Northern Ireland's
historic peace meeting
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments directly
to JonatPower@aol.com
October 11, 2006
LONDON - The atmospherics in Scotland around this
week’s meeting of the main protagonists in Northern Ireland’s
long civil war have been good. The IRA has given up the gun. The fundamentalist
preacher and leader of hard line Protestant opinion, the Rev Ian Paisley,
is prepared to sit down not just with the prime minister of Ireland, Berty
Ahern, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain but also with Gerry Adams,
the Sinn Fein leader (and the person in the IRA leadership who counts
the most).
Scotland, with its long history of autonomy on legal matters (remember
the Lockerbie air terrorism trial), its independent educational system
(no wonder Scots dominate the Blair administration) and, most recently,
an autonomous parliament with real power is a lesson in political devolution
for all who fear it, whether it be in Belfast, Madrid, Kosovo, Tel Aviv
or New Delhi. Just about everything, other that foreign, military and
nuclear policy can be fudged. Edinburgh even has its own permanent political
mission in Beijing.
Fudge is a million times better than war, especially civil war, the cruellest
and often the most bloody of all wars, which the Spaniards in particular,
as the opposition rants against the sensible compromise proposals of Prime
Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to the demands of the Basque
militants, seem to have too quickly forgotten.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 is the bargain that ushered in today’s
present state of de facto peace in Northern Ireland. (It was also the
model for the Lizarra Declaration in Spain which led to ETA’s first
cease-fire.) One commentator at the time called it “a working misunderstanding”.
It enabled both sides to believe the agreement best served their political
agenda, which suggested that both sides read into it things that weren’t
there.
The political agendas of the two sides remain irreconcilable. The Protestants
who make up around 60% of the North want to remain part of the United
Kingdom and the Catholics want to join up as part of independent Eire
to the south.
The Good Friday Agreement, which attempts to provide the Catholics with
equitable political representation and a minority share of the offices
of state in a devolved parliament modelled on Scotland’s, is seen
by around half of the Protestants as the basis for a good permanent solution.
(But the other half of the Protestants, led by Paisley have been public
doubters.) The nationalists on the Catholic side see it only as a stepping-stone
to a united Ireland.
But the major achievement of the negotiations that have followed the Good
Friday deal is not only has most of the political violence died away,
it is that neither side feels trapped in old political forms. The government
of Eire won a referendum in 1998 that renounced the south’s constitutional
claim to sovereignty over the north.
And the Protestants, with Paisley only partially dissenting, have declared
themselves willing to be party to all-Ireland institutions in which Britain
and Eire have an equal say in making policy. This opens the doors to voluntary
change rather than coerced change.
For a long time yet reality will be governed by the levels of unrest that
accompany another provocative Protestant Orange Order march and by the
number of times dissident IRA splinter factions let off a bomb. Although
the religious earnestness on both sides made the province not that long
ago one of the outstanding non-violent cultures in Europe- perhaps nowhere
else was it as safe to bring up your teenage daughter- these days after
40 years of political gangsterism the province has a residue of severe
criminal violence.
This week’s meeting will aim to fudge a little more - to persuade
Ian Paisley’s Unionists to take up their seats in a devolved parliament
and take into the cabinet senior Sinn Fein members. Now that the British
government has certified that the IRA has totally disarmed Blair and Ahern
will remind Paisley that as long as the Protestants watch the birth rate
in their community their majority will stay intact for as long as the
eye can see. Sinn Fein is already persuaded that violence is no longer
necessary if the cross-border institutions function reasonably well and
if they continue both in the north and the south to up the proportion
of the vote at election time.
For both sides the trump argument for compromise should be the province’s
economic future. If peace is finalised there is no reason why the North
should not be an organic part of the South’s remarkable rush to
economic prosperity.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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