WILL U.S. PEACE PROCESS ENVOY DO THE RIGHT THING

Oh, croppies ye'd better be quiet and still

Ye shan't have your liberty, do what ye will

As long as salt water is formed in the deep

A foot on the necks of the croppy we'll keep

And drink, as in bumpers past troubles we drown,

A health to the lads that made croppies lie down

Down, down, croppies lie down.

The Irish Peace process has encouraged Irish people to accept, to tolerate and to understand the Orange Order culture as practiced by hundreds of thousands of Orange men, since the creation of their sectarian state almost a hundred years ago. Heaven knows Irish people have tried for centuries to understand the planters and be patient with their culture, that seems to be based exclusively on prejudice, bigotry and “Croppie lie down” mentality. But the hatred is as overwhelming and simply unbearable to sensitive souls, as their massive bonfires and sectarian killing rituals drag on year after year. Their tactics are straight out of a KKK manual and they are now once again parading in KKK garb as above. This eternal marching chant, continues to rant through Irish streets, in several thousand marches annually.

They burn anything from thousands of effigies of his holiness, to anything remotely Celtic or green, to native property, accompanied by huge Lambeg drums with viriolic “hate speech,” which the British seem to selectively mentor or ignore while censoring the Irish. They scrawl vile racism on the Irish flag. They flaunt KKK slogans, such as, “Wee are not racist we just hate cotton picken N..”. which are paraded down Irish streets, while the vast majority of Irish people, are expected to accept and encourage this culture, for the sake of the Peace Process. Turn the other cheek they say but if you observe carefully, people from that part of Ireland, you will notice they are disfigured, from winding in their necks and talking out of the side of their mouths. A rude generalization you may exclaim but I have scrutinized them carefully firsthand.

This is not culture, it is simply pure hatred and bigotry, it has no place in a civilized Ireland from any quarter, including the resulting reactionary politics, which is far easier talk than walk, when it is marching down your streets for most of the year. So in this context, as Gary Hart is a very welcome envoy from the the US to people craving a solution, sits down to negotiate with these British mentored power brokers and ruling elite. However, let there be no illusions about what he is dealing with and let him honestly call them by their correct names in plain English rather than be seduced, by the rhetoric of the British gravy train of political careerists.

He is dealing with racists not a culture. He is dealing with hate speech not free speech. He is dealing with sectarian incitement to violence, not empty and harmless slogans.The sooner Gary Hart faces these realities, the better the odds, of Ireland avoiding a looming, sectarian, civil war. Denial of these hard facts, of what the Orange Order consider acceptable behavior, will simply lead us further down the road to the abyss. Like the Middle East Peace Process, the Irish version remains in eternal gridlock, because of the intransigence of supremacist ideology. It must be called out. The Orange Order bretheren of the KKK is not acceptable in the States why should it be in Ireland. Republicans in the States are permitted to bear arms for self-defence, while any republican in Ireland is deemed a terrorist who protects his home on such hate filled streets. Don't get me wrong, I do not advocate a military solution but in a sectarian state, where police walk in, and liquidate whole families, people are entitled to defend their flesh and blood.

Objective political analysts, that include the Unionist and British tradition, are slowly coming to the realization, that the only realistic road to a lasting peace is a Federal Ireland. London is tiring in a time of contrived austerity of it's 10 billion annual subsidy, to the non-viable, artificial 'statelet'. That is the trump card for any honest broker of substance to face down the Orange Order bullying and bluff. If Gary Hart himself cannot do the right thing and he does carry enough clout to do it, then the only realistic alternative for the ordinary people, who are being held hostage to this anomaly, is that the European Union starts to assume it's political and financial responsibilities, if the British continue with their hands off approach and continue to enable this Orange Order monstrosity, to ruin the lives of generations of Irish people to come.  

