Northern Ireland's consensus

THREE MURDERS in Northern Ireland this month were echoes of its violent past, but that's all they were. Because of the durability of the 1998 Good Friday agreement, the chief protagonists in the old conflict have shown, as the agreement states, their "total and absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences."

This renunciation of violence explains why Martin McGuinness of the Sinn Fein party, deputy leader of the Northern Ireland government, denounced the killers as "traitors to the island of Ireland." Contrast that with the mealy-mouthed comments Sinn Fein spokesmen would have uttered 15 or 20 years ago, when the Provisional Irish Republican Army, parent organization of the party, committed similar killings.

Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party, the leader of the power-sharing government, appeared with McGuinness and said, "The stronger we stand together the more surely we will come through this together." Just three years ago, the Democratic Unionists were denouncing Sinn Fein as front men for terrorists.

Despite false starts, the Good Friday agreement began a process that forced the Provisional IRA to disband and encouraged Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists to form a government in 2007. Sinn Fein is committed to a united Ireland, and the DUP is determined to maintain the amalgamation of Northern Ireland with Great Britain.

The Good Friday agreement is finely modulated to provide a consultative role for the Irish Republic in the north; guarantee the rights of Sinn Fein and other Irish nationalists; and ensure that Northern Ireland will not be severed from Britain without majority approval of the Northern Irish people. Unlike the 1920 law passed by the British Parliament that created Northern Ireland, voters in the north and the republic approved the 1998 agreement in plebiscites. Never before has a fundamental law of government affecting all of Ireland had greater political legitimacy.

The agreement did not immediately change the habits of mistrust and fear that divide nationalists and unionists. Nor did it bring affluence to the pockets of poverty in Northern Ireland where despair and violence endure. Nor did it prevent IRA renegades from acquiring the weapons that killed the two soldiers and a police officer recently. The dissidents may be capable of other atrocities, and the police need to be careful not to overreact. But here again the agreement has provided a remedy: creating a reformed police service that is shedding its unionist bias.

McGuinness and Robinson are in Washington to meet with President Obama today. Somber because of the killings, the meeting will also be a reminder that peaceful politics can triumph over violence and hate.