Ulster Says: We're not entirely convinced by the merits of that proposal

This week’s good news: Northern Ireland is on the brink of an historic deal. I think these words have been uttered so many times in the last ten years that they’ve lost all meaning.

In Tuesday’s Guardian, Gerry Adams computer article-writing programme wrote a piece so platitudinous that I wish it was clichés that the Protestants insisted were put out of commission by an international committee led by Lynne Truss and David Crystal.

I don’t know why the decommissioning issue has proved such a stumbling block. The kalishnikovs have been buried under haysheds for so long that if anyone tried to convert them into ploughshares they’d probably all just disintegrate into rust. The semtex has probably gotten so damp that if they tried to set it alight that it would go off like a cheap firecracker imported from China.

The ironic thing is that while this argument has being going on, there’s been little sign of demilitarisation from the British, who continue to use places like South Armagh as testing grounds for whatever country George W Bush wants to invade next.

It’s hard not to sense that beneath the incessant demands that the IRA give up their guns a belief that the only people who are responsible enough to carry lethal weapons in their hands are white Protestants. Consider the alarm that greeted the news that India and Pakistan were devloping what Bush would call nuke-a-leer weapons. It didn't seem to matter to them that the US spends as much on weapons as the next 20 countries put together, the US is run by sane, responsible white people, so that’s OK. Ironically, most of the Americans who supported the disarmament of Iraq are the same sort of people who’ll only be deprived of their right to bear arms over their dead bodies and from their cold dead hands.

Similarly, in the North, the native population, who until relatively recently were depicted as monkeys by British caricaturists can’t be allowed to have guns either, as they can’t be trusted not to use them to kill people. It doesn’t seem to matter that Bloody Sunday, one of the worst incidents during the troubles, was committed by the British army and that they almost certainly had a hand in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and the deaths of human rights lawyers like Rosemary Nelson and Jim Finucane.

It’s also ironic that Ian Paisley, the man whose done so much to keep the province on a constant war footing over the last 40 years, is the man who won’t join the assembly until Sinn Fein give up violence.

But people have been watching Paisley very carefully ready, and think he may be close to a deal. Tommie Gorman was watching him so closely that he was able to tell us what he had for breakfast last Wednesday. It was two eggs. I bet he likes them hard, and wouldn't eat free range because they don't use any form of birth control and therefore must be Catholics.

Perhaps I’m being a bit unfair to the old man. The dogs in the Ulster streets, who always seem to be au fait with what’s happening up there, say he’s mellowed a bit lately. Call me a cynic if you like, but I’d say that was a good thing. Imagine if the man who had to be physically restrained when he shouted foul-mouthed abuse at the pope getting any less mellow and I’m sure you’ll agree.

But now it seems that Paisley’s getting old and is soon to meet his maker, who must be wondering what the fuck he was thinking of. When Paisley gets to the gates of all-Presbyterian heaven, I bet he’d like to show Calvin and Knox a Nobel peace prize in case they doubted that he was really one of the elect. If he can get the scowling psychopaths that constitute the DUP to go into government with Gerry Adams, then it might be within his very firm and uncompromising grasp.

In the last decade it was given to Hume and Trimble, moderate politicians both. Perhaps in another 10 years it might be awarded to Dominic “Mad Dog” McGlinchy and Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair, who’d be quite happy to go to Sweden when he found out that they practice Protestantism there as well. Both sets of terrorists have their frothing-at-the-mouth canines, but it’s hard to think of any politician on the nationalist side as larger-than-life as Dr. Ian.

That Paisley, rather than Trimble is in a position to make this historic compromise is a bit of a surprise to some people. After the Good Friday agreement he was written off as yesterday’s man, though yesterday subsequently claimed that he had nothing to do with him. One typically trippy Steve Bell cartoon depicted him being carried out in a dustbin by a dove. Yet now he bestrides the Ulster political firmament like a weary, wheezy, colossus.

That Paisley is the leader of the biggest party in the six counties says a lot about both the psyche of the Protestant population and the nature of democratic politics. Why would one out of every four people who live in the North vote for a blustering demagogue who lives in an Alice-in-Wonderland world where the Vatican is still a major power, where the South of Ireland is a place of barbarous savages and not the fourth richest country in the world?

Scholars of Adolf Hitler, about whom there are even more books written than about the troubles, argue about whether he dragged the German people down to his level of racism or rode a wave of anti-semitist sentiment that was already immanent in Austria and Bavaria. The truth in the North, as in Germany, probably lies between the two extremes. Paisley’s constituency is the Working Class Protestants who worked long hours for poor wages to build stuff like the Titanic, but didn't care how poorly they were paid as long as more than Catholics and were able to live in slightly nicer slums than them. Paisley came along at a time when the shipbuilding industry was in decline and many Protestants had nothing better to do than go round to Catholic estates and bully the locals. Who better to lead them than a blustering minister like Paisley?

He took advantage of the fact that many Protestants resented the cosy clique that ruled the province from Stormont, though they didn't resent them quite as much as they resented the Catholics. Now Paisley is in a position of similar power himself, with the only slight proviso that he has to share it with nationalists.

Meanwhile, the brain-drain goes on among the middle-class Ulster Protestants who vote for the more moderate UUP. Many young Protestants go to Britain to go to university and as they are more likely to find work there, don’t ever come back. The sort of Protestants who are left are the sort who have few skills other than the ability to have FTP (that stands for fuck the pope, not file transfer protocol) tattooed on their foreheads and not feel self-conscious about it. One of the ironic things is this they would be so much better off living in the Republic where they would have better education and welfare and more opportunities, but many of them would fight to the death rather than let this happen.

The task of convincing the more extreme loyalists that they’ll have to live in the Romish Republic won’t fall to Paisley but to one of his equally bitter successors. But, regrettably, it’s the Garda Siochana, who prove so inept at dealing with crime in Limerick and West Dublin who’ll have to deal with those oxymorons, dissident loyalists. I fear that while we might soon be rid of Paisley, the vituperation that he’s stoked may take a lot longer to extinguish.