ALL PEACE IS LOCAL REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TIP O’NEILL CHAIR LECTURE SERIES
ALL PEACE IS LOCAL REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TIP O’NEILL CHAIR LECTURE SERIES ‘LESSONS OF THE PEACE PROCESS’
Good evening, everybody.
Thank you for your warm welcome, and my special thanks to John Hume for his invitation to me to speak to you this evening.
Tip O’Neill, in whose honour this lecture series was established, told us that “All politics is local”. It’s a truth that says every conflict has its own complex local personality which makes it difficult for outsiders to fully comprehend but also paradoxically says that the human psychology at work in politics is essentially the same everywhere and so we may have something to teach and learn from one another. And that is what I want to cast a look at - what is shareable and what, too, do we need to remember.
Northern Ireland is regularly compared in the media to other situations of conflict from Palestine, to Sri Lanka, the Basque Country, South Africa, Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia and beyond. In a more substantive way, there is a growing academic discipline around comparative conflict resolution – exemplified by the International Centre of Excellence for Conflict and Peace Studies here in the University of Ulster – although not many are so fortunate to have such a distinguished and experienced a Chair as the international statesman John Hume. It was John’s legendary persistence as a champion of peace and his Europeanising and internationalising of the debate about Northern Ireland that helped promote today’s new global reality in which more and more politicians, civil society leaders, students and professionals are engaging in dialogue across these situations, discussing each other’s experiences and deepening their knowledge of conflicts, how to manage them, how to avoid them and how to get out of them. Judging by the global success rate there is a very long way to go but judging by our own situation we are among the fortunate few who have an imminent possibility of putting conflict permanently behind us.
There are those who would dismiss the value of comparisons between conflicts saying each is too unique to be of use elsewhere, that it is naïve or even arrogant to think our experience can be transferable. But the truth is of course that our own peace process did not occur in a hermetically sealed bubble but happened in a local, European and international context from which came many sources of inspiration, support and experience, some obvious, some subtle - but all of which impacted emphatically on our journey to peace, justice and equality.
Those who drove the Northern Ireland peace process were often warned about the futility of their efforts by a litany of armchair observers and commentators and it is true that it sometimes did look as if we were going one step forward only to go two steps back.
Eight years on from the Good Friday Agreement, even the sceptics would acknowledge that we have progressed to two steps forward and one step back which if you do the maths is quite a considerable advance. Two clear warnings we can send to other places of conflict - and keep well to the front of our own minds as a caution against relapse - are firstly that entering conflict is a lot easier than exiting conflict and secondly, there are no quick, easy solutions. At times the pace has been so slow that it has felt as if people had to be persuaded one at a time. And yet looking back at where we started from and where we now are, there is a lot to be grateful to the peacemakers for.
Considerable progress has been made in making Northern Ireland a more equal society socially, politically and economically, guided by the precepts and principles of equality and human rights. The changes in policing and in employment laws to take two important examples, have set the scene for the development of a fully inclusive society.
The IRA armed campaign has ended, its arms have been decommissioned and its leadership now supports the exclusively political path. The military presence is at its lowest in thirty years and as watchtowers are demolished and bases closed the apparatus of war has almost disappeared.
Loyalists paramilitaries, while regrettably not yet over the decommissioning line, have nonetheless evolved considerably in their thinking and among them are leaders who are anxious to make a positive contribution to the new, re-imagined Northern Ireland, which is beginning to emerge.
Bridges have been built between North and South, economically, politically, culturally and humanly, completely altering the nature and temper of dialogue between both parts of this island.
Cooperation between the two Governments has never been better and is exemplified by their role as stewards of the peace process.
While the tediously heavy lifting required to finally put in place a power sharing administration is evidence of lingering, though hopefully diminishing political difficulties, the fact that both the DUP and Sinn Fein have asserted their willingness to engage in a new administration is just as important evidence that the distance left to be travelled is relatively short and the issues at least, clear. One side has to commit to power sharing and the other to policing.
So what lessons have we learned that might be of some use to others faced with that dangerous intermingling of divided politics, religion, ethnicity and violence?
The first thing we acknowledge is that there is no neat universal solution, no one size fits all answers, for wherever people attempt to build peace, while the challenge will be the same there will be differences of context, memory, ambition, personality, resources and outcome.
