here’s a storm blowing outside. Not that unusual. This is a windy place, as more than one Baltic immigrant has ruefully pointed out. What’s 10-a-season in Donegal is once-a-decade in Kent. Blow, winds, blow.
Does this affect the way we are? Bluff and breezy and often so full of air we could float a balloon? Perhaps. Our Atlantic weather makes us.
Whatever about that, the big wind blowing around the coast is well matched by the big winds blowing around the peace process, gust after gust, gale after gale.
These seem like momentous times. It may be that, a decade from now, when the drums are being tightened for the centenary celebrations of the 1916 Rising, people will reflect on these weeks as a watershed, the moment in time when Ireland finally left the 20th Century for the 21st.
Not all Ireland yet, of course. As I write, many different voices contend for our allegiance. The big winds blow. They bluff and bluster. They rattle the roof. They shake the trees. From east to west and north to south, they huff and puff, they pose and posture.
Whatever the DUP might say, the IRA has decommissioned a huge amount of ordnance. It looks like they have followed through on a promise and are on their best behaviour. Even an ultra-sceptic like Michael McDowell says there has been no criminality that he knows of.
Is it really so? And will it last? Unionists don’t think so. One sympathises with their view. In particular, their weary complaint that what is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander must be heeded – that it is manifestly unfair to demand that they share government with Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland when nobody is willing to do so in the other part of Ireland.
But I think they’re wrong. It is true that certain things can’t be forgiven – like the bombing of the La Mon restaurant, the bomb in Enniskillen, the sectarian murders, the disappeared, the criminality, the intimidation and extortion and the anti-democratic manoeuvring in many parts of the island.
These things can’t be wished away or airbrushed out of the picture. They’re real. They happened. There are bones still mouldering underground where IRA killers dumped their victims. There are lanes and yards where the very stones cry out in anguish at what they have seen. There are people who can’t sleep at night because of what they saw or heard or came to know.
Republican adherents will say that the loyalists killed too, and they did. Indeed, there is a special kind of black murderousness amongst loyalists that has no competitor in the known world. It is the murderousness of people who have no souls, whose brains have not fully developed and who know nothing but darkness.
But none of this excuses the dreadful things done in the name of a 32 county republic.
And yet, though we shouldn’t forgive or forget, equally we can’t deny the significance of the moment. It really is a watershed. And opponents should try to understand the immensity of the change and challenge undertaken by the republicans.
It’s not just that giving up the ordinance is akin to willingly surrendering your balls. We must consider their constituents as well.
You see, for a generation or more, the IRA was a shield – real or imagined – for many. Cowed and intimidated, people felt that there was always the possibility that the IRA would visit vengeance on their tormentors. Their decision to decommission deprives some of these sad people of their balls, and the whole process had to be carefully taken forward step-by-step to keep them onside.
It will take time, and possibly quite a long time, for this to be understood and accepted by many in Northern Ireland. It is also a major danger that the same progress is not being made on the loyalist side.
There’s a reason: whereas electoral success for Sinn Fein gave the republicans a major stake in the democratic process, and indeed legitimacy by all accepted definitions of democracy, there was no such endorsement for the loyalist parties, so the Protestant terrorists are excluded from the general forward movement.
It will take a major evolutionary step for the unionist political parties to find ways of including the loyalist groupings. It goes against the grain. But it has to be done.
None of this will be easy. One or two of those who will be elected to parliament may have done terrible things. If you shook their hand, no soap on earth would be strong enough to wash the stain away. There’s no two ways about it, and I’m talking about both sides.
And yet, we’re moving forward. It’s beginning to look like we’re witnessing a major evolutionary advance. It can be real if we all stick to our principles and don’t compromise on the fundamentals of democracy. Sinn Fein can learn. After all, 80 years ago Fianna Fáil made the same leap forward, and look at what happened then.
If the winds would but blow less hard, others might follow.b