Have they done it again? That was the question on everyone's mind. More than once over the last few years has the peace process in Northern Ireland appeared to be in extreme peril, only to be rescued at seemingly the last possible moment. With the release of a joint statement entitled "The Way Forward" on July 2, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern held their breaths and hoped that this would turn out to be just another of those times.
The failure of the political parties in Northern Ireland to reach agreement on forming an executive for their new Assembly by the deadline of July 1 was the proximate cause of the statement's existence. This failure, depending upon whom one asks, was either the fault of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the largest pro-British party in the province, or of the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party. What was certain beyond any possible doubt, however, was that it was now the UUP squarely upon the political hot seat.
The argument between Sinn Fein and the UUP lies in bunkers hidden all over Ireland on both sides of the border. In these bunkers is the vast arsenal of weapons held by the IRA. For more than 25 years they were used as part of the republican movement's struggle to reunite Ireland, a struggle that was revived in the Catholic ghettos of the north in 1969. It was in that year that a peaceful Civil Rights movement was crushed by the joint efforts of the RUC, Northern Ireland's police force, and Protestant mobs. In the flames and destruction that followed, many young Catholic men and women found that the best way to defend their communities was to join the ranks of the IRA.
More than 25 years later, with the IRA plainly unable to drive the British out of Ireland, these Catholic communities were ready to seek peace. When Britain announced that it no longer had any selfish interests in Northern Ireland, the republican movement was ready to call a halt to its guerrilla campaign and to begin the peace process. As the past few years have clearly shown, the pro-British unionists (or loyalists) were completely unprepared for the events that would follow. Having grown comfortable bunkering down in what they felt was the moral high ground, and failing to recognize that times have greatly changed, they have kept to their "Not an Inch" motto and have had to be dragged along with the rest of the peace train, complaining all the while.
