Monthly Archives: February 2024

You didn’t think the peace process was only about ending the IRA’s war against the British, did you? Silly you, if you did.

When the news came to New York that Sinn Fein and the major Unionist party (by the way, what should either be called these days?) had agreed to go into government together at Stormont, I couldn’t get one stubborn thought out of my mind. Hadn’t we been somewhere like this before?

We had of course, but not in the way most would expect. It was 1974 and the bulk of political and paramilitary Unionism was lined up in quite violent opposition to a power sharing government at Stormont created by the British government, with the knowing assent of the Dublin government, the SDLP and the Alliance party.

Unionism wasn’t the only fractured polity in town. Nationalism was also divided; the SDLP, then the unchallenged spokesperson for Northern Nationalism, enthusiastically backed the new government, named Sunningdale after the place of its birth at a conference in sunny southern England.

But the Republicans – and in those days it was the IRA, not Sinn Fein, which mattered – opposed the deal and refused to vote, so the republican vote was measured for many years in pounds of gelignite and gun battles. The IRA and hard line Unionism were on the same side, so to speak, both eager to see the deal brought down in May 1974, as today they are consenting parties in a process slated to end with dependable bums safely ensconced on cabinet seats. That has to be an irony with few equals.

The fact that there is really nowhere else for either ‘Unionism’ or ‘Nationalism’ to go serves mostly to guarantee the longevity of, what we might call ‘Sunningdale Two’. The unanswered and unasked question which as yet no-one is openly asking, but sure as hell is thinking, is harder to face, as least for those at the cutting edge of events, and is best put something like this: “If you knew how it would end, would you have done what you did?”

It is perhaps to the advantage of the new deal that within a couple of decades the Troubles generation, thanks to Mother Nature, will be a distinct minority and the effect of violence well on the way to becoming a folk memory. The answer to that ‘what did you do in the war, daddy?’ question will, at that stage, be more a curiosity than anything more foreboding.