Whitelaw Whitewash?

I suppose so. But if it had been up to him and Mick McGahey, then the miners' strike would have been resolved. Alas, they had to answer to Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill respectively. Alas for them. And alas for everyone else.

Speaking of Thatcher, she was a Cabinet Minister while this was going on, just as she was when European Community law was being made supreme over that of the United Kingdom, when our historic fishing rights were being signed away, when the only British Government ever seriously to consider doing so was coming within hours of withdrawal from Northern Ireland, when the ancient counties were being abolished, when schemes for Scottish and Welsh devolution were being devised, and when she herself was closing so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled, all under a Prime Minister who in his earlier career had laid waste to small and family business by abolishing Resale Price Maintenance.

And what of this strange, strange case? However much the man at the centre of it would have been horrified by the fact, it illustrates the long and very friendly partnership beween the Catholic Church and the British State in Ireland. There were numerous Catholic pulpit denunciations of Fenianism, which is unlike any of the three principal British political traditions in being a product of the French Revolution. Hence its tricolour flag. And hence its strong anticlerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland's two biggest problems.

In reality, those two biggest problems are the abiding legacies of the two main streams feeding into Irish separatism. The Orange Lodges opposed the Act of Union of 1800, the best thing that ever happened to Ireland, which incorporated one of the most backward countries in Europe into what became in the nineteenth century the most advanced country in the world. The consequent improvements in Ireland's agriculture, industry, education, infrastructure, welfare provision, honest and responsible administration, and so on, were almost incalculable, and enjoyed the strongest possible support of the Catholic Church, without which many, most or even all of them could not have happened, especially at local level.

But to the Orangemen, the Union meant Catholic Emancipation, and indeed the necessary Unionist majority in the former Irish Parliament was secured on that very basis, by Protestant Emancipationists who secured the votes of the Catholic commercial class by promising to deliver the Union that would deliver to those voters the right to sit in Parliament. Those voters delivered that majority, that majority delivered the Union, and the Union delivered Catholic Emancipation, which the old Irish Parliament would simply never have countenanced.

Protestant pioneers are sometimes produced by Republicans as a sort of trump card. But those believed their own Protestant, "Saxon" nation to be the only nation, as such and with all national rights accordingly, on the Irish island. They had no more interest in or regard for Gaels and Catholics than their contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, had either for the "Indians not taxed" or for his own slaves. They viewed those other inhabitants of Ireland as anti-monarchist opinion has regarded the Australian Aborigines from the Victorian Period to the present day, as Hendrik Verwoerd regarded the non-white peoples of South Africa, as Ian Smith regarded the Mashona and the Matabele, and as Golda Meir regarded the Palestinians when she denied that they existed at all, a view still widely and deeply held.

Such notions have been ridiculous when viewed from east of the Irish Sea at least since Dr Johnson asked "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" But when the Stormont Parliament and its supporters opposed integration because integration meant Civil Rights, then they were in no way out of keeping with the anti-Unionist thinking of their ancestors. In the meantime, separatist leaders as late as the Gladstone years had seized on the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, with all its implications for the system of tithes, as a nullifying breach of the Act of Union.

The other main stream feeding into Irish separatism arose out of the urban Catholic bourgeoisie that the Union had so greatly expanded and entrenched. But it was largely directed from outside Ireland, and very often from thousands of miles away. It was, and is, the wannabe leprechaun pretensions of those who, if they had ever seen what they saw as the pure Gaelic folk-culture at all, had only ever done so from their carriage windows, so that they had no understanding whatever of people whose circumstances compelled them to live like that, people who warmly welcomed the drastic elevation of their condition by the alliance of Throne and Altar, however many tears that may have brought to the eyes of those whose wholly detached world had by then passed from Jacobinism to Romanticism, and who for the most part did not live in Ireland.

When those fantasists seized their moment during the international distractions of 1916, almost no one in Ireland had ever even heard of them, and barely any more people took them remotely seriously. By the time that the Home Rule legislation, with its built in delay until after the War, actually came into effect, then even the "official" reasons given for it by its proponents no longer applied.

Tendencies very much like both of these, and no less pernicious than either, are now apparent in the Nationalist nomenklatura of Scotland, in Wales's ruling oligarchy of those whose use of Welsh as a cordon sanitaire in English-speaking areas expresses their disdain for the Welsh-speaking and English-speaking common herds alike, and in the mounting clamour for an independent or heavily devolved England which in reality amounts to nothing more than the White Van Men of the South East, but bolstered from time to time by a sort of sub-Tolkien nonsense which nevertheless includes the waving of a Norman flag confined to ecclesiastical use until a football tournament in 1990.

Speaking of flags, that red saltire on the Union Flag was, and is, no word of lie. The Irish were vigorous participants in British imperialism, and especially in its military aspects. It was under that Flag, and by those means, that they propagated the Faith to the ends of the earth.