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Leaving it to them
BILL KIRKMAN
Will the peace process still be on track?
ON the day before writing this I flew to Belfast to attend a lunch at Stormont, the Parliament Building, home of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly. In the previous few days the latest Northern Ireland crisis was developing rapidly. When I arrived the suspension of the Northern Ireland Executive was already seen as inevitable.
My visit was not connected in any way to the breakdown in the fragile edifice of trust which has been painstakingly constructed since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. I had been asked to make a short speech, as Secretary of the Cambridge Society, at a gathering of members of its Irish Branch and their fellow Cambridge guests. The aim of the meeting was to encourage Cambridge people in Northern Ireland to play a more active part in the branch, whose focus has been largely in the Republic. Those attending were from both sides of the border.
Our sponsors were three members of the Legislative Assembly, one of whom, in welcoming us, expressed his sadness at the turn of events. He also emphasised his view that it did not mean that there would be a return to the bloody hostilities that obtained before the 1998 agreement.
In the conversation before and during lunch one of the main topics was, inevitably, the constitutional crisis, and the restrained optimism of the MLA was widely echoed. Another theme, among this group of well educated lawyers, academics, and business people, of widely varied ages, was a scepticism, sometimes bordering on contempt, for the local politicians who had got the province into this latest mess. As one man put it: "They have excellent working conditions (Note: true; the facilities at Stormont are first class) and high salaries, and the country is smaller than Majorca." (Note: not strictly true, but you could see what he meant.) There are, as always with Ireland, many paradoxes. For example, there has never been any problem about travelling between the province and the Republic. Cross-border contact and collaboration has always been a reality.
In parts of Belfast the signs of Catholic-Protestant hostility are, and for years have been, a visible affront, yet as I strolled through one of the shopping areas there was no sign of concern about the constitutional crisis.
It would be foolish to underestimate the strength of the mistrust that still exists between many on both sides of the Nationalist (largely Catholic) Unionist (largely Protestant) divide. They often do not accept that there is any good faith on the other side. (Equally important, they often dare not accept that there is, for fear of losing the support of their more extreme followers.) And yet, there is little sign that anyone wants to return to the terrorist mayhem that persisted for so many years, led to hundreds of murders, and made life intolerable for whole communities.
Paul Arthur, Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster, produced a cogent analysis of the situation in an article in The Times. Recognising that we have had a healthy ration of lunacy and dollops of paranoia in our history — which was supposed to have been ended by the 1998 agreement — he noted that he knew of only one Assemblyman who relished the collapse of the agreement. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, he suggested, can call on Margaret Thatcher's dictum in moving the peace process forward: There is no alternative.
Similar points have been made by other commentators. They are not saying in so many words that political heads need to be knocked together. That, however, is one of the implications of a situation which allows local politicians to engage in self-indulgent posturing, in the knowledge that the British and Irish Prime Ministers will pick up the pieces.
Another factor is that most people in mainland Britain have little knowledge of, and little interest in, Northern Ireland. The chairman of the Cambridge Society Irish branch, a distinguished lawyer and writer from the Republic, referred to an "information deficit", in both Britain and the Republic, and expressed the hope that everyone would be sympathetic in the present crisis.
It is a wholly appropriate sentiment, but of course sympathy and patience are not inexhaustible. When I suggested, provocatively, to a lunch guest that most people in Britain would not mind in the least if our government left the people of the province to sort out their own quarrels, she agreed without hesitation. It is a reality that the local politicians need to appreciate, and there are some signs that this process of understanding is under way.
The writer is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, U.K.. E-mail him at wpk1000@cam.ac.uk
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