Ireland

LONDON – The atmospherics in Scotland around this week’s meeting of the main protagonists in Northern Ireland’s long civil war have been good. The IRA has given up the gun. The fundamentalist preacher and leader of hard line Protestant opinion, the Rev Ian Paisley, is prepared to sit down not just with the prime minister of Ireland, Berty Ahern, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain but also with Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader (and the person in the IRA leadership who counts the most). Scotland, with its long history of autonomy on legal matters (remember the Lockerbie air terrorism trial), its independent educational system (no wonder Scots dominate the Blair administration) and, most recently, an autonomous parliament with real power is a lesson in political devolution for all who fear it, whether it be in Belfast, Madrid, Kosovo, Tel Aviv or New Delhi. Just about everything, other that...

LONDON – Didn’t somebody once say that it’s not over until the fat lady sings? Never was this more apposite than when applied to Northern Ireland. Despite their recent pledge to renounce the armed struggle the IRA is not going to just fade away. Neither will the protestant militias. And certainly not, despite ill health, will the rabid, protestant preacher, Ian Paisley, of whom it was recently said, “He is no more representative of Christianity than Osama bin Laden is of Islam”. He has his son in waiting, just as the IRA will still have access to fertiliser, just as soon as they feel they are not getting their due. The extremists are doing better than they have ever done at the polls, and the province, once the safest place in Europe to bring up a teenage daughter, now appears to have an unfailing ability to produce a steady supply...

LONDON – This is not the last tango in Belfast, whatever the hype of Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein and the IRA have a marked ability to suggest, even promise, a course of action but then the actual delivery becomes a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t process. Still, the IRA proposal made earlier this week looks like the firmest and clearest promise yet to destroy their arm caches. And common sense suggests that in the end they will act to begin real disarmament before next week’s deadline, despite today’s qualms by the Unionists. Not only do the nationalists have the better part of the bargain in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, everyone knows that the arms cache question is more symbolism than substance. As was shown with the bomb that wounded eleven people in west London last week dissident factions of the IRA have no trouble in making deadly bombs out of fertiliser and...

LONDON – President Bill Clinton who has just arrived in Northern Ireland likes to think the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 was one of his great accomplishments. Apart from the fact that he was but one pivotal actor among many, the truth is it is far too early to boast. The silencing of the guns and the creation of an Assembly in which sit militant Catholic Republicans who wish the north to be joined with independent Eire to the south, and equally passionate Protestants who want to ensure that the north is forever wedded to the United Kingdom, is an undoubted accomplishment. But it has all been done on a fudge. At bottom the positions of both sides are irreconcilable and the stresses and strains that have made ribbons of previous understandings can re-surface at any moment. Clinton can use his charisma to push things along an inch or two,...

LONDON–The centre cannot hold–that has been the received wisdom since in 1921 the protestant bulwark of Northern Ireland was detached from the rest of this catholic- dominated, Irish island and incorporated into the United Kingdom. Now the historic peace agreement between the mainstream protestant unionists and Sinn Fein, the political front of the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, will be put to the test in next week s referendum. It is not a simple choice between the ballot or the bullet, for Sinn Fein has long had a dual Armalite and ballot box strategy. Even now the decommissioning of the IRA’s formidable arsenal has been allowed a two year grace period, enough for the IRA to see if it gets anything out of this deal. But the accord has put the ballot box on a higher pedestal than the bullet and reverses a long-standing, almost sacred, position of Sinn Fein/IRA...