The debacle at Stormont was a blow to the peace process that had brought Northern Ireland to the brink of self-government for the first time in 25 years. The Assembly has been sitting as a shadow legislature for a year. It managed to agree on hiking members’ mileage allowance, but the dominant Ulster Unionists were unwilling to let Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, sit on the cabinetlike executive unless they had a firm guarantee that the IRA would begin to turn in its weapons. Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble said that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had failed to produce “even a vestige of proof” that terrorists would disarm. With that, Trimble announced that his party was boycotting Stormont, and he urged that the whole process be “parked” for the summer.
Is peace dead? Almost certainly not. What Stormont showed was just how fragile institutions can be in Northern Ireland, where power sharing is as young as sectarian strife is old. The current peace process, which began five years ago, was not really institutionalized until May of last year, when 71 percent of the voters of Northern Ireland approved the Good Friday Agreement. That “massive consensus,” Mowlam said last Thursday, “puts today’s setback, serious though it is, in perspective.” The bigger picture is encouraging, says Alan Gillespie, chairman of the Industrial Development Board for Northern Ireland. “After 25 years of pretty outrageous violence and bloodshed,” he says, “there has been an increased level of normality–not just in a social sense, but also in an economic and business sense. Northern Ireland is no longer in the headlines for violence.”
That’s not hollow boosterism. The peace process, along with two ceasefires since 1994, have made it possible for the Northern Ireland economy to grow faster than that of any other region in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. Unemployment is at its lowest point (7.3 percent) since record-keeping began. Real-estate prices rose 10 percent in the past year, and manufacturing output has grown at twice the national rate in recent years. Belfast’s look is changing rapidly. The city now boasts pricey waterfront apartments, and the city’s downtown has been rejuvenated. Just a day before the mess at Stormont, an Irish developer announced a £400 million shopping complex in the heart of Belfast. Northern Ireland is also basking in the glow of the republic’s booming economy. “You’ve got to put politics in perspective,” says Chris Gibson, Northern Ireland chairman of the Confederation of British Industry. “What drives people are the things that put money in their pockets.”
Blair has vowed to press on with the painstaking peace process, despite the setback in Stormont. This week he and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, will meet with George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator who helped hammer the Good Friday Agreement into existence. They will seek to enlist Mitchell’s help in a “review” of the agreement–not a renegotiation, they insist–in order to get the shambled executive back on its feet, and to resolve the dispute over disarming paramilitaries. The Anglo-Irish initiative could be frustrated once again by Trimble. At the end of last week he said he wanted face-to-face talks among the Northern Ireland political parties on their own, to avoid “running” to London and Dublin for answers over the summer. The “parking” process can accommodate this kind of political maneuvering. What it cannot accommodate is a return to violence, which would shatter the two-year-old ceasefire. This summer’s “marching season” has been remarkably free of bloodshed; in the past, Protestant parades through Catholic neighborhoods have been flash points for violence. That good news didn’t get much air time last week as the wanna-be Northern Ireland Assembly collapsed into farce. But if the ceasefire holds, the summer of 1999 might just be remembered as a season of peace rather than for the one day in July when a bad vaudeville troupe played Stormont.
