Blair remains optimistic that this could still happen. “One of things I learned about the peace process is, you can create an agreement, and you can create a legal framework, and you can do the reforms and pass the laws, but that’s not the same as two communities trusting each other,” he said recently. “But at least if there’s peace and, if we get back to some form of political stability, I think you’ve got the right circumstances for that reconciliation.”
Yet, if anything, the divide has hardened. The largest parties in Northern Ireland today are no longer Trimble’s moderate UUP and Hume’s SDLP, but the hardline DUP and Sinn Féin. Meanwhile, the great losers are the Alliance Party, the one major party in Northern Ireland which seeks an end to the unionist-nationalist dichotomy. After decades of treading water, the party has recently seen its popularity jump and many believe we are witnessing the birth of a new normal in which three tribes must be brought together and not just two.
Should the Alliance continue to hoover up support, some of the basic tenets of the peace settlement would start to lose their legitimacy. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the votes of Alliance party MLAs at Stormont simply do not count for as much as their DUP and Sinn Fein colleagues. Power has to be shared between nationalists and unionists — not with those who refuse to define as either. This will no longer be tenable if 20-30% of Northern Ireland is voting for parties outside the divide.
This is one of the major reasons — alongside the DUP’s continuing refusal to serve — why there are now calls for the Good Friday Agreement to be reformed. But those calling for reform are essentially calling for an entirely new agreement — and usually because they want to bypass the DUP. But you can’t ask unionism to share power when it is a majority, and then to give up its veto the moment it becomes a minority. The Good Friday Agreement, as Blair said, can only be changed if both communities agree. And this can’t happen until the current crisis has ended, which can only happen if the DUP’s concerns are met — or enough voters abandon the party in protest. As Powell puts it: “You can’t impose it, or change the rules in the middle of a crisis. It can only happen when the conditions are right.”
But what if they never are? Either way, the great irony is that as Northern Ireland becomes more normal, the Good Friday Agreement becomes less workable. This is in large part because it has always meant different things to each side. For many nationalists it was a process. As Gerry Adams said in 1999: “The Agreement is not a peace settlement, nor does it purport to be one.” Rather, he claimed, it was “the beginning of a transitional period towards Irish unification”. To unionists, it was no such thing. It was a settlement, a reasonable compromise upon which a new Northern Ireland could grow.
Trimble’s Peace Prize speech is remembered today largely for his remark that unionists built a solid house in the north after Irish independence, but one that was “a cold house for Catholics”. Less well-remembered — but just as important — was his next sentence. “And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.”
Many northern nationalists do want the house to burn down — and legitimately so. Seeking Northern Ireland’s withdrawal from the UK and absorption into the Republic is just as legitimate and noble a cause as wanting the house to remain standing forever, like some Victorian terrace connected to Great Britain on the other side of the wall. Yet, the reality of Northern Ireland’s existential uncertainty means the “assembly of one nation” that Trimble so desperately wanted is an impossible dream. At heart there remain two nations, with two interests each opposed to the other. And while his imperfect and incomplete set of political compromises solved some of the most intractable problems in western Europe, it only replaced them with others.
Northern Ireland is one of the most constitutionally uncertain places on earth — by design. The Good Friday Agreement is ambiguous on how a future border poll will come about, for example, or even what Irish unity looks like. All that is said about a future referendum is that one must be called by the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland “if it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be a part of the United Kingdom”. But how this might be determined is not stipulated. Nor what it would mean, should it happen. The Irish government believes all that is required for a referendum to be called is a majority in the Northern Ireland assembly. The British Government has not made its position clear. Adding further uncertainty is the fact that, once a first referendum takes place, subsequent polls can then be called every seven years: a recipe for permanent instability. No nation on earth could create any meaningful unity of purpose should its very existence be put to a public vote every seven years. The stakes to avoid a first one are therefore extraordinarily high for unionism.
But even if the cause of Irish nationalism were to triumph in a poll, it is unclear what would happen then. Once the reality of Irish unity is set out in black and white, some may be less keen — and others more.
Rory Montgomery, a member of the Irish delegation in 1998, told me it was important to remember that while the agreement was a remarkable achievement, it was also the work of imperfect humans negotiated with great haste. “This was not handed down on tablets of stone by great men.” Many issues were resolved by the agreement, but many more had to be parked, chief among them how to deal with the legacies of the past and the continuing reality of sectarianism.
One of the problems today, Montgomery told me, was that the politicians in Northern Ireland had become “addicted to the constitutional question and the politics of crisis and intervention”. For a small place, it continues to be treated with great solemnity, a source of conversation in London and Washington, Dublin and Brussels. “The politics has remained focused on the constitutional issue and the rivalry of the two communities,” he said. “Even if Stormont was sitting for a relatively long period, there hasn’t been much focus on usual politics. And you have to be honest: the performance of the institutions has been mediocre at best.” It is hard to argue with this conclusion.
Back in 1998, Trimble warned that peace needed magnanimity, but also political prudence, “a willingness at times nor to be too precise or pedantic”. It is not for one generation of politicians to future-proof a set of laws and strictures. They must work within the bounds of what exists, not seek to perfect the world. Trimble quotes Amos Oz, who said inconsistency was the basis of coexistence. “The heroes of tragedy driven by consistency and by righteousness, destroy each other. He who seeks total supreme justice seeks death.” This is true, and yet nothing can be built on foundations that never settle. The house that Trimble and Hume built is still standing, but the running repairs are racking up.
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