WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SPRING 2005
The Unsung Heroes of the Irish Peace Process
RECONSIDERATIONS
By Ted Smyth
Ted Smyth took part in the Irish peace process as an Irish diplomat in the United States, Britain, and the secretariat of the
New Ireland Forum.
Why did the Irish peace process eventually
succeed in stopping the sectarian killing after
centuries of violence in Ireland and when
other sectarian conflicts still rage around the
world? Might there be lessons the Irish
could teach the world about reconciling bitter
enemies? The political successes in
Northern Ireland owe much to that oftscorned
ingredient, patient, determined, and
principled diplomacy, which spanned successive
administrations in London, Dublin,
and Washington. The result is a structure
surely durable enough to survive the IRA’s
disturbing recent violations: an apparently
long-planned $50 million raid on the
Northern Bank in Belfast in December attributed
to IRA militants and the leadership’s
unabashedly outlaw offer to shoot
their own members responsible for the brutal
murder of a Belfast man, Robert Mc-
Cartney, after a pub quarrel in January of
this year. The peace may be tested once
again during the perennially volatile
“marching season” this summer when
Ulster hardliners vent sectarian passions.
Still, there is agreement that a political
peace now prevails, backed by a popular
consensus sturdy enough to frustrate a veto
by a violent minority, or a continued criminal
conspiracy by Sinn Fein/IRA. The universal
public revulsion in Ireland north and
south toward the IRA’s handling of the Mc-
Cartney murder and the huge swell of support
for McCartney’s sisters in their public
calls for the arrest and punishment by due
process of his killers give ample evidence of
the success of the peace process. Twenty
years ago, the McCartney sisters would have
been viewed as traitors to their Catholic
tribe, but today they are celebrated for their
courage and integrity.
The road to peace in Ireland was led by
many, many individuals who made contributions
large and small. There were politicians
who were truly heroic, but it should
never be forgotten that the ordinary people
of Northern Ireland steadily found their
own way toward reconciliation, defying history
and the climate of fear. Maurice Hayes,
a columnist for the Irish Independent and a
veteran peacemaker puts it well: “Throughout
the troubles, in the darkest days, there
have been outstanding examples of charity
and courage, of heroic forgiveness, often,
and most notably, from those who had suffered
most. One thinks of Gordon Wilson,
who held his daughter’s hand while she died
in the rubble of a bombing in Enniskillen,
dedicating the rest of his life to the search
for reconciliation.(1)
Some of the finest people from two continents
worked on the Irish peace process for
30 years, and their influence was apparent
in three decisive elements that made the difference
between success and failure. The
first element was strong political leadership
in pursuit of a unifying vision consistently
supporting nonviolence. Such leadership is
rare, but just as South Africa was fortunate
to have Nelson Mandela to lead it peacefully
to freedom, so Ireland was fortunate to have
John Hume, an eloquent, charismatic Irishman
with a Ghandi-like faith in nonviolence.
As long ago as 1972, the soft-spoken
founder and former leader of the Social Democratic
and Labor Party (SDLP), an essential
voice of moderation and nonviolence for 30
years, stated that peace could only be based
on “an agreed Ireland,” with shared government
between the two nationalisms, the
Irish Nationalists who wanted Irish unity,
and the British Loyalists, who wanted to remain
part of the United Kingdom.
The second key element was political
imagination and receptiveness to new ideas
by key politicians and officials in Ireland
and Britain who established a series of institutional
frameworks to build confidence
between the two sides and to provide security.
Among these institutions were the Sunningdale
Agreement, the New Ireland Forum,
the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and the
Good Friday Agreement. Probably the most
important breakthrough was the Anglo-
Irish Agreement of 1985, which guaranteed
the equal legitimacy of the conflicting loyalties
by giving the Irish government a significant
role in Northern Ireland for the
first time in history. A leading commentator
on Northern Ireland, David McKittrick
of the London Independent, says: “In retrospect,
that agreement was a turning point
in the peace process and provided the foundation
for its ultimate success.(2) The story
of how that agreement was reached and successfully
implemented is a combination of
shrewd calculation and courage, which lured
people from the extremes, promising respect,
protection, peace, and a prospect of
prosperity.
