Diarmuid Breatnach

Preamble:

The discussions prior to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, in what is often termed “the Irish peace process”, were based on six principles and the Agreement itself is also said to be based on them. The Mitchell Principles are named after George Mitchell, a US Senator and mediator in the Irish talks and earlier in the Palestinian talks of 1993.

The Good Friday Agreement was agreed in 1998 between representatives of Provisional Sinn Féin (and arguably, at the very least by proxy, Provisional IRA also) on the one hand and by representatives of the British Government on the other. Subsequently a referendum in the Irish state gave a big majority for the removal of Articles 2 and 3 of Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Constitution of the Irish state, articles which had claimed dominion over the whole of Ireland, and this was taken as a popular endorsement of the Good Friday Agreement. An election in the Northern Ireland statelet gave a narrower majority to parties who endorsed the Good Friday Agreement and this too was taken as an endorsement of the Agreement.

The Mitchell Principles are often hailed by commentators as fair and democratic and as a sound basis for peace talks. This short article sets out to test this claim, to analyse the six Principles from a democratic and anti-imperialist point of view.

1. “The parties agree to democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues.”

The terms of the first stipulation of the Mitchell Principles, in the circumstances in which the British had imposed a division on the country, in one part of which they had constructed a statelet within which their supporters, the Unionists¹, had an inbuilt majority, were not only unfair but intrinsically undemocratic.

Ireland had been considered one entity by the English conquerors at least since the 15^th Century. Its partition was not even imagined until the early 20^th Century and then only as a response to the nationalist demand for autonomy under Home Rule², conceded in principle by the British in 1914; allegedly partition was in response to militant unionists rebelling³ against nationalist Home Rule.

The partition of Ireland, in one part of which the unionists would have a voting majority, had first been conceived to keep the historic province of Ulster for the unionists, while the Nationalists could have the other three provinces. However, it was soon realised that Nationalists and Republicans would between them outvote the Unionists and so the boundary was re-drawn to exclude three counties ⁴ of Ulster’s nine from the proposed Loyalist state. Even within these Six Counties, the unionists were obliged, in order to ensure political control of local authorities, to draw election constituency boundaries in such a way as to ensure that many areas with a Nationalist-Republican majority in their population nevertheless returned Unionist candidates ⁱ.

Entitlement to vote based on home occupation and property ownership, coupled with wide-scale housing discrimination against potential nationalist voters (i.e. Catholics) kept local authorities in unionist hands until a fierce campaign for civil rights and a guerilla war forced the removal of these franchise restrictions, after which some local authorities came under nationalist-republican control. However, within the Six Counties overall, demographics continued to ensure a unionist majority.

The wish of the majority of Ireland had been for independence of the whole country and that had been demonstrated not only by centuries of struggle and uprisings but by the guerilla war of 1919-1921 and also by the bourgeois elections of 1919 under British rule, the democratic expression of which the British had firstly ignored and later assaulted by their proscribing the First Dáil (parliament) and the jailing of elected members.

The First Mitchell Principle’s stipulation that the division of the country could only be overcome if a majority of the voters in the Six Counties voted for that proposition is profoundly unfair, in that its effect is that decolonisation and national unification can only be permitted by a majority vote in that part of the country which had artificially been divided from the rest precisely on the basis that the majority of the population there was known to vote Unionist, i.e. for remaining a British colony ⁱⁱ.

Furthermore, the acceptance of such a principle internationally would be disastrous – it would mean that any state could legitimately invade another, annex a part of it by force of arms, ensure through colonisation and other means that a majority voted to remain its colony and then prohibit the colonised from liberating the colony and reunifying the country.

2. “The parties agree to the disarmament of all paramilitary organisations.”

This second stipulation might appear at a hurried first glance as fair but in fact it is completely the opposite. It leaves totally out of the equation the largest and most heavily-armed party to the dispute – the British state, with over 177,000 personnel in their armed forces^* and over 7,200 armed police in the Six Counties, along with their intelligence services. It was in fact the violence of the armed and sectarian colonial police force which had sparked off the uprising in Derry and Belfast in 1969 and it was in their support that the British armed forces had been sent to the statelet.

The main armed struggle had subsequently been between the Republican organisations and the British Army, with the armed colonial police in second place. The Loyalist paramilitaries were only third in level of struggle with the Republican armed organisations; in addition irrefutable evidence has emerged over the years of collusion between the Loyalist paramilitaries and the colonial police and British Army and indeed points to their actual direction by British intelligence services.

The British state’s armed forces do not even receive a mention in the Mitchell Principles and are left at the disposal of the state unhindered to use in any circumstances as it deems fit. Indeed, the possibility exists that the state would prevent the decolonisation and unification of the country even in the extremely unlikely eventuality that such a proposal received a majority of the votes in the Six Counties; the Mitchell Principles have nothing to say about that.

3. The 3^rd Principle, “To agree that such disarmament must be verifiable to the satisfaction of an independent commission”underlines the first Principle and sketches the structure through which the unfair Second Principle is to be given effect.

