Ireland's Uncertain Peace

John Lloyd

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998

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Summary:  For the first time in a generation, there is real hope for peace in Northern Ireland. A fortunate political constellation in Britain, the United States, and Ireland provided the impetus to make the compromises needed for a viable pact. But the Good Friday Agreement is fragile. It survived its first major challenge, this summer's marching season and its attendant strife, only by a grim kind of Irish luck: a brutal bombing that killed three boys and inspired both unionists and republicans to renew their commitment to the accord. The province's new government will face more such challenges, and its ability to overcome them depends on a few good men.

John Lloyd is Associate Editor of the New Statesman, a writer for the Financial Times, and the author of Rebirth of a Nation: An Anatomy of Russia.

BEATING UNIONIST DRUMS

Northern Ireland stutters and grumbles its way toward a peace which is still uncertain. April's Good Friday Agreement, whose signing in Belfast was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, did no more than sketch out a middle ground on which unionists and nationalists who reject violence might together govern this province of 1.6 million people. But that ground is still narrow. Although it has withstood one severe challenge this summer, it did so by a very Irish kind of luck. Another threat at least as bad is sure to come.

The referendum on the agreement gained the support of 71 percent of the province's voters. Most of the no votes were in the unionist camp, which makes up between 55 and 60 percent of the province. The unionists have many cavils with the agreement and the structure of the assembly it sets up. But most of all they are concerned and often enraged by the vast concessions being made to Sinn F?in, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. The IRA has waged continuous war on the United Kingdom and on unionists for 30 years; many unionists cannot believe that it has given up and see in its acquiescence to the agreement a sly opening gambit in a war by other means.

The two toughest elements for the unionists to swallow are the release of terrorists, the majority of whom are republicans, and the entry into the provincial government of the two leading members of Sinn F?in, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. These issues will have to be faced later this year, but already in July, only weeks after the appointment of a new first minister and his deputy, a quite different issue all but swamped the agreement. It is an issue that goes to the heart of the relationship between Protestants and Catholics, who roughly equate with unionists and nationalists. It is the matter of culture and its relationship to power.

At the core of militant unionism is the Orange Order, which, with its brother organizations, the Apprentice Boys and the Royal Black Preceptory, has organized unionist men from all classes into lodges that express their loyalty to the British crown each summer in a series of parades. The order is a religious one, limited in its membership to Protestants and explicitly hostile to Catholicism (though, its supporters would say, not to Catholics). Its parades vary from processions to church for worship and marches to memorials to commemorate the dead of the two world wars (especially those at the Somme in 1916, where a disproportionate number of Ulstermen were slaughtered) to grand days out with bands in comic-opera uniforms, crowds lining the streets, speeches, and galas. Though some of it is gay and much of it stirring, the marches have a sectarian edge that has often sharpened in the last few years as Protestants and Catholics drew further back from each other. The great Lambeg drums are banged fiercely near Catholic areas, and ...

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