This week’s riots in east Belfast have been blamed by some in the loyalist community on a lack of political leadership and a subsequent alienation from the peace process. That argument doesn’t stand much scrutiny. In the year since the resignation of Progressive Unionist party leader Dawn Purvis, it has become depressingly clear among acute observers of Belfast’s loyalist communities that the loyalist paramilitary UVF has been purposefully ratcheting up tensions among its youthful foot soldiers to show some muscle.

Lack of jobs and social opportunities were excuses that once held weight for sympathetic observers of the Protestant working class. It is now abundantly clear that those issues are being manipulated by darker forces intent on agitation. Once again, the loyalist paramilitaries are damaging their own communities.

If we are looking for social context to the recent riots, we have to dig deeper. The loss of industry is one key reason for the current dystopia in Protestant working-class areas. Some observers have maintained that the decline of the shipyards is punishment for a hubristic sense of primacy among the Protestant working class. There can be little doubt that in the years between the formation of the Northern Ireland state and the beginning of the Troubles in the 1960s, Protestant workers did enjoy an unbalanced presence in Belfast’s traditional industries. Socially, however, working-class Protestants in east Belfast would have had many of the same gripes as their Catholic neighbours.

Protestant workers would also have seen their counterparts in industrial outfits in Clydeside, Merseyside and Tyneside – components of the wider British community that the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland saw themselves as part of – and wondered how exactly they as British citizens were in any way privileged. While the work provided by the “yard” may have been allocated to a majority of Protestants, the erratic market in which they operated meant that employment security was not always guaranteed. In contrast, by the late 1960s many of their Catholic counterparts had begun to see the progression of the first generation to benefit from the Education Act of 1947.

The decline of industry also affected the influence of Protestant trade unionists within communities: skilled and semi-skilled workers saw their ability to act as civilising influences in their areas wane as the vigilantes formed into paramilitaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

During the 1960s, there had been many progressive educators in Protestant schools. One of these was John Malone, head teacher of Orangefield Boys’ Secondary School in east Belfast. Malone was renowned for marshalling his underachieving charges to believe that they were the best schoolchildren around. The alumni of Orangefield at this time suggests that industry was perhaps not the catch-all occupation that history would have us believe. Van Morrison was one pupil who passed through Orangefield’s gates during Malone’s tenure. Even that most reasonable of loyalist voices, David Ervine, had fond memories of being taught by the well-respected educationalist from Downpatrick.

Malone and men like him saw their best efforts dashed when the Troubles started, as children often became dangerously enchanted by the subcultures being thrown up by the violence around them and were increasingly corralled into participating in riots and attending mass political rallies – some of which coincided with school hours.

Population movements due to violence and intimidation in the early 1970s also affected the vitality of Protestant church congregations. One church in particular, Macrory Memorial, has lain derelict for nearly 40 years on the New Lodge/Tiger’s Bay interface of north Belfast since subscribers to the church’s weekly offerings dwindled to zero in 1973. In the early years of the conflict, many Protestant working-class communities were decimated as people fled the threat of the Provisional IRA and the dreadnoughts of their local loyalist paramilitaries.

The 1960s may have borne witness to a hardening of Protestant working-class attitudes, but this bitterness became further calcified when the Troubles erupted and school attendances declined, church congregations disappeared and inner-city communities became “sink estates” controlled by the new loyalist paramilitaries of the UVF and UDA.

To put it bluntly, the community spirit of the Protestant working class was consigned to the dustbin of history. This civic-mindedness has never been allowed to recover, due in large part to the loyalist paramilitaries who demonstrated the other night in east Belfast that they are not yet ready to allow their communities the emancipation they truly deserve.

The Orange marching season in the north of Ireland always provides its share of problems. Some of it is the mundane business of finding a way through the inevitable traffic chaos that results from major Orange demonstrations. But this year, as in previous years, a small number of contentious Orange parades have been the focus for confrontation and conflict.

There is also no doubt that a tiny element of so-called dissident republican groups – some of whom are little more than criminal gangs – were able to mobilise an antisocial element to engage in street disorder. Their efforts in Ardoyne failed to stop the Orange march they opposed but succeeded in disrupting life for the nationalist community.

Their actions also succeeded in taking the spotlight off the loyal orders. The fact is that violence around Orange marches is not new. These marches have been responsible for sectarian strife in the 19th century, the 20th and now the 21st century.

But this is not an entirely Irish phenomenon. English Tories have exploited it since the first Home Rule bill in 1886. The Conservatives played the “Orange card” then, and won. William Gladstone lost power and Randolph Churchill subsequently coined the phrase: “Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right!” In an echo of this the present British secretary of state Owen Paterson joined with the Orange Order and the unionist parties in a pre-election effort earlier this year to secure unionist unity.

Those who do not learn the lessons of history are often doomed to repeat them: 41 years ago it was an Orange march in Derry that led to the Battle of the Bogside and the pogroms in Belfast. And the following year, 1970, it was another Orange march on the Springfield Road in west Belfast that led to the first serious confrontation between nationalists and the British army.

Little wonder that host communities feel besieged and are fearful when the marching orders insist on parading through areas where they are not wanted. The Orange Order still refuses to talk directly to the host communities.

Earlier this year the DUP and Sinn Féin agreed a new way forward to resolve this issue. It seeks to legally protect the rights of the marching orders, and equally those of host communities. Two weeks ago the “Grand Lodge” of the Orange Order rejected the draft proposals.

I have written again this year to the leaderships of the marching orders asking to meet. I have received no reply. At its core this refusal to talk is about power. For more than 150 years the Orange Order was the glue that held together the interests of the unionist political and business establishment and its urban and rural working class.

After partition, the northern state was their state. It didn’t matter that some unionists lived in appalling housing or worked in terrible conditions. The northern state – the Orange state – belonged to them. Orangeism gave unionists a sense of belonging, of cohesion and superiority.

And now all of that is changing. The sectarian certainties of the past have gone. Political unionism has compromised, and executive and assembly power is based on equality. And the Orange community finds it difficult, and some within it impossible, to come to terms with the new realities.

So the issue of parades is only a manifestation of a bigger problem – sectarianism. Tackling this and breaking down the prejudices that exist within unionism and Orangeism is one of the big challenges facing all of us. But the starting point must be dialogue. And this is particularly important in light of the efforts by some on the fringes of unionism and nationalism to provoke conflict and street disorder in recent days.

The violence of the last few days in Northern Ireland has been in marked contrast to the earlier part of this year’s marching season. The Drumcree march and many other marches passed off peacefully, or largely peacefully. Now, however, we have again seen people out on the streets rioting, we have seen police officers and members of the public injured, and we have seen shotguns, blast bombs, petrol bombs, bricks and other missiles thrown across communities and at the police. We have seen again the use of baton rounds and water cannon.

The scenes of destruction evoke the memories of years gone by. There were reports not only of hooded, masked men engaging in violence but also of small children on top of the shops at Ardoyne, a traditional location for hurling down missiles on anyone below. This violence, though, is on a smaller scale, looks very clearly orchestrated and bears the marks of dissident republicanism.

Great work has been done again this year. There have been 2,423 marches in Northern Ireland so far: 603 of them took place yesterday. There are a further 856 marches to come: 841 will have taken place by 31 August. Marching is certainly still a strong part of the culture. Some 65% of our marches are unionist and loyalist and 3% are republican and nationalist. The remaining 32% are motor cavalcades, girl guides on parade, and so on.

While the Orange Order talks of Orangefest and there are portrayals of the marching season – and particularly the Twelfth – as a community festival, that is not the experience of the whole community. The Orange Order celebrates the victory of Protestant William of Orange over Catholic King James at the battle of the Boyne, and does not permit Catholics to belong to the order. For many, the marches are times when they are constrained from moving freely around their local area, when roads are closed, tension rises, and there is the fear of attacks on people and property.

The marches are preceded by bonfires on the 11th night – enormous fires, one of which this year destroyed a family home and put others in jeopardy. On the top of these great bonfires, built very often of wooden pallets and old tyres (an environmental disaster), with any old rubbish thrown on them, can be seen the Irish national flag, the Tricolour, and even nationalist and republican election posters which have been carefully kept for the Twelfth bonfire.

The bonfires are not a safe place – every year people are seriously injured, and because the bonfires are built on roads and car parks there is damage to the infrastructure. At a time of financial stringency tens of thousands of pounds will be spent on repairing this damage.

There have been more sinister events recently. A very serious bomb attack on a young Catholic police officer, a landmine explosion in South Armagh, and the discovery of several dissident republican bombs have caused great concern. The memory of the Omagh bomb and the deaths of 29 people and two unborn children are still fresh in our minds, 12 years on. There is fear that dissident republicans will kill a police officer or succeed in setting off another bomb.

The combination of rioting, attacks on police and occasional bombs marks a very real deterioration in the security situation, and has the capacity to further delay our return to greater stability and economic development.

Notwithstanding the violence of the past few days, it remains the case that the majority of our people are committed to peace. They do not want a return to terror and destruction. The challenge for everyone is to build the shared future which will ensure that never again will paramilitary violence destroy lives.

To an outsider, even a sympathetic one, Northern Ireland feels strange at the height of the marching season. The zenith comes on July 12, when tens of thousands of Protestant men, wearing sober suits, bowler hats and orange sashes, parade through the streets to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne.

That was the victory, in central Ireland, of a Dutch Protestant king, William of Orange, over a Catholic English monarch, James II, in 1690. In these commemorations, Christianity and newer forms of sacred history are fused. Indeed, there is an old joke about a tourist, caught up in an Orange parade, who shyly enquires who King William was. “Read the Bible!” a marcher retorts.

As a Frenchman who teaches and researches Irish history, I know which holy texts the Orangeman had in mind: the historical and semi-historical episodes that have become part of the sacred mythology of Ireland’s rival tribes.

But I still find the 12th an odd experience. After the din of flutes, bagpipes and giant drums, bonfires transform Belfast into a strange city of light.

Two days later, a quieter celebration takes place in Belfast. In a pub called Kelly’s Cellars, supporters of the Irish Republican cause mark Bastille Day, seeking to fuse their political movement with that of revolutionary France. Wine and cheese are served, and a group of men — tippling Guinness rather than Beaujolais — sing the Marseillaise. In a surreal touch, bits of red, white and blue bunting — used two days previously to celebrate Britishness and the Union Flag — are recycled to recall the French tricolor.

The history lessons proclaimed by the Bastille festivities are a bit more subtle than those of the indignant Orangeman. On the pub’s walls, there is a mural that tells a significant story. It features Wolfe Tone and Henry McCracken — leaders of an Irish uprising in 1798, and both Protestants, as it happens — and a French flag crossed with an Irish banner, surrounded by France’s revolutionary slogan. What this recalls is the French force that landed in Ireland and helped the rebellion until the Franco-Irish cause was crushed by the British crown.

All true enough. Still, flattered as I am by this attachment to my country, I have to admit that Bastille Day in Belfast has little to do with France — just as Orange parades are remote from the Dutch dynasty of that name. Both events reveal more about Northern Ireland in the 21st century than they do about other countries and epochs. They tell us that although violence has largely ended, and Catholics and Protestants grumpily share power, they are still deeply divided — and keen to use any historical symbol to prove how different they are from one another.

It would be nice to believe that the determination of a few history buffs to celebrate Bastille Day marked a desire to break the cycle of religious violence — after all, the French Revolution was anticlerical. But most of the time, the only thing that unites Northern Ireland’s competing versions of the past, and their exponents, is a determination to exclude any real sense of shared memory.

Even those institutions that could help the communities form a common narrative are missing opportunities. Take a new section at the Ulster Museum. The events of 1914-1918 are shown on facing walls: One depicts World War I, remembered by Ulster Protestants as a time of huge sacrifice for Britain, and another the anti-British rising in Dublin of 1916. Wouldn’t it be better to create a single panel, incorporating all the awkward details — like the fact that many Catholics fought for Britain?

The frustrating thing, especially to an interested outsider, is that Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics do have a common history. They have all undergone a unique sort of suffering, the kind that goes with urban war in a small, introverted place where everybody has some connection to victims and perpetrators of violence.

One day, shared suffering could create a better social glue than any artificial links with other places or centuries. Because of its raw wounds, Northern Ireland really is different from Ireland or Britain. A Catholic from West Belfast and a Protestant from East Belfast really do understand one another at a level that outsiders cannot grasp.

If it ever takes hold, a common understanding of the past could open up the space for entirely new ideas about the future. But in the marching season, with the sound of drums vibrating in the air, such an understanding feels far away.

I was in the House of Commons on 1 February 1972 when defence minister Lord Balniel said of the Bloody Sunday massacre: “In each case, soldiers fired aimed shots at men identified as gunmen or bombers … in self-defence or in defence of their comrades who were threatened. I reject entirely the suggestion that they fired indiscriminately or that they fired into a peaceful and innocent crowd.”

Thirty-eight years and £191m later, Lord Saville has stated:

“The firing by soldiers of 1 Para on Bloody Sunday caused the deaths of 13 people and injury to a similar number, none of whom was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury. What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the army, and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.”

David Cameron has said the killings were “unjustified and unjustifiable“. There will be no more such inquiries.

Yet there is an ongoing, articulated need for the investigation of so many of the unsolved and of some of the “solved” atrocities of the Troubles.

The revelation that the then attorney general had stated that soldiers would not be prosecuted in respect of incidents that occurred while they were on duty; the fact that deaths and serious injuries caused by soldiers were effectively investigated only by the military for years (with no obvious outcome); the cover-up of the Bloody Sunday events; and the bizarre events surrounding the Stalker-Sampson inquiries all encouraged the suspicion that the state would not be accountable for the actions of its agents. The activities of paramilitaries, both loyalist and republican, have in many cases not been properly dealt with.

Many argue for closure in these issues, saying, we need to move on. However, international experience tells us that closing down does not necessarily bring closure. Nor does the adoption of a Widgery approach.

Sentences for pre-Good Friday agreement Troubles crimes cannot exceed two years. A number of pardons have been granted. Investigation leading to prosecution may not be possible, because of lost evidence, dead witnesses, and various interventions over the years. That may well be the case in the Bloody Sunday killings. The prosecution of each Troubles case should be considered on its merits, as other cases are.

As police ombudsman, I investigated many complaints where I found serious wrongdoing by police officers, often acting in conjunction with paramilitaries, both loyalist and republican. The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s historical inquiries team is concurrently investigating deaths in which the alleged perpetrators were either soldiers or (paramilitary) civilians. Many cases still await coroners’ inquests.

After Saville, there will inevitably be calls for further inquiries, for instance into the case of the 11 people who were shot dead by the Paras in Ballymurphy in 1971. What is now essential is the creation of a single, impartial, independent investigation office to deal with all the outstanding cases of the past. Properly funded and empowered for whatever period is necessary, working with full governmental co-operation, it could, in a much more cost-effective manner, deal with such cases. As Maya Angelou said: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

It was another “Good Friday” in the peace process yesterday. Hillsborough Castle was the setting for the final piece of the jigsaw of devolution which saw agreement between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist party on the transfer of policing and justice powers and other outstanding matters arising from the Good Friday and St Andrews agreements.

Many had thought it wouldn’t, couldn’t happen. That our respective positions were too far apart. But it did, and it was achieved primarily as a result of very intense discussions between Sinn Féin and the DUP. This is a hugely important, as well as symbolic moment. This is the political parties in the north of Ireland demonstrating our ability to negotiate a successful agreement together. It marks a new phase in the process.

The current crisis had been in progress for some time. Last year I had warned the British secretary of state that the political institutions were not sustainable in the longer term because they were not functioning on the basis of equality and partnership. Sinn Féin’s strong view was that the governments were in default of their obligations as guarantors of the Good Friday and the St Andrews agreements. London and Dublin are not facilitators. Their function is not to “close the gap between the parties”. Their duty is to uphold the agreements and hold the parties to what they had signed up to.

Ten days ago a protracted negotiation began. Sinn Féin’s focus was on getting agreement between the parties in the north. As the DUP finance minister Sammy Wilson put it, we needed a deal “made in Ulster” . But it could only be accomplished by the leaders of unionism working genuinely to secure a new beginning which would see the proper functioning of joined-up government based on equality and citizens’ rights.

The agreement that has now been reached will not only see the transfer of powers on policing and justice in April, but also by the end of the year the transfer of responsibility from London to Belfast for dealing with the issue of parades. We have also agreed a process to progress the rights of Irish language speakers, clear the backlog of executive papers and decisions which are still pending, and advance the all-Ireland aspects of the St Andrews agreement. It is a detailed and timeframed agreement.

Of course, there will be some who will rail against it. The naysayers will study the details, seeking points of criticism. But they are the minority. The vast majority want this process to work. Public opinion in recent weeks has overwhelmingly favoured a deal.

So, new and important progress has been made in consolidating the political institutions. The judgment on our success, however, will be in whether the process and the institutions deliver for citizens. As the parties negotiated, hundreds more job losses were announced in Belfast and Monkstown in County Antrim. The number of unemployed is rising; families are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. There are increasing numbers of children living in poverty, while our elderly choose between heating homes and buying food.

The reality is that for two years the executive and assembly have not been as effective as they should have been in developing strategies to tackle these problems. There is now a significant opportunity to change that. An opportunity to build a society based on respect, equality, partnership and fairness. Sinn Féin is an Irish republican party. As Martin McGuinness said yesterday, we believe in a united Ireland. And in two weeks’ time we will be hosting a conference in London to discuss this very issue.

But that doesn’t mean that Irish republicans and unionists cannot work together in the interests of those we represent. We can, and Sinn Féin is determined to make positive use of the opportunity that now exists to do that.

Well, golly. Northern Ireland’s politicians can’t agree. Forget Groundhog Day – we’ve already had our deja vu. And when they can’t agree, in fly the British and Irish prime ministers to try to sort things out. And after hours and hours of talks – no deal.

The stakes for this couldn’t be higher. Even after all-night talks, Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen had to fess up to no deal. The body language of the two ­leaders and their facial expressions kind of said: what on earth are we going to do with these people?

I guess the last thing Brown wanted this week was a trip to Belfast. Nor Cowen. Does Brown want to re-institute direct rule from London? Hell, no. Does Cowen want a destabilised Northern Ireland on the doorstep of the Republic of Ireland, while he’s trying to cope with the strange death of the Celtic tiger economy? Hell, no.

But it just shows how both men and their governments regard this problem as a major issue. For this, if no other ^­reason, Northern Ireland’s peace process is examined the world over as a model for resolving divided societies. Now, neither prime minister has invested as much time in this as their predecessors, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern. Do they really be want to be seen to fail? I don’t think so.

The prime ministers have said that the prospect of agreement is close to 80%, maybe even more. But we’ve been here before. The parties involved in Northern Ireland’s assembly know that policing and justice powers have to be devolved from London to Belfast. As do Brown and Cowen. Why hasn’t it happened? Without going into too much detail, unionists have enough difficulty with Martin McGuinness – a former IRA commander – in government at all, as deputy first minister of the devolved executive, never mind having him run the courts. Tough stuff (for unionists).

What unionists argue is that all the concessions have been in the republicans’/nationalists’ favour. What they forget is that the IRA decommissioned its weaponry: and that Sinn Féin signed up to backing policing and justice, and the courts. I suspect that people ­outside of Irish republicanism do not get just how much that was throwing away ­tablets of stone.

The overarching risk in all of this is that Sinn Féin could walk away from the assembly as it stands, and provoke an election where the unionist vote is split three ways – leaving Sinn Féin the largest party, and McGuinness the likely first minister in a new assembly. Picture even the most liberal unionist living with that.

There are a few days left to save this Northern Ireland assembly. If it can’t be retrieved, look out for direct rule: or worse – for unionists – joint authority between London and Dublin.

There’s an old adage in Northern ­Ireland: every time the unionists walk away from the table, the less there is for them when they come back.

A personal prediction? Some kind of halfway house deal will be done, fairly soon. The parties have invested too much in the process to let it go.

And everyone’s fear is this: the ­­republican dissident paramilitaries fill the vacuum. The message to Sinn Féin in their latest attacks (including as nasty and as vicious an attack as I can remember in 30 years, on Peadar Heffron, the Irish-speaking Catholic member of the new police force who encapsulates the province’s future) is that politics doesn’t work. They forget: violence doesn’t work either.

So in terms of preserving devolution, could the stakes be any higher? As one official said to me: “I’m pessimistic, but not without hope.”

If you offered an account of the past five days as a piece of a fiction to a publisher he would throw it back in your face and tell you that it was too unbelievable for anyone to buy.

Actually the real crisis this week at Stormont had little to do with the salacious details of Peter and Iris Robinson’s private lives. It relates to a much more plausible, elemental power play of “who eats whom”.

Yesterday brought to a close, for now at least, the most extraordinarily feverish week in Northern Ireland since the collapse of the Assembly in October 2002. In the end, Mr Robinson’s response to the controversy and media fire around his wife’s extramarital affairs, dodgy dealing and mental health was to step down for six weeks as First Minister of Northern Ireland.

In any other corner of the democratic West, the fall of a single leader would signal trouble for the governing party and opportunity for the opposition. But in Northern Ireland, the whole political settlement is now under question, because here we don’t have an opposition. Instead we are gifted with the extraordinarily inclusive and utterly cumbersome mandatory coalition government that must include the biggest nationalist and biggest Unionist parties. So going into this crisis we had a situation in which the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin, who loathe everything the other stands for — including the vital issue of nationality — hold the joint offices of First Minister and Deputy First Minister. Falls one, falls the other.

The fear was that had Peter Robinson fallen absolutely in disgrace, rather than just temporarily stood down as First Minister, then Sinn Féin would have called an Assembly election as a means of dispatching what they considered to be an infertile partnership.

In such a scenario, the consequences for the DUP could have been near-fatal, with the primary beneficiaries being their formidable hardline former MEP, Jim Allister, the leader of Traditional Unionist Voice, and the newly minted and relatively moderate Conservative/Ulster Unionist alliance.

On the nationalist side, a snap election would have put Sinn Féin in a strong position to pick up seats from the moderate SDLP — which with a leadership contest only weeks away is effectively leaderless and rudderless — and advance against unionism, which is split three ways. Depending on just how deep the theoretical hole might have been, one very likely outcome would have had the Conservative/Unionist alliance return to the Stormont Assembly as the leading party in Unionist politics.

Under the new rules of the St Andrews agreement the largest party in either community takes the office of First Minister with the largest party on the opposite side taking the deputy’s role.

The likely outcome to such an event would have been Martin McGuinness becoming First Minister with his deputy being drawn from the Conservative/Unionist party ranks: setting up a joint Tory/Sinn Féin-led administration in Stormont Castle.

But there is not the slightest evidence that any of the parties were prepared for such a bizarre outcome, mostly because no one — except Sinn Féin, who helped to trigger the crisis with a whispering campaign up to and after Christmas — saw this crisis coming.

The crisis has been averted by a clever use of statute that means Mr Robinson can be relieved of some of his duties, but not his office, for six weeks. These next six weeks could be crucial in refocusing minds. Not least on the main issue that’s been vexing relationships between Mr Robinson and Mr McGuinness — the devolution of policing and justice from Westminster to Stormont.

In the scheme of things, policing and justice is no big thing either to have or withhold. Nor is it a pressing issue for most of the electorate. But for IRA volunteers and a large section of Sinn Féin’s political supporters and activists, the promise of having an Irish man or woman in charge of such matters is an important point of principle.

Nonetheless it is this issue that has caused the deepest division between the two parties, because at its heart lies the question of trust — a trust that barely exists between what remain two mutually exclusive expressions of political enmity.

In the meantime the political landscape could shift in important ways. But whatever mess the Robinsons have inflicted on their party, the damage is likely to be less traumatic than in a snap election.

Sinn Féin — which has spent the past two years complaining loudly that its partner has not given it what it wanted — is in danger of sounding like a two-times divorcee compulsively blaming each of his previous wives for his broken marriages.

The SDLP, which spent most of the peace process years asleep at the wheel, now stands a chance of rejuvenating. A new leader will compete more aggressively with Sinn Féin for votes from an electorate for whom the whiff of cordite grows increasingly stale.

Had Mr Robinson resigned yesterday, it would have spelt the end of devolving policing and justice. And with unionism split three ways it would have been almost impossible to resurrect the current all-inclusive governmental arrangements.

His six-week stay of execution is a breathing space for everyone else. But for Mr Robinson, his political career is almost over.

The crisis of Peter and Iris Robinson, falling hard upon the heels of the fall of the House of Paisley, may well mark the end of dynasty politics in Northern Ireland. But its significance is far greater than that. The First Minister, Peter Robinson was the British and Irish governments’ best hope to achieve delivery of the final critical stage in the peace process — the devolution of policing and justice powers to Northern Ireland.

Wounded as he now is, even if he manages to maintain his leadership in the short term, has he the capacity to persuade the increasingly assertive right wing of his party to cut the final deal with Sinn Féin? The problem is that Sinn Féin has it in its power to retaliate by bringing about a crisis of the institutions that may be fatal to the whole process.

Since long before the electoral eclipse of David Trimble in 2004, Mr Robinson was the favoured politican of those not only in the Northern Ireland Office but in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and the United States State Department. Such mandarins regarded David Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party as dysfunctional. Their problem is that now Peter Robinson’s DUP looks even more dysfunctional from the point of view of inter-governmental strategy.

