One troubled family.

Against the bloody background of "the Troubles" that have been raging in Northern Ireland over the past quarter-century, the announcement last August of a unilateral and open-ended cessation of hostilities by the IRA was welcome news indeed. The more recent announcement of a permanent cease-fire by the Combined Loyalist Military Command, the umbrella organization that combines the Ulster Freedom Fighters and the Ulster Volunteer Force, is even more heartening.

Nationalists seeking the reunification of the six counties of Northern Ireland with the Republic may now be afforded a place at the conference table to discuss their political objectives, for they have--in the words of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams--pledged their "firm intention to see the gun removed permanently from Irish politics." By spending time at the table with Nationalists and with representatives of the Irish Republic, Unionists now seeking to remain with the United Kingdom may receive sufficient assurances that their communal identity and all of their civil and political rights will be fully protected in any new arrangements for the future of Ireland. In the words of the statement accompanying the Unionist cease-fire, the people of Northern Ireland are "on the threshold of a new and exciting beginning, with our battles in the future being political battles.... Let us firmly resolve to respect our differing views of freedom, culture, and aspiration, and never again permit our political circumstances to degenerate into bloody warfare."

To apply John Hobbes's famous description of human nature to the Irish question, for the people of Northern Ireland, the past twenty-five years have been nasty and brutish, but not short. If anything has been very long for these people, it is the relentless memory of past injustices. Nationalists and Unionists alike nurture their different versions of centuries-old grievances, not to the expiation of their grief, but to the extension of their pain. The grief of Nationalists is never diminished, only exacerbated, by the constant drumbeat of the Orangemen each summer recalling the victory of their Dutch Protestant hero, William of Orange, over the last Catholic king of england, James II. And the anguish of a Unionist mother who has lost her only son in a senseless pub bombing cannot be justified by Nationalist recollections of colonial domination going back to Henry II or the other things on the too-long list of injuries inflicted over the centuries.

One of the ancient Irish Brehon laws limited recovery in the settlement of a debt. No creditor was allowed to take a debtor's book, sword, harp, or plow. Sad to say, this ancient custom was abrogated when the British monarchy extended its imperial rule in Ireland, and literally took away the book, the harp, the sword, and the plow from the conquered Irish. Deprived of their books, is it any wonder that some of the Irish nurtured one-sided oral memories of the past? And with the theft of their swords, is it any wonder that some of the natives eventually turned to the gun and the bomb? Left bereft of a sense of security in their own homes--folks on the Shankhill Road do not regard the occupying British Army as a peacekeeping force--these citizens of Northern Ireland saw little in their external reality to call into doubt the truth of the ancient myths about the foreign conqueror.

As long as the collective memories went unchallenged either by competing versions of the same story or by the radical breakthrough toward repudiation of violence of the last several months, was it any wonder that conflicted Irishmen inflicted brutish violence on one another over the past quarter-century? John Hume, chair of the Social Democratic and Labor party, noted recently that over half of the 3,106 who lost their lives in the past twenty years in Northern Ireland were ordinary civilians going about their business. As Hume rightly observed, "All of those people who lost their lives were human beings. All of their families suffered the same sense of loss and grief. All are victims of our history and our failure to solve our problems."

Only now that the reality in Northern Ireland is beginning to change can the myths be reshaped. Still, now is not the moment for premature pronouncements of "peace in our time." As London and Dublin both know, the road to the conference table is still pocked with great potholes. Bosnia and Rwanda remind us of that every day. Even though the Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, was able to reach a new level of accord with British Prime Minister John Major in the historic Downing Street Declaration last December, Reynolds recently suggested that it may take another quarter-century before all the issues of Northern Ireland are finally resolved peacefully. But the stunning breakthroughs in Israel and South Africa also remind us of the possibility of success. At least the road ahead in Northern Ireland now has greater promise at its end than the previous standoff and slaughter. So neither is this a moment for failure of nerve to seize the precious opportunity that the ceasefire presents.

Those who are committed to the status quo of the appalling violence in Northern Ireland will now attempt to sabotage the peace before it has a chance to succeed, much in the style of the hawkish hardliners among Israelis and Palestinians who remain opposed to the peace process there. For example, Dr. Ian Paisley, chair of the Democratic Unionist party, responded to the IRA cease-fire, "I see no suggestion whatsoever of a permanent cessation of violence." There are none so blind as those who refuse to open their eyes. Rather than call upon his own followers to lay down their arms, Paisley forecast a full-scale civil war and accused Britain of having betrayed the Unionists by "selling out to the IRA" and "pandering to the government of the Irish Republic."

Such talk is a distraction from the urgent task of ending the conflict in a way that ensures it does not erupt again. Opponents of peace in Ireland can be counted on to rev up their old resentments and to point accusing fingers. But as they insist on rehashing old and unhelpful questions about who started what first and who replied with more excessive force, saner minds should repudiate their arrogant, smug commitment to continued mutual self-destruction.

The Irish are a profoundly dysfunctional family. That, at least, is the view of Ivor Browne, a distinguished Irish psychiatrist who nearly twenty years ago characterized the situation in the North with this metaphor. Last February, Dr. John Alderdice, a Belfast psychiatrist, son of a Presbyterian preacher, and the chair of the Alliance party--a smaller but calmer group