of bitterness, and perhaps more competitive economic interests than Britain and Ireland, but this had not prevented them from seeing national interest in the formation of Benelux.
Britain and Ireland started with some advantages: they had had a common monetary unit before the pound and the punt were so unwisely allowed to diverge in 1978. Citizens of the two countries had the unique privilege of voting in each other’s elections (not quite reciprocally until 1983) and they had long anticipated the EEC’s enforcement of free movement of peoples by being able to travel between the two countries without passports. The main requirement for breaking the psychological barrier to confederation was that politicians on all sides should stop peppering their speeches with emotive references to the Norman Conquest, the Battle of the Boyne, 1916 and so on. The upsurge of civil disorder following on the Protestants taking to the streets in 1983 did much in the end to discredit these tired old slogans on either side. The practical needs of security on both sides of the border encouraged both governments, by mutual agreement, increasingly to disregard its existence, and when relative calm returned, the mass of the people were surprised but by no means dismayed to find that some kind of confederal union had de facto come to birth.
There were two incidental clues in this story to foreshadow what came next. It was Isles of the North Atlantic which were moving towards a Benelux type of agreement. This was not an empty geographical expression. The term North Atlantic carried unmistakable echoes of the fact that thirty-four years earlier a group of countries had come together under that very name to express in the treaty that gave birth to NATO their common interest in resisting external threat. The group extended beyond the islands of the North Atlantic ocean to include countries on its continental coasts — Belgium, Federal Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, France (which remained bound to the Alliance even when in 1966 it left the Organization), Spain (which joined later), some countries (Greece, Italy, Turkey) which had no Atlantic coastline but shared the defensive interests of those who had, and above all, the lynchpin of the Alliance, the United States.
The need to restore internal security had now become a further powerful motive to express in concrete form the common interests, within the Atlantic Community, of IONA. It did not require a great leap of the imagination to see that external threat could easily feed on internal disorder; indeed there was good reason to think that Irish terrorists had received aid from various potentially hostile sources in addition to what they were given by misguided Irish-Americans.
An unconnected circumstance pushed coincidentally in the same direction. When the European Community at last agreed on a fisheries policy it became necessary for this to be enforced throughout the maritime economic zone surrounding Community countries and extending to 200 miles from their coasts. The prospective admission into the Community of Spain and Portugal with their activity and expertise in distant deep-sea fishing reinforced the requirement. A glance at the map is enough to show that a very large area of this common maritime zone in the Atlantic is defined by reference to the coast of Ireland and can most easily be supervised by vessels and aircraft operating from its territory. It was equally clear that Irish military resources were inadequate to meet this requirement, and, with some nationalistic misgiving, it became necessary to accept that the ships and aircraft of other Community countries should help to police the operational area, and should in some cases be stationed on Irish territory. All this helped to break down the historical Irish reservation about becoming involved in a common effort for defence. The extension of political co-operation in the European Community from foreign policy to security policy, begun under the British presidency in 1981, had accustomed Irish representatives to taking part in discussion of matters relating closely to the Atlantic Alliance, and enabled them to learn what the others knew about the Soviet military build-up, and the increasingly dangerous situation arising from Soviet opportunism round the world and from the deepening concern of Soviet leaders facing rebellious subjects in Eastern Europe.
All these strands seemed to lead almost insensibly towards the goal so long desired by Western strategic planners: Ireland’s recognition that it is of, and not only in, the West, and that some practical consequences could now be drawn from this recognition. To begin with there was no need even for formal alliance. It was enough to agree that the forces of friendly countries participating in the policing of the maritime zone should be authorized to take such steps as were necessary to protect themselves and their shore installations against any possible threat. Then, as the international situation deteriorated and the risk of hostilities grew more acute, the fishery protection ships could be replaced by anti-submarine naval vessels and maritime reconnaissance aircraft augmented by such further air support as was necessary.