The cool, calculating Mr Robinson appeared to officialdom as the man who could deliver. Many of the issues that have led to the current scandal engulfing the Robinson family may well have been pretty well known inside government. But the decision was made to rely on Mr Robinson as much as possible. It is not difficult to see why. In the past few weeks as First Minister he seemed to give off the signal that he might, in the right circumstances, be capable of negotiating the next step with Sinn Féin. But the truth is that, even before this crisis broke, his position was weakening. His personal poll ratings were weak and it was widely speculated that the DUP vote, both in his wife’s Strangford and his own East Belfast constituency, were unimpressive in the recent Northern Ireland European elections.

The brutal fact is that we were heading for a dangerous political crisis in Northern Ireland even before the Robinson revelations. It is now very difficult indeed to see how it might be avoided. Of course, Sinn Féin could show forbearance. It could take the view that this latest development is an act of God that inevitably will take the DUP some weeks to sort out, and that therefore more time should be allowed for political negotiations.

The problem here is that Sinn Féin believes that it has had an implicit understanding that there would be rapid devolution of policing and justice powers away from London to Northern Ireland since the St Andrew’s Agreement of 2006 and that in each succeeding year it has been subjected to foot-dragging. This in turn makes it look weak in their own community and helps the rise of the dissidents, who launched a murderous attack on yet another Catholic policeman last week.

While the British Government is inclined to believe that Sinn Féin tactics and rhetoric is at least partly to blame for the fact that Mr Robinson did not have the space to deliver when he was strong enough, it nonetheless takes the view that the devolution of policing and justice is essential to stabilise the institutions and marginalise the dissidents.

The problem is that large swaths of the Unionist community view matters entirely differently. They regard devolution in this sensitive area as likely to have little good effect on security policy in the face of dissident activity. In parts of the Unionist right wing it is genuinely believed that they are faced with a nightmarish scenario in which Republicans are in government with an influence on security policy while other Republicans pursue violence in the streets.

This is to ignore the reality of the split in the Republican movement. But nonetheless a significant number of Unionists in Northern Ireland are inclined to take the pessimistic view of these issues. This is why the DUP chief whip, Lord Morrow, has openly stated that there will be no devolution of policing and justice before the next general election and that, consequently, Sinn Féin has to accept another delay.

There is little likelihood that Sinn Féin can accept this quietly, even though it may well be the best way for devolution to take place before the end of the year. It should not be forgotten that its key leader, Gerry Adams, is also embroiled in an embarrassing controversy, over child abuse, in his own family. Sinn Féin might well feel it is better to keep the focus on the DUP’s political failures.

Sinn Féin has the capacity to bring down the local power-sharing executive and to ensure that any election in the near future will be held in the most chaotic circumstances. There is even the realistic possibility that Sinn Féin might emerge then as the largest single party and have the right to the position of First Minister — something that is likely to be unacceptable to even pro-Agreement sentiment among the Unionist community.

In the era when David Trimble was First Minister (1998-2003) there were two such collapses of the institutions occasioned by this political-ethnic standoff. Then the Blair Government (once in defiance of the Clinton White House) suspended the institutions and allowed a cooling-off period of several months to allow re-negotiations that then moved things along. More recently, however, the British Government, under Sinn Féin pressure, stripped itself of the power to suspend. This means that we could now face a very hard landing indeed. There is still majority support in both communities for the power-sharing institutions but in the complex crisis that is unfolding it is not immediately obvious how that reality can express itself.

El castillo de Galgorm, en Ballymena, en el condado de Antrim (Irlanda del Norte) fue construido en la primera mitad del siglo XVII por el doctor Alexander Colville, un doctor no en medicina sino en “divinidades”, es decir teología, a quien, como se hizo rico de la noche a la mañana, sus contemporáneos sospechaban de haber hecho pacto con el diablo y practicar las artes mágicas. Un retrato suyo orna todavía la entrada del castillo y el actual dueño del lugar, Christopher Brooke, dice que nadie se ha atrevido a sacarlo de allí porque, según una enraizada creencia, quien ose hacerlo morirá en el acto.

Visto desde el prado arbolado que lo rodea, el castillo, de forma cúbica y de robustas piedras negras, torreones, grandes ventanales, chimeneas, escudos y su fachada catedralicia, es imponente. Por adentro es una ruina que se cae a pedazos y Christopher y su familia, refugiados en unas pocas habitaciones de la primera planta, tienen la esperanza de que en uno de esos desmoronamientos cotidianos uno de los espesos muros comience a vomitar las talegas de oro que, se dice en Ballymena, enterró en ellos el diabólico reverendo Colville antes de morir. Así reunirán el capital necesario para convertir al castillo de Galgorm en una lujosa residencia de 14 apartamentos restaurados en su viejo esplendor. Ya lo han hecho, con buen gusto y rigor histórico, con los patios y dependencias exteriores y el resultado no puede ser mejor.

Como todo castillo irlandés que se respete, el de Galgorm también tiene su fantasma. No es el espectro de Colville sino el de una muchacha de su tiempo a la que la BBC, cuando hace algunos años hizo un documental sobre el castillo, trató de filmar. A fin de lograrlo importó a una célebre médium griega quien, para mala suerte de la televisión británica, sólo logró hacer contacto con la fantasma cuando las cámaras estaban ya apagadas y los camarógrafos dormidos. Pero, según Christopher, la muchacha espectral no es nada huraña y se aparece con frecuencia a los muchos médiums, espiritistas, diabolistas y fantasmistas que peregrinan hasta aquí para convocarla y platicar con ella de cosas del más allá. Sin ir más lejos, se le apareció una mañana a su propia esposa, al despertar, y celebraron ambas una conversación entretenida.

El castillo de Galgorm está en manos de la familia de Christopher, los Young, desde mediados del siglo XIX, y uno de los antepasados más ilustres del actual propietario es Rose Maud Young, quien, pese a pertenecer a una familia sólidamente unionista -protestante y pro británica- formó parte de un puñado de damas de Antrim que participaron de manera muy activa, a finales del XIX, en el renacimiento de la lengua y la cultura gaélicas, empeño que fue acercándolas al adversario tradicional, el nacionalismo irlandés. Rose Young, además de escribir un minucioso diario, publicó tres volúmenes de poemas, leyendas y canciones en gaélico que se habían conservado por tradición oral y que ella misma fue recopilando por las viejas aldeas de pescadores y campesinos de Antrim. Además de bella, culta y liberal, Rose Maud Young -en cuyas tertulias convivían presbiterianos, anglicanos y católicos- fue amiga y protectora de Roger Casement (1864-1916), el fascinante personaje cuyas huellas trato de seguir por estas tierras de Irlanda.

De adolescente, a fines del siglo XIX, Casement estudió tres años en el colegio de Ballymena y pasó muchos fines de semana en Galgorm Castle, según quedó registrado en los diarios escrupulosos de Rose Maud Young. Aquí leyó tal vez esas memorias de los grandes exploradores ingleses, como Livingstone y Stanley, que le abrieron el apetito por los viajes y el África. Aunque había nacido en Sandycove, Dublín (muy cerca de la Martello Tower donde comienza el Ulises de Joyce) su familia era de aquí y en Antrim pasó gran parte de su infancia y adolescencia y en su edad adulta a esta tierra volvía cada vez que podía a curar su nostalgia y a sosegar su espíritu de los grandes tumultos que lo asaltaron a lo largo de una vida intensa, aventurera y arriesgada como la de un paladín de novela épica. Gran parte de su trayectoria estuvo consagrada a denunciar la explotación y el maltrato de las comunidades indígenas del África y la Amazonía, y, asimismo, sobre todo en sus años finales, a luchar por la independencia de Irlanda.

Cuando, la víspera de su ejecución, el pulcro verdugo de la prisión londinense de Pentonville, Mr. John Ellis (en sus ratos libres era también peluquero) procedía a la macabra ceremonia de pesarlo y medirlo para que la soga con que iba a ahorcarlo tuviera la consistencia y la altura debidas, Roger Casement pidió que sus restos fueran sepultados no lejos de aquí, en la bahía de Murlough, a la que en sus cartas se refería como “la bahía del paraíso”. Las autoridades británicas no le dieron gusto: lo enterraron en la misma prisión donde lo ahorcaron (por traidor, pues había conspirado con los alemanes durante la Primera Guerra Mundial para contrabandear armas destinadas a los revolucionarios irlandeses que se alzaron en la Semana Santa de 1916), en una tumba sin nombre y junto a un célebre destripador de mujeres, el Dr. Crippin, ajusticiado unos años antes. Sólo en 1965 fueron entregados sus restos a Irlanda y ahora reposan en el cementerio dublinés de Glasnevin, bajo una sobria lápida en gaélico (idioma que él, pese a sus esfuerzos, nunca aprendió) que dice, sobriamente: “Muerto por Irlanda”.

Roger Casement tenía mucha razón de querer ser enterrado en Murlough Bay, pues es el sitio más bello de Irlanda, de Europa y acaso del mundo. En él culmina uno de los más hermosos glens de Antrim, esos valles o desfiladeros que, entre montañas coloreadas por todos los matices del verde, árboles frondosos, riachuelos, cascadas, recios acantilados, bajan al encuentro de un mar encabritado que arremete contra unos farallones rocosos y esculturales. Hay bandadas de pájaros revoloteando por el cielo y, cuando los días son claros y despejados como los que me han deparado los dioses celtas, se divisa, muy cerca, la mole de la isla de Rathlin, en cuyas aldeas centenarias Rose Maud Young recogió muchas de las poesías e historias de la milenaria Eire, y hasta las costas de Escocia. El paisaje parece deshabitado de seres humanos, naturaleza en estado puro, virginal y edénica.

Es pura apariencia, desde luego. Esta tierra de castillos, glens, fantasmas, poetas y famosísimos contadores ambulantes de cuentos (los seanchaí) ha sido también una de las más violentas de Europa, donde las guerras étnicas y religiosas han enconado a las gentes y sembrado sangre, odio y resentimiento por doquier. No sólo los siglos de la ocupación británica; también los de la partición -que dejó como parte del Reino Unido los seis condados de Irlanda del Norte- han estado signados por matanzas y atentados inicuos. Algún rastro de todo ello queda en las alturas de la bahía de Murlough donde, hace algunos años, el Sinn Féin erigió un monumento en homenaje a Roger Casement. Poco después fue dinamitado por un comando terrorista del Ulster y no ha sido reconstruido desde entonces. Los pedazos esparcidos que de él sobreviven en el solitario altozano son un inquietante llamado de atención sobre la existencia de la otra cara de la medalla de este paraje de sueño.

¿Qué ocurrirá ahora en Irlanda del Norte? Después de los acuerdos alcanzados durante el Gobierno de Tony Blair entre unionistas y republicanos ¿habrá por fin paz en estos seis condados y podrán los fantasmas y los vivos de Antrim dormir tranquilos y fraternizar? Quien recorre la pujante Belfast y sus noches agitadas, la próspera campiña que la cerca, y las ciudades y lugares del interior que parecen haber encontrado el secreto milagroso de hacer coexistir la tradición y la modernidad en absoluta armonía, no tiene ni remotamente la impresión de que podría haber una marcha atrás y que los grupúsculos de extremistas intransigentes que todavía ponen bombas y asesinan, conseguirán su empeño de destruir la paz y volver al enfrentamiento de antaño. Casi toda la gente con la que conversé es más bien optimista y piensa que el futuro reforzará el proceso iniciado con el desarme de los dos bandos y que la política reemplazará a la guerra cainita de manera definitiva. Uno de esos optimistas es Christopher Brooke, el amable castellano de Galgorm. Está convencido de que la coexistencia que se ha puesto en marcha gracias a los acuerdos entre los ancestrales adversarios, la inmersión en Europa, la mecánica de la globalización y las exigencias económicas irán fortaleciendo la integración y la paz. Que Cuchulain y demás dioses del panteón de Eire lo oigan y hagan realidad ese justo designio.

Nos despedimos al pie del retrato del tenebroso doctor Colville. Tiene una mirada beatífica y ligeramente burlona. Sus ojitos fruncidos y claros parecen apenados de vernos partir. Porque en este país hasta los teólogos pactatarios y los fantasmas practican con denuedo el vicio de la hospitalidad.

The single most important issue facing the people of Ireland and Britain is the achievement of Irish unity and the construction of a new relationship between Ireland and Britain based on equality.

Economic crises, however severe, will come and go. Governments will come and go, but for more centuries than any of us care to contemplate Britain’s involvement in Ireland has been the source of conflict; partition, discord and division; and great hurt between the people of these islands.

The peace process has delivered an end to conflict and that is to be welcomed and applauded. But the underlying cause of conflict persists – the British government’s claim of jurisdiction over a part of Ireland. It is this denial of the Irish people’s right to self-determination, freedom and independence that is the core outstanding issue that must be resolved.

Sinn Féin is initiating a conversation this week in Westminster about achieving this. Sinn Féin believes that a national representative democracy in a sovereign reunited Ireland is desirable, viable and achievable in this generation through peaceful and democratic methods.

To succeed in this there are three interlinked challenges facing us. These are: getting the British government to change its policy from one of upholding the union to one of becoming a persuader for Irish unity; getting the Irish government to begin preparations for Irish unity; and engaging with Ulster unionism on the type of Ireland we want to create.

To achieve all of this requires those of us who share these goals to find ways in which we can work together. Is it possible to put in place a formal structured broad front approach to campaign for a united Ireland? Or would it be better to opt for an informal, organic and popular movement based on core principles?

That’s a matter for the dialogue we are beginning. Some progress has already been made. The Good Friday Agreement has put in place all-Ireland political institutions which can be enhanced and developed. It contains a legislative, peaceful and democratic mechanism to set up a new and democratic Ireland. Advancing this means reaching out to others, including those who are unionist, and engaging with them on the type of Ireland we want to create.

We need to address the genuine fears and concerns of unionists in a meaningful way. We must be open to listening to unionism, to look at what they mean by their sense of Britishness and be willing to explore and to be open to new concepts.

It is worth noting that within the British system, unionists make up fewer than 2% of the population; they cannot hope to have any significant say in the direction of their own affairs. As 20% of a new Ireland, unionists will be able to assert their full rights and entitlements and exercise real political power and influence.

So, our vision of this new Ireland must be a shared Ireland, an integrated Ireland, an Ireland in which unionists have equal ownership. The shape and structure of that new Ireland must be a matter of agreement.

At the Unite Ireland conference in early June in New York, Professor Brendan O’Leary, in his contribution to this very debate, suggested that republicans and nationalists and unionists should examine the possibilities of some form of federal arrangement. Others may have different ideas and suggestions. This is one part of the debate we must have.

All of this presents a daunting challenge. But it is a challenge I believe we can rise to and meet. This is not about some pie-in-the-sky naive discussion and aspiration, about an unachievable goal or meaningless political outcome. No. This is about solving one of the great unresolved and contentious issues of Britain’s colonial past. In preparation for this, Sinn Féin has already held discussions with people in Britain from different sectors; trade unionists, academics, Irish community groups and others, including elected representatives in Westminster and the Welsh and Scottish assemblies.

Next February we will hold a major conference here in Britain to move into the next phase. Of course this conversation, this dialogue, with people here in Britain or in the US or elsewhere will not in itself achieve a united Ireland. That is a matter for agreement between the people who live on the island of Ireland. But British policy toward Ireland is key to unlocking the potential for this change to occur. So, we need the active support of people in Britain.

We need to reach out to the widest possible public opinion, to the trade unions, the business sector, the community and voluntary sector, to the political class, as well as with those of other ethnic minorities who have experienced a similar history of colonisation and immigration.

I believe we can be successful. Why? Think back 20 years. Then my voice could not be heard on the British media – censorship ruled courtesy of Margaret Thatcher. For much of that time I was a banned person – unable to travel to London. British policy was locked into a military/security strategy and a policy of criminalisation, and the conflict was dug in and vicious.

Had I been in London asking for support to build a peace process I would have been thought of as at best naive or just daft. Had I predicted cessations, peace talks, an international agreement, a resolution of issues as difficult as policing and arms, I would have been dismissed by the Guardian and others as crazy.

Well, it happened. All of those difficult and some said, unimaginable goals have been achieved. So – Irish reunification is achievable. With the right strategies and a determined commitment to a united Ireland can happen. Join us in that task.

Pocos días después de los asesinatos en el Ulster, los irlandeses hacían algo que saben hacer muy bien y que es muy sano: reírse de sí mismos. En la Opera House de Belfast se representaba The history of the troubles, accodin’ to my Da (La historia de los conflictos, según mi padre), de Martin Lynch, un autor local, en la que se ironiza sobre la parte más sórdida de los seres humanos al más puro estilo de Sean O’Casey o de tantos otros dramaturgos irlandeses. La obra, que ha agotado entradas y ha recibido aplausos en pie, empieza en 1969, cuando Gerry Courtney, un católico de un barrio obrero, espera en el hospital de Belfast el nacimiento de su hijo. Justo cuando vendrían 35 años de infierno, que se desarrollan durante hora y media como una memoria de las vidas trágicas de los norirlandeses. La obra acaba en 1998, año de la firma del Acuerdo de Paz de Belfast, cuando nuestro héroe, Gerry, vuelve a la sala de espera del mismo hospital, en esta ocasión por la llegada de su nieto y con el inicio de una esperanzada nueva era. Una buena observación sociológica de cómo el terrorismo es una locura colectiva sin sentido y de cómo llega a afectar a la forma de pensar de muchas personas, pero también de la diversa forma de reaccionar de cada individuo.

COMO RESULTADO del proceso de paz, la gran mayoría en Irlanda del Norte es contraria a la violencia política. Por tanto, el proceso de paz no está en peligro. Sin embargo, todavía quedan pequeños grupos marginales de terroristas que quizá cometerán atrocidades esporádicas, pero no una campaña sostenible. Son mayoritariamente grupos escindidos del IRA, que ya han atentado en estos últimos años sin lograr sus macabros objetivos hasta ahora. Fracasaron estrepitosamente en su intento de lograr representación política en las elecciones de hace dos años. Sus actos violentos, en realidad, han tenido el efecto inverso y han generado una unión contra la violencia más fuerte que nunca, que ha consolidado aún más un proceso de paz admirable, y así podía sentirse en aquellos aplausos más largos de lo habitual en aquel teatro.
Precisamente durante aquella semana, en la Universidad del Ulster y ante una audiencia con 200 vips del mundo político y cultural, el proceso de paz era analizado brillantemente por Jonathan Powell, que fue mano derecha de Tony Blair y acaba de publicar su experiencia en la obra Great hatred, little room: making peace in Northern Ireland (Grandes odios, pequeños espacios: construyendo la paz en Irlanda del Norte).
Powell cuenta que es muy difícil para gobiernos democráticos admitir que negocian con grupos terroristas cuando estos aún están matando a gente inocente. El político inglés tiene una original teoría de la bicicleta por la que un Gobierno nunca debe permitir que un proceso de paz se detenga, puesto que la alternativa siempre es peor y el Gobierno debe entretenerse en diseñar una coreografía bien secuenciada de acontecimientos para que el ritmo no decaiga. Es mejor tener a los grupos terroristas en el Gobierno, ya que en esta situación se moderan y nunca hay que descartar ninguna estrategia para lograrlo. Por ejemplo, la ambigüedad, en algunos momentos, puede utilizarse para evitar bloquear el proceso y nunca debe presentarse un desarme como una rendición. Powell se atrevió, incluso, a referirse al caso español acusando al PP de haber negociado más con ETA que el PSOE porque la oposición, o sea, los propios socialistas, no les criticaban por hacerlo.
Un ejemplo de dificultad para el Gobierno británico fue cuando el IRA de continuidad, uno de los grupos escindidos del IRA, justo después de haber firmado el Acuerdo de Paz, cometió el atentado de Omagh, el más trágico en la historia de Irlanda del Norte. Precisamente, el Gobierno se encontraba en aquel momento en la delicada situación de tener que decidir si debía seguir liberando a prisioneros. Al fin, Londres tomó una arriesgada decisión y lo hizo. Powell llega a confesar que en las negociaciones secretas con el IRA se hicieron concesiones en privado. Cuando fue necesario, incluso tuvieron que inventar un nuevo léxico, como las famosas “actas de desarme” que nadie sabía qué significaban. En definitiva, Powell recomienda hablar, hablar, hablar y lograr que los oponentes participen y se impliquen en el proceso de paz tanto como sea posible. La consecuencia para el mundo es que “tenemos que hablar con Hamás, con los talibanes, con Al Qaeda. Necesitamos canales de comunicación. Rendirnos no es la respuesta, pero hablar no es un error”.

DE POWELL también son interesantes algunas anécdotas. Desde que no puede olvidar el impacto de ver jugar a Adams y McGuinnes con los hijos de Blair por los jardines del número 10 de Downing Street, hasta unas conversaciones a altas horas de la madrugada en casa de Martin McGuinness en el oscuro barrio del Bog Side de Derry, donde todo empezó. Mientras hablaba, Powell estaba intentando arreglar su reloj cuando McGuinness se ofreció a llevarlo al relojero de al lado de su casa. Cuando se lo devolvió, Powell, que todavía no confiaba plenamente en el antiguo dirigente del IRA, hizo que lo miraran los especialistas, no fuera que le hubiesen puesto algún mecanismo sospechoso. Por fortuna, el tic-tac era inocente. Como vemos, en política no todo es macro: también está la parte personal, que posiblemente sea menos micro de lo que pensamos.

In Northern Ireland the squalid and brutal murders of two unarmed, off-duty soldiers taking delivery of pizzas, followed by the execution of a police officer who was responding to a call for help, achieved what all acts of terrorism intend — the release into the body politic of the poisonous spores of fear.

In this case, the fear was all the more potent because it infected the psyche of all those who had lived through the Troubles, regenerating the memories of the darkness. The stigmata of those partly repressed memories were suddenly uncovered and they seemed as vivid as when we first encountered them. There was that almost forgotten surge of fear, then the uncontrolled free fall of emotions rushing through sorrow to anger before stalling in a sense of helplessness.

We recognized and acknowledged, too, the rituals that accompany such deaths — the television pictures of swaths of flowers that transform murder spots into temporary shrines; the bewildered expressions of those who lay them; the white-suited forensic experts carrying plastic bags; the voices of politicians in competitive condemnation. The fear also infected our children, many of them asking their parents questions about history to which it was difficult to find coherent or explanatory answers. In schools some children — and not just the children of police officers — openly expressed an ominous apprehension about the future.

The spoken and unspoken question was whether we were about to see the return of the Troubles. There was an implicit fear that the period of political agreement had merely been a mirage, what Seamus Heaney in his poem “North” described as “exhaustions nominated peace” — a temporary and arbitrary pause for respite.

Certainly, the dissident Republicans who carried out these murders, whether they called themselves the Real I.R.A. or the Continuity I.R.A., must have exulted over what their bullets had achieved, and like all jihadists who believe that killing people is the blood-petaled path to glory, must too in those immediate hours after the killings have felt a gratifying sense of their newly claimed power.

But something quite remarkable has happened in this country as the hours have turned into days. It started with ordinary people interviewed on television and radio who invariably expressed an abhorrence of “returning” or “going back.” At first it was clearly the product of a deep-seated fear of regression towards the abyss, a fear that the peace process itself would crack asunder with the impact of violence, but then the fear turned to anger — an anger that a small group of fanatics with little or no popular support should seek to subvert the will of the people of Ireland.

Across towns and cities people of all traditions assembled to protest in dignified but powerful silence. There was a constant reiteration that what had been achieved could not now be lost, that a peace process, for all its problems, could not be usurped and subverted by the gun.

Something else remarkable happened. In a country where politicians can argue about which way the wind is blowing, they instead lined up shoulder to shoulder, so physically and rhetorically close there was not the tiniest chink or warp of divergence, and expressed their unity in uncharacteristically crystalline language. So we saw Martin McGuinness — once a senior commander in the I.R.A., now a deputy minister in the local government — standing alongside the province’s Protestant first minister and chief constable as he labeled the killers “traitors,” his anger palpable.

Indeed, it was a crossing-the-Rubicon moment for many nationalists as their leaders condemned the killings and urged their followers to pass on any information to the police. What only a decade earlier would have been denounced as “touting” now became the moral responsibility of every citizen.

And then there was Jackie McDonald, a hard-bitten leader of the Ulster Defense Association — a Protestant paramilitary organization that had engaged in many sectarian murders — among the thousands who turned up for the vigil at Belfast’s City Hall. There as a passionate advocate for peace, he praised Mr. McGuinness for his public statements.

There was soon evidence also that paramilitaries on both sides were in communication with their former enemies, offering assurances. So what we initially thought was a potentially dangerous attack on what has been achieved in Northern Ireland, and what we momentarily feared might be the beginning of disintegration, has in fact served only to demonstrate the strength of the process of reconciliation and the inviolable strength of a community that has made its political differences subservient to an overwhelming desire for peace.

So even now, while in brooding housing estates blighted by poverty and corrupted by the commerce and culture of drugs, young men made bitter by the scourge of history throw their bricks and bottles and stones and perhaps dream of more killings; or in some shed deep in South Armagh where a car bomb is painstakingly being assembled, the dissidents that remain must struggle to suppress the insistent truth that while they have the power to kill, each killing merely serves to strengthen what they wish to destroy.