The third element was the important
role of the United States in providing jobcreating
peace incentives and in correcting
the imbalance of power between Britain and
Ireland. America, with its 40 million Irish
Americans, decisively helped the peace
process through at least three major crises
that threatened to derail it.
The sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland
dates back to the seventeenth century
when Protestant settlers from Scotland
seized land from the native Catholic Irish as
part of the British attempt to colonize Ireland.
But Ireland was always a troublesome
colony, and just before the outbreak of the
First World War the British government reluctantly
concluded that it could not govern
the country and moved to grant a form of
independence. The Loyalists settlers in the
northeast, fearful of losing privileged status,
smuggled weapons from Germany preparing
to fight British troops if necessary to retain
the British link. By 1920, the British government
gave in to these threats and partitioned
Ireland, in effect gerrymandering a
majority for the Protestant Loyalists. Half a
million Irish Nationalists were trapped
within the new border.
Successive British governments legitimized
this stand-off by guaranteeing that
Northern Ireland should remain part of the
UK so long as the Loyalist majority wished
it. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1979, John
Hume concluded that this “produced the
basis for a half century of injustice, discrimination
and repressive law, a situation in
which the minority community have been
the persistent losers and victims.(3)
The state that was founded on violence
went on to erupt in regular cycles of violence
during the twentieth century, the
worst being the recent “Troubles” that left
3,600 dead and thousands more dreadfully
maimed. The beginning of this latest conflict
can be traced to the Loyalist murders in
1966 of three innocent civilians (one a 77-
year-old Protestant, mistakenly assumed to
be Catholic). At the time, many Catholics
and Nationalists were inspired by the American
civil rights movement to march for basic
rights such as “one man, one vote” and
fair allocation of public housing. The
marches, with the familiar refrain of “we
shall overcome,” came under increasing attack
by both Loyalists and the local police,
with 77 injured in a Derry march in 1969.
Ian Paisley emerged as the leader of the Loyalists,
ranting against Catholics and whipping
up fear among Protestants. In the summer
of 1969, 150 Catholic homes in Belfast
were burned by rioters as the police stood
by. In the face of such provocation, the Provisional IRA came into being, recruiting volunteers
as “the defenders” of the Nationalists.
It was not long, however, before this
defender role became, like that of the Loyalist
terror groups, one of sectarian aggression
and criminal conspiracy.
Stung by international outrage at the
attacks on Irish Nationalists, the British
government deployed soldiers on the streets
of Belfast and Derry both to protect the
Nationalists and restore stability to a situation
that was getting out of hand. The
troops were initially welcomed by the local
population with flowers and trays of tea.
But the IRA deliberately provoked the troops, and their heavy-handed reaction was
seen as a broad attack on the Nationalists.
In tactics eerily similar to those employed in
the Sunni triangle in Iraq, local communities
rallied around the “insurgents.” The
British hope of acceptance as a neutral
peacekeeping force was finally dashed by internment
without trial of hundreds of Nationalists
and the “Bloody Sunday” killings
of 13 civilians by British paratroopers in
1972. Many ordinary Nationalists and Loyalists
became convinced that only some sort
of violent victory by one side over the other
would bring peace.
Hume and the Four Horsemen
In the context of this serious conflict,
John Hume proclaimed his vision of an
“agreed Ireland.” The son of a working-class
Catholic who had because of discrimination
spent most of his life unemployed, Hume
had inherited from his father a healthy skepticism
for the warring loyalties in Northern
Ireland. “You cannot eat a flag,” his father
had said and Hume spent his early adult
years founding a self-help Credit Union that
provided low-interest loans to people used
to living from hand to mouth.
During the worst riots in 1969, when it
seemed that the Loyalists might kill many
Catholics, Hume and other brave community
activists and church leaders struggled
night and day to reduce tensions and fears.
Asked, for example, during a meeting in
Derry why he objected to “wee boys” throwing
stones, he gave a reply which will resonate
with anyone who has seen the genocide
dramatized in the movie Hotel Rwanda:
“Because you don’t know what effect it will
have—whether it will be a broken window,
twenty broken windows, or a thousand
dead. When you can’t control a weapon, you
don’t use it.”4 Later that year, Hume was
elected to the local Northern Ireland parliament
and together with five other members
formed the SDLP, which would become
the majority nonviolent voice of the Irish
Nationalists.
