The peace talks under way in Belfast, London, and Dublin may afford the best opportunity yet to end the conflict in Northern Ireland. For the first time leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), are sitting down with leaders of parties representing most of the loyalist paramilitary groups that have opposed the IRA. The British government, which has ruled Northern Ireland directly since abolishing the province's assembly in 1972, appears newly committed to resolving the conflict and establishing some form of democratic self-rule in the province. For its part, the Irish government has indicated a willingness to drop its long-standing constitutional claim to sovereignty over northern Ireland.
Although at three decades "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland stand as one of modern Europe's longest-running conflicts, their roots can be traced back much further: to the establishment of Protestant supremacy in Ireland by English and Scottish settlers in the eighteenth century (or even further, depending on whom you ask). The Protestant population was centered in Belfast and the surrounding counties of the northern Ulster region; with the partition of the island in 1920 and the end of the Anglo-Irish War in 1921, the six predominantly Protestant counties remained part of the United Kingdom, becoming the providence of Northern Ireland.
For 50 years the Protestant unionist majority controlled the provincial government with little interference from London. Meanwhile, the Catholic (and mainly Gaelic, or Irish) minority, effectively excluded from politics, was largely shut out of the economy as well, with many companies refusing to hire Catholic workers. Catholis were also discriminated against in the distribution of housing and public services. The police were overwhelmingly Protestant. Northern Ireland, while "at peace," remained tense and divided.
The tension built in the late 1960s when a nonviolent, largely Catholic civil rights movement began pressing for equality; in 1969 the situation exploded and the Troubles began when unionist extremists responded with violence. The ensuing sectarian bloobshed, and the police's failure to protect Catholics, led to the deployment of British army troops (initially, it is easy to forget, welcomed by most Catholics). By early 1971 the army, perceived to have sided with Protestants, became the target of a rejuvenated IRA, and organization that had been in decline since the Irish civil war of the early 1920s. So began the low-intensity but bloody guerrilla war that has torn the province ever since.
The three books under review shed light, from very different angles, on the Troubles and on the changes in political climate that have enabled the peace process to come as far as it has. Peter Taylor is an award-winning journalist who has covered Northern Ireland since the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" massacre of apparently unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry (Londonderry) by British troops; his Behind the Mask accompanies a Frontline/BBC television program of the same name. The book, which chronicles the evolution of the conflict and the IRA campaign, features extensive interviews with IRA members, British soldiers and itelligence agents, politicians of all stripes, and other participants and observers. Taylor and those he interviews relate both well- and little-known episodes from the conflict--the tragedy of Bloody Sunday, the tarring and feathering of a Catholic woman for consorting with British soldiers, the mistrustful secret dialogues between the IRA and the British government--giving the reader a vivid sense of the terror and uncertainty that have prevailed in the province. Especially strong are the sections dealing with the early Troubles, the British security strategy, the hunger strikes by IRA and other republican prisoners, and the efforts by many parties since 1988 that produced the current cease-fire and negotiations.
Behind the Mask does not try to tell the story of the loyalist paramilitaries that sprang up in the early 1970s and whose tactics have been, if anything, even more abominable than the IRA's. Taylor also does not attempt to draw back and discuss the larger historical and political questions surrounding the Troubles; his mission is to uncover details and convey something of the conflict's human drama. If his book has a central point it may be that all sides in the conflict have generally muddled through, without a grand plan and without any idea that the conflict would drag on as long as it has.
For a treatment of the political and cultural issues (inseparable in Northern Ireland) at stake, readers can turn to Richard Kearney's Postnationalist Ireland. Kearney, a longtime proponent of some of the ideas now being discussed at the peace talks (a council of the islands of Britain and Ireland, cross-border ties between Northern Ireland and Ireland), believes that "absolutist sovereignty claims have no place in negotiations on the North." As long as Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists believe their cultural identities require undiluted territorial sovereignty, conflict is inevitable. Noting that the one setting in which nationalist and unionist politicians have been able to work together is in representing Northern Ireland's interests in European forums, Kearney sees hope for a solution in the project of a "Europe of regions," although he cautions that any transfer of sovereignty to the European Union must be accompanied by an increase in local political control.
It is local (and pluralistic) political control that Northern Ireland desperately needs; the province has never had a government viewed as legitimate by nearly all citizens. Equally, certain mainstream political aspirations-- a united Ireland-- have never been seen as legitimate by unionists or their governments, even when pursued peacefully. As Kearney notes, '[p]aramilitary violence thrives on a widespread sense of illegitimacy. If we could develop a constitutional arrangement in Northern Ireland such that almost all the citizens would regard policemen and judges as 'ours' and not 'their,' and such that all Catholics were not seen by most unionists as crypto-subversives, then paramilitaries on both sides could be so marginalized as not to survive on anything like the same scale."
Kearney's discussion ranges widely, with sections devoted to politics, culture, and philosophy, but the heart of the book lies in his proposals for Northern Ireland. While his arguments are mainly well reasoned and certainly passionate, Kearney occasionally suffers a critical lapse (as when he approvingly cites scholarship praising the decentralized politics of the Celts in Ireland--yes, but didn't they fight among themselves more often than not?) or simply what seems like unwarranted hopefulness. It may be that "Irish people, North and South, [are moving] gradually beyond the orthodox equations of political and cultural identity." But can we really expect unionists to replace "the triumphalist emblems of Empire (Britannia, Sceptre and Crown, King and Country) with alternative images of accomodation: Britain as 'archipelago,' as 'North-West Islands' and so on"?
Still, Kearney's book remains an important contribution to the debate over the future of Northern Ireland. His is a rare perspective, moral, balanced, and generally pragmatic.
Like Kearney, Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole sees broad cultural change occurring in Ireland. In The Lie of the Land, O'Toole writes engagingly on such diverse subjects as the Catholic Church's crisis of authority, Ireland's unique position as an emigrant nation, younger Irish writers' fascination with Native Americans, and an attempt by the Irish Ireland movement in 1917 to replace the "alien" Santa Claus with an authentic Gaelic figure, Finn Varra Maa (accompanied by what the Dublin Evening Herald at the time described as a "nobly Irish" wolfhound "squatting on his haunches and occasionally bitting himself"). O'Toole believes that in Ireland by the early 1990s the "fixed points on the compass of life--Church, nation, family--had been unsettled." He does not assess whether this is as true of Northern Ireland as it is of the republic, but he does venture that the peace process is part of an island-wide move toward democracy and the questioning of authority.
In an essay in the February 19 New York Review of Books, O'Toole sees reason to hope that the peace process might succeed (as well as ample reason to fear that it migt not). He believes that the negotiations could produce progress on the historical position of Catholics in the north as a second-class group; resentment of that position, he says, has been one of the three main sources of support for the IRA, the others being ethnic hatred and an elitist republican revolutionary tradition. He also cites evidence of greater realism in recent years, both from republicans, who have publicly conceded that unionists have political and cultural rights, and from unionists, who appear willing to recognize the goal of a united Ireland as a legitimate political aspiration if pursued nonviolently. In short, O'Toole, like Kearney, thinks there is now an opportunity to marginalize the extremists by establishing a legitimate and pluralistic political space.
Still, the devil is in the details--and in Northern Ireland the details are devilish indeed.
Douglas Watson