In Northern Ireland, elections last week saw moderate politicians in both the Republican and Unionist communities pushed aside in favor of the more radical Sinn Fein, led by former IRA commanders, and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), led by the bombastic veteran politician Ian Paisley. The DUP has always opposed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which saw the end to much of the violence that had disfigured the province for over 20 years and created the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Though it took its seats in the new assembly and accepted two ministerial posts in the cross-party executive, the DUP’s policy has always been that it will not work with what it calls “Sinn Fein-IRA”, refusing to differentiate between the terrorists and their political wing. On the face of it then, with the DUP now the largest single party elected to the new assembly, there is no chance of that body being reconvened, since Sinn Fein is now the largest party representing Republican views. Indeed DUP assembly members have been warned publicly to have no contact whatever with their Sinn Fein counterparts.
Yet this polarization of views does represent an opportunity. The DUP has finally won power, but that power means nothing if it refuses to ascend the platform on which it can be exercised. Demanding that the Good Friday agreement be renegotiated is a nonsense, because it denies the basic truth behind that agreement, which was that both sides of the community had had enough of the violence and brutality. Neither that weariness nor the great hopes that five years of relative peace have since brought can be tossed aside.
The DUP may have won, but the party now has to do something with that victory. The sticking point for all Unionist opinion has been the slow disarmament of the IRA and the fact that Sinn Fein, now the leading voice of Republicanism, still has an armed wing. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams is still dogged by his notorious speech in which to cheers, he told a Republican audience that the IRA hadn’t “gone away”. Yet since the DUP’s victory, Adams has been sounding increasingly moderate and reasonable. Were this to translate sometime soon into a final arms decommissioning and disbanding of the Provisional IRA, the DUP would have lost its excuse for refusing to have any truck with Sinn Fein. The focus would then turn on the Protestant gangs, whose thuggish behavior has long besmirched the Unionist cause.
That the two radical parties in Northern Ireland politics are finally confronting each other on virtually equal terms is probably no bad thing. Few if any of their electoral supporters have any stomach for a return to violence. The next move simply has to be dialogue.
