Hope in Ireland

THE IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY’s historic announcement that it has ordered an end to its armed campaign couldn’t be better news for the people of Belfast and London, the focus of so much IRA violence. It is also great news for Washington and even Bogota, Colombia, where three IRA commandos were convicted in 2004 on charges that they helped train terrorists.

Calling for a stop to all paramilitary activity and instructing IRA members “to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means,” the statement is a heartening development for Northern Ireland after years of indiscriminate violence there and elsewhere in Britain. Never before has the IRA been so explicit in its language and clear in its intentions.

It is true, as skeptics point out, that actions will be the test of the IRA’s commitment to a purely political and democratic process, and that the IRA has made and broken promises before. But the significance of these words cannot be easily dismissed -- especially when they come from the top commanders to the troops. “All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms,” reads the statement. Besides politics, members “must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.”

This is the kind of language that all the parties involved in the Northern Ireland conflict have demanded from the IRA for more than a decade. And this is what they got. And yet, as important as the IRA announcement may be, it is only the beginning of a process that will be difficult and may take months to come to fruition.

The IRA’s destruction of its weapons, said to be hidden in bunkers throughout Ireland, will be the first indication of its seriousness. Over the next weeks, two disarmament commissioners along with two independent witnesses (one Protestant, one Catholic) will witness the decommissioning of the arsenal and produce a detailed account of what they saw. Such verification is the basis upon which the confidence-building process must begin.

As significant as the IRA’s commitment to nonviolence is its pledge to use only legal means to achieve its goals. Its statement left no room for ambiguity: IRA members will cease any involvement in criminal activities such as punishment beatings, robbery, extortion or incitement of riots. The Independent Monitoring Commission, set up by the British and Irish governments last year to report on paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, will play a key role here. Its reports in October and January will show whether these activities have in fact stopped.

For now, it will be up to the parties loyal to British rule, such as the Democratic Unionists led by Ian Paisley, to help to restore the political institutions necessary for Northern Ireland to prosper. Such leaders must also bring paramilitary activity to an end and push for fair and effective policing there. Meanwhile, for both the Irish and anyone who opposes terrorism, there is hope that -- to paraphrase an Irish cliche -- the best day of the past may be the worst day of the future.