Perhaps this writer has become cynical, with the amount of hot air, that has been expended around the Irish Peace Process, so I hope our American friends can forgive me, when I write, that searching through the US envoy's speech yesterday, around negotiations in Belfast currently, I can find nothing of substance, that offers hope that the monster of the Orange Order Veto will finally be faced down. I sincerely hope I am wrong and I would be happy to see any evidence from anyone, who can demonstrate it simply and clearly, that the US is truly being an honest broker of substance and prove my analysis incorrect. Meanwhile in such avoid, I remain a proponent of of moving on to a Federal solution, rather than remain stuck in the eternal, internal, problem of a sectarian contrived entity. Below is a copy of Gary Harts speech of yesterday, where he asks people to do the right thing. Mr Hart, with all due respect, I urge you, with all the resources that a reformed pacifist can command, to lead by example.

GARY HART 14 NOVEMBER 2014

I've been honoured to represent United States Secretary of State John Kerry on issues related to Northern Ireland. It is well-known that the current talks span a great number of issues from finance to parades, flags, and the past to implementation of previous agreements to restructuring political institutions. Given the wide array of group interests, fashioning any kind of comprehensive resolution of all these subjects, each one more dear to one group than another, is an immense challenge to those seeking negotiated solutions.
As we in America have done for more than two decades, we continue to try to be helpful. The United States Government does not bring a preconceived solution to the table. The citizens of Northern Ireland well know by now that we are an outside presence simply seeking to support these negotiations. Other than a peaceful and prosperous future for all the people of Northern Ireland, we have no agenda of our own.

Her Majesty's Government and the Government of the Republic of Ireland have been very welcoming to a continued US presence. They both understand that we have no political agenda of our own. The ability of the United States Government to add encouragement, ideas, and assistance is dependent on this collective trust among our governments and we will continue to build upon it.

After many years of public service at home and engagement in projects in nations around the world, I find a concern that virtually all human beings share - the love of our children and the hope for a better future for them. This is perhaps the most powerful common human instinct. We can build upon it.

All of us must appreciate this: we do not have to sacrifice the common good and the interests of future generations in order to maintain our identity. My nation, a nation of immigrants, did not demand that immigrant groups give up their cultures and histories in order to become American. But we have promoted the idea that all in America, regardless of their origin, had an interest in achieving a better common future as a nation.

The ghosts of the past must not be allowed to haunt the future of those yet unborn. Despite historic differences, I am struck by the intelligence and goodwill of all the party leaders I have met. Yes, they have their respective party agendas. But there is in each and all of them a desire to move beyond the past. It is not a question of whether; it is a question of how.


We in the United States can seek to encourage private investments, and thus employment opportunities, to Northern Ireland. But our success in that effort will require political stability and a functioning, problem-solving government operated by men and women of goodwill.

As a frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, I am finding citizens organising themselves around a common future, a future that will be better in every way for their children. Pursuing a sense of the common good requires us to place the interests of traditional politics at a distant second.

Northern Ireland's great poet, Seamus Heaney, once described a "republic of conscience" in which there were "no porters, no interpreter, no taxi". In this republic, he wrote, "you carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared". And as to public leaders, he said, they "must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office".

This republic is what Vaclav Havel called "a politics above politics". It is the realm where we must do what is right and not what is politically advantageous to us and our group.

As the years have passed - in my case many years - I have come to pay attention to the republic of conscience more than the republic of traditional politics. And in doing so I have found an increasing number of people shedding any notion of power in the form of creeping privilege and putting the common good above the presumptions of political office.

Perhaps if we all keep our eyes on the republic of conscience, a place where politics and power are kept in perspective and we atone for our presumption to hold office, those in Northern Ireland and those of us in America, can escape the worst of our past. A friend of mine once said that each of us is better than the worst thing we have ever done.

Americans must always be cautious in our interventions. We must always keep in mind that we killed hundreds of thousands of our own citizens in a bloody civil war. We are still atoning for our early history of slavery and that has not been easy. But each generation of Americans has produced a few citizens of the republic of conscience who have led us to higher things and who have urged us to keep our eyes on the stars.

So too with Northern Ireland. You have some remarkably capable and visionary leaders in office and in the public square. You have every right to be optimistic, to hope for a better future for your children, to say, in the words of Martin Luther King's memorable speech: "I have a dream today."