In an attempt to replace violence with
politics, the British and Irish governments
joined the SDLP and the moderate Loyalist
party, the Ulster Unionist Party, in a novel
initiative in 1973. The result was the Sunningdale
Agreement, which provided for a
power-sharing government between Nationalists
and Loyalists in Belfast, and a consultative
role for the Dublin government.
While the prescriptive arrangements were
visionary, the extremists of Northern Ireland
were not yet ready for compromise. The IRA
and its supporters, still convinced they
could achieve Irish unity by forcing the
British to withdraw from Northern Ireland,
escalated their bombing and killing. (They
were not far wrong: recently released British
archives reveal that Harold Wilson’s government
seriously considered withdrawal, deterred
only by the prospect of a Lebanontype
civil war on Britain’s doorstep.)
The Loyalists, in turn, were convinced
that more effective repression would contain
the Papist threat to their state and the following
year staged a massive show of force
before which the British army retreated.
The sad fact was that the Wilson government
lacked the will to defend the agreement
if it meant fighting on two fronts,
against not only the IRA but also the Loyalists.
Instead, the British government introduced
direct rule from London as a secondbest
option.
It took eleven more years of education,
equality legislation, and reform in the security
forces, combined with “war weariness,”
before another agreement could be negotiated
and successfully sustained. This time,
the lessons of the past would be applied and
the second key element of the peace process
came into play. The new political structure
was designed as an intergovernmental partnership
between London and Dublin so that
it would be insulated against local boycotts
and terrorist intimidation. It is this intergovernmental
structure that is the foundation
of the peace process and gives it the strength to withstand the ongoing criminal
activities by the IRA. The British prime
minister, Tony Blair, recently advocated a
similar process for the Middle East: “You
have to have a proper insurance against the
next suicide bomb and the only way of doing
that is to have clear understandings
about how the Palestinian state might
develop.”(5)
But after the collapse of Sunningdale in
1974, British and Irish politicians and officials
had to dig out from the hole created
by the fact that the British could be intimidated
by Loyalist terror. The British army
was trained to be more evenhanded (with
some Scottish regiments withdrawn), and
the police force began the slow transformation
to becoming a nonsectarian force. The
British had much ground to make up since
the European Court of Human Rights, in
response to an Irish government complaint,
had found British interrogation methods
used in 1971 to constitute “inhuman and
degrading treatment.”
While it was clear to Hume and Dublin
that the British should move faster to give
Nationalists an equal stake in the community,
the Irish had limited leverage with the
British government. Consequently, the
Dublin government embarked on an intensive
diplomatic campaign in the late 1970s
to secure American support for change. This
proved an effective strategy because the influence
of American residents, members of
Congress, and media and business leaders
would be one of the decisive factors in persuading
Britain to sign the Anglo-Irish
Agreement.
Hume’s philosophy of nonviolence and
vision of an agreed Ireland was attractive to
Irish-American leaders. But no American
president had previously been willing to
interfere in what America’s closest ally insisted
was an internal British affair. Events
took a historic turn in 1977, when President
Jimmy Carter, at the urging of the
“Four Horsemen”—Speaker of the House
Tip O’Neill, Senators Ted Kennedy and
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Governor
Hugh Carey of New York—promised an
aid program to Northern Ireland conditional
on a solution “that the people of
Northern Ireland, as well as the Governments
of Great Britain and Ireland can
support.” The U.S. administration was
finally involved in finding a just solution
and had legitimized the “Irish dimension”
by stating that the support of the Irish government
was necessary for any solution.
These Irish-American leaders had emerged
as influential supporters of moderation
when Hume and Irish diplomats encouraged
them to make a St. Patrick’s Day
statement in 1977 that denounced all violence
in Northern Ireland. This denunciation
resulted in picketing and verbal abuse
by Irish extremists in New York and Boston.
The courage of these leaders would be
comparable today to members of Congress
denouncing violence both from the extreme
Israeli right and from the Palestinian
terrorists.
