Former Conservative defence minister Alan Clark often let the cat out of the bag. He caused outrage here with his remarks about the north. His recipe for ridding Britain of the problem was brutally simple. 'I am confirmed in my opinion that it is hopeless here. All we can do is arm the Orangemen to the teeth and get out. This would give the not slight advantage that, at a stroke, "infantry overstretch" is eliminated.'
It was not original thinking. In fact the British had already tried it. Cabinet records show that at a meeting on 23 July 1920 'the Secretary of State for War (Winston Churchill) enquired that would happen if the Protestants in the six counties were given weapons and charged with maintaining law and order and policing the country'. Another maverick, callous imperialist Alan Clark, was under pressure from the GOC for more troops. He pressed on with his plan urging the rabid unionist general Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff, to propose that the cabinet 'hand Ulster over to the Ulstermen and withdraw five or six battalions from there.' And so they did. The result was the RUC and the B Specials. And the rest, as they say, is history.
It wasn't even original thinking in 1920. What Churchill did then and what Clark mused about 70 years later was tried and trusted British imperial policy for centuries. The majority of British troops in India were Indians carefully stationed in parts of the sub-continent far from their homes so that there was no danger of their being called upon to shoot their relatives. Same story in Cyprus where the British armed the Turkish minority to police the Greeks who wanted the Brits out. Same in Yemen in the 1960s where they invented a front group which rejoiced in the name of SOFTI so the British could claim not all Yemenis wanted them out. When the British pulled out in 1967, SOFTI lasted a week. Same story all over Africa.
That's why the so-called 'home service' battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment have to go. Nothing to do with normalisation. The very reason given for their existence is a fraud and a deception, an affront to any concept of fairness or justice in society. The RIR is the lineal descendant of the B Specials via the UDR. The UDR was the last native regiment of foot raised in the British army, a ridiculous, offensive, dangerous, divisive anachronism essentially no different from the King's African Rifles used in Kenya against the Mau Mau or a hundred other contingents raised to avoid what Alan Clark called 'infantry overstretch'. Quite simply and cynically, wherever they were, the British armed one section of the local population to police another. It saved British soldiers' lives.
That's why the RUC had to go. It was 93% Protestant and 100% unionist. That's why the PSNI has to be 50% Catholic and that's why unionists oppose the quota system. Whatever our pudding of a proconsul may say this week, the RIR is next. With 44% of the population Catholic and the combined SF/SDLP vote also 44%, it is simply unacceptable to have a politically inspired militia, 99% of which is Protestant and whose purpose is to maintain the unionist status quo.
Besides, the completely sectarian nature of the RIR and the concepts behind it are confirmed by unionist politicians who now openly claim the regiment as their own private militia which they must hang onto even if the most imminent threat to their wee six were an invasion of Cyborgs. It remains eternally beyond the grasp of unionists that in a society where there is equality of status and parity of esteem, one community cannot have its own private army. None of them can see how silly they sound demanding SF disband its private army yet demanding the retention of their own.
In the present context the responses of both SF and SDLP are hard to credit. Both Martin McGuinness and Mark Durkan talk about the RIR having to go as part of normalisation; that in the event of 'acts of completion' in the Joint Declaration there would be no need for the RIR in three years time. Listen lads, there is no need for the RIR now. There was no need for them in 1992, nor for their grandas in the UDR in 1970 either.
The mindset behind their establishment was wrong. The RIR's existence means the British administration endorses the unionist community's definition of itself as the official community, literally an arm of the British state while the nationalist community is a deviant community with a secondary status in society.
