Approaching the 15th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement the News Letter is critical – Things have not gone according to plan… For starters, instead of getting peace we got a “peace process”, an endless process…It is hard to think of any other conflict after which it has taken so long for the two sides to come to terms with each other, perhaps because the “peace process” has little to do with delivering peace.
As the winter gloom continues we start to look forward to Easter, and with it the fifteenth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
The expectation was that after the Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland would become normal, that politics would morph from green and orange tribalism into new alignments in left and right discourse, and that instead of repeatedly fighting yesterday’s battles the focus would move to the future.
Things have not gone according to plan.
For starters, instead of getting peace we got a “peace process”, an endless process.
It is hard to think of any other conflict after which it has taken so long for the two sides to come to terms with each other, perhaps because the “peace process” has little to do with delivering peace.
The peace process is a lucrative gravy train for politicians, “community activists”, and assorted liberal academics and “commentators” to ride on. If the process ever came to an end with peace and normality delivered to Northern Ireland, just imagine how many people would lose their incomes and their influence. As George Orwell noted in ‘1984’, peace does not suit the political classes.
The fifteen anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement is an opportunity to ask “what has been achieved?”
While violence has massively decreased, it has not gone away: dissident republicans are still killing, and the other terrorist groups are also active when it suits them. The threat of a return to violence still trumps all normal democratic norms. Northern Ireland is still a society where the hard men call the shots.
Society still remains divided, “peace walls”, as twisted a piece of doublespeak as “peace process”, still scar Belfast; children go to different schools, play different games, live in different areas and grow up to vote for different parties. Many are still used as cannon fodder by the riot organisers.
Public services such as health care and public transport still lag far behind what they should be and there has been no meaningful economic development despite all those economic conferences and thousands of pounds spent on PR photography.
Politics is still about tacky spin, managing welfare, playing the blame game, and avoiding responsibility to deliver a better future.
So, it seems that all that has been achieved is the reduction of something that should not have been happening in the first place, and even that has not been without cost.
From the perspective of many, perhaps most, unionists, the peace process is a euphemism for a constant stream of concessions to nationalism.
Unionists were led to believe that the Good Friday Agreement meant that the constitutional question had been parked, and that all sides would concentrate on making Northern Ireland a better place. Instead unionists have also had to endure years of offensive revisionism, during which IRA atrocities are whitewashed out of history while unionists and the British are painted as the sole aggressors.
Northern Ireland has been blighted by a myriad of expensive quangos that appear to have no purpose other than to facilitate the continuation of nationalist agendas, and often headed by nationalist and leftwing politicians. Perhaps this has built confidence in nationalist communities, but it has eroded and undermined unionist engagement in politics.
But nationalism, despite the pretence to the contrary, does not want an agreed future, or to build confidence amongst its electorate, or any of the other hypocritical platitudes that are the droning soundtrack of the Northern Ireland peace process.
When a run of opinion polls showed that people from a Roman Catholic background were becoming more relaxed about the union, nationalist politicians reverted to their well-practiced prod and provoke technique, developed decades previously around the “parades issue”, and launched a shoddy little culture war in the council chambers.
After naming kids playgrounds after terrorists and passing motions of support for terrorists and criminals, nationalists then demanded the removal of the Union Flag from Belfast City Hall. This constant prodding eventually provoked the desired effect, a crude backlash which drove many disillusioned unionists onto the streets, and back under the sway of the hard men and street corner gangsters. Faced with angry loyalists on the street, many wavering nationalists will have retreated back to the security of green trenches.
Another result of this renewed and virulent pan-nationalist campaign has been to push unionism into a unity bunker. Unionist unity, as it currently seems to be being played out is a retrograde step, a further deviation from normality, but, it is the only logical outcome. It is basic political game theory: unless nationalism and unionism both make a break from the past, then neither can.
Those of us who had hoped and expected to see the last 15 years deliver something akin to a normal (and cross community) political landscape emerge in Northern Ireland, with conservatives, liberal and socialists competing to deliver economic, environmental and social improvement, now have to accept defeat. The politics of division and the past have triumphed and there is no option left but to retreat to the old battle lines.
Published on Wednesday 20 February 2013
http://www.newsletter.co.uk/peace-process-a-gravy-train-for-politicians-and-community-activists-1-4803275