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Ireland finally made it big in the American
media last week: front page in the New York Times and three minutes on the
evening news. Protestants and Catholics had made peace in Northern Ireland.
The heads of both warring political factions sat at a table with each other
and made statements about political cooperation. Finally, a conflict that
went back to Oliver Cromwell had come to an end.
This was not the first such an announcement of peace. The scene, with different characters, had been performed several times since the original Good Friday agreement. It was different in two respects: Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley represent the extremes of Catholic and Protestant sentiment, and the British and Irish governments were willing to pour major subsidies into Northern Ireland to help it catch up with the prosperity of the rest of the island. |
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Will the agreement
hold? Anyone who has studied the history can only cross his fingers and
hope. Ireland is the only country in Western Europe with a foreign colony imposed on it, a colony with gerrymandered boundaries which permits a minority in the whole island to impose its will on the part of the majority group that lives within its artificial boundaries. The descendants of the Protestant genocidal colonizers believe as self-evident that they are morally, intellectually and humanly superior to the descendants of the Catholics who were not quite eliminated. Hence, it is difficult for them to accept any agreement that constrains them to share power with Catholics -- just as whites in Mississippi found it so difficult to share power with blacks. Paisley is very sensitive to the emotions of his hard-line constituents. He knows that he must humiliate the Catholics by cooking up new requirements (added to the substance of the Good Friday agreement) to prove their good faith. |
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.The
Ulster Protestants share this conviction of the racial inferiority of the
Catholic Irish -- slovenly, ignorant, superstitious, lazy, no'count and
responsible for all their problems -- with a substantial proportion of the
population of Great Britain, including their intellectuals, liberals and
academics. There are not many people left that the English can feel superior
too, so it's a good thing the Irish are still around. That the standard of
living (as measured by per capita gross national product) in Ireland is the
highest in Europe (save perhaps for Norway) and higher than that of England
has yet to penetrate English consciousness.
The small print in the recent agreement is that power-sharing will begin only after two months. That gives Paisley and his allies time to discover that the Catholics are still violating some of the conditions for power-sharing -- new conditions that they will have dreamed up. The history of the last 10 years of negotiations in Northern Ireland have been a story of "just one more thing you have to do --," thus establishing that the Protestants are still in charge. The security agencies of the British government have cooperated with this stalling process. They raided the Sinn Fein offices in the Ulster Parliament and removed carloads of "evidence" that Sinn Fein was working with the IRA. The evidence oddly disappeared. Then the Ulster police blamed a big bank robbery on the IRA, though they never did get around to arresting any suspects. It would be unwise to bet against more such delaying tactics before May 21.
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