The 1998 accord, known to its admirers as the Good Friday Agreement, was an enlightened effort to see if Northern Ireland's politicians might agree to differ on the national question, and yet find sufficient common ground on which to govern for all of the people. After 30 years of dirty war, no one expected the immediate burial of enmity and, in that respect, no one has since been disappointed.
Nevertheless, the Agreement represented an historic compromise between the traditions. The political representatives of nationalism and republicanism conceded the principle of unionist consent to any constitutional change in the six counties; while a useful proportion of unionists consented to put up with north-south bodies and the aspiration, if peaceably expressed, to a 32-county republic. In turn, ex-combatants found words to draw a line under the miserable violence of the war, few more eloquently than David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), political wing of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force: "I accept my complicity; I accept my responsibility; and I expect others to do the same."
But unionism's chief negotiator on Good Friday was Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader David Trimble, the most inwardly conflicted figure ever to have emerged within his famously staid and unimaginative party. Once a hardliner, Trimble had now agreed terms for a reconciliation with the old enemy, and such is the insular nature of the man that few of his colleagues had sensed the historic compromise afoot. Yet more damning for the Agreement's chances, Trimble immediately seemed sickened at the prospect of going out to sell the deal that he had settled for. During the subsequent referendum campaign, he was unwilling to share a platform with David Ervine, much less Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness. Finally, in May 1998 the Agreement was endorsed by 71.12 per cent of voters, that figure comprising the vast majority of Catholics who voted, but only barely the greater number of Protestants. The latter contingent has diminished further in the last four years; and now, as the north's devolved government is suspended for the fourth time in its short life, unionism's staunchest nay-sayers are relishing their most emphatic "told you so" moment to date.
Unionism is an internally fractured and disputatious family, and many amongst its number maintained from the start that this whole peace craze was a gilded disgrace. They insisted upon a higher moral reckoning for men such as McGuinness, complicit in past Provisional IRA outrages. And, despite two acts of IRA decommissioning, the suspicion has never abated-reinforced by recent events-that the Provos still favour a "dual strategy," whereby their military capacity remains largely intact should the gains of representative politics prove insubstantial. With such distrust at large, debates within the Stormont assembly have sometimes been no better than stand-up Prod vs Taig slagging matches. Moreover, what incensed even pro-Agreement unionists was that Gerry Adams's media-proficient Sinn Fein could pitch the deal to their constituencies as an ongoing process rather than a final settlement-a stepping stone to Irish unity, the freedom to win their freedom.
For the Agreement to prosper, unionism needed leaders who could present an optimism similar, if converse, to Adams's about what might be achieved by a muscular engagement with the new dispensations. As poet Tom Paulin blithely argued in a 2001 peace symposium, "It's got to be about making both sides feel that they won." But not since Trimble emerged from Castle Buildings on 10th April 1998, declaring the union safer than when he had first sat down, has unionism said much in public that savoured of victory. The talk was only of incessant affronts to their tradition, and of a one-way track bearing intolerable concessions. Why couldn't unionism engage? Two years ago, politicians and commentators began to talk of the threat to the Agreement posed by "Protestant demoralisation." A people long perceived as proud to the point of arrogance began to be sketched in shades of aggrieved, doom-laden defeatism.
Meanwhile, more and more grudgingly pro-Agreement UUP voters were switching against the deal, even embracing Ian Paisley's rejectionist Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). As the liberal unionist and UUP councillor Chris McGimpsey says, "The more Protestants feel under threat, the more they go for extreme views; which is why Paisley keeps telling Protestants they're under threat." The DUP took up their two ministerial posts at Stormont while boasting that they would suffer no contaminating contact with Sinn Fein's representatives. They then inflicted serious casualties on the UUP at the 2001 Westminster election, dismaying Trimble's party over their prospects for the next assembly poll, set for May 2003. It became accepted wisdom that no unionist party could go to the people while seated in government with the associates of gunmen.
This perception has sharpened over the last year, as the IRA came to be suspected of loaning ballistics expertise to the FARC guerrillas in Colombia, and of mounting the audacious robbery of classified files from Special Branch headquarters in Castlereagh in March.
