POLITICS-NORTHERN IRELAND: Tripping Down The Road To Peace

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Malachi O'Doherty

BELFAST, Northern Ireland, May 25 1998 (IPS) - No sooner is one obstacle cleared in the Irish peace process, another is met on the way. After the Good Friday peace accord here, came last week’s blunt ‘yes or no’ referendum on its provisions.

That vote having delivered a 71 percent ‘yes’ vote, the battered protagonists now move right along to an election on Jun. 25, called to assign seats on the assembly proposed by the unique cross party constitutional agreement.

“We stumble over the stumbling blocks, that is how this works,” quipped Mark Durcan, a leading light from the Irish nationalist SDLP party, describing the progress of the process on the day after Friday’s referendum here.

The intent is to create partnerships between British and Irish people in Northern Ireland and also between the British run province and the independent Irish Republic to the south, with cross-border institutions to link them.

The two were partitioned when the mainly Protestant six counties of Northern Ireland remained under British rule when the rest of the island won independence after World War I. Conflict has raged for decades between the mainly Catholic ‘nationalist’ supp orters of reunion with the Irish Republic, and the Protestant ‘unionists’ who want the province to remain British.

However the agreement could yet come apart, even with a 71 percent vote in favour of it.

Up to half of Northern Ireland’s Protestants do not support the new arrangements. Thus if half, or more, of the candidates elected by the unionist community on Jun. 25 are opponents of the deal, it will be impossible to establish cross community consensu s on the new assembly, and the whole system may seize up.

Even if the assembly survives that threat, two other huge hurdles remain. The political parties associated with the paramilitary groups will have to declare their war over before they take their seats on the new assembly’s executive.

These parties frankly refuse to take responsibility for the so-called ‘decommissioning’ of weapons held by the armed groups that back them. Much of the business of the new assembly could be held up by this one issue.

Many unionists who support the deal agreed to it only on the understanding that the British government would back their demand for decommissioning and may withdraw if the paramilitaries don’t disarm.

Then there is the forthcoming ‘marching season’ in Northern Ireland. Every summer there are thousands of parades by Protestant ‘Orangemen’, banging drums in celebration of the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, when Irish Protestants successfully backed the Du tch Prince William against an English Catholic King.

These parades routinely lead to violence now, as Catholics try to prevent them from passing through predominantly Catholic streets.

As sure as the clock ticks, everyone in Northern Ireland knows that an enormous confrontation is looming in July over one such parade scheduled for the town of Portadown, yet no one seems to have any power to prevent it. It is difficult to see how the pr esent faith in peace making can be sustained if the expected clash comes.

Yet Saturday was historic. The impossible happened. A deeply divided society reached a coherent decision.

In Belfast’s King’s Hall, where referendum votes on the new settlement were counted on Friday night, former killers from both sides of the paramilitary war cheered the same result, something that would have been inconceivable a few months ago.

Indeed, many voters were perplexed by the way irreconcilable interpretations of the agreement continue to be touted by the opposing parties.

Gerry Adams, leader of the nationalist Sinn Fein party, political associates of the Irish Republican Army paramilitaries, says his party has a strategy for bringing about a united Ireland free from Britain, by working through the new arrangements.

This can only really mean that he foresees the defeat of the pro-British unionists and the collapse of the elected assembly. Yet, at the same time, he speaks of wishing to have partnership government with the Unionists.

The Unionists, on the other hand, will not even speak to him. They regard him as a killer and a subversive. The only partnership they are interested in is with the more moderate nationalist SDLP which has no history of violence.

There are two tendencies within the new agreement. The first aims for a quiet political life in which aspirations for a united Ireland or a restoration of Protestant hegemony simply disappear. The other aims to pull the deal apart and create a vacuum, on e that would require extreme political measures to restore peace.

There will be delegates to the new assembly representing the spirit of both these tendencies.

At the same time some dissident republican militants continue to prepare bombing attacks on targets in the North. These are routinely disrupted by the Irish police, raising suggestions that intelligence is flowing to the authorities as never before.

Both the British and Irish governments are committed to the crushing of any armed resistance to the deal, now that they have the people’s mandate for the new arrangements. A referendum was also held in the Irish Republic to measure support for the agreem ent, and it was also passed overwhelmingly.

In the meantime, there will be many challenges. The lesson of the peace process to date is that it can survive enormous problems. Many times, people have thought it was on the brink of failure, and yet, it is back on track, for now. That creates a faith here that, no matter how bad things look, something will always happen to save the process.

“We stumble over the stumbling blocks”, says Durcan. Naively, giddily, prayerfully, the greater number of people in Northern Ireland have come to believe in miracles.

They are convinced that the gory past is well behind them. And they will be extremely unforgiving of anyone who takes them back to war.