I just visited Northern Ireland, and I have some bad news: The status quo there is too comfortable.
Yes, the cease-fire between the factions broke down in February 1996 after 17 months of peace. But the truth is, the breakdown of the cease-fire has not really affected Northern Ireland much, because the IRA has confined its bombings to England. As for life here in Belfast, well, McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken seem to be everywhere. The Europa Hotel, Belfast's most oft-bombed building, recently signaled its optimism by removing from the lunch menu its famous "BLAST" sandwich (bacon, lettuce and some tomato)! And in recent years, the authorities have replaced some of the ugly corrugated steel fences dividing Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods with what the locals call "designer walls" - the sort of patterned brick wall you'd find around a gated community in Florida.No, Toto, this is not the Gaza Strip.
Or as one moderate Catholic professor here remarked to me: "Let's be honest, the middle classes here are doing very well." The dirty little secret of Ulster is that while it has become a metaphor for civil war, that war is actually confined to a few very small areas in Belfast and Derry, and the rest of Northern Ireland is downright beautiful. For those who know the secret, Ulster is now a metaphor for a "great wee place" to retire. Housing prices are cheap, golf is plentiful and public schools, social services, investment subsidies and roads are the best in Britain - thanks to the money the British and the European Union pour in here. Unemployment is around 8 percent, far better than France, Germany or Italy. And if per chance the IRA does blow up your shop, the British will rebuild it free.
That's why I wonder whether Northern Ireland's cure and its disease aren't the same thing: The same economic development that produced the cease-fire (and still limits its breakdown) also cushions the factions and reduces the pressure on them to make the tough compromises needed to get beyond the cease-fire and secure a lasting peace. There is an all too tolerable balance here now between violence and affluence.
In Belfast, political leaders can still afford to indulge their ideological fantasies. Gerry Adams, head of the IRA.'s Sinn Fein Party, David Trimble, leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party, and Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister, all did better than ever in the past elections - without having to promise any courageous initiatives to get peace talks going.
Successful peace talks would require Adams to take the risk of getting the IRA to declare an open-ended cease-fire without any guarantees about the timing and outcome of those talks. They would require Trimble to risk sitting down with Sinn Fein and negotiating a power-sharing arrangement with the Catholics. And they would require Blair's fracturing the bipartisan British consensus on Northern Ireland and negotiating with the IRA before it turned in every weapon or gave ironclad assurances that the cease-fire wouldn't be broken again. All three would have to take these risks while their opponents denounced them for "selling out."
Maybe they will show such courage. But it won't be easy. The public longing here for peace is very real but passive. Life here is already 85 percent normal, and the political price for getting the last 15 percent is very high. It would require bringing into the peace process the hardest-core elements on both sides, such as the thousands of working-class Catholics and Protestants who still live in the pockets of very high unemployment, and for whom the Irish wars still burn white hot.
The brutal murders last week - a Catholic stomped to death by a Protestant gang in Portadown and a Protestant gunned down by Catholic guerrillas in a Belfast bar - remind us how the pockets of abnormality here could still blow apart the web of normalcy. And such an explosion would really set back the chances for peace . . . or would it?
New York Times News Service