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The Council of the Isles and the Scotland-Northern Ireland relationship
by Graham Walker
Scottish Affairs No.27 Spring 1999. (Published by Unit for the Study of Government in Scotland at Edinburgh University)
The inclusion of the BIC in the terms of the Agreement was fundamental to the Ulster Unionists' acceptance of the whole package. The Unionist leader, David Trimble, was quoted as saying in march 1998 that the creation of the British Isles-wide Council 'makes it possible for Unionists to contemplate an institutionalised relationship between Belfast and Dublin' (Irish Times 18 March 1998) and he and his party, along with other pro-Agreement Unionists, played on the possible significance of the BIC in their efforts to win the support of the Unionist community in Northern Ireland for the Agreement before the Referendum of 22 May. White it was the contentious issues of decommissioning and the release of paramilitary prisoners which claimed most media attention during the Referendum campaign, the position of pro-Agreement Unionists would have been far weaker without the innovative institutional acknowledgement of East-West links supplied by the BIC as a counter-balance to the North South dimension of Strand Two. The drawback for these Unionists was the ultimate failure to have the North-South bodies made subordinate to the BIC, something apparently built in to an earlier draft by the British government, which caused Nationalist alarm (Irish Times 12 January 1998). Instead the Agreement provided for the separate operation of the North-South and East-West bodies with the clear implication that a spirit of interdependence was to hold both, along with the Northern Ireland Assembly, together. However, it has been observed that the North-South dimension is bound more tightly to the Northern Ireland Assembly, and that the development of the BIC is not as clearly pre-determined as that of the North-South bodies (O'Leary 1999).
The idea of the Council of the Isles was credited to the Unionist Party at the time of the Agreement but it was hardly new. It probably owes more to the Dublin political thinker Richard Kearney who explored the concept in his 1997 book Post Nationalist Ireland, and who, along with Simon Partridge, has for some years urged that British-Irish relations should find an institutional model akin to that of the Nordic Council (Kearney and Partridge 1998: constitution unit 1998. 1 Kearney and Partridge and the cultural commentator and critic Edna Longley (Longley 1996) have all laid stress on the cultural interactions which mark the archipelago can find expression free from political constrictions. In addition, such thinkers have approached the concept in a broadly 'post Nationalist' spirit, encouraged by the notion of transcending traditional idea of nation-states and of sovereignty and by the apparent emergence of a more regionally focused Europe.
Ulster Unionist enthusiasm for the Council of the Isle cannot be said to have embraced to any significant extent this type of radical thinking: strategic political calculations demand that the party still insists on Westminster sovereignty. Nevertheless, it is easy to see why the BIC has assumed such significance for Unionists. The Council embodies new East-West structures which for Unionists represent a departure from the trend in Britain during the Northern Ireland 'troubles' to regard 'all-Ireland' relations as the only ones to be developed and nurtured to the ends of peace and stability. The Council of the Isles proposal challenges the widespread assumption that the British role is simply to hold the line while the Irish - North and South - work out their differences. Underpinning this assumption is the notion of Irish unity, meaning a 32 county full sovereign nation state - as 'natural' and 'inevitable' or 'the only solution in the long run' a notion which has led to the Northern Ireland conflict being viewed in a one-island context and which has encouraged the 'distancing' or the marginalisation of Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK (McBride 1996, Walker 1998).
The timing of the Northern Ireland Agreement has enabled the Blair government
to tie Northern Ireland into its wider constitutional reform project, and
to raise the possibility that the BIC could play a significant role both
in the management of constitutional change and in the forging of a new set
of relationships within these islands, perhaps too a new sense of collective
identity. As Blair put it in his speech to the Oireachtas, Northern Ireland
now draws Britain and Ireland together whereas it had driven them apart
in the past (Belfast Telegraph 26 November 1998). Knitting Northern Ireland
into the constitutional re-structuring of the UK as a whole has upset some
traditional assumptions about the Irish question in British politics, notwithstanding
the continuing stress on developing all-Ireland relations and institutions
as well. Instead of one centre of government from which Northern Ireland
was apt to be viewed as the most distant periphery, there will soon be several
'centres' including that of Northern Ireland itself, with the potential
for substantial co-operation and interaction. Much of course will depend
on how successful the respective devolution schemes turn out to be, and
how the de-centralisation process develops in respect of the position of
England (Bradbury and Mawson 1997; Constitution Unit 1998). |
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