Bernie McAdam
Fears have been raised that the Robinson scandal would impact on devolution of policing and justice to Stormont. Bermie McAdam argues that devolution is no solution
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has expelled MP Iris Robinson after a love affair and financial corruption scandal. Despite reassurances that Christ had forgiven her, Robinson failed to impress her fellow evangelicals in the DUP. But now the scandal has gone beyond a personal or family crisis, and has implications for devolution and the Good Friday Agreement.
Last month, the BBC’s Spotlight programme exposed how Robinson had abused her position for loans to give to her teenage lover Kirk McCambley. Her husband, First Minister Peter Robinson, is also in trouble after failing to notify the authorities when he found out. He has had to step down while an investigation is launched into his cover-up of events.
At the same time, concern is mounting over a possible collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly as the two parties in government, Sinn Fein and the DUP, fight over the devolution of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont. This is meant to be the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the Good Friday Agreement.
A political scandal
Robinson is a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Castlereagh Borough Council. Last year she attacked gays as an “abomination” and said that homosexuality was “viler” than child sex abuse. But the affair exposed her religious hypocrisy, and the bigotry of some Unionist politicians for all to see. In a state well used to pogroms against Catholics and Roma, gay people would be particularly vulnerable.
Robinson’s position was also used to benefit McCambley and herself financially. Two loans of £25,000 were secured from wealthy property developers, £5,000 of which she took for herself. The loans were to set McCambley up as a cafe owner. When the question of the lease came to be decided at a council meeting, he was given the go-ahead. Robinson was present but did not declare her interest on the loans.
This scandal reveals much about the way that the rich and their politicians look out for each other. Robinson had lobbied on behalf of property developers Fred Fraser and Ken Campbell on planning applications before, which made the loans easy to get hold of. A sickening reminder of how politics functions in capitalism.
A sectarian state
In the state of ‘northern Ireland’ this kind of greed and corruption has a sectarian character. Regarded as a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’, where Catholics are second class citizens and subject to discrimination over jobs, housing and education, oppression of Catholics was used to keep the Protestant working class onside. This was a classic British imperial divide and rule policy.
In 1968 this discrimination was the trigger for mass anti-Unionist revolt. Thirty subsequent years of struggle against British imperial might have ended when Sinn Fein signed up to a peace deal. The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) started a process in which Sinn Fein/IRA would disarm, accept the Unionist veto over a united Ireland, and finally accept the hated police force. In typical Sinn Fein spin this would bring a united Ireland all the nearer.
But the Good Friday Agreement has not brought a united Ireland nearer and has not changed the spots on Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). Since Sinn Fein appointed representatives to the Policing Board in 2007, republicans have pointed to the increases in harassment by the PSNI. This has been borne out by a trebling of stop and search operations last year to nearly 10,000. Republican opponents of the Good Friday Agreement continue to experience arrest and detention without trial.
Peace settlement a sham
It’s been 10 years since the agreement, and Sinn Fein is still waiting for the transfer of policing powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly. Their DUP partners have stalled the process to get more concessions out of Sinn Fein and the British government. They also fear the growing influence of the hard-line Traditional Unionist Voice who are against any partnership in government with who they term “unrepentant terrorists”.
The devastating impact of the Robinson scandal and the possibility of Sinn Fein becoming the largest party in the next Assembly election has alarmed the DUP. Not surprising then that the UUP and the DUP met up with the Tories. A united Unionist bloc or an electoral agreement would ensure that Sinn Fein does not gain the highest vote. The potential for a collapse of the power-sharing executive remains very real.
Whatever the outcome, direct rule or not, Sinn Fein is left clinging to a flawed peace process that has not delivered an equal and just settlement. The GFA does not challenge the sectarian and privileged nature of the Orange state.
Devolution of policing is not making the police force – or the state – more democratic. Only the dismantling of the Orange state can do that.
The need for a political alternative to the sectarian and shambolic peace settlement is urgently required. Sinn Fein’s power sharing with the deeply reactionary DUP has not only seen the historic sell out of the fight for a united Ireland but complicity in cuts and attacks on all workers in the North. Sinn Fein also faces a number of charges of covering up sex abuse allegations against fellow republicans. The time for a revolutionary alternative is now!
A new revolutionary workers party committed to the abolition of capitalism and imperialism throughout Ireland needs to be built. The fight against the sectarian state and its police force in the north needs to be linked to the struggle around jobs, pay, housing and social services and control in the workplace, opening the way to working class power in a united Workers Republic.