Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

And So To The Next Crisis

While most men are at home making the dinner or are out buying the kids new clothes, and women are in the bookies doing their Yankee Doubles or pinting away in the public bar on this sun-showery Saturday afternoon, I am listening to the radio as the result of the Ulster Unionist Council vote comes through.

So, 53% of delegates have voted to back David Trimble which means that by the time you read this the lifting of the suspension of the Executive by Peter Mandelson will have been announced. If the DUP decide not to take their two Executive positions the Assembly will have to meet next week and the top parties in terms of their strength will nominate members to the ministries. The Ulster Unionist Party and the Alliance Party would be the net beneficiaries from a DUP boycott, and, presumably, the Ulster Unionists would attempt to seize Education and/or Health to prevent those particular ministries returning to Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness and Barbara de Brun, though Sinn Fein will still be entitled to two seats on the Executive, and their performance will still annoy people who want to be annoyed.

Trimble has just about scraped through but it is unlikely that the opponents of the Good Friday Agreement within his party will accept and meekly go along with the outcome. While Trimble was careful not to set preconditions on the Republican Movement, or a timetable, he foolishly chooses to interpret the IRA's offer of an inspection of its dumps as a precursor to actual decommissioning, which will never happen. In other words, at some time in the future, when unionist dissidents and their DUP allies, and perhaps also some disillusioned pro-Agreement unionists, or even David Trimble, don't like the way things are going, don't like nationalists and republicans exercising power, disbursing monies, evening up the economic disparities, there will be another crisis and another leadership challenge.

However, the difference between-times will be that continuing peace will have become a force in itself. More people - nationalists, republicans, unionists and loyalists - whether dissident unionists or republicans try to deny it, will have increasingly come to identify with peace, will have benefited from it in socio/economic terms, the freedom it makes to their lives, the possibilities it opens up, and they will come to defend peace and live with its many contradictions, not least power-sharing between those with conflicting objectives. It was always going to be a long, slow haul.

Last Tuesday night Ian Paisley appeared on BBC's 'Spotlight' programme in front of a studio audience. A bitter old man. Not at his best, this once-real, now-pathetic, bogey-man. To think that as kids he terrified us! On the one hand, the fact that in the last European elections a majority of the unionist community voted for this religious fundamentalist who for so long has been associated with anti-Catholic bigotry is disturbing. On the other hand, one is tempted into a bit of inverse, sectarian elitism, thinking that unionists must be stupid or jurassic to vote for the self-styled doctor-without-a-doctorate, without a strategy, an alternative or a winnable mission. The big success of the Ian Paisley story has been Ian Paisley not the cause of unionism and certainly not the cause of Christianity.

That unionism in general has a major problem coming to terms with empowered nationalism, has difficulty with ideas such as human equality and parity of esteem, was clearly seen in the remarks of the man of the moment, the man who "saved the Agreement". Such a yarn. Had the Ulster Unionists rejected the IRA's peace initiative of May 6th, nationalists and republicans could have coped with the outcome far better than unionists - and still improved their position.

Saviour David Trimble, commenting on the performance of the two Sinn Fein ministers in the executive, said that they still had to be 'house-trained'. Those comments, comparing people to a dog, are worthy of a racist. Trimble's personality certainly leaves to a lot to be desired. But he is the leader of the largest Unionist party, he is the First Minister and it is in cooperation with him that the SDLP and Sinn Fein have to work, even if we are just to get through this summer, until the date of the next crisis which the anti-Agreement unionists are probably planning right now.

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