It is impossible to imagine that the
American diplomatic breakthrough would
have been achieved without Hume’s consistent
opposition to terrorism and the trust
that engendered in Washington. By contrast,
the Palestinian movement, without a
prominent spokesperson for peace prior to
Mahmoud Abbas’s election, has not been
able to secure widespread support in
America.
America also helped in other ways. In
1976, Irish-American business leaders, at
the initiative of the Irish entrepreneur Tony
O’Reilly and Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan
Rooney, founded the American Ireland
Fund, dedicated to peace in Ireland. The
fund was an important private sector alternative
to IRA fundraising and has supported
thousands of community peace programs in
Northern Ireland, including the first schools
that integrated Protestant and Catholic
students.
American Influence and the “Iron Lady”
Some may ask why it was necessary to exert
American influence on Britain to grant
equal rights to Irish Nationalists in Northern
Ireland. There were many reasons,
some related to Britain’s slow acceptance
that unilateral control of Northern Ireland
was no longer necessary for its strategic security,
and others related to lack of prioritization,
arrogance, and a failure to accept
Britain’s fair share of responsibility for the
problem.
When Margaret Thatcher was elected
prime minister in 1979, her support for the
peace process was hampered by her philosophy
that British sovereignty was inviolable;
therefore Britain would not share power
with Dublin. With the peace process spluttering,
Hume and the Irish again played the
American card. Thatcher was proud of her
special relationship with President Ronald
Reagan who was belatedly discovering his
Irish roots. More important, Reagan was
prepared to do a favor for Speaker O’Neill
because the two old Irish pols enjoyed an
unusual but close friendship. At O’Neill’s
prompting, Reagan told Thatcher that the
United States might be willing to give financial
backing to a new agreement and
urged progress.
Meanwhile, Thatcher had badly mismanaged
the IRA hunger strikes of 1981
and, faced with a worsening crisis, she and
some of her shrewder advisors began to listen
to new proposals from Hume and the
Irish government of Garret FitzGerald, a
longtime advocate of compromise in Northern
Ireland.
These proposals emanated from an important
new initiative of all the constitutional
Nationalist parties in Ireland that
effectively widened the goals of Irish nationalism
from unity to include joint authority
with the old enemy, Britain. The rationale
of this New Ireland Forum was that both
conflicting loyalties would identify with
such a Joint Authority and it could not be
wrecked by local boycotts and intimidation.
This formula provided the basis for the crucial
Anglo-Irish Agreement a year later.
The British reaction to the forum was at
first negative, and Margaret Thatcher, in a
major rebuff to Hume and FitzGerald, said
that all the forum options, including joint
authority, were “out.” Mrs. Thatcher’s receptiveness
would not have been helped by the
IRA attempt on her life a few months earlier
at her Conservative Party conference in
Brighton, when a bomb killed five delegates
and speakers.
America came to the rescue again when
widespread hostile reaction to Thatcher’s
outburst helped persuade her to be more attentive
to FitzGerald at their next meeting.
For example, the New York Times in its editorial
of November 24, 1984 stated: “No
one doubts her courage in opposing the demonic
fanaticism of the IRA. But she has yet
to show the same resolve in dealing with
Northern Ireland’s Protestants who refuse to
share power on even symbols with the oppressed
minority.”(6)
Finally, the crucial foundation of the
peace process was laid in November 1985
with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement,
giving Dublin a significant role in
Northern Ireland for the first time since
partition of the island in 1920. This agreement
was an event that changed Ireland.
As the late Jack Holland, a prolific writer
in Northern Ireland, wrote: “Unless Protestant
violence got out of hand, politicians
could view the next few years as a time
of opportunity for them to undermine—perhaps
significantly—the IRA’s base of support
in both Ireland and America by pressing reforms
in Northern Ireland. That they were
in a position to do so is due in large measure
to the power and influence of the American
connection and the success with which
Irish diplomats utilized it.” (7)
The Loyalists reacted with fury to
Dublin having a role in Northern Ireland,
attempting to destroy the agreement as they
had Sunningdale eleven years earlier. But
this time the “Iron Lady” was prime minister
and the Northern Ireland police had become
a much more professional force. The
Loyalists attacked over 500 police homes,
and 150 officers were forced to move house.
