It appears as if Northern Irish
politics needs to be shut down and re-booted. To add to the growing list of
seemingly insurmountable challenges – welfare reform, dealing with the legacy
of the past, and identity and culture – to name but a few, last month's report
on paramilitary activity, ordered by the Secretary of State, Theresa Villiers,
has further hampered political progress.
The report was commissioned
following the Ulster Unionist Party's graceless exit from the
Executive, undertaken as an act of protest in response to the 'news' that the
IRA structures of the 1990's remain intact. The report confirms the Chief
Constable's statement, and indeed, what almost every conscious member of
Northern Irish society knows: paramilitaries remain a part of Northern
Ireland's social and political landscape.
Intense talks – which, we are
told- are our only hope of ‘saving’ a broken system, once again dominate the
news. Why are we at this point of deadlock? Seventeen years after the historic
Good Friday Agreement, which won Ulster Unionist Party and Social Democratic
and Labour Party leaders the Nobel Peace prize for their role in shaping it,
the major Unionist parties have awoken, as if from a moral coma, and begun to
question the continued existence of the IRA.
As is so often the case, whilst David Trimble and
John Hume won notoriety as committed peace-builders in 1998, women had broken
the path long before them. Some 22 years earlier, in 1976, Mairead
Maguire and Betty
Williams, founders of the Peace People movement, became
Nobel Peace laureates for their pioneering efforts in advancing nonviolent
modes of resistance and change. Having been at the sharp end of much of the
physical and psychological traumas of the conflict, it was women who worked to
develop solutions.
Yet when we return to the
current, gendered
‘peace’, the murder of former IRA member, Kevin McGuigan, on 13th August,
has brought the Stormont Executive to the point of collapse, as the Chief
Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland stated, in response to the
killing that, "some of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) structure from the 1990s
remains broadly in place" but its purpose "has radically changed
since this period."
This came as news to the DUP and
UUP, who, despite having access to the publicly available, and indeed costly
(running to £600,000 per annum), Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) reports
which, from 2004-2011, totalled twenty six in number and repeatedly emphasised
that the Provisional IRA had not "gone away", were shocked into
action by the Chief Constable's words.
It is more surprising that the
Unionist parties needed a new report to tell them what was already widely
known. In 2011, the IMC even praised "the very considerable progress
PIRA had made to follow a political path." Nevertheless, the UUP have
transformed this killing into a lever of power.
We are left, then, with half a
government. The UUP refuse to re-enter Stormont until Sinn Fein admit that the
Provisional IRA still exist. What this will achieve is anyone's guess.
Meanwhile, the DUP, after several weeks of toying with the Ministerial spaces
which they occupied, are back to work.
Stormont. Photo: flickr
What has not yet been discussed
is how we move beyond moralising about paramilitary groups, with Mike
Nesbitt simply insisting they should "go away, and take their flags
with them." These organisations (Ulster Volunteer Force, Ulster Defence
Association and Provisional Irish Republican Army), in whatever guise,
have been part of loyalist and republican areas since the beginning of the
Troubles.
They shaped the war and, despite
the consternation of middle-class Unionists, their participation was necessary
to end it and begin to build peace. Only the men (and it's always men) with
guns can lay down the guns. Calls for them to "go away", then, are
redundant.
Back in the real world, where
the NHS is chronically
under-funded, where food bank use
and homelessness
is on the rise, those with the power and resources to do so must call a halt to
the politics of self-interest which have failed the people of Northern Ireland.
What is needed is a new,
political agreement, which brings to the table all sections of Northern Irish
society. After the release of the report on paramilitaries, the Progressive
Unionist Party called upon the First and Deputy First Ministers of the Northern
Ireland Executive to resign from their
roles, and for the Good Friday Agreement to be revisited, and a new system of
government and opposition to be crafted.
Billboard promoting the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, 1998. Photo: CAIN
This new agreement could
re-calibrate our political system, and perhaps even see votes cast along class
lines, as opposed to the 'ethnic tribune' voting which has characterised, and
damaged, so much of post-Agreement Northern Ireland.
A new dispensation might go
further, and commit itself to principles of participatory democracy, which sees
individual participation by citizens in political decisions and policies that
affect their lives, especially directly rather than through elected
representatives.
More specifically, it would
firmly locate women at the centre of conflict transformation and peace-building
strategies, as the UN Resolution 1325 outlined was not only a right, but an
imperative to building a sustainable peace. The destruction of the Civic
Forum, a mechanism for ensuring widespread participation in politics, must
be reversed, and new modes of engagement made a priority.
This measure would counter the
current, widespread reluctance to engage in formal politics. It would also bring
in the many, committed groups and individuals operating in the community and
voluntary sectors, who are facing destruction via waves of austerity.
Such “meaningful
participation”, at an everyday and structural level, would begin to rectify
the harms visited against many, particularly women, as peace has been negotiated
above and around them.
Smaller, political parties and
their members could participate in this new system. Workers, students, women's
groups and refugees could deliberate upon, and shape policy, as
opposed to being represented and/or ignored by middle-aged men with no
understanding of their lived experiences. The “incomplete peace” offered by
elites has brought little dividends to deprived areas, whilst Northern Ireland
remains a cold house for women seeking reproductive
rights and recognition.
Yet we must not take this to
mean that peace cannot mean a just and equitable society. Peace can be positive,
and can include the currently marginalised, the disenchanted and the voiceless.
Above all, in our political vision for this region, must sit a shared
commitment to ensure that the horrors of the past do not ever happen again.
As Betty Williams outlined in
her Nobel acceptance speech, “every death in
every war that was ever fought represents life needlessly wasted, a mother's
labour spurned." She also said that, “The Nobel Peace Prize is not awarded
for what one has done, but hopefully what one will do.”
There is much
more to be done. Yet the work of women and grassroots activists has limited
scope whilst they are excluded from power. To truly transform our society and
address the social, economic and cultural injustices visited on so many, we
must include women at every level.
In short, this must be the last engineered 'crisis' to
threaten the Northern Irish peace process. People have waited too long,
accepted too little, and have been failed too abjectly for this to continue.
Re-work the Good Friday Agreement. Bring everyone to the table. And begin to
build a just and peaceful society.