Peace Without Consensus

Power Sharing Politics in Northern Ireland

Mary-Alice C. Clancy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754678311
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317082774
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'Peace Without Consensus' demonstrates that the rise of Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was not 'inevitable'. Rather, it argues that critics who blame Northern Ireland's power-sharing institutions for the electoral triumph of the political 'extremes' in 2003 have not fully considered how the US, British and Irish governments contributed to this outcome. Through interviews with key US, British and Irish officials this groundbreaking analysis, which represents the first examination of the Bush administration's vital role in the peace process, demonstrates that Washington and Dublin were considering a deal between the DUP and Sinn Féin as early as 2002. Profiled in the Guardian, the Observer, BBC Radio Four, the Irish Independent and in Henry McDonald's 'Gunsmoke and Mirrors', Mary-Alice C. Clancy's theoretically informed and empirically grounded book presents new and salient lessons for other regions embroiled in conflict and should be read by all those interested in Northern Ireland's peace process and US foreign policy.

Chapter 1 The Formation of Northern Ireland, Ethno-Nationalism and Consociationalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315599854-2

This chapter will review the factors that led to Northern Ireland's creation in 1921. In doing so, it will demonstrate that Northern Ireland's character, rather than being preordained, was the product of a number of exogenous and endogenous factors’ interaction. This discussion will lead to an examination of the Northern Ireland conflict's assumed origins. Arguing that the conflict is ethno-national, the chapter will then move to an overview of the theory most closely associated with the conflict's regulation, consociationalism. Having made the case for the importance of external actors in facilitating and upholding consociational settlements, it will be argued that the inherent reductionism in anti-consociationalists’ critiques renders them erroneous, as anti-consociationalists’ failure to integrate an ample understanding of external actors into their critiques leads them to incorrectly explain the electoral rise of the DUP and Sinn Féin via the Belfast Agreement's consociational institutions. Whilst more empirically robust than anti-consociationalists’ critiques, the chapter shows that consociationalists’ centripetalist defences of the Belfast Agreement similarly cannot be fully understood without reference to external actors’ perceptions, calculations and actions. In doing so, the chapter will demonstrate the vital, yet somewhat neglected, role of the British, Irish and US governments in determining Northern Ireland's political trajectory in the post-Agreement era.

The Creation of Northern Ireland

Careful analysis of Northern Ireland's formation and consolidation demonstrates that a complex interplay of external and internal factors determined Northern Ireland's political character. Events leading to the partition of the island of Ireland and the subsequent creation of Northern Ireland have been described as the product of dual British and Irish state- and nation-building failures on the island (O’Leary and McGarry 1996: 142–43, Lustick 1993). The influx of settlers from Scotland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thwarted British state-building in Ireland by alienating local élites, and the integration of settlers into British administrative apparatuses on the island prevented the passage of conciliatory measures that possessed the potential to legitimate British rule and allow a wider sense of loyalty to the UK to take root (for example, granting Catholic emancipation with the passage of the Act of Union in 1801) (Bew 2007a: 63, McGarry and O’Leary 1995: 332, Lustick 1993: 5). Although some British politicians viewed conciliation of the indigenous population as the best means of bolstering both the Union's strength and national security, the thwarting of such measures by the settlers’ descendants and their metropolitan allies helped to facilitate the Union's eventual truncation in Ireland (Bew 2007a: 52–3, Lustick 1993: 37, 84). Attempts at British state- and nation-building were further aggravated by religious differences between settlers and natives, with the former largely drawn from various Protestant denominations, and the latter largely Catholic.

These failures meant that growing demands for political reform on the island of Ireland were increasingly made outside of British state- and nation-building frameworks, and this process was complemented by a breakdown in British conceptions of Ireland as an inextricable part of the United Kingdom (Lustick 1993: 124–39). Attempts to govern Ireland through both coercion and conciliation aided the incipient nationalist movement on the island, and the gradual movement away from constitutional to violent nationalism – as evidenced by the Easter Rising of 1916 and later establishment of the IRA – in the wake of successive home rule defeats and the conscription crisis that attended the onset of universal suffrage led to the Anglo–Irish War (1919–21). This in turn led to the creation of the twenty-six county Irish Free State via the Anglo–Irish Treaty (1921).

When taken in combination with other factors, these failures meant Irish nation- and state-building projects would also founder in what would later become Northern Ireland. As mentioned above, the settler population was relatively well integrated into British political and administrative structures and thus identified with Britain and had an interest in a continued political link with the UK. The aforementioned overlapping settler/native and religious divisions were the strongest in the north-eastern part of the island, and they were not mitigated with the onset of industrialisation, as the concentration of industrial development in the North–East rendered it all the more dissimilar from the rest of the island (Bew and Patterson 1985: 3–4). As such, the main features of the Irish nationalist project – agrarian mobilisation, Catholicism, and the Gaelic language – were an anathema to much of the Protestant population of Ulster, who largely remained unionist in their political orientation.

