Fin Keegan

“Anyone who isn’t paranoid in Northern Ireland has something wrong with them,” Dennis Bradley once said. And, certainly, never really knowing who to trust is the hallmark of civil conflict. Betrayal, lies, and casual violence; civilians routinely murdered on their doorsteps; security forces conspiring with sectarian assassins; religious leaders bellowing Scripture at the mob: such was life in the British-controlled portion of Ireland before the 1998 Peace Agreement brought relative calm.

For Clinton and Blair, adepts of spin and ambiguity, such conditions were perfectly suited to both the aspirations and pretensions they share. Together with local players and former Senator George Mitchell, the two overseas leaders made it their business to understand and accommodate the grassroots consensus for peace throughout the island.

Both men relished the late-night conference calls, the marathon negotiations, the legalistic contortions, and probably too the gallery of characters involved–from wannabe Ché Guevaras to fire-and-brimstone shitstirrers. The Irish Problem, you get the feeling, was something from which Clinton and Blair, Boomer Idealists bogged down in domestic governance, got a real buzz.

Not so the current President, who famously avoids the epic briefings ingested by his predecessor and has no peacemaking ambitions, at least where vital interests are uninvolved.

Why, indeed, bother with such a small, squalid, conflict? There is no strategic U.S. interest in permanent settlement, other than the removal of an occasional irritant in the “special relationship” enjoyed (or, latterly, endured) by the two largest English-speaking powers. And any number of needier countries in Africa could do with the diplomatic attention lavished on the provincial chieftains of tiny Ulster. But Ireland and America go back a long way–after all we saved civilization (Guinness; Thin Lizzy; James Joyce) and you once rescued a few million of us from starvation. We built many of your cities; you built many of our dreams: if any two countries can claim to be sister nations, they are Ireland and America.

But for all the complexities of the world beyond Crawford, Texas, the need for justice and freedom, as recent events in Beirut, Bishkek, and Belfast have shown, can be piercingly simple. In Ireland, an unexpected revolt against terror has come from the steadfast, outspoken courage of five remarkable women–sisters of a working-class Catholic called Robert McCartney, battered and sliced to death by IRA men in a crowded bar in spring of 2005.

Sinn Féin, political wing of the nominally dormant Irish Republican Army, has been caught on the back foot by the near-universal demand, even among their own supporters, for their paramilitary cohort to submit to the rule of law, release the many witnesses of the pub murder from threat of reprisal, and then “go away”.

IRA disbandment [see below] would leave the community, including an unshackled Sinn Féin, to rebuild their lives in peace. And it may surprise some to learn that the best way to achieve a reunited Ireland would be for the IRA, increasingly active in organized crime, to retire themselves into history.

In their pain, the McCartneys’ moral clarity has proved a beacon by which to guide the often-benighted ship of Irish peace. Washington’s job now is to provide a calm and prudent escort to safety, without brinksmanship or name-calling.

Update: Dropping the Armalite

Post Date: March 25th, 2005