Peace in Northern Ireland

The legendary ‘Days Like These’ advertisement wasn’t too far off the mark after all. After a 25-year orgy of sectarian slaughter and political repression, during which we switched on the radio every other morning to hear of bombings, shootings, murdered teenagers and auld dears blown to bits while doing their shopping, the Province/Six Counties whatever-you-call-the-place-yourself has settled down to a life of relative normality.

Murder is still not unheard of, and relations between the so called ‘two communities’ may never be totally harmonious, but they’re no longer lethally poisonous. The entire apparatus of institutionalised sectarian discrimination which defined the North’s governance for at least 70 years – and which, let’s be honest, led to armed conflict in the first place – has also largely been dismantled, as a power-sharing government (with Sinn Fein as the largest party) works laboriously but purposefully towards the elimination of inequality between the ‘communities’. The vexed question of inequality between the classes remains a live issue, as Eamonn McCann has repeatedly pointed out in these pages. But no-one in their right mind would deny that the Northern Ireland of today is an infinitely better, safer place to live than was the case in 1993.
The defining image of the decade was that of Martin McGuinness and the Reverend Ian Paisley grinning from ear to ear, laughing and joking like long-lost brothers, as they prepared to take their place as joint First Ministers in a power-sharing executive. Even fifteen years ago, such a prospect would have seemed utterly surreal. By all accounts, the two men established an excellent working rapport. Paisley finally stood down as DUP leader and First Minister last year at the age of 82, to be replaced by his long-term understudy Peter Robinson. Despite the worrying extremism evident from a cursory glance at his track record, Robinson has been largely a model of realpolitik and good behaviour, although comments made by his wife Iris about the ‘abomination’ of homosexuality revealed the prejudice lurking underneath the DUP strait-laces.
The PSNI, for those of you who spent the decade abroad, is the Police Service of Northern Ireland (as gaeilge: Seirbhís Phóilíneachta Thuaisceart Éireann; Ulster-Scots: Polis Service o Norlin Airlan). It is the successor to the discredited Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was reformed and renamed in 2001 after a thoroughly inglorious history characterised by active co-operation with loyalist sectarian murderers. It enjoys the full support of Sinn Fein (although dissident republicans have shown no inclination to accept its authority) and is working towards redressing decades of religious imbalance via the introduction of a quota specifying that 50% of its recruits must be from the ‘Catholic’ community. The quota is clearly having the intended effect: between 20-30% of the force is now comprised of Catholic/nationalists, as opposed to 8% of the old RUC.
A side-effect of policing reform is the fact that loyalist paramilitaries can no longer regard the official police force as a friendly institution which will operationally assist its misdeeds. Sensing which way the wind is blowing, and lacking any significant level of public support, the paramilitaries on either side have scaled down their activity greatly. The INLA formally renounced violence in October of this year; the UVF formally decommissioned its weapons in June of this year.
There have, inevitably, been isolated lapses: Robert McCartney, a Catholic father-of-two widely thought to have been killed by IRA men during a bar brawl; Michael McIlveen, a Catholic teenager kicked to death in a car park in Ballymena by a loyalist mob consisting of his fellow teenagers; Denis Donaldson, an IRA volunteer exposed as a Special Branch informer and shot dead in his Donegal cottage; and others. There has also been a very high attrition rate among feuding loyalists, who have turned on one another with a vengeance as their vocation of ‘defending Ulster’ loses relevance, and largely resorted to turf warfare. And dissident IRA men lurk menacingly. But, for the most part, the murder rate is phenomenally low compared to the horrors of the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties, and with every passing year of peace, the prospect of a return to the abyss becomes more and more remote.