And so the other night when my teenage daughter briefly turned her eyes away from “The Simpsons” to ask in a curiously tentative voice if the Troubles were coming back, I was able to say, “No, no they’re not.” And what I also know is that despite its painful human tragedies, the past week has not been about going back but about how far we’ve come.

I wonder if Gerry Adams, the Sinn Finn leader, remembered his old adversary Margaret Thatcher as he stood in Government Buildings in Dublin last week and said that dissident republicans “shouldn’t have room to breathe”? He liked the image so much, he repeated it in a press statement. “It is crucial that there is no breathing space given to these unrepresentative groups and that there is no sense of ambiguity about our collective opposition to their actions.”

It was a remarkable echo of the Iron Lady’s call for the Provisional IRA to be denied the “oxygen of publicity” when its campaign was going full tilt in the 1980s and Adams was a leading spokesman for the terrorists. Adams and Thatcher are, politically, morally and in every other way, poles apart. Yet it’s hard to escape the fact that the Sinn Fein leader now finds himself in a similar position to the former prime minister, so he subconsciously reaches for some of the same vocabulary.

Where terrorism, or armed struggle, as he preferred it, once served his purpose and gave him a bargaining chip, it is now an unequivocal threat to all he has achieved. Preventing a new IRA campaign from emerging is not just a political imperative; it is a legacy issue. Adams’s life will have been for nothing if his decision to lead the republican movement into compromise fails at this point.

There is also the small fact that, unlikely though it now seems, if the dissidents do actually gain traction, Adams himself would eventually go the way of all compromisers and become a target.

It happened to Michael Collins, the leader of republican forces in the Irish war of independence who, when in government, was gunned down by dissidents.

To put it bluntly, Adams and Martin McGuinness, once known to the British Establishment as “the Bogside butcher” but now feted as the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, have both moved from poacher to gamekeeper. It has been a slow shimmy rather than an abrupt leap. For years they talked peace but counted on violence to get them what they wanted.

Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the former Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) chief constable, compared Sinn Fein’s stance in the days of the 1990s peace overtures to that of a man with a vicious dog beside him. He would tell you it wasn’t his dog and he couldn’t be responsible for its actions but he was trying to keep it calm. He would urge you to cooperate with his efforts or things might turn nasty. Those days are now gone. The dog is now as ready to turn on Sinn Fein as on anyone else.

After 10 years of trying, diehard splinter groups have succeeded in murdering three members of the security forces. The deaths of the soldiers Mark Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar in Antrim and of Stephen Carroll, a Catholic constable in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), in Lurgan removed any room for equivocation.

Peter Robinson, the Democratic Unionist party first minister, who is now Sinn Fein’s partner in government, put it well when he posed shoulder to shoulder with McGuinness and Sir Hugh Orde, the PSNI chief constable, last week. “This is a battle of wills between the political class and the evil gunmen – the political class will win,” Robinson declared. Orde, still shocked by the death of the first PSNI officer to be killed by terrorists since the force was created from the RUC, had just given McGuinness and Adams a briefing on the security threats their joint administration faced. He admits it felt slightly “wacky”.

It was clear the gunmen in Antrim were former comrades of McGuinness in the Provisional IRA and that one of the men being held for questioning on the Carroll murder was a former Sinn Fein councillor. In the recent past McGuinness and other Sinn Fein members might have been expected to raise concerns about the rights of detainees and security policy.

After the murder of Robert McCartney, killed by republicans after a disagreement in a Belfast bar, Sinn Fein condemned the police for carrying out house searches in pursuit of the killers and had refused to call for statements to be made to the police. Only two weeks ago McGuinness had threatened to withdraw confidence in Orde after it emerged he had called in a small number of undercover troops to boost his technical capability against the dissidents.

This time there was no agonising. McGuinness spoke even more strongly than Robinson, the unionist hardliner. “These people are traitors to the island of Ireland; they have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of all of the people who live on this island,” he said, calling for all republicans to give information to the police. He later pledged to do so himself if he had any.

There is no honourable retreat from such words and, like Thatcher, Sinn Fein is not for turning. The party has burnt its boats with the men of violence and the only way to go is forward.

Sinn Fein is part of the political class. It must now start supporting the police with practical intelligence to prevent the emergence of a new IRA from the ashes of the old.

It is Easter Day – the most sacred day in the Irish Republican calendar.

In the drizzling rain last year the Provisional movement is assembling to march through the tawdry streets of West Belfast to celebrate the 1916 Easter Rising and Pádraig Pearse, the IRA’s bloodthirsty founder.

The flute bands strike up, the drummers roll and the procession slowly snakes its way forward. But something is wrong. Under the orders of Gerry Adams the marchers are not allowed to unfurl their banners – which bloodcurdlingly commemorate recently dead IRA volunteers. Anything resembling a modern, military-style uniform has been banned.

And oddly, as if this were the Irish equivalent of Morris dancing, a group of marchers has dressed up in historical outfits to entertain the crowd. Armed with a plastic drainpipe done up as a 1920s machinegun they strut forward in their heavy-wool uniforms. Not so long ago they would have been carrying Kalashnikovs.

Notting Hill carnival it is not, but the message from the leadership is clear: the Provisional IRA has been defanged and the Troubles are over and should be forgotten. It is all history now. But, as this week’s killings show, Ireland’s Troubles are far from over. Traditionally, the Easter Rising ceremony is a big day out for local IRA men, who don cool black sunglasses and berets to impress their girlfriends. More seriously, at the graveside of IRA martyrs, the Easter Day rite becomes an evocation of blood sacrifice against perfidious Albion.

The symbolism is potent. From the graves of dead IRA men springs a fresh generation of Irish patriots ready to bomb their way to the “august destiny” of Irish freedom. It is a message that Mr Adams, son of republican royalty, would have imbibed as a child, like the freshly minted gunmen of the Real IRA.

Republicans are fond of evoking Pearse, a chorus sergeant for the “cleansing” power of political violence, as the litmus test of IRA virtue. Would he have shot those two “alien” soldiers at Massereene Barracks? Would he have approved of the shooting of the police officer in Craigavon? For the dissident republicans the answer is yes.

Mr Adams’s contortions over a few banners and speeches on Easter Day illustrate the fragility of his leadership and the threat that the dissidents pose. Like his predecessors he is haunted by accusations of treachery.

Until now he has performed a deft but impossible political illusion. Painstakingly over the past 30 years he has cranked the edifice of Irish republicanism up off its violent foundations and shifted the whole structure on to fresh but unstable ground.

Inevitably, Mr Adams has traded his great political asset – the willingness of his followers to kill – for grubby but substantive political gains. He has horse-traded “Irish freedom” over coffee on the sofas of Downing Street. He has betrayed Pearse’s mythic Irish Republic and sold its followers out because in

the real world there was no other choice.

In the toxic theology of the IRA Mr Adams still has to tread a careful line, hence the odd convolution that shooting British soldiers is “counter-productive” as opposed to being just morally wrong. To save his political skin Mr Adams can never publically become merely another standard bearer for British rule in Ireland. And if he ever shares his knowledge of republican dissident groups with British intelligence it will be well away from the cameras.

Mr Adams is the master of the long game – in the short term he is likely to wait and see how the police deal with the dissidents in order to keep his own hands clean. For him the real nightmare would be internecine war with the dissidents turning on the provisionals. Always heavily protected, he will step up his own security. He has never forgotten the fate of Michael Collins – ambushed by his former comrades in the IRA.

Mr Adams is the most successful republican leader since Collins. And there have been rewards – peace and an end, albeit temporary, to the Troubles. Some, however, have had greater rewards than others. Mr Adams has a nice house in Donegal and his leadership circle have prospered through their sinecure jobs courtesy of the British taxpayer. Perfidious Albion has been generous.

But Ireland is no more united than it was in 1922. And Sinn Féin, sunk into insignificance in the last elections in the South, is unable to articulate how the current Stormont settlement leads to a united Ireland and something more than jobs for Mr Adams’s boys.

In West Belfast, the republican heartland, his political machine is slick, suffocating, thuggish and ready to isolate all those within the “republican family” who question the long betrayal. No one is immune from the leader’s wrath if they dissent and ask – what was all the sacrifice of the 1970s and 1980s for? Did Bobby Sands starve himself to death so that Martin McGuinness, a legendary IRA man, could become a minister of the British Crown in Ireland?

Even Brendan “the dark” Hughes, Mr Adams’s old Long Kesh cellmate, was cast out into the wilderness. “I would have taken a bullet for Gerry Adams but perhaps I should have put a bullet in him,” said Hughes despairingly.

By their latest killings, the republican dissidents are reminding us all that Gerry Adams does not have a monopoly on the theology of republicanism. They intend to go on with the killing until they are stopped. Like the poor, Ireland’s Troubles are always with us.

Ya han transcurrido casi 15 años desde el inicio del proceso de paz en Irlanda del Norte. Son muchas las cosas que han pasado desde entonces: rupturas de treguas, escisiones en grupos terroristas, atentados brutales o el paso al crimen organizado de antiguas bandas terroristas. El 3 de septiembre de 2008 la Comisión de Supervisión Independiente (IMC), organización creada en 2004 por los gobiernos británico e irlandés para supervisar el desarme de los grupos paramilitares norirlandeses, emitió su decimonoveno informe. En él afirmó que el IRA Provisional había dejado de ser una amenaza para la seguridad ya que su mando, aunque siguiera existiendo, no era ni operativo ni funcional.
Era sin duda una buena noticia que fue recibida con enorme alegría, pero que no ocultaba que el conflicto estaba aún lejos de la solución final. Se ha podido comprobar el pasado sábado, cuando dos soldados británicos murieron tiroteados por disidentes republicanos. Y es que el IRA Provisional es la organización armada más importante de Irlanda del Norte, pero no la única. Hay otros grupos tanto católicos como protestantes que aún no han dejado las armas. De hecho ni siquiera es el único IRA, ya que hay otras organizaciones terroristas que reclaman para sí esas siglas. Por partes.

Tras la creación del Estado Libre de Irlanda y la partición de la isla en los años 20, el IRA inició una deriva hacia la progresiva marginalidad. El fracaso de sus cada vez menos populares campañas le sumió en una crisis de identidad que le llevó a abrazar el marxismo y a una mayor preocupación sobre cuestiones económicas y sociales, por lo que fue dando a la lucha armada un papel cada vez más pequeño. Así, para finales de los 60 la dirección del IRA tenía pensado el abandono de la violencia. Sin embargo, los disturbios que comenzaron en 1969 truncaron esta evolución. Para los líderes del IRA (la mayoría gente que vivía en la República, poco conocedora de la situación a pie de calle en el Norte) la cuestión de los ataques no era materia de su incumbencia, ya que suponía convertir el enfrentamiento entre Irlanda y Reino Unido en una lucha sectaria entre católicos y protestantes. A los católicos de Irlanda del Norte no les gustó la pasividad del IRA. Algunos de sus militantes eran increpados en las calles por personas que se sentían abandonadas y desprotegidas, por lo que miembros del grupo en Ulster sintieron la inevitabilidad de recurrir a las armas para proteger a su población ante un posible exterminio. En ese contexto, unos cuantos militantes contrarios a la dirección decidieron escindirse y fundar el IRA Provisional (PIRA).

Inicialmente minoritario, el PIRA enseguida se convertiría en el mayor grupo terrorista de Irlanda del Norte, ya que consiguió atraer a sus filas a mucha gente, sobre todo jóvenes, descontentos con el giro del sector oficial. Éste, por su parte, constituyó el IRA Oficial (OIRA) con la vista puesta en el abandono de la lucha armada a corto plazo, aunque siguió empleando la violencia durante el inicio del conflicto. El OIRA iría poco a poco dejando la violencia hasta abandonarla completamente, actitud que no gustó a muchos de sus miembros, que a mediados de los 70 fundaron el INLA (Ejército Irlandés de Liberación Nacional), que aún continúa activo y es considerado una amenaza por la IMC.

En 1986 se dio una nueva escisión en el movimiento republicano, cuando el Sinn Fein decidió participar en las elecciones al Parlamento de Dublín. Los contrarios formaron el Sinn Fein Republicano (RSF) y el IRA Continuidad (CIRA). Sin embargo, el CIRA no adquiriría notoriedad hasta 1994, cuando comenzó a realizar atentados para oponerse al alto el fuego declarado por el IRA Provisional en 1994. Por otro lado, en 1997, un grupo de militantes contrarios a la implicación del PIRA en el proceso de paz formaron el IRA Auténtico (RIRA), que se haría tristemente famoso en agosto de 1998 por la colocación de una bomba en Omagh, causando 29 muertos (dos de ellos españoles) y más de 200 heridos. A día de hoy, tanto el CIRA como el RIRA siguen activos y continúan atentando. Pero ni siquiera los escindidos se han librado de las escisiones. Así, en 2005, de las filas del CIRA surgió Guerreros de Irlanda (ONH) y ese mismo año apareció otro pequeño grupo: Libertad de Irlanda (SnaÉ). Recientemente, la IMC ha detectado el surgimiento de otro nuevo: IRLA (Ejercito Republicano de Liberación Nacional).

Y esto sólo en el lado republicano. Porque al peligro que representan INLA, CIRA, RIRA, ONH, SnaÉ e IRLA hay que añadir, en el bando protestante, a los grupos paramilitares lealistas. Durante el conflicto que estalló a finales de los 60 hubo dos grandes grupos terroristas favorables a la unión con Gran Bretaña: UDA (Asociación de Defensa de Ulster), que reivindicaba sus crímenes con las siglas UFF (Luchadores por la Libertad de Ulster), y UVF (Fuerza Voluntaria de Ulster), estrechamente unido al minoritario Comando de la Mano Roja (RHC). Estos grupos aceptaron el Acuerdo de Viernes Santo pero no han iniciado el desarme y continúan con la violencia. De la UVF surgió en 1996, por ser contraria al proceso de paz, la LVF (Fuerza Voluntaria Lealista). Ésta última anunció que dejaba la violencia en 2005, pero continúa activa. Y la IMC ha detectado que podrían estar formándose, aunque aún con muy poca militancia, dos grupos disidentes de las principales organizaciones: RUVF (UVF Auténtico) y RUFF (UFF Auténtico). Por otro lado, los grupos paramilitares lealistas han ido cayendo en el crimen organizado, siendo protagonistas de tráfico de drogas, contrabando, extorsiones o robos (crímenes protagonizados también por los republicanos, aunque en menor cuantía), hasta hacer del crimen mucha gente su particular modus vivendi. Esta circunstancia, unida a la autoproclamada tarea de proteger a su comunidad de los también activos grupos republicanos, hace muy difícil a corto plazo la entrega de armas y el consiguiente abandono de la violencia.

Con tantos grupos paramilitares activos, Irlanda del Norte está sin duda lejos de ser una sociedad normalizada. Los dos soldados muertos el pasado sábado no han sido desgraciadamente una excepción. Y es que, a pesar de no copar portadas en los periódicos, la violencia ha estado muy presente a lo largo de los últimos años. Entre marzo de 2003 y agosto de 2008 (según datos de la propia IMC) ha habido en Irlanda del Norte 23 asesinatos cometidos por paramilitares (5 por los republicanos y 14 por los lealistas, además de tres de los que se desconoce la autoría), 374 heridos en tiroteos (270 por grupos lealistas, 104 por republicanos) y 454 en ataques de diverso tipo (313 y 141 respectivamente). Todo eso en una población relativamente pequeña: menos de dos millones de habitantes. Por tanto, podemos concluir que la buena noticia de que el IRA Provisional no sea ni operativo ni funcional no debe ocultar que aún queda un largo camino hacia la paz completa y que pasará tiempo hasta que la norirlandesa sea comparable a la mayoría de sociedades europeas.

El atentado del pasado sábado muestra una compleja realidad en Ulster, con numerosos grupos violentos y paramilitares activos, que, según el autor, anuncia «que aún queda un largo camino hacia la paz completa y que pasará tiempo hasta que la norirlandesa sea comparable a la mayoría de sociedades europeas»

Don’t we know, for we are told it often enough, that however unjustified terrorism is, it springs from real social and political conditions? That this is the sequence: from the feeling of grievance, through a growing belief in the need for violence, finally to the subsequent act of terror? From this it follows, solve the grievance somehow – through concessions or talks or even military measures – and the terror will stop. There will be no reason for it.

Let us presume that it was indeed the Real IRA, as claimed to the Sunday Tribune, whose “volunteers” shot up a pizza delivery to the Massereene Barracks on Saturday night, badly wounded two pizza “collaborators” – a new category in the history of terror attacks – and then finished off at least one of the four wounded soldiers as he lay bleeding on the roadside.

After the condemnations there followed a discussion on why this shooting had happened. It was sometimes a very rational discussion, suggesting a very rational shooting. The head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Sir Hugh Orde, had only recently revealed that he was bringing some army intelligence capability back into Northern Ireland because of what he saw as the renewed threat of attacks from people like the Real IRA. Was it – it was speculated – as a consequence of this announcement that the gunmen had struck?

Even Gerry Adams seemed to be suggesting that perhaps the Saturday pizza killings might not have taken place but for the special dislike reserved for army intelligence because (I tried to follow the logic) of its democratic unaccountability. “No one knows if the attack was prompted [by Orde’s action] or was coincidental …,” somebody said on the radio.

Rubbish. Really, absolute rubbish. Such an assault is not set up in a couple of days or even weeks. You need the men, the cars, the weapons, the reconnaissance, the plan and the back-up. As the author Kevin Toolis said, this was not a whim, but rather “a bloody annunciation” to let everyone know that violent republicanism is back, in a new, potent, death-dealing guise.

But to do what? When the guys and gals of the Real IRA sat down and discussed their plans together, rationally, how did shooting these young men and their collaborating pizza suppliers (minimum-wage Poles, armed with mozzarella and tomatoes) fit into their overall strategy? In fact, what was their overall strategy?

When they sat down again in their political guise of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement – the movement that does not like to be called the political wing of the Real IRA, so that’s what we’ll call them – and after they had dealt with their role in defeating the Lisbon treaty in the Republic, did they consider how a poorly supported return to killing in Ulster might somehow be turned into a magnificent victory, the likes of which had eluded every physical-force republican movement before them? Did they debate just why it was they were more likely to succeed this time? Given that the “armed struggle” (a euphemism for strolling up behind someone and blasting their brains out all over their children) was partly ended through the offices of Sinn Féin, it is interesting how the warriors of the Real IRA seem to have forsworn the obvious tactic of bumping off the Adamsite traitors.

So no, it was the Massereene Barracks. And the one thing that we know about that place is that it was due to close in 2010. They only had to wait a few months, and the occupying forces and their counter-revolutionary fast-food accomplices would have been gone. The hate object would have been removed.

That’s the clue. Hatred requires an object. It needs a Jew or a black or a Brit or a Papist, for your KKK man, your stormtrooper, your Gordon rioter or your green fascist to buttress the walls of their collapsing egos. As William Hazlitt put it in his 1826 essay, The Pleasure of Hating: “We have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loath were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other!”

The shooting wasn’t designed to get rid of the British Army; it was designed to bring it back. It was the first atrocity in a desired new cycle of attacks, arrests, martyrdoms, bombings, internments, hunger strikes, funerals, orations, gun-runnings and crying children, which could return us to the Seventies, the golden time of death and certainty.

What do the Real IRA actually feel the compulsion to kill for? They have the vote, the right to speak, the right to argue. There are no B-Specials, there’s no more job discrimination, no more gerrymandering.

Republicans sit in government. Why does a group in the US, calling itself the Coalition of Irish Republican Women salute the attack on its website with the headline “New Group turns up the heat”? The heat which, when turned up, will burn other women? They hope. They hope.

If hatred is one pleasure, with grievances to be “nursed”, then violence is another. Think of those local hard men, once recipients of frightened glances and scared obsequiousness, having spent the past decade being just ordinary no-marks again. Think of them getting together with the young psycho, who is sitting at their corduroyed knee, learning the intoxicating vocabulary of killing. “Don’t you know that Che Guevara thought it was necessary to execute traitors himself? One shot, just here.” And you to fire it, Jamie.

These men, these hard men, lost in the era of peace. Unattractive men with bald heads and pallid skin and an inability to string five words together without inducing catatonia, can again imagine themselves to be Wolfe Tone or James Connolly reborn. Middle-aged matrons, brought up in the purple of Republicanism, but now with roots showing through the dye, can reconceive of themselves as Gaelic warrior queens, or bereted resistance Valkyries. It’s worth killing other people’s sons and daughters for this.

Last Saturday night, as the gunmen walked up to deliver the death shots – executing the wounded victims, because their terrible injuries were somehow insufficient and there must be funerals – what TV programme or movie did they imagine themselves to be in at that moment? The Sopranos, perhaps. And then, sometime later, a drink and black humour at the Real IRA equivalent of the Bada Bing.

Sometimes – often, perhaps – the grievance comes second. The desire to hate and kill comes first, and then grubs around in the shit for its excuse.

This is a moment to hold one’s breath. The last murderous barracks assault on British soldiers in Northern Ireland took place a dozen years ago at Thiepval. Then it was not unexpected; this time the assault has a terrible quality of nightmarish unreality. But the Northern Ireland peace process has proved surprisingly durable. It even survived the mass slaughter at Omagh in 1998. The key now is the response of the Sinn Féin leadership.

Thus far that leadership has felt able to condemn the attacks of dissident republicans. But there are two fiendish complications this time. First, the target is the British Army not the local police force. Ideologically speaking the dissidents have now challenged Mr Adams in a way the murder of fellow Irishmen would not have done. This is a decisive moment in the history of the “Brits Out” mentality in Northern Ireland.

That is why Mr Adams is careful to denounce the murders as counter- productive in the struggle for Irish unity. But he has also said that they were wrong and more important that he supports the police in the apprehension of the killers.

This comes at a moment when the Chief Constable’s decision to employ Special Forces soldiers in the Province presents Mr Adams with his second difficulty. Sir Hugh Orde will undoubtedly argue that his decision was justified by the seriousness of the security crisis now so amply demonstrated. Mr Adams initially responded that the decision meant the Chief Constable risked losing the support of the majority of republicans.

This row over the role of British intelligence in the province goes back to ambiguities in the St Andrews Agreement of 2006. It has profound roots in the psychology of republicanism and the legacy of one of Mr Blair’s creative formulations to move the peace process along. It will not be easily sorted out.

The crisis both validates the approach of the Secretary of State Sean Woodward and demonstrates its limitations. Mr Woodward has been convinced that Sinn Fein’s strength is directly correlated to progress on devolution in general and devolution of policing and justice in particular. This explains his rather strange decision to railroad the Northern Ireland Bill through the House of Commons last week, despite sustained protests by MPs from all parties. They ask why, when the actual devolution of policing and justice was not exactly imminent – one DUP minister said it could be a matter of several years – the Government acted in such haste. But for Mr Woodward it was a no-brainer. As the DUP agreed the devolution model, while retaining its veto on timing, the Government felt it was possible to offer something to show that Sinn Féin was still making progress. The very indignation of MPs generated by the indecent haste was almost a selling point in itself. Sinn Féin still had visible leverage.

The trouble is, that for all the Secretary of State’s solicitude, this is small beer. The crisis of Sinn Féin is far wider and deeper and is due to developments about which the British government can do little. The unexpected electoral humiliation of the party in the 2007 general election in the Republic has derailed Mr Adams’s all-Ireland political strategy. Even now, as the Irish Republic enters deep recession, it is the Irish Labour Party rather than Sinn Féin that appears to be picking up the protest vote. In the North the DUP, SDLP and many pundits hail the DUP’s success in blocking Sinn Féin projects in the Assembly. The British Government might privately wish there was less of this triumphalism but, having failed to protect David Trimble’s more conciliatory leadership of Unionism, it is in no position to complain. The consequence of all this is that to some minority elements of nationalist youth in Northern Ireland the Sinn Féin leadership looks boringly respectable and even a little moth-eaten. The electricity and excitement that it once generated now seem to be a thing of the past.

It is not that Sinn Féin is likely to lose out to the SDLP but more a question of its ability to mobilise. There is even some early indication that nationalist/republican electoral turnout is no longer as vibrant as it once was.

The dissidents themselves remain small in number. Their potential influence lies in their ability to capsize the arrangements that have been reached between larger groups. Already they have succeeded in bringing about the cancellation of the American trip of the First Minister, Peter Robinson, and the Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, to Washington for the St Patrick Day’s Jamboree. There is much that is bogus and unappealing about this event. But it is at least an occasion when the political leadership of Northern Ireland – unionist and republican – presents a more or less united face to the world.

For all its difficulties, however, Sinn Fein are not passive players in this crisis. This atrocity in the Protestant heartland of Antrim will shake the Unionist community but it will not destroy support for the current settlement. What would destroy it would be a sense that Sinn Féin did not fully support policing in the Province and instead sought to garner political advantages from the crisis.

The republican leadership’s words on the issue will be scrutinised more rigorously over the next few days than those of any shame-faced banker before the Treasury Select Committee. Mr Adams is well aware that the Irish Government is totally absorbed with its own economic crisis and is not available to exert energy and pressure on his behalf in the way it once did. He is also well aware that the British Government has reached the end of the road in terms of the concessions it might meaningfully offer. This gives him a strong incentive to protect his one great triumph, the substantial slice of local power that Sinn Féin enjoys in the local assembly.

