Good Friday Agreements, Now As Then

In this week's Catholic Herald, Kevin Myers writes:

On April 10 falls the 10th anniversary of the day that the various parties in Northern Ireland, and the British and Irish governments, finally hammered out the details of an agreement which was to end the province's troubles. Many critics said at the time, and others have come to concur, that the agreement sets in stone the divisions within Northern Ireland. It has turned religion from being just a denominational and theological matter into a permanent political identity. Even the names by which the accord is known symbolise the province's enduring divisions.

To Northern Ireland unionists, the accord of 10 years ago is known as the Belfast Agreement; to Irish nationalists, it is the Good Friday Agreement. This latter wording follows the debased nationalist tradition of giving religious titles to secular and political events. The Easter Rising of 1916 is the quintessence of this perversion. Contrary to what most people believe today, the first victims of the Rising were unarmed Irish civilians, unarmed Irish policemen and Irish soldiers, all killed by the insurgents, aptly fulfilling the demented prophecy of the Rising's leader, Patrick Pearse: "In the beginning, we may kill the wrong people." (Though I'm not sure whom even God in his wisdom would have identified as the "right people" to kill.)

How debased and meaningless must be that grasp of Christianity which sanctifies the butchery of the innocents of Dublin with the very name of the greatest and most awe-inspiring event in the entire Christian calendar: the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Redeemer of Mankind, three days after his own murder? So was that what Calvary what was all about: Jesus dying on the Cross and being resurrected in order to provide a divine authorisation for Irishmen to kill fellow Irishmen 2,000 years later? To use Christ's torment and death for such purposes is nothing less than pagan blasphemy, murderous sacrilege and political simony.

The exploitation of the Easter symbolism to justify both the 1916 Rising, and all the murders which that foul event inspired down the decades, is so ingrained in the nationalist psyche it is no longer remarked upon. So it was almost as a matter of course that the conclusion of years of protracted and agonising negotiation, which coincidentally occurred on a Good Friday, should be known by that title by nationalists. After all, they rejoice at Easter, not because Jesus Christ has risen from the dead on that day, but because this was the day when Irish republicans formally removed one of the commandments from the Decalogue.

In the 10 years that have elapsed since then, the IRA has not gone away, nor has it totally disarmed, nor has it ceased to kill. Even while nationalists commemorated the religious anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, Irish police were arresting yet more suspected IRA men in connection with the Northern Bank robbery of three years ago, which netted the Sinn Fein-IRA movement £27 million. Meanwhile the compromises made to keep Sinn Fein-IRA in countenance, regardless of all else, have effectively destroyed the centrist parties of the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Left standing are the two groups which have been the authors of so much misery, bigotry and suffering down the decades: Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and of course, the political arm of the IRA, Sinn Fein.

Power in Northern Ireland now belongs to a republican Tonton Macoute, and a semi-religious political sect. But it is only power in the most etiolated sense, for these ugly, conjoined sisters cannot actually govern. They have no consensus or programme. They spend, but they cannot rule: and meanwhile, peace-lines, 12 ft-high walls dividing the communities, spread through Belfast like fissures in a cracked cup. Ten years ago there were 18 of them in Belfast; now there are 40, stretching 13 miles, keeping Catholic and Protestant not merely physically apart, but out of sight of one another.

But surely the Belfast Agreement has brought peace to Northern Ireland? No it has not. Peace was a certainty. The IRA campaign had largely been halted by the penetration of the IRA's structure by British intelligence. Indeed, the obsequies upon the IRA campaign could have been pronounced at least a decade earlier if the Irish Republic had shown the necessary political courage and had ruthlessly cracked down on the IRA in border areas, especially around the republican heartland of South Armagh.

So what the Belfast Agreement actually did achieve was to give a lifeline to Sinn Fein-IRA. Its leadership now has the power to decide whether to allow policing to devolve to the Northern Ireland Executive (which, however, can agree on almost nothing). Irish President Mary McAleese announced during the Queen's recent visit to Belfast that Her Majesty would not be invited to the Republic until this had happened. Apart from this being an astounding departure from both basic good manners and presidential protocol - the Irish head of state does not make such pronouncements on policy, any more than does the British monarch - this means one extraordinary thing. The furthering of good relations between the two common-law Anglophone states of the EU is now dependent upon the whim of the leaders of Ireland's Tonton Macoute, the army council of the IRA. Like the multiplying peace-lines across the city, that is just one of the grotesque legacies of what was agreed in Belfast, on April 10, 1998. Only the victim of the first Good Friday Agreement - the one to spare Barabbas - knows what all the others might turn out to be.