Give peace a chance? The Irish 'peace talks' are raising hopes: bringing peace is another matter.

DUBLIN--With Ireland fast recovering from Europe's long recession and Dublin in the grip of a better-than-usual seasonal spending spree, the week before Christmas would have been cheerful in any event. From the traditional department stores on O'Connell Street, now retreating before the garish spread of McDonald's and Burger King, to the chic pedestrian precincts around Grafton and Dawson Streets, where brand names like Gucci and Armani sprout, well-dressed crowds staggered under the weight of consumer bric-a-brac, while young people rattled collecting boxes to fight Ireland's newest plague, drug abuse. One might have been in a prosperous Swiss or German city with Swiss or German problems on its collective mind.

Such an impression is not misleading. With 6 per cent of its national income accounted for by European Community subsidies that come ultimately from the German taxpayer, Ireland feels increasingly "European" politically, economically--and morally. This means, contrary to Hilaire Belloc's claim, "Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe," that the country feels less Catholic and more liberal. The power of the Catholic bishops, who a generation ago were obeyed when they demanded the cancellation of Saturday dances to ensure attendance at Sunday morning Mass, has been vanquished by television, which is as sexually uninhibited here as elsewhere. Literary censorship, Catholic in all but name, is a dead letter. Condoms, illegal even for married couples a decade ago, are now universally available via vending machines. A new divorce law is expected to pass a referendum test next year. Although there is still a popular majority against legalizing abortion, most people feel that a combination of a liberalish establishment and the European courts will before long push through an amendment to the constitution allowing it on fairly strict terms. And the usual gay and feminist movements, advocating a morality of personal "liberation," set much of the agenda for the media and politics.

Such changes also make the country more "British"--and not only in the sense that Britain underwent the same liberal revolution in morals 25 years ago. Irish nationalism has been bound up with Catholicism since Daniel O'Connell. So, as Conor Cruise O'Brien pointed out recently in The New York Review of Books, "the weakening of Catholicism weakens nationalism also." With both sides of the Irish Sea moving in a post-religious direction, the national and cultural differences between them are growing less stark. Post-Catholic Ireland's latest heroes are pop groups like U2, actors like Daniel Day-Lewis (star of In the Name of the Father, which was premiered in Dublin), and writers like Roddy Doyle--all of them equally popular in post-Protestant Britain. Indeed, Mr. Doyle recently won Britain's literary Booker Prize for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha, Ha, Ha.

This closeness is reflected in other attitudes. A traditional question here is: "But would you want your daughter to marry one?" Dr. O'Brien quotes a major survey, Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland by Father Micheal MacGreil, which, in measuring the degree to which Irish people would welcome foreigners as close friends or family members, revealed that the "English" would be the most acceptable at 87.3 per cent, followed closely by the "British" at 82.4 per cent, with "Northern Irish" next at 77.5 per cent, significantly ahead of "Nationalists N.I." at 71.9 per cent. Irish-Americans, Dr. O'Brien notes mordantly, would be distressed to learn that "Yanks," at 69.9 per cent, score almost twenty points below the Ancient Enemy.

Hence the popular Christmas welcome in Dublin for the Downing Street Declaration, signed by British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, and designed to produce an IRA ceasefire, talks among all parties including the IRA after three months of non-violence, and, eventually, "peace." To the southern Irish the prospect of peace is almost desperately beguiling. The conflict "up there" no longer seems their quarrel; yet it is a permanent threat to their well-being. They feel less and less sympathy with the Northern Catholics, less and less desire to incorporate territory that includes so many unreasonable people driven by national and sectarian hatreds. They simply want the violence to end--and they are quick to favor anyone who seems likely to end it.

So Mr. Major suddenly became in Irish eyes a hero of a very English kind--modest, good-natured, commonsensical, and willing to compromise. The very opposite, in fact, of Mrs. Thatcher, whose harshly logical unionist rhetoric ensured that she was never popular here in spite of giving Dublin a major practical say in Northern Ireland's affairs through the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement. Mr. Major, by contrast, is more prepared to talk Dublin's language (quite literally, as we shall see) and so is seen as a good neighbor dressed up as Santa Claus with a basket full of--"peace."