El 10 de abril de 1998 los medios de comunicación abrieron sus informativos con el anuncio de un histórico acuerdo de «paz» para Irlanda del Norte. En estos diez años los principales grupos terroristas norirlandeses han abandonado sus campañas de violencia, acometiendo el sistema político importantes cambios bajo los que, no obstante, subyacen graves carencias. Oportuno resulta destacarlo cuando el modelo norirlandés continúa utilizándose en España como referente, asumiéndose desde algunos sectores que el hipotético final exitoso de dicho proceso obliga a iniciativas semejantes en relación con ETA. En tan significativo aniversario dos son los interrogantes que pueden plantearse.

En primer lugar deben recalcarse los elevados costes de un proceso que dista mucho de la perfección que se le atribuye desde la ignorancia o desde la interesada propaganda política. En segundo lugar, incluso aunque se valoraran los beneficios de semejante referente, su réplica en nuestro país en absoluto resulta recomendable. Así ocurre como consecuencia de factores diferenciales entre el contexto vasco y norirlandés que resultan determinantes, entre ellos, los siguientes: la democratización acometida en España; la existencia de un gobierno autónomo administrado por el nacionalismo vasco desde sus orígenes; la obligación de legitimar unas instituciones democráticas por cuya defensa han sido asesinados numerosos ciudadanos que siempre han respondido al terrorismo pacíficamente; y la posibilidad de aplicar una eficaz política antiterrorista, como la seguida entre 2000 y 2004, que llevó a la propia ETA a contemplar su derrota, demostrando la validez de medidas coactivas que serían abandonadas durante la negociación emprendida por el gobierno socialista al emular un modelo defectuoso.

Las alabanzas al proceso norirlandés como un ejemplo que debería seguirse en otros escenarios violentos suelen ignorar que las iniciativas adoptadas en Irlanda del Norte han garantizado una peligrosa impunidad política, jurídica, histórica y moral. No sólo se ha permitido la excarcelación anticipada de los presos condenados por delitos de terrorismo, sino que se ha fortalecido a los representantes políticos de una organización terrorista como el IRA a través de concesiones que han incrementado la influencia del Sinn Fein. Esa misma lógica inspiró las fracasadas negociaciones con ETA ignorándose sus contraproducentes efectos en Irlanda.

Esclarecedoras son en ese sentido las conclusiones de Seamus Mallon, prominente responsable del que hasta 2001 fue el partido nacionalista más votado en Irlanda del Norte, el SDLP (Partido Social Demócrata y Laborista), liderado durante décadas por John Hume, premio Nobel de la Paz en 1998. Al ser entrevistado por The Guardian en 2007, Mallon aseguraba que la «paz» podía y debió alcanzarse mediante «otra vía» diferente a la utilizada por el primer ministro británico Tony Blair. Esta convicción llevaba al político norirlandés a rechazar el término «proceso de paz» por sus negativas implicaciones para la resolución de la problemática de la región.

Tanto Mallon como Hume formaron parte del movimiento por los derechos civiles que a mediados de los años sesenta aglutinó a católicos y protestantes reclamando «derechos civiles para ciudadanos británicos» en la región. Se anteponía así la igualdad de derechos a un nacionalismo dogmático e identitario propugnado por quienes respaldaron el terrorismo del IRA. Sin embargo, estas figuras que representaron la voz mayoritaria de una comunidad contraria al terrorismo se han visto perjudicadas en los últimos años por la política del gobierno británico, profusa en simbólicas concesiones hacia los violentos que han debilitado a quienes optaron siempre por métodos pacíficos.

De ese modo se ha desmoralizado a quienes han respetado la ley, desactivando a una formación como el SDLP, y al unionismo moderado representado por David Trimble, que compartió con Hume el Premio Nobel de la Paz. Peter Mandelson, ministro británico para Irlanda del Norte entre 1999 y 2001, apoyó públicamente estas críticas, pues esa política de concesiones que definió el «proceso de paz» derivó en un peligroso fortalecimiento de los extremos en detrimento de los moderados. Se ha favorecido así una narrativa legitimadora de quienes utilizaron la violencia, recompensándose su asociación con el terrorismo.

Estas y otras opiniones críticas con el proceso norirlandés obligan a cuestionar la generalizada asunción de su «final feliz» que tan recurrente resulta para los interesados en extrapolarlo al terrorismo etarra. Así lo confirma la polarización política y social que se aprecia en una Irlanda del Norte gobernada hoy por quienes han visto premiado su fanatismo con el respaldo de una injusta política gubernamental. Esas son las condiciones de una normalización política que no ha logrado derribar los muros que separan físicamente a las comunidades norirlandesas en determinadas zonas donde la segregación mantiene elevados niveles.

El modelo norirlandés se fundamenta en un chantaje, impunidad a cambio de cese de la violencia, que genera la ilusión de que el problema ha quedado resuelto al desaparecer el terrorismo mortal. Sin embargo, el desprecio que supone relegar la aplicación de la justicia provoca un importante déficit democrático, como han subrayado quienes reclaman en Irlanda del Norte que se inicien procedimientos judiciales contra los responsables de crímenes cometidos en el pasado. Estas exigencias surgen al concebirse dicha impunidad como un obstáculo para una verdadera normalización. Por ello podría aplicarse al modelo norirlandés la reflexión que Reyes Mate realizaba para el contexto vasco en un informe de la Fundación Alternativas en 2006: «La justicia a las víctimas pasadas es la condición necesaria para una política futura sin violencia, pues la justicia a las víctimas no es sólo un problema moral, sino también político».

Ante la peligrosa contradicción en la que se sustenta la «paz» norirlandesa, se está intentando suplir la necesaria justicia que reclaman quienes han sido víctimas de flagrantes violaciones de los derechos humanos con iniciativas que permitan «hacer frente al pasado dejando atrás una historia de división», objetivo del recién creado Grupo Consultivo sobre el Pasado. Ese interés ha llevado a ignorar una lección clave de otros «procesos de paz» donde también se recurrió al chantaje de presentar como un dilema moral y político esa impunidad a la que se supeditaba el avance de la sociedad. Frente a tan perjudicial método de clausurar el pasado, las palabras del jesuita José María Tojeira en 2003, refiriéndose al conflicto salvadoreño, aportan claridad sobre los principios en los que debe construirse una auténtica paz: «El lenguaje se volvía contrario a su significado natural cuando se nos decía que no convenía abrir heridas del pasado. Como si juzgar a los victimarios fuera abrirles heridas a ellos en vez de cerrar las que ellos mismos habían causado a sus víctimas».

El pragmatismo con el que se excusa la impunidad dominante en Irlanda del Norte ha favorecido una prostitución de la historia en la que los terroristas han llegado a ser presentados como héroes a los que la sociedad debe agradecer su esfuerzo por la paz. No es sencillo, quizás imposible, procesar individual y colectivamente semejante aberración que puede convertirse en el germen de futuros conflictos. Por tanto, las lecciones del modelo norirlandés deben extraerse con rigor, particularmente al aplicarse a España, como sugiere el testimonio de la presidenta de la Fundación Víctimas del Terrorismo, Maite Pagazaurtundua: «Se habla con frivolidad de los días sin muertos. No son días sin muertos, son días sin atentados, porque los asesinatos son irreversibles, y cada día desde el asesinato de un ser humano es para sus seres queridos un día más con muerto, porque el duelo del terrorismo no se cierra mientras no se realiza justicia, la concreta de que los responsables encaren su responsabilidad ante la sociedad, y la general que consiste en derrotarlos, no en apañarse con los que no han respetado la vida y la dignidad de los demás y no se sienten responsables por todo ello».

The recent assertion by Gerry Adams that Ian Paisley “radicalised a generation of young people” like himself might have raised eyebrows elsewhere, but in Northern Ireland – which tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement – it was another example of a remarkable consensus emerging between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist party: a consensus about the past, not the future. After decades disputing whose voters were more deserving of the title Most Oppressed People Ever, Sinn Féin and the DUP have spent the past 10 months patting themselves – and each other – on the back for forging the Most Successful Peace Process Ever-ever-ever. The casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that both parties had had their eyes on the prize of a power-sharing executive at Stormont all along: that conflict had been no more than the preamble to conflict resolution, the Troubles a vast hoarding erected on the rubble of the 70s and 80s: “We apologise for any inconvenience caused in the preparation of a brighter tomorrow … ”

That it took nine years from the signing of the Good Friday agreement to get the two parties into government together has not lessened the self-congratulation or the crowing over their rise to pre-eminence at the expense of their rivals. The Social Democratic and Labour party has been rechristened by republicans the South Down and Londonderry party in view of its dwindling electoral base and, by implication (the use of Londonderry), its alienation from nationalist public opinion.

Seamus Mallon, the former SDLP deputy leader and former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, famously described the Good Friday agreement as “Sunningdale for slow learners”. He might have said “for Slow Negotiators” (the 1973 Sunningdale power-sharing deal was hammered out in weeks), or even “for people with short memories”: Jonathan Powell, whose book Great Hatred, Little Room has been serialised in the Guardian, claims in an interview that there were “no serious negotiations” in the 70s and 80s, by which he means no negotiations that included the republican movement; not by the front door anyway. He, too, belittles the SDLP’s influence: “Seamus Mallon’s complaint is that we talked to Sinn Féin because they had the guns. My answer to that is: yes, and your point is?”

His point, Jonathan, is that at the time Sinn Féin did not have the majority of even the nationalist vote.

In The Trouble With Guns, published in the year of the agreement, Malachi O’Doherty summarises Sinn Féin’s tactics: “Republicans would talk us all into a clear linkage between two things that were not necessarily part of each other: constitutional agreement and peace. What satisfied most people in both communities might not be enough to satisfy republicans. Linking agreement and peace would put all parties under a moral onus to find not the best compromise between their different positions, but an agreement that could include Sinn Féin.” In other words, every IRA bomb sent the same petulant message: “Look what you’re still making us do.”

Only a fool would be sorry that they had finally let themselves be persuaded to stop doing it, and that Paisley had been dissuaded from marching men up any more hills. But it would be a bigger (Blair-sized?) fool who argued that just because we are where we are, there wasn’t a shorter way. A way, say, that didn’t take in the theft of £26.5m from the Northern Bank or the murders of Robert McCartney and Paul Quinn.

As for that consensus on the past, there remains one small matter of semantics to be resolved. To Sinn Féin, the quarter century from 1969 to the IRA’s 1994 ceasefire was a war. Not so to their partners in government. Sinn Féin might advance its argument if it could come up with a catchy name, though I wouldn’t recommend Ireland’s earlier 20th-century history for guidance. Applying the 1919-21 war of independence’s model of end results would give us the war of devolution with a north-south dimension, while any analogy with the Irish civil war (1922-3) would take us into the tricky territory of, well, territory – a Northern Irish civil war being as unacceptable to republican grassroots as a six-counties war would be to unionists. (For practical purposes most people in Northern Ireland/the Six Counties agree to call this “here”.)

Perhaps republicans could borrowing from Our Wee Country, a website for fans of Northern Ireland’s football team, to create Our Wee War – whose initials, OWW, would give voice to our past pain, lest we were to forget our debt to the people who delivered the Most Successful Peace Process etc. After years of using “conflict” (see opening paragraph), I am coming back round to Troubles (see same paragraph). Those were very, very disturbed times, Seriously Fucked Up in fact. There’s an acronym to conjure with: SF*dUP, anyone?

Why do rats float while good men sink? Readers may have exploded over the headline on this page yesterday. It read “A fascinating, gracious man”, and crowned a eulogy on Northern Ireland’s retiring first minister, Ian Paisley, written by his one-time bitterest foe, Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin/IRA.

Adams described Paisley as variously civilised, good-humoured, respectful, cordial and a man whom “I would like to know better”. Funny that Adams, or at least his friends, spent much of their lives trying to kill him or his ilk. As for Paisley’s role in inciting violence and tension, it “whetted my political appetite and radicalised a generation of young people like myself”. It was almost a thank you. It was sickening.

I first encountered Paisley as a young reporter covering a bible-bashing rally in the grounds of Stormont Castle. It was a miserable, freezing afternoon and raining hard. The faces of the drummer boys were mauve with cold, as were the bare legs of the majorettes. The men round Paisley wore bowler hats. It was not an appetising event, yet thousands of Ulster Protestants were there.

Then the big man began. Like a revivalist preacher from the deep south, Paisley ranted over the sodden slopes of Stormont. It was electrifying and archaic. The curses of God were called down on “old red socks”, the Pope, the “anti-Christ”, whom Paisley was later to heckle with primitive discourtesy in the European parliament. Catholics were damned – “they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin” – and King Billy glorified. The crowd sang hymns and roared. It was like watching a mad Celtic druid blessing the Brythonic hordes before confronting the Roman army.

The man was a monster, a fanatic, a hangover from the middle ages. I remember wondering how on earth Britain had allowed Ulster’s constitution so to fester as to have this man roaming the woods and hills of Ulster. One thing Britain does not do well is postcolonial partition. It creates a fertile breeding ground for the likes of Paisley, and his antagonist, Adams.

By the 1970s and 80s the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland was beginning to understand that the long persecution of the Catholics was inexcusable. Unionist leaders from Terence O’Neil through Brian Faulkner to David Trimble struggled – some harder than others – to reform Ulster’s unequal society. They did so even as the housing and schooling policies of Britain’s direct rulers subsidised the polarisation of the province into increasingly segregated Catholic and Protestant districts.

By the 1980s, elected leaders of both communities were having to look over their shoulders at the militias who were coming to dominate their enclaves. The Catholics had remained overwhelmingly loyal to John Hume’s Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) but were driven into the arms of the IRA’s terrorist gangs. The Protestant unionists were sabotaged by the Paisley “loyalists” of the Democratic Unionist party. While Paisley claimed to reject violence, his bloodthirsty language laundered the brutality of the loyalist paramilitaries.

Between them Adams and Paisley made Northern Ireland ungovernable and brought death, destruction and untold misery to tens of thousands of their countrymen. They offered no leadership towards compromise and undermined those who did by pandering to the baser instincts and fears of their supporters. They were the Taliban of Europe, operating in their equivalent of Tora Bora, the fields of South Armagh and the Orange Order halls of the Shankill. The death toll rose to 3,500.

Adams and his collaborator, Martin McGuinness, destroyed Hume’s SDLP, and Paisley’s histrionic fundamentalism destroyed Trimble’s unionism. Any effort to drag the province into the 20th century was met with a flurry of kneecappings, bombings, murders and exile. These were appalling people doing appalling things, when good people were struggling to bring peace to a corner of a nation that boasted to the world that it was a sophisticated democracy.

That grand old observer of Ireland, Conor Cruise O’Brien, once remarked that Northern Ireland will never be wholly at peace as long as its politics were dominated by religion, but that it would see periods of calm coinciding with the ageing of each generation of tribal leaders. Men such as Adams and McGuinness would not like their children hearing them being called terrorists. Paisley would tire of fearing for his life and yearn for the respectability of power and visits to Downing Street.

These men eventually eliminated moderate leaders so they could claim moderation for themselves. They smashed power-sharing so they could share power between themselves. They now pretend that change could not have been faster because the people would not let them. The climate of public opinion in the province was not ready.

That is a lie. These men were the climate, and it was one of systematic bigotry and violence. They chose their methods and terrorised all who opposed them. While religious sectarianism elsewhere in Europe was on the wane, lovers of Northern Ireland had to watch in despair as it drifted to ever greater separatism – territorially, politically and psychologically.

The Good Friday agreement did not end this polarisation. It is best described as a moment in a long process, when Tony Blair cleared from the battlefield the moderate clutter of Hume and Trimble so that Adams and Paisley could see the whites of each other’s eyes.

Blair’s prisoner release turned more terrorists and gangsters on to the streets of Britain than anything in modern history. By pandering to extremism it destroyed the electoral bases of both Hume and Trimble. It rewarded Adams for his negotiating cunning and Paisley for his intransigence. The spoils of violence were recouped by the men who had opposed peace.

What restored devolved government to Stormont was not Good Friday but, as Adams claimed yesterday, a decision by him and Paisley to abandon their former ways, stand on their heads and compromise. Each got what he wanted and could seek comfort in old age, lubricated with exorbitant amounts of British money.

Needless to say, Paisley was soon “Paisleyed” by the hardliners he had once led, and has had to resign. As anyone who walks the Falls will know, the Real IRA is still a menace to Adams. The legacy of four decades, if not four centuries, of communal hatred is entrenched in segregated schools and housing estates. The men who now claim to have brought peace to Ulster delayed it so long that their peace is insecure and their landscape traumatised.

A cliche of conflict studies holds that only leaders of extremist factions can deliver closure. Hence Kenyatta of Kenya, Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Begin of Israel. Hence the “feelers” put out to Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hamas in Gaza. Eventually we must all “sit down with the men of violence”.

To that thesis history can only reply, sometimes yes and sometimes no. When there is a future to be rebuilt, bygones must be bygones. But it is one thing to forgive, quite another to forget.

As I meandered my carefree way to school, I and other pedestrian scholars passed the election offices, in a shop, of the local republican candidate Liam McMillen. It was 1964. It was Belfast. The Irish national flag adorned the shop window. We paid little attention to this until Ian Paisley announced that he would march on to the Falls Road to remove “this foreign flag” unless the RUC removed it.

The RUC promptly obliged, smashing the shop front in the process and swamping the neighbourhood with armoured cars and riot police. The people in the election office did what anyone else would do in the circumstances. They got another flag and put it back in the window. The RUC returned and days of street rioting ensued.

These events whetted my political appetite, radicalised a generation of young people like myself, and were my first acquaintance with Ian Paisley. For his part Paisley was one in a long line of firebrand fundamentalist protestant clerics who ignited and enflamed Anglo-Irish politics at different times in our history by playing the sectarian card.

The result was to impede or delay progress, to polarise our society, and to incite violence and tension. So Ian Paisley was not the exception. Though he was exceptional.

In 1946, two years before I was born, he was ordained at the independent Ravenhill Evangelical Mission church in east Belfast. And in the early 50s, after a dispute with the Presbyterian church, he helped to establish the Free Presbyterian church. In 1954 he received an honorary doctor of divinity degree from the Bob Jones University in South Carolina. In 1971 he founded the Democratic Unionist party.

He was also associated with a number of hardline organisations including Ulster Protestant Action; Protestant Unionists; Ulster Protestant Volunteers; Ulster Workers’ Council; Vanguard; Ulster Defence Association; and Ulster Resistance.

Ian Paisley led the efforts to topple every single unionist leader, from Terence O’Neill in the late 60s to David Trimble a few years ago. His demand that “O’Neill must go” or “Faulkner must go”, right up to the modern day, cut down generations of unionist leaders. So Ian Paisley was a busy man.

He and I were not to meet until recent times and he did not talk to me directly until March 26 2007, when we agreed the arrangements which led to the re-establishment of the political institutions here.

In and around 2003 and 2004, when it was obvious that David Trimble was not going to deliver, some of us formed a view that our big challenge was to make a deal with Ian Paisley. By 2004 it was my opinion that he would do a deal. We had to make sure that the timing and substance was right. By 2005 and 2006 I had warmed to the view that a Paisley deal was the best option. After all, who could out-Paisley Ian Paisley? It needed him to bring unionism into the new dispensation.

Of course I could not be certain that he would come on board, but in fairness, when he did it was with grace and good humour. That humour and his civilised accord with Martin McGuinness went against the grain of those who had been reared in the image of the old Paisley.

I am often asked what made him do the deal. He himself explains that he had no alternative, that if he did not accept the St Andrews agreement the British and Irish governments were going to move ahead despite unionism.

I think that’s only part of the story. His wife, Eileen, and his family undoubtedly played a big role in his decision, and I think his willingness to reach out and to work positively with Sinn Féin was a genuine endeavour to make things better for the people who live here.

Did he do everything that was required of him during his term as first minister? No. He was restrained, in part perhaps by his own history, and by some within his party who don’t like the new political arrangements. It is ironic that a “Paisley must go” campaign started less than a year after he became first minister and for the last few months there has been a growing leadership crisis within the DUP, culminating in Tuesday’s retirement announcement.

Will I miss him? Well, maybe I can get to know him better now that he is retiring to the backbenches. I would like that. He is a fascinating figure, with many facets to his character. In my dealings with him I have always found him cordial, good-humoured and respectful.

But of course the main focus has to be on delivering and on working with the new DUP leader, who will also have challenges in the time ahead. For Sinn Féin the peace process is certainly a marathon. Ian Paisley’s retirement makes it a relay race for the Democratic Unionist party. Will we succeed in getting to the finishing line? Yes. That is one lesson that Ian Paisley teaches all of us. Never say “never, never, never”.

I asked a former paramilitary recently if 10 years ago he could have imagined that in his life the Troubles would be declared over, power would be devolved, and Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness would have such a good rapport as to earn them the monicker locally “the chuckle brothers”. “No way,” he said emphatically. “Not in a million years.” It is a sentiment shared by many of us who lived through the 70s, 80s and 90s in Northern Ireland. The violence seemed so entrenched, so woven into the fabric of everyday life, that it was inconceivable an enduring political settlement could be found.

Even when the Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998 – the first real glimmer of peace – the years of relentless carnage had taught us not to count our chickens. From “no surrender” to “not an inch”, the language of our lives was laced with intransigence. But of course a lot has changed in Northern Ireland since 1998. Loyalist and republican paramilitaries announced ceasefires. Soldiers no longer patrol the streets as they did in my childhood. The ominous, fortress-like police stations that once overshadowed the Falls Road where I grew up have been demolished. Political power is back at Stormont and appears to be functioning, an economic and tourism boom has provided jobs, wealth and tangible incentives to make peace last. Cross-community groups working to dismantle sectarianism are flourishing. And there are genuine material changes in the quality of many people’s lives. It is astonishing – but it is not the whole picture.

No one thought a transition to peace – to a “normal” society – would be easy, and sure enough that has proved to be true. In August 1998, the bomb that killed 29 people in Omagh was a terrible reminder of the hazards still remaining. There were plenty of other serious hiccups along the way, including paramilitary feuds, and a fair share of political brinkmanship (usually involving Tony Blair arriving at the eleventh hour to mediate). At community level there are more “peace lines” (walls that slice between loyalist and nationalist communities, thereby guaranteeing their continuing segregation) than there were 10 years ago.

However these are not, given time, insurmountable hurdles to peace. More worrying is that beneath the shiny new veneer of “post-conflict” Northern Ireland there is an insidious gnawing away at the hope of the past few years because of recent murders. Just last week, the body of 27-year-old Andrew Burns, who had been shot, was found near a village church on the border with the Irish Republic, allegedly the handywork of a dissident republican group. And last March, the bodies of 38-year-old Joe Jones and 36-year-old Edward Burns – a childhood friend of mine – were found in Belfast. Burns had been shot, while Jones was beaten to death.

But it was perhaps the death last year of Paul Quinn in Co Monaghan and that of Robert McCartney in Belfast in 2005 that have resonated most because their families have emerged as unlikely but vociferous campaigners. (Indeed, the McCartneys’ campaign took them all the way to the White House.) Both say they want justice for their loved ones – innocent victims of brutal beatings – and the perpetrators convicted. But they are also attempting to use what happened to highlight problems that persist within Northern Ireland.

Catherine McCartney claims that although there is government at Stormont and relative peace on the streets, her brother’s death is indicative of a “sick society” that is still a long way from coming to terms with its past. “People really want [peace] to work,” McCartney says. “But outside Northern Ireland people only see the bigger political picture. Real people on the ground are still living with it. The threat is still there.” We need to be wary, McCartney argues, of “sweeping under the carpet” those events that do not fit in with the “peace agenda”.

It has been a long, hard road to get to where Northern Ireland is today, and there is an understandable reluctance to focus on things that might destabilise it. This includes in any way exaggerating the impact of recent murders. This is not, after all, the 70s. Nevertheless, we should be cautious about brushing aside the concerns within communities affected by deaths of people such as Robert McCartney or Paul Quinn. As I was told recently: “People in Northern Ireland have very long memories.”

I have been interviewing a lot of people recently who, like myself, lived in the areas worst affected by the Troubles: former paramilitaries and soldiers, people who lost family and friends and who were, to varying degrees, damaged by what they saw and experienced.

What we all share, I realise, is a horror at the prospect – however unlikely it appears – of returning to “the bad old days”. Sometimes there is a feeling that we should be grateful for so few deaths compared to the years of the Troubles. This is a misguided impulse. We should be grateful that the worst is over and for the enormous strides made by one-time political foes. But we should only be satisfied when there are no more deaths, no more “punishment” beatings, and no more generations who have the threat of these hanging over them.

TOMORROW is the anniversary of the Battle of Tara Hill, fought on May 26, 1798, between 4,000 United Irishmen and 700 British yeomanry. The British carried the day. More than 200 years later, the hill of Tara, a little over 30 miles north of Dublin, is the scene of yet another battle, between the forces of modern Ireland, represented by the advocates of the M3 motorway, and those of us who believe that the routing of a busy road slap bang through the Tara-Skryne Valley represents an act of vandalism with not only national, but international, ramifications.

