West Britons

I fully support those who argue that there were many other Bloody days in Northern Ireland, but no one has bothered to spend twelve years or £191 million on investigating them. I only put it to them, in all humility, that the denial of truth and justice to them is not a reason to deny it to other people. But what of the commonplace that the Bloody Sunday soldiers fired on their own citizenry? Yes, they did.

It was Bloody Sunday, more than anything else, that acted as a gigantic aid to recruitment by the IRA and other such organisations, just as many another Bloody day acted as a gigantic aid to recruitment by paramilitaries on the other side. But the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was actually called that, and was explicitly a movement for equal British citizenship, not for a United Ireland. Even the old Nationalist Party, never mind Sinn Féin, was permitted no part in its early organisation. It was classically British Labour in identifying education, health care, decent homes and proper wages as the rights of citizens, who are demeaned precisely as citizens when they are denied those rights. The fruits of Catholic Social Teaching, indeed.

The British State is of continuing importance in protecting Northern Ireland's Catholic interest against Protestant domination, whether under devolution pursuant to the Good Friday Agreement, or within such federal Irish structures as may ever be acceptable to a Dublin Establishment at once profoundly unconcerned about Northern Ireland's Catholics and profoundly influenced by the theory of two nations with an equal right to self-determination. As much continuing importance, in fact, as in saving the Catholic schools and the legal protection of unborn children that are both doomed in the Republic.

No wonder that the recent Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey indicates that, while forty per cent of Catholics are Nationalists, forty-seven per cent are Unionists, even if they might have their own reasons for disliking the term or for voting SDLP. But, of course, voting SDLP can be an act in favour of the Union, without which nothing Social Democratic or Labour would be possible in Northern Ireland. No wonder that nearly one in ten Catholics wants to restore direct rule.