THE BRITISH and Irish governments have moved decisively to reassure Loyalists in the Six Counties that their interests were not threatened by the "peace process".
John Major, while abandoning government restrictions on the broadcasting of Sinn Fein representatives, made it clear that there would be a referendum in Northern Ireland over the outcome of any peace talks.
The restriction of such a referendum to the North effectively seals the right of the Loyalists to a veto on unification.
Major also stated that Sinn Fein would not be admitted to peace talks unless and until it clarified that the IRA ceasefire was "permanent".
The statements by Major were reinforced by the frank admission by Irish premier Reynolds that Irish unification was off the agenda for decades.
The "peace process" package is now absolutely clear. First, the IRA calls off the armed struggle. Then there are talks, eventually involving Sinn Fein, which lead to the creation of a new Northern Ireland assembly, to which Adams and other Sinn Fein representatives are elected.
The government hopes that Loyalist opinion would be reconciled to this, and their paramilitaries demobilised. "Peace" would thus be established. But what exactly would be achieved from the viewpoint of the Republicans and the struggle for Irish unification?
While the whole process will bee subject to a referendum in the North, the British state is not going to allow a 32county referendum on unification. The outcome will thus be the election of a Six County assembly, and the transformation of Sinn Fein into a more-or-less radical nationalist, but constitutional, electoralist party.
It is highly unlikely in such a scenario that Sinn Fein will replace the SDLP as the dominant nationalist party; indeed the political differences between sections of Sinn Fein and the SDLP will begin to erode. After all, what is the SDLP but constitutional, reformist, nationalism?
National rights
What this scenario does not include is anything to address the national rights of the Irish people, or indeed of the nationalist community in the North.
In other words, there is nothing in this package which addressed the question of the Orange nature of the Six County statelet; its existence as the institutionalthe union with Britain. tainly exist. nationalist politicians being elected to local councils and as MPs to the British parliament. That was the situation in the 1950s and 1960s, when such people called themselves simply "Nationalists".
It was precisely the failure of this type of communal electoral politics, and the continuation of mass discrimination, which led to the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which