Letter: Articles Ireland has little faith in

Sir: Given the sensitivity of the search for peace in Northern Ireland and the faint hopes that some political movement is at last a possibility, the decision of the British Labour Party spokesperson on Northern Ireland, Kevin McNamara, to travel to Cork this weekend to beat the drum in defence of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution is somewhat puzzling.

While his speech may have more to do with internal British Labour Party politics than any attempt to promote progress in Ireland, his assertions about Articles 2 and 3 cannot be allowed to go unchallenged, lest people in Britain be misled into believing that the left in Ireland, or political parties generally here, back Mr McNamara's enthusiasm for these Articles.

All of the political parties in Dail Eireann, other than Fianna Fail, have called for changes to Articles 2 and 3, and most Fianna Fail members are even willing to concede that they would have to be amended in the context of an overall political settlement in Northern Ireland. In 1990 I introduced a Private Member's Bill in the Irish Parliament that would have provided for a referendum to replace Articles 2 and 3 by an aspiration to unity of the people on this island. The Bill was supported by Fine Gael and the Labour Party, but was voted down by the then Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrats government, although the PDs actually expressed their support for the content of the Bill.

Perhaps Mr McNamara's most astonishing claim is that the Articles are 'irrelevant to the realities of the present situation in Northern Ireland'. It is quite honestly frightening that the spokesperson on Northern Ireland for the principal British opposition party should be so ill-informed. Irrespective of what the authors intended them to mean, unionists in Northern Ireland see these articles as asserting the right of the people of the Republic to impose their will on the citizens of Northern Ireland, irrespective of the democratic rights of the latter. The sense of grievance they provoke was greatly increased by the judgment of the Irish Supreme Court in the McGimpsey case, which found that these Articles constituted a claim of legal right over Northern Ireland, and that not only had the government a right to pursue that claim, but it was obliged to do so.

It is one thing to aspire to a unitary state on this island; it is another to engage in the sort of fantasy involved in Articles 2 and 3, which basically suggests that a de jure all-Ireland state already exists.

Articles 2 and 3 should be amended not just to remove a major obstacle to political progress in Northern Ireland, but as a matter of good neighbourliness and for the health of our own political system here in the Republic, where politics is distorted by this hankering after 'unfinished business'.

As long ago as 1967 an all-party committee in the Republic recommended major changes in Article 3. Surely, given the terrible events of the past 25 years, the case for removing these Articles, which most people in Northern Ireland regard as offensive and most people in the Republic are prepared to amend, is now compelling.

Yours sincerely,

PROINSIAS DE ROSSA

Leader, Democratic Left

Dail Eireann, Dublin