February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The British government, reluctant as ever to draw the Northern Ireland problem any closer to its governmental bosom than it must, acted only to preempt the threatened walkout by the Ulster Unionist party, disgruntled as it is by the series of incidents linking republicans to dubious (to say the least) activities.
Familiar, too, are the predictable recriminations issuing from politicians who seem at times to live in parallel universes. However, on this occasion there was a somewhat different note struck when Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams acknowledged in his remarks that republicans did carry some of the responsibility for what had happened. This could be the beginning of wisdom.
Progress cannot be made as long as everyone insists that they are right and everybody else is wrong. Republicans should accept the fact that maintaining the IRA while being in government inevitably will lead to incidents that will deepen the distrust of their fellow citizens who happen to be of the Unionist persuasion. Unionists must accept the fact that nationalists have cause to suspect a party that has always dragged its feet when it came to welcoming the Good Friday agreement and seems too eager to seize every opportunity to prove that it is not working. For generations they have suspected each other, and not without reason — Unionists did scheme to keep Catholics out and republicans did plot to overthrow the state. But the agreement was meant to provide the context in which those suspicions would dissolve away. That clearly has not happened.
There are still enclaves of embattled nationalists, subjected to sectarian threats. There is still an armed, illegal army linked to Sinn Fein. There are still Unionists who have not fully accepted the logic of the Good Friday agreement. But all of these facts are not separate, suspended in a political vacuum. They are all clearly linked. Suspicions, that is, are mutually dependent.
Four years into the Good Friday agreement it would make sense for republicans to come out and say it clearly and unequivocally: The war is over. It has been for years. The era of the nudge and the wink has long past. Four years on, it would make sense for the Ulster Unionists to act as if they really do accept the changes that are transforming Northern Ireland, and show that they are happy to live with them, whatever their outcome. That might be a beginning to the road back to devolved government.