Questionable Peace

PEACE, however, is a pleasant abstraction. We are all in favor of it until questions arise: Whose peace? Peace on what terms? An IRA slogan has it, for instance, that a divided Ireland can never be at peace. To the IRA, peace means calling off its terrorist campaign in return for a British-government declaration that it will deliver a united Ireland. To that the Northern Protestant majority retorts that such a united Ireland could be achieved only by a full-scale civil war: a peace of the grave.

A unionist "peace," on the other hand, would be the constitutional status quo--Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom--reinforced by the defeat, however disguised, of IRA terrorism. (And to discuss Ireland without giving full weight to the views of the Ulster Protestants, as too many American editorialists do, is like Hamlet without the grave-digger.)

That leaves the two governments, whose vision of peace is deliberately less precise but which seems to be something like an end to terrorism in return for negotiation with all parties, including the former terrorists, that could lead either to a united Ireland or to the status quo, depending on the wishes of the Northern majority. In the interim this peace would probably involve new all-Ireland political structures and joint Anglo-Irish initiatives designed to render the distinction between Irish unity and division so theoretical--in a "European context" of blurred constitutional integration all around--that there would be no point in anyone's fighting over it.

An appealing scenario. But one reason for thinking it might not be the likeliest outcome is that the pre-Christmas burst of peace euphoria was the work of, above all, the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein. Though the Downing Street declaration was crafted largely by the Irish Prime Minister, Mr. Reynolds, the political momentum behind it was created by the "Hume-Adams talks," and by the revelation that the British government has been secretly negotiating through intermediaries with the IRA since last February--both sets of talks being IRA initiatives. The negotiations with the British started from an IRA message that began: "The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to a close." The IRA disputes this wording as British disinformation suggesting an IRA surrender. But the fact that the talks continued through the Warrington and London bombings--which provoked anti-IRA demonstrations in Ireland as well as in Britain--suggests strongly that some such carrot was dangled before the Brits.

Why Peace Now?

WHY DID the IRA launch this peace offensive? The popular view in London and Dublin is that the IRA, though not actually defeated, had concluded that it could not drive the British out of Ireland by violence. Their supporters in the North were war-weary. After Warrington, the southern Irish were actively hostile to them. And the "loyalist" terrorists in Northern Ireland were increasingly efficient and well-alarmed, killing Catholics in retaliation for IRA murders on better than a 1-to-1 basis (The rise of Protestant terrorism is, as it happens, one of the unintended consequences of the Anglo-Irish agreement, which persuaded many Protestants that they Could no longer rely on Britain and must therefore fend for themselves. But in the present atmosphere of enthusiasm for peace, few want to dwell on that.)

If this rosy estimate of IRA calculations is valid, then the Downing Street declaration was a public camouflage for a surrender-in-stages by the IRA. Subsequent talks would doubtless add internal reforms favorable to Catholics in the North, but the "unionist veto" and thus the border would stay. In effect, the unionists would have won.

But there is another, more ominous, and, alas, more plausible interpretation of IRA motives. This is that they concluded that the British were sufficiently war-weary to grasp at any hint of a ceasefire. In return for such a prospect, the IRA might get status as a partner in a "dialogue" with the British government, further disillusionment with Britain on the part of the unionists, and a series of political concessions. These might be made to the IRA in direct talks, or they might be offered to proxies such as John Hume--leader of the Catholic Social-Democratic Labour Party and the leading constitutional nationalist in Northern Ireland--or to the Irish government (both of whom sometimes play "soft cop" to the IRA's "hard cop" in dealings with the Brits).

These calculations worked well--up to a point. The Downing Street declaration promoted the IRA from terrorist to political status. Both governments promised that Sinn Fein--which represents 2 per cent of voters in the Irish Republic and approximately one-third of the Catholic one-third in the North--would play a crucial role in all-party negotiations to draw up future reforms, if only it would announce a permanent end to violence. Of course, this gave the IRA a status it would be difficult to withdraw if no ceasefire was forthcoming. And the text of the declaration had more in it to persuade the IRA that events were moving in their direction, whether or not they cooperated in a ceasefire.

