Beginning of the end in Northern Ireland?

Social justice news
March 2002

Beginning of the end of violence in Northern Ireland?—news analysis
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Beginning of the end of violence in Northern Ireland?
Daniel McColgan, the young postal worker shot dead by loyalist gunmen in January, paid the ultimate price in the sectarian conflict of Northern Ireland. Duncan Morrow, professor of politics at the University of Ulster, sees a terrible logic to these tragic events—anti-agreement paramilitary hardliners see the prospect of peace as a threat to their very existence. But, Morrow suggests, there are grounds for hope—the people of Northern Ireland will need cool heads and steady nerves to ensure that these terrible events mark the beginning of the end of the paramilitarism of old.

There is an awful familiarity about events in North Belfast: sectarian riots, politicians unable to speak clearly or honestly about the responsibility their side bears for the violence for fear of being accused of letting down the side, police caught in the middle, and now the shooting dead of a young postal worker for "being a Catholic." So far, so depressingly familiar.

The easy, and fairly widespread, response is to despair or to reassert traditional enmities. But something more important is at stake here. The current violence in North Belfast is the last throw of the dice by a desperately threatened power structure. In a nutshell, the violence is the response of a paramilitary sub-system with deep roots to the prospect of oblivion. The crisis is most easily visible within loyalism, but the same choices will ultimately face republicanism as well. Unfortunately, it may yet get worse before it gets better.

The failure of the 'No' campaign to win the 1998 referendum on the Good Friday Agreement (even among protestants) left die-hard opponents of the Agreement with a choice: to accept the result or to bring the Agreement down. While there is little doubt that collapsing the system remains the ultimate goal of nearly all those who campaigned for a 'No' vote in that referendum, it is not an objective without risks. In a nutshell, anyone who wants to break the Agreement must do so in such a way that someone else, or even the Agreement itself, is blamed.

Let me try and explain the logic. If the Agreement collapses, it will collapse because it does not bring peace and loses public confidence. So open opponents of the deal are almost forced to wish for more trouble. Indeed, they may almost feel the need to incite it. For elected political parties, and for much of their support, this logic not an easy thing to admit, no matter how true. The logic of needing violence to prove that there is no peace is so powerful, however, that there is a real risk that the opponents of the Agreement will ultimately be blamed for inciting the trouble. Thus, elected anti-Agreement Unionists have found themselves forced to participate in working the Agreement even as they have sought to bring the structure to collapse.

The same dilemmas do not apply to paramilitary hardliners. Both anti-Agreement loyalists and republican dissidents know that the way to undermine any confidence in their communities about the Agreement is to incite an attack on the community from traditional deadly opponents. In the short run, that means, for example, loyalists pipe bombing Catholic homes or even shooting dead a few Catholic workers. These 'loyalists' know that such acts terrify the whole Catholic community and lead to demands for defence for the vulnerable. Traditionally, the IRA has claimed the role of community defender. To the delight of hardline loyalists, then, the local IRA rejoins the fray, resulting in a terrorised Protestant community and the collapse of Protestant support for the Agreement. The Real IRA are committed to the same strategy in reverse: a bomb in a protestant town brings revenge from a loyalist death squad and leads to nationalist disillusion with the peace process and support for a renewed campaign.

This diabolically simple logic is currently being played out in North Belfast. The failure of anti-Agreement Unionism to halt the progress of the Agreement and the effective disintegration of any remaining coherence in the UDA has left loyalist paramilitaries facing long-run political irrelevance. Should the devolved government achieve widespread popular support, there would be no need for local Tiger's Bay, Shankill Road or Glenbryn defenders. In a paramilitarised society, there are many people in North Belfast with access to weapons and ongoing local mistrust of the neighbours who have peered into the future and are frightened by their own irrelevance to it. Daniel McColgan and his family have paid the awful price.

So where is the hope in all of this? Well, there are several grounds for hope. First, a showdown with those who cannot accept this particular peace was probably, and tragically, inevitable. One of the myths of the peace process was that peace could be achieved without some people losing power. In the case of paramilitaries, of all sides, this is certainly not the case.

If they or their supporters can get elected, as in the case of the PUP or Sinn Fein, then the prospect is of a swap of paramilitary power for a real share in constitutional power. If not, then the future of paramilitary authority outside the state has to be oblivion. This journey is unlikely to be admitted to willingly, especially where paramilitaries remain strong or can most easily incite fear.

Second, the killing of Daniel McColgan was such an overt act of violence that it is impossible not to attribute it directly to those who did it. Paradoxically, the very awfulness of the crime may force those who did it to think again. Thirdly, the administration which is being attacked is a cross-community government.

Even opponents of the Agreement, such as the DUP, are forced to support the law and the government against the kind of outrage we have witnessed in the murder of a postal worker. Fourthly, Sinn Fein cannot support a return to the field for the IRA without destroying their own credibility outside the republican heartland—especially in America. They may even be forced to give tacit support to the new police service, who for the first time have the explicit backing of all the other elements of the Irish nationalist coalition. Put at its weakest, this is the first time in my memory that Sinn Fein spokesmen have seemed embarrassed about not calling for support for the police.

For as long as the institutions of government act with extreme resolution, there is at least the prospect that this kind of loyalism will fail to recreate the sectarian bun-fight except in the pockets where paramilitarism is most deeply rooted. If this could be achieved, then this would be a historic first in the North of Ireland. While it is not exactly good news for North Belfast in the short run, and much will have to be done for people caught in its midst, it is by far the best hope for stability in the medium term. The message of the moment? Don't panic—and keep all lines of inter-community communication open.— Duncan Morrow

This article was reprinted with the permission of Corrymeela Connections magazine.

For more information:
Corrymeela Community Peace and Reconciliation Center
Irish Times on the Peace Process
Conflict Archive on the Internet

Co-operation Ireland

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