But despite all the riots and intimidation
over the next 12 months, the agreement
survived and Thatcher was the first British
leader to successfully fight on two terrorist
fronts in Ireland.
The IRA could not but notice that the
Protestant veto on reform had finally ended.
The authors of The Secret Story Behind the
Irish Peace Process, Eamonn Mallie and David
McKitterick, put it this way: “Nine years
separate the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November
1985 and the IRA cessation of August
1994. It is difficult to point to a precise
moment when the peace process was
born within the republican movement,
but there is a least an agreement that its
genesis is to be found in the document
which...Thatcher and Fitzgerald signed on
that frosty November day in 1985.(8)
The Nationalist voters of Northern Ireland
registered their approval of the agreement
and British-Irish partnership by reducing
the vote for Sinn Fein/IRA by over 30
percent in the next election.
An unsung group that played a crucial
role through these years were women from
both sides who realized that it was their
children who were dying and began to say
enough is enough. For example, it was
mothers helped by the Catholic priest, Father
Faul, who ended the IRA hunger strikes.
Most recently, it was the sisters of Robert
McCartney, murdered by IRA operatives in
Belfast in January 2005, who defied massive
intimidation to demand justice. Catholic
and Protestant church leaders also played a
key role in defeating the “culture of violence”
on both sides, providing a continuous
bulwark against terrorism that could not be
co-opted.
In this new environment in the mid-
1980s, where the Nationalist community
wanted peace, where their rights were constitutionally
recognized, and where the IRA
was suffering from police breakthroughs, it
seemed that the IRA needed a face-saving
formula to back down from its murder campaign.
A priest in West Belfast, Father
Alec Reid, emerged as an intermediary for
British and Irish discussions with the IRA.
Reid’s quiet achievement is that by a mix of
persistence and self-effacement he convinced
both Hume and Albert Reynolds, Ireland’s
prime minister in the early 1990s, that
Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the
political front for the IRA, wanted peace,
realizing that the IRA could not defeat the
British.
IRA Diehards
As for the IRA, it is not clear even to this
day that Adams himself is committed exclusively
to peaceful methods, or whether
Sinn Fein/IRA is deviously seeking to get
into government by a Jekyll and Hyde
combination of “democratic” politics funded
by the largest criminal conspiracy in the
island. Back in 1981, Sinn Fein’s Danny
Morrison first articulated this policy of dualism/
duplicity when he asked at a Republican
rally if anyone would object “if with a
ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite
[assault rifle] in this hand we take power in
Ireland.” Later, when Adams was professing
his initial commitment to peace in 1987,
the IRA blew up 11 civilians at a war memorial
service in Enniskillen and then lied
about their accountability. In 1990, Ed
Moloney, an Irish journalist and author,
wrote that “the IRA leadership, including
Adams, was capable of seeing the negative
consequences that resulted from, for example,
placing a bomb on a school bus, yet
they had unhesitatingly supported a tactic
that involved forcing a father of three to
drive a huge bomb to an army base and
then, before he had the chance to escape,
blowing him to smithereens.(9)
In recent years, Adams, in an effort
to attract more voter support, has abandoned
the extreme policies that had been
his when he seized control of Sinn Fein/IRA.
These included the goal of a far-left socialist
republic, the abolition of the right to hold
property, opposition to federalism, and opposition
to electoral politics. He is savvy
enough to realize that pure socialism does not have broad appeal among Irish
Catholics.
One of Hume’s compelling arguments
in hours of debate with Adams during the
late 1980s was that the British were no
longer an imperialist power to be fought by
insurrection. The British minister in Northern
Ireland, Peter Brooke, finally confirmed
this publicly in 1990 when he said that
Britain had “no selfish strategic or economic
interest in Northern Ireland.” In late 1993,
the two governments announced a Joint Declaration
that was based on Hume’s redefinition
of Irish self-determination and which
went a long way to accommodate IRA rhetoric,
while preserving the important principle
of Loyalist consent to any constitutional
change.
Inevitably, the IRA still had diehards
who wanted to go on killing, and Adams
said he needed to demonstrate that a nonviolent
strategy would be more successful
in attracting support for Sinn Fein in America.
