Brian Feeney: The north can never be ‘a nation once again’

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Hmm. Wishful thinking. It didn’t work for the Montagues and Capulets and it doesn’t work for Britain’s attempts to rename places and events they want to bury.

British governments like doing that, even if no-one is fooled.

For example, after the Windscale fire of October 10 1957, the worst nuclear accident in Britain’s history, and one of the worst in the world – ranked level 5 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale – the British changed the name to Sellafield, which continues to spew out nuclear waste.

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Brian Feeney: The north can never be ‘a nation once again’

Here, the most infamous name change was trying to banish the memory of the 1971 internment sweep arresting 340, all Catholics (and one Protestant by mistake), being found guilty of ill treatment by the European court and having to derogate from the ECHR.

The location of the squalor, beatings, gassings – Long Kesh – miraculously changed to HM Maze prison. So that’s OK then. Nobody remembers?

The latest example is changing the name of the Irish Protocol in the Trade & Cooperation Agreement to the Windsor Framework.

Well, that’s what the British call what is essentially a streamlining of the operations of the TCA, for the protocol hasn’t changed.

As far as the EU is concerned, the British can call it whatever they like as long as they operate the TCA, which they do.

Unionists aren’t fooled, though the DUP’s Gavin Robinson collaborates with the British in pretending the Windsor Framework makes a difference, and even worse, has called for the current review of the unworkable Stormont Brake to be “an honest assessment”.

Hah. The only honest assessment is Jim Allister’s. He has correctly pointed out that the review isn’t designed to work because para 3.5.1 stipulates “any recommendations to the government… will [have to] command the support of both communities” here.

As Allister concluded, the whole process is “two fingers to unionism”.

However, there’s another name-changing effort among the hundreds of words of waffle in our proconsul’s statement announcing the review of the Stormont Brake on January 9.

We’re told Lord Murphy, who will conduct the review, “has shown a deep understanding of the bonds between the nations of the United Kingdom, and an appreciation of the operation of all three strands of the Good Friday Agreement to which the government is committed.”

These two things can’t exist together because if you appreciate the operation of the Good Friday Agreement, you would know that the north of Ireland is not a nation, never has been, never will be.

It’s a catastrophically failed sub-polity, which is why there is the GFA in the first place.

In this context it’s worth quoting from a letter to the Irish Times last August by former Irish ambassador and head of the Joint Secretariat here, Declan O’Donovan.

He pointed to “a very recent trend in British media, and British officialdom also, to refer to Northern Ireland as a nation or country, one of the four countries or nations of the UK. Northern Ireland, unlike England, Scotland and Wales, is neither.”

O’Donovan continues: “Acceptance of the description country or nation for NI may be thought to imply NI, like Scotland, has a right to self-determination and independence.

“Under the GFA, approved in referendums north and south, self-determination is ‘for the people of the whole island of Ireland alone by agreement between the two parts respectively’. Northern Ireland is part of the UK and may become part of a united Ireland. It is not a country.”

Now, it may be that whichever teenage special adviser whizz kid wrote the verbose statement for our proconsul doesn’t know any history, but the proconsul ought to know and shouldn’t sign off on official statements containing such imprecisions, especially when they contradict crucial elements of the GFA which he claims his government is committed to.

The misnomer ‘nation’ for this place has accelerated since the pandemic, mainly because health is devolved throughout the UK and it was a shorthand the BBC used daily for going to bulletins from ‘the four nations’ about infection rates and death rates.

However, it is unacceptable that the British government should retrofit the media’s loose nomenclature onto official language when there are constitutional implications.

The failure of previous attempts to wash away the name of something unpleasant, as illustrated with Windscale, Long Kesh and the protocol, only leads to ridicule.

Trying to make this place into a nation or a country similar to Scotland or Wales is just putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.

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