Given these differences, unionism in the northeast of Ireland cohered in opposition to three unsuccessful home rule bills proposed for Ireland (Jackson 2004: 115). As home rule gave way to separatism, however, Westminster passed the Government of Ireland Act (1920), which provided for a separate parliament within what would later become Northern Ireland in 1921: a truncated six-county Ulster. Although the creation of the Stormont parliament proved to be, from a British perspective, the best way of allowing Northern Ireland to remain in the Union, whether its creation would signal the onset of ‘British’ democracy remained to be seen.

The Northern Ireland State, 1921–1972

The violence both in the north and the south of the island that both preceded and followed Northern Ireland's creation did not augur well for the nature of its governance; however, the political exclusion and alienation of Northern Ireland's Catholics/nationalists¹ were not preordained. The inchoateness of British policy towards Northern Ireland in the immediate aftermath of its formation resulted from divisions within the Cabinet, and Prime Minister Lloyd George's strategic desire to bolster the pro-Treaty faction's prospects in the Free State meant that he preferred squeezing unionists politically in order to create the impression that pro-Treaty forces could bring about the island's eventual unification (Bew, Gibbon and Patterson 2002: 19–22). In addition to bolstering more conservative forces within southern Ireland, the British government's concern for American opinion, particularly Irish-American opinion, further underscored its vacillating commitment to unionism (ibid: 28, Buckland 1981: 18, O’Brien 1972: 138).

1 As the conflict is ethno-national in origin, from this point on the two ethno-national communities will be referred to as nationalists and unionists unless otherwise noted. The former largely correspond to Northern Ireland's Catholic population, and the latter largely refer to the Protestant population. Republicanism represents a radical form of nationalism, whilst loyalism represents an extreme form of unionism.

Britain's status as a less than reliable ally was one of the main factors behind the establishment of a cross-class alliance of unionists, but this alliance was also subject to exogenous and endogenous pressures. For example, pressure from London, and the violence emanating from the Free State, led the Northern Ireland government to sign the Craig-Collins Pact in March of 1922. Among other things, the Pact allowed for the joint policing of Belfast's mixed districts by nationalist and unionist officers and the reversal of workplace and home expulsions of nationalists (Buckland 1981: 44). However, the onset of the Irish Civil War in June left the British government relatively less interested in Northern Ireland, and thus the need to construct a non-sectarian state largely evaporated (Prince 2007: 14). Westminster's failure to veto the 1922 Local Government Bill when threatened with the Stormont cabinet's resignation further underscored the irrelevancy of inclusivity in Northern Ireland.²

2 Proportional representation was also abolished for Stormont elections in 1929. There is a question as to whether this abolition was designed to weaken nationalist or labour parties (see Bew, Gibbon and Patterson 2002, Buckland 1981, Pringle 1980, Farrell 1976 and Osborne 1979), but the point here is that it facilitated the consolidation of unionist political control of Northern Ireland by marginalising smaller parties.

British indifference allowed progressive legislation to whither and legislation that consolidated unionist control to stand, and this influenced the nationalist community's reaction to the Northern Ireland state. Nationalist leaders were prepared to countenance the recognition of Northern Ireland and nationalist participation in the police, provided the Craig-Collins Pact's provisions were upheld. However, the pro-Treaty faction's ambiguity vis-à-vis Northern Ireland – epitomised by leader Michael Collins's apparent recognition that Northern Ireland couldn’t be coerced into a united Ireland while also continuing to support pro-Treaty IRA violence and nationalists’ non-recognition of Northern Ireland – contributed to unionists’ distrust of both the nationalist population and the Free State (Bew, Gibbon and Patterson 2002: 37–9). This ambiguity, along with the Catholic and Gaelic trajectory that various Free State governments pursued in the wake of partition to a degree explains the shape of the Northern Ireland state (Kennedy 1988).

Northern Ireland's development into an ‘open ethnocracy’³ can be ascribed to the interaction of exogenous and endogenous factors, and these factors continued to influence Northern Ireland's ethnocratic character until Stormont's prorogation in 1972. In the aftermath of World War Two, unionist modernisers predicated their arguments for reform on the basis that the post-war movement towards internationalisation would subject Northern Ireland to greater scrutiny and that therefore its existence would have to be defended on different terms (Prince 2007: 20). Unionist modernisers also felt that the benefits accruing from the extension of the welfare state to Northern Ireland would make nationalists more comfortable with partition. Events, however, weakened the force of these arguments. The British government responded to the Éire⁴ government's declaration of a republic in 1948 by making Northern Ireland's status conditional upon Stormont's consent. This, along with both the Conservatives’ return to power in Westminster and the establishment of a less bellicose government in the Irish republic in 1951 rendered modernisers minority shareholders in unionism.