With the end of the Northern Ireland conflict and the power-sharing agreement of the Rev. Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, this area of County Meath has rapidly become the most disputed terrain in the country. Even the nearby scene of the Battle of the Boyne, where in 1690 William of Orange defeated James II to reassert English Protestant rule over Ireland, and which was visited recently by Ian Paisley and Prime Minister Bertie Ahern in a spirit of great joviality, joshing and gift-giving, is now likely to be relegated to the status of theme park.

What makes the Tara-Skryne Valley so special is not only the battle once fought there, but a remarkably high concentration of ceremonial monuments including the Hill of Tara itself, which was, and is, the seat of the High Kings of Ireland.

Archaeologists calculate that the oldest of the monuments, the Mound of the Hostages, was raised in about 3000 B.C., thus making it roughly contemporaneous with the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt. This monument contains a chamber in which, at the festivals of Imbolc (Feb. 1) and Samhain (Nov. 1), the rising sun is perfectly aligned, just as at the winter solstice in the great passage tomb at nearby Newgrange, a shaft of sunlight penetrates the inner sanctum of a massive mound whose white quartz facade is glisteningly reminiscent of the Portland stone of the Parliament buildings in Belfast.

Also nearby is the Hill of Slane, on which St. Patrick is reputed to have lighted a fire to get the attention of King Laoghaire and begin to obscure the light of the sun god with the light of God the Son. It was from the Mound of the Hostages that the coronation stone of Laoghaire and countless other Irish kings, the six-foot-tall, phallic Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, was moved to the nearby memorial honoring the 500 or so United Irishmen who died at the Battle of Tara Hill.

Some believe that the Stone of Scone, long used for the coronation of British monarchs, may also be traced back to Tara, having been removed by St. Columba to Scotland and thence to Westminster Abbey by Edward I.

And it was at Tara in 1843 that the political leader Daniel O’Connell, known as “the Liberator,” spoke to an estimated million people — the largest of a series of “monster meetings,” as they were termed — in support of Catholic Emancipation, the repeal of the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland and the restoration of the Irish Parliament. This location was chosen by O’Connell precisely because of its profound significance in the Irish psyche.

It’s an irony, then, that Prime Minister Ahern and the Fianna Fail government of the Republic of Ireland (the party name, which means “Soldiers of Destiny,” suggests an intimate relationship with the Stone of Destiny) have seemed to be standing by while the Tara-Skryne Valley is threatened with destruction by the building of a 70-mile motorway to ease the commute between County Meath and Dublin to the south.

The plan to build the M3 close to the Hill of Tara has been in place since 2002 and has already been widely condemned for what it is: cultural vandalism. To quote a letter from a group of eminent American and British scholars published in The Irish Times recently, “Tara wasn’t just a site, but a landscape, a complex of monuments that, in combination with the topography, place names, mythology and history make this a uniquely well-preserved place of truly international importance.”

Yet, three weeks ago, the minister for transport, Martin Cullen, officially “turned the sod” on the motorway in County Meath. Within 24 hours, however, it was announced that in Lismullen, right in the path of the motorway, there was the site of a 3,500-year-old structure similar to Stonehenge, though made of wooden pillars, and covering an area the size of three football fields. The minister for the environment, Dick Roche, ordered work on the M3 stopped in light of the discovery of a national monument.

Leaving aside the issue that it’s only now that this discovery is being made (or only now revealed), the find should signal the need to reroute the M3 away from the Tara-Skryne Valley. But nothing is quite so simple in the new, emancipated Ireland. It turns out that there was a 2004 amendment to the National Monuments Act that allows the minister for the environment to demolish a national monument if he chooses.

So work continues on the motorway, if not precisely in the area of the henge, causing untold damage. Yesterday, I spoke with Muireann Ni Bhrolchain of the National University of Ireland and the Campaign to Save Tara who reported that on-site protesters have been attacked by construction workers.

The time has come for another “monster meeting” at Tara, one conducted, perhaps, by the new “Liberators” — Mr. McGuinness and Mr. Paisley. Earlier this month, at the Boyne battle site, Mr. Paisley gave a good-humored warning to Prime Minister Ahern that “you will have an invasion from Ulster on many occasions,” and it’s more likely than not, for example, that busloads of Ulster Loyalists will come south each July 12 to commemorate the Battle of Boyne.

It’s much less likely that Bertie Ahern would welcome Ian Paisley to the hill of Tara, since the prime minister has stood by while one of the chief glories of the country he purports to hold in safekeeping has been attacked.

The results of yesterday’s general election in the Republic of Ireland, in which Mr. Ahern is trying to return to power for a third term, are still unclear. What is clear, however, is that whichever government takes charge, one of its first responsibilities should be to preserve the fabric of a country that depends on cultural tourism.

It seems strange, to say the least, that the idea of the scene of the Battle of the Boyne as a tourist destination is being bandied about while Tara is being bulldozed. If Bertie Ahern does happen to be returned as prime minister, it’s still not too late for him and Fianna Fail to go down in history as the government that paved the way for a new era of Irish cooperation rather than the government that, at least with regard to Tara of the Kings, literally paved the way.

La foto del pastor Ian Paisley y del republicano Martin MacGuiness, dos antiguos enemigos irreconciliables, riéndose ahora a mandíbula batiente, produce desazón. Si se entienden tan bien, ¿por qué se han matado estos irlandeses durante 40 años, dejando a unas 3.400 víctimas en el camino?
Seguro que uno y otro han recordado en un momento tan solemne como este (juntos en el mismo Gobierno) a las víctimas propias y que las habrán honrado reconociendo su contribución a la causa, pero lo que no pueden es ocultar la inutilidad de tanto sufrimiento propio y extraño. Las víctimas no murieron por la paz, sino por una Irlanda unida a Gran Bretaña o independiente. ¿Para qué tanta violencia, si al final se lo pasan tan bien juntos? Naturalmente que hay que celebrar el silencio de las armas y el imperio de la palabra, pero la llegada de un nuevo tiempo sin terrorismo no puede significar amortización del pasado violento. De ahí la pregunta: ¿cuál es el lugar de la memoria de las víctimas en el nuevo tiempo de paz?

DIGAMOS de entrada que el interés que guía esta pregunta no es meramente moral. No es solo por exquisitez moral que haya que preguntarse por la responsabilidad de líderes políticos respecto a crímenes cometidos. Lo decisivo de la pregunta afecta más bien a la calidad de la paz o de la política que ahora se inaugura, si su precio es el olvido. ¿De qué pasta está hecha la paz que celebran los de la foto?
Para saberlo hay que seguir el rastro de la estrategia política que ha llevado a este feliz desenlace. Desde los primeros pasos en 1996, con John Major, hasta la formación de un Gobierno entre unionistas y republicanos, hace unos días, ha habido momentos clave, como la Declaración de Downing Street, en 1994, donde se aceptan las negociaciones políticas si el Sinn Féin abandona las armas, o los Acuerdos del Viernes Santo de 1998, que reconoce la posibilidad de un Gobierno autónomo. Pues bien, en todos esos momentos se jugaba con un supuesto que no había que explicitar porque era indiscutible: a saber, que si los contendientes abandonaban las armas –y, por tanto, la pretensión de conseguir sus objetivos políticos a punta de pistola– se haría invisible su pasado violento, de suerte que habría “arreglo” con respecto a la responsabilidad por los delitos cometidos, los presos saldrían de la cárcel, se les facilitaría la inserción social etcétera. El premio al abandono de las armas era el olvido del pasado.
Este supuesto no era necesario explicitarlo, porque es el abecé de la política. La política es de los vivos. Nada hay más importante para la política que la vida de los vivos, de ahí que si un terrorista decide respetar esas vidas contra las que hasta ese momento atentaba, los representantes políticos de las vidas de los vivos estarán dispuestos a hacer la vista gorda sobre las responsabilidades derivadas de atentados contra las vidas de los ya muertos.
Ese convencimiento lo comparten terroristas y demócratas con la sociedad en su conjunto, por eso la prensa puede exhibir la foto como un triunfo y no como un escándalo. Saben que la reacción va a ser de alivio. ¡Por fin podremos vivir en paz!, suspiraremos todos.
Los de la foto tienen fundadas razones para estar satisfechos. Han conseguido ahorrar a sus conciudadanos más sufrimientos inútiles. Hay que reconocerles ese mérito, pero solo a condición de que ellos, en primer lugar, y los demás también, reconozcamos la endeblez de esa paz. Si basta, en efecto, dejar de matar para que todo se olvide, ¿qué impide volver a la violencia para conseguir determinados objetivos? Esa paz pone término a la violencia local, pero corre el peligro de alimentar la espiral de violencia, porque no da importancia a los desastres que ha causado. Como se concede a los actores del armisticio el poder taumatúrgico de hacer invisible el pasado calamitoso, ¿por qué no recurrir a la violencia si las circunstancias lo exigen? Y ¿por qué fijarse en los daños colaterales, si se posee la fórmula para hacerlos irrelevantes? Para lograr una paz de mejor calidad hay que tomarse mucho más en serio la significación de la violencia ejercida.
¿Y eso qué significa? Reconocer que el asesinato político origina un daño irreparable que no queda saldado con abandonar las armas, por eso ahí sigue, como una pregunta pendiente. Esa pregunta o denuncia de la injusticia sufrida va dirigida directamente al que mata, pero no es una pregunta privada, sino política. No es lo mismo una paz construida sobre el pasar página que otra sin olvido ni amnistía.

DOS TIPOS, pues, de paz posible en Irlanda del Norte: una que se deja fotografiar porque garantiza la vida de los vivos, se entierra el hacha de guerra y también el dolor sufrido en las propias filas y el causado en las del bando contrario. Y otra paz que sabe enfrentarse al dolor causado en el otro; abierta, por tanto, a responder del daño infligido. Son dos tipos de paz irreductibles pero indisociables. Irreductibles, porque difícilmente la política podrá hacer justicia a tanto sufrimiento; pero indisociables, pues solo esa exigencia de justicia podrá colocar a la política en la ruta de una democracia mejor.
Los dos modelos están en permanente tensión, y cada uno tiene su tiempo. Cuando las heridas son recientes, conviene mirar hacia adelante pero a sabiendas de que hay una deuda con el pasado de los otros que ninguna risa, ninguna “química”, podrá disimular.

THE packet of Wagon Wheel cookies crushed into the damp grass on the slopes of Black Mountain in the Belfast Hills bore a faded illustration of a covered wagon traveling at speed, together with the slogan: “Size Matters!” Indeed, it does. I was making my way gingerly down this steep hill, which, along with the rest of the massif — from Divis Mountain to Cave Hill — was imagined by Jonathan Swift to be a giant, recumbent figure. Some say that this was his inspiration for the distortions in scale with which he opened “Gulliver’s Travels.”

I myself couldn’t see it. When I’d arrived in Northern Ireland three days previously, my flight skimmed past Black Mountain to the north, and the day before I’d driven back into town from Fermanagh over a spur of Cave Hill (the supposed nose of the giant). Then, this afternoon, I’d quit my hotel in the center of town and walked west along the Falls Road. The whole way up this artery — which is imprinted in the national consciousness as the very circulatory system of Republican terrorism — the landmass loomed above me, its flanks dappled with heather and pitted with old quarry workings. Big it may have been — but anthropoid, not at all.

The last time I was in Belfast it was shortly after the Easter Accords had been signed. I walked this way with my friend, the writer Carlo Gébler, then we stomped back into town via an equally notorious Loyalist artery, the Shankhill Road. The time before that it was the early 1990s, and I went up the Falls Road to visit the Sinn Fein headquarters and interview its press officer, Mitchel McLaughlin, who now represents South Antrim in the Legislative Assembly.

On neither of those previous occasions do I remember feeling any great anxiety along the Falls Road, despite the Republican murals of H-block martyrs and gun-wielding paramilitaries, the gun-toting Royal Ulster Constabulary foot patrols, and the armored vehicles swishing past, hopeful “Crimestoppers” hotline numbers painted on their camouflaged sides. But this time it was the May Day holiday and the streets were empty; I suspected that if I were to encounter loafing oafs they might well give me a casual, nonsectarian thump. Then, the potential violence was so extreme it was non-apprehensible; now the teenagers smashing traffic lights with their hurly sticks suggested merely workaday beatings.

At Milltown Cemetery I made a detour to visit the Irish Republican Army plot. It was here, in 1988, that a Unionist paramilitary member, Michael Stone, shot and threw grenades at three Republican mourners at a funeral. Three days later, two British Army corporals who accidentally ran into the funeral cortege for one of these victims were dragged from their car, beaten by the crowd and then summarily executed. So the Troubles eked themselves out in grotesque dribs and drabs of human life, adding up to more than 3,500 in all.

Even on a bright day, with sun and showers alternating, there remained something minatory about Milltown. A couple of tight-faced street drinkers loitered among the overgrown Victorian graves. The I.R.A. plot is like an ancient chamber tomb: the volunteers’ black marble markers arranged in a boat-shaped compound, while at the prow the declaration of the 1916 Easter Rising is carved in stone.

I turned my back on the city and trudged up the Monagh Bypass, then past the Irish travelers’ camp and along the Upper Springfield Road. Finally I reached open ground and headed on up to the ridge. Public access to the Black Mountain has been possible only for the last couple of years. Before that the British Army held sway up here: it still has a huge listening post on the summit of Divis.

The evening before I’d met a warden for the new park that’s being created here, and he told me that the hills were becoming well used by the city’s inhabitants. This didn’t accord with my experience: as the wind soughed over the heather I saw only a posse of young travelers — indigenous Irish nomads — coursing for hares, their track suits flapping as they ran after their lurchers. And the heather itself was burnt to a crisp, while fresh yellow blades of grass speared among the scorched roots. The warden had told me that the children set fire to the heather every year, and that really it wasn’t such a bad thing, since it provided one of the few remaining habitats suitable for the red grouse to nest in.

It was beautiful up on the hills, with achingly long views southwest to Strangford Lough and over 30 miles south to the conical Mountains of Mourne. In the near distance, on the far side of town, I could make out the pale, stone monstrosity of Stormont: a Brobdingnagian Parliament built for politicians all too often fit only for Lilliput. The following day would see Tony Blair and Bertie Ahearn descend on Stormont to celebrate the new devolved government of the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein with plenty of mutual back-slapping.

But the arrival of these giants lay in the future; for the meantime it was I who was slapping the back of the mighty hill with my boots. Immediately below me I could see the enclaves of Ballymurphy and Springmartin, Catholic and Protestant respectively, still separated by 30-foot-high “peace walls” topped by razor wire, and I wondered, which one would it be safer to walk through, the Big or the Little Endians’?

Aunque a los políticos se les llene la boca hablando de la sociedad del conocimiento y la necesidad de que la educación se convierta en un proceso para aprender a aprender, lo cierto es que el debate político organizado en frentes impide cualquier aprendizaje. En lugar de ello, el frentismo político se basa en la convicción de estar en posesión de la verdad, o de la moral histórica, lo que lleva no al diálogo como aprendizaje, sino a la condena de quien no participa de las mismas convicciones. Y, así, en lugar de aprender de lo que pasa en el mundo para avanzar en la solución de los problemas propios, la comparación se lleva la palma: hay que hacer lo mismo que lo que en otros lugares parece haber conducido al éxito. Pero solo se toman los sucesos que permiten apuntalar las propias convicciones, o, de los sucesos de otros lugares, solo se toman los elementos que permiten reforzar la posición propia y condenar la del adversario.

NO TIENE nada de raro que el jefe de un Estado con un problema de terrorismo, el rey de España, sienta sana envidia de la foto de estos días en el Ulster: en lugar del terror intercomunitario, los representantes políticos de las dos comunidades, sentados juntos, dispuestos a compartir las tareas de gobierno. Es normal que diga que, visto el éxito, el empeño ha merecido la pena. Y también es normal que, visto nuestro fracaso con nuestro terrorismo, añada que las situaciones, quiere decir los problemas, no son comparables.
Alguno ha afirmado que, de tanto comparar la situación de Euskadi con la de Irlanda del Norte, terminaríamos importando no la solución, sino el problema: la división de comunidades, algo que todavía, a pesar de todo, no se ha producido del todo en Euskadi. Algunos miran al proceso de paz norirlandés para subrayar el largo tiempo que ha sido necesario para llegar a buen término. Otros miran a la tenacidad que ha sido necesaria para superar las dificultades que se han ido planteando en el camino. También ha habido quienes han mirado al Ulster para comparar el comportamiento del partido que ha estado en la oposición para utilizarlo como espejo crítico en referencia a la situación española, y en Gran Bretaña les ha tocado a los dos grandes partidos, al laborista y al conservador, ser oposición en algún momento el largo proceso.
Todos esos puntos son importantes y conviene tenerlos en cuenta: ningún proceso de estas característica es coser y cantar. Puede durar mucho tiempo, aunque tampoco sea un dogma indiscutible que siempre tenga que ser así, y exige entonces mucha tenacidad. Y que el problema de acabar con el terror esté fuera del debate político del día a día en sus rasgos fundamentales para poder llegar a buen término es algo que permite comparación, aunque salgamos mal parados. Pero también es importante describir y analizar las diferencias para que las comparaciones fáciles no se conviertan, ellas mismas, en artillería que ahonda las diferencias y el debate estéril, en lugar de inducir a seguir el ejemplo.
Los dirigentes del Sinn Féin eran los dirigentes del IRA: tenían mando en ambas plazas. Nunca ha tenido sentido pedir que en Batasuna surgiera algún Gerry Adams: la petición correcta hubiera sido tomar a ETA como destinataria de la petición. En el caso norirlandés no ha sido el Sinn Féin quien ha convencido al IRA de la necesidad de deponer las armas: ha sido un proceso de convencimiento al unísono. Pero, en el caso vasco, esa identidad de dirección en ambas organizaciones no se ha dado nunca, ni creo que ETA vaya a permitir que se dé alguna vez. Entender esta diferencia es vital para no equivocarse en el destinatario de los esfuerzos por buscar el fin de la violencia: pensar que el interlocutor sea Batasuna es perder el tiempo. Pero parece que no terminamos de aprender.

EN SEGUNDO lugar: la violencia y el terror en Euskadi son unidireccionales. Y es unidireccional además de dirigirse contra decisiones que cuentan con legitimidad democrática. En el Ulster ha habido violencia y terror católicos contra los protestantes, y violencia y terror protestante contra los católicos. Y además ha existido una situación en la que los católicos se encontraban en situación de indigencia social, económica e incluso política. En el Ulster ha habido, y sigue habiendo, división entre comunidades. En Euskadi, no. En el Ulster tienen por delante la superación de las divisiones comunitarias. En Euskadi, ese paso ya está básicamente dado. En el Ulster llegan a algo parecido, aunque de lejos, al Estatuto de autonomía. Nosotros lo poseemos, de forma democráticamente legítima, desde hace casi 30 años.
La vía abierta a la autodeterminación en los acuerdos de Stormont está condicionada al consenso entre ambas partes, es decir, está heterocondicionada. Londres no ha dudado, cuando ha habido problemas, en suspender la autonomía del Ulster. A partir de todas esas diferencias es preciso aprender una cosa fundamental: o el interlocutor es el mando militar, o no hay interlocución. El resto es perder el tiempo. Los guiños a Batasuna con las listas de ANV no conducirán a nada –otra cosa es el galimatías jurídico en el que nos hemos metido–. Y con la interlocución armada solo se puede hablar de presos. Cualquier referencia en ese contexto a la normalización, a las cuestiones políticas, es condenar al fracaso la posibilidad de terminar con el terrorismo.

Acuerdos de Viernes Santo, St. Andrews, Stormont…: entradas para un futuro diccionario de Ciencia Política. Tres mil seiscientos muertos y muchas generaciones echadas a perder en un ambiente sórdido e insufrible. Insultos, desprecios, desconfianza genética. Ingleses e irlandeses, ricos y pobres, protestantes y católicos: «como si fueran habitantes de planetas distintos», decía Benjamín Disraeli respecto de las clases sociales («Sybila o las dos naciones», 1845). La historia tiene muchas cuentas pendientes con Irlanda. Ahora empieza a pagar esa deuda, incluso con intereses de demora.

Eire es hoy día una sociedad próspera y eficiente, cuyo nivel de renta se sitúa en un sorprendente segundo puesto en la Unión Europea. Muchos ingleses no salen de su asombro. Ya no sirven algunos tópicos, entre ellos la tesis weberiana sobre la ética protestante y el espíritu del capitalismo. El Ulster podría renacer con este nuevo rumbo político. Belfast, Londonderry, Omagh… dejarán de significar odio, fanatismo, violencia. Quizá con el tiempo todo sea un mal sueño. Excepto, claro, para las víctimas, eternos perdedores. Pero mucho cuidado con el falso paralelismo. Pasado, presente y futuro son muy diferentes en Irlanda y en el País Vasco, por mencionar un ejemplo obligado. Veamos por qué.

El pasado. Agravios, injusticias, venganzas… Habla la literatura, quizá más veraz que una memoria falseada. Odio eterno a los ingleses. Los enemigos de mis enemigos son mis amigos: «vivan los boers», gritaban los colegas juveniles de Leopold Bloom. James Joyce, un irlandés muy poco nacionalista, expresa así su antipatía: son «niños idiotas», que «al cabo de pocos años serán magistrados y funcionarios». Tal vez era una premonición. ¿Cómo actúan los héroes de la libertad? El párrafo que sigue es demoledor: «Sinn Fein. Si te echas atrás te meten un cuchilllo. Mano oculta. Si te quedas, el pelotón de ejecución…» Mientras tanto, «el sol de la autonomía se levanta en el noroeste…» Recuerde el lector que «Ulises» fue publicado en 1922. La historia menos sectaria cuenta cientos de dramas personales que reflejan -una vez más- la insuperable capacidad de la especie humana para hacer daño a sus semejantes. La política es un invento de los griegos que los ingleses manejan mejor que nadie. En casa, y también en buena parte del Imperio. Excepto en Irlanda, porque el poder que se ejerce sobre los vecinos, ayuno casi siempre de legitimidad, exige actuar con rigores y crueldades. La reacción ante la injusticia viene acompañada del peor condimento ideológico: nacionalismo romántico, orgánico e historicista; tenebrosa fragua del espíritu del pueblo; comunidad imaginaria. Del paisaje a la mafia, del orgullo herido a la miseria moral, del patriota vibrante al terrorista desalmado… Muchos, demasiados, recorrieron todos los caminos. Unos cuantos han emprendido el viaje de vuelta. Estaban ayer en Stormont.

El presente. Día de gala y retórica propia de las grandes ocasiones. Muchos protagonistas. El primero, Tony Blair, en el penúltimo capítulo de su largo adiós cuyo final parece que no llega nunca. Momento de gloria. Un buen socialista, aunque sea británico, necesita demostrar que prefiere la paz y no la guerra, da igual preventiva o represiva, que tanto desprestigio le ha traído entre los suyos. Ayer explicó una teoría singular sobre la resolución de conflictos que hará las delicias de los departamentos universitarios pero que no servirá de nada fuera de contexto. Presencia americana. La cuestión irlandesa sólo se entiende con referencia al padrino lejano y poderoso: millones de inmigrantes devuelven el cariño hacia su país de origen a través del poderoso «lobby» que defiende la causa nacional en los Estados Unidos. Vieja Irlanda, hermosa, católica y sentimental, casi como nuestro marqués de Bradomín. Nuevo ministro principal, el reverendo Ian Paisley, el unionista pragmático cuando ya no queda más remedio. Si algunos energúmenos guardan los uniformes y entierran los fantasmas, algo habremos ganado. Gerry Adams y Martin Mc Guinness, los grandes triunfadores, son los héroes de la opinión progresista. De las pistolas a las corbatas, con buenas pruebas de que algunos han entrado en razón; entre ellas, reconocer la autoridad de la policía y del poder judicial. En una relativa penumbra se mueve Bernie Ahern, el principal beneficiado a medio plazo… ¿Oiremos hablar de la Gran Irlanda?

El futuro. Ya tenemos gobierno de coalición entre romanos y cartagineses, algo así como un pacto entre Aníbal y Escipión el Africano, mientras Blair -como buen laborista- ejerce de Fabio Cunctator, modelo de sosiego y perseverancia. El día después no será fácil, por supuesto. Los políticos de trinchera suelen ser malos gestores. Algún día tendrán que olvidar las estrategias y ponerse a trabajar en favor de la mayor felicidad para el mayor número, según la clásica regla utilitarista. ¿Serán capaces? Vestido de futuro primer ministro y no de escrupuloso responsable de Hacienda, Gordon Brown ha prometido bastante dinero. A los nuevos socios les parece poco, incluso antes de empezar. Mal asunto. Como buenos empiristas, los ingleses no gustan de ocultar la realidad de los hechos bajo la magia de las palabras: al precio que pagan lo llaman «dividendo de paz». Quedan extremistas a un lado y a otro. Resabios de una convivencia quebrada, escuelas separadas, insultos que apuntan al corazón de la dignidad ofendida… Las ganas de jugar al racismo no se olvidan fácilmente: al parecer, el nuevo objetivo son los jóvenes policías de origen polaco. El ejemplo de la república de Irlanda debería servir de modelo para los condados que acceden ahora a una autonomía limitada. Sin embargo, conviene tener muy presente la sabia advertencia de Montesquieu: el despotismo (social y político) daña de tal modo la «constitución» de una sociedad que la libertad se hace imposible para siempre. Ojalá se equivoque.

