At a recent function in Dublin marking the award of the 2007 Ewart-Biggs memorial prize, instituted to commemorate the British ambassador to Dublin who was murdered by an Irish Republican Army bomb in 1976, the writer Colm Tóibin spoke powerfully of the way in which, over the past decade in particular, politicians and civil servants in both Ireland and Britain have been borrowing the modalities and the practised ambiguities of creative writing in order to create texts which would allow the protagonists in Northern Ireland to move towards peace without undue loss of face. The outcome of the elections to the north's new legislative assembly on 7 March 2007 will be the acid test of how successful they have been, and will confront all those involved with the necessarytransition from words to deeds. It will also - if it manages to give birth to a new, power-sharing executive - mark a significant milestone in the long and often difficult relationship between the two parts of Ireland.
John Horgan is professor of journalism at Dublin City University, after many years as a journalist on the Irish Times and in other media. Among his books are Mary Robinson: An Independent Voice (O'Brien Press, 1997), Sean Lemass: The Enigmatic Patriot (Gill & Macmillan, 1999), and Irish Media: A Critical History since 1922 (Routledge, 2001).
In the decades that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, Irish unity was an aspiration of all Dublin governments, just as the rejection of that aspiration by the province's majority, which saw the south as not only clerically-controlled but as a social and economic backwater, became the cornerstone of Unionist policy and praxis. In the Republic of Ireland (as it became in 1949), the aspiration to unity remained precisely that for many years - an aspiration rather than a policy - until the rise of the civil-rights movement in the late 1960s cruelly exposed that policy vacuum. Events since then have been, for people on both sides of the border, an educational as well as a political process, and one not without pain.
In the Republic, a knee-jerk irredentism has given way to a more realistic appreciation of the fact that an internal settlement in Northern Ireland is a prerequisite to any form of progress. Paradoxically, the length and the frequently sanguinary nature of the conflict also created, among many voters in the Republic, a distinct hesitation about the idea of national unity, or at the very least a diminution of any sense of urgency about it. In Northern Ireland, the temptation of prosperity has been added to the prospect of peace.
A financial salve
It is certainly significant that both parts of the island are now unrecognisable compared with the entities that were created in 1922. The republic, if not quite post-Catholic, is today a modern, open, prosperous and secular economy light-years removed from the largely agricultural, conservative society that existed until the 1960s. The north's economy, by contrast, has been fractured and undermined by the conflict, although it also has an enormous potential to benefit from any peace dividend. And, over the past year in particular, that potential has been underlined by the willingness of both the Irish and British governments to signal the availability of financial support in the event of the formation of a power-sharing executive.
Also in openDemocracy on politics in Ireland:
Douglas Murray, "Trusting the enemy"
(2 May 2003)
Robin Wilson, "The end of the IRA"
(16 March 2005)
Fred Halliday, "Thinking straight about Ireland"
(27 May 2005)
Paul Arthur, "The end of the IRA's long war" (29 July 2005)
Stephen Howe, "Mad Dogs and Ulstermen: the crisis of Loyalism", parts one
(28 September 2005) and two (30 September 2005)
Robin Wilson, "Northern Ireland peace by peace" (12 October 2005)
Richard English, "Sinn Féin's hundredth birthday"
(28 November 2005)
Conn Corrigan, "A long march: Ireland's peace process"
(23 February 2006)
Robin Wilson, "Ireland's blocked path to reconciliation"
(5 April 2006)
Stephen Howe, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley: Ken Loach and Irish history"
(12 June 2006)
In October 2006 the British chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, indicated that up to £50 billion ($65.6 billion) could be made available to Northern Ireland on a phased basis following the establishment of a new executive there. Although this sum incorporated some previously-offered initiatives, it amounts to a substantial incentive. The Dublin government, although unwilling to show its hand to the same extent, has made an initial commitment of some £1 billion: plainly there will be more to come. Even in advance of the election, no effort has been spared, by the British government in particular, to facilitate and where necessary finance the more mundane constituency objectives of members of Dr Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in order to give them a foretaste of the economic rewards available for politically changed behaviour.
Arguments about the legitimacy of the state or about the loyalties of its inhabitants have, almost imperceptibly, given way to the language of economics, of development, and of creating non-threatening modes of cooperation between the two parts of the island. It is a sign of the times that the tensions about control of security, which occupied much of the airwaves in the recent past, have been overshadowed (although they have not disappeared) by the revelation that if there is a new power-sharing executive, the DUP will insist on control of the finance portfolio. This is not the language of rejectionism.
If the northern politicians have been learning the importance of economics, their counterparts in the Republic have been acquiring a new sensitivity to the importance of symbols, for so long the chief rhetorical weapons of Unionists. A striking example came at the conclusion of the talks in St Andrews, Scotland, in October 2006 which marked the most recent phase of the peace process, when the Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Bertie Ahern, presented Ian Paisley with a wooden bowl carved from a tree that had once stood on the site of the battle of the Boyne in 1690 (celebrated by Paisley's tradition as a great victory, whose site stands on the Republic's territory). It was one of those rare moments in which - as the poet Seamus Heaney has written - hope and history rhymed.
The next hurdle
The passage from the election to the creation of a power-sharing executive by the British-imposed deadline of 26 March is not guaranteed, and there will be more than a few crises along the way even if it is achieved. But there is a growing awareness on all sides that the present situation, whatever the political difficulties, cannot continue to exist economically. Northern Ireland currently gets a subsidy of approximately £6 billion every year from the British taxpayer, and its employment patterns are heavily skewed towards the state sector, perhaps to a greater extent than any region of the European Union other than some parts of the central and eastern European countries which joined the EU in 2004 and 2007.
Nor is the British government the only potential beneficiary of the peace process, if it leads to renewed economic development and a lessening of Northern Ireland's dependence on the British state. Such development would also bring comfort to the taxpayers in the Republic, who (a robust economy notwithstanding) will not take too kindly to regular demands to subsidise Northern Ireland indefinitely in pursuit of an as yet unrealised political objective.
As Ahern faces his own next election, due in May, and as Blair looks with increasing urgency for a high point on which to end his premiership, the stakes and - paradoxically - the chances of success for peace and progress in Ireland are higher than they have ever been before.
