Two Irelands Expected to Adopt Peace Accord in Voting Today

Theobald Wolfe Tone, the leader of a failed Irish rebellion in 1798, slit his throat with a penknife while in British custody rather than accept that his dream of a free and united Ireland had been shattered.

After 200 years and thousands of war dead, the heirs to Tone’s nationalist struggle say they are fed up with violence. Today, they are expected to adopt a peace agreement that will, in effect, sanction Northern Ireland’s union with Britain.

The greatest resistance to the Good Friday peace agreement has come from pro-British unionists who have long enjoyed a lock on power in Northern Ireland, even as Irish nationalists have made a profound political shift to accept the accord.

Under the agreement, the Irish Republic will loosen its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland. The largely Roman Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland will join a provincial government and recognize the rights of the majority Protestant population in deciding the region’s future. Most important, supporters of the accord are promising to relinquish the centuries-old option of armed struggle.

Advocates of a unified Ireland, including Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and the Irish Republican Army’s political wing, Sinn Fein, say they will continue to labor for their goal through nonviolent means. But, meanwhile, another imperative has taken precedence: peace.

“Sure, unification is important, but what’s really important is stopping the killing,” said Brid Carraghen, 32, a homemaker taking her 11-month-old daughter for a stroll along the main street of Leixlip, a town in the Irish Republic.

Her sentiments are echoed throughout Northern Ireland, which has served as the battleground for a united Irish Republic for 30 years. In Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery, next to a monument to fallen republicans, Joseph Heaney, a retired millworker, explained why he will vote for the compromise agreement.

“There is a saying, ‘Don’t die for Ireland--live and fight for Ireland,’ ” Heaney said. “I want to live my life in peace. I may not have long to go.”

Ireland was divided in 1921 when republican leader Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty with the British government, which declared an Irish Free State in 26 of the 32 counties of the island. Collins saw the agreement as a first step toward winning independence for all of Ireland--what he called “the freedom to win freedom.” But many of his cohorts viewed him as a traitor, and he was killed in an ambush the following year.

Now, the gradualist logic of Collins is about to prevail, with the Catholic South and the Catholic minority in the North expected to give their overwhelming approval to the agreement in twin referendums today.

The reasons for the shift in nationalist sentiment are many, and they vary from the Irish Republic to Northern Ireland, which have become distinct regions since their separation 77 years ago. Economic development, education and the European Union’s blurring of national boundaries have contributed to the change in the South, while residents of Northern Ireland have been moved by human rights improvements and a desire to stem the terrible toll of war.

Free of sectarian violence for the last half-century, the Irish Republic has become known as the “Celtic tiger,” one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies. Its citizens have prospered, and its youth, having known only a divided Ireland, have come to identify with Europe on the cusp of the new millennium.

Still committed to a united Ireland in principle, the new middle class worries about taking on the economic burden of Northern Ireland--”a kept woman,” as one Dublin professor called it, referring to British subsidies of about $5 billion a year to the province. Many southerners express revulsion at the war in the North, which has included terrorism against civilians.

“I don’t think that any land in the world is worth the killing of a person,” said Helen Murphy, 23, a guide at the Kilmainham Jail west of Dublin, now a museum to the struggle for Irish freedom. “When you go to the North, what differences do you see? The mailboxes there are red. Here they’re green.”

The differences run far deeper, of course. Northern Ireland’s economy has been hamstrung by 30 years of “the Troubles,” as the IRA’s modern war against British rule has come to be known. Its old mills are obsolete, and it relies on the British subsidies to sustain economic growth of 3.1%--compared with the 8% predicted for the Irish Republic this year.

The sectarian war has been a daily fact of life for Northern Ireland, where the British army maintains heavily fortified garrisons and patrols in armored personnel carriers. Belfast’s working-class neighborhoods, divided between Protestant and Catholic by ugly partitions euphemistically called “peace walls,” are painted with militaristic murals and flecked with memorials to the dead.

Virtually everyone in Catholic West Belfast has had a friend or relative felled in the conflict. In Milltown Cemetery, lists of some of those who died for Ireland are recorded on the gray slab monument in a “roll of honor” dating to the rebellion of Tone’s United Irishmen in 1798. Marble plaques mark graves of those who died in the IRA prison hunger strikes in 1981; each row of tombstones includes a young man who died in his teens or 20s.

