Patrick Murphy. Irish News ( Belfast). Saturday, December 27, 2014.
THE North is to be privatised, its past sanitised and its electorate anaesthetised.
That appears to be a reasonable summary of what the Stormont parties agreed in their
annual sleep-over at Stormont.
The grandly titled Stormont House Agreement (it conjures up images of the Irish
foreign minister politely proffering a plate of Ferrero Rocher) looks not so much
like an agreement, more a series of stop-gap and unrelated ideas to rekindle the
dying embers of interest among a wearied electorate.
The spectacle of well-paid politicians tweeting self-congratulatory photographs of
themselves to a people struggling through economic recession did little to dispel
the view that the parties saw it all as a Christmas football match among the
trenches of prolonged sectarian warfare.
Or maybe they just reached agreement to prevent the Queen's Christmas Day references
to the north from sounding silly.
While the agreed paper contains little which could not have been achieved within the
daily workings of a normal government, its financial details represent a massive
shift to the right in Stormont's ideology.
If this document does not exactly reflect the hand of history, it certainly smacks
of the hand of Margaret Thatcher.
It was achieved by the British government moving from bribing Stormont with its own
money, to bribing it with its own debt.
The new financial arrangements are based on David Cameron's ideology that all
Britain's ills ("a bloated, high-tax, welfare-heavy nation") stem from the public
sector. Sinn Féin previously said that he was "a penny pinching accountant". He is,
but the party is either ignoring or misunderstanding his approach to public sector
finances.
It is a bit like criticising the spots on a child's face, rather than explaining
measles.
None of the parties disclosed that all five of them have now all adopted the
Conservative Party (and Fine Gael) ideology of transferring much of the state's
apparatus to the private sector. They have a perfectly valid right to do so.
However, having apparently opposed at least parts of it in recent months, Sinn Féin
and the SDLP have now agreed to implement this policy by borrowing money to lay off
thousands of public sector workers (including teachers) and to sell off as many
public properties and other assets as they can.
They have also abandoned their much-publicised opposition to welfare reform. They
have agreed to pay the fines for failing to implement the new welfare system up to
now (explain that to redundant teachers). They will continue to fund any future
deviation from those rules by diverting money from other sources without any
additional cash from Westminster.
So, while the parties can claim to have protected some of the original welfare
system, Cameron won the bigger argument by forcing them to adopt his experimental
model of society based on individualism rather than collective social
responsibility. No-one tweeted that bit.
The agreement deals with the past by burying it with bureaucracy.
It proposes four separate bodies, which display little obvious connection. They
include an oral history project, which will incorporate research to produce 'a
factual historical timeline' of the Troubles (Oh good, we are about to get an
'official' history).
The PSNI's Historical Enquiries Team (HET) will be replaced by the PSNI's Historical
Investigations Unit (HIU). (You can make your own comment on that one.) A Commission
on Information Retrieval will privately collate information about individual deaths
for surviving relatives, but will not pass the information to the legal authorities,
thereby rendering the past officially dead.
A fourth organisation, the Implementation and Reconciliation Group, will formally
bury the past by, among other things, 'reducing sectarianism' (but presumably not in
Stormont).
On the good news front, the parties agreed on 'respect for and recognition of the
Irish language in Northern Ireland'. (Wasn't that nice?)
On the downside, Irish is only for Catholics because, in agreeing to the Commission
on Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition, nationalists have now formally stated for
the first time that Protestants do not have an identity, they have their own
culture.
The concept of the Irish nation is finally dead.
It is hard to see how the agreement represents anything other than a further
political consolidation of Britain's victory in the long war.
However, the parties will prescribe it as a general political anaesthetic, because
it allows them to retain power, employ their relatives, pay their friends, claim
questionable expenses and pat themselves on the back for keeping their jobs, while
thousands lose theirs.
The agreement's most significant aspect is that Stormont has now officially embraced
Thatcherism. It will be interesting to read the factual historical timeline on how
that came about.
