Hopefully, Good Friday

The hard-won settlement reached on Northern Ireland is a historic breakthrough which gives peace a real chance after three decades of violen...

The hard-won settlement reached on Northern Ireland is a historic breakthrough which gives peace a real chance after three decades of violence and mayhem. It provides for trust in place of hate and for hope instead of despair. It gives both sides of what has for so long appeared as an unbridgeable divide, Republicans and Unionists, the chance to look with optimism towards the future. It is not going to be easy to throw off the burdens of the past, such a long past, with the sorrows and triumphs of South and North, Catholic and Protestant, richly and perhaps uniquely memorialised in the literature of the whole English-speaking world. Here is an agreement which asks everyone to put aside all that and to adopt new ways of thinking. Can it be done? Given time and courage on all sides, the peace pact can work. Today, things are very finely poised between success and failure but there is more reason to be hopeful than there has been in a long, long time.

The centrepiece of the Good Friday agreement is mutualconsent in arriving at any decision now and in the future about Northern Ireland which will see big changes in its governing structure. The principle is given institutional muscle, so to speak, in a North-South council. This cross-border organisation will have Republicans and Unionists working together in certain specified areas. Although whether the council will eventually have legislative powers has not been decided, the mere existence of such an institution is an achievement. It demands that both sides talk about ordinary, everyday matters with each other and then get to know each other not as combatants but as partners working for common aims. This is the area where hope resides. And this is where new chapters of Irish history will come to be written. The elected Assembly for Northern Ireland on the basis of proportional representation and proposed referenda are other promising elements in the peace pact. Northern Ireland remains a British province but with its own assembly restored and greater Catholicparticipation, it can hope to be governed in a more truly democratic fashion.

It is best, nevertheless, to be realistic and not expect sweetness and light to break out overnight everywhere. Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, and David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, can hardly bring themselves to speak to each other as yet. Extremists on the fringes of the Republican and Unionist parties still threaten to wreck the peace. So, it will be a long, slow, hard haul but it will be worth every minute of it. It is a fragile peace based on incomplete guarantees to give up violence by the IRA and the Protestant armies. The pace of decommissioning of arms is controversial and the process fraught with trouble. But the governments of Britain and the Irish Republic are backing the peace pact to the hilt and the Clinton Administration which has made strenuous efforts to bring it about is committed to it. They can be counted on to do their utmost and to use all their authority to make the agreements stick. Once, wheneverything changed quot;utterlyquot; in Ireland, WB Yeats sang in Easter 1916: quot;A terrible beauty is bornquot;. Let men make the adjective redundant.