Ulster: is peace now worse than war?

The hope exists. Unionism has won some points, too.

In the next few weeks, the armed peace in Northern Ireland will begin its slow traverse to an unarmed peace – or back to a drear war. This is the state of affairs nine months after the Belfast Agreement was hailed as bringing peace to the province, and Nobel prizes were awarded to the leaders of its two traditions. Peace is on the edge of a knife, desperately dependent for its existence on the calculations of leaders of the republican movement, dedicated for a century to driving the British from their soil, and now asked to make a compromise that they regard as treachery.

The Belfast Agreement of last April did not end, but only froze, the war to drive the “British” (Northern Ireland unionists) out. Since it was signed, it has been spattered in blood – of the 29 men and women blown up by a republican bomb in Omagh; of the three children of a mixed marriage immolated in their home by loyalist thugs in Ballymoney; of the Catholic and Protestant men shot, tortured and beaten to show that the paramilitaries of both traditions still command their patches. If this is peace, say the opponents of the Belfast Agreement, then perhaps it would be better to go back to war.

The past nine months since the agreement was signed have seen much more pressure come upon the unionists than on the nationalists. Many in the unionist camp believe that everything that has happened since last Easter – the release of terrorist prisoners, the bestowal of political office on Sinn Fein/IRA leaders and the lack of any progress on weapons decommissioning – favours the republicans. The unionist camp is splintered. Two parties, the Democratic Unionists of Ian Paisley and the UK Unionists of Bob McCartney, walked out of the talks that produced the agreement long before it was signed and remained bitter and full of dark warning. Inside the main Ulster Unionist Party, a group called Union First was formed last month, to show its distrust of David Trimble, the UUP leader and First Minister of the province, for being too accommodating to the British government.

Trimble is at his political limit. Voted in as First Minister with only two votes to spare, he knows that his manoeuvrings to secure a workable assembly have met with deep scepticism, if not active hostility, from the unionist community: he cannot compromise more without losing his party. One adviser said: “He’s a bit like Martin Luther now -‘Here I stand, I can do no other’. He won’t move any more.”

He sticks on the issue that has haunted the agreement – the spectre of the leaders of the IRA entering into the government of Northern Ireland. Trimble, with his Deputy First Minister, Seamus Mallon, the deputy leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, has agreed how ministerial responsibilities in a new assembly cabinet will be divided. This will be ratified by a vote in the assembly – which is still a “shadow” assembly, waiting for powers to be devolved – on 15 February. Thereafter, it will be open to Mo Mowlam, the Northern Ireland Secretary, to bring the cabinet into existence.

Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, received enough votes at the last election to merit two seats in a ten-minister cabinet. The two leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, could be in next month, laying down the law for people whom they tried to terrorise into leaving the province for three decades of their now middle-aged lives. Trimble does not think Mowlam will do this, but he cannot be certain, and he has never trusted her.

He has said he will not lead a cabinet which includes ministers who could return to terror if they deemed normal politics to have failed their cause. Since Sinn Fein has not persuaded the IRA to decommission even one ancient revolver, Trimble remains firm that neither Adams nor McGuinness will take up their portfolios. The agreement is ambiguous about whether or not he has the right to say this but, if the British government takes issue with him and forces the Sinn Fein leaders upon him, he will simply resign. And whatever their protestations, Adams and McGuinness would not be sorry to see the destruction of the assembly.

The issue of decommissioning has been one of the slipperiest slopes in British politics – encrusted with solemn declarations that decommissioning must happen before this or that concession is made. The concessions multiply but no arms are handed over. Nearly four years ago, Adams said decommissioning would happen when the talks ended; three and a half years ago, Trimble said there was “no question of negotiations without decommissioning”; three years ago the prime minister, John Major, said all paramilitaries had to decommission before negotiations started; a year and a half ago an Independent Commission on Decommissioning was appointed with which Sinn Fein pledged itself to work; nine months ago, after the agreement was signed, Tony Blair wrote to Trimble to say that “the process of decommissioning should begin straight away”.

Reality, however, has set in. A fortnight after the signing, the IRA issued a statement in which it said: “Let us make it clear that there will be no decommissioning by the IRA. The issue is a matter only for the IRA, to be decided and pronounced upon by us.” Last November, when a BBC interviewer put to McGuinness that he had given no good reason why a handover of some weapons should not begin, he said: “Well, I’ll give you a good reason. The IRA won’t do it. That’s the reason.” Last month, in briefings to journalists, the IRA ruled out decommissioning for the foreseeable future.

Trimble is faced with three possibilities. The first, so unlikely as to be virtually impossible, is that the IRA decides wholeheartedly to embrace democratic politics and to disarm. The second is that it decides to give over some of its weapons, to gain further concessions while retaining the bulk of the armoury. The third is that it stands pat: “There will be no decommissioning.”

The last of these is almost decreed by history and by psychology. No organisation keeps itself in being over a century in which it has been hunted by two governments, remained faithful to a cause and kept a level of military discipline, training and ruthlessness without developing some ferocious taboos. The most ferocious of all has been, and remains, that weapons are not handed over.

Trimble sees things differently. He thinks that he and Mallon have locked into place all that can be agreed between them, including the scope of the cross-border bodies, which will bring the Irish government into discussions with the assembly on issues such as tourism and EU spending. Unionism and constitutional nationalism are being seen to make things work. This has, he believes, isolated Sinn Fein. If it now refuses to decommission, republicanism, not unionism, will be exposed as the wrecker.

Trimble asks the IRA only to begin decommissioning. He believes that the act of handing over even a few weapons will destroy the myth that the IRA is the legitimate government- in-waiting of a united Ireland. But the IRA knows this, too. Its resistance to giving up arms is a refusal to enter a world in which rules apply that it has never recognised.

For three decades, IRA men have bestrode their communities to the point where they are now the law. They have seen the Royal Ulster Constabulary pull out of communities through which they once swaggered; they have rubbed out whole communities of Protestants in Armagh by terror, forcing unionists back increasingly east of the River Bann. They have secured the city of (London)Derry, its Protestants backed into little enclaves. They have done all of this – and stand on the threshold of political power.

It has been an astounding achievement. In its path is an agreement, signed by governments for which the IRA has contempt, which sets up an assembly of a state that it believes has no right to exist. That agreement now depends on the slim hope that republican leaders may be war-weary – and that they can persuade the rest of their organisation that constitutional politics will serve them better than war.

The hope exists. Unionism has won some points, too. An assembly is within reach; the Irish constitution has lost its clauses claiming the North; the SDLP is at least sometimes a partner. But it still has no solid ground beneath its feet. If the guns are not handed over, it cannot carry on with the agreement. In that case, the agreement may be dead by its first anniversary, on 10 April.

In a speech to his party’s conference late last November, Ian Paisley, still the unchallenged leader of religious fundamentalist unionism, said: “The worst and most loathsome person in society is the traitor – the Judas, the Iscariot. Of him who professes to be a dedicated ally but who goes over to the enemy because of personal advantages, no words in any language are adequate to describe. He is a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, a knave, a thief, a loathsome reptile which needs to be scotched.”

Almost as if in reply, Trimble, in the course of his closely argued Nobel acceptance speech (in which he quoted from the 18th-century Tory philosopher Edmund Burke and the contemporary Israeli writer Amos Oz) referred to “the tradition from which I come, but by which I am not confined”. To say this in Northern Ireland is to launch oneself on to the most perilous waters in British politics. He is a long way yet from the shore.