Book Review

Poems of Living, Loving and Dying in ONGKESH Though the tw elfth is Past, the fla i And we will ke Till all the rebels are interned ‘ With all the rat S and all Concerned, They're ke, Pt in a place that’s The rebel’s say it's quite a eee Long Kesh, oe Called But we all know it’s good enough For they‘ve been reared in dirt and Scruff. Their families are living off the state The wives don’t thi But their men = iy i will be in fo So they can beg and chant Now we will still make Certai i in Nn, without an e South, you men of the green Ulster is ours -+ ++ God save the Queen. .

“Love Orange Love Green’, Whitcor Publications. conflict.”

between the two communities.

WILL STAND IDLY BY In a spectacular “‘leak’’ to the press last week Conor Cruise O’Brien hit the headlines with a piece of high-powered propoganda which was quickly labelled a ‘‘Doomsday Document”. The document was supposed to have been drawn up for the eyes only of the 31 members of the 26 Cos. Labour Party administrative Council to answer points raised in a similar type of document delivered to the same body by the Liaison Committee of the Labour Left last August.

The controversial and confidential nature of O’Brien’s ‘leak’ lies in the fact that the ‘‘secret papers’’ contain what O’Brien maintains is the view of the present Coalition government on the Northern situation, particularly in regard to the probability of a Loyalist seizure of State power and a resulting civil war. Somewhere along the line, somebody, (and that somebody does - not exclude Mr. O’Brien himself) revealed the contents of the paper to the National Press where it duly hit the front pages with a bang.

O’Brien’s line, ‘““scenario” in current jargon, envisages the likelihood of a Loyalist majority in the Convention Elections in the North, due to take place within the next six months. With such a clear majority the loyalists could then go ahead and forma “provisional government” and legalise the fascist para-military bodies as the official security forces of the new loyalist state.

This new state of affairs would either be agreed to by the British or they would be forced to react by confronting the new security forces with the British Army. In either situation the British would be forced to withdraw, either through lack of political will or lacking the physical capacity to take on these combined Loyalist forces. Such a withdrawl, says O’Brien, would not be a “’phased”’ operation but a himself more or less admits this is a bit of a gamble since he provides no proof that even if such a vote ever existed, or still exists, that it does so in sufficient strength to neutralise the Loyalist threat. However, not to be outdone, O’Brien says that if after all this ““keeping mum” and adopting low profiles all over the place, that a Loyalist vote does emerge (something which he admits in his own academic way as a near certainty in the first part of his argument) then what the British should do is to dissolve the Convention and state that there must be power-sharing and no return to the ‘’B”’ Specials — This is the sum total of the O’Brien-Coalition policy on the North!

If we are to follow the logic of the Dr.’s own line of argument, then there is scant little different between the British being drawn into a confrontation with a Loyalist Provisional Government (deriving from a Loyalist majority in the Convention) and actually going in and dissolving the Convention which contains that Loyalist majority, who would constitute such a government in all but name. The distinction between the two lines rests, as does most of O’Brien’s political arguments, on academic or constitutional niceties.

Reasons for leaking document If we accept that the end results amount to the same whichever way you look at it, then the weight of O'Brien's argument lies in allowing a Loyalist takeover to happen with a resulting civil war and DO NOTHING ABOUT IT! The ‘leak’ of the document can only have been designed to depress and terrorise people with the fact of a Doomsday situation and using false logic to talk them into _& COALITION