For international (and some local) observers, the events of the last several weeks in Northern Ireland seem utterly incomprehensible. A group of men affiliated with the Unionist Orange Order, citing historical precedent, sought to march down a particular length of road (Garvaghy) in a predominantly Nationalist area of Portadown southwest of Belfast. When they were granted legal permission to walk from the appointed legal body (the Parades Commission), local residents vehemently protested. The result was a protracted standoff involving police, local communities on both sides of the sectarian divide and various interlocutors, including the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland seeking to calm the escalating situation by finding a political solution to the impasse.
It was all shockingly familiar for those of us who lived through “the Troubles” that stretched across three decades from 1969 to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998. The crisis this month exposed some fundamental truths about the post-conflict transition in Northern Ireland, and it highlights the harsh reality that transitions from conflict are long and fragile, and we are often just a breath away from triggering a return to instability and violence.
For many years, colleagues outside of Northern Ireland would often remark caustically that I was too pessimistic about the success of the Northern Ireland transition. After all, our 30-year-plus deadly conflict had ended, political parties across the political divide had signed the Good Friday/Belfast Peace Agreement, weapons had been successfully decommissioned, and new democratic institutions were up and running. All of that is true. But living in Northern Ireland, close to the rawness of wounds, the ambivalence of the political settlement, and the inability to “deal with the past,” I knew we were living in a present that was still unsettled. The real question is just how unsettled?
This past couple of weeks has revealed the unresolved ambivalence of our peace. The challenge of translating the words of the peace agreement into operative practice on the ground presents a persistent test. For three decades, the fragility of post-conflict governance institutions – the legislative Assembly, for example — was displayed by their stop-and-start operation, politics regularly crashing on the shores of sectarian pressure. Non-state armed groups continue to pose a security threat; children’s education in Northern Ireland remains separate; and working-class communities continue to struggle economically. While conflict violence between (largely) male combatants in public ended, and while many communities have been able to live lives free of violence and fear, the necessary social and political movement towards shared space, forgiveness, truth, justice and reconciliation remains nascent.
Slow and Winding Post-Conflict Progress
Thus, my assessment on the health of the peace process was always hesitant, though essentially positive. I soberly believed that this kind of stop-and-start progression, this laborious winding towards co-existence was, in fact, progress, after decades of conflict. Northern Ireland demonstrated that even in optimal post-conflict settings, progress would be steady but slow, uneven with backsliding, and that the legal commitments in the peace agreement would hold: to use “exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences on political issues,” and to maintain “our opposition to any use or threat of force by others for any political purpose, whether in regard to this agreement or otherwise.”
After years of working in the ebb and flow of the transition in Northern Ireland as well as in conflict zones as a United Nations Special Rapporteur and advising governments on ways to end violence, I was wary of quick fix (and one-sided) solutions for ending conflict, and always cynical about the motives of mediators, negotiators, and bargains struck in other parts of the world that promised fast and happy endings in the short run. In Northern Ireland, we knew better.
Notwithstanding those standing caveats, the past few weeks have exposed deep imperfections in post-conflict institutions and processes designed to manage impasse and political accommodation. Tellingly, the Garvaghy Road dispute demonstrates the power of the spoiler in a peace process, individuals whose fundamental goal is to hinder, delay, or destroy the peace settlement. There are spoilers on both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland — those in the leadership of both Unionist (favoring Northern Ireland remaining part of the U.K.) and Nationalist (favoring unification with Ireland) political parties who gain more from stirring up sectarian sentiment than they do from stepping up and making compromise. But with elections pending and sectarianism selling better than solving our public services and budget crisis, the leadership of Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party have opted for the allure of the echo chamber and the comfortable silo. Non-sectarian leadership from the two dominant political parties is in low supply, and its articulation largely comes from smaller parties trying to hold the political middle.
The recent standoff also demonstrated another obvious truth: that politicians and some communities forget the cost of the conflict all too quickly. In Northern Ireland, deaths and conflict-related injuries have left profound intergenerational trauma, much of which remains unresolved because of the failure to embed a truth-recovery process in the peace deal. At least 20 deaths were related to standoffs over Orange Order marching in the 1990s, and it was the grim murder of three young boys in a petrol bomb attack in 1998 that finally forced retreat and compromise.
Conflict Nostalgia
But that was, again, almost three decades ago. Conflict nostalgia, a kind of willful amnesia of the violence of the past, partly explains the willingness to turn up the temperature on the language of domination, victory, and absoluteness, and discard the language of generosity, grace, and understanding. As we have long learned, words matter, and those in public life should choose them carefully in a post-conflict society.
Finally, the apparent ease with which key actors have been careless and defiant of legal process and legal determinations reminds us that once we discard the commitment to our (imperfect) rules, we risk violence, threat, and intimidation as the lingua franca going forward. When political leaders appear to defy the law, the message to all is that the law is irrelevant to our sectarian politics. In post-conflict society, sometimes the imperfect rules are all we have, and to be cavalier with them invites mob rule — or its online equivalent, generated outrage via social media.
So, how to prevent the unravelling of a carefully constructed, if imperfect, peace process now? There is no simple fix. It requires patient back-to-basics, accepting the compromise that was crafted in 1998 and going back to making it work with some humility and grace. There are no shortcuts on a peace process; it is an intergenerational endeavor. It requires accepting that that initial compromise was only the first, and that a successful peace process requires the practice of compromise over and over again.
The two dominant political parties in Northern Ireland both need tutorials on compromise. Communities need to practice compromise too, embedding ordinary peace in acts of neighborly co-existence that may not be immediately reciprocated. Lasting success still requires two governments, Ireland and the U.K, that agreed to act as peace guarantors, to step up and remain committed, despite the distraction of Middle East wars and an imperious and unpredictable United States that can no longer be relied upon as a neutral guarantor.
Success also requires making Northern Ireland work, and that means placing a political priority on the things politicians simply don’t want to work on: agreeing on a budget, fixing the health service to better serve the needs of a post-conflict population, finding ways to educate our children together, looking after the elderly who survived conflict and deserve better.
None of this is sexy. It is definitely less appealing than sitting comfortably in the chair of name-calling and one-upmanship. Most urgently, we also must squarely face the “the cost of our troubles,” because confronting the ugly truth of violence, sectarianism, and grief of the past would remind us why we never want to go back there. This is the hard stuff of building a shared society. But avoiding it, as the Garvaghy Road standoff demonstrates, may simply de-transition us from the future back to the past.
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