>From MCELROY@zodiac.rutgers.edu Sun May 2 19:50:50 1993 BLUSTERING UNIONISTS FIND AN ALLY IN WORKERS' PARTY by Jack Holland from the Irish Echo, April 21-27, 1993 ********** Belfast--Social Democratic and Labour PArty (SDLP) chief John Hume has been coming under fire from the usual quarters for his meeting with Gerry Adams two weekends ago. It has given Ian Paisley yet another excuse to say he will not attend Sir Patrick Mayhew's talking shop if the Northern Ireland Secretary of State should manage to set it up again after the May local elections. Already, Paisley has one excuse in Articles 2 and 3, which he has been saying have to be abandon before he'll talk to Dublin. But the more excuses he has to beat the tribal drum the better--he's gambling on it. winning the DUP votes next month. So the Big Man's been howling that if Hume meets with Sinn Fein's president again, the DUP will boycott negotiations. Excuse me if I yawn. Isn't this where we came in, 20 years ago? The ritual remains stultifyingly the same, year in and year out. Blustering Unionists behaving like spoiled children wanting everything their way, terrified of change, of movement in any direction other than the way they want to go-- i.e. backward. Hume knows them well enough to ignore this routine and do what he has to do: talk with Sinn Fein, which continues to represent a significant portion of opinion in Northern Ireland, whether Paisley likes it or not. However, Hume has been attacked from another quarter recently. Workers Party and Democratic Left (a split from the WP) spokesmen have been targeting him. Last week, Tom French, the Northern chairman of the WP, said, "John Hume's meeting with the Provisionals has more to do with scuttling any real talks process, rather than any attempt at finding a peace formula." Two weeks earlier, French's former colleague, Prionsias DeRossa, now head of the Democratic Left, made an unprecedented attack on Hume in the Dail. He accused Hume and other Northern politicians of being unwilling to compromise. He singled out constitutional nationalists for criticism, saying it had turned its back on "important signs of flexibility and movement from the Unionist Party." Like French and the WP, De Rossa and the Democratic Left spend a lot of time sounding more Unionist than the Unionists, partly because they foolishly hope that Protestants might take them seriously. But De Rossa's attack, in particular, has a wider significance. It is one more sign that sections of the Southern establishment are distancing themselves from the SDLP. Their Northern political guru is no longer John Hume but Ken Maginnis, the Ulster Unionist Party's security spokesman. Maginnis represents the acceptable face of Unionism. And moderate Unionism is a force with which elements in the Irish government seem eager to make common cause. This stems from the desire of many in the South to keep Northern Ireland at a distance; they suppose that the best way to achieve this is to support Unionist demands for a devolved government. For a long time, it has been the policy of the Workers' Party to call for the re-establishment of Stormont, which it fondly supposes would allow 'normal' politics to develop in Northern Ireland. At the moment this fits in nicely with those sections of the Dublin government-- particularly in the Labour Party--that are anxious to placate Unionism. Hence the growing pressure on Hume and the mounting criticisms of him. However, the SDLP has made it clear that it no longer sees devolved government as the solution to the North's crisis. Nationalists have grown more ambitious in the years that have gone by since power-sharing in 1973-1974. Last month, in an interview with me, Dr. Brian Feeney, an SDLP councillor for North Belfast, was emphatic about it. "There won't be a regional assembly here", he said. "What was offered to us by the Unionists during the talks was less than what Faulkner was offering in 1972, pre-Sunningdale. What the Northern Ireland Office was proposing in the drafts was what Prior (former Northern Ireland secretary) had offered and was rejected as unworkable by us years ago. Hume and his party know all too well what trying to work with Unionists is really like. They've found little room there for compromise. By turning to Sinn Fein, Hume is signaling that the needs and concerns of this important section of the electorate have to be addressed as well if any kind of stable solution to the North's problems is to be found. Voting for Sinn Fein should not be tantamount to disenfranchisement, which in effect is what it means. For groups such as the Workers' Party to suggest that there can be any 'real talks' without this section of the nationalist community taking part shows just how craven and unrepresentative of nationalist opinion they have become. ********** for more information in peacenet on Ireland, see reg.ireland.