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The fragile Northern Ireland peace is trembling, with both sides marching toward the extremes
Sunday, July 08, 2001
By Brian Connelly
Northern Ireland's perennial summer crisis is on again, but this year there may be real consequences.
Against the traditional backdrop of street clashes over Protestant Orange Order parades passing through Catholic neighborhoods, David Trimble, the Protestant first minister of the Catholic/Protestant power-sharing government, has resigned. He has in the past threatened to resign before over the issue of the IRA disarming, but this time he made good on his threats. Trimble won a Nobel Prize for leading his Unionist party into a coalition government with the IRA's political wing Sinn Fein before the IRA actually began to disarm. Now he is unwilling to take anymore "risks for peace," as Bill Clinton used to say.
The cynics may have been right about the Northern Irish peace process. Since the early 1990s, voices have said that the peace process was a means for the IRA to gain breathing room and for Sinn Fein to gain unprecedented respectability. In the end, the cynics said, this will strengthen the extremists on both sides.
And the extremists, it appears, are stronger than ever.
In the British general election in May, Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party on the Protestant side and Gerry Adam's Sinn Fein on the Catholic side each gained seats in Parliament -- this at the expense of the centrist Protestant and Catholic parties that actually created the power-sharing Good Friday Agreement. Parties once regarded as the fringe now probably represent the majority in both communities.
Perhaps this is the way of all the Clinton-era peace processes. After nearly a decade of negotiated co-existence with the Palestinians, Israelis have decided they feel safer in the hands of Ariel Sharon, who was against that peace process from the beginning.
In Northern Ireland, the question is once again how to save the agreement. The Irish government, the British government, the moderate Catholic nationalist Social Democratic and Labor Party, the Irish churches and all right-thinking people are imploring Sinn Fein to intercede with the IRA to make some gesture of disarming that will make David Trimble and the Unionists want to stay in the government.
Sinn Fein has blithely ignored these kind of pleas for years. They are even easier to ignore now that the president of the United States is not one of the pleaders.
Sinn Fein is not going to ask the IRA to do anything. Gerry Adams came up with one of his opaque yet weirdly accurate answers to a reporter's suggestion that the Sinn Fein actually had an obligation to try to persuade the IRA to decommission some weapons: "It's not we who are carrying the white man's burden out in one of their colonies." Meaning, that if you expect Sinn Fein and the IRA to stick their necks out to save the Good Friday agreement, you are crazy.
The hard truth is that the Good Friday agreement power-sharing government was always worth a lot more to Unionists than to anyone else. The agreement returned to the Unionists a semblance of the autonomy they once had as a self-governing part of the United Kingdom. That is why the Unionists made so many concessions to Nationalists and Republicans. While the Unionists would never again be able to lord it over the Catholic minority in a "Protestant parliament for a Protestant people," they would at least be able to fix their own roads, administer their own hospitals and regulate their own drinking water. Participating in the government of what they regard as their own country holds meaning for the Protestant middle class that has always been the backbone of the Unionist party.
For Sinn Fein and the republican movement, there is no appeal to working in a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland unless that government is a steppingstone to a united Ireland. Of course, Sinn Fein tells its supporters that the Good Friday agreement is nothing more than a steppingstone to a united Ireland. In Sinn Fein's eyes, that's a matter-of-fact statement. In the eyes of Sinn Fein's enemies, it is a provocation.
Sinn Fein's bitterest enemies are coming to the fore in the Unionist camp. Under the Good Friday agreement, the No. 1 and No. 2 vote-getting parties in the assembly nominate the first and second minister. If the assembly elections would go the way that the general election did, Ian Paisley would be first minister and Gerry Adams would be his second minister, an unimaginable partnership.
Sinn Fein doesn't shrink from contemplating that sort of chaos, and seems more to embrace it. Ian Paisley, almost a caricature of Protestant Ulster's legendary obstinance and bigotry, has always been the IRA's best recruiter. His assertions make terrorists, especially former terrorists, seem reasonable.
You might say Sinn Fein seems to prefer Paisley in power, but that would be cynical.
Brian Connelly is managing editor of Focus, the Carnegie Mellon faculty and staff newspaper. He writes frequently on Northern Ireland.