For although it is a carefully ambiguous balancing act--reaffirming both the Northern majority's right to stay British and the right of the minority or Dublin to press for Irish unity--the declaration's rhetoric is distinctly nationalist in tone, with phrases like "the island of Ireland" scattered throughout. Insofar as a future direction for policy can be discerned, moreover, it seems to be the gradual establishment of joint Anglo-Irish authority over Northern Ireland. Here, for instance, is paragraph four: "The role of the British Government will be to encourage, facilitate, and enable the achievement of such agreement over a period through a process of dialogue and cooperation based on full respect for the rights and identities of both traditions in Ireland. They accept that such agreement may, as of right, take the form of agreed structures for the island as a whole, including a United Ireland achieved by peaceful means."

Unexpected Acceptance

ALL IN ALL, the flavor of British-government intentions revealed in the declaration is a spiritless and reluctant shouldering of a burden it hoped might somehow be shared with others through the workings of the "peace process." This might have been expected to delight the IRA--and to dismay the unionists.

In fact, the unionists publicly accepted the declaration, to which the canny leader of the official Unionist Party, Jim Molyneux, may have contributed a phrase or two. There were even statesmanlike endorsements of it from loyalist terror organizations, on the hard-headed grounds that its concessions to Irish nationalism were purely rhetorical. Only the Reverend lan Paisley of the splinter Democratic-Unionist Party (DUP) came out in full-blooded opposition to it as a shameful sellout to Fenianism. But Dr. Paisley is so associated with explosions of outrage that a sardonic Daily Mirror reporter was able to respond: "So it's a cautious welcome, then."

Dr. Paisley's honest outburst, however, almost certainly reflected not only the reaction of his constituents, but also the private calculations of other unionist leaders. So what is going on? The best guess is that the unionists reckon this latest "peace process" will, like all the earlier ones, run into the sand, and they don't wish to be blamed for that failure. They will keep their powder dry for the negotiations--if any--in three months' time.

For the declaration is extremely popular in Britain and, more significantly, in the Irish Republic. An Irish Independent poll, conducted in the Republic immediately after the declaration's signing, showed that 97 per cent of those questioned thought the IRA should give up its campaign of violence; 70 per cent said their preferred solution was a negotiated settlement accommodating the unionists (as against only 30 per cent who favored a united Ireland); and only 28 per cent would be prepared to pay higher taxes to sustain a united Ireland.

Given these figures, all the parties now supporting the declaration, including both governments, make a transparent calculation: Once the IRA calls off its campaign of violence, it will face popular opposition too strong to renew it. If it does not, the two governments will have popular support in bringing in a strong security crackdown. It is a win--win situation.

Perhaps it will turn out that way. Let us hope so. It is not impossible. But there are reasons for skepticism. To begin with, as the labyrinthine calculations of all the parties suggest, the declaration is a fragile document. It cannot be modified, or even interpreted, without upsetting this balance. Mr. Reynolds caused the first such upset a few days after the signing when he told an interviewer that any settlement would probably include an amnesty for convicted IRA terrorists. This outraged the unionists, and the British government promptly denied any such possibility--a denial later qualified by vague talk of "parole."

First reactions from the IRA--which have included the bombing of a police station and the murder of a soldier--suggest that they see a way to exploit this fragility. A meeting of Sinn Fein and IRA activists, some of them on Christmas parole from prison, came up with the idea of neither accepting nor rejecting the declaration, but instead seeking to "tease out" its implications while continuing the terror campaign. If the two governments were to yield to this temptation--Mr. Major has rejected the idea out of hand--perhaps by publicly teasing out new implications through John Hume as a sort of intermediary, that would have the additional benefit for Irish nationalists of driving the Protestants into an unpopular intransigence.

