Four years into the Belfast Agreement, reconciliation seems farther away than ever.

That’s the message from the University of Ulster’s Life and Times survey, released in June, showing that increasing numbers of Catholics and Protestants want to live in segregated estates, want their children to be taught in separate schools and want to work in single-identity workplaces.

The findings prompted a slew of features from commentators confessing frustration that peace hasn’t softened the North’s sectarian heart. Why are there more and higher “peace walls” in Belfast than there were before the ceasefires? How can this be when a measure of peace has been achieved and both communities are guaranteed parity of esteem and are represented in government?

All mainstream analysts seem to concur that Nationalist and Unionist ministers have worked diligently and well together in an administration which has defined its overall aim as the creation of “a peaceful, inclusive, prosperous, stable and fair society” based on “reconciliation, tolerance (and) mutual trust.”

So how come the Executive has worked so successfully and, yet, the objective of all its activities is even further from realisation? How can there be easy relationships and routine cooperation in government, and still murder stalking the streets?

Tony Kennedy, chief executive of Cooperation Ireland, observed in a pained piece in the Belfast Telegraph that, “The Agreement is now more secure than at any time since the ink was dry on it, while the surveys show that attitudes are getting worse... The figures don’t indicate that people do not have the opportunity to integrate, but rather that there is increasing reluctance among people to avail of what opportunities there are.

“The communal tension that everyone seemed to assume would disappear with the absence of large-scale violence and in the presence of an agreed form of government is proving far more resilient than that.”

Of course, Kennedy’s suggestion that “everyone” assumed that the ceasefires and the Agreement would result in a lowering of sectarian tension is wrong.

Over the past four years, the directly contrary argument has been advanced in a number of quarters, including in this space with a regularity which some readers have found irritating. If you are a member of this section of the audience, turn away now.

The argument has been that the Belfast Agreement represented not a challenge to sectarianism but an acceptance of sectarianism—that this could hardly have been otherwise, given the political base of the parties involved and the structure of the negotiations which led to the deal.

Under the Agreement, every person in the North was implicitly allocated to one or other of “the two communities”. The political system then constructed was predicated on representatives of each of these separate peoples agreeing to work peaceably together.

It doesn’t need saying that peaceful coexistence is immensely preferable to violent conflict. But what’s envisaged here is not a coming together but an agreement to stay apart. The securing of the Agreement and the segregation of the people are not contradictory developments. Each is a natural concomitant of the other.

The practical expression of these ideas is seen in the outworking of the Agreement. Each elected Member of the Legislative Assembly is required to register on arrival at Stormont as Nationalist, Unionist or “other”. This is the only mention of “others” in the text of the Agreement. When it comes to day-to-day operations, “others” don’t figure at all. It was for this reason that members of the Alliance Party, registered as “others”, had to “redesignate” as Unionists in order to help David Trimble out of a mess of his own making earlier this year. As “others” they didn’t count. As Unionists, their votes counted, and were crucial.

All “key” decisions require the support of a majority of both Nationalist and Unionist representatives —and it takes only half of either the Nationalists or the Unionists to stipulate a particular decision as “key”. This provides a basis for enclosing any and every issue within the paradigm of Nationalist versus Unionist hostility.

Moves to end the 11-Plus system of academic selection for post-primary schools are a case in point. Following publication of the Burns Report last October, and extensive debate and consultation since, a Bill to abolish the 11-Plus and institute a system which doesn’t discriminate so drastically against the poor is due to be presented to the Assembly later this year.

But whatever new system is proposed will require the support of separate majorities of Nationalists and Unionists. Thus, 50 percent plus of the Unionist representatives — many of whom are against reform on class grounds or for reasons of “conscience” — will be able to block change, even if they constitute only, say, 30 percent of the total number of MLAs voting. Some at least of these naysayers will have to be conciliated if change is to come about. So a measure which doesn’t of its nature slot into the “traditional” sectarian pattern of Northern politics at all will be compressed into sectarian shape, and will stand or fall on the basis of sectarian arithmetic, as it is processed through machinery built according to the Agreement’s specifications.

The same is true, or can potentially be made to be true, of every major decision, in relation to health, public spending, industrial development, the environment, whatever.

This pattern of politics tends inevitably to reinvigorate sectarian sentiment in society generally. Herein lies the contradiction in the Agreement which could prove its undoing.

Separate electoral rolls might be a logical step towards shoring up the Agreement, making it not a means towards an end but a permanent system of governance. If all key votes require the support of a majority of both Nationalist and Unionist representatives, the voters of each of the communities — increasingly defined by a desire to live in segregated estates, for their children to go to separate schools, and to work in single-identity workplaces — should surely be allowed to select its representatives from its own list of candidates. This would ensure that those exercising political power in the name of a community accurately reflected the spread of opinion within the community. In the context of the Agreement, inviting Unionists to have a say in the selection of who will represent Nationalist views, and vice versa, makes no sense.

Separate electoral rolls as in apartheid South Africa? Surely it will never come to that?

Not in the short-term, certainly. But never?

Striving to save the Agreement is not an adequate response to the rising level of sectarianism which we can see and feel around us and which has been measured in the Life and Times survey.

In the words of the great Ed McBain – Let’s hear it for the deaf man!

Looking for signs of optimism, we turned to the Brisbane Courier and Mail, wherein it is reported that a deaf man has been jailed for a fortnight. The judge told him:

“It was bad enough you were involved in a brawl, but your behaviour before me today has been even more disgraceful. As you are profoundly deaf, I agreed to your solicitor’s request to allow you to use sign language in this court. But when I asked the interpreter how you had pleaded to the charges, she translated your reply as, ‘The judge is a fucking dickhead.’

“I sent you to the cells for a few hours to reconsider your behaviour. But when you were called back, you signed to your interpreter that I was a fat bastard and more boring than a pneumatic drill, and what is more — you still refuse to withdraw the insults.”

The Courier and Mail reports that the defendant “made a gesture” to the judge as he was being led away.