Northern Ireland: back to the future

LITTLE OVER seven years ago, with former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and President Clinton closely engaged, the Belfast agreement was negotiated. This established a system of power-sharing between Protestants and Catholics, long divided over whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or become part of a united Ireland. Major powers were to be devolved from Westminster, with significant scope for cooperation on the island of Ireland.

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The violent legacy of the previous three decades was to be addressed by the release of paramilitary prisoners within two years, with paramilitaries disarming over the same period. The Protestant-dominated police force would be reformed and the British army presence scaled back.

The agreement secured worldwide media attention, and President Clinton hailed it as a model for divided societies.

Yet elections Thursday to the Westminster Parliament reveal a darker picture. Far from overcoming its historic divisions, Northern Ireland is as polarized as ever. In the first elections to the new Stormont assembly in 1998, the (mainly Catholic) Social Democratic and Labour Party and the (predominantly Protestant) Ulster Unionist Party secured the largest vote shares.

In the Westminster election in 2001, however, they were respectively overhauled by Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party. This though the first is the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, responsible for more deaths than any other organization during Northern Ireland's ''troubles," while the second is the only party in Europe led by a fundamentalist preacher (Ian Paisley).

Thursday's elections consolidated the militant advance, particularly in the Protestant community. The UUP leader and former first minister under devolution, David Trimble, was defeated by a local DUP rival as his party was reduced to one seat.

After the agreement it took nearly 20 months of further negotiation between these four main parties before they formed an uneasy coalition, and this was repeatedly suspended before its demise in October 2002. All attempts since by London and Dublin to resuscitate it, with President Bush in attendance, have foundered .

Protestants now overwhelmingly reject the presence in government of Sinn Fein, given its association with the IRA. Most Catholics, meanwhile, have concluded that unionists are unwilling to share power equally, and point to the prevalence of violence by Protestant paramilitaries in recent years.

In his book on power-sharing, Timothy Sisk wrote: ''A necessary condition for the mitigation of conflict in deeply divided societies is the existence, or creation, of a centrist core of moderates -- drawn both from elites and from the broader civil society -- that adheres to rules and norms of pragmatic coexistence with other groups and can withstand the pressures of extremist outbidders that seek to mobilize on divisive themes for their own power-seeking aims."

That core in Northern Ireland has collapsed, with its demoralized supporters mainly responsible for falling electoral turnout.

With hindsight, two big mistakes were made in the peace process. The first was to allow, since the loosely defined paramilitary ceasefires of 1994, what Professor Donald Horowitz of Duke University calls an ''auction mentality" to take hold.

Prime minister Tony Blair admitted after the 2002 collapse that the continued existence of the IRA had given Gerry Adams political leverage and the rival SDLP was even excluded from talks at Downing Street in 2003.

The second was to adopt a model of power-sharing, based on the principle that high fences make good neighbors, which has come under increasing criticism.The agreement institutionalized sectarian division -- notably in requiring all elected assembly members to designate themselves as ''unionist" or ''nationalist" -- and requiring that the critical vote for the first and deputy first ministers secure a majority in both blocs. This entrenched communalist mindsets and allowed conservative Protestants to veto arrangements for which there was otherwise a cross-communal majority.

Drawing the political tectonic plates back together will involve rewarding those parties committed to conciliation and ensuring paramilitaries are made subject to the rule of law. This will include re-engineering the Belfast agreement to foster integration -- integrated schools are an unsung Northern Ireland success story -- rather than the division on which the region's current political leaders depend.

It will be a long haul, and the principal task will fall to civil society there. But having messed up, the international community has some responsibility to clean up afterwards.

Robin Wilson is director of the Belfast-based think tank Democratic Dialogue.