Irlanda y el País Vasco, asunto ineludible. No tiene nada que ver una situación con otra. Basta con dar un paseo por Belfast y por San Sebastián. Con una excepción: la ETA y el IRA llevan muchos años compitiendo por demostrar quién pone más muertos sobre la mesa. Aquí no hay dos sociedades, dos religiones o dos historias nacionales. Tenemos ciudadanos honrados frente a los asesinos y sus secuaces. Para buscar el equivalente a la foto de ayer en Stormont hace falta acudir a la hemeroteca. Un Parlamento Vasco elegido libremente existe desde hace más de un cuarto de siglo. Por tanto, jugamos con ventaja. Sobre las competencias de unos y de otros, más vale no preguntar demasiado. Los más entusiastas del sedicente «proceso de paz» deberían comparar los recursos que va a gestionar el Ejecutivo norirlandés con los fondos propios del Gobierno de Vitoria. La capacidad de Londres para suspender la autonomía ha quedado bien demostrada. En cambio, nadie puede asegurar entre nosotros que el artículo 155 de la Constitución sea una norma en disposición de ser aplicada de forma efectiva. A pesar de todo, tendremos que soportar nuevos reproches contra los supuestos intransigentes. Lo cierto es que allí las cosas se hacen al modo británico: Blair no ha dado un solo paso sin contar con la oposición y el IRA ha dejado las armas sin equívocos ni medias tintas, aunque tal vez con alguna reserva mental. Es el momento de reiterar los buenos deseos : ojalá no explote de nuevo el polvorín.

Mejor para el Reino Unido, para Europa en general y para todas las gentes de buena voluntad. Paz verdadera significa, sin embargo, mucho más que discursos y acuerdos políticos. El personaje de Joyce advierte del peligro: «me dan mucho miedo esas grandes palabras que nos hacen tan infelices».

No hay nada que el IRA pueda lograr ahora que no hubiese podido conseguir en los últimos veinticinco años». Con estas palabras, pronunciadas poco antes de la aprobación del Acuerdo de Viernes Santo en 1998, Merlyn Rees, ministro británico para Irlanda del Norte entre marzo de 1974 y septiembre de 1976, resumía el fracaso de la violencia perpetrada por el grupo terrorista dirigido durante décadas por Gerry Adams, también presidente de Sinn Fein. Esta formación acepta ahora un acuerdo político que le permitirá compartir el Gobierno de Irlanda del Norte junto al Partido Unionista del reverendo Ian Paisley, el DUP (Democratic Unionist Party). No es ésta una fórmula novedosa, pues ya en 1973 se intentó poner en funcionamiento una Asamblea autonómica que en unos pocos meses fracasaría como resultado del terrorismo del IRA y de la oposición violenta de unionistas contrarios a dicha iniciativa y que fueron liderados por el propio Paisley. Así pues, quienes en ese momento rechazaron poner en marcha una limitada autonomía, similar a la que acaba de inaugurarse, aceptan ahora unas estructuras de gobierno cuyas características invitan necesariamente a moderar las exultantes valoraciones con las que muchos medios de comunicación y políticos se han referido a este momento histórico.

No debe ser de otro modo cuando se recuerda que cerca de cuatro mil personas fueron asesinadas porque organizaciones terroristas como el IRA y quienes les respondieron desde el bando unionista se negaron a admitir mecanismos democráticos parecidos a éstos a los que Adams y Paisley finalmente han dado su respaldo. En realidad la devolución propuesta en aquel entonces resultaba más ambiciosa al contemplar amplios poderes ejecutivos en ciertas materias hoy eludidas. El decepcionante balance que emerge al compararse los resultados obtenidos -una limitada autonomía bajo completa jurisdicción del Reino Unido- con los medios empleados y los costes derivados de los mismos -el asesinato de miles de seres humanos- no puede ser ignorado. Tampoco puede obviarse el limitado alcance de las competencias que administrará la nueva Asamblea norirlandesa, sometida en todo momento a la soberanía británica. Educación, salud, agricultura, comercio e industria, medio ambiente, desarrollo regional, transporte, agua, arte, ocio y cultura son las áreas sobre las que esta institución podrá legislar, aunque siempre sujeta al condicionante de la aprobación real, manteniéndose fuera del alcance de la misma las cuestiones relacionadas con policía y seguridad, prisiones, justicia, relaciones internacionales, inmigración, recaudación de impuestos y telecomunicaciones, entre otras. Si bien en el futuro algunos de los aspectos relacionados con la gestión de la policía y la justicia pasarán a ser responsabilidad de los políticos norirlandeses, todavía debe determinarse cómo se procederá exactamente en este sentido.

Como han confirmado diversas consultas sociológicas, hasta muy recientemente el propio electorado norirlandés se mostraba escéptico ante la posibilidad de restablecer una asamblea autonómica, asumiendo en un elevado porcentaje que el mantenimiento de un sistema de gobierno centralizado y dirigido desde Londres satisfacía sus intereses, habida cuenta de la considerable disminución de la violencia que se ha apreciado en los últimos años. La presión ejercida por el Gobierno británico, amenazando con la suspensión definitiva de la Asamblea y la consecuente interrupción de los salarios de los encargados de administrar la autonomía norirlandesa, ha sido un factor importante al influir sobre unos dirigentes políticos que a partir de ahora deberán aprender a gobernar asumiendo que las frustraciones políticas propias de cualquier democracia no pueden ir acompañadas de amenazas violentas.

Las primeras tensiones ya se vislumbran al haber exigido unionistas y nacionalistas un aumento del presupuesto disponible para la Asamblea, así como la desaparición del ministro británico para Irlanda del Norte, figura política que al referido Rees, que ocupó este cargo en la década de los setenta, le merecía la siguiente opinión: «Los poderes otorgados al ministro para Irlanda del Norte le hacen a él y a sus sucesores extremadamente poderosos, un cruce entre un monarca, un gobernador colonial y un comandante en jefe (del ejército)».

IT was summer 1975 when the chilling report filtered through to our suburban Dublin kitchen: there’d been another killing in Northern Ireland. Members of a well-known music group, the Miami Showband, had been driving home to Dublin after a gig in County Down. They were stopped at a false checkpoint 30 miles south of Belfast by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force. As one of the terrorists tried to plant a bomb in the back of the band’s van, it exploded. In the confusion, three of the musicians who had been lined up along the side of the road were executed.

To a 10-year-old it was almost a glamorous massacre. The deaths were easy enough to conjure up in the imagination. A country road. The headlights spraying through the trees. The long-haired musicians in the back of the van: bright-eyed, smoking, laughing. The barrier across the road. The squeal of tires. Shouting, screaming, pleading. The explosion. A trumpet going up in the air as if making a final note to heaven. The brief moment of silence. The bullets sounding out. The thud of heads against muck. And then another sort of silence altogether.

My mother was from the North, my father from the South. I wanted desperately to know the “why” of Northern Ireland. My mother was raw and quiet with grief. “Ach, it’s just sad,” she said. My father told me that the answer was simple — all the murderers, hatemongers, kneecappers, bombers, were going to be herded onto a small floating island, and they would be pushed out to sea, whereupon they could kill and maim and tar-and-feather one another endlessly. The rest of us, he said, would be left in peace.

Visiting my mother’s family farm in Derry, I hated the sight of soldiers crouching in the hedges. Why were the postboxes red instead of green? Why was a soldier sliding a mirror under my cousin’s car? Why was the border so squiggly that, in school exercises, it made our tracing paper slip beneath our fingers? I searched for the Miami Showband’s music in the record shops of Dublin. I couldn’t find an album.

As I grew up and traveled, eventually to New York, I found that trying to explain the politics of Northern Ireland to others was nearly impossible. Whose God were these people fighting for? Why did justice sound like another word for revenge? Who would ever be able to make a virtue of old hatreds? Who was that distant child who wanted to travel north to a forest road and search for a piece of trumpet?

I still manage each year to take my children to Northern Ireland for a short holiday, but these days they are as likely to see as many armed soldiers in Grand Central Terminal, or on the Triborough Bridge, as I ever did on the back roads of Derry.

My children might ask me about the complexities of SWAT teams on Wall Street, or why there are traffic bolsters around the synagogue on East 87th Street, or why once a year there are extra flowers in the window of the fire station off Lexington Avenue.

One of the chores and joys of being a parent is answering questions. The most difficult ones slide a hand through our rib cages and turn our hearts a notch backward, sometimes toward our own childhoods.

If I am to take any solace from the troubles in Northern Ireland and the perplexing answers my own parents gave me, it is that — on occasion and sometimes against all expectations — a certain amount of endurance brings about a possibility of hope.

The questions about Northern Ireland are different this week. Today, the 108-member Assembly is scheduled to enter a historic power-sharing agreement between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party. In the past, the two parties sat at the province’s most distant extremes. The Democratic Unionist leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, once said that he would be ready for talks only “when you marry Christ to Beelzebub.” So what happened? Did he and Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams just grow up? Were they able to understand the terror of fathers and grandfathers — that our children might one day become as bad, or as conflicted, or as confused, as us? Is today’s swearing-in ceremony the final, inevitable triumph of reason over hatred?

Hardly. The victories of peace aren’t as immediate as those of war. It is difficult to imagine the members of the Assembly’s opposing parties shaking hands and agreeing on the colors of the flowers for the Easter parade. It will be a long, rocky road. Parts of the North are still separated by 50-foot-high “peace” walls. More than 90 percent of public housing is segregated, and research has shown that even 3-year-olds still display sectarian instincts. But in the aftermath of so many decades of violence, children are out in East Belfast scrubbing the walls free of political graffiti. Fierce enemies are shaking hands. Prisons, like the infamous H-Block, have been torn down.

There is no greater moment in war than the end of it. The vague dream of getting older, for politicians and terrorists and even children, is that we can somehow still become better people. As much as anything, the move toward devolution is a glimmer of hope for the rest of the world — if it can happen in Northern Ireland, it’s possible that it can happen anywhere. Palestine. Sri Lanka. Iraq.

One of the reasons that center holds is that no one politician, or party, or popular figure is trying to own the peace. It is an international agreement that owes as much to the vision of political leaders as it does to the thousands of mothers and fathers who have brokered it from the inside.

The questions of this generation of children are yet to be shaped. With luck and vision, the “Why?” will be said with a bewildered look backward rather than with a horrified glance about.

For a nation that has shouldered so much for so long, the possibility of no more needless small white coffins is almost answer enough.

Al asumir Ian Paisely y Martin McGuinness las responsabilidades de gobierno en Irlanda del Norte, vemos finalmente materializarse las esperanzas ofrecidas por el Acuerdo de Viernes Santo de 1998. Para una isla a menudo plagada de un exceso de historia, esto supone un movimiento espectacular y sin precedentes hacia el futuro.

El camino ha sido difícil hasta alcanzar este punto. Desde la firma en 1998 del Acuerdo de Viernes Santo, hemos tenido que abordar muchos temas que afectaban su aplicación. Ha supuesto un enorme reto superar la falta de confianza entre las dos comunidades, separadas por tantos años de enemistad y violencia.

Sin embargo, desde entonces hemos visto acontecimientos que han transformado la situación totalmente. El IRA ha puesto fin a su campaña armada y ha desmantelado sus armas. Ha habido un riguroso proceso de reforma de la policía y el respaldo a ésta por parte todos los partidos. La infraestructura del conflicto ha desaparecido con una enorme reducción en el número de tropas, en las bases militares, y la demolición de las torres de seguridad que habían ido surgiendo en el campo y zonas urbanas.

Los Gobiernos británico e irlandés han trabajado mano a mano para impulsar este proceso hacia adelante hasta llegar a la etapa en que hemos alcanzado hoy, una etapa en la que todos los partidos de Irlanda del Norte, de ambas tradiciones, están plenamente comprometidos y dispuestos a compartir el poder en el Gobierno autonómico.

Esta es la solución: compartir el poder en Irlanda del Norte y un acuerdo marco para la cooperación con el resto de la isla de Irlanda. Se trata de un acuerdo político que respeta los derechos, las opiniones políticas y las tradiciones de ambas comunidades. Aparte de esto, existe un consenso arrollador sobre la forma en la que se llevaría a cabo cualquier cambio en el estatus de Irlanda de Norte: solamente con el consentimiento libre de la población, norte y sur.

Por supuesto que aun hay trabajo por hacer. El conflicto ha dejado su legado, pero el futuro prometedor de este nuevo comienzo es inequívoco.

En este momento es importante que reconozcamos el papel enormemente positivo que ha jugado Europa, ayudando a lograr la paz y el progreso en Irlanda, un papel que queda subrayado por la oportuna visita a Belfast la semana pasada del presidente de la Comisión Europea, señor Barroso.

La Unión Europea ha sido descrita como el mecanismo más importante para la resolución de conflictos en la historia. En el caso de Irlanda del Norte, nuestros socios europeos han dado su inquebrantable apoyo político y material al trabajo para la paz, para hacer de los beneficios de ésta una realidad en Irlanda del Norte.

El proyecto europeo estableció un contexto esencial para Irlanda del Norte, dándoles espacio a las dos comunidades y a sus dirigentes para imaginar nuevas soluciones y nuevos futuros.

Y de esto ha tratado el proceso de paz: los gobiernos, la comunidad internacional, los dirigentes empresariales, los grupos comunitarios, las iglesias y los votantes, todos ellos cambiando el contexto en el que existía la política en Irlanda del Norte hasta que el único espacio legítimo que quedaba fuera un espacio compartido: pacífico y democrático.

Y allí, en ese espacio, los partidos encontraron la libertad y el mandato para entrar a gobernar juntos.

Irlanda del Norte ha pasado de ser un sinónimo de violencia y división a ser la escena de uno de los procesos de paz más exitosos del mundo. Ha tenido muchas ventajas sobre otros conflictos mucho más devastadores, sobre todo en lo relativo a la atención y el apoyo internacionales. Pero el Gobierno irlandés está comprometido a devolver este apoyo haciendo todo lo posible por apoyar los esfuerzos de la comunidad internacional para poner fin a conflictos en otras situaciones alrededor del mundo.

No existe un modelo Irlanda del Norte que se pueda trasponer en su totalidad a otras situaciones, pero sí existe tal vez un ejemplo de un conflicto insoluble, en un momento dado y en un lugar dado, que llegó a solucionarse de manera pacífica y justa.

Reitero que hay aun trabajo por hacer en Irlanda del Norte, y estamos comprometidos a ello, pero creo que los acontecimientos de hoy son una poderosa señal de que existen el consenso y la voluntad para hacer de ésta una paz que resista los retos venideros. Es un día que muchos de nosotros pensamos que jamás veríamos, pero, ahora que está aquí, estamos empeñados en seguir adelante en la construcción de un futuro mejor para todos.

“Gran Bretaña no tiene ningún interés egoísta, estratégico o económico en Irlanda del Norte”, declaró en 1990 el ministro británico para el Ulster, el conservador Peter Brooke. Este fue un aspecto clave que hizo que el Sinn Féin, el brazo político del IRA, se entregara a la vía dialogada y que el grupo terrorista dejara, poco a poco, de matar o agredir. A partir de hoy este partido, estrechamente vinculado a la violencia durante décadas, formará Gobierno, un Gobierno que ha estado paralizado cinco años a causa, precisamente, de las actividades de espionaje de algunos de sus dirigentes. Y lo hará ni más ni menos que con los unionistas radicales de Ian Paisley. Hoy se celebrará a lo grande el final de un proceso que no ha sido fácil.
Precisamente, el derecho de autodeterminación marca una gran diferencia entre la situación irlandesa y la española en relación con el País Vasco, ya que el Gobierno español nunca ha hecho una declaración parecida a la que hizo el Gobierno de John Major ni parece que tenga intención de hacerla próximamente. Pero el Gobierno británico aún fue más allá. Recientemente, en el diario inglés The Guardian, otro ministro para el Ulster, en este caso el laborista Peter Mandelson, aseguraba que Tony Blair ha estado siempre dispuesto a hacer tantas concesiones al Sinn Féin como fuera necesario para no parar el proceso de paz.

LO HIZO PESE a saber que estaba sacrificando el destino de los partidos moderados norirlandeses que tanto habían contribuido al Acuerdo. Por ejemplo, Blair presionó duramente al primer ministro nor- irlandés, David Trimble, líder de los unionistas moderados, para que formara Gobierno con el Sinn Féin antes de que el IRA diera algún paso hacia el desarme, incluso después de los atentados de Nueva York. El sacrificio de los unionistas moderados puso en bandeja la victoria posterior de Paisley, que solo ha aceptado gobernar con el Sinn Féin cuando ha tenido bien segura la victoria. Otro sacrificado fue John Hume, Nobel de la Paz como Trimble, que renunció a preservar el programa moderado de su partido para poder ir allanando el camino.
Los ilusionantes progresos irlandeses que están dando frutos estos días contrastan con el estancamiento vasco. Pero el compromiso en las islas ha sido intenso, y el sacrificio, permanente por todas las partes. Británicos e irlandeses han demostrado de sobras su determinación política, y han hecho todo lo posible para convencer a los violentos de que se pasen a la política. Tanto el Gobierno laborista de Blair como la oposición conservadora han estado siempre unidos y han evitado el tentador uso electoralista de la situación. Además, el lenguaje y la diplomacia, fundamentales siempre, pero especialmente en situaciones de conflicto, ha sido respetuoso, constructivo y amable a pesar de las numerosas dificultades, con asesinatos incluidos, que iban surgiendo.
Diversos aspectos han sido la clave de su éxito. En primer lugar, ha sido un proceso inclusivo. Desde la cárcel, los terroristas fueron consultados periódicamente durante todo el proceso y, entre los años 1998 y 2000, salieron de la cárcel 433 terroristas (193 lealistas y 229 republicanos). Por otra parte, la firma del Acuerdo de Paz significó el final formal de la violencia, pero no su desaparición total. Nadie puede negar que los principales protagonistas –el Gobierno británico, el irlandés, Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea– tuvieron una paciencia infinita con el IRA para conseguir sacar a la organización terrorista de la trampa-gueto en la que ella misma se había metido. Su capacidad violenta ya había quedado disminuida a finales de los 80 por el Ejército británico, pero, de todos modos, los republicanos ya se iban dando cuenta de que con la violencia nunca logra- rían sus fines. En cambio, se dieron cuenta de los frutos que podían obtener en la esfera política. Si se presentaban como valientes luchadores por la paz y contra la intransigencia de los británicos y unionistas, aunque, lógicamente, sería difícil que muchos tragaran, tal vez les iría bien. Y, de hecho, desde 1998 el éxito del Sinn Féin en las urnas no ha parado de crecer.

NEGOCIAR no es rendirse. Ser capaz de perdonar no quiere decir estar de acuerdo con los violentos, ni tampoco perder credibilidad democrática. Mientras tanto, la ambigüedad puede ayudar. Mientras Paisley dice a sus votantes que el Acuerdo asegura más que nunca la unión con Gran Bretaña, el mensaje de Martin McGuinness es que ha empezado la marcha atrás hacia la Irlanda unida. Pero la realidad es que todos los partidos norirlandeses pueden continuar persiguiendo sus aspiraciones políticas por medios pacíficos, y que, a partir de hoy, trabajarán juntos. Lo harán en un soberbio edificio de Stormont, presidido por la estatua de Edward Carson, un unionista visionario que en 1921, justo antes de que la República de Irlanda se independizara, ya advirtió inútilmente de que los poderes centrales acostumbran a menospreciar a las minorías: “Dijimos que no podíamos confiar en que un Parlamento irlandés en Dublín hiciera justicia con la minoría protestante. Desde Stormont digo que espero que no nos puedan hacer esta recriminación a nosotros. Desde el prinicipio, mostrémosles que la minoría católica de Irlanda del Norte no tiene que temer jamás a la mayoría protestante”.

Ningún conflicto del mundo moderno, ni siquiera la disputa árabeisraelí, ha suscitado tantas controversias, polémicas, poses públicas, palabras vacías e ideas equivocadas como la cuestión irlandesa;un término que remite al conflicto armado que estalló en Irlanda del Norte a finales de la década de 1960 y, de modo más general, a los conflictos políticos y militares que han enfrentado a los irlandeses entre sí y al nacionalismo irlandés contra el dominio británico en los últimos siglos.

Como sabe todo el que, como yo, haya nacido y crecido en Irlanda (en mi caso, en una ciudad cercana a la frontera con el Norte, en una zona donde el IRA tuvo durante unas décadas su base), la realidad puede estar a años luz de la retórica, así como de la imagen que tiene casi todo el resto del mundo de Irlanda. Puede que los irlandeses sean, como sin duda indicará cualquier estudio aleatorio en los bares y pubs del planeta, la nación más popular de toda la Tierra, con los cubanos quizá como únicos rivales; sin embargo, este afecto y esta aparente familiaridad con Irlanda casi nunca se corresponde con un juicio informado – y menos aún crítico- acerca de lo que ha sucedido y está sucediendo en la isla. Habrá cambiado el contenido del mito, los duendecillos y los heroicos guerrilleros habrán sido sustituidos por las proezas del tigre celta,pero el nivel de precisión sigue siendo bastante bajo.

Lo cierto es que pensar bien sobre Irlanda es una circunstancia muy poco frecuente, ya sea dentro del país como fuera de él; sin embargo, ese tipo de reflexión constituye un requisito previo para comprender el actual acuerdo político alcanzado en Belfast y, en realidad, para comprender lo ocurrido en las últimas décadas. Se trata de una excelente lección de realismo político y de principios políticos en general, de ahí la máxima que alguna vez he utilizado:

“Quien no sea capaz de pensar bien sobre Irlanda no será capaz de pensar bien sobre nada”. Muchos ejemplos acuden a la mente.

Y lo mismo se aplica al reciente acuerdo entre Ian Paisley y Gerry Adams para la formación de un gobierno norirlandés. Ante todo, las buenas noticias. Este acuerdo va en serio; representa un cambio capital en las posturas históricas del Sinn Fein y el Partido Unionista Democrático cara a una cooperación formal y, al menos durante un tiempo, tiene que funcionar. Ambos bandos han abandonado los objetivos maximalistas abrazados durante muchos años: una unificación forzada con Irlanda por parte republicana, el mantenimiento de la hegemonía protestante por parte de los unionistas. Se ha alcanzado cierto grado de reconocimiento mutuo, de la legitimidad y los derechos de la otra comunidad. Además, la solución del tema concreto sobre el que persistía el desacuerdo, el apoyo por parte del Sinn Fein al nuevo cuerpo de policía, marca la resolución del más duradero y espinoso de los cuatro grandes problemas subyacentes a las protestas católicas originales de la década de 1960 (siendo los otros tres la discriminación en la vivienda, el trabajo y los acuerdos electorales). Que hayan hecho falta cuarenta años de violencia, demagogia, oportunidades perdidas e ingentes cantidades de dinero y esfuerzo diplomático para alcanzar esta conclusión de sentido común, y eso en el contexto de un país bastante moderno, democrático y próspero, el Reino Unido, puede causar consternación. Pero el movimiento es real.

Por otra parte, aunque las cosas se enreden, ya sea de forma accidental o deliberada, es muy improbable que este pacto se vea seguido por un regreso de los asesinatos, las bombas, la violencia sistemática de las décadas de 1970 y 1980. Las intimidaciones, la actividad semidelictiva, las extorsiones a cambio de protección siguen existiendo, sobre todo en el lado republicano, pero no forman parte de un conflicto armado continuado. Haciendo una comparación contemporánea evidente, se podría decir que los libaneses deben temer por una vuelta de la guerra civil, los habitantes de Irlanda del Norte no.

En todo esto han tenido importancia las fuerzas y los cambios externos. Los británicos perdieron hace mucho tiempo el interés por Irlanda del Norte en tanto que activo económico, estratégico o ideológico, y les encantaría verlo esfumarse mañana. Además, el actual clima europeo no favorece el extremismo político ni religioso. Quizá sea todo un símbolo que el acuerdo de paz de Belfast se haya producido un día después de que los 27 miembros de la Unión Europea celebraran su quincuagésimo aniversario y un día antes de que el principal partido secesionista de Quebec sufriera la mayor derrota de su historia. Muchos estados, sobre todo el Reino Unido y EE. UU., han contribuido a conducir a los dirigentes norirlandeses hasta esta conclusión y, algo de suma importancia, a hacer posible que esos dirigentes, que posiblemente se dieron cuenta hace años de lo que tenían que hacer, arrastraran consigo a la mayor parte de sus seguidores.

Sin embargo, frente a estos aspectos positivos, deben apuntarse los límites de la entente Adams-Paisley. Primero, si bien puede que los políticos cooperen al más alto nivel, la paz que hoy impera en Irlanda del Norte supone una separación casi completa de las dos comunidades, en la enseñanza, la vida social y las adhesiones políticas. De modo asombroso, ha aparecido un nuevo modelo europeo de resolución de conflictos interétnicos basado no en la tolerancia y en una ciudadanía compartida, sino en la segregación en comunidades diferenciadas: en Bélgica, Bosnia, Chipre, se ha convertido en la norma; Irlanda del Norte no es ninguna excepción. Quizá haya equipos deportivos comunes, y un sentido del humor y del afecto bastante similar, pero la mezcla acaba ahí. Las cosas estuvieron mal en la década de 1960, antes de que empezaran los combates y, por lo que parece, están igual de mal o peor, sobre todo entre los jóvenes.