The people of America wish for you to achieve that dream and to be with you when it happens. As President Obama put it in his speech in June 2013 at the Waterfront Hall: "And you should know that so long as you are moving forward, America will always stand by you as you do."

FEDERAL IRELAND Irish Times Article

Is it time to revisit the idea of a federal Ireland?

Opinion: If the UK leaves the EU, the North’s status will change, perhaps disastrously

No compromise? The Stormont statue of unionist leader Sir Edward Carson, seen through a broken link, in Belfast. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

Dennis Kennedy

• News
• Politics

Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 00:01

First published:Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 00:01

While the political parties at Stormont continue their shadow boxing and the world waits with bated breath for the insights of the US envoy to Northern Ireland, Gary Hart, into parades and flags, there seems little chance of what may be the biggest issue facing Northern Ireland even making it on to the agenda.

This is the accident that looks increasingly likely to happen: the UK’s exit from the European Union.

If it happens, the whole context in which the Belfast Agreement was framed, and in which the limited progress since then has been achieved, will be changed radically, and possibly disastrously.

The agreement makes only one mention of the EU (in the preamble, where EU membership is cited as one factor in the unique relationship between the UK and Ireland), but it is the framework of EU citizenship that validates its essential core: the idea that conflicting Irish and British identities can co-exist as equals within present-day Northern Ireland, pending some future resolution of the fundamental divide.

How would the promise in the agreement to “recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose”, and accordingly to confirm their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship, be honoured if the UK, including Northern Ireland, was outside the EU, while the Republic was inside?

How would freedom of movement across the Border be guaranteed when one of the UK’s main motivations for leaving the EU would be to control migration? Would there be a return to a physical Border, with passport checks and queuing lorries? Would fresh restrictions on travel be placed on movement between the Republic and Britain, or even possibly between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK? How would the nationalist community inside Northern Ireland respond to such a situation? Would those now seemingly comfortable enough within the UK remain so? How would the more nationalistic respond to the prospect of Irish unity becoming even more distant, and to the reimposition of a visible controlled Border between North and South? How would Northern Ireland fare within a UK outside the EU?

Scotland would almost certainly demand, and get, a referendum to make its own decision on EU membership, and would most probably opt to stay in the EU, not the UK. That would leave Northern Ireland painfully isolated within a UK that would be even more dominated by the 90 per cent of the population living in England, who are manifestly becoming increasingly nationalistically British or, in reality, English.

Pro-European North

Northern Ireland is not regarded as rampantly pro-European – certainly its politicians are not – but it did vote Yes in the 1975 referendum to endorse membership. Academic research suggests that today the balance among the general public is for, not against, EU membership.

Northern Ireland is too small and too divided to permit the Scottish alternative of independence within the EU, so what options does it have, apart from voting No in any poll on leaving the EU and campaigning in Britain against exit on the grounds of the threat it would pose to a fragile peace?

The answer is very few, so is it time to revisit Conor Cruise O’Brien’s last and most controversial intervention in Northern affairs? In the late 1990s he suggested that the interests of the Protestant or unionist community in Northern Ireland were more threatened by the UK’s determination to do a deal with Sinn Féin/IRA than they would be by a negotiated deal with Dublin to unite Ireland under a federal-type arrangement that guaranteed all existing rights to all residents of the North. This community, he maintained, would be better able to defend its interests under such an agreement than it would as “despised hangers-on” and a tiny minority in the UK.

In a federal Ireland, unionists would be a formidable voting block in a system of government where coalitions are the rule rather than the exception. Conor Cruise O’Brien argued that London would be happy to be rid of Northern Ireland, and would facilitate such a move. Dublin might have more reservations but could hardly say no to the long-cherished goal of Irish unity. At that time, O’Brien also assumed that such a move would trump Sinn Féin, North and South. He did not foresee, it would seem, Sinn Féin’s continued electoral success in the North while playing a leading role in the administration of a devolved region of the UK. Nor, most likely, could he have predicted that party’s reinvention of itself in the Republic as the professed party of protest and social concern, and as the one party untainted by the tarnish that is staining politics generally (despite the much more sinister skeletons in its own cupboard).