David Trimble's only hope was to outflank Paisley, and so he finally made common cause with his nemesis, UUP Lagan Valley MP Jeffrey Donaldson, who deserted the leader at the eleventh hour of the 1998 talks and has coveted his job ever since. On 21st September 2002, at the annual meeting of the UUP's governing council, Trimble and Donaldson cobbled together a resolution stating that the party's bottom line on sharing power with Sinn Fein was the total disbandment of the IRA, without which its ministers would take their leave of the executive on or before 18th January 2003. In the meantime, they would withdraw from the north-south ministerial council, and seek to revoke the 50-50 recruitment quotas of Catholics and Protestants to the reformed police service. A more purposeful desolation of the terms of the Agreement could scarcely be envisaged.
Then on 4th October, armed police officers raided Sinn Fein offices at Stormont and conducted searches of six private residences in Belfast. This was described as the culmination of a year-long investigation into leaks of confidential documents by Sinn Fein to the IRA. The Stormont raid was a needlessly heavy-handed affair, and Chief Constable Hugh Orde apologised for its manner but professed himself satisfied by the seriousness of the material uncovered. For the British government, suspension now became the least worst option. A spectacular reversal had been affected. It had been clear for a fortnight that the assembly was destined for the deep freeze, but now, rather than intransigent unionism, it was militant republicanism that carried the blame.
In truth, the ill omens for the Agreement were clear even to its well-wishers when I visited Belfast in early summer. My first appointment was at the PUP office at Stormont, with David Ervine and fellow UVF veteran Billy Hutchinson. "All Prods are clairvoyant, you know," Ervine said. "And it's never good news." If David Ervine was now playing Cassandra, then the peace process was sickly indeed. After all, the PUP were the sole unionist grouping which wholeheartedly championed the Agreement-indeed, the first unionists in living memory to come up with a new idea, namely that working-class Protestants and Catholics should make common cause to challenge the long misgovernment of middle-class, "big house" unionism. Ervine was hailed as a man who had made a difference in Northern Ireland; and journalists have since depended on him to offer a well-turned endorsement of the process. Today, though, was different. "The atmosphere is bloody awful within the unionist community," Ervine claimed. "Eighteen months ago you could at least have had a debate about the Agreement, for or against. Now I think the cynicism is too great."
The PUP invested faith in working-class people as the engine that would drive the Agreement forward, on the premise that loyalist ex-combatants too would find their niche in the new society. Instead, Ervine's party was driven back ceaselessly to the discontent of the streets: first by a lethal feud between the UVF and the UDA in the summer of 2000; then by the infamous scenes outside Ardoyne's Holy Cross primary school in September 2001 and renewed skirmishes at Belfast's many other interface hotspots.
Even amid this malaise there was, I said, something to be said for the benefits of political stability: inward investment resurgent, rapidly falling unemployment, house prices up and, for the first time in years, net immigration, raising hopes that the north's "brain drain" can be reversed. "You can sell large positives," Ervine admitted, "but the difficulty of living in a divided society where there's a lack of trust is that small negatives can overshadow large positives. So you get Paisley huffing and puffing and then Sinn Fein giving the impression to the unionist community that Paisley's got it right-demanding benefits but only for themselves, sending out the mood music that nationalists will never be comfortable, never be satisfied, never be reasonable." What has gone missing from the process in Ervine's eyes is some reciprocal generosity of spirit. Meanwhile, he senses "an underclass mentality growing hugely within the unionist community-disaffected, apathetic, and much less politically sophisticated than their nationalist counterparts."
The British government has not been blind to the problem of Protestant alienation. In November 2001, Secretary of State John Reid gave a speech at Liverpool University in which he set out to acknowledge Protestant grievance (or, as Chris McGimpsey puts it, to "be nice to the Prods for a week or two"). He addressed Protestants in the terms by which they know themselves-as "victims of violence who are witnesses to a stream of 'concessions' to the 'other side'... under threat from an alliance between the large and vibrant Catholic minority within its boundaries, its larger neighbour to the south, and a spineless, ungrateful or even perfidious parent across the Irish Sea." Reid cautioned that "Northern Ireland must not become a cold place for Protestants."
It was a homage to Trimble's 1998 Nobel Prize speech ("Ulster unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics"). But anti-Agreement unionists mocked Reid's attempt to share their pain. "A cold place indeed," muttered many. Nigel Dodds, DUP minister for social development, rebutted Reid in the Orange Standard, savaging the Agreement as a vehicle for "rampant north-southery." By the time he had called for the restoration of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the scrapping of the Parades Commission, one's inner ear had made out the unmistakable sound of a community talking to itself in an echo chamber. For sure, the constitutional and legislative changes wrought by the Agreement have meant that some trusted unionist landmarks-symbolic vouchsafes of their cultural, political, and religious identity-have been lost rather too quickly. But unionists make themselves ridiculous when they pretend that the radical reform of an overwhelmingly Protestant police force was not a prerequisite for any settlement; or that the celebration of the Orange anniversaries are neighbourly festivals that once delighted local Catholics until the Provos convinced them otherwise.
