Here, then, is a random selection of the vices and fallacies which, I maintain, have distinguished British policy in Ulster during this period. The d… - T. E. Utley

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Here, then, is a random selection of the vices and fallacies which, I maintain, have distinguished British policy in Ulster during this period. The dominant vice has been an obdurate refusal to recognise the existence of any ultimately and incorrigibly unpleasant fact. Positively, this has taken the form of an assumption that in politics there can be no final incompatible aspirations; that there is never a point at which it must be recognised that the wishes of one man are wholly irreconcilable with those of another; that there is never a dispute which can only be settled by force. This particular weakness bears fruit in one of the most cherished convictions of British liberalism—the belief in negotiation. Negotiation is seen not as a means of establishing where differences lie or even as a method of persuading adversaries to change their minds: it is seen rather as a form of therapy which, applied with however little regard to the nature of the disease or the character of the cure which it is supposed to effect, has an intrinsic value.