Segundo, este pacto, como otros muchos del mundo moderno, es llevado a cabo por dirigentes que, debido a su compromiso y al apoyo internacional vinculado con él, gozarán de una inmunidad completa, e incluso de una absolución completa, por los errores y crímenes de su propio pasado. Ian Paisley no estuvo nunca, según afirma, directamente relacionado con los escuadrones de asesinos protestantes que acosaron Belfast en la década de 1970, pero no cabe duda de que, por medio de su retórica sectaria y alarmista, desempeñó un papel importante azuzando la intransigencia protestante y los desplazamientos forzados de población en los distritos mixtos de Belfast y también saboteando acuerdos de paz anteriores y muy similares que, de cumplirse, habrían ahorrado muchas vidas y problemas. El IRA, organizado y dirigido por Gerry Adams, Martin MacGuinness y otros, llevó a cabo durante años crímenes terribles, asesinatos, bombas, secuestros y torturas de habitantes protestantes y católicos de Irlanda del Norte. Ahora Adams es todo sonrisas, aparece como promotor de la paz y autor de edulcoradas autobiografías en las que no muere ni una mosca y que ocultan un pasado siniestro del que no ha respondido en absoluto.

Aquí llegamos a la cuestión mucho más amplia que el acuerdo de Belfast no ha conseguido cerrar: la del futuro político, no de Irlanda del Norte, sino del conjunto de Irlanda. El Partido Unionista Democrático de Paisley se circunscribe a Irlanda del Norte. Su objetivo es mantener la situación diferenciada de esa entidad, así como los derechos de los habitantes protestantes. No alberga aspiraciones británicas más amplias: el unionismo norirlandés perdió hace mucho tiempo los vínculos con el Partido Conservador de Gran Bretaña. En muy buena medida, Paisley ha alcanzado su objetivo. Ahora bien, no puede decirse lo mismo del Sinn Fein, el partido creado y dirigido por el IRA. Con más de un siglo, el Sinn Fein es uno de los partidos más antiguos de Europa y en todo este tiempo su objetivo general no ha cambiado: gobernar en una Irlanda unida.

En este aspecto, el acuerdo de Belfast resulta de gran ayuda puesto que, aunque renuncia a una reivindicación inmediata sobre el norte, permite al Sinn Fein participar en las elecciones de la República de Irlanda previstas para mayo en una posición mucho más fuerte. Con el nuevo nacionalismo imperante en el Sur como resultado de la prosperidad económica y con una generación más joven de votantes, el Sinn Fein se encuentra en una posición de ventaja para erigirse como socio de coalición en cualquier nuevo gobierno y reclamar el liderazgo histórico que obtuvo en las últimas elecciones panirlandesas, las de 1918. Los otros dos partidos, Fianna Fail y Fine Gael, son escisiones del propio Sinn Fein. Por lo tanto, el resultado del acuerdo de Belfast quizá fortalezca al Sinn Fein en la búsqueda de su objetivo nacionalista a largo plazo y permita que esa siniestra, corrupta y taimada organización – cuyo nombre irlandés Nosotros Solos es un absurdo en este mundo moderno globalizado- conquiste el poder al que siempre aspiró. Sería un precio elevado, si bien es posible que sea necesario para poner fin a los últimos cuarenta años de violencia en Irlanda del Norte. En este sentido, la cuestión irlandesa dista mucho, por supuesto, de estar resuelta.

La violenta historia del conflicto norirlandés ha sido inmortalizada a través de miles de fotogramas. En uno de ellos, filmado a finales de los sesenta, puede verse a un policía golpeando a un manifestante mientras éste se retuerce de dolor ante la brutalidad de quien debía velar por su seguridad. El oficial pertenecía a un cuerpo integrado mayoritariamente por protestantes unionistas, esto es, partidarios de mantener Irlanda del Norte dentro del Reino Unido. La víctima de la agresión era un ciudadano que pacíficamente reclamaba igualdad de derechos civiles para la minoría católica. En esa época, el reverendo Ian Paisley lideraba multitudinarias contramanifestaciones organizadas para neutralizar a quienes denunciaban las desigualdades de un sistema político dominado exclusivamente por los unionistas norirlandeses. En unos pocos años, Gerry Adams se convertiría en un joven líder del IRA, una organización terrorista que aprovecharía ese volátil contexto político y social para incrementar su violencia nacionalista destinada a lograr que los seis condados de Irlanda del Norte abandonasen la jurisdicción británica unificándose con el resto de Irlanda en un solo Estado.

Hace unos días, cuatro décadas después de aquellos turbulentos comienzos de un conflicto que se ha cobrado más de tres mil víctimas mortales, Paisley y Adams aceptaban constituir un gobierno que administrará una limitada autonomía para Irlanda del Norte. Esto sucedía el mismo día en que Antonio Aguirre, militante socialista del Foro Ermua, era insultado por una turba nacionalista al entrar al Palacio de Justicia de Bilbao. Este ciudadano, golpeado por un activista nacionalista de rostro iracundo, fue intimidado y amenazado mientras acudía a escuchar la declaración del jefe del Gobierno vasco por reunirse con una organización ilegalizada. Un ciudadano respetuoso con la ley era agredido por militantes de un partido que se dice democrático tras haberse reunido uno de sus máximos representantes con quienes la legislación vigente ha situado fuera de la legalidad por su apoyo y vinculación a una organización terrorista. Tras la herida llegó el insulto de la portavoz del Gobierno vasco manipulando la realidad al transferir a la propia víctima la culpa por la agresión sufrida. Todo el episodio confirma cómo el nacionalismo institucional que ha administrado la autonomía vasca desde su origen no tiene reparo en deslegitimar las instituciones democráticas que escapan al control de los dirigentes nacionalistas, incumpliendo además su obligación de garantizar los derechos y libertades de los ciudadanos vascos con independencia de su ideología.

La indefensión que Aguirre y muchos otros ciudadanos no nacionalistas sienten ante la incapacidad de poder ejercer sus derechos civiles en plena libertad recuerda esa desprotección que hace más de cuarenta años parte de la sociedad norirlandesa padecía ante la hegemonía unionista. Este paralelismo sirve para enmarcar de manera adecuada las instrumentalizaciones que del conflicto norirlandés suelen hacerse desde nuestro país, tal y como los recientes acontecimientos en Irlanda del Norte han vuelto a demostrar. La impunidad del agresor de Aguirre y el vergonzoso victimismo de un líder populista como el lehendakari, jaleado por quienes continúan ignorando las consecuencias que la intimidación del terrorismo etarra tiene sobre quienes son blanco de dicha coacción, evoca la falta de garantías soportada por aquellos ciudadanos de Irlanda del Norte que no compartían la ideología nacionalista pro británica que define al unionismo norirlandés. ¿Qué otra opción que la justicia a la que ha recurrido el Foro Ermua tiene un ciudadano obediente con la ley que desea denunciar la insistencia de la principal autoridad vasca en legitimar al portavoz político de una organización terrorista que continúa amenazando a la sociedad? En lugar de aceptar respetuosamente ese legítimo recurso de quienes sufren la violencia, el nacionalismo prefiere apelar al sentimiento tribal, exponiendo la falsa empatía con las víctimas del terrorismo etarra que dice perseguir a través de otros gestos que se demuestran así hipócritas.

La impostura del nacionalismo institucional, definiéndose como víctima de sucesivas injusticias al tiempo que se presenta como un desinteresado actor que busca con denuedo una paz que, insiste, sólo se alcanzará mediante ese genérico diálogo por el que abogan sus responsables, también encuentra un referente en el personaje de Gerry Adams. Al contrario de esa imagen que cuidadosamente ha alimentado el presidente de Sinn Fein, éste jamás formó parte del movimiento por los derechos civiles que durante los años sesenta denunció las injusticias contra la minoría católica, optando en cambio, y en contra del criterio de quienes lideraron esas históricas y valientes protestas, por el terrorismo como método de conseguir sus aspiraciones nacionalistas. Oportuno resulta destacarlo, pues quienes ahora vitorean el reciente acuerdo entre Paisley y Adams ignoran que bajo esa escenificación se esconde un terrible drama.

El apoyo de Sinn Fein al gobierno compartido que liderará el unionismo de Paisley confirma el fracaso de una violencia terrorista que ha sido incapaz de alcanzar sus objetivos nacionalistas mediante el terrorismo. No resulta extraño que, tras conocer el respaldo de Sinn Fein a la policía y a la judicatura en Irlanda del Norte, paso previo a la formación del gobierno ahora anunciada, la madre de un policía asesinado por el IRA formulara una pregunta devastadora para los asesinos de su hijo: «¿Para qué les ha servido tanta violencia?». En esas condiciones muchos han sido quienes han prostituido la historia para favorecer la rehabilitación de un cruento criminal como Gerry Adams, que, en su intento por legitimar sus acciones, ha justificado como necesario el terrorismo ante la supuesta ineficacia de los métodos pacíficos. Es totalmente falso que Adams desempeñara protagonismo alguno en un movimiento por los derechos civiles que sí fue eficaz. En 1968 Séamus Rodgers, representante de Sinn Fein en Donegal, reconoció que en unos meses el movimiento por los derechos civiles, a través de sus manifestaciones pacíficas, había conseguido mucho más que el IRA en toda su existencia.

Esta variable arroja otra interesante comparación con nuestro propio ámbito, donde el modelo norirlandés es utilizado por algunos para exigir concesiones que refuercen a quienes apoyan el terrorismo. A este respecto es revelador el testimonio de Séamus Mallon, dirigente del que hasta 2001 fue el partido nacionalista más votado en Irlanda del Norte, el SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party), liderado durante décadas por John Hume. En su opinión, había «otra vía» para alcanzar «esta paz». Tanto Mallon como Hume formaron parte de ese movimiento por los derechos civiles que aglutinó a católicos y protestantes reclamando «derechos civiles para ciudadanos británicos», anteponiendo así la igualdad de derechos a un nacionalismo dogmático e identitario. Sin embargo, estas figuras que representaron la voz mayoritaria de una comunidad contraria al terrorismo, se han visto perjudicados en los últimos años por la política del Gobierno británico, profusa en simbólicas concesiones hacia los violentos que inevitablemente han debilitado a quienes optaron siempre por los métodos pacíficos. Como destacados políticos y funcionarios británicos e irlandeses ahora reconocen, esa política ha destrozado electoralmente a los moderados fortaleciendo a los extremos y con ellos a una peligrosa narrativa histórica que no hace justicia a quienes siempre se opusieron a un terrorismo que aspiraba a unir territorios en vez de personas. De ese modo se ha desmoralizado a quienes han respetado la ley, logrando desactivar a una formación como el SDLP, cuyo origen y filosofía difieren notablemente de un nacionalismo étnico y excluyente como el que ejerce el poder en el País Vasco. La propia denominación de las formaciones reconocidas como nacionalistas en uno y otro contexto expone significativas diferencias. Repárese en cómo, frente a los valores «socialdemócratas y laboristas» que enfatiza el partido norirlandés con su designación, el PNV subraya su condición de «nacionalista vasco».

Como han confirmado las desoladoras imágenes de la rabia nacionalista agrediendo a un ciudadano indefenso, el odio alimentado durante cuarenta años de la hegemonía ejercida por el nacionalismo vasco no surge de la exclusión de su ideología, sino del desprecio hacia una identidad cívica que simplemente aboga por la igualdad de derechos y libertades. Un siglo atrás, un sector de la sociedad norirlandesa reivindicaba también esa equiparación de derechos y libertades que el unionismo les negaba. Por ello la reciente fotografía de la interesada reconciliación de los extremos norirlandeses acordando gestionar esa limitada autonomía que el IRA se negó a aceptar antes, cobrándose en consecuencia ese obsceno coste de miles de vidas humanas, revela otro fracaso. No es sino el de un nacionalismo vasco que desde el poder ha renunciado a construir un país en el que también sean respetados los derechos de quienes son incapaces de ejercerlos en plena libertad como consecuencia, fundamental pero no exclusivamente, de una amenaza etarra que, no se olvide, persigue unos objetivos nacionalistas.

At some point in every election campaign every candidate forms a view that they are going to win. This syndrome, known as candidatitis, is capable of moving even the most rational aspirant into a state of extreme self-belief. It strikes without warning, is no respecter of gender, and can infect the lowly municipal hopeful as well as lofty presidential wannabes.Screaming Lord Sutch, or his Irish equivalents who stand just for the craic, could be prone to fall victim to candidatitis as much as the most committed and earnest political activist. I believe this is due to two things. First of all, most people standing for election see little point in telling voters that they are not going to win. That just wouldn’t make sense. Of course not. So they say they are going to win.

Listen to Michael Howard, the former British Tory leader. He had no chance of beating Tony Blair. Did he admit that? Not on your nelly. Howard sounded as confident as George Bush addressing a rally in his native Texas in the run-up to the last US presidential election.

That’s when candidatitis starts. As “we are going to win” is repeated time and time again it starts to have a hypnotic effect on the person intoning the mantra. By this time it’s too late. Which brings me to the second point. The electorate, and others, encourage candidatitis. Unintentionally. Not even the candidate’s best friend will say, “Hold on, you haven’t a chance.” The media might, but no candidate believes the media. And most candidates are never interviewed by the media anyway.

So a victim of candidatitis will take succour from any friendly word from any punter. Even a “good luck” takes on new meaning and “I won’t forget ye” is akin to a full-blooded endorsement. Are we to pity sufferers of this ailment? Probably not. They are mostly consenting adults, though in most elections many parties occasionally run conscripts. In the main these are staunch party people who are persuaded to run by more sinister elements who play on their loyalty and commitment.

In some cases these reluctant candidates run on the understanding that they are not going to get elected. Their intervention, they are told, is to stop the vote going elsewhere or to maintain the party’s representative share of the vote. In some cases this works. But in other cases, despite everything, our reluctant hero, or heroine, actually gets elected. A friend of mine was condemned to years on Belfast city council when his election campaign went horribly wrong. He topped the poll.

That’s another problem in elections based on proportional representation. Topping the poll is a must for some candidates. But such ambition in a PR election creates a headache for party managers. If the aim is to get a panel of party representatives elected they all have to come in fairly evenly. This requires meticulous negotiations to carve up constituencies. Implementing such arrangements makes the implementation of the Good Friday agreement look easy – and it’s taken us nine years to get our first meeting with Ian Paisley. It requires an inordinate amount of discipline on the candidates’ behalf. Most have this. Some don’t.

Some get really sneaky. Particularly as the day of reckoning comes closer. Hot flushes and an allergy to losing can lead to some sufferers poaching a colleague’s votes. This is a very painful condition leading to serious outbreaks of nastiness and reprisals and recriminations if detected before polling day. It usually cannot be treated and can have long-term effects.

So, dear friends, all of this is by way of lifting the veil on these usually unreported problems which infect our election contests. Politicians are a much maligned species. In some cases not without cause.

But love us or hate us, you usually get the politicians you deserve. This might not always extend to governments, given the abandonment by most governments of the election promises that persuaded voters to elect them in the first instance. The lust for power causes this condition, which is probably the most serious ailment affecting our political system and those who live there. It is sometimes terminal. But this comes after elections and is worthy of a separate study.

So, don’t ignore the visages on the multitudes of posters that defile lampposts and telegraph poles during election times, and in some cases for years afterwards. Think of the torment that the poor souls are suffering. When you are accosted by a pamphlet-waving besuited male – and they mostly are besuited males – as you shop in the supermarket or collect the children at school, try to see beyond the brash exterior. Inside every Ian Paisley is a little boy aiming to please. The rest of us are the same. It’s not really our fault you see. Big boys make us do it. And your votes encourage us.

Las recientes elecciones en Irlanda del Norte son las terceras que se realizan en este territorio desde que, hace casi nueve años (abril de 1998), el denominado Acuerdo de Viernes Santo abría un nuevo periodo en la vida política norirlandesa. El hecho de que se hayan celebrado desde entonces tres procesos electorales (1998, 2003 y 2007) sin la presencia de la violencia terrorista es, sin duda, el primer y más importante dato a reseñar. Ello tiene especial significación en un país que en el periodo anterior, durante las décadas de los setenta, ochenta y primera mitad de los noventa, sufrió con mayor intensidad que ningún otro en Europa los efectos de la violencia terrorista, con un saldo de víctimas mortales estimado entre 3.200 y 3.600 (como referencia comparativa, valga decir que estas cifras cuadruplican el número de las causadas por nuestro terrorismo ‘autóctono’).

Pero, además, las recientes elecciones norirlandesas presentan otros aspectos sobre los que tiene interés hacer algunos comentarios. En primer lugar, estos comicios han puesto de manifiesto, una vez más, la reproducción de la fractura comunitaria en Irlanda del Norte, sin que apenas puedan observarse avances apreciables en la dinámica intercomunitaria. No hay que olvidar que el elemento estructural determinante en Ulster es la aguda división entre su población (alrededor de 1.700.000 habitantes) desde el mismo momento de su configuración como marco político autónomo por la Government of Ireland Act en 1920, tras la constitución en el resto de la isla del Estado Libre de Irlanda.

Desde entonces, la realidad estructural norirlandesa viene marcada por la coexistencia separada de dos comunidades en el sentido fuerte del término; es decir, dos colectivos cuyos miembros tejen todas sus relaciones sociales con los miembros de su propia comunidad al margen y/o en contra de la otra: cada una de ellas tiene sus propios clubes, deportivos y de cualquier otro tipo, diferenciados, sus propios pubs, escuelas y centros culturales; y también iglesias y confesiones religiosas distintas, lo que da lugar a la incidencia determinante del factor religioso en el conflicto norirlandés. Lógicamente todo ello tiene su expresión política, cuya manifestación es el peculiar sistema político de partidos que refleja con toda nitidez la fractura comunitaria de su población: protestantes-unionistas contra católicos-nacionalistas; con sus correspondientes alas moderada y radical en cada comunidad. Este esquema se ha visto reproducido sin apenas variaciones en estas últimas elecciones; prueba de ello es que las formaciones políticas de adscripción comunitaria han copado conjuntamente más del 92% de los escaños elegidos.

Teniendo en cuenta que la vida política norirlandesa viene determinada por la estructura (y la fractura) comunitaria de su población, tiene interés conocer cuál ha sido la evolución política en el interior de cada bloque comunitario: protestantes-unionistas, por una parte, y católicos-nacionalistas por otra. En este sentido, hay que constatar el progresivo decantamiento del electorado, que ya se puso de manifiesto en las anteriores elecciones de 2003, hacia las opciones más radicales de cada comunidad y el consiguiente debilitamiento de las más moderadas, lo que, en principio, perjudica las posiciones más proclives al entendimiento intercomunitario. Si bien es preciso puntualizar también que tanto el radicalismo unionista del partido de Ian Pasley como el radicalismo nacionalista de Sinn Fein han experimentado en el transcurso del proceso una importante corrección moderadora, que es precisamente la que les ha permitido hacerse con parte de los apoyos de sus rivales en el seno del propio electorado protestante o católico en cada caso.

Hay que llamar la atención, asimismo, sobre el hecho, nada habitual, de que estas elecciones se realizaron para elegir una Asamblea -la Assembly prevista en el Acuerdo de Viernes Santo de 1998- que en el momento actual no existe realmente, ya que fue suspendida por decisión del Ejecutivo británico hace casi cinco años debido al incumplimiento de los compromisos exigidos a sus integrantes para la conclusión del proceso de paz. Y que, tras las recientes elecciones, no están asegurados de antemano su restablecimiento ni su continuidad si no se llega a un acuerdo previo para la formación de un Gobierno compartido -la Executive Authority prevista también en el Acuerdo de Viernes Santo- con presencia en él de las formaciones políticas de ambas comunidades.

Esta peculiar exigencia ‘constitucional’ -el reiteradamente mencionado Acuerdo de Viernes Santo (1998) puede considerarse el ‘estatuto constitucional’ de Irlanda del Norte- de ‘power-sharing’ (según los propios términos literales del Acuerdo) o poder compartido, es una de las principales características distintivas de la singular forma de gobierno norirlandesa. De acuerdo con esta premisa, la formación del Ejecutivo tras las elecciones no resulta del libre acuerdo entre los grupos que puedan alcanzar una mayoría en la Asamblea sino que viene predeterminada de antemano, forzando la configuración de un obligado Gobierno de concentración con participación, en proporción a su representación en la Asamblea, de los grupos políticos presentes en ella.

Es precisamente la formación de este peculiar Gobierno de concentración norirlandés lo que se está negociando estos días, con el condicionante añadido de que si no se consigue el acuerdo entre las fuerzas políticas, y en particular entre las dos principales de cada una de las comunidades tras las recientes elecciones, Londres suspenderá, como ya ha hecho en otras ocasiones, las instituciones norirlandesas. Asimismo, una vez formado el Gobierno, se sigue manteniendo la exigencia de ejercer el poder de forma compartida ya que las decisiones de la Asamblea que afecten al equilibrio intercomunitario deberán ser adoptadas por un complejo sistema de mayorías especiales que implica, bien el ‘consenso paralelo’ de ambas comunidades -mayoría entre los unionistas y también entre los nacionalistas- o bien una mayoría cualificada global (60%) que incluya al menos un 40% de cada una de las representaciones comunitarias unionista y nacionalista.

Se trata de un sistema institucional que no hace sino reflejar la profunda fractura estructural que escinde a la sociedad norirlandesa en comunidades separadas y concebido, ante todo, para impedir cualquier eventual situación de dominación intercomunitaria. Y un sistema institucional, hay que añadir también, que apenas ha tenido ocasión de funcionar efectivamente y de forma continuada ya que ha estado suspendido, por decisión del Gabinete británico, más tiempo del que ha estado funcionando. A falta de un rodaje institucional consolidado, que hasta el momento no se ha dado, resulta cuando menos aventurado cualquier pronunciamiento valorativo sobre su funcionalidad para hacer frente al principal problema que tiene planteado hoy la sociedad norirlandesa: la superación de su persistente fractura comunitaria.

Más allá del recuento de votos y escaños, que suele ser lo único que centra la atención de los comentaristas tras las elecciones y que en el caso de Irlanda del Norte ha habido que hacer teniendo muy en cuenta la peculiar ingeniería político-constitucional de su singular sistema institucional, las recientes elecciones pueden servir para abrir un nuevo periodo en la vida política en el que, por primera vez, pueda empezar a funcionar de forma continuada y efectiva el modelo de poder compartido previsto desde hace casi una década. La actual consolidación del proceso de paz, tras la desaparición de la violencia terrorista en este último periodo, proporciona las mejores condiciones para que las instituciones -Asamblea y Ejecutivo- puedan abordar sin impedimentos la cuestión clave del proceso de normalización mediante la superación de la fractura intercomunitaria.

Falta ahora por saber si las fuerzas políticas norirlandesas de ambas comunidades, y especialmente las triunfadoras en estas elecciones, además de tener que compartir obligadamente el poder en las instituciones por imperativo legal, serán también capaces de acordar un programa y unas medidas comunes para normalizar definitivamente las relaciones intercomunitarias en la sociedad norirlandesa.

It’s a romcom ending tacked on to a Strindbergian tragedy you stopped reading years ago. Yes, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, big winners both, can finally plight their political troth. Yes, this is devolution at last. Yes, Northern Ireland has voted for low water rates, mobile phones that work both sides of the border – and a warm bath of southern comfort. Yes, this is Tony Blair’s legacy (with a nod to John Major). Yes, we mainlanders can relax, switch off and concentrate on global warming, not Belfast hot air. And no, Nuala O’Loan isn’t welcome at the wedding breakfast.

But let her in for a moment, because she matters. O’Loan, you may recall from two months’ back, is the Northern Ireland police ombudsman who produced the devastatingly detailed report that made headlines around Britain (for at least 15 minutes). She and her team revealed how police informers in one Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gang had been shielded by RUC officers as they murdered 10 or more Catholics – some of them total innocents. These loyalists were, in effect, sanctioned killers who the forces of supposed law and order left to get on with their grisly business.

You couldn’t find a more damnable indictment: in Spain, in similar (Eta) circumstances, they locked up the interior minister for letting such things happen. But in Northern Ireland? These killings took place. Because only one UVF mob was targeted, there may well have been more the ombudsman never got round to. And, as she investigated, she got shamefully scant police cooperation.

Serving officers said nothing. Retired officers said nothing. Even the chief constable of the time – now Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, if you please – found nothing to say. But, jobs unaffected, pensions intact, they’ve just been allowed to carry on as though nothing untoward had occurred. That – the time of police-approved murder – was then; this is now. And never the twain shall come within touching distance, apparently, while the policing board chews six months of cud.

Peter Hain makes one of his “totally unacceptable” speeches, but then shrugs in silent, tacit acceptance. O’Loan begins an inquiry into Special Branch tolerance of IRA killer-informers who enjoyed similar immunity, as though two wrongs could equal a right. Nobody wonders why MI5, so deeply ingrained in this woodwork, allowed such slaughter. (Indeed, one of the top spooks of the time has just been promoted to rule Thames House.) Ian and Gerry head the polls. Assorted expressions of hope become standard issue.

