Honourable but superfluous: Adams and Ahern discuss peace process with eye on Gaza
Gerry Adams and Bertie Ahern at an event in Belfast in April 2023 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Picture date: Monday April 17, 2023.
The Skibbereen Eagle had an outing in Leinster House on Tuesday. An Oireachtas committee debated at length how it might find a solution to the impasse in the Middle East. Netanyahu, they’re keeping an eye on you.
The foreign affairs committee heard from Bertie Ahern and Gerry Adams, with a view to finding some common ground between the peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement and the ending of the ancient conflict in Palestine.
The premise was honourable, but somehow felt superfluous to the real world. Asking Ahern for his insights does make sense. His overall legacy is mixed, but on the North it is unimpeachable. He showed a patience and resolve that imbued him with huge knowledge of bringing people together.
At Tuesday's meeting, Ahern gave an idiot’s guide to the long road to Good Friday, which included making “incremental movements towards the end of violence and conditions for an inclusive process”.
The key aspect to success, he said, was “the challenge of implementation”.
That is far more important than it may sound, as has been observed over the last 30 years. If there was any value to be taken from the afternoon, it was the insights provided by Ahern, usually offered in a weary yet patient voice, because he knows that the inches towards peace are hard fought and hard won.
Realistically, however, this State would be highly unlikely to feature in any efforts to broker a peace in the Middle East. We are seen as being hugely pro-Palestinian, which is accurate, and anti-Semitic, which is not.
There is little reason to believe Israel would accept the bona fides of this State as an honest broker. Still, there is no harm in a little jaw-jaw in the bowels of Leinster House.
Why Adams was there is puzzling. For the greater part, he simply parroted Sinn Féin’s talking points on the conflict in the Middle East, rather than offering the benefit of his experience here. He inferred that enacting the occupied territories bill would be a step on the road to peace.
As for his own recollection of what happened on this island, his various contributions suggested that the Provisional IRA would have stopped killing people a lot earlier if only the British and Irish governments stopped putting obstacles in their way.
Far from planting bombs in public places, running protection rackets, and making common cause with the dictator Gaddafi, the Provos were actually pursuing peace but were stopped at every turn apparently. Who would’ve known? Who remembers?
Adams noted that if the government had listened to motions by Sinn Féin on the occupied territories as far back as 2014, the world would be in a better place now.
Instead, “it never happened until after the calamity”. The calamity, as he references it, was the murderous attack by Hamas on mainly civilians on October 7, 2023.
Adams did provide one noticeable contribution: That the various factions with influence over the Palestinians need to unite if there is going to be a real attempt at brokering peace in the wake of the genocide committed against them.
Beyond that though, it was more or less a party political broadcast on behalf of the party in which he probably retains cult status. To be fair to Ahern, he did not attempt to defend or promote the positions of Fianna Fáil.
At the end of it all we didn’t know much more. The chair of the committee, John Lahart, set out that he wanted to see what could be done after viewing a performance of the Peace Proms, a hugely successful cross-border initiative set up over 20 years ago.
The sentiment is well placed. How it will make a blind bit of difference to the harrowing and all but intractable conflict thousands of miles away remains to be seen.
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