Haass Talks in Northern Ireland Begin

This week former George W. Bush administration special envoy to Northern Ireland Richard Haass began what is slated to be twelve weeks of intermittent consultations with the five parties in Northern Ireland's Executive. The talks will be conducted in rounds with Haass flying in to Belfast from New York several times a month to conduct them. The talks will focus on three key stumbling blocks to progress in the peace process: parades, flags and emblems, and dealing with the past. 

As part of the Northern Ireland peace process in the late 1990s a quango (quasi non-governmental organization--a body financed by the government but with independence like an NGO) known as the Parades Commission was created to deal with the problem of parades regulation during the marching season. Every year it receives requests for parade permits stating the date, time, route, and details of a proposed parade. Local residents along the parade route are free to submit objections and the Parades Commission then makes a ruling. Only a few parades in Northern Ireland--those involving Protestants marching through Catholic areas--are controversial. At present these are mainly in North Belfast, which is an area of alternating nationalist and unionist neighborhoods criss-crossed with peace walls in order to protect the residents from missiles from the other side. The Orange Order has refused to hold dialogues with residents' groups contending that its members have an absolute right to march on the "Queen's highway." Since the mid-1990s when the controversies were at their height over the Drumcree Church march outside of Portadown in north Co. Armagh, in the Lower Ormeau area of South Belfast, and in Derry in Co. Londonderry, the number of controversial parades has been gradually reduced.

A solution to the flags issue in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland, particularly the Greater Belfast area and East Belfast in particular, has witnessed protests accompanied by rioting for the last five weeks in response to a Belfast City Council decision to fly the Union flag (the British flag) over city hall only on some 15-20 designated days per year rather than 365 days per year as had previously been the practice. This decision actually brings Northern Ireland into line with the rest of the United Kingdom. But the loyalist working class, backed up by elements of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in East Belfast and initially by the mainstream unionist parties are determined to show their Britishness by behaving in a thoroughly un-British manner. 

As has been pointed out at the Slugger O'Toole website (see comments) the American South also has a flags problem. Ever since the beginning of desegregation in the mid-1950s the Confederate flag has been used as a symbol of racists opposed to integration and equality. When pressed, in order to be politically correct, they claim it as a symbol of cultural pride. But in reality, as in Northern Ireland it functions as a territorial marker in the South warning blacks to keep out.

What are Alliance's Future Prospects?

Mick Fealty over at Slugger O'Toole had an interesting post about the middle ground of Ulster politics. As he defines it this consists of the two moderate sectarian parties, the Ulster Unionists (UUP) and the SDLP, and the non-sectarian Alliance Party. In the summer of 1998 when I was researching my first book, Native vs. Settler: Ethnic Conflict in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and South Africa (Greenwood, 2000) I found a dearth of published information on Alliance. I did manage to find an unpublished Masters Thesis on Alliance written in the early 1990s for a politics degree in France as well as the back issues of Alliance's in-house newsletter in the politics collection of the Linen Hall library in Belfast. This book included a chapter on Alliance that then became the core of my next book, Indispensable Traitors: Liberal Parties in Settler Conflicts (Greenwood, 2002).

I learned that Alliance had actually begun life as a non-parliamentary pressure/ginger group, the New Ulster Movement, in Belfast in early 1969. After about a year it decided to form a party that was both liberal and non-sectarian. The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland was launched in April 1970 months before the SDLP. It had its best recruiting periods in its first three years in 1970-73 as The Troubles were becoming a republican insurgency against the state. Alliance reached its peak in a local election in 1977 at just under 15 percent of the total--higher than for the DUP. Then it began to slowly slide back until 1981 when it lost almost all of its vote west of the Bann River. It again had an above-average  recruiting period in the mid-1990s as the province was moving out of The Troubles following the first IRA ceasefire. But by 1997 the vote was shrinking back down to its previous high of 6.5 percent. This continued to deteriorate until it hit just over five percent.

I interviewed a number of Alliance figures including its first leader, Oliver Napier, and then Assembly Speaker John Alderdice and his brother, Lord Mayor David Alderdice, who was kind enough to give me a tour of City Hall before the interview. Noting that the party after the 1981 hunger strike had been limited largely to Greater Belfast--to constituencies with a unionist majority, I suggested to several members that the party declare itself to be a unionist party (it was on record as being pro-union) but emphasis its differences with the other unionist parties i.e. its two Catholic party leaders, high percentage of women office holders, innovative policies, etc. They replied that the party would lose many more votes than it would gain by doing this as its members regarded themselves as belonging to the Other tradition: participants in or issue of mixed marriages or simply non-religious.

Former First Minister David Trimble links protests to East Belfast Seat

In an interview published today on the Newshound site, former First Minister David Trimble, who now sits in the British House of Lords for the Conservatives, linked the flag protests and riots that have engulfed Northern Ireland over the last ten days to the DUP's loss of its East Belfast seat to the Alliance Party in the last general election. This was the seat of party leader Peter Robinson who had held it since first being elected in 1979. It was also the Alliance Party's first parliamentary seat. Trimble was implicitly criticizing his former party, the Ulster Unionist Party, which has teamed up with the DUP to protest the compromise crafted by Alliance with the two nationalist parties on the Belfast City Council. As Alliance councilor Laura McNamee points out in an interview, had Alliance not acted the two parties would simply have voted to eliminate the flag flying over Belfast City Hall altogether.

So what are the motives for the unionist parties in these protests? Peter Robinson gets to act out and extract some revenge on Alliance for taking his seat. He may even stir up the electorate enough to win the seat back for his party in the next election. The UUP by putting Alliance on the defensive may end the attrition of party members to the party that has been going on since the last general election when Alliance outperformed the party. And the tiny Progressive Unionist Party can look statesmanlike by issuing statements calling for restraint and condemning the violence while also condemning the compromise. So, the unionist parties are the winners.