Salvaging the Irish Talks

It would be easy to place the blame for the deteriorating Northern Ireland situation on any or all of the protagonists. But finger-pointing won’t help. The challenge is to restore what Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs Dick Spring has called “the primacy of politics.”

In the political realm there is no room for those who believe a bomb attack against innocent civilians will speed the reunification of the six northern counties with the Irish Republic. The Irish government should declare, loud and clear, that reunification is not an option for the time being.

Neither is mob rule a good tactic in the search for understanding. Chief Constable Sir Hugh Annesley erred gravely last week when he reversed his initial decision and allowed the Protestant Orange Order to parade through a Catholic area in Portadown. The Catholic minority had every right to protest and demand equal treatment, which it did not receive.

The unwinding of the political process began with the collapse of the two-year-old Irish Republican Army cease-fire after the British government dismissed a key element of the Mitchell Report that recommended all-party talks with no further delays.

The task now is to somehow get a substantive dialogue restarted. Enough of discussing agendas and procedures. The situation is getting dangerous again, and this is the time to deal with matters of substance and the future and how to get there.

A sense of deja vu colored the provocative marches and rioting last week in Northern Ireland, evoking the ghost of past “troubles” in 1969, 1922 and 1690. The time has come to step back, take a deep breath and devise a way to restart the dialogue, to strive for a consensus settlement of this very complicated issue.