We can say about ourselves though that the wider context was and remains crucial and that what happens in far off places does have a tangible impact. As I said at the beginning what happened here did not happen in a sealed vacuum. Northern Ireland had known sectarian conflict and paramilitarism from its inception. The most recent episode, known as the Troubles began in the ferment of the American and European 1960s civil rights movements and the rising expectations of the local baby boomer generation, the first to benefit from widened access to third level education, that generation so memorably described by another Nobel Laureate of this city, Seamus Heaney as having “intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars”. It ran in parallel with the largely peaceful end of South African apartheid, the Oslo Peace Accords, the end of the Cold War and the liberation of much of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States in velvet revolutions - which proved that long-frozen situations could thaw, and thaw rapidly and that non-violent political efforts had a formidable power. These examples were real factors in building the all-important sense of momentum and possibility for justice and peace in our own situation.
Another important international context was membership of the European Union which gave Ireland the opportunity, an opportunity it used brilliantly, to transform itself into one of the world’s most prosperous and globalised economies. Today’s Ireland is socially, politically and culturally light years away from the Ireland of thirty years ago. It is a confident multicultural, problem-solving, can-do country, a significant player in Europe, the United Nations and in world affairs.
The European Union can also be credited with being the prompt for one of the most crucial dynamics in the peace process and that is the hugely improved relationship between Ireland and Britain which began to change as they grew in friendship and trust around the Union table. In a remarkably short period of time the historically fraught relationship gave way to a deep and genuine mutual respect which made it possible to work collegially towards solving the Northern conflict culminating in the Good Friday Agreement.
Support for successive peace initiatives came from around the world but nowhere more effectively than from the United States where Irish America had long been mobilised in opposition to discrimination against Catholics by people like Hugh Carey, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ted Kennedy and of course Tip O’Neill himself. Successive American administrations became actively involved in constructing the peace process and there is no doubt that without Presidents Clinton and Bush and the saintly Senator Mitchell we would not be as far down the road as we are. Their unwavering opposition to violence and determination to see politics triumph, were matched by an even-handedness in dealing with all sides which greatly facilitated the attempts to mediate compromise.
By the time the Good Friday Agreement was hammered out there was a long legacy of failed efforts from which to learn. The overwhelming validation of the Agreement by those who share this island gave it a huge moral status in addition to its legal authority as an international treaty. The Agreement tackled the conflict on a series of interlocking fronts addressing all the relationships and issues which had been problematic. It settled the vexed question of the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, allowing that it would stay within the United Kingdom unless and until a majority decided otherwise. It detailed the arrangements for power sharing within Northern Ireland and prescribed the intergovernmental arrangements between North and South and between Ireland and Britain, thus putting a fresh new coherency at the heart of these previously awkward relationships. Crucially the Agreement’s overarching context was a commitment to the building of a society based on true equality, fairness and justice for all the people of Northern Ireland.
Fully inclusive negotiations was another clear feature of our experience. In charting the history of the peace process, attention has rightly been given to the moment of recognition that durable peace required Sinn Féin to be brought into the process. No one should be under any illusion about the risks that were taken and the enormous political and moral courage that was involved in articulating and finally achieving this. The name of John Hume towers above all others and the Agreement is clear confirmation that he led in the right direction, understanding as he did so clearly that the peace dividend had to be real in its effects across the full political spectrum from loyalism and unionism through to nationalism and republicanism.
Another important lesson learnt was to avoid the paralysis of the politics of the last atrocity. Time and again paramilitary outrages threatened to close negotiations down but intelligent peacemakers knew that there was no future in giving such a comprehensive veto on peace to the men of violence. The talking had to continue no matter what, if politics and peace were to prevail.
At various times contentious issues looked set to derail the process – the structures of power-sharing, cross‑border cooperation, policing and criminal justice reform, prisoner releases, decommissioning, contentious parades and more. But with careful choreography small gestures of generosity were elicited from all sides and as each of these small steps filled in the long arrears of trust, they brought us closer to the possibility of taking bigger steps.
We learned that there was no one Rubicon but rather successive Rubicons, each vital in its own way but never more than the one that lay ahead. We learnt how important it was to get all the likely trip wires on to the table rather than have them ambush proceedings just as agreement looked possible.