Reid also received a scornful notice from DUP alderman Jack McKee. "The time is coming when we will see unionists out on the streets demanding their civil rights," McKee told the Larne Gazette. But there is something unsavoury about the spectacle of a self-pitying majority-like a tearful bully when finally collared by someone of his own size. The north's pro-union majority was only established when the 1921 partition threw a lasso around the fattest territory that Protestants could conceivably hold-six counties, rather than a more logical but somehow derisory four. This overreach sowed dragon's teeth.
Any serious peace deal had to entail a net loss for Protestants, and an accompanying gain for Catholics. In the event, the Agreement enshrined the principle of parity of esteem, "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British." The unionist policy of staunching the hopes of the nationalist minority was thus officially undone. For some time now, Catholics have been on the move, confident, expectant.
Some press reports claim that the 2001 census will show that Catholics make up as much as 46 per cent of Northern Ireland's population-a formidable minority indeed. West of the River Bann, there is scarcely a unionist MP in sight. Chris McGimpsey still believes the Agreement buried the prospect of Irish unity. Many of his fellow unionists believe the opposite. "A guy in the same Orange lodge as me says he's convinced that within five years the tricolour will be flying over every public building," he admits.
By desiring most vehemently to be where it claims it is not wanted, Ulster unionism is strangely unmanned. The absurd terminus of such thinking was reached by the Reverend William McCrea when he proposed that unionists "may even yet have to fight the British to remain British." McCrea's remark was directed at the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, designed by Dublin and London to improve cross-border security and counter an electoral surge for Sinn Fein after the IRA hunger strikes of 1981. But unionists perceived no such benefits, appalled by the prospect of Dublin getting a direct say in Ulster's business and by the veil of secrecy under which the deal was struck. A week after its signing, Harold McCusker, then UUP MP for Upper Bann, made a famous lamentation in the Commons, describing the desolation of his protest at the gate of the secretary of state's official residence: "I stood outside Hillsborough... like a dog." McCusker died of cancer in 1990 and his Westminster seat was inherited by the up-and-coming David Trimble. One winces to imagine what McCusker would have made of the agreement into which his successor then led Ulster.
If the British government has decided that unionism is a less than wholly righteous cause, then it is not alone. An interested global audience has been studying Northern Ireland's efforts at conflict resolution since the mid-1990s, and unionist arguments have not always played well under this scrutiny. In particular, pictures of the scenes on the Ardoyne Road last September-the howling, spitting harassment of little girls from the Catholic Holy Cross primary school by an adult mob from loyalist Glenbryn-did not serve the unionist cause.
The holding of territory felt to be perennially under threat from a wily enemy lies at the core of Protestants' oft-cited "siege mentality." This is a condition to which they are habituated, and they won't be apologising for it any time soon. "If nationalists want us to get away from the siege mentality," says Chris McGimpsey, "it's about time they lifted the siege." Now the Catholic community is expanding, fears of encroachment are expressed more vehemently than ever, loyalists insisting that there is a Sinn Fein/IRA strategy to expel Protestants from their traditional neighbourhoods and capture Belfast by stealth.
From his watch on the Lower Shankill, McGimpsey finds some evidence for those concerns, citing a succession of bomb scares at the Everton Day Centre on the Crumlin Road that separates Ardoyne from Glencairn and Shankill. He believes that militant republicans are responsible: "I think they want to get that school closed down and bulldozed. If they get Catholic houses there, then Protestant Ardoyne would be done. And if you managed to engineer the fall of Protestant Ardoyne, you'd get the Westminster seat." Sinn Fein's anointed candidate in North Belfast is the stern-faced Gerry Kelly, convicted IRA bomber and Long Kesh escapee. He lags some 6,000 votes behind the DUP's Nigel Dodds but, by McGimpsey's arithmetic, this could yet be small beer.
In any case, young and aspirant Protestants have for some time been deserting north Belfast in favour of neighbouring suburbs, such as Carrickfergus or Newtownabbey, where their community's traditional safety in numbers remains intact. Is it accurate to say that these people have been driven from their homes? Or have they chosen to be someplace where they will not be affronted by the sight of a thriving rival with whom they cannot or will not share? In Breaking the Bonds, a fine new study of the peace and its prospects, journalist Fionnuala O'Connor writes of "a pattern familiar across Belfast, and to a lesser extent across Northern Ireland. Catholics move in, Protestants move out, and loyalist paramilitaries attack individuals, businesses, sports facilities." Interface violence is a bitter business, but it cuts both ways, and so when loyalists characterise themselves as the blameless victims of "ethnic cleansing," they express a complicated resentment for which the Provos cannot be held solely responsible.
