N Ireland: compromise and the fight to be heard

While major progress has been made in the region since 1998, there are ongoing issues with paramilitary groups and violent confrontations around marching.

We asked two experts on the region – former Maze hunger striker Tommy McKearney and Gareth Mulvenna, visiting research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast – to provide their analysis.

In spite of efforts by small groups of armed republicans to destabilise Northern Ireland, there is little imminent threat to what we call the peace process. Nor will the Good Friday agreement disintegrate as a result of this year’s violent street protests by hard-line elements within the unionist community.

The reason is twofold. Firstly, a great majority of Northern Ireland’s people are determined not to return to an era of violence. Second, and equally important, is the fact that N Ireland’s two major political power blocks – DUP and Sinn Fein – are committed to maintaining the current status quo, if only because neither sees a more attractive alternative.

Both the major parties are unwilling to appear weak when addressing controversial issues such as parades or flags, commemorations or flags.

Their ability to remain in control, however, is dependent on the two parties retaining sufficient electoral and communal support to prevent critics and opponents undermining their positions. Sinn Fein and the DUP need only look across the floor in Stormont and view the faltering Ulster Unionist and SDLP parties in order to be reminded of the risk of being outflanked by more energetic or strident competitors.

Both of the major parties are, consequently, unwilling to appear weak or unenthusiastic when addressing controversial issues such as parades, commemorations or flags and emblems. Compromise is therefore difficult at best and virtually impossible on many occasions.

Herein lies the real problem with working the Good Friday agreement, an accord that is, by definition, a mutual compromise requiring republicans to recognise the state on one hand and unionists to accept republicans (aka ex-IRA) as partners in government on the other hand. This is the realpolitik of Northern Ireland’s political settlement but none of the main parties are prepared (or able) to honestly spell it out.

No material benefits

The task for Richard Haass is to reconcile the factions and to do so against the background of a global recession that has restricted the feelgood factor that was supposed to be delivered by way of a “peace dividend”. He needs also to make N Irish politicians – all of them – recognise the facts of life in relation to the deal they accepted on Good Friday 1998 and then to sell the concept and its ramifications to their supporters.

The problem for the DUP and Sinn Fein in doing so is that with a contracting economy and the hardship accompanying the outworking of austerity, there is little by way of material benefit to offset their critics’ cries of sell-out.

Should Dr Haass fail to achieve his objective – and the betting must be against him succeeding – the consequence will not be an explosion of insurrectionary violence. Instead, it will be a debilitating decline in confidence in the ability of the assembly – and, by extension, conventional politics – to deal with the important matters relating to day-to-day life in N. Ireland.

The political class will become ever more remote from the electorate and the resulting, predictable vacuum will eventually pose questions over the future of Northern Ireland.

Tommy McKearney is the author of The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament

It is hard to judge what, if any, deep impact the Haass talks will have for the grassroots communities in Northern Ireland. Loyalists – particularly those who have been protesting at the civil rights campsite at Twaddell Avenue – may feel unaffected by the “high politics” of the Haass circus. Flags and emblems, parading and, to a certain extent, “the past” are issues which have all played a part in loyalist discontentment over the past nine months.

Loyalists feel that Sinn Fein have acted outside the spirit of the Good Friday agreement, and the phrase “de-Britification” has been coined by PUP leader Billy Hutchinson to encapsulate what is perceived to be an aggressive attack by Sinn Fein on British culture in Northern Ireland.

In lieu of real progress toward a united Ireland, Sinn Fein have conjured a ‘culture war’ to sate the rank and file of its membership.

This is what Sinn Fein have been reduced to because, realistically, there has been a lack of real progress toward a united Ireland. In lieu of this, Sinn Fein have conjured a “culture war” to sate the rank and file of its membership.

Sinn Fein is seen as masters of the Janus-face, such is the ability of high-ranking members of the party such as Gerry Kelly to one minute celebrate dead IRA bombers in Castlederg and in the next breath tell loyalists to “get real” over issues such as marching past Ardoyne shops; or to criticise the UVF’s veneration of one of its dead members, Brian Robinson.

Telling the Protestant story

There has been much talk within Protestant working class areas such as the Shankill of a “loyalist spring” – the sense that loyalists finally feel able to grasp the opportunity to have their voices heard. To outsiders, loyalist projections of social, political and cultural identity may appear to be retrograde, but that ignores the progress that is being made at ground level with an emerging thirst, particularly among young loyalists, to learn more about the civic aspects of their history as an essential component part of the wider British working-class community.

A new play entitled Crimea Square, which is to be staged as part of the Belfast Festival in the autumn, seeks to bring the story of the people of the Shankill to a wider audience. Having emerged from an amateur writers’ group that met on a regular basis, this project signals that Protestants want their story told and are willing to do it on their terms, just as the Catholic working class have done for many years.

The Haass talks will not capture the imagination of the average person on the street. It is in the areas of community self-help, better public relations and more thoughtful approaches to contentious issues such as parading that the loyalist community will emerge stronger and more emboldened from the “flags” era.

Gareth Mulvenna is currently co-editing a book on Ulster Protestant culture entitled No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care