So why not be sunnily cheerful? Why be glum? Because nothing good can be built on such poisonous foundations. Ask seasoned, decent, humane loyalists what they think and their voices drop. “It’s Nuala,” they say: meaning she’s one of them, not one of us. The war of survival and truth, in their minds, is still to be waged across a canyon of distrust. Northern Ireland can’t play the justice game yet. Justice follows later, if at all.

So order a few pints of bleak and bitter in this last-chance Stormont saloon. The moderates of history, the ones who stood against violence and won Nobel prizes, didn’t win. Their moderation is history now. Of course Paisley and McGuinness can hobble along together for a while in a nightmare coalition of twisted motives, but don’t for a moment believe that four-party rule is anything but an illusion. Where else in the world would such a construction work?

In reality, it’s a no-party system, designed to operate in the sectarian bunkers, giving voters no great alternative (just a little Alliance somewhere in the middle). If the flaw that’s blighting devolution in Scotland is that things were subtly rigged to keep the Nats out of the action, so the flaw here is that Stormont is rigged for “normal” stagnation, disillusion and recurrent crisis at the whim of any supposed partner. The centre cannot hold because there isn’t a proper centre to begin with. What of the next election and the one after that? Chant “more of the same” until supplies of sameness run out? What if Ulster’s general election vote holds the British balance? Chant “chaos is come again”.

The awkward truth, demonstrated yet again as the legacy-makers depart, is that mainland UK wants shot of this problem. Hold on to Scotland at all costs, but let Northern Ireland go its own sweet way as the troops head home. Been there, done that, had enough. But the coalition we leave behind isn’t a way forward, more a full stop: an agreement to play politics for a while rather than play demagogues or gunmen. And the underlying craving for justice in a fresh, non-sectarian land? Ah! It’s party-party time. Pour one for Nuala.

This is what will happen today and over the rest of this month. Elections will anoint Ariel Sharon, miraculously resurrected from his coma, as Israel’s prime minister. They will also establish Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas as his deputy. These two men, mortal enemies for so long, will govern together. The finance ministry will stay in Likud hands, but the education minister will be a veteran of Hamas’s armed wing, a man who once served several years in jail for his part in a lethal bombing. After decades spent fighting each other to the death, these two movements will now share power, spending the next year or two arguing about school admissions and local water rates. Their long war is over.

If that sounds like wild, lunatic fantasy, it is – for the Middle East at any rate. But something very much like it is happening before our eyes in Northern Ireland. In Sharon’s place is Ian Paisley, the octogenarian embodiment of Unionist intransigence, whose Democratic Unionist party is likely to emerge as the largest single party in today’s elections for the Northern Ireland assembly. For Ismail Haniyeh, read Martin McGuinness who will serve as deputy first minister. That’s right: McGuinness, widely famed as a former IRA commander, will team up with Paisley, who made a reputation denouncing the IRA as bloodthirsty, murdering bastards whose only place was frying in the fires of hell.

At Paisley’s side, as education minister, we may well see Gerry Kelly, a former hunger striker jailed for his part in the IRA bombings of the Old Bailey and Scotland Yard. And yes, one of the big issues before the Paisley administration will be the price of Northern Irish water.

Of course, the analogy is not perfect. (Last time I deployed it, several readers shot back that the IRA never rejected Britain’s right to exist, in contrast with Hamas’s position on Israel.) But it helps convey the scale of the transformation now underway in Northern Ireland. A place that was riven by violent conflict – euphemistically referred to as the Troubles – is striding towards normality. And those who are crafting this peace are the very same people who made the war.

It makes for some eye-popping transitions. The new general secretary of Sinn Féin, set to be charged with governing Northern Ireland, is officially wanted in Northern Ireland for the shooting of a British soldier 30 years ago. When Sinn Féin’s conference recently discussed the party’s policy on climate change, the debate was led by one James Monaghan. He’s wanted in Colombia, where he skipped bail after allegedly aiding Farc “narco-terrorists”. Now he talks about carbon emissions.

The people of Northern Ireland have had a few years to get used to all this, but for those outside it can still come as a delightful shock. You only have to imagine the equivalent changes in Israel-Palestine to see how far the province has come. As Paisley himself put it this week: “The political landscape has been transformed in a way that … many said was impossible.” Among the “many” were Unionism’s cheerleaders in Britain, in the Conservative party and in the commentariat. I remember columnists Stephen Glover, Charles Moore and Michael Gove all insisting that the IRA was irredeemably bent on war, that negotiations with republicanism were a treachery doomed to fail. They were all wrong.

Of course, things can unravel. The adrenaline junkies who serve as Northern Ireland’s politicians tend to take things to the wire and they still might hesitate. Their deadline for forming a power-sharing executive is midnight on March 26. Expect negotiations to be still underway, both sides trying to extract the best possible deal, at 11.55pm.

But it’s hard to see what grounds they would have for failing to do the business now. Unionists have got what they never expected: an IRA declaration that their war is over and the verified decommissioning of their weapons. In January Sinn Féin removed the last obstacle in the way, by agreeing to back policing arrangements for the province. There’s not much Paisley can ask for that he hasn’t already got. One British official says that if Paisley does not go ahead and form a government it will be because the old warhorse simply “bottled it”.

And so the campaign in Northern Ireland has not been about bombs and bullets, or the great national question, but about the humdrum stuff of normal politics. The biggest Belfast rally of recent months was about that increase in water charges.

What’s more, the parties have fought an oddly consensual campaign. They differ on education – nationalists tend to oppose selection, Unionists support it – but on the rest there is a striking uniformity. “You cannot put a bus ticket between them,” says Mick Fealty, of the indispensable Slugger O’Toole blog.

That’s no coincidence. The DUP and Sinn Féin, along with the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP, have spent months hammering out what will, in effect, be the programme for the new devolved executive. They know that, whatever votes are cast today, they will all be in government. Those are the rules of the game, as laid out in the Good Friday agreement: a “mandatory coalition” in which every party with a serious number of seats gets a place at the governing table.

The result is a kind of hyper-normality, in which there can be no real policy disagreements because everyone is going to end up on the same side, governing together. It means Northern Ireland is about to jump from civil war to soggy consensuality, without ever passing through democratic, adversarial politics.

And yet the national question is not going away. It’s just being resolved in a new way – with not a shot, nor even an argument, being heard.

The driving force is the economic success of the Irish republic, a surge in prosperity which the north wants a part of. All the main parties are calling on London to reduce Northern Ireland’s rate of corporation tax, for example, to bring it into line with the investment-attracting south. Even Ian Paisley is in favour of this little piece of all-Ireland harmonisation.

Meanwhile, the secretary of state Peter Hain won plaudits when he demanded mobile phone companies drop their “roaming” charges across the Irish border, replacing them with one rate for the entire island. He’s also legislated for a single electricity market covering north and south. Indeed, Hain has said that a single, Northern Irish economy is unsustainable, that only an “island of Ireland economy” makes sense. Paisley heard that as a pro-nationalist message and called for Hain’s resignation. But when business leaders backed Hain, Paisley quietly dropped it.

Gradually and through economics rather than politics – still less armed struggle – Ireland is moving towards a kind of de facto unification. There are plans for a new road linking Dublin to Derry. The Irish government has announced that the north is eligible to compete for a share of Dublin’s €1bn national development fund.

Each year that passes, the border separating north and south will come to look more obsolete. It will not be Semtex and Armalites that erase it, but the slower, subtler suasions of wealth and convenience. Normality is coming to Northern Ireland – but it’s taken a damn strange route.

A los surrealistas les intrigaban las coincidencias, el azar, las cosas raras que nos ocurren sin aparente explicación racional pero que, cuando se producen, parecen tener su propia lógica. Grandes maestros en el arte de vivir, receptivos ante las oportunidades que nos brinda nuestro discurrir cotidiano –aunque no siempre las sepamos reconocer, apreciar o aprovechar–, bucearon en el inconsciente y siempre abominaron de una sociedad que consideraban miserable, pacata, acobardada. Luis Buñuel no fue excepción a la regla. En sus memorias, recuerda la fuerte sacudida que le produjeron las primeras lecturas de Freud cuando era estudiante en Madrid, con Dalí y Lorca a su lado. Y su larga filmografía, incluso cuando se veía forzado a trabajar con guiones mediocres y fines estrictamente comerciales, es una llamada constante a la insubordinación.
Todo ello me lo ha recordado el excelente documental A propósito de Buñuel, rodado para el centenario del cineasta en el 2000 y vuelto a emitir el sábado pasado por el segundo canal de RTVE. ¡Qué gran personaje aquel aragonés fornido que tanto se las daba de macho peleón, pero que en el fondo era todo bondad, compasión, ternura y humor! ¡Y qué obsesión la suya con la muerte, desde su niñez, en una Calanda casi medieval, hasta los postreros y conmovedores párrafos de su tardía autobiografía, Mi último suspiro!

POCOS DÍAS antes de emitirse el documental en cuestión, acababa de releer, ¿por azar?, el cuento Los muertos, de James Joyce, obra maestra de la literatura convertida por John Huston en obra maestra del cine. No sé si Buñuel conocía el cuento de Joyce o si apreciaba a Huston. Me gustaría creer que ambas cosas. El director norteamericano siempre había querido hacer aquella película. Pero lo dejó para muy tarde; tuvo que dirigir desde una silla de ruedas, y la genial cinta resultaría ser su canto de cisne. Extraordinarios los actores, extraordinaria la ambientación. Y desgarradora la escena final, cuando Gretta (Anjelica Huston) revela a su marido que tuvo un amor adolescente, trágico, que nunca ha podido olvidar. El monólogo interior de Gabriel tras la revelación, mientras contempla por la ventana los copos que han vuelto a caer sobre Dublín, demuestra que experimenta la nevada como anuncio de la muerte. No habrá otra fiesta navideña como la de esta noche (lo decían los ojos desvaídos de la tía Julia), y su relación con Gretta nunca podrá ser la misma, pues ella jamás le amará como a aquel pobre Michael Furey. La nieve cae lentamente sobre todos los vivos y todos los muertos.

ME RESULTA imposible leer el cuento de Joyce, o ver la película de Huston, sin pensar en el largo sufrimiento del pueblo irlandés y, sobre todo, su sangrienta lucha secular contra el brutal invasor británico. Por ello la noticia de que el proceso de paz en Irlanda del Norte acaba de dar un significativo salto adelante llega, en medio de tanto desastre alrededor del mundo, de tanta muerte y miseria y estupidez e irracionalidad, como brisa fresca y suave, signo de esperanza. Al decidir apoyar a la nueva policía no sectaria del Ulster, el Sinn Féin –que por supuesto no renuncia a su meta de una Irlanda reunificada, pero sí a la pretensión de conseguirla por métodos violentos– ha dado una prueba de gran madurez.
Era la última condición que exigía el ya vetusto Ian Paisley para colaborar con ellos en el Gobierno autonómico de la provincia, y ahora habrá que ver su respuesta. Esperemos que sea igualmente sensata, y que el furibundo anticatólico sepa reconocer pasados errores y terquedades. Yo siempre he creído que, en una Irlanda reunida, los protestantes del Norte no tendrían nada que temer y que, al contrario, estarían mucho mejor que con Londres, que en el fondo se quiere desentender de ellos. Poco a poco, con el enorme éxito económico irlandés dentro de Europa, y con el progresivo debilitamiento del poder de la Iglesia de Roma, los del Norte han empezado a ver que efectivamente podría ser así. Martin McGuinness les ha dicho que el futuro puede ser brillante. No lo dudo. Tardará en llegar el momento de la reunificación. Hay profundas heridas, el recuerdo de 4.000 muertos. Pero llegará.

HOY ME ENTERO por la prensa –¿última coincidencia?– de que, cuando le sobrevino la muerte al académico y crítico Claudio Guillén, hijo del poeta, el mismo sábado 27 de enero, veía en la televisión, justo antes de empezar el documental de Buñuel, el final de otra gran película de John Huston, La Reina de África. No me imagino mejor manera de morirse que disfrutando aquel canto a la vida y a la valentía, con Bogart y Hepburn insuperables. ¿Cómo no admirar, tal vez sobre todo, la espléndida escena en que los ya amantes, exhaustos después de empujar el sufrido barco por el laberinto de las marismas, se entregan al sueño sin saber que no solo no han fracasado, sino que están a unos pocos metros del lago patrullado por los alemanes? ¿Y luego su despertar incrédulo al descubrir que una lluvia torrencial ha liberado el barco y que todavía van a poder darle su merecido al enemigo?
Joyce, Huston, Buñuel: acérrimos defensores de la vida frente a la insondable sima.

Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley first came into each other’s orbit in 1966, on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Sinn Féin had defiantly displayed an Irish tricolour in its office window in Belfast and Paisley threatened to lead a march to remove it unless the authorities did so first. Such a display was illegal at the time. The police moved in, removed the flag, and republicans promptly reinstated it. The RUC smashed down the door to remove it again. Fierce rioting broke out and 350 police officers roared up with armoured cars and water cannon to restore order. It convinced the young Gerry Adams that “the north of Ireland was a state based on the violent suppression of political opposition”.

The lines were drawn for decades of bloody conflict, a conflict that now stands on the brink of being finally resolved with the astonishing prospect of Paisley’s DUP and Adams’s Sinn Féin sharing power in a devolved government. If that happens, it will mark the triumph of the extremes of loyalism and republicanism, which have marched over the debris of their moderate political rivals in both camps. It would also crown Tony Blair’s decade of endeavour to solve the Irish Question. If success is achieved, it will rank high in the Blair legacy – although it is unlikely to overshadow the chaotic legacy of Iraq.

But we’re not there yet. The republican movement has delivered its part of the bargain. The IRA has decommissioned its arsenal and Sinn Féin declared its support for the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland, turning on its head almost 90 years of violent hostility to policing in the North. Remarkably it did so with only a marginal 5% dissent.

Adams has declared “the war is over”, and Paisley knows that it is – at least in the military sense. He’s far too long in the tooth to believe that republicans have set aside their historic goal of a united Ireland and knows that they will continue to pursue that holy grail for which so many of their comrades have died.

The irony is that Paisley may be about to become prime minister himself. If so – given declarations down the decades that he would never, ever surrender – how will he spin such an extraordinary turnaround to supporters who have long worshipped him as the rock on which Protestant Ulster and the union have stood?

First, Paisley could argue that through standing firm and refusing to compromise, he has finally defeated the IRA – and that the enemy, at least the armed version, is no more. Second, that the union is secure – ironically made so by the Good Friday agreement their leader rejected. Sinn Féin has accepted that Northern Ireland will remain part of the UK as long as that remains the wish of the majority of its people. And that means it is likely to do so for a long time.

The intriguing question is: will Paisley declare such triumph from the steps of Stormont and the world’s television studios to rub it into the noses of his partners in government? Perhaps he will hold back: Paisley, seen by many as the monster of old, now the peacemaker and statesman. We’d still have to blink to believe it. It would be wrong to think that the “Big Man” has changed. He has not. His instincts and his Free Presbyterian faith remain strong. If he finally does the deal and becomes the province’s prime minister, he knows that the enemy is now within and he has no illusions about its determination to pursue the goal of a united Ireland.

Paisley helped politicise the young Adams on the Rising’s 50th anniversary. Prime Minister Paisley will do all he can to make sure Adams does not achieve his goal by its centenary in 2016. A marriage in government between Sinn Féin and the DUP there may be, but the going is likely to be rough.

When I was a child Irish jokes were the absolute staple of humour. That was as true for television comedians as it was in everyday banter. Looking back, it must have been an irritation for those who paid their licence fee in Northern Ireland (and viewers who did not do so in the Republic but could receive a BBC signal anyway) to have to put up with the likes of Ken Dodd implying that they were collective idiots.

You rarely hear an Irish joke these days and for my son’s generation (aged ten) they are a meaningless notion. When I tested one on him yesterday — “heard about the Irish woodworm, found dead in a brick” — he not only failed to laugh but looked at me as if I were slightly deranged (rather disturbingly, he tends to do this more and more often).

Yet, as far as I can recall, Irish jokes were never outlawed by legislation. Nor was there a rash of Irish Nobel Prize winners that forced a reassessment of the Emerald Isle’s IQ. The economic transformation of the Irish Republic might have had a subliminal impact, but there is no innate incompatibility between wealth and stupidity (as Celebrity Big Brother has spectacularly demonstrated). Irish jokes just faded away without attracting comment.

In a strange way the same is true of the Northern Ireland peace process. It has dragged on for so long — it will be a decade this summer since the IRA ceasefire began — and been through so many political twists and turns that eyes in mainland Britain (and possibly many in the Province itself) have long glazed over. It has appeared like an endless circuit of crises and conferences. That, allowing for past form, hundreds of people have been saved from violent death and Belfast, especially, has been totally reborn as a city scarcely appears to merit a mention. The restoration of devolution in Ulster when it comes at the end of March will probably be greeted with a weary “yeah, whatever”. It really shouldn’t be.

For the better part of 30 years a corner of the United Kingdom was riven by the most brutal civil unrest experienced by any part of western Europe in the 20th century. That violence periodically manifested itself in England. It claimed far more lives in our nation than Islamist fundamentalism has done.

In 2005 the IRA decommissioned a vast arms stockpile. Yesterday, by accepting the authority and legitimacy of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the judicial system more broadly, Irish republicanism as it has been known for more than a hundred years essentially decommissioned its own ideology. In 1998 Tony Blair spoke of a “hand of history” and a little later of a “seismic shift” in Sinn Fein/IRA thinking. It was premature hyperbole then. It is a matter of solid fact now.

At a time when it is fashionable (if not entirely accurate) to lament an absence of bold political leadership, it would be churlish not to acknowledge the distance that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have moved and managed to take their supporters with them. Irish republicanism today is unrecognisable from that of a relatively short time ago.

If it had been suggested in 1981 that Bobby Sands was starving himself to death so that Mr McGuinness could eventually serve as the Rev Ian Paisley’s deputy in an executive drawn from a Northern Ireland Assembly, the idea would have been deemed ridiculous. But unless the Democratic Unionist Party insanely draws back at the last minute that is what will happen. It is change of a scale to rival the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In a sense it could and should have occurred much sooner. The IRA had, to be frank, won the intellectual argument by about 1972, in that London had conceded that the political arrangements in Ulster that had been there since partition were unsustainable. But the IRA carried on with its bloody armed struggle for an utterly senseless 25 years. Most of the institutional arrangements of the present peace process were foreshadowed by the Sunningdale accord brokered in 1973 but which imploded 12 months afterwards. It could not survive because both the Paisleyites and the republican high command stayed out of it. A DUP-Sinn Fein Executive and Assembly, by contrast, once it is created can run the course.

The curse of sectarianism will not disappear from Ulster instantly. Yet a DUP-Sinn Fein alliance is not quite as bizarre as one might imagine. Both are populist parties that traditionally appeal to voters on low incomes, in contrast with the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP, which are middle-class enclaves (and destined to be marginalised).

The Rev Paisley and Mr McGuinness will find little difficulty making common cause in asking for ever larger public spending to be showered, equitably, on their constituencies. This despite the reality that state expenditure as a proportion of national income in Ulster is almost 60 per cent, which must be the largest such percentage in modern Europe.

The danger for Ulster, therefore, is that it will shortly trade sectarianism for socialism. This is despite the evidence that the astonishing emergence of the Republic of Ireland as an economic force to be reckoned with has been on the basis of rampant Thatcherism. Low tax rates and a benign entrepreneurial climate explain why prominent companies have, or are considering, relocating their head offices from London to Dublin. The last thing that Northern Ireland needs is the peace dividend it is about to receive to be squandered in a shared orgy of spending by DUP and Sinn Fein ministers out of Stormont.

The core question facing Northern Ireland’s politicians of all stripes once devolution returns is whether the model for the Province should be Eire or Scotland. For permanent peace might prove surprisingly easy to achieve, while permanent prosperity may be elusive. Exchanging sectarianism for socialism would be the ultimate, deeply unfunny, Irish joke.

A PRIMARY school teacher in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s posed his class of nine-year-old boys a tricky theological question: “Hands up those of you who think Protestants believe in God,” he said.

Only five of the thirty-two Roman Catholic children in the class raised their hands. The rest either didn’t know or, for one reason or another, imagined that Protestants worshipped some unknown deity.

I was one of the ill-informed children and, as the teacher tried to explain that Protestants believed in exactly the same God that we supposedly did, clearly remember experiencing a rising sense of shame at my ignorance.

There was another uneasy feeling. Why, if Protestants were also Christians, were they in different schools; why did we never meet any of them; and what was the fighting all about?

Some years later, as a sixthformer at a Catholic school, I helped to organise a charity event and approached the local Protestant grammar school to try to make it a cross-community affair. The stern answer came back from the headmaster that his pupils would not be participating.

I left Northern Ireland the following year, eager to escape a society scarred by segregation. In my first week at university in London I met a student from Belfast who became my first Protestant friend. Two decades on we remain close, sharing a loathing of the segregated school system in which we were educated.

The sense of shame I felt as a nine-year-old now returns as cold anger every time I hear ministers, bishops or others who really should know better claiming that so-called faith schools are progressive and will encourage “community cohesion”. They cannot, because by their very nature these schools create division.

Northern Ireland should stand as a stark lesson that segregating children breeds distrust, hatred and violence. The paramilitary war may be over but the Province has a new reputation for racial hatred, with high levels of attacks against immigrant communities.

When British cities are becoming ghettoised and fear of foreigners is running high, there should be no truck with those who want to isolate five-year-olds in opposing religious camps. Education is too important to be entrusted to men who want to emphasise the differences between children rather than what binds them together.

Will Ian Paisley wreck hopes for peace in Ireland again? Or will the fundamentalist cleric, nicknamed “Dr No” for the glee with which he kiboshed past deals, finally bend to become Northern Ireland’s first minister?These questions hang in the air as the North’s political parties prepare to meet tomorrow. The talks, aimed at restoring devolution, follow last week’s Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) report – which confirmed what fairminded observers have known for years: the IRA’s armed struggle is at an end.

The roaring reverend, who leads the Democratic Unionists (DUP), has been showing signs of moderation. He met the Catholic primate of All-Ireland for the first time yesterday – no small move for a man who once called the Pope the antichrist. But Paisley is as aware as anyone that he owes his pre-eminence within Unionism in part to his recalcitrance. Last week, he sourly insisted that the IMC report showed only “that the pressure being brought to bear on republicans by the unequivocal policies of the DUP is working”.

Paisley’s obstinacy matters because his party is the largest in Northern Ireland. A resuscitation of the devolved institutions in Belfast – suspended four years ago as a result of the murky “Stormontgate” affair in which a British agent played a central role – depends upon the DUP agreeing to go into government with Sinn Féin. Paisley’s basic position is that he will not do so until Sinn Féin backs Northern Ireland’s police force. Sinn Féin has indicated it will not endorse the police until Paisley commits to government. Hence the stalemate.

Paisley’s current demands are only the latest justifications offered by Unionists for their refusal to engage with Gerry Adams’s party. The IRA has maintained its ceasefire for nine years. It began to decommission weapons five years ago and publicly declared the armed campaign over in July 2005. Still Unionists demand more. On Friday the DUP MP Nigel Dodds shifted the goalposts again, warning that any provision to allow republican “on the runs” to return to Northern Ireland would destroy chances of a deal. At the weekend, the MEP Jim Allister complained that Sinn Féin had still not done enough “to make themselves fit for government”.

However, Sinn Féin’s position on policing is also flawed and its leader’s room for manoeuvre limited. Adams’s old hints that pushing him too far could result in the IRA’s return to war lost credibility years ago. However visceral their feelings about the issue, it is not tenable for republicans to argue that they can join the government of the state they once fought to destroy, but that backing its police would involve an unacceptable breach of their principles.

The two governments are desperate for progress tomorrow. One rumour is that they will propose a contingent and somewhat convoluted deal. Each party would agree to move forward by a specific date, as long as its counterpart threw some positive shapes between now and then. There is no guarantee that the DUP and Sinn Féin would sign up even to such a conditional accord – a source of increasing frustration not just to the British and Irish governments, but to many people in Northern Ireland. They are grappling with bread-and-butter issues to which the old slogans bear minimal relevance. In the absence of a settlement, decisions will continue to be taken by British ministers who have never received a vote from the citizens over whom they rule like viceroys.

The list of subjects that a devolved government in Belfast should be dealing with is long and growing. Northern Ireland’s private-sector economy is notoriously feeble, accounting for less than half of the region’s output and two-thirds of its jobs. Though the unemployment rate has fallen, pockets of grim poverty remain. The education system is in a state of flux. Other issues, such as the introduction of water charges and a rise in rates, are also causing uproar.

Sinn Féin seems to have taken those concerns on board. Its supporters are scheduled to hold a rally in Belfast tonight under the slogan “Can You Afford It?”. The event will kick off a campaign aimed at persuading Unionists that the costs of continued direct rule from London are too great.

Tonight’s rally will take place at a hotel that the IRA bombed repeatedly. That fact alone shows how far republicans have moved. It is now up to the DUP to leave behind the reactionary and bigoted policies that mark its own past.