4. “To renounce for themselves, and to oppose any effort by others, to use force, or threaten to use force, to influence the course or the outcome of all-party negotiations.”

This fourth principle not only strengthens the unfair Second Principle but leaves the Republicans with no means of bringing about independence and unity beyond a majority vote in favour within the Six Counties where, as observed earlier, an artificial majority militates against this possibility.

The British state, on the other hand, can and does use force and the threat of it to influence not only negotiations but its continued control over its colony of the Six Counties. It used force to achieve the colonisation of the whole country for hundreds of years and when it could no longer continue to do so, it used force to partition the country and to maintain that partition for what is now approaching a century.

The section which calls upon the parties “to oppose any effort by others, to use force” is understood by all not to refer to opposing the use of force by the British state. But not only that, in “opposing any effort by others”, i.e. those who might not be signatories, it commits the signatories to at least morally condemn those who may continue armed activities and possibly even to collaborating with forces of the state against them.

That this stipulation in theory falls equally upon the armed sections of the Loyalists as it does upon the Republicans is immaterial, since as we have seen the Loyalist paramilitaries are not the most significant armed opposition to the Republicans and in fact may be seen mainly as auxiliaries of the British State, its armed forces and its colonial administration. It is the Republicans who are clearly the target of this section and it requires those among them who have signed up to the Principles to denounce armed activities of other Republicans who do not feel bound by the Principles and perhaps even to supply the British state and its armed forces with information about them.

Certainly since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which we are repeatedly informed are based upon the Mitchell Principles, the Republican parties to the Agreement, Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA have publicly condemned other Republicans (“dissidents”) for their continued resistance, have threatened them and at times administered physical punishment⁵. In addition, one of the Provisionals’ most senior figures, Martin McGuinness, on a number of occasions has publicly called for people to inform on them to the British authorities⁶.

5. The Fifth Principle, “To agree to abide by the terms of any agreement reached in all-party negotiations and to resort to democratic and exclusively peaceful methods in trying to alter any aspect of that outcome with which they may disagree,” strengthens the Fourth.

As we have seen, the “democratic” methods available apply only to an area with boundaries so drawn as to leave the Republicans always outvoted by Unionists; they do not apply to a vote in all 32 Counties of the country (nor even by the population in Britain, which has shown in repeated censi their wish for the British to withdraw from Ireland). The “peaceful methods” are required of the Republicans but not of the British state. The Principles deny the Republicans, in effect, both democratic and military means to achieve decolonisation and reunification.

6. The Sixth Principle “To urge that ‘punishment’ killings and beatings stop and to take effective steps to prevent such actions” is one which seems, at first glance, to be merely requiring civilized standards of behaviour. However let us examine the situation more carefully.

The state has means of ensuring compliance with its requirements – maintaining its social order, control of property and security. It uses fines, threats of and periods of actual imprisonment as punishments with the intention of ensuring compliance. It administers these through courts, police and prison service, using physical force to carry out court sentences. Unofficially, it also administers beatings, both when attacking demonstrations and on prisoners in their police stations.

Whatever one may think of punishment beatings, they were the equivalent control mechanisms of the Republican armed groups. They did not have recourse to fines and imprisonment.

With regard to “punishment killings”, these were usually carried out, it seems, against people who were proven or thought to be informers to British state forces. Looked at another way, in the absence of the possibility of jailing for espionage harming their security, i.e. the standard punishment of the state, the Republican armed organisations were either beating or killing those assumed to be endangering their security – upon which their very lives depended. The Sixth Principle in effect prohibits the use of any force in order for the Republicans to ensure compliance and their organisation’s security, whilst at the same time permitting the state all of its own panoply in that regard, including the anti-democratic special “anti-terror” laws of the Six Counties.

Conclusion:

Adherence to the Mitchell Principles removes the possibility in any foreseeable future of achieving the objectives of the Republicans, national reunification and national independence. In regard to those objectives, the effect of the Principles is to ensure the continuation of the status quo, legitimising the undemocratic partition of the country in 1921 and the continued existence of a British colony in Ireland. In turn, that false legitimisation and continued colonisation perpetuates the unjust invasion of Ireland and its progressive English colonisation nearly a thousand years ago, against which the Irish people have never ceased to struggle for even a generation but which has arrested the political and economic development of the nation and destroyed a significant part of its culture.

The continued colonisation is a brake upon the future develoment of the Irish nation and the continued sectarian and colonial rule within that colony, along with the partition of the country, also retards the development of the Irish working class as a united force able to pursue its own interests.

The Mitchell Principles, all six of them, are colonial and imperialist in effect, profoundly unfair and essentially undemocratic. Any agreement based upon them, such as for example the Good Friday Agreement, cannot help but be imbued with the same qualities.

Lúnasa/ August 2013

Note: A translation of this document into Spanish is available: Los Principios Mitchell – ¿una base justa para la resolución de conflictos? O un conjunto de principios no democráticos y pro-imperialistas?

Footnotes