If You Ask Me
with Malachi O'Doherty

There is no telling yet whether the Troubles are coming to an end on Monday. A political process that started in fire might be resolved in amity. Who knows? But attendant on that hope is a curious sense that it all looks too easy.If the Provisional IRA and the DUP are settling for power in Stormont, what was all the fuss about? Well, the fuss was about securing a role for the oppressed nationalist minority, wasn't it? Time might have done a better job of that unaided.

Two big Unionist parties now take 54 seats between them - that is, half the seats in the assembly. Majority rule is over. Though there is still a democratic deficit in that they end up with a majority in the executive. But Unionists couldn't oppress nationalists now if they tried.

Even the old-fashioned parliamentary democracy, as in the old Stormont, would give us, through coalition, nationalist Prime Ministers - even cross community allegiances, the sort of governments they have in the south and all over Europe. Who knows, we might be better off now if it had all just been left the way it was.

But 35 years ago this week, the mother of parliaments suffocated her own child. And a historic journey to a refashioned Northern Ireland was begun. John Hume declared it was time to reach out to our Protestant neighbours - so that we might use our talents together; urged them not to see this as a nationalist victory.

Even he can't have imagined he'd be making the same speech for decades. He would never need another one. Ian Paisley, back then, urged the total integration of Ulster into the UK, so that Belfast might be as British as Finchley. He's changed his mind since.

The Alliance Party, in 1972, claimed an insight into British intentions. Direct rule was a temporary measure until the security problem was brought under control, then our parliament would be restored to us.

The IRA had a hunger strike in the prison for political status and then a ceasefire so that they could meet the British and tell them in person to take a running jump at themselves. It was a telling year. It tells us that peace was not secured through novel political ingredients. No. The ingredients are old and familiar. But something else was needed. People had to grow older and sick of violence. Radical parties would have to get to the top of the political pile.

Then the sellouts they would not allow others to make - they would happily make themselves. Nothing that happens on Monday will change that, neither devolution nor dissolution. The telling difference is that people were young and angry and deluded back then, and they do not have the same fire in their bellies now. Why not?

More people claim to want a united Ireland than back then but fewer would fight for it now. Unionists accept that they lose nothing by good relations with the Republic, though Paisley threw snowballs at the first Taoiseach to cross the border.

And the edge that danger gave to difference is gone. Will it come back? Perhaps. Perhaps in 10 or 20 years. But not before Monday, or much after it, which ever way things go. So should it all fall apart, weep for your water rates, but don't fret about the peace. The passion is spent.

If You Ask Me Archive