If the Belfast riots were happening in any other city in the United Kingdom, there would be uproar. For almost five weeks there have been violent clashes each night. Live rounds have been fired on city streets, politicians’ houses set ablaze, petrol bombs thrown at police and over 60 officers hurt. David Cameron seems to be doing his best to pretend that nothing is happening. The Prime Minister, like most in Britain, appears to be clinging to the lie that the 1998 Good Friday agreement somehow brought peace to Northern Ireland.
There is sadly nothing anachronistic about the loyalist riots and they are only tangentially related to the alleged cause — the number of days in which the Union flag is flown over City Hall. As with the continuing violence of untamed republican paramilitaries, the outbreak of rage exposes the real legacy of the Good Friday agreement: institutional instability. By rewarding the extremists — and thus destabilising the centre — the British, Irish and, indeed, American governments taught aspiring malcontents that intransigence and violence pays.
Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern certainly did their best to bring about a final settlement for the province. But from the outset, they ignored the advice that those on the fringes should be involved as little as possible and that peace should be made from the centre out. So Dublin and London politicians and diplomats made the running, told the locals what to do, and gave more weight to paramilitaries and bigots than to the centre parties that had fought for decades for constitutionalism and decency.
Seamus Mallon of the Social Democratic and Labour Party summed it up well. The Good Friday agreement was based on the idea that, to make peace work, you had to dispense with middle unionism and middle nationalism. ‘But middle unionism won’t go with [Ian] Paisley and middle nationalism won’t go with the Shinners [Sinn Fein] — there’s your instability.’ Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, once joked with Mallon that he could hardly be surprised at being sidelined in negotiations, since his party had no guns. Powell showed little more enthusiasm for David Trimble, who, as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, wanted a settlement that discouraged sectarianism.
Trimble found himself increasingly ignored by a Downing Street frantically in search of the prize of the endorsement not just of Gerry Adams, but of Ian Paisley, who had been instrumental in stoking the Troubles, and had wrecked every peace negotiation until the one that would make him what he had always wanted to be — de facto Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. He got there, with Martin McGuinness, an IRA commander, chuckling along beside him.
Power-sharing was what the Good Friday agreement was supposed to be about. Power-splitting is what has inevitably occurred. Northern Ireland is being sorted into two sectarian fiefdoms — which suits Peter Robinson, the First Minister, and Martin McGuinness, his deputy. Both are happily convinced that they’re crushing their moderate enemies, and just need to tame the extremes. For McGuinness, it’s those he calls ‘dissidents’, who plant bombs and shoot policemen just as his IRA used to do. For Robinson, it’s the angry loyalist thugs whom the Democratic Unionist Party found so useful in the past when berating what they regarded as middle-class, sell-out unionism.
Gerry Adams famously said of the IRA ‘they haven’t gone away, you know’. As we can now see from the violent rituals performed on the streets of a British city, the Troubles haven’t gone away either.
Reversed forecast
Good news doesn’t always travel fast. The Met Office admitted this week that, contrary to its previous forecasts, the world’s temperature seems to be stabilising — not rising. But what should have been a source of New Year cheer went almost unnoticed. The Met Office certainly didn’t publicise it. Eagle-eyed bloggers spotted that on Christmas Eve the ‘global annual temperature’ graph on the Office’s website had been revised and spread the news themselves — much to the Met’s dismay, as it insists that ‘There’s still a long-term trend of warming compared to the 50s, 60s or 70s. And because the natural variability is based on cycles, those factors are bound to change the other way at some point.’
Well yes, naturally. But what if the Met Office had found new evidence pointing towards more global warming, not less? Would their reaction have been so muted? It’s hard not to imagine that the climate lobby would have declared victory, saying that once again science has proved global warming to be humanity’s greatest threat and that governments must act now before it’s too late.
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