3 An ‘open ethnocracy’ is a regime which possesses some democratic features, such as a free press and political competition (and it is worth remembering that the restriction of the vote to rate payers in Northern Ireland and allowing multiple votes was in keeping with UK wide practice at the time – the principle of ‘one man, one vote’ was only conceded in the rest of the UK in 1945. It is also worth mentioning that abolition of proportional representation in Stormont only reduced nationalist representation by one seat (J. Whyte 1983)) but where said democratic features are applied selectively in order to facilitate the dominant ethnic group's political control of a contested territory (Yiftachel and Ghanem 2004: 649). 4 In the immediate aftermath of partition the southern state was known as the Free State, but its name was changed to Éire in 1937. A coalition government of Fine Gael and Clann na Poblachta later declared a republic in 1948, which came into being in 1949.

Unionists’ retreat from reform would represent an incredible lost opportunity. Although members of the Nationalist Party in Northern Ireland founded the Anti-Partition League in 1945, wider events enervated the League. Éire's neutrality during World War Two changed many British Labour ministers’ outlook vis-à-vis Northern Ireland, and it also led the US to be strongly sceptical of Irish foreign policy (Prince 2007: 57, Lynch 2004: 11). These factors, along with the onset of the Cold War, meant that the League met with little interest in either London or Washington, and its leaders soon discovered that Dublin was similarly unsympathetic. Although its own anti-partition rhetoric was often deployed to pursue political goals within the 26-county republic, Seán Lemass's arrival as Taoiseach (premier) in 1959 significantly altered Dublin's approach towards northern nationalists. Concerned that close cooperation with Northern nationalists would harm the Irish government's policy of détente with the Northern Ireland government, Lemass told the Nationalist Party to reconcile itself to working within Stormont. However, Lemass's occasional bellicosity vis-à-vis Northern Ireland – again deployed to manage internal political problems – left unionists wary of his overtures (Patterson 2006: 153–4). Moreover, by the time the Nationalist Party assumed the position of official opposition in Stormont it was too late, as its poor organisational structures meant that nationalist grievances were increasingly articulated through alternative fora such as the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) and later, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).

Northern Ireland's Prime Minister, Terrence O’Neill, was slow to respond to the CSJ and NICRA's demands, as reform of Northern Ireland was liable to aggravate incipient divisions within his party. Therefore, instead of tackling reform head on, he hoped that economic modernisation would ameliorate Northern Ireland's ethno-national divisions. Although the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson threatened to intervene if O’Neill failed to implement local government, electoral and housing reforms in Northern Ireland, his warning had more to do with O’Neill's party management than it had to do with Northern Ireland per se; Northern Ireland's twelve MPs at Westminster were voting with the Conservatives on English matters and thus threatening Wilson's parliamentary majority (Prince 2007: 46, cf. Hennessey 2005: 387). Reluctance to intervene was also reflected in the Home Office's unwillingness to disabuse O’Neill's rivals of the erroneous notions that either the British government wouldn’t intervene, or that a quasi-federal relationship between Stormont and Westminster prevented it from doing so (Hennessey 2005: 379).

The torpid pace of reform in Northern Ireland, combined with the Nationalist Party's pragmatism within Stormont and Fianna Fáil and the Irish Labour Party's pragmatism within the Republic provided an opening on the Left both in regions. As the IRA was regrouping after its failed Border Campaign (1956–62), it, along with its political wing Sinn Féin, wasted little time in exploiting these openings (Moloney 2007b: 57, Prince 2007: 107). However, the involvement of republicans, and the attendant non-involvement of all trade unions meant that NICRA appeared to be fighting for nationalists’ rights – as opposed to civil rights – and it should be admitted here that although NICRA was not a nationalist organisation per se, this is what some organisations ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Formation of Northern Ireland, Ethno-Nationalism and Consociationalism
• 2 The ‘High Politics’ of the Sunningdale and Anglo–Irish Agreements
• 3 An Agreed Approach? The ‘High Politics’ of the Belfast Agreement
• 4 Saving Dave? The High Politics of the Post-Agreement Period, 1998–2000
• 5 All Changed, All Changed Utterly? September 11th and Beyond
• 6 ‘You never hit a homerun with these things; sometimes you just get a walk’: Northern Ireland, 2004–2007
• 7 Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index