Despite the celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the peace process remains work in progress. MALACHI O'DOHERTY reports
WE SHOULD now come down now from the giddiness around the Agreement anniversary and acknowledge what little progress Northern Ireland has made as a society emerging from sectarian division.
A lot of superficial statements have been made.
It particularly grates on me when I hear people celebrate our ‘vote for peace’.
The suggestion in that phrase is that the majority of people in Northern Ireland chose to end the violence of the previous decades; that it was somehow their responsibility.
I doubt there was ever a moment in the previous decades in Northern Ireland when there was anything remotely like a majority in favour of violence.
The referendum on the Good Friday Agreement was a vote for political structures with the attendant promise that the paramilitary groups would endorse it and maintain their ‘cessations’.
Bill Clinton speaks of how we had shown the whole world that identity differences could be made secondary to our common humanity. Well he was right in locating the source of division here in identity differences — these being much broader than the simple question of sovereignty — but he was wrong to say that we have overcome them.
The simple fact is that the peace was delivered by those who had denied it to us, the paramilitaries, and primarily by the Provisional IRA.
Chris Heaton-Harris, the Secretary of State, came under criticism for commending the courage of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, but he had a point.
There were threats against Adams from within his own movement.
The IRA did split and the faction that held fast to the old way of doing things had a lot of weaponry, experience and murderous intent.
But the start of the peace process was Gerry Adams agreeing to lower the bar of his expectations and the IRA, at first trying to mix intimations of peaceful intent with strategic bombings, and then accepting the political route to Irish unity.
Adams’s greatest incentive to doing this was almost certainly the prospect of political growth for Sinn Féin. And this paid off.
In the 1990s I participated in debates which included a former republican internee at Garnerville RUC Training Centre. The republican quoted an IRA man saying, “Sure if it takes another 25 years to deliver a united Ireland without war, I’ll settle for that.”
He hasn’t got his united Ireland in the time frame but now politics is so much more attractive to republicans than violence that it is inconceivable that they would give the gun pre-eminence again.
The political deal that was made doesn’t even work as a form of government.
It did produce some instances of amity between republicans and unionists but it provided no route to the erosion of sectarian division. Rather, it institutionalised it.
The biggest healing was in the division within the Catholic community, not between that community and the Protestant community.
It is within the Catholic community that we see former killers widely respected, the idea generally accepted that the IRA campaign had been inevitable and was even productive.
Polling suggests that 7 out of 10 Catholics agree with Michelle O’Neill that there was ‘no alternative’. The Provos are endorsed retrospectively, largely by people who don’t even remember the Troubles
This development is disastrous for any effort to reconcile with the Protestant community which will never agree that the IRA campaign was necessary and ultimately for the good of us all.
There is a similar consolidation within the Protestant community, evident in that the DUP is now the largest party and that the UUP has been sidelined like the SDLP.
But there is no similar widespread endorsement of the loyalist paramilitary campaign within unionism.
Clearly there was some interaction between some unionists and loyalist paramilitaries, most evident during the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council Strike, when Ian Paisley Snr sat with an organising committee that included the UVF, the UDA and Ulster Vanguard when some of them were planning the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
But the scale of unionist endorsement of terror is evidently much lower than that routinely expressed by nationalists, and cheered on by louts with pseudonyms on social media.
I voted for the Agreement.
I was not given the option of voting for its distortion at St Andrews in 2007 into a system favouring the further consolidation of sectarian parties and the sidelining of the SDLP and the UUP.
What was lost there was a proper consideration of the divisions that existed within rather than between the big communal blocs.
Through the peace process, John Hume worked to bring the IRA into the fold of the larger, more moderate and more practical nationalist community and he succeeded. He brought the errant cousins and brothers home. But what was lost was clear distinction in that tradition between those who endorsed violence and those who rejected it.
But some divisions are worth preserving.
And the peace process and subsequent Agreement directed us away from a possible politics in which identity really was secondary to running the place for the good of all.
So there really isn’t much to be giddy about and there’s a lot more work to be don
