Conterence of double talk
Socialist Press1980 1980-01-09Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 4 →
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closures, wage cuts and speed Atkins The Atkins talks on the future of Northern Ireland opened on Monday with a prospect of two months double talk in store.
The SDLP, growing desperate to regain some credibility with its diminishing Catholic base is seeking an agreement which will leave reality unchanged but which will make a nod-or at least half a nod-in the direction of 'an Irish dimension'.
Paisley and the 'Democratic Unionists' are present to ensure that the British government makes no concession in this direction. • The Alliance Party is there to make up numbers and to back whatever devious formula the British government will use in an attempt to paper over this divide.
Prospects of any tactical success for the British government are slim. Paisley holds his dominant position precisely because of his intransigence.
Waiting to pounce on any weakness outside the talks are the Official Unionists, who oppose any • steps towards 'Ulsterisation'.
Enoch Powell in a speech to Dundonald Orange Lodge four days before the talks begin savagely attacked the British Foreign Office for trying to 'weaken the union'.
"What bribes, what threats, what agents provocateurs can achieve, for that in Ulster you may put your bottom dollar on the Foreign Office".
The British government may confidently expect malleability from SDLP leader John Hume but the Orange politicians have seen too many of their predecessors tossed aside on the alter of compromise to budge an inch.
The only likely outcome of the talks is therefore either a breakdown followed by an imposed local government' Stormont or the destruction of the SDLP as a major political force.
Meanwhile outside the talks the Provisionals campaign continues unabated.
*A report from 'independent' academics published in the Belfast magazine 'Fortnight' into 350 Diplock Court cases declares that interrogation practices render confessions useless.
About 94% of those brought before the no-jury courts are convicted, and of the 25% contested cases the vast majority are convicted on confessions alone.
But the report's conclusionrestricting interrogation to four one-hour sessions a day!-are almost a parody of bourgeois liberal 'solutions' for Ireland.