Shadow assembly will solve nothing

REMEMBER Bill Clinton’s horrible gaffe? No, not the blatant lies he spun about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, but the joke he made about the Irish during an address to the United Nations.

Here it is in all its glory and gory:

“I spent an enormous amount of time trying to help the people in the land of my forebears in Northern Ireland get over 600 years of religious fights. And every time they make an agreement to do it, they’re like a couple of drunks walking out of the bar for the last time - when they get to the swinging door they turn around and go back in and say, I just can’t quite get there.”

Poor Slick had to make an abject apology for the misbegotten metaphor.

But for the life of me, I could never figure out what all the fuss was about. Granted, people with microscopically thin skin might have taken offence at the ‘drunken Irish’ slight. But as a synopsis of the Irish peace process, it was spot on.

For us complacent southerners, last weekend’s craven violence in the heart of our capital city brought it all back home for us.

We may be an independent republic. We may have a mature and peaceful democracy. Eighty years of separation may have inured us from the immediacy of the Troubles. But there remains an overlap. We remain protagonists, not bystanders.

The right of citizens to freely express their views is a cornerstone of a functioning democracy.

Sadly, the concept isn’t as simple and neat in practice. It’s all very well quoting Voltaire’s dictum that I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to my death your right to say it.

What happens when it’s a group of neo-Nazis calling for the extermination of Jews?

Or the Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa against Salman Rushdie?

Or a protesting Muslim in London wearing the garb of a suicide bomber?

Or for that matter, a Danish cartoonist mocking the image of the Prophet Mohammed?

There is a point where free speech comes up against the cliff-face of incitement to hatred and there ain’t no getting over it.

The Love Ulster march last Saturday could never be considered in that in extremis category. But it was very obvious there were a wasp nest of political sensitivities surrounding it.

The marching season in the North is regarded as the scrub-brush of the political landscape.

Just one nasty confrontation along a contentious route could spark it all into conflagration and raze everything.

The perils of the process hitting the doldrums in the run-up to the marching season has been a recurring theme of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s for the past few years.

So much effort goes into dampening down the mood surrounding marches - extending from political initiatives, to comprehensive consultation, to the work of the Parades Commission.

But for some reason, none of those realities were apparent in the planning for last Saturday.

The low-key approach of the gardaí was founded on what seemed a solid enough rationale. But there was also a naivety there, an unfounded expectation that the tribal animus of the North wouldn’t transfer to the safe and sane South.

Justice Minister Michael McDowell argued that as Irish citizens (albeit those who would deny such citizenship) the marchers had a right to march.

But in the real world, without resolution in the North, was it too early? And was the route - down O’Connell Street on a busy Saturday afternoon - the only feasible one?

And back to the swing doors. Bertie Ahern will meet Tony Blair on Wednesday to see what they can do to get the process out of its current rut.

The British are now pressing for a shadow assembly (with no functioning first minister, deputy first minister or executive). They say they will impose a sunset clause of six months, at which time the executive is set up or the assembly is collapsed.

But there is a new reality in the North. The IRA is no longer the problem. The provisional movement has delivered what was asked of it. But the problem now - and the SDLP and Sinn Féin are unusually of the same mind on this - is the DUP and its intransigence.

A shadow assembly will ultimately only lead to another swinging door bringing us all back to where we started from.