Adams got the evidence he needed
when President Bill Clinton granted him a
visa in January 1994 to speak in New York,
despite fierce British opposition. Adams was
able to say to the IRA that this was proof
that America would encourage Irish selfdetermination
if the violence stopped.
The IRA announced later that year a “complete
cessation” of its campaign. Hume,
Reynolds, and Adams shook hands publicly
saying they were “totally and absolutely
committed to peaceful and democratic
methods.”
Two months after the IRA announcement,
the Loyalist paramilitary groups also
called a ceasefire. It was announced by
Gusty Spence, the Loyalist who was jailed
for the murders in 1966 that launched the
Troubles. It was too late for many, but
Spence offered “the loved ones of all innocent
victims over the past 25 years abject
and true remorse.” The Loyalists also had
church leaders and new politicians such as
David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson who
were less fearful of the increasingly prosperous
and secular “Celtic Tiger” to the south
and who were also less enamored of Ian
Paisley.
In December, Clinton appointed former
U.S. senator George Mitchell as his American
envoy to advance the peace process.
The momentum of the ceasefire had been
punctuated by calls for IRA arms to be “decommissioned”
before Sinn Fein would be
admitted to the talks. Mitchell recommended
that talks and weapons decommissioning
should occur in parallel (an approach Israel
might look to with the Palestinians). But
months went by, and amid accusations of
foot dragging by the British, the IRA violated
its ceasefire after 18 months, bombing
London’s Canary Wharf, killing two men
and causing millions of dollars of damage.
In spite of this, the peace process went
on. With the election of Tony Blair as prime
minister in 1997, the peace process was renewed
as he and the Irish prime minister,
Bertie Ahern, together with Bill Clinton,
tried to create local institutions that would
accommodate the extremists. Assisted by
Hume, George Mitchell, and the moderate
Loyalist leader, David Trimble, these leaders
emerged as the architects of the next phase
of the peace process which led to the Good
Friday Agreement of April 1998. Bill Clinton personally telephoned participants at
regular intervals during the final tense hours
of negotiation. A month later, the agreement
received overwhelming all-Ireland
legitimacy in referenda north and south of
the border, with 71 percent in support in
Northern Ireland and 94 percent in the Republic.
In December, Hume and Trimble received
the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, a fitting
recognition for the leaders of the opposing
loyalties in Northern Ireland who
were willing to take many risks to achieve
peace.
At this stage, one should also credit the
small cadre of advisors in the Irish, British,
and U.S. governments who for three decades
were committed to peace and prepared to
think outside the box. They are too many to
be named but they are certainly among the
unsung heroes.
Apart from the horrendous bombing in
Omagh by a dissident IRA group in 1998,
sectarian killings have been significantly reduced
in recent years. By the end of 2004,
the two governments and the major Northern
Ireland parties were even close to establishing
a local Northern Ireland government
that would have been dominated by the two
extremes, Adams’s Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). John
Hume had retired as leader of the SDLP,
Sinn Fein had become the largest Nationalist
party, and there was the danger that the
alternative voice of nonviolence would be
eclipsed. But the Sinn Fein/DUP deal to
share power fell apart in December because
the IRA refused to permit photographic evidence
of its remaining weapons being decommissioned.
Adams warned that the photographs
would have caused major problems for the
IRA: “These are people who are proud, rightly
proud, to have fought the British, people
who have resisted attempts to criminalize
and humiliate them.” The only problem
with this statement is that the Irish and
British governments believe that the IRA
was responsible for a $50 million bank raid
a few days later. As to whether or not the
IRA did it, there is a slogan doing the
rounds in Belfast that runs, “Ten out of nine
people believe the Provos (IRA) done the
bank.” The embarrassment and shock were
compounded by the murder of Robert Mc-
Cartney by IRA operatives, which has led to
disarray and the postponement of further attempts
at local government. The IRA said it
was withdrawing an offer of full arms decommissioning,
but gave no indication of
preparing a return to full-scale violence.
