How to Fix Northern Ireland (eBook)

Prologue

It was the day of the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement.

That agreement, six weeks earlier, had been celebrated as an historic breakthrough bringing peace to Northern Ireland after thirty years of violence. The world saw Northern Ireland’s trouble as some kind of confused religious war, a relic of religious wars in Europe which had ended four hundred years before. In part it was. Weren’t the Irish nationalists catholics and the British unionists protestants? Was that not centrally important?

The naming of the agreement after that holy day on which it had been completed seemed also to recognise that religion was at the heart of the inter-communal dispute and carried a suggestion that a spiritual breakthrough had occurred around the central fact cherished in both communities, that Christ had died for peace.

For the poetically minded and the devout that suggestion might have impressed. It echoed and perhaps finalised an earlier reference to Easter in the marking of historic Irish days, the Easter Rising of 1916.

The agreement, however, was not poetic. It was the opposite. It had sought to encapsulate long-simmering passions as hard realities and to seek a contractual agreement between bitter factions. It did this at first by paying respect to the forces that had contended with each other historically, acknowledged that each had a legitimate case, a grievance inherited from a troubled past. It classed the violence as political and prescribed a political solution. The problem was not that protestants were evil bigots contemptuous of the Catholic Church and Gaelic culture; nor was it that the catholics were slaves to a foreign church and besotted with blood-drenched mythologies. Neither was it that Britain was a voracious imperial despoiler of Irish decency. All of these analyses were freely available and routinely expressed.

The framers of the Good Friday Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998, chose to describe the past decades of bloodshed, terror and mayhem as a political conflict. At its heart was the question of whether Northern Ireland was British or Irish. Sort that out, they decided, and peace and good relations would follow. The past was indeed part of the problem.

Most of the island of Ireland had taken a road to progressive independence from Britain after a guerrilla war nearly eighty years earlier but six counties in the North had stayed within the United Kingdom.

For decades, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had been campaigning for British withdrawal through bombing and murder. The British would probably have left if they could, but most of the people in Northern Ireland were British themselves and could not simply be dumped. The British army had entered the territory in force to suppress resistance. Armed protestant loyalist factions had sought to aid them by sending death squads out to murder random catholics and, when they could get them, members of the IRA.

This had all been messy and bloody and unpopular but seemed, decade after decade, to be going nowhere, without anyone having any idea of how to bring it to an end.

Animosities were encapsulated in song and daubed on the walls in graffiti and murals, some of them indeed quite artful. The level of violence, by the end of the seventies, had settled down to a routine average of a hundred murders a year. If there is a mistake at the heart of the agreement, it is in the presumption that all this was the work of reasonable people with intelligible grievances.

Murder was a crime, but political murder was a different category of crime and warranted early release once the political problem was resolved, so in the following two years the killers would go home. Some truly grotesque murders would be more or less absolved on the understanding that the motivation behind them had been removed by the agreement.

There was practical good sense behind that decision, for the paramilitary organisations had mobilised support around sympathy for the prisoners and had set up structures to raise funds for them and to campaign on their behalf. It was better to just let them all out to facilitate the dismantling of those structures rather than leave republican and loyalist groups with grievances and excuses.

Numerous books about the Northern Irish Troubles, up to that time, had ended with the conclusion that no obvious solution was in sight, the two communities being so resistant to integration with each other. The agreement, by contrast with this routine pessimism, was elegant and optimistic. It provided for a local power sharing assembly, run by Irish nationalists and pro-British unionists in partnership with each other. It set up cross-border institutions to involve the Irish government and provided for institutional connections between the governments of Britain and Ireland. All of this was to be enshrined in international treaty.

This was the three-stranded approach, the product of sophisticated diplomatic creativity and years of negotiation. Here was proof that a doggedly intractable conflict, often compared to the Israel–Palestine conflict, could be solved. This offered the whole world an example in creative peace-making.

The British and Irish diplomats were proud of what they had done. They had brought nationalist and unionist politicians to the table alongside their extreme and violent rivals within their own communities, and got them to accept a new formula for governing the region acceptable to most, if not all, political parties.

Naturally, everyone was happy. There were high hopes for the agreement’s endorsement in a referendum. The world’s media was in Belfast. I was a reporter working with a camera crew to make a little film about how people on the street felt about the breakthrough. This is what broadcasters wanted, not the close analysis of diplomatic and constitutional formulae but eager hopeful young people looking to a bright future.

We had found a smart young lad from east Belfast and we thought we would take him to one of the big loyalist political murals on the Newtownards Road and interview him there. The mural, black lettering on a white wall, declared: ‘The Conflict is about Nationality’.

Well, that was pretty much the central point of the new agreement: two legitimate conceptions of nationality were to be accommodated within the one region.

We stood Tommy at the wall and prepared to set up the camera. This involved carrying the camera and the tripod from the car boot, setting up the camera and connecting it to the microphone managed by the sound guy. These things always took a little time, time for us to draw attention to ourselves. The camera operator would want to check the white balance so that the painted wall would not have a blue or yellow hue. The producer would want to be sure that the picture was well framed and the sound guy would want to take levels from me and from Tommy to be sure that we came out on the tape – yes, actual tape in those days – without one of us sounding louder than the other. There was also the worry about the noise from passing traffic.

It was a nice sunny day. Men sitting outside a pub across the road were drinking pints and watching us intently. That was normal when you were filming outside. But what’s this? They are coming over?

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ said the first to reach us, a hefty but smallish man in a green T-shirt that was stretched around his paunch. ‘What’s your name?’ he said to Tommy. ‘Speak up or we’ll burn your fucking car.’

His friends had now joined us, three of them. One of them rested his arm across the camera to be sure that no one touched it.

I said, ‘We are making a small film.’

‘Who the fuck’s talking to you? What’s your name?’

There is something of which you will be aware if you are a Malachi, or Eamon or Seamus or Sean, and that is that your name declares that you are Irish, most likely catholic and therefore almost certainly a nationalist. Such a name will be treated as a declaration of affiliation even though your mother gave it to you before you got the vote, about eighteen years before you got the vote in fact. Nothing in the Good Friday Agreement was going to change that.

These guys, I was assuming, with my similar familiarity with the codes, were protestant loyalists. Their affiliation was to organisations which had killed people for having names like mine.

‘What’s your film about?’

‘We’re just sounding out people on what they think of the agreement and their hopes for the future.’

‘You think everybody around here is behind this agreement, don’t you? Well, you’ve another fucking think coming.’

I wasn’t sure that getting into a political argument with him was the way to resolve this. At that point another man came round the corner to join us. I recognised him and he recognised me. He was a senior loyalist but of a type that had emerged during the political negotiations, mannered and conscientious. His value was in the respect he got from the hard men and his ability to translate their concerns into language that sounded astute and reasonable in a television interview.

He didn’t say things like: ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘Och, Malachi, it’s you.’

This was a relief. This would get sorted out now.

‘People are just a bit touchy with a camera around, and the lads just across the road having a drink want to be sure you’re not filming them. And to tell you the truth, we don’t want the impression to go out...