Building Site for the Irish

By itself, the agreement signed Friday at Stormont Castle outside Belfast won’t bring peace to troubled Northern Ireland. No agreement can make peace; that can be achieved only by the people who have to build on a paper document day after day. But today in Belfast there is a well-founded belief that peace may be at hand in a place soaked in blood for three decades.

The next steps will be crucial. First come two referendums in which the voters in both parts of Ireland--the Irish Republic and British-ruled Ulster--will decide whether to sanction the agreement. A vote for an end to the fighting will take them to a brighter future, but reconciliation will take time.

The agreement provides the architecture that could house a real peace because it proposes greater sharing of political power. It calls for changes in both the British and the Irish constitutions to require that the current status of Northern Ireland be changed only if the majority in Ulster--Irish Catholics and British Protestants alike--votes for approval.

The political institutions of the so-called Six Counties would be transformed with the installation of a new assembly from which a governing cabinet would be elected. A North-South Ministerial Council would bring representatives of the Irish Republic and Ulster together to implement decisions on economic and social areas. New commissions would be set up to deal with policing, civil rights, discriminatory abuses and economic rights.

Getting to Good Friday’s historic agreement was not easy, and credit goes to many participants from all sides. Certainly former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) tops the list for his diligence, patience and intelligence in bringing the boat ashore. He devoted almost four years of negotiations to persuading the parties to strike this blueprint for peace.

Credit also goes to President Clinton, who made Ulster a priority of his foreign policy. So convincing was his commitment that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern agreed to seize the moment and boldly move to strike the current agreement. The challenge of building a new form of governance is enormous, but the will displayed in reaching the agreement underlines its prospects.