British Plan for Ireland
A Times editorial (May 20, 1984) hailed the Report of the New Ireland Forum as the “New Course for Ireland which can be ignored by the British government only at great peril.” Margaret Thatcher, in a public diatribe, reacted to the report’s three proposals, shouting: Out, out, out! Hardly a “new course.”
A recent editorial (Nov. 19) calls the latest agreement between Thatcher and Garrett FitzGerald, which accords the Irish Republic consultative participation in the affairs of northeast Ireland, “historic,” and “a start toward peace.”
Whether the agreement is a road to peace remains to be seen, but historic it certainly is. By conceding veto powers to Loyalists in the six counties for the first time since partition in 1921, Prime Minister FitzGerald and the Irish Parliament violate Ireland’s constitution, which is the governing document in all of the country’s 32 counties.
By assigning to England jurisdiction and control of a 10-mile-wide corridor within the Free State, unconstitutionally, Dublin surrenders hundreds of square miles of Irish sovereignty over which thousands of Irish men and women fought and died.
The agreement represents an historic sellout of the Irish struggle in the six northeast counties and makes the Dublin government a willing accessory to the human rights violations that have characterized British rule in Northern Ireland. Peace in our day--another Munich.
ROBERT E. FORD
La Mesa
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