sectarian ghettoes were fraying at the edges as people of different religions moved cautiously into one another’s areas.
Bigotry had receded somewhat as a player in politics and now with the gun out of the way there seemed hope that politics would normalise into the usual phoney squabble
over the inadequacies of capitalism.

 But in offering peace the IRA had thrown a bomb into politics both north
and south of the infamous Border.
When the republicans inaugurated their political strategy with the unveiling of
constitutional Republican Clubs, William Craig, the unstable Unionist Minister of
Home Affairs, responded with a banning order. This was open to being used as
a justification of new IRA violence, in replacement for the absurd notion that the “right” of armed struggle was bequeathed to the IRA by the results of a questionable election in 1918.

 In the north a political lout in a dog collar, energised by inherited bigotry and
a bad strain of megalomania, was about to create opportunities for the promotion of violence in protestant heartlands and spawn and motivate the utterly violent Provisional IRA. Ian Paisley was becoming a politician through the back door.

 In the south, too, the IRA’s declaration of peace was giving yesterday’s
republicans now aboard the establishment gravy train some concerns. It was common knowledge that ‘Communists’ of the Leninist genre had edged their way into the leadership of the IRA and Sinn Fein and it was this influence that had brought closure to the faltering armed struggle.

 Among church and state leaders, victims of their own fevered ignorance, the
comfortable corruption of capitalism could conceivably come under threat. From some remarkable sources, in politics and industry, faith and self-interest combined to conjure up another IRA to counter the influence of the Leninist-dominated one.

 From the south the help was practical while in the north Paisley and his political ilk were fabricating conditions favourable to the emergence and rapid growth of the new Provisional IRA.

 The banned Republican Clubs were not alone in creating the movement for
civil rights in Northern Ireland but they probably were the main promotional
engine. Labourites, Communists, trade unionists, even unionists as well as people of different religions and none took aboard the methods and the anthem of the American Civil Rights movement to demand the extension of the democratic franchise to all adults in local government elections together with a points system for the allocation of social housing and an end to gerrymandering of electoral boundaries.

 Such democratic proposals were anathema to the man who is now the leader of the so-called Democratic Unionist Party and prospective first minister. Paisley articulated the gutter thinking of politico-religious unionism.
The Provisionals went into the murder business, responding with gun and bomb
to the demagoguery of Paisley and his bigoted cohorts. Catholic-nationalist
bigotry was feeding on that of its opposite number and putting flesh on the body of that republican interest that wanted to dish the ‘commies’ of the old IRA and get back to the form of politics they knew best. It was a grim, irrational reciprocity that over the years spread like a political malaise in Northern Ireland and, as we saw from the recent election results, finally affected even those of a less unwholesome political disposition.

 Is there a Hegelian irony in these recent election results? Will power and political reward sate the ambitions of those at the forefront of Northern
Ireland’s infamous ‘antithesis’? Will the fear-inspired electoral capture of the less bigoted weaken the bigotry of the two extremes? Will the threats, bribery and unmitigated corruption of the British and Irish governments combine with
these factors to create an uneasy peaceful synthesis? If so, will it last?

 We shall see, but one thing we can predict with absolute confidence: even
the peculiar nexus of Sinn Fein and the ‘Democratic’ Unionist Party combined
in a government based on clearly-defined sectarian lines will have less effect on
conditions in Northern Ireland than the workings of global capitalism.

RICHARD MONTAGUE