"We Wrecked the Place": Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles.

"I WAS offered a sabbatical in any trouble-spot of my choosing," a foreign journalist observed to me last year. "I thought about Bosnia and Rwanda, but in the end I opted for Northern Ireland." I was less than astonished: when it comes to tribal warfare, for a quarter of a century Northern Ireland has offered the safest and most rewarding game in town.

The attractions are myriad. Intellectually it is satisfyingly intractable and forever confounds the experts; the natives speak English and enjoy talking about themselves; the restaurants are good, the hotels comfortable, and transport and telecommunications services first class; and even at the height of the Troubles paramilitaries tried to avoid killing those who came to study them. As a bonus there is abroad a mistaken notion -- even since the ceasefire -- that it is a dangerous place to visit: the returned traveler will earn almost as much kudos for his bravery as if he had been dodging machetes on the Zairean border.

No wonder that Northern Ireland has been dissected by hundreds of foreign journalists, economists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists. No wonder either that the Northern Irish people have come to think themselves unique and endlessly fascinating.

"They became spoiled and expected special treatment," notes American journalist Jonathan Stevenson, who has lived in Belfast since 1993. The Troubles had convinced them that "sectarian conflict was an immutable law of their unique nature" and allowed them self-importantly "to celebrate their stoicism and their strife and to solicit pity from the rest of the world." Once the killing stopped, they were obliged "to awake to their own foolishness."

Not all of them, unfortunately. As the IRA has demonstrated in the months since Stevenson finished his book, it cannot come to terms with the frustrations of democracy: no more than an old-style Marxist can most republican activists face the truth that their ends have been unrealistic and their means wicked. With a substantial majority of the people of Northern Ireland wishing to stay part of the United Kingdom, and with the British and Irish governments committed to the principle of majority consent, a United Ireland cannot in the foreseeable future be achieved through the democratic process. It cannot be achieved through terrorism either, but many republicans hang onto the illusion that it can.

Kevin McQuillan, one of the many ex-prisoners Stevenson interviewed, denounced the peace process savagely: "At the end of the day, what's it going to get us, after 25 years of horrendous sacrifice, struggle, and suffering we have had to endure, as well as the suffering we have made other people endure? It's going to end up with the republican family becoming partitionist republicans."

Unduly sanguine, Stevenson thinks McQuillan's views untypical. Like many other commentators, he hopes the bomb that broke the ceasefire on February 9, 1996, at Canary Wharf in London was an aberration --planted, as he puts it, by terrorists whose "devotion is merely to the IRA itself, and to the posterity of rebellion for its own sake." Sadly, it is increasingly clear that this remains the cast of mind of many IRA members. And since Sinn Fein/IRA are programmed against a split, the hardliners carry the day.

Yet though recent violence has somewhat undermined Stevenson's hope that Northern Irish society can grow away from the victim mentality (nationalists think themselves oppressed, while unionists feel besieged), this subtracts little from his book, which is built around extensive interviews with 32 IRA and loyalist ex-paramilitaries and a supporting cast of constitutional characters. Writing with an eye to an American readership, Stevenson assumes no prior knowledge: the interviews are placed cleverly in their historical, political, and psychological context, every necessary fact is pithily provided in illuminating footnotes, and several times a position that seems bafflingly irrational is elucidated by a telling international comparison.

Intellectually rigorous, the book is a comprehensive and brilliant blend of information, analysis, and insight, written with sharpness and wit: it not only would give someone who knew nothing of the problem a first-class grasp of its essence, but also in its freshness and iconoclasm has much to offer even the best informed. If I had to recommend one of the thousands of books on Northern Ireland, I would choose this.

Stevenson was a successful New York lawyer for several years before he became a journalist, and it shows. The virtues and vices, achievements and failures, hopes and fears, and self-justifications of unionists and nationalists in general, and loyalists and republicans in particular, are subjected to scrutiny by a cold and detached intellect -- albeit one with imagination and a passion for truth. The British and Irish governments too come under tough criticism.

Starting out objectively, Stevenson has ended his time in Northern Ireland with more sympathy for loyalist than republican arguments. But that was inevitable, for as his interviewees demonstrate over and over again, not only do loyalists have the better case, but they have thought it through for themselves and do not take refuge in romanticism or sentimentality.

When Catholic sectarian murderers went to jail in the 1970s, they were indoctrinated with republican ideology, subjected to authoritarian discipline, and harnessed to the fight against the state through strategically directed disobedience, blanket protests, and even hunger strikes. Their Protestant counterparts --disoriented by being imprisoned by the very state to which they were intensely loyal -- took refuge in education and religion: through painful self-examination and argument, loyalists developed their attitudes to politics individually. Among the consequences of these two differing experiences are that unlike many loyalists, most republicans have no remorse for their past actions, have no moral objections to political violence, and suffer from massive self-delusion: in paradoxical consequence, they are brilliant propagandists.

Stevenson critically addresses republican and loyalist misconceptions (for example, that Protestants have no culture and that republicans are subservient to the Catholic Church), class issues (how the nationalist and unionist middle classes flourished while leaving the nasty business to the working classes), and financial and military realities. He is particularly good on the paradoxes. For instance, because republican ex-prisoners are widely accepted in their community as folk heroes, when it comes to elections they "have a ready constituency, but they are dispositionally unsuited to statesmanship without bombs . . . Conversely, the new loyalists have the right attitude for normal politics, but they lack the constituency," for unionists are law-abiding and disapprove of terrorism even when it is pro-state.

Looking to the community as a whole, "The problem in Northern Ireland," says Stevenson, "is not that Catholics and Protestants can't live together . . . The problem is that they have been content to live together and remain willfully ignorant about each other --in particular about how similar they are." Worse than that, the British and Irish governments, eternally these days trying together to work out some compromise that will magically satisfy the center and the extremes, are ignorant too.

They could all learn much from Jonathan Stevenson. However, you can bet your shirt that while loyalists will read him, republicans will avoid his book on principle.