W2E-005 Fortnight editorials-0.txt
leader

Ideology's human cost

Robin Wilson

"Everybody has had enough." Those four words from the wife and mother of two of those injured in the Shankill IRA atrocity ought to have been enough to staunch the bloodshed. Yet they were not: loyalsts were already well on the way to evening the'score' after we went to press.

Last month we warned that the Hume-Adams agreement would only serve to "reinforce the adversarial political culture on which the War Process subsists"." And so, with relentless inevitability, it did.

The Ulster Unionist leader, James Molyneaux, who sees himself as government kingmaker courtesy of his 'understanding' with John Major, described John Hume as his "greatest ally" in cementing that relationship - reciprocated in the prime minister's conference approbation of the "Conservative and Unionist party".

But there was, of course, far worse. It was as sure as night follows day that loyalists would up the ante. Some 30 attacks followed in as many days - with unionists, slavering about a 'pan-nationalist front' in front of every microphone, effectively egging them on.

It was utterly predictable, too, that the IRA - incredibly not required to make a single concession for the new legitimacy attaching to its political wing - would 'negotiate from strength' with further bombs, and would in turn up the stakes with the loyalist hit squads. 'Regrettable', though, as Gerry Adams put it, the collateral damage of those ten massacred at the fishmonger's.

But why should Mr Adams be contrite? He had outmanoeuvred Mr Hume, and was perfectly placed to claim the onus was now on the British government, not the IRA, to respond to their 'peace plan'. A plan about which the IRA army council, the US administration and Nelson Mandela have been briefed, but which cannot be revealed to the D&/ail - never mind the long-suffering populace of the north.

Unlike SDLP members. Sinn F&/ein activists have been told the substance of the discussions. As Ed Maloney reported in the Sunday Tribune, "Activists are being told that Sinn F&/ein could make substantial gains through what the party's leaders see as the potential of the Hume-Adams agreement to bring the SDLP and Dublin government closer to Sinn F&/ein on the terms for a northern settlement." They were not, he said, being prepared for any concession.

Mr Adams has now secured the unprecedented principle that a cessation of IRA - and all other - violence is not an immediate moral imperative, but must attend upon a political pay-off acceptable to the army council.

As Stephen Collins commented in the Sunday Press last month, "The fact that things have gone so far in the direction of a common nationalist front involving Sinn F&/ein while the IRA campaign continues is something that would have been unthinkable even a year ago and it marks a huge sea change in Irish politics... Despite some deep-seated reservations the government has gone along with the strategy to date and it may well be too late to get out."

Ministers were rocked on their heels by Mr Adams'remark, echoed by the IRA, that peace was not a "prerequisite" of the... peace process! After the Shankill bomb, the t&/anaiste, Dick Spring, said that 'process' had been dealt a "grievous blow"."

Yet Mr Adams'response to the t&/anaiste's comments suggested that he was the government, the latter a mere bystander. He slapped him down thus: "Mr Spring has to allow me to be the best judge of how I move forward"."

It is an appalling catalogue of error. There must now be an end to what Dick Walsh of the Irish Times called "fooling around with words"." Engaging in an airy disquisition about 'Irish self-determination' while claiming simultaneously to be seeking unionist 'agreement' is self-delusion: ever heard of anyone supporting'self-determination' who wanted to remain inside a state? The inevitable unionist riposte was that they had the right of'self-determination', to secede from the rest of the island. We 've had that argument for a century and, while the slaughter continues, we can go round that circle for ever.

There has been much facile comparison of Northern Ireland with the middle east and South Africa - mindless of the fact that these two conflicts were prisoners of the cold war, whose demise made the breakthrough possible. Last month, Padraig O'Malley of the Opsahl Commission, who has closely studied South Africa, drew the real parallel: the relative 'manageability' of the Northern Ireland conflict, the argued, meant there was not the same pressure on politicians to compromise. It may, he gloomily concluded, have to get a lot worse before it gets better.

The two government must now recapture the initiative. They must elaborate positive proposals that can command acceptance across Northern Ireland. People are crying out for the "vision of hope" called for by Archbishop Eames. The 'realities' identified by the Opsahl report, based on a widespread survey of opinion, offer a ready-made framework.

If they do not, that human appeal of the Shankill relative will be in vain.
