Madam, – Bill Clinton was always assured of a warm welcome in this country, whatever his domestic problems, or indeed the controversies about the questionable use of US military power, because of his critical contribution to and engagement in the peace process. John Major receives a warm reception in this country for a similar reason. Given that Tony Blair did more for peace in Ireland as prime minister than any of his predecessors, he should be received as a friend, who is welcome to visit this country freely – the country of summer holidays with his maternal grandmother – any time he wishes.
Various hard-left groups and individuals repeatedly make a nonsense of their claim to be champions of Ireland’s neutrality, which requires a great deal of self-restraint and measured comment, when they take up the most partisan positions in relation to foreign conflicts. The Iraq war may have been a serious mistake, and some of its justifications flawed, though international law in this area is not at all as clear-cut as is often made out, but it undoubtedly removed from power Saddam Hussein, who by any standards was a longstanding domestic tyrant and war criminal, and still some danger to his neighbourhood.
If any consistent logic were applied by the said protest groups, to what class of criminality would they consider that such “heroes” as Lenin and Trotsky belong? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Michael Lillis’s eulogy of Tony Blair (August 31st) was an unstinting tribute to a now widely discredited and derided politician and self-confessed liar. Whatever one thinks of Mr Blair or of Mr Lillis’s admiration for him, one line in the letter surely demands questioning – his description of the situation of the minority in Northern Ireland in the years 1921-1968 as one of “near apartheid-scale humiliation and discrimination”.
Apartheid was a uniquely evil system under which a small minority excluded the majority from any participation in the electoral process, from government at any level, and ordained, among other things, who could live where and marry whom, on the basis of legally defined racial classifications.
There is not the remotest comparison between this and Northern Ireland under unionist rule. To suggest the comparison is to diminish the evil of apartheid and to demean the many, both within South Africa and around the world, who campaigned for years against it.
There were no “apartheid” laws in Northern Ireland: everyone had the vote, with no restrictions on basis of race or religion. Administrative malpractice in some areas did mean discrimination in housing and jobs, mostly against nationalists, but also by nationalists.
Nationalists did not share in government at provincial level because they could not win enough seats in an entity where the constitutional issue was the defining question in politics – not least because the minority community helped make it so.
The result was a divided community in which Catholics were in various ways disadvantaged, and a society which needed fundamental reform.
But there was never anything to justify comparison with apartheid.
Ironically the Belfast Agreement engineered by Mr Blair has a key feature that does have some echoes of apartheid – the requirement of all those elected to the legislative assembly to declare themselves as unionist, nationalist, or other, which “designations of identity” are then basic to the securing of required majorities in the assembly. (South Africa’s Population Registration Act of 1950, giving everyone a racial designation, was fundamental to the apartheid system.)
Thus Mr Blair helped ensure in Northern Ireland the institutionalisation of the political divide between majority and minority, and its permanence.
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