A giant leap for Northern Ireland

Change doesn’t always come about as we expect. Sometimes it’s just there, an undercurrent that’s unheralded, unnoticed. One day things are as they’ve been (it seems) forever – and the next we’re into a whole different movie.

And you’re not exactly certain what’s happened except that things have changed, sometimes utterly. What follows isn’t always terribly beautiful or strange or compelling. But if you’re lucky, the new dispensation at least holds out the prospect of a better future. As the old Clareman was wont to say in the midst of pelting rain and wind, ‘there’s brightness over yonder’…
Well, that’s what I thought when, at last, Sinn Féin endorsed the PSNI by 9:1. In doing so, they bounced the ball back to the Reverend Ian Paisley and the DUP.
But what’s especially encouraging is that it looks as if this goes beyond mere political manoeuvring. Gerry Adams also said that any republican wanting to join the police force should be supported.
There are caveats, of course. It wouldn’t be Northern Ireland and it wouldn’t be Sinn Féin if there weren’t. Specifically, the resolution changing Sinn Féin policy only kicks in when power-sharing is established. But fair’s fair. It’s a huge step forward.
Murky Business
Just for good measure, the Police Ombudsman in Northern Ireland Nuala O’Loan issued a report only a week earlier in which she vindicated claims by Raymond McCord that members of the Northern Ireland Special Branch had colluded with north Belfast UVF members responsible for the murder of Raymond McCord jnr in 1997.
The leader of the UVF gang involved is described by O’Loan as “a serial killer”. He was directly implicated in at least 10 murders and perhaps as many as 15. He was also a police informant and was protected by the police from charges relating to these murders. Further, she suggests that the murders couldn’t have happened without the knowledge of senior members of the old RUC.
O’Loan was not given much co-operation by the police or by former members of the RUC. Indeed, she alleges a deliberate strategy that effectively avoided proper accountability.
It’s a murky business. Republicans have not been slow to seize the report and to tell the world that it shows the dread situation faced for decades by nationalists. The victim flag was unfurled, often by people who were not involved with any of the victims.
What they fail to recognise is that a process now exists within which this appalling criminal activity could be identified, described and outed.
But no such facility exists whereby republicans can be called to account. There is no Ombudsman for Sinn Fein or for the Provisional IRA. Murders and disappearances remain out there beyond recall, beyond resolution. More died at the hands of republicans than at the hands of this loyalist cabal. And many republican murders were comparable to those of loyalists. There were serial killers amongst republicans too. But you won’t find that acknowledged too often.
Yes, I know – loyalists are capable of a kind of cold killing known only in horror fiction. Murders by republicans, cold and ruthless as they were, tended to be less personal – assassinations apart – and more terroristic. More political and less criminal if you like, but hardly less appalling for all that. Could the victims still talk, I think they’d regard any distinction as semantic.
New Identity
But let’s be optimistic for once. We woke one late January morning to find that things had changed while we were looking elsewhere. There’s a new mood in Northern Ireland that suggests progress.
It has been like watching an elephant gestate and then give birth. It’s been too long in the getting here and a whole generation has been devastated by the ruinous and murderous divisions. But better late than never.
Some hard realities will inevitably emerge. Like the fact that Northern Ireland’s economy is entirely dependent on the public sector, ie the British taxpayer. And the fact that, as the conflict winds down, people are going to have to find a new identity that isn’t predicated on the Troubles or British/Irish rhetorics, or old scores, generations deep.
In a way, while Northern Ireland’s place on the map is secure, it’s going to disappear off the stage unless some new reason is found for being noticed. Like becoming the next Silicon Valley. Like building a self-sustaining economy. Like matching the swaggering economic progress of the Celtic Tiger…
It can be done and the recent changes open the door. But to develop in any meaningful way, mind-sets have to change.
That takes its own time. But here’s hoping.