An ideal Christmas present

by Henry McDonald.........Irish editor Observer

Since the Good Friday Agree--ment, a key Sinn Fein strategy has been to portray the settlement as a stepping stone towards a United Ireland. The Provisionals spokesmen have set off a series of green-coloured heat flares aimed at deflecting the republican base from zeroing in on the partitionist core of the 1998 historic compromise. As the republican movement marched en masse towards the Stormont parliament they once vowed to smash their generals shrouded the political battlefield in emerald mists convincing their foot soldiers that they were about to plant the Tricolour in triumph over unionist trenches.

Now the fog that descended over the political landscape producing contradictory interpretations of what the Agreement means is beginning to clear. The fact that Sinn Fein are pursuing David Trimble through the courts in a desperate attempt to overturn his ban on republicans attending North/South Ministerial Council meetings is a measure of their concern that a central truth about the Agreement has finally been exposed. Trimble’s ban on Martin McGuinness and Bairbre de Brun is the clearest evidence yet that the unionist veto is alive and well. The First Minister’s ability to bar Sinn Fein ministers from what republicans regard as the crucial aspect of the Agreement has re-kindled grassroots suspicions that the accord has underpinned partition and the unionist consent principle. Combined with Peter Mandelson’s ruling that the Union flag must fly over McGuinness’ and de Brun’s departments, the Trimble ban marks a significant victory for pro-Agreement unionism even if most unionist voters are too stupid to see it that way.

Nationalists might protest that the Agreement belongs to everyone but at its heart the Good Friday deal signified a major compromise on the national question. The Irish government dropped the territorial claim and Sinn Fein agreed to enter a partitionist parliament.

With the smoke and flares of propaganda fading from the post-Agreement battleground, a route map has been provided to show unionists, nationalists and republicans the shape of the new Northern Ireland. Austin Morgan’s "The Belfast Agreement: a practical legal analysis" is 595 pages of densely legalistic prose which, if you bear with it, helps you cut through the blur of rhetoric and lies.

Morgan points out in Part 2 of his book, in a segment on constitutional matters, that "the constitutional changes brought about by the Belfast Agreement are characterized predominantly by the end of the territorial claim over Northern Ireland" rather than a weakening of the link with the UK. The author stresses the importance of the May 1998 referendum in Northern Ireland noting that the simultaneous vote in the Republic was merely to change the 1936 Irish Constitution and overturn Articles 2 and 3. Effectively it was the vote in the north that really counted.

The UK is still the sovereign power over Northern Ireland, as Mandelson’s reserve powers on the flags issue bears out. In addition the legislative supremacy of Westminster is reaffirmed in paragraph 33 of Strand One of the Agreement. Another interesting section of Morgan’s book deals with the north-south bodies and how Trimble’s unionists pruned back the number of areas that were to be dealt with on an all-Ireland basis.

Despite the legal jargon and the tightly packed text, Morgan’s analysis would be an ideal Christmas present for republican dissidents such as Ruairi O’Bradaigh or Bernadette Sands-McKevitt. The book will undoubtedly confirm their suspicions that the Agreement has not eroded British sovereignty and indeed it may have given unionists the ability to manage change within the northern state. The book should also be slipped into a few Christmas stockings in sceptical unionist households this year. It might even convince them that their leaders actually achieved something two years ago.

The Belfast Agreement: a practical legal analysis can be purchased on the Internet