Something Worth Working For
The heroic work by Hume and successive
Irish and British leaders to convert Sinn
Fein/IRA to democracy is suffering, one
hopes, a temporary setback. The British and
Irish governments have stated clearly that
until the IRA gives up its weapons and organized
crime Sinn Fein will be isolated
from politics, and there is unlikely to be
much further progress until after the British
and Northern Ireland elections in May.
Conor O’Clery, the Irish Times U.S. correspondent
concludes: “Sinn Fein now faces a
stark choice: split with the IRA hardliners or
watch its political support erode in Ireland
and the United States.(10)
Meanwhile, the people of Northern
Ireland are grateful that the killings, the
maimings and the bombings have largely
stopped, with the number of sectarian
killings down to four last year, the lowest
number since 1968. Loyalists don’t feel the
menace of a united Ireland, and Nationalists
enjoy increased prosperity and respect for
their traditions and aspirations. The people
don’t have the stomach for more violence
and after years of reforms see no earthly
need for it. In addition, the IRA realizes
that in the post-9/11 era, the Bush administration
and American public opinion would
react very badly to a resumption of bombing.
Richard Haass, director of policy planning
at the State Department in George W.
Bush’s first administration, confirms this:
“The world has changed since 9/11 and
there is no tolerance anywhere in America
for actions that smack of terrorism. If the
IRA goes back to bombing that would fundamentally
discredit Sinn Fein in America.(11)
The reality is that the IRA and money
laundering are not so much a crisis for the
peace process as they are for Sinn Fein and
Gerry Adams. Democracy and terrorism do
not mix well, as demonstrated by an Irish
public opinion poll in February, which revealed
that Adams’s approval rating has fallen
dramatically since last November, to a
low of 31 percent. Nor can the British and
Irish governments continue to turn a blind
eye to Sinn Fein/IRA crime more than a
decade after Adams pledged that he was “totally
and absolutely committed to peaceful
and democratic methods.”
Peter Mandelson, a close political ally of
Tony Blair and currently EU trade commissioner,
is one of many who confirm that the
Irish peace process is durable, deliberately
designed to withstand any threats from terrorism/
organized crime: “The Good Friday
Agreement, and the peace process as a
whole, have been made possible by the integrated
efforts of the Irish and British governments.
This relationship is now so strong
and interdependent that it will endure, particularly
with the special political chemistry
between Ahern and Blair. I cannot see a
wedge being driven between the governments
however hard some might try to do
this.(12)
To paraphrase Yeats, the centre can hold
in Northern Ireland, but the two governments
must end the ten-year “transition” for
the IRA and ensure that the peace process is
about the terrorists abandoning violence,
and not about terrorists corrupting the legal
and democratic system. Most people have
learned to respect the two nationalisms, and
the British-Irish framework provides security
and puts off indefinitely the respective
fears of either a United Ireland or purely
British rule.
The Irish peace process will continue to
have its ups and downs, but the silencing of
the guns has been transformative for Northern
Ireland and is a truly heroic achievement,
based on imagination, skill, conviction,
and hope. The great poet, Seamus
Heaney, eloquently celebrated the peace
process with these words written in 1994:
“Hope, according to [Vaclav] Havel, is different
from optimism. It is a state of the
soul rather than a response to the evidence.
It is not the expectation that things will
turn out successfully but the conviction that
something is worth working for, however it
turns out. Its deepest roots are in the transcendental,
beyond the horizon. The self-evident
truth of all this is surely something
upon which a peace process might reasonably
be grounded.”(13)l
Notes
1.
Maurice Hayes, article in Ireland Fund publication,
2005.
2. Interview with the author, January 2005.
3. Paul Routledge, John Hume, A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 161.
4. Barry White, John Hume: Statesman of the
Troubles (Belfast: Blackstall Press, 1984), p. 77.
5. Financial Times interview, January 26, 2005.
6. Quoted in Jack Holland, The American Connections:
US Guns, Money and Influence in Northern Ireland (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 232.
7. Ibid, 151.
8. Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, The
Fight for Peace: The Secret Story Behind the Irish Peace
Process (London: Heinemann, 1996, p. 35.
9. Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London:
Penguin, 2002), p. 349.
10. Interview with the author, February 2005.
11. Interview with the author, February 2005.
12. Interview with the author, February 2005.
13. Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers, Selected Prose
1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 47.