Assad’s fate in Fermanagh’s ‘dreary steeples’
Churchill called them the “dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”. The world may have been convulsed by war between 1914-18, but as he sat down in its aftermath yet again to stare at maps of the disputed border counties, Ireland’s bloody quarrel emerged from the Firsr World War battle smoke untouched.
Today, County Fermanagh is swarming with international news crews covering a summit that’s been located here to celebrate the end of that conflict. You do though get some flashbacks of the bad old days. Some of the police road checkpoints are exactly where they used to be back in the troubles, returning like homing pigeons even though the concrete pill-boxes are long since demolished.
This gathering wasn’t meant to be about conflict at all but about closing off some of the pipes international companies use to siphon of profits and avoid paying tax in developing and developed countries. Germany and the US still have some problems over “beneficial ownership” (declaring in a registry who really owns a company) but you can be sure there will be some grand-sounding promises of good intent come Tuesday afternoon. Some of those who get accused of harbouring the tax avoiders, like the DPM of the Turks and Caicos, are already warning of “push-back” from global conglomerates – lobbyists must be salivating.
But for now, the focus is on a new bloody quarrel that pitches most of the G8 in one corner (it’s thought that Germany’s not mad keen on deeper Syrian involvement but will not obstruct it) and its newest member, Russia, in the other.
The process of trying get Vladimir Putin to accept that President Assad will never be fully in command again in Syria started this afternoon in No. 10 but 45 minutes later than planned as there was a demo in Downing Street and President Putin’s convoy had to nip round the back. President Obama’s expected to pile in with similar arguments in a bi-lateral chat with the Russian leader tomorrow in Enniskillen. The best that David Cameron is hoping for is that we get a bit closer to a Geneva summit on Syria with the right people at the table.
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