It is plain that some Protestants dislike the peace process because Catholics have seemed so well served by it. They acknowledge and perhaps envy the communal energy and organisational efficacy of the Catholic community. Popular theory has it that these strengths are a byproduct of decades of alienation from a British state perceived as oppressive and illegitimate. In response, Catholics built up strong civic structures to serve their own ends. The model is republican West Belfast, so long detached from British democracy that it has persistently chosen Gerry Adams as its Westminster representative, in the knowledge that he will not take his seat. Adams was himself instrumental in one of West Belfast's great leaps forward when, in the late 1980s, he suggested that republicans might mark the anniversary of internment by something more productive than rioting. The outcome was an arts festival, the Feile an Phobail, established with government assistance and now generating millions of pounds for the area.
Protestants have never been so community-minded. Ervine's PUP colleague Billy Hutchinson believes this can be attributed to a dependency inculcated in Protestants by the majority-rule Stormont regime of 1921 to 1972: "A clear message went out: 'It's a Protestant government for Protestant people.' We're still living with the hang-ups of that... We don't have the understanding that people need to do things by self-help." Hutchinson recently spent a morning at the Protestant Mount Vernon estate, attending the opening of the splendidly named "New Mucky Field," a community centre built by local people out of eight derelict flats. "Those people epitomise what should be happening in the Protestant community," Hutchinson saya. "It was the last of the 'Peace One' money from EU, and they went through hell to get it. But I think Prods are catching on now, they realise what they have to do."
Working-class Protestants have never had much esteem for educational qualifications, nor for much of the last century did they require them: a trade was thought best, and-given the unabashed sectarianism within the north's major industries-it came easy. This economic prop has since been kicked away by the decline of traditional employers such as Short's aircraft factory and the shipbuilder Harland & Woolf. As Hutchinson puts it, "Long gone are the days when Uncle Sammy got you a job in the shipyard." Harland & Woolf once employed 20,000 men, now it is barely 400, and increasingly it appears more interested in developing its Queen's Island site for "commercial and entertainment purposes." Can information technology replace heavy industry as the mass employer of east Belfast Prods? Hutchinson is dubious: "High-tech jobs usually mean employing people with degrees. Most of the people who will lose their jobs at the shipyard are welders and joiners."
The solution as Ervine sees it is obvious: "Education, education, education." Catholics cottoned on to this some years ago. While Protestants took up their guaranteed apprenticeships, Catholics saw qualifications as their escape from poverty. The consequences of those respective attitudes are clear to McGimpsey in the Lower Shankill. "Kids round here don't go to school," he says. "Or if they do, they don't bother. But Catholic kids are getting their A-levels and going to university. They're writing poetry, and our kids are painting graffiti on the walls."
In 1969, Catholics made up 30 per cent of the student body at Queen's University, Belfast; 30 years later, they accounted for 52 per cent. The picture is similar on all Northern Irish campuses. It is no accident then that young Protestants increasingly head for English or Scottish colleges. "We find that most of our people want to go to St Andrews or elsewhere," laments Hutchinson. "And they don't come back-why should they? So we don't see the benefits."
Northern Ireland still has grammar schools and the 11-plus, which 65 per cent of children will fail, most of them working class. "The average Catholic working-class pass rate is 12 per cent. That's not good," says Ervine. "But the average working-class Protestant pass rate is 3 per cent; we're breeding an underclass."
Under devolution, the fate of the exam was placed in the hands of Martin McGuinness, the north's most famous 11-plus failure. In 2001, McGuinness commissioned a review which recommended that the transfer test be replaced by some form of "parental choice" of school. Ironically, the first topic of debate on the assembly's discordant 8th October gathering concerned McGuinness's report on the consultation process that followed the review. The minister reaffirmed his conviction that the 11-plus would be "consigned to history at the earliest possible date," reiterating that "the concern is to improve the educational opportunities of all our children-regardless of where they live, whether it be the Bogside, the Shankill Road, Portadown or Maghera."
