Partition was never envisaged as a final settlement

The View

Pope Francis, meditating recently on the problematic history of Latin America including his own country of Argentina in its evolution over the past 500 years, and especially the treatment of native peoples, ran into criticism from Spanish conservatives. They hold that Spain gave Latin America (except Brazil) its language and Catholic religion, and that the Spanish Empire was a glorious one. There are echoes closer to home of the last point.

The Pope in the present age is a world leader, with an authority that stretches well beyond the members of his own Church to most of Christianity, and he indeed speaks to those of other religions and none. A symbol of this role is the existence of Vatican City as an independent State. Pope Francis has used his office, as did his predecessors over the last 60 years, to preach a progressive Christian message addressing a wide range of contemporary moral problems of every kind. He is not beholden to any partisan political or material interest. It is true that this can sometimes be overshadowed by focusing on difficulties the Church has with the direction taken by society in the western world and by aberrational individual or organisational conduct that gravely undermines trust in its authority and integrity.

President Macron suggested recently that in serious circumstances the seal of the confessional should be overridden”

This last weekend, he met President Joe Biden, in Rome for the G20 Summit, and, according to news reports, they discussed climate change and Covid. President Biden, like President Kennedy before him, is proud of his Irish Catholic background, in both cases dating back to Famine emigration, but it would have been unrealistic to expect of either of them that they would be free or bound to pursue confessional politics in a country as diverse as the United States with no mandate to do so.

Churches also have to defend themselves from attack. President Macron suggested recently that in serious circumstances the seal of the confessional should be overridden. All that would achieve is that serious wrong-doing would never be confessed, and the perpetrator, potentially open to religious counsel, would be deprived of the benefit of it. Unfortunately, political leaders resort too frequently to what sounds plausible, in this case pandering to the anti-clerical French republican ethos, before it has been fully thought through.

German counterparts

Macron, to be fair, like his German counterparts, is willing to grapple with the legacy of imperialism, in his case the Algerian war, in theirs German South-West Africa, today Namibia. The British Government is reluctant to do this, and the problem lies not only in former British possessions far away but much closer to home.

As a conference hosted by the National Museum of Ireland last Friday discussed, Ireland has its own problems, in that some of its collections were assembled in Victorian times (or earlier), when post-1800 Ireland was not only part of the Union but of the Empire, and when soldiers, scientists and explorers shared colonial assumptions. It would be comforting to put it mainly down to the Anglo-Irish élite, but it is a wider problem than that.

Partition

The four Church leaders conducted a dignified, moving and genuinely reconciliatory remembrance in Armagh of the establishment of Northern Ireland in 1921 and a century of partition. It was not a celebration of either, even if the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson left muttering that word in obvious disappointment. Participation in commemoration, even for office-holders, is a matter of choice, and one of the principles of the decade of centenaries is that we are not all required to think or react in the same way to our shared history. One can respect different decisions made in good faith, without having to condemn either those who decided not to go or those who went.

The context was Ukraine, which is de facto divided into an independent state and an unrecognised Russian-dominated part of its territory”

Outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s diplomatic advisor for twelve years, Christoph Heusgen, in a Spiegel interview (September 19) stated that Germany was always ready to help a country move from being a partitioned state to a reunited one, and turn its economic strength into political strength. The context was Ukraine, which is de facto divided into an independent state and an unrecognised Russian-dominated part of its territory. But his observation has a wider validity, in that few States in the world like to see other countries being partitioned or staying partitioned. Germany was able to make the leap, when circumstances allowed, but that moment has not yet arrived for Korea, Cyprus and Ireland.

At the time of the Treaty, it was recognised by the British and very occasionally by Ulster Unionists that partition was not ideal, which is why the door has always been left ajar to Irish reunification, if the principle of consent is satisfied. Indeed, that was the policy of the British Labour Party in the era of Kevin McNamara. The new dispensation created by the Good Friday Agreement would satisfy most people, if it were allowed to work as intended, rather than being continually frustrated in many areas. It was never envisaged as a final settlement, but nor was it a purely temporary and transitional arrangement, particularly as conditions that would allow constitutional change would take time to come about.

Public servants

Sir John Chilcot, who has died, was one of the most effective British public servants, who had to deal with Northern Ireland. During his time he brought the Northern Ireland Office right back into the centre of things, after being sidelined during the lead-in to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. He steered the British back-channel exploratory dialogue with the Republican Movement, while managing as best he could real political constraints on his side. His leadership contributed to making possible the initial breakthroughs in the peace process. Later, his inquiry into what went wrong on the lead-in to the Iraq war was not a comfortable one for those responsible for having justified British participation on a flimsy and mistaken premise. That event was not a good demonstration of the merits of the Churchillian ideal of a united Anglosphere, still touted, even here occasionally, as a superior alternative to the EU.