Plan B For Ulster:
Repartion and Resettlement
Roderick Moore

Since the peace process in Northern Ireland keeps coming to a halt time after time, thanks to the refusal of the IRA to disarm, we should start thinking about alternatives to the Good Friday Agreement. So far, all attempts to bring peace to Ulster have failed because they have all tried to square the circle, and it looks as if the Good Friday Agreement will be no exception. The basic cause of the problem is well-known. Northern Ireland is inhabited by a million people who think of themselves as British and half a million who regard themselves as Irish. We must face the fact that when a region is inhabited by two distinct communities which identify themselves with different nations, it is impossible to achieve political stability, because it is impossible to satisfy the aspirations of both sides within the boundaries of the same state. The only way to give both sides what they want is to separate them geographically. To put it another way, if you want to get rid of malaria, you have to start by draining the swamps where the mosquitoes are breeding, and the same thing applies to terrorism. As long as there are half a million people in Northern Ireland who are living under British rule against their will, there will always be a potential breeding ground for terrorism.

I propose that Northern Ireland should be divided into two parts, and the Catholics should be encouraged to resettle in one part and the Protestants in the other. In due course, the Catholic zone should be allowed to unite with the Irish Republic. The border between the zones should run from north to south along the line of the River Bann, Lough Neagh and the abandoned Newry Canal. I propose to call this the Bann-Newry Line. This would minimise the amount of resettlement which was necessary, because of the present distribution of the population. In Ulster, the general rule is that the further west you go, the more Catholics there are. The Catholic zone would consist of the counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh and most of the counties of Londonderry and Armagh, while the Protestant zone would include Antrim, Down, a small part of County Londonderry around Coleraine, and a small part of County Armagh around Lurgan. This distribution of territory would stand the best chance of satisfying both sides. If the Catholics got the best part of four counties, while the Protestants got two and a couple of bits, the Catholics could not complain that they were not getting a fair deal. On the other hand, the scheme would not treat the Protestants unfairly either, because the eastern zone, being more densely populated, has about a million people already, so the existing housing stock should be enough to accommodate all the Protestants.

The Bann-Newry Line would have major advantages over the present border. The Irish are a historically-minded people with long memories, and nationalists have often complained that there is no historical precedent for the border which came into existence in 1922. They could not object to the Bann-Newry Line on those grounds, because it would correspond to the border of the ancient Kingdom of Ulster which existed from the 5th Century until its conquest by John De Courcy in 1177. It would also correspond to the present diocesan boundaries of both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland. In fact, the River Bann is widely recognised within Ulster as forming a natural boundary between two distinct geographical regions.

The new border would also be much easier to defend against terrorist raids from the Irish Republic, because it would follow clearly-defined geographical features throughout its length. The present border, on the other hand, is impossible to patrol effectively, because it wanders all over the countryside, following the boundaries of medieval farms and estates, sometimes even cutting right through the middle of villages. It is true that the towns of Coleraine and Portadown are divided into two by the River Bann, but it is a wide river with only two road bridges and one railway bridge in each town, so the new border should not be too great an inconvenience. At Newry, where the canal threads its way right through the heart of the town, the Bann-Newry Line should be diverted to the east, along the line of the Newry River and Greenan Lough, to put this mainly Catholic town in the Catholic zone.

Resettlement could be achieved by a combination of the stick and the carrot. On one hand, the government could pay the expenses of anyone who wanted to move house. In the long run, this would be much cheaper than maintaining the security forces and compensating the victims of terrorism. On the other hand, persons convicted of offences such as rioting or membership of an illegal organisation could be offered the option of resettlement instead of punishment, and persons convicted of more serious terrorist offences could be offered a shorter prison sentence if they accepted resettlement at the end of it. Resettlement should not be compulsory, of course, but it should be made clear to anyone who chose to stay in the zone allocated to the other community that they could expect no favours, and they would be expected to live as law-abiding citizens.

As an interim measure, two assemblies should be set up, one in each zone. The majority party in each assembly should be allowed to form a government without any obligation to form a coalition with minority parties, and the government should be given full control over law enforcement, including the power to allow or prohibit public demonstrations such as Orange Order parades. Persons who objected to the policy on demonstrations in their zone should have their attention directed to the facilities for resettlement, which should speed up the resettlement process. When the Catholic zone joined the Irish Republic, its assembly could, of course, be dissolved.

Repartition and resettlement may seem like a drastic solution, but we have got to face the fact that nothing else is going to work. It is not a new idea, and it has at least one very distinguished supporter, because in 1984 Margaret Thatcher said privately that she was in favour of it (see Stuart 1998, p.140). It should be attractive to the Protestant community, because the higher Catholic birth rate means that their majority in the present Northern Ireland is gradually being eroded. In the long run, it will only be possible for them to protect their way of life if they withdraw to a smaller area. Losing Londonderry would be a blow to them, of course, but since 1922 they have lived with the fact that the site of the Battle of the Boyne is in a foreign country, and Londonderry has had a Catholic majority for many years. The scheme should also be attractive to mainland Britons, because most of them must be fed up with risking the lives of British soldiers to maintain British rule in God-forsaken places like Crossmaglen and Coalisland where the people only came down from the trees yesterday. There would inevitably be protests from Irish nationalists, but the proposal would bring home to them the fact that the Protestants are only asking for the same right of national self-determination that they have always demanded for themselves. Gerry Adams would be faced with the problem of explaining why he wanted to deny Protestants the rights which he was claiming for his own side, and it would be very interesting to watch him try to wriggle out of it.

REFERENCE

STUART, Mark, Douglas Hurd: The Public Servant. Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1998