Irlanda del Norte (Continuación)

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Thirty years ago, two nervous Sunday Times reporters sat in a country inn outside Dublin waiting for an IRA contact to show up. Neither I nor my colleague David Blundy had ever met this shadowy figure before, and we knew nothing of his motives. But he had held out the promise of solving one of the darkest secrets of the Provisionals' terror campaign against the British - the truth about the murder of the undercover army intelligence officer, Captain Robert Nairac.

Even by IRA standards Captain Nairac's death was shocking. Taken from the Three Steps public house in South Armagh, where he had gone undercover to gather information about republican operations, he had been beaten, tortured and finally shot.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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".…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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 eldebate 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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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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).…  Seguir leyendo »

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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.…  Seguir leyendo »