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Analysis North’s political process grinds to a halt

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Jack Holland

As the British and Irish governments move closer to "parking" the Good Friday Agreement, the most ambitious attempt in decades to find a solution to the long-running Northern Ireland conflict may have ground to a halt. As a result, reliable sources say, the political process and the peace process have effectively split.

The peace process continues, with the maintenance of the IRA and major loyalist organizations’ cease-fires. But the political process that began some 18 months ago with the all-party negotiations faces what some view as a terminal crisis. The prospect of its effective suspension over the summer could bring about its collapse, with little hope of a renewal in the fall.

The immediate issue which has led to the current crisis is the dispute between the Ulster Unionist Party and Sinn Fein over the decommissioning of IRA weapons, a precondition demanded by the Unionists before the IRA’s political representatives are allowed into the new executive.

The new executive in which Sinn Fein can claim two seats should have been established in February. But due to the decommissioning controversy, the deadline was moved back to April. When parties to the agreement failed to get around the issue, the Irish and British government’s promulgated a compromise in the form of the Hillsborough Declaration. However, it has been rejected, leaving London and Dublin with no way forward other than to encourage the parties to continue talking.

"We are now into the management of enmity," commented a source close to the talks process.

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That enmity could greatly increase during the coming months, thanks to the annual Orange marching crisis at Drumcree. This year, thousands of Orangemen are threatening to converge on the scene from all over Northern Ireland and from parts of Scotland as well. Catholic residents who continue to resist the parades have been embittered by the assassination of Rosemary Nelson, the nationalist lawyer who was identified with the attempt to halt the Orange marches past the Catholic enclave of Garvaghy Road.

Any widespread outbreak of violence would be sure to further endanger the survival of the agreement and make any hope of restarting in the fall remote indeed.

The governments insist that they will continue the talks. They are especially concerned about the effect that parking the agreement might have on other aspects of it. The Patten Commission on policing is due to report its findings sometime during the summer. But if the assembly and the executive have not been established, there will be no local political forum where the commission’s findings might be debated. This consideration might lead the British government to delay the publication of the findings until the fall.

There is also a fear that in the absence of decommissioning, any proposals seeking substantial reforms of the police would provoke a violent reaction among loyalists, for whom the handling of the RUC is a sensitive issue. An indication of just how contentious an issue it is came last week during a visit to New York of David Ervine, the spokesman for the UVF-linked Progressive Unionist Party. He reacted angrily to a suggestion that the IRA and Sinn Fein might reject anything other than drastic reform of the police.

"How dare they," he said. "If the IRA don’t like it, that’s tough." He warned that Protestants, who overwhelmingly support the RUC, would not tolerate too much tampering with it and expressed his "disgust" at the activities of U.S. congressmen Ben Gilman and Chris Smith, who are involved in the hearings on the RUC being held currently in Washington, D.C.

"Protestants feel that it is time to circle the wagons again," Ervine said at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, where he was the guest speaker last week.

The minister for political development in Britain’s Northern Ireland Office, Paul Murphy, who was also in New York last week, gave a more upbeat outlook on the agreement’s future. He said that the Hillsborough Declaration "has not been abandoned as a working document" but that there would "have to be some variations."

"No one’s walking away from the process," he stressed. Murphy said it had to be kept in mind how much had been done so far.

"The prisoners have been released, the equality commission is at work, as is the Patten commission. . . . Everything’s ready to go," he said. "The financial arrangements are in place. We could devolve powers next week."

Murphy said he felt confident that the different parties were eager to assume the reins of government with some £7 billion (about $11 billion) to spend among the 10 different executive departments.

"But everything is voluntary," he said. "The success of the agreement was that the parties themselves did it."

However, by this week, though talks had resumed in Belfast, there was as yet no sign that Sinn Fein and the UUP would be able to reach a compromise.

In 1998, the political process and the peace process came together and the fruit of that union was the Good Friday peace agreement. But if indeed the political and peace processes have now parted, it will not be the first time. In 1991 and ‘ 92, the Brooke-Mayhew talks took place without a peace process. From 1994-97, there was a peace process but without Sinn Fein’s participation in the talks there was no meaningful political process. So each can survive without the other — for a time.

The question that will become increasingly important as the summer goes on is how long can the peace process last without a political process to sustain it?

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