This letter is a bit of an effrontery because I am going to offer you a solution to the Northern Ireland problem when I don’t have any experience in foreign affairs or diplomacy. However, when one looks at what the people with experience in foreign affairs and diplomacy have done, I don’t think it is a disqualification.
The first thing is you must stop announcing policy with words that mean different things to each side.
Talking about “”self-determination, freely and concurrently given, north and south” is plain silly. Ian Paisley and intractable mob of Protestant Unionists think this means that there will be no governmental changes in Northern Ireland without consent of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland. As there are more Protestants than Catholics he thinks he is safe. Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein (Ted Heath would call them the acceptable face of the IRA), on the other hand, think that “”self-determination” means a vote of the whole of Ireland, north and south, and thus there will be union.
I would have thought your Civil Service would have learnt by now. Remember the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Britain wanted to keep both the Arabs and Jews on side in the middle of World War I. It supported “”the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The Jews read this a meaning Palestine was the Jewish national home and the Arabs read it as meaning Jews would be allowed to come to Palestine but not in a way to upset the existing Arab population. And there has been turmoil ever since.
The outcome of the “”self-determination” declaration of the British and Irish Governments on December 15 has been inevitable. At first there are encouraging noises (leaving aside “”the Reverend” Ian Paisley whose only encouraging noises are ones that encourage people to question whether there is some other branch of the evolutionary tree of homo sapiens called Belfast Man). These encouraging noises do not arise because of what the British and Irish Civil Services think have concocted, but because of what each side thinks the British and Irish Civil Service have concocted. Eventually, reality sinks in and people on the ground learn what the December 15 “”self-determination” statement really means: nothing at all. It was too ambiguous to mean anything.
And thus the ceasefire is over and the violence continues.
Speaking humbly from my non-diplomatic background, Mr Major, your Civil Service, is not thinking along the right lines. It imagines that if both sides agree to a form of words, then there is agreement that will lead to settlement of the issue. But if the words mean different things to different people you have not got agreement nor a settlement. You have false expectation and disappointment.
You may as well get both sides to agree the sky is blue (or in the Irish case, grey) or some other statement of the obvious. No; you have to deal in outcomes. Are the northern counties to become part of a united Ireland or not? If so how and when?
Yes; I’m slowly getting to the solution. Northern Ireland is part of a general problem of dealing with a contracting and expanding empire. The degree of strife and violence associated with that has depended on the mixes of indigenous and immigrant population and the placing of borders. Viewed in that light, you should forget about Northern Ireland being “”an integral part of the United Kingdom” and the legal mechanism behind the creation and contraction of empire. Northern Ireland, is very little different from Hong Kong. And, indeed, the same decolonisation solution (from a practical rather than legal viewpoint) could be used. In effect, Britain gave everyone in Hong Kong a decade or so’s notice that it was withdrawing. It could do this and keep face because technically its 99-year had run out. But you do not need a lease to use the Hong Kong solution.
You could announce that Britain will withdraw from Northern Ireland in 25 years, that is in 2019. It is far enough away for people not to worry too much now and gives Ian Paisley enough time to die or emigrate. Imagine, Mr Major, if someone had had the foresight to do that in 1969. All your trials would have soon been over. You would not have to pay for 19,000 soldiers and, seriously now, the prognosis for the Protestants of Northern Ireland in a Republic of Ireland has got to be at least as good as the capitalists of Hong Kong in totalitarian Communist China, especially given the integration of the European Community and its community-wide human-rights regime.
The Hong Kong solution (approved by a majority of Ireland (north and south voting the total as a single electorate) has got to be a better way.