Many Irish nationalists believe that Britain, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, would like to withdraw from Northern Ireland if it could find a peaceful exit. But there is a militant minority in the republican camp led by Bernadette Sands--sister of martyred IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands--that sees the peace agreement as a betrayal of the dream of national unity and those who died for the cause.

“The British will use this to tell the world that, for the first time in history, [they have] the right to be in our country,” she said. “[Britain] will try to use our people to give her a mandate.”

Sands, and others like her in the 32-County Sovereignty Committee that she heads, believes that average Catholics are being “manipulated” and “deceived” by Sinn Fein.

“People are being conned out of their legitimate rights,” she said, adding that, as long as the British rule Northern Ireland, “armed struggle is inevitable.”

But most prospective “yes” voters among the nationalists see the accord as recognition of a different reality--that, despite 30 years of armed struggle, Northern Ireland is still part of Britain and nationalists cannot reunite the island without the consent of the province’s 1 million Protestants.

The prolonged war has not worn down the nationalists’ will but has forced them to think in terms of decades. They believe that they are making a pragmatic decision to work through a peaceful political system for a united Ireland--but perhaps for the sake of their children or grandchildren.

“This is the best chance we have for a lasting peace. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we can get at the moment,” said Joe Bannon, a Catholic postal worker in West Belfast.

“I am happy for any structure that will allow for a united Ireland when there is a majority of support for it,” said his friend Laurence McKenna. “That was always enough for me. I am not endorsing British rule but recognizing what is an actual fact.”

Bannon, 36, and McKenna, 37, also a postal worker, were buying each other beers on a recent weekend night at McEnaney’s Pub, less than a mile up Falls Road from where Sands was speaking.

“I feel the armed struggle was worth it. It got us to where we are today,” McKenna said. “But now we’re moving on. It’s served its purpose.”

One thing that has convinced McKenna of this is the fact that nationalist leaders have become more adept at politics. Although Sinn Fein has refused to take the seats it has won in the British Parliament, it and a more moderate nationalist party have control of the local councils in Londonderry and Belfast, the provincial capital.

For many nationalists, it turns out, republicanism has been as much about respect and equal rights as it was about a united Ireland.

“We are going to have parity of esteem and equality,” Bannon said. “Most people want a united Ireland. But if there hadn’t been discrimination against us, you wouldn’t have had so much support” for the IRA.

When the IRA began its modern campaign of violence in 1969, human rights issues were foremost in the minds of most Catholics. Since the partition, they had suffered discrimination in housing, jobs and public services under a provincial unionist government in the Stormont Parliament that they called “a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people.”

“The Troubles” escalated on Jan. 30, 1972, when 13 people were shot to death at an illegal civil rights march in Londonderry by members of Britain’s First Parachute Regiment. The unionist Stormont government was dissolved shortly after that “Bloody Sunday,” and Britain took over direct rule of Northern Ireland.

In the ensuing decades, laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing and education were passed, and the British government pumped billions of dollars a year into Northern Ireland to try to redress inequalities. While there are still problems, many things have changed. Catholics and Protestants working together in factories and government offices over the last decades have gotten to know each other, demystifying the enemy and, in some cases, making friends across the divide.

Catholics have moved into the middle and upper classes and, consequently, into once-Protestant universities and neighborhoods. Queens University stopped playing the British national anthem once Catholic students were a large enough force to protest; St. Bridget’s Church, built for the maids of wealthy Protestants, was expanded and remodeled to accommodate all of the Catholic homeowners who had moved into the fancy Malone Road neighborhood of Belfast.

Now Catholic nationalists want to move into government. They say they feel buoyed by the fact that they will have their representatives in a provincial government instead of direct British rule.

“The agreement is a step forward toward a sovereign government, and we will have a say in it,” said a 42-year-old heating engineer at McEnaney’s Pub who would not give his name. “Sinn Fein is getting their foot in the door, which was never the case before.”

Now even longtime Sinn Fein militants such as Jim Gibney think that the time has come for cooperation instead of confrontation. Gibney, who helped organize international support for the hunger strikers in 1981, argues that the accord Sinn Fein helped to negotiate will bring about “revolutionary changes” on the ground in Northern Ireland, particularly through a North-South Council that will be established to deal with cross-border issues such as agriculture.

“For the first time since partitioning, there will be an all-Ireland institution that is going to look at the island and the needs of people as a whole,” Gibney said.

He insists that, once the North-South Council is functioning, “the logic and sense of reunification will become clear even to the Protestants. . . . It will be clear that the island is too small for two states to exist.”