Graffiti on a wall in the mainly Catholic area of West Belfast
Jef McAllister: It's hard to tell, because we have what appears to be significant movement on the part of the IRA on the issue of decommissioning, which had put the future of the process in jeopardy. The international commission that was set up to deal with the issue has said they've held serious talks with the IRA, and that they like the solution the IRA is proposing. The IRA doesn't like to use the term "disarmament" because they say they were never defeated in war, and to hand their weapons over to the Brits would be an insult. So their euphemism is to "put them beyond use," meaning they can bury or destroy them or whatever. Nobody has yet revealed what they have proposed.
There's an urgency to the question because Sunday is a key deadline: Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble has resigned as the territory's first minister (in protest against the IRA's failure to decommission its weapons) and by Sunday he has to either reconsider, or else Britain has to dissolve the institutions of home rule and restore direct rule from London, which would be a setback. They could also call new elections to the Northern Ireland assembly, but that could be disastrous because it could see gains made by the hard-liners on both sides of the divide.
The British and Irish governments have tried to save the process by proposing ways of giving concessions to the IRA in order to get concessions from them. The IRA is good at making statements that sound like breakthroughs, but until there's beef in the form of actual disarmament, the Unionists are rightly skeptical. But the British and Irish governments have probably worked out some choreography with the IRA to turn the promise into action. Clearly something is happening, but we don't exactly know what it is.
Will the political climate in Northern Ireland right now help restore the peace or militate against it?
Right now, the Unionists are warring among themselves. It has always been difficult to bring them together behind the peace process, and the fact that there's been no decommissioning of IRA weapons two years after the Good Friday Agreement has created growing sourness among the Unionists towards the peace process. Sinn Fein did better than ever in the June election, and in the long run Unionists fear the Sinn Fein is going to become the major opposition party in Northern Ireland without ever having given up the guns. So some are inclined to simply stop the process, which they see as delivering Northern Ireland slowly to the Republicans. The mood in the territory is ugly this summer, with low-key incidents of violence. The question now is whether the latest IRA move is simply a ruse to put pressure on the Unionists and reach out to moderates, or whether they're serious.
What's the alternative if the process fails?
Well, there is no real stomach for war in Northern Ireland. The guys who have been at this since the beginning are grandfathers now. They have a younger generation attracted to some degree, but the economy has been doing well, foreign investment is coming in, the Irish economy is the fastest growing in Europe. People know it's stupid to keep blowing each other up. The context has changed since 10 years ago. So although there are a few people willing to commit stupid acts of violence, there's no desire to rekindle a major conflict. The question is not whether to make peace. Peace is already a reality. The question is how to make it stick and stop it sliding back into low-level violence. And if the home rule institutions fail, it will certainly be a setback. The mood is grumpy and dyspeptic — it needs a breakthrough.