No Cheers for Resurrected Peace Process

The Irish Republican Army jettisoned guns that had been pointed at Protestants for 30 years. The British army dismantled surveillance towers that had symbolized occupation to Roman Catholic nationalists. The peace process was saved.

And on the streets of Northern Ireland, no one came out to cheer.

Politicians hailed the historic moment, but average men and women went about their business as usual. After so many advances and setbacks during 2 1/2 years of peacemaking, the people of Northern Ireland were reluctant--almost afraid--to embrace last week’s breakthrough.

“It is a new dawn. Again,” a seasoned observer of Northern Ireland politics said in a voice heavy with irony.

The day after the IRA gave up its first guns, Belfast’s daily News Letter said, “For most people, surely, Ulster this morning must seem a more hopeful place.”

This sounded more like a question than a statement of confidence. Or perhaps it was a recognition that, however long it takes to remove tons of armored steel and concrete from British military posts, it will take even longer to erase the hatred and distrust that have fueled the sectarian conflict.

The IRA said it was getting rid of weapons “to persuade others of our genuine intentions” to make peace. But in pro-British Protestant enclaves of Belfast, few accepted an international commission’s word that a significant part of the IRA arsenal had been put “beyond use.” Many suspected that the IRA had ditched some rusty guns and outdated explosives that were no longer of use and held on to the most lethal materiel.

The hard-line Democratic Unionist Party called the IRA move trickery and said the IRA would continue trying to undermine the peace process.

Catholic nationalists, meanwhile, predicted that Protestant leaders would up the ante now and ask the IRA gunmen “to cut off their trigger fingers too.” As the British military hastened to demonstrate a retreat, the sudden appearance of a police foot patrol in the Catholic neighborhood of Andersonstown sent chills down the spines of nationalists. Now that the IRA had disarmed, they feared, the Royal Ulster Constabulary was “moving in.”

A tiny republican splinter group said it would continue the armed struggle.

“We used to be shellshocked. Now we’re peace shocked,” said Danny Morrison, a former republican leader and now an author. “People are very nervous. In many respects, this is an experiment.”

Back in his days as a militant, Morrison coined the phrase “ArmaLite and ballot box” to describe the IRA’s two-pronged strategy of fighting for a united Ireland on both the military front with guns and the political front with elections. He served five years of an eight-year prison sentence for aiding in the kidnapping of an IRA police informer.

Now Morrison was sitting in an Irish coffeehouse and culture center on Falls Road, the heart of Catholic West Belfast, and explaining why he supports the IRA’s decision to abandon armed struggle and stick to politics.

For 30 years, IRA militants died and went to jail in order to fight the British army to a stalemate, he said. In the 2 1/2 years since the signing of the Good Friday peace agreement, IRA prisoners have been let out of jail and their political representatives in Sinn Fein have won seats in the Northern Ireland government--a local government that resolves local problems in ways the British never did.

“There is a new feeling of confidence in the Catholic community,” Morrison said.

And yet even he sometimes flinches at the idea of a disarmed IRA, particularly as long as Protestant paramilitary groups have weapons.

“If the loyalist militaries thought there were no weapons in nationalist areas, they would come in and try to burn us out as they did before,” Morrison said.

Morrison is a minority in Northern Ireland: He tries to look over the corrugated metal and barbed wire “peace walls” that divide many Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods and to put himself in the shoes of pro-British unionists on the other side.

“I suppose from the unionist point of view, the way they look at it is that the guerrillas fought their way into government. We have to try to remember that’s the way they view it,” he said. “But as a republican, I haven’t changed since what happened Tuesday [the start of disarmament]. I didn’t wake up a unionist on Wednesday. . . . I want the British out of Ireland.”

So how do the people who want a united Ireland and the people who want to remain British break down the barriers of hatred and distrust?

“Dialogue,” Morrison said. “There are a lot of people who have never spoken to each other around this place.”

More than 90% of the 1.7 million people of Northern Ireland live in segregated neighborhoods, according to David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party, and the vast majority of children attend segregated schools. Most cemeteries are segregated.

New cafes and restaurants that have opened in downtown Belfast since the IRA declared a cease-fire in 1997 have put middle-class residents on neutral ground for leisure as well as work, and the city’s new ice hockey team, the Belfast Giants, has both communities rooting together.

Many working-class Protestants and Catholics labor side by side too. But then they go home to separate pubs, sports clubs and housing estates, to a self-imposed apartheid. They back different Scottish soccer teams--Rangers for Protestants, Celtics for Catholics--use different taxi companies and claim different streets, where members of the other community are unwelcome at best and often in danger.

“If I walk into Andersonstown, it’s all in Irish,” said Isabel Millar, a community worker in a Protestant enclave of West Belfast. “If I walk on the Falls Road, I feel isolated, like I am in a foreign country.”

Catholic nationalist neighborhoods fly Irish flags; Protestant unionist neighborhoods fly the Union Jack. The murals in Catholic neighborhoods celebrate Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoner who died in 1981 on the 66th day of a hunger strike; murals in Protestant neighborhoods depict loyalist paramilitary soldiers with their guns raised.

Protestants and Catholics who live on dividing lines put metal grates over their windows to keep out rocks, bottles and pipe bombs tossed across the divide. Others board up their houses and move out, away from what Ervine calls “the intimacy of fear.”

Millar says she’s not sure she believes the IRA has begun to disarm.

“I am a bit skeptical, coming from a loyalist background. I would like to believe it,” she said, in what is a generous statement here.

Through her Suffolk Community Center, she is involved in cross-community programs with Catholic mothers and children.

“I wouldn’t even have sat in a room with republicans six years ago,” Millar said.

She does now, but her shrinking Protestant neighborhood and the changes brought about by the Good Friday accord leave her feeling lost in the belief that Northern Ireland will, eventually, opt to join the Irish Republic to the south.

“I feel as a Protestant I am losing everything, my sense of identity and my heritage,” Millar said. “They’re going to take down the army posts.

“I am British, and I want the British presence to remain here, even if it means soldiers in the streets. . . . I want to stay British and a part of the British Isles. I am frightened of the unknown.”

Millar acknowledges that the peace process has meant less violence and “a more relaxed atmosphere,” but not the absence of fear.

“There is a feeling of fear in the loyalist community because the nationalist community is getting a lot of concessions, and what are we getting? We’re only getting what we’re entitled to--peace,” she said.

And the nationalists?

“I suppose, to be truthful, peace to live, for the ordinary Catholic,” she said.

Asked how Protestants and Catholics can overcome the sectarian divide, she shrugged like so many people do in Northern Ireland and said, “Dialogue and understanding.”

“People have more friends than they let on. They just afraid,” she said.

Beyond a metal gate separating the Suffolk center from a Catholic neighborhood, social worker David Johnston agreed: “Around here, if you open your mind, it puts you in a dodgy situation with your neighbors.”

But talking is the key to making peace between individuals and communities, said Ervine, whose party is linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant paramilitary group. “Never mind that one is speaking Hindu and the other Swahili,” he said. “We’ll get there.”

To make the point, Ervine, a member of the Northern Ireland Legislature who served time in jail on an explosives charge, recalls a moment after the IRA had declared a cease-fire in 1997 when he was planning to meet with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Some toughs from his own side approached him at his local pub and said, “I hope you’re not going to talk to that bastard. You’d better not be going to talk to that bastard.”

About 10 days after the meeting, they saw him at the pub again, moved in close to his face and hissed, “So, what’s he really like?”