Has Mrs Thatcher got the appetite to find an Irish settlement?

Press, 15 May 1985, Page 21

Has Mrs Thatcher got the appetite to find an Irish settlement?

MARY HOLLAND, the London “Observer” Irish correspondent, concludes her examination of the prospects for a Dublin-London agreement on the future of Northern Ireland. It depends in the end, she says, on whether the Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, is ready to play the role of a De Gaulle.

Looming behind all the pressures for an Anglo-Irish settlement — and a major factor in creating them — is national and international concern about the growth of support in the Northern Irish Catholic community for Sinn Fein and, by extension, for the Provisional I.R.A.

There is anxiety that if something is not done to reverse the sense of alienation in the Catholic community it could be lost forever to constitutional politics. That in turn would give the Provisionals a power base from which they could hope to destabilise the politics of the republic as well as of Northern Ireland.

This is something of which British politicians are well aware; it was a British Secretary for Northern Ireland who first talked of the “Cubanisation” of Ireland as a threat.

It does seem that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet are now prepared to consider the Irish problem more seriously than any British Government has done since Edward Heath organised the Sunningdale Conference in 1973, which in turn led to the setting up of the short-lived power-sharing executive.

The most recent evidence of a new approach has been the enlargement of the Cabinet committee set up in London to consider Northern Ireland policy. Norman Tebbit and Lowd Gowrie (himself a Southern Irish Protestant with ministerial experience in the North) have joined the Secretary of State, Douglas Hurd, and Geoffrey Howe in the committee to consider future policy. What they will mainly be consid-

enng are proposals which have been a matter of intense discussion between senior civil servants and Ministers from both Governments. “What has been going on,” a British Government source told me recently with satisfaction, "is an oldfashioned process of diplomatic bargaining, and that is the kind of negotiation that is most likely to yield results.” The proposals, from both sides, are designed to give the Irish Government a much closer involvement in the day-to-day running of Northern Ireland, without overtly challenging British sovereignty. The purpose of this would be to give the Catholic community in the North a sense that its interests on a whole range of issues would be adequately represented and protected by Dublin, but that Unionists would be reassured that there was no question of eroding

the link with Britain. This is not going to be easily achieved. Both sides admit that the closer they get to discussing the actual structures for, say, supervising the activities of the security forces, the more difficult the whole process becomes. It could very easily break down. A problem in Northern Ireland has always been that concessions to the sensitivities of one commun-

ity are always interpreted as a defeat for the other. At one stage last year it seemed that the question of involving Dublin might be resolved by giving the Irish Government a formal right to be consulted on all matters affecting the Catholic community, including the administration of justice, allegations of discrimination, a bill of rights, matters of national identity, and so on.

Officially, that is still the sum of what is on offer from the British. The London Government has been prepared to go a considerable way down this road, to the extent of having an Irish official presence in Belfast and/or other parts of the province. But, at the moment at least, it remains adamant that the Irish Government cannot expect any executive role in Northern Ireland, because that would be an unacceptable infringement of British sovereignty. The Irish Government, for its part, argues that a consultative role would commit it to responsibility without power, and that this would place it in an impossible position with its own electorate and with Northern Catholics. On controversial issues of security, for example, it would be roundly blamed for policies and events of which it might well

disapprove. It could end up at loggerheads with the British and discredited with the very people — the Catholic minority — whose interests it was trying to protect.

There are other elements to the package under discussion, some of which will be far from easy to achieve. Both Governments would like to see the setting up of a devolved administration in Northern Ireland with politicians from both communities involved, something which has proved impossible to achieve except for a very brief period in 1974. There is also likely to be a parliamentary body drawn from the House of Commons, the Dail and, possibly, from the Northern Irish Assembly.

These other factors are difficult but the crux of the problem is to find some way of giving an adequate role to the Irish Government and political reassurance to the Catholic minority without driving the Protestant majority to open revolt. If a formula can be found it will take a high degree of political resolution to make it stick.

That is why all discussions about the Northern Ireland question came down in the end to speculation about Mrs Thatcher.

There is general agreement among her enemies and friends alike that if there is one British politician who has the mettle to take on a historic problem of this kind it is Mrs Thatcher, rather as De Gaulle was the leader necessary to end the conflict in Algeria. The next few months will show whether the Prime Minister has the appetite to try and find an honourable settlement to this oldest and most wretched of Britain’s problems.