Historic Handshake has Fired the Starting Gun

By AM Tuesday, July 10, 2012

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Guest Writer ex-Blanket columnist and Radical Unionist commentator Dr John Coulter maintains the historic handshake has fired the starting gun on a new Irish peace process which will see a peaceful Home Rule for the entire island.

Old republicanism is dead, long live new nationalism! That’s the clear message Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness’s handshake with Queen Elizabeth has sent across Ireland.

This change will not come about this morning magically as if McGuinness was the political version of the youthful wizard Harry Potter. Rather than the Provisionals’ long-war strategy, this will be a long-term tactic of symbolism eventually leading to a new relationship with Britain.

Just as the Good Friday Agreement peace process began in 1998 and effectively concluded with the queen laying a wreath at Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance, the latest historic handshake will start the ball rolling on a new phase of the peace process – one which will see the South form a closer link with Britain through the much-favoured Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

But Irish politics is cluttered with the art of the impossible. The so-called Chuckle Brothers routine between DUP firebrand Ian Paisley senior and McGuinness has been one of the most successful and stable political coalitions Ireland has ever seen.

But just over three decades ago as around 100,000 nationalists bade farewell to the dead IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands MP, if you had said then that one day Sinn Fein would sit at a partitionist parliament at Stormont with the supposedly hardline DUP, you would have been told to seek serious psychiatric help. But it happened.

Ironically, the new peace process which McGuinness and the queen have set in motion is almost a carbon copy of the Home Rule crisis which plunged the island into generations of conflict a century ago.

This new phase of Anglo-Irish relations will signal greater all-island co-operation between the Dail and Stormont. Given the Republic’s dire financial situation with the euro bail-out, the South will seek a closer link with Britain, with initial membership of the CPA a first step.

When Ireland was entirely in the Union, it was a founder member of the original Empire Parliamentary Association in the early 20th century. The modern CPA boasts a membership of more than 50 national and regional parliaments, some of whom were never members of the original British Empire.

The historic handshake is preparing Sinn Fein for the new to return to the roots of its founder Arthur Griffith, who was a major fan of the dual monarchy system in 1905 – two separate nations, one monarch.

McGuinness must also re-position Sinn Fein to take advantage of the forthcoming independence vote in Scotland. Even if First Minister Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party loses the poll, he can expect to gain increased devolved powers for the Scottish Parliament, dubbed ‘devo-max’.

The handshake will also see Sinn Fein phasing out the influence of the IRA prisoners and membership’s influence within the republican movement, as a new generation of so-called ‘draft dodgers’ slowly grips the party.

The ‘draft dodgers’ is a rather cheeky term for those young – and old - political republicans who now have a major influence or position within Sinn Fein, but have never been members of the Provisional IRA. Or if they have been members of the IRA, they have kept it a closely guarded secret!

But the bitter medicine McGuinness must prepare Sinn Fein to swallow is not a deal with Unionists over Home Rule, but tough security measures to deal with the republican dissidents.

Abusive and emotive terms such as ‘Judas’ (a reference to one of Jesus Christ’s disciples, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed our Lord for 30 piece of silver) and ‘traitor’ are being kicked around like political footballs as the rival mainstream and dissident factions of the broad republican family exchange insults.

Historic comparisons are already being drawn between the present activities of the McGuinness/Gerry Adams camp in Sinn Fein and the dissident republican movement, and the events which happened in Ireland in the 1920s following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the equally bloody Irish Civil War. 

Politically, the dissident republican movement will never dent Sinn Fein, even in its traditional heartlands. But just as Eamon de Valera had to crack down on the IRA after the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, McGuinness may have to oversee a no-nonsense PSNI and Southern security forces campaign to eradicate groups such as the Real IRA and RAAD (Republican Action Against Drugs).

McGuinness and Adams must rebrand Sinn Fein as an Irish version of Salmond’s exceptionally popular and successful SNP. It’s not a case of Sinn Fein using the handshake symbolism to move into the centre ground as Peter Robinson’s DUP has done in the North.

If Sinn Fein is to ‘milk’ the long-term publicity from the handshake, it must firmly entrench itself as the saviours of the financially battered Southern middle classes.

In the North, Adams and McGuinness were highly successful in electorally raiding the rich Catholic middle classes which were once the bastions of the now rapidly fading SDLP. It is now the middle ground which holds the rich pickings for Sinn Fein; it is the middle classes.

In the North, too, Sinn Fein achieved this without offending substantial sections of its core vote – the working class Catholic republican heartlands. Yes, there will always be a section of the republican family which will take the fantasy approach – kill as many Brits as possible and then talk to whoever is left! That did not work for the Provos, Stickies or INLA, and it won’t work for dissidents.  

Just new nationalism must take account of a British and Unionist dimension, so too must Unionism take account of an all-island framework. In the coming years, nationalism and Unionism’s spin doctors will have their work cut out for them – and not just in Scotland.

The queen will also be diplomatically sending a message to Unionists. If she can shake hands with a former IRA commander, the Protestant Loyal Orders can meet nationalist residents groups to solve the contentious parades dilemma.

Could a republican grandfather and an octogenarian monarch have finally solved the Drumcree dispute in Portadown with a mere handshake?