Would any significant section of traditional unionism even look at a federal proposal? The once great obstacle of “Rome Rule” has almost vanished, but other roadblocks remain, and the answer is almost certainly no.

But might unionists consider it if life within a very much changed UK was less agreeable to them, and particularly if they felt they were being edged closer and closer to a united Ireland, either by pressure from London or by demographic change in Northern Ireland? This may be venturing into the land of fantasy, but then who foresaw the Chuckle Brothers, starring the immoderate moderator and the republican chief of staff, topping the bill at Stormont?

Everyone has his price, so what sort of price might unionism demand? Obviously a new constitution would be needed to accommodate the new Ireland, and some sort of devolved structure for what is now Northern Ireland.

Some things would have to go: the name of the state could no longer be Éire, nor could Irish be the “first national language”, nor the tricolour the national flag. (Though it’s not in the Constitution, a new national anthem would be needed, and we could throw in neutrality and the names of the railway stations as beyond their sell-by date.)

Constitutional opportunity

Apart from these and other adjustments, the negotiation of a new constitution would be a golden opportunity for the South to get rid of much superfluous material in the current one, and to ensure that matters properly belonging to the parliament are not needlessly put to a patently uninterested people in referendums in which most of them do not vote.
The constitution would have to reflect an ethos for the new entity to which all could subscribe. Writing more than 40 years ago, Michael Sweetman indicated what this might be: “We [in the Republic] have got to go back to 1912 and relinquish a great deal of what has happened since in order that both parts of the country can make a new start.” He deplored “consistent attempts to impose a narrow concept of Irishness, involving the primacy of Gaelic culture, the rejection of British strands in Irish traditions, and a particular view of history which made a virtue of fighting against Britain and a vice of defending British rule”.

And he added: “It is not from that kind of Republicanism, with its glorification of violence in the past and its incitement to violence in the present, that the new Ireland will come.”

That was written, by a then leading young Fine Gael thinker, before the Provisional IRA campaign had, over 30 years of pointless conflict, caused the loss of thousands of lives. What a tragedy that a Fine Gael Taoiseach could still say last month that he was always proud to be a 1916 man and that he saw the Rising as the central formative and defining act in the shaping of modern Ireland.

At this point we can probably stop fantasizing. The Rising was the “formative and defining act” of a partitioned Ireland, in which one part was in many ways Rome-ruled, socially conservative (to put it mildly) and at times dangerously ambivalent towards armed republicanism. This held no attractions whatever for the “divided brethren” in the North. Much has changed in many ways, and in the minds of many of the people, but the State, and its political leaders, cling to their founding fictions.

Waking up at this point would save us from wrestling with the question of where the £9 billion London transfers each year into Northern Ireland would come from. In 1998, Conor Cruise O’Brien blithely assumed that London would be so happy to be shot of Northern Ireland, and Dublin so pleased to welcome it, and the international community so delighted for us all, that they would all stump up. Fat chance of that now. All of which leaves Northern Ireland, as ever, in the quare place.

Dennis Kennedy is a former deputy editor of The IrishTimes, and was European Commission representative in Northern Ireland from 1985 to 1991

@Brian Clarke

Although there is much in the article I disagree with, and the Irish Times has always been a great platform for the Unionist tradition in Ireland, nevertheless it is a good article. As a former chairperson of Provisional Sinn Fein in Newry, who resigned, before.they became decadent, I am presently non -aligned to any political party. However as someone who supports a federal Ireland, as proposed by Ruarai O'Bradaigh of Republican Sinn Fein, I believe this article, would serve as an excellent discussion document, to open negotiations for a peaceful solution, to the primary Irish problems of division, bigotry and prejudice. Unfortunately self-politicians will not act on it, so once again only the ordinary people, from all communities will male it happen. Those who have Ireland's long term interests at heart and learned the lessons of our history, will make it happen with the dialectics of materialism, rather than violence. No it's not fantasy and the EU has a critical role, both materially and politically to take  responsibility as an honest broker, if the US & UK continue to fail to do so.