PETER HITCHENS: Another big step towards the first handover of territory in Western Europe since 1945 after our abject surrender to the IRA

Why do we keep fooling ourselves that Northern Ireland is part of this country? It’s not.

The fantasy that this is so does no one any good. The county stands on a trapdoor, waiting for the moment when the bolts will be released and the county will twist and tumble through the floor, whatever fate awaits it under the rule of Dublin.

If Dublin is controlled by Sinn Fein republican militants by then, which is entirely possible, events will be even more dramatic.

The, er, provisional position of the six counties of Northern Ireland is the result of a comprehensive British surrender to terrorist violence, which took place in 1998 under heavy pressure from America, especially from President Bill Clinton.

Like many embarrassing defeats and withdrawals, this one is disguised and softened by a “decent pause” during which we can adjust to the shame and prepare to lower our flags to the sound of sad bugle calls. If it happens, and I don’t see how it can be avoided now, it will be the first transfer of territory in Western Europe since 1945, as a result of a violent war.

The British political and media classes, as usual more or less blind to the real problems facing this country, see the endless rows over the border in Ireland as a hallmark of our departure from the EU. In fact, it is all about Northern Ireland’s departure from Great Britain. This week we’ll likely see another big step toward that exit.

The province’s chief minister will now be the choice of Sinn Fein, a party committed to the end of British rule there.

Currently that choice is Michelle O’Neill, daughter of a former IRA prisoner and member of a long-standing Republican family, who has emerged as Sinn Fein’s leader in the North.

This is a strange position, given that her party wants to wipe Northern Ireland off the map and, of course, abolish the Stormont mini-parliament from which it is governed. She is implicitly committed to the abolition of her own post.

But this is nothing like, nor as strange as, the other facts about Northern Ireland that we keep hidden from ourselves.

How is it that IRA men convicted of crimes such as the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher (and the actual murder of several others) walk free in Brighton, while those who served in the British Armed Forces during the Troubles continue to be legally prosecuted today for alleged crimes? crimes?

What solid, objective evidence do we have that the IRA ever got rid of its vast stockpiles of weapons, ammunition and explosives, provided with the help of Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi and also many Americans who poured money into pro-IRA collection boxes for many years?

Why does the IRA, which has a long tradition of violently imposed discipline and deadly factional warfare, never do anything against the so-called ‘dissident’ republicans who have continued to blow off bombs and attack police officers since peace was declared?

How is it that Sinn Fein can raise money abroad when no party on the British mainland can do so legally (a task made all the easier in the US by the party’s fashionable selection of women to adorn its leadership platforms )?

Who actually leads Sinn Fein anyway? This is a risky question to ask in Belfast, but as recently as 2019 the Police Service of Northern Ireland confirmed its previous assessment that the IRA Army Council ‘retained its control of the party’. The alleged boss in Dublin is the interesting Mary Lou McDonald.

But how did she come to be elected unopposed in 2018 (she was the only candidate for the position)? She’s not some marshmallow “moderate” either.

She once chose to attend a memorial ceremony in Dublin and speak for wartime IRA chieftain Sean Russell, famous for going to Nazi Germany in 1940 to offer his services to Hitler. He died on the U-boat that took him back to Ireland, and his (much vandalized) statue in Dublin is, as far as I know, the only monument to a Nazi collaborator anywhere in Western Europe.

There are now many signs in the province that London’s rule is coming to an end. Thousands of British troops left long ago.

Hugely expensive surveillance equipment in sensitive areas was dismantled and taken away forever. The Special Police Branch, a formidable weapon against the terrorists, was disbanded. IRA veterans have been welcomed into mainstream politics with fat tax-funded salaries and, in the case of the late Martin McGuinness, invited to royal banquets.

The Crown of St. Edward, symbol of authority in our kingdom, has been removed from police badges. Flying the Union Flag is severely restricted by law. Does this look like an IRA defeat to you, as we are always told?

A few years ago I slipped into the Sinn Fein bookshop on the Falls Road in Belfast. I was a little nervous because the movement’s then leader, Gerry Adams, had once publicly called for me to be ‘dismantled’.

The leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, addressed the media in Belfast yesterday

During our only face-to-face (or perhaps beard-to-beard) private meeting, he had dropped his usual mask of friendliness to express some pretty strong personal animosity. I could understand his point. I had actively undermined his publicity tours of the US.

But Mr. Adams wasn’t there that day, and while browsing the shelves of militant Republican memorabilia, I chanced upon a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s sharp little book The Devil’s Dictionary.

I looked up the word peace, as you did in Belfast, because you are constantly told it exists there. If this is peace, amid the shootings, the occasional bombs, the less occasional sectarian forced evictions, the 7-meter-high ‘peace walls’ separating supposedly reconciled communities, and the busy smuggling and protection practices, what can the term possibly mean? ?

And there I found it defined as “a period of deception between two periods of conflict.” Well, exactly. I bought the book with untraceable money and slipped back out, wondering what smart person had chosen to put such a subversive book there.

For we have now had over twenty years of deception, as the British Government and the British people have tried to deceive themselves about the Belfast Agreement reached at Easter 1998. I say ‘achieved’ because it is incorrect to say that it has been signed. The representatives of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army and by far the most important people there, never signed it.

From whispers and rumors in London and Belfast that evening it was quite clear that huge concessions had been made to Sinn Fein. And so it turned out, although I suspect that most people east of the Irish Sea never read the text of what the British government agreed to. I kept a copy and have carefully preserved it ever since.

The core of it remains very simple. Once the two referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic vote for unity, the Irish border will be abolished and the entire island of Ireland will be governed from Dublin.

Our parliament must legislate to transfer the territory. And then what? Irish police – and perhaps, if things go badly, Irish troops – patrolling the Protestant streets of Belfast under the leadership of a Sinn Fein government in Dublin?

The Democratic Unionist Party, led by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, knows all this. That’s why even though it can’t undo the 1998 deal now, it’s struggling and cutting ties. One day that hatch will fall open. Why do we tell ourselves that this is not the case?