Knowledge Is Power

Without wishing to get bogged down in taking sides in the debate over the future of Northern Ireland (stay integral part of UK; devolution; independence; or (re)join Republic of Ireland?), until recently I always had the impression that Labour's policy in NI was doomed to failure; their way of maintaining a fragile peace was to buy off the 'leaders' of the warring factions by paying them Danegeld.

It's a simple trick, actually, and it was Red Ken Livingstone who inadvertently stumbled across this in the 1980s. What the GLC did was set up all sorts of quangos and working groups etc at taxpayers' expense to deal with wimmin's rights, gay rights, anti-racism and anti-nuclear campaigners etc. Once the figureheads of proper grassroots movements get their snouts in the trough, with a nice office and personal assistants and so on, they get increasingly bogged down in small "p" political warfare with the bureaucracy, and end up just defending their own little fiefdoms, rather than actually campaigning for anything in particular. In the jargon, this is referred to as 'going native', or more crudely, 'selling out'.

So what Labour did (and quite possibly the Tories before them) was shower leaders of IRA/Sinn Fein, DUP, UUP, SDLP and so on with money and the trappings of power; as well as creating a shed-load of taxpayer-funded jobs. It's a tricky game of course, if an arch republican gets too close to an arch unionist, then this erodes the gap between 'leaders' and the grassroots, so you get breakaway movements, and then there are more people you have to pay off and so on. But similarly, once you have enough little breakaway movements, you don't really need to worry about them too much.

So far so good, a bit of a dead-end, you may think, but it strikes me that The Powers That Be were very busy behind the scenes on the "give 'em enough rope" basis.

Think about it, what are the three big stories to come out of Northern Ireland recently?

1. Gerry Adams' brother was reported to be a paedophile, it is implied that Gerry Adams knew all about this, all very embarrassing and a bit of a blow to the credibility of the IRA.

2. Iris Robinson (who was simultaneously the wife of DUP leader Peter Robinson, himself First Minister, an MP, a member of the NI Assembly and probably a local councillor as well) was the subject of a suspiciously well-researched BBC programme which reported that she'd had an affair and brokered loans between property developers and her young friend. Her husband had to stand down while an enquiry was carried out; miraculously, this was all done and dusted in a few weeks and he was then back in office.

3. A major bone of contention between the warring factions was whether the NI Assembly would assume responsibility for police and justice or not, and this argument had been rumbling on ever since the Assembly was set up. Somehow or other, a happy outcome of the enquiry into Peter Robinson more or less coincided with the factions finally reaching agreement that they would do so.

I would guess that stories 1. and 2. were actually shots across the bows of all politicians in NI; a lot of them must have had some dealings with the paramilitary groups and know that their immunity from charges was not guaranteed; similarly, if you give politicians plenty of money and the trappings of power without real responsibility, they will get involved in all sorts of stuff that they wouldn't want to be made known to the public or their own supporters.

So, like in a proper spy novel, each and every one of them realised that unless they did what the UK (and to a lesser extent the Irish) government(s) wanted, they may well be next to have a light shone on the skeletons in their particular closet, and so all of a sudden, they fell into line*. Whether this is a viable long-term strategy for maintaining the peace in NI, only time will tell, of course.

Just thinkin' out loud, is all.

* Rather more worryingly, the EU might be trying exactly the same strategies with openly anti-EU MEPs in specific (getting them to 'go native') and with debasing Europe's national parliaments in general (the Devil makes work for idle hands - see e.g. the MPs' expenses 'scandal'). The trick certainly worked with that arch-trougher Neil Kinnock, who earlier in his career had been quite anti-EEC. Hmm.