We learnt to think inventively and laterally, breaking new ground with borrowed mechanisms like d’Hondt. Workable models, sequencing, care around language, all provided us with a resource base of cautionary tales and inspiration for ourselves and perhaps others.
But not one step would have been possible if the political parties and civic society had not committed, no matter how tentatively, to the process and if they had not stayed with its bumpy course through thick and thin. So courageous leadership was key and still is. Similarly none of this would have been possible had not the people of Northern Ireland, for all their woeful loss and brokenness, committed to peace and reconciliation as their gift to future generations.
Through fighting and death and injury and fear they debated and argued and listened and disputed, often with the help of the media, church groups, and others and somehow, somewhere along the way, the peacemakers reached critical mass. People began to look more analytically at their own stories and listen more thoughtfully to the story of the other. They started to look for points of connection with the other rather than points of conflict. Cross community initiatives, cross-border initiatives, helped by the International Fund for Ireland and European funds, opened people from opposing communities up to each other in ways that had not happened previously. Many key groups in civic society gave great example as they explored ways to reach out to one another, to tackle sectarianism, to encourage simple friendships. And many organisations official and unofficial which had been structured on a cross-community or cross-border basis and which drew together people from all backgrounds, hung together through the most difficult of times bearing effective witness to the importance of not giving up. There was a growing realisation that peace would cost each side; that there would be sacrifices as well as gains but that ultimately ninety nine percent of something was better than one hundred percent of nothing. In these very human processes of disappointment and reluctant acceptance, of conceding a little and gaining a little, lie insights that are very shareable with other communities who are further back down the road to peace and in need of reassurance that the journey ahead is worthwhile.
As the poet said peace does come dropping slow. And here we are just a whisper away from devolution and a new Government and a new dawn. The DUP and Sinn Fein have both indicated a willingness to make it happen and to make it work. That is welcome news for all of us who share this island and especially for the long-suffering citizens of Northern Ireland. It is no consolation but hopefully may be some kind of memorial of vindication for all those scandalously lost, wasted and broken lives. And there is another constituency watching to see if the politics of partnership and peace will make it across the line here. That constituency is in Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Myanmar, Congo, Palestine, Israel and all the other places where there is only fear and hatred and violence and no end in sight despite a clamour for peace and stability. And then there is the constituency that is our children and our grandchildren.
Recent events confirm to us that the peace process is still a work in progress. How could it be otherwise when you consider that the conflict it is attempting to resolve is more like four hundred rather than forty years old. But this is the most liberated and the best educated generation ever to inhabit this island. It has the brainpower to know the past was a mess and the skill to clean the mess up effectively. It has the heartpower to recognise the loss and waste that came out of conflict and the passion to heal and to reconcile.
Northern Ireland played Ireland’s starring role in the first industrial revolution. It has a strong entrepreneurial tradition, a rich multifaceted culture drawing on the deep wells of Irish, British and Scottish tradition. But just at the point where its most educated generation ever appeared, it slid into the Troubles and so has never until now had the chance to reveal its fullest potential, harnessing all its talent, in a unified civic society, working together in peace and partnership. In the South, though access to free second level education came twenty-five years later than in the North, there is no mystery as to what that education revolution unleashed into Irish society for the Ireland built as a result, is today the success story par excellence of the European Union. But both jurisdictions inhabit one small divided island and we have yet to see what could be accomplished if both jurisdictions worked comfortably and respectfully together for the advancement of this region and for all its inhabitants. The potential is enormous. The business communities north and south have been powerhouses of fresh energy and pragmatic thinking, seeing as they do the many benefits to be gained for both jurisdictions by working collegially.
Through the pressures for peace from so many constituencies we now have this hard-earned, miraculous chance to see what a fresh, new culture of cooperation within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between Ireland and Britain can accomplish.
A wise man once said, if you are given the opportunity of a lifetime make sure you take it in the lifetime of the opportunity. Lets hope the opportunity will be taken and that soon, very soon, Northern Ireland will become a byword for the triumph of politics.
The latest lesson from these past fraught years of peacebuilding is that there is a time for moving on and we are clearly well and truly there.
Thank you.