Republicans making better use of the British solution than unionists

IT’S an awful thing to say, but there’s some truth to national stereotypes.

I’m writing this from the south of France, and out the window I can see French families sitting to dinner in the town square. Mama and papa, grandparents and children all around a table groaning with food and wine, with les enfants too busy tucking into their fourth course to parley, let alone squabble.

It’s not a sight you’d usually see at home, or in Britain, where I was last week. Talking about Northern Ireland with political friends, it’s clear the British have their own way of thinking. Most voiced strong support for the Good Friday agreement, and think it will work. One described it as “a very British solution”, by which she meant it encapsulated the values of common-sense, fair play, and pragmatism, all of which the British regard as their national virtues.

Another English friend described how long ago, just before World War I , the Irish question threatened to drag the whole of the United Kingdom into civil conflict. Efforts at mediation stalled around what Winston Churchill later called the “dreary steeples” of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Specifically, no agreement could be reached on whether Tyrone should become part of a southern State, or remain in the north. To the British, the solution was obvious: divide the disputed county in two. But neither of the warring factions would agree that most of what they wanted was better than nothing at all, and the opportunity for an agreed settlement was lost.

According to this friend, the Belfast agreement is fundamentally the application of the same “divide the bloody thing in two” mentality. In this case the division is political rather than territorial. The key phrase is “parity of esteem”. If the new statelet it going to equally esteem nationalism and unionism, what we’re looking at is equal numbers of Tricolours and Union Jacks, equal numbers of Catholic and Protestant policemen, and so on.

Of course, it’s tough for the unionists that the new institutions generally don’t carry any expressions of Britishness, apart from a few tokens such as the flying of the Union flag on a few days each year. In the recent past the same flag fluttered defiantly over heavily-fortified police stations and the RUC band played God Save the Queen at the graduation ceremonies in Queen’s University. Then, unionists could imagine themselves the standard bearers for civilised (British) values in a hostile world, rather like the white settlers in old cowboy films. Now, the Indians have stormed the defences, and it’s Ode to Joy at Queen’s and a Sinn Féin Lord Mayor laying the wreath at the Cenotaph.

Many unionists find it hard to adjust to this new dispensation. There’s even a concerted effort by anti-agreement unionism to argue that the Good Friday settlement hasn’t brought even relative peace. Seizing on every violent incident, they claim that the “peace” is an invention of Tony Blair, or Gerry Adams, or Dr John Reid. No good will come of it, they warn darkly.

You’d wonder if they’re living on the same planet as the rest of us. Don’t they remember what it used to be like? Don’t they ever walk around the shopping area in Belfast and marvel at the crowds thronging the once-deserted streets? Nowadays, if you bring a visitor to Belfast, the only thing to show them is normality. No army patrols, no heavily-armed policemen, no bombed hotels, no unsettling beat of ever-present helicopters. A few years ago I’d an appointment to meet someone in the Europa Hotel, or what was left of it after a bomb. That day we were the only customers the staff had seen. Now the place is buzzing.

Some people point to the nightly rioting at the flashpoints as evidence that there’s no peace in the north. Yes, it’s a nasty business, but it’s small scale compared to what used to happen. It’s not too long ago that David Trimble and Billy Wright were organising strategy at Drumcree and the entire province was at the barricades. Nor is it a million years since Sinn Fein refused to condemn violence. Compare this to Martin McGuinness’s comment that last week’s murder of a civilian contractor at an army base was “totally wrong”.

In their heyday, the unionists created what David Trimble has acknowledged was a “cold house” for Catholics. At the foundation of the northern state, there was an armed Protestant “policeman” for every two Catholic families in the six counties. And over the following years, the Northern unionist community did precious little to build an integrated society. This is not to suggest they deserved what they got from the IRA, but merely to acknowledge that they partly created the conditions for evil extremism to flourish.

But it’s hard not to sympathise with them now. Not many southerners would fancy a Sinn Féin education minister visiting their children’s school, or a Sinn Féin health minister appearing on their hospital wards. And we southerners didn’t have to endure what the unionists endured during the troubles. In the main, we weren’t losing friends to terrorist bombs and bullets, and living in fear of our own lives.

Perhaps a majority of unionists could buy parity of esteem and all that entails if they thought political change would end there. But there’s a widespread view that a united Ireland is inevitable, mainly due to changing population patterns in Northern Ireland. As one English person inelegantly put it to me this week, the republican movement failed with their bombing, but will succeed with their breeding. And while Sinn Féin uses different language, there’s no doubt that it sold the ceasefires to its own hardliners partly on this analysis, and that many unionists also believe it.

It’s an essentially sectarian viewpoint. Unionists fear that John Hume’s “agreed Ireland” is but a stepping stone for republicans, and republicans believe the same, settling for an interim arrangement until they can outnumber their unionist neighbours and bring about unity by majority vote. Perhaps little else could be expected from a terrorist organisation.

And yet, recent events suggest that republicanism may be moving beyond this win-lose mentality. Some weeks ago Alex Maskey, the first Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Belfast, laid a wreath to commemorate those who’d died in British uniform during World War I. Then the IRA issued its apology to their civilian victims. Both occasions are remarkable, not for themselves, but for the proof they display of a republican movement that is at last showing generous intent.

Many unionists, perhaps a majority, are prepared to deny reality by claiming the agreement hasn’t brought peace. In contrast, republicans seem to be thriving in the new environment, and be moved to previously unimagined generosity towards their enemies. Perhaps the recent gestures suggest republicanism has moved closer to the preferred British approach of “divide it in two”, and away from “victory or defeat”. If so, it will be one of the great ironies of history that the nationalists proved better able to adopt the British solution than the unionists were.