“Northern Ireland: memory or amnesia?: Peace walls stand; Good Friday Agreement wobbles”, Le Monde diplomatique

By Simon Jones, Paris, June 2018 Issue

While the UK and Irish Republic discuss the post-Brexit border, in Northern Ireland, despite the Good Friday Agreement, people remain stranded in past trauma.

The world still ignores Northern Ireland’s internal politics, mostly speculating on the future of the UK-Irish border after Brexit, with Dublin and London the only actors, or wringing hands about the backwardness of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the Conservatives’ partners in power in the UK parliament. Twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), Brexit threatens the few positive changes, while the people of Northern Ireland still deal with violence and mistrust.

The geography of the Troubles is still visible as peace walls, 20-foot fortifications dividing Catholic and Protestant communities geared to Irish unification or UK loyalism. They replaced makeshift barriers erected during 1960s and 70s rioting. Violence is now far less intense, but social issues remain: Northern Ireland’s suicide rate is more than twice London’s (1). Deaths from drug and alcohol abuse have risen sharply in the last decade. More than 25% of the working-age population is economically inactive, neither in work nor looking for it.

The People Before Profit (PBP) party, active in Ireland and North Ireland since 2005, has established a non-sectarian foothold, basing its policies on fighting poverty and dealing with social issues. Gerry Carroll leads a network of activists with strong connections to the social issues of the areas they represent: ‘Elections don’t change the world but it’s not clear what else might.’ He acknowledges that even urgent social issues are unlikely to start a cross-community movement in the absence of established politics and identifies the biggest obstacle to change: ‘We still live in a sectarian society’ (2). Most Northern politicians I spoke with acknowledge that progress has relied on Dublin or London or Brussels to pull the region from its malaise. But attention has diminished, and US involvement has fallen away since a generation of politicians whose ancestral affection for Ireland led them to push for peace left office.

‘Everyone’s political in Derry,’ said Colum Eastwood, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), who came of political age after the GFA. Derry was the birthplace of the 1960s civil rights movement whose thwarted aims burst into the Troubles, after Bloody Sunday in 1972 when British paratroopers fired on unarmed civilians. It is still a tense place. SDLP involvement in drafting the GFA won its then leader John Hume the Nobel Peace Prize. But the GFA was more popular outside Northern Ireland than at home (3). Almost immediately, voters turned from moderate parties towards Sinn Féin and the DUP, which had supported armed struggle and were not initially involved in the peace process. Their rise paralysed the NI Assembly until the 2006 St Andrews’ Agreement restored power to Belfast; it also reinforced the two largest parties’ unwillingness to compromise, and created loopholes to circumvent a theoretically constructive political process. For 17 months, the Assembly has been suspended with no signs of the impasse being bridged soon.

Fresh Republican groups

In Northern Ireland, the distinction between political and paramilitary was not always clear. No truth and reconciliation process made it into the final draft of the GFA, while police and media investigations have led to allegations of collusion, involving many murders, between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries. Decommissioning the IRA hasn’t stopped new republican groups from forming. Violence continues, including the murder of police and prison officers. Europol claims more than half of Europe’s terrorist attacks are in Northern Ireland (4).

Billy Hutchinson was jailed for involvement in two murders committed while he was a loyalist paramilitary in the 1970s (5). He is now leader of the Progressive Unionist Party: ‘We’ve wasted 20 years … We keep coming back to the same things, and they’re all conflict-related.’ He acknowledges that, in the absence of a reconciliation process, the only alternative is investigation and prosecution of individual cases, which has a political element. Did the lack of a reconciliation process make him sad? ‘I don’t think I would want truth and reconciliation. We needed to deal with the legacy … the first thing you do is deal with the victims.’ He said no other unionist party would call for even that level of insight into past crimes, and in another decade those with insight into the Troubles, including forced disappearances and unsolved murders, will be dead.

The poet Seamus Heaney, in his 1995 Nobel Literature Prize lecture, told the story of Kingsmills, South Armagh, where factory workers coming home in a minibus were ambushed one January night in 1976. Masked gunmen asked any Catholics among them to step forward. There was only one, and as he moved, believing the gunmen were vengeful Protestant paramilitaries who would execute him, a Protestant workmate gripped his hand, urging silently, as Heaney put it, ‘no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you’. He still stepped out. The gunmen were IRA. They pushed him aside and shot his workmates. Heaney said the future was born of the grip, not the gun. Whatever political processes there are now in Northern Ireland depend more on amnesia than cooperation, dangerous in this place.