Hit the North! Northern Ireland… back to the future?

I’m wondering if I was the only one this morning who felt that the Archbishop Brady/Dr. Paisley meeting earlier today might well be a harbinger of an unintended consequence of the Peace Process. Hearing Archbishop Brady talking about the central position of “marriage and the family” and “faith-based” education struck me as rather intriguing. After all, Dr. Paisley is no social liberal, and neither is Brady. Brady is a patently decent human being, Paisley patently sincere in his beliefs, although a person who few would consider as unambiguously beyond serious question (hmmm… didn’t catch the libel aspect of the blogging conference down the Digital Hub, but it’s in my mind).

There is, in truth, more that unites them in the social sphere than that which divides them. Now, don’t get me wrong. They are sincerely held beliefs, some of which I would agree with, some of which I wouldn’t. Doctrine is more difficult, but doctrine can be devolved to the personal, particularly in a context where they can agree to agree on policing, stability, the economy and so on.

In ways, it’s also a bit like the utopian dream, which I once sorta kinda shared, of working class unity that would unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. Sure, we’re seeing unity in the North, but it’s not socialist millenarianism. The thought of a monolithic agreement in the North between such conservative social powers is somewhat reminiscent of what this state was like post-Partition. And it’s curiously reminiscent of the unspoken compacts between Catholicism and the Unionist state which permitted the Government of Northern Ireland to rule with considerable stability between 1920 and it’s poroguement in the early 1970s.

It’s not absolutely the same, if only in this instance the respective balance of power between the two blocs is radically different. Unionism, in all it’s forms, has seen the space within which it operates whittled away. And this is the core paradox of a Unionism, which seeks to exercise power through the Union, but in that process—representation in Westminster—it actually becomes emasculated since the tiny smattering of Unionist MPs is—and always has been—far too few to influence the UK polity outside of very specific circumstances. And there is another issue, power is only truly power when it’s exercised visibly. That opportunity has been denied to Unionism for a considerable period.

But now they have to work in tandem with Nationalism and Republicanism. How strange, and telling, that part of the process is an engagement with religious Catholicism in the shape of Brady. It is as if somehow his word will allow, to some degree, the DUP to ultimately sit in power with SF.

Yet, it’s also not absolutely the same, if only because Sinn Féin is a radically different political animal from previous Nationalist political incarnations. I’m sorry to harp on about this, but there is more than a little something of the old WP about them. Not in policy, a comparison that would appall them, and be as inappropriate as it is inevitable in the mouths of their enemies, but instead in approach, a disciplined march through the institutions, as it were.

How are these two entities going to coexist, because that is what the GFA demands of them, and beyond the GFA the social and political dynamic of a decade and a half? I haven’t got a clue. Even if a power sharing administration is established, perhaps it will be along the lines of the FF/Labour coalition, with each partner keeping an eye on the door. Or perhaps it will be the curious meeting of minds that characterised the FG/DL relationship. Or perhaps, more likely, Archbishop Brady is giving some symbolic assurance to the good Rev. Paisley that he and his will be watching SF and reining in their more revolutionary tendencies (a remarkable thing in itself, where else in Europe could one see such an avowedly left of centre party gaining any serious measure of state power?).

But, to position these thoughts in the more local for a moment, the impact of a power sharing government will, of necessity, be considerable on the 26-county polity. Not in the big headlines, but in the slow working through of cross-border bodies, in the legitimation of SF as a party of state and government, and the jettisoning of the albatross of the armed struggle in favour of the slog of not merely electoralism, but day-to-day governance and potentially as a serious partner for a Southern Coalition government. Any one, or all, of those factors will be enormously significant; and to be entirely local for one final thought, a successful reinstatement of the Assembly and the Executive might just give one B. Ahern, his best day of the year so far…