While Hutchinson welcomed the statement and was thanked by the minister, UUP and DUP members queued up to insist that McGuinness was pursuing a personal vendetta. The debate cracked along tiresome sectarian lines. On this issue, as on many others, Protestants may be their own worst enemies. McGimpsey believes that an overhaul of selection is needed to assist the Protestant working class. What, I asked him, if hatchets were buried for the greater good, and right-minded unionist politicians got behind McGuinness? He chuckled at such na?vet?.
In the early days of the peace, much hope was vested in the fresh inter-community links that might be forged beyond politics. But for an Ulster Protestant to seek out the middle ground is to risk being labelled as a useful idiot in the republican debauching of democracy. The Reverend Dr John Dunlop, minister of Rosemary Presbyterian Church in north Belfast, has been called that and worse. He is chairman of the North Belfast Community Action Project, established by the Stormont executive to explore ways in which hostile communities might develop their organisational capacities for the greater good. "There is a community worker I know well," he says, "who says that cross-community work for her is to get young people from the two loyalist paramilitary factions together in the same room. It's a big move from that to then engage with the republican community further up the street, who tend to be a lot more articulate and ideologically aware."
Dunlop is preoccupied by the solitary and ungovernable aspect of the Protestant temperament, one that seems to inspire in him a mingled pride and regret. "The Protestant community is diverse, fractured, individualistic," he says, "which is one element of what Protestantism is about, that you make up your own mind about things. And if you don't like what your church is doing, then you go and join another church." By contrast, Dunlop sees Catholicism as forming a kind of homogeneous social unit that folds together parish, church, school and family-a useful united front when it comes to applying for community development monies.
"Protestantism must engage with the Catholic community in Northern Ireland," Dunlop says, "and indeed with the majority community in the whole of Ireland, out of self-interest-you don't want to live your life inside ghettos. Protestants have to realise that engagement is strength and not weakness."
This kind of enlightened self-help cannot prosper if the institutions of the Agreement are buried. They were always imperfect: the executive was so crafted as to require cross-community compromise, or sectarian headcount if you like, but then majority rule and cabinet government are simply not yet possible in this divided society. Naturally, one would prefer political institutions to be empowered from below rather than imposed from above. But as Ervine suggested early in the process, Northern Ireland has long been an abnormal society, and abnormal measures may be required to convert such a society to normality. The gangsterism and grotesque "community justice" that have taken root must be expunged. But other equally grave matters have afflicted Northern Ireland since 1998: foot-and-mouth, the decline of industry, inadequate public transport, educational inequality. When I first met Ervine in 2001, he was preoccupied by his position on the assembly's regional development committee, and in particular the ?180m of public money needed to upgrade a flagging sewerage system. I put it to Ervine that this unglamorous matter was the true business of government. "Aye," he deadpanned. "A big load of shite."
But who will hold it together on the unionist side? The UUP is middle aged and middle class, its Glengall Street headquarters notoriously torpid. In May, its youngest assembly member, Peter Weir, jumped ship for the DUP. Chris McGimpsey was untroubled by the defection, and claims not to countenance fears of electoral annihilation. "I've heard it all before-'The UUP's finished.' I think it'll just carry on. It's a loose alliance. We don't bother with Glengall Street here-most of Glengall Street couldn't find the Shankill." But if Jeffrey Donaldson really embodies the future of the UUP, one hopes he has given some thought as to how he intends to outflank Paisley and represent the hopes of those in Northern Ireland who wish to be governed by their fellow countrymen rather than a Westminster proconsul. Sinn Fein are neck-deep in electoral politics and their mandate cannot be ignored; nor can nationalists be expected to accept a renegotiated constitutional arrangement that revokes the gains of the Agreement. It may be that Donaldson doesn't care: he is a Presbyterian who has spoken of his faith in predestination, a worrisome trait in someone who should be addressing himself to the art of the possible. In any case, there is a strong chance that the DUP and Sinn Fein will be the two biggest parties after the next election.
Unfortunately, the Agreement's best ally is that least malleable of factors, the slow passage of time. "You can't commit the kind of things we've done to one another over 30 years and then expect it all to end in six months," says McGimpsey. "The communities will come together, but it'll take a generation." This process can be hastened only if both communities come to believe that something was won for them on Good Friday, and that the other's good fortune might also be their own. Otherwise the disciplined and imaginative reforms made by unionism over the last decade could yet be undone; in which case all that will remain is increased segregation, resumed bloodshed, and the nay-saying triumph of the sectarian. Northern Protestants can surely imagine the absolute demoralisation that lies in wait down that dead end.
