A Tangled Web

Taking the Rick!



As the talks process gets underway again (big yawn), there are new efforts afoot to scare Unionists into submission. Take this article in yesterday's Belfast Telegraph. Rick Wilford's academic crowd have predicted that, should the talks process collapse in the autumn (nigh on impossible given the DUP's sacrifice of principle for fiscal reward) then Northern Ireland will be subjected to 'bilateralism by London and Dublin.'



Joint Authority has been raised as a spectre by nationalist Ireland and sympathetic professorial gurus for several years. It had its genesis in the New Ireland Report of the mid-1980's. Every time the broad pro-Union populace collectively fails to bend to the will of insatiable nationalism, there are dire predictions of formal joint rule involving the southern government.



I, for one, take these predictions with a pinch of salt. Successive governments have only been able to grant concessions to the Irish nationalist agenda because they had some acquiescence from a section of the pro-Union body politic. In the absence of that acquiescence, the primary objective of HM Government would be Ulster's stability over continued appeasement. And, as history has shown, Ulster's British population will not allow themselves to be governed (wholly or partly) by a foreign government based in the Republic. Some of the more nationalist inclined readers on ATW may scoff at the somewhat emotional grammatical structure of this confident prediction, but it remains a fact rather than a threat. The mass instability resulting from such a move would be for more troublesome for HM Government than the inevitable vocal grandstanding of Sinn Fein/IRA (constrained from employing a terrorist response by the global situation vis a vis the United States) under a continuation of Direct Rule.



If Wilford et al genuinely think that the British majority in Northern Ireland would even remotely contemplate the scenario of joint rule, then they obviously know nothing of recent history or the psyche of Unionism.