Tony Blair’s Northern Ireland policy — which has been, in essence, to hand
over the keys of the store to Republican terrorists — blew up in his face
last week, when elections were held to the Northern Ireland Assembly. This
assembly is a “power-sharing” legislature established as part of the 1998
Good Friday agreement, but suspended last year after Sinn Fein, the
hard-line Republican party (“the IRA in suits,” as people in Ulster say
pretty freely) was found to have been running a spy ring in the executive
offices of Northern Ireland’s administration. Well, Tony Blair has been
determined to get “power-sharing” back on track, notwithstanding the fact
that Sinn Fein / IRA has made no real move towards demilitarization, as
required by the 1998 agreement. Blair accordingly arranged last week’s
election, and made a point of telling Ulster Unionists not to vote for Ian
Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, which refuses to talk to SF/IRA until
some real demilitarization has taken place. The Unionist voters of Ulster,
who regard Blair, with much justification, as being determined to sell them
out to their enemies, poked their collective finger in his eye, giving the
DUP 30 seats against the more moderate UUP’s 27. At the same time,
Republican voters abandoned their own moderate party, the SDLP, for SF/IRA,
the seats here going 18 to 24. So: the Northern Ireland assembly now
breaks 54-45 hardline-moderate. It is still suspended, and likely to remain
so for a long time. The province is being ruled directly from London. The
IRA terrorists will put up with this for a while, then start letting off
bombs again to (as the saying goes) “push the peace process forward.”
Whoever is in charge of the British government at that point will cook up
some new formula to give the terrorists more of what they want in return for
some token concessions. The Unionists will grudgingly go along; the
Republicans will fail to deliver what they promised; the Unionists will
withdraw their support; and so on to the end of time… Or until the whole
wretched island converts to Islam–there are already mosques in all big
Irish towns. Dublin has at least four.