It’s a cliché, but it seems like yesterday. That April 10, 1998, icy for a spring and even winter day, with hailstones, the representatives of the international press bundled up in their coats and anoraks, their scarves tightly wrapped around their necks, waiting numb in the castle gardens. from Hillsborough to white smoke. May months of negotiations between unionists and republicans, Dublin and London, with the mediation of the United States, bear fruit and put an end to a hidden civil war that in 30 years claimed more than 3,500 lives.
And yes, there was white smoke, after an endless wait in which the conditions of one and the other were about to throw everything to the ground. But it was one of the great victories of diplomacy and today, a quarter of a century later, Northern Ireland is an unrecognizable place. A place where peace reigns, even if it is an imperfect peace, but nothing to do with the horrible place of the sixties, seventies and eighties, when bombs were the order of the day and so were the dead. When Catholics were discriminated against and victims of bullets from the British army, and unionists, from shrapnel from the IRA. When the streets of Belfast and Derry were rivers of blood (this correspondent recalls a trip to the province, in 1975, in another life, when he was a cherub, there were checkpoints at every corner, and he had to spend a rainy summer night among the bushes of the hedge that separated the two lanes of a road where the tanks did not stop passing).
Yes, it’s been a long time. Of the signatories to the Good Friday accords, nationalist John Hume and unionist David Trimble, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize, have died. Also Martin McGuinnes, who played a starring role as a negotiator for Sinn Féin. Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerry Adams, the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and US Senator George Mitchell (who acted as mediator) have long since left power and receded into the background. In Ulster there are 18 restaurants recognized by the Michelin guide, a bus connects the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods (something unthinkable until recently), numerous scenes from Game of Thrones have been filmed, and the old shipyards where the Titanic was built and chartered attract to tourists from all over the world. For young people, the troubles (as the three long decades of violence are called) are something as remote as the Civil War for Spaniards born after 1950, boring stories that grandparents told. Tribal politics interest them little, and they have friends on the rival side.
But this does not mean that it is the country of wonders. Segregation continues to be a fact in the field of religion, education, neighborhoods, and sports activities. There are Catholic and Protestant taxis and pubs, most families have suffered more or less direct losses at the hands of the other, and many neither forget nor forgive. Huge steel plates topped with barbed wire, called with a certain irony the walls of peace, separate the two communities. Belfast looks (and is very much) a normal city, which has prospered a lot (GDP is up 43% since 1998), but resentment lingers in the background. The past is there.
Even if young people want to turn the page, if your name is Billy in Ulster you are a Protestant, and if your name is Sean you are a Catholic. The way you pronounce the letter “h” inadvertently distinguishes you as belonging to one tribe or the other. In 1998, 93% of voters favored Republicans or Unionists, in 2023, 20% of the electorate supports the Alliance Party, which is intercommunal. More and more middle-class and wealthy families settle in neutral neighborhoods, and more and more parents send their children to non-denominational schools. But even so, one cannot speak of integration. At concerts and football matches you still hear shouts like oh, ah, up the IRA.
There are still violent elements on one side and on the other, but very marginal. In the last 12 months, only one death and 37 injuries have been registered due to sectarian violence, and the police have seized a thousand rounds of ammunition, a small part of what used to circulate. The old Royal Ulster Constabulary was 92% Protestant. The current Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has 32% Catholics in its ranks.
To reach the Good Friday agreements a quarter of a century ago, the whole world had to give in. The IRA proceeded to confiscate its arsenals and renounced violence, and went from seeking reunification through weapons to seeking it through the ballot box; the Republic of Ireland accepted that the island would only be one again when the majority of Ulster wanted it to be; the United Kingdom assumed that same premise, as well as the existence of cross-border bodies that give Dublin a role in managing the affairs of the province, and, the most controversial issue, all the prisoners accused of terrorism were released in a within two years, to the immeasurable pain and anger of those who had lost loved ones.
Those who said no to the peace agreements and continue to do so are the politicians of the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party), which was the second in the Protestant bloc and is now the first (with 21% of votes). He allowed himself to be cajoled by Boris Johnson into supporting Brexit, when not even the Protestant majority wanted it, and has since lost his oremus. Sinn Féin won the last elections, Catholics have more children, demography plays in their favor, and they, lords of the no, limit themselves to blocking the regional institutions for a year, which require the participation of the most voted party of each community. The formula is outdated, and there is pressure to change it for a 65% supermajority of legislators to pass laws.
Unionists are terrified of becoming a minority as Sinn Féin marches to power, in Ulster and in the Republic. “How the years have passed, how things have changed, what a different world, and here we are face to face like two teenagers who look at each other without speaking… How the years have passed, the turns that life takes…” The song by Roberto Livi is the story of two lovers already with gray hair. In Northern Ireland, it is that of two old enemies who do not and will not love each other, and who do not make love, but neither do they make war. Seems like yesterday…