But will not public opinion also condemn the IRA for its continued terrorism? Certainly, but perhaps not where it counts--among Ulster Catholics. In the last twenty years, a gradual ethnic cleansing has produced a segregated Northern Ireland. Ninety per cent of the people live in communities that are almost wholly Catholic (nationalist) or Protestant (unionist). Partly as a result, the province has been much less influenced by the post-religious liberalism that has rendered the rest of the British Isles less fervently nationalist. Even the war-weary majority in these segregated communities is more susceptible to nationalist appeals and, among Catholics, less prepared to assist the Royal Ulster Constabulary or the British army. The minority that will actively help the IRA--or, in today's circumstances, "understand" its decision to keep bombing--is a significant one. Even were that not so, a terrorist organization has an advantage in negotiating with a democratic government: it is better able to ignore public opinion.

Mr. Major, having talked up the "peace process," will find it difficult to resist any interpretation that the Irish government and John Hume tease out of the declaration in order to entice the IRA to the negotiating table. If that happens and talks are held, he will be unable to quarrel seriously with Mr. Reynolds. If talks should fail because of British disagreements with the Irish government, Mr. Major will be seen by much of public opinion to be "prolonging the conflict" (probably on the grounds that he should have stood up to the unionists). And in the event of such failure, the British army will be fighting an enemy which its own government has substantially legitimized.

This puts Mr. Reynolds, assisted by Mr. Hume, in a strong position. Without saying so, he probably hopes to confuse the unionists into a united Ireland via a constitutional maze of joint authorities over many years--if the IRA will step aside and let this happen. This is a fantasy, though a relatively benign one. There are only two ways in which a united Ireland can be established. The first is when nationalism in Ireland has become so much a matter of cultural nostalgia that no one strongly opposes Irish unity because no one passionately desires it. That still seems a long way off.

The second route is if the British government were to expel a million of its citizens from the United Kingdom and the British army were to force them into a united Ireland--a course of action that would require more British troops than now to suppress a larger guerrilla force), involve many more deaths, and demand a great deal more money from the British (and probably the American) taxpayer. That eventuality is likely to be even more delayed than the first.

Mere withdrawal by the British army (which the latest IRA statements seem to be demanding as the minimum price for a ceasefire), far from producing a united Ireland, would postpone it forever by provoking a full-scale civil war, the expulsion of Protestants from the border areas and of Catholics from Belfast, and the establishment of a smaller but permanent Protestant garrison state.

Unaccountable, Irresponsible

AS WELL as resting on various fantasies, the peace process obstructs policies that really might improve Northern Ireland, since all reforms are being kept on hold until they can be discussed in negotiations that include Sinn Fein. Yet, as Simon Jenkins points out in an original analysis in the London Spectator, many of the province's problems stem from the fact that its politicians are excluded from responsibility for day-to-day government and so from real accountability to the people. Housing, town planning, education, libraries, etc. have been removed from local governments--because the British did not trust local sectarian majorities to govern local minorities fairly--and placed in the hands of appointed boards responsible to Whitehall. As a result, Northern Irish politics is either confined to local trivialities--or diverted into stirring up sectarian passions on the national question.

As Mr. Jenkins points out, however, the paradoxical result of the segregation that has taken place in the last two decades is that local governments, may now be safely restored (within carefully drawn boundaries) since there are very few local minorities to oppress. Normal politics might then revive as the voters and politicians argued over roads and schools--and the importance of terrorists would be correspondingly reduced.

Sensible though it is, Mr. Jenkins's approach cannot work if terrorism continues unabated. Nothing can. Law and order will remain the responsibility of the two central governments, which have so far shirked the only measure likely to restore it: the internment of both IRA and loyalist terrorists. But people are more likely to accept internment if the IRA rejects this last chance for "peace" and carries on bombing. Although Mr. Reynolds has already ruled out internment in the Republic as part of any security crackdown, the changed moral atmosphere of Irish politics gives Mr. Major some leverage here. Whether or not he can persuade Dublin to join him, he will not encounter strong southern-Irish hostility if he puts away Catholic and Protestant terrorists at the same time as he extends real local power to Catholic and Protestant politicians. This is likely to prove a more fruitful approach to restoring normality in Northern Ireland than the pursuit of a "peace" that is in the end dependent upon the IRA's favor and thus a permanent excuse for British passivity on security and reform.

Much of the world thinks the problem is that Britain is governing Northern Ireland; the real problem is that Britain refuses to do just that.