In a recent interview, Gerry Adams said that the signing of the Good Friday Agreement 28 years ago had saved thousands of lives.
He is correct in that it did bring an end to what became an ultimately pointless armed conflict. However, it also begs the question as to what was the point of the thousands of other deaths that had been lost.
There was a rationale for the defence of the northern Catholic community in 1969, and even a plausible basis perhaps for believing that the British might have been forced to declare an intent to withdraw for several years following that. Had that been backed by the Irish state, and had serious efforts been made to engage the northern Protestant population in making arrangements for a unitary state with regional autonomy, as was proposed by Provisional Sinn Fein at that time, that might have happened. That opportunity had clearly passed by the mid-1970s.
I do recall being stung by Seamus Mallon of the SDLP’s reference to the GFA being “Sunningdale for slow learners.” This pithy, and bitter, remark struck to the core of what most republicans had accepted in the end: an agreement that was no different in any fundamental way to Sunningdale in 1973 nor the Anglo-Irish (Hillsborough) Agreement of 1985.
The similarities are right down to the provision for an unwinnable and unlikely even to be held border poll within the 6 Counties. The only thing that had changed in the meantime was the willingness of most of the “extremes” of northern nationalism and unionism to accept it. Even if it did take the DUP a bit longer, and even if they are still not wholly bought into it.
It is also true that they may not cherish the idea of having a Taig as first Minister but they would not have cherished that in 1922 nor 1973 nor 1985. The actual head buck honchos in Whitehall could not care less what creed, or former creed, or ethnicity or gender or colour or shoe size their colonial governors are.
That’s the point those making a big issue of who gets to be Governor seem to miss.
Indeed it is interesting that it is the DUP that still constitutes the main fly in the ointment in making the “institutions” work, for the simple reason that they know that whether they do or they do not, Northern Ireland will remain, short of some unforeseen event and for the foreseeable future, part of the United Kingdom.
And ironic too that it is the inheritors of the defunct and disbanded and disarmed Provisional IRA who are the ones begging for Stormont and devolved administration – whose destruction the Provos boasted about in 1973 – to be put back in place.
We even have Gerry Adams, who in 1998 was assuring the IRA that any revival of Stormont would be temporary and that Sinn Féin would never take part in administering partition, now calling for more time to be given to Jeffrey Donaldson to maybe see his way to allowing Michele O’Neill to be first minister.
And they are desperately hoping that the visit of the American Democratic Party bosses who played, and still play, a crucial role in neutering Irish nationalism, might pressurise Donaldson into returning to the place from which British rule in Ireland has been overseen for a century.
You really could not make this up, and anyone who thinks this was worth one life is completely dishonest or delusional.
I supported the ceasefire in 1994. Despite the bombings at Canary Wharf and elsewhere, the IRA was never going to force the British to declare an intention to withdraw. There were those in the IRA leadership who tried to persuade us in 1994, and for several years later, that the Brits had secretly made such a declaration, and that it was inevitable anyway and that all the rest was just window dressing, designed to gull the unionists, and even the Irish government.
The only ones gulled were those who believed that the British had given some sort of secret undertaking to the IRA. A quarter of a century later, the IRA no longer exists. It was stood down and disarmed in violation of its own Constitution which committed it to remain in place until there was a 32-county Republic.
No amount of tacky tee shirts or drunken slobbering about them still existing in the background like some pot-bellied balding Illuminati – something which only the dimmer Shinners and a few Dublin journalists believe – alters the fact that revolutionary republicanism in any meaningful sense came to an end formally on Good Friday, April 10, 1998.
That this meant the end to any serious military campaign was no bad thing, especially when one looks at the infantile ideology which the mock IRAs now espouse.
An historically illiterate reversion to the crude Stalinist “anti-fascism” of the 1930s peppered absurdly with claims to be the inheritors of a group of Dublin and Belfast bourgeois Protestants who knew nothing about the Gaelic Ireland they claimed to be liberating, and who in many cases were openly disdainful of the culture and religion of those who purported to be liberating. That much has not changed.
What did not come to an end in 1998, and which is in the gift of no person or organisation to exchange for the banalities of personal and party advantage, is the historical reality of an Ireland with valid aspirations to political sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity. That is no closer to achievement now than it was 25 years ago, and will become an even more remote reality the longer current trends continue.
Ironically if the “dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone” are ever to be surpassed as symbols of a seemingly insoluble clash of the two main cultural and ethnic groups on the island, it will because both will be further subsumed by a trend that will make all such distinctions and the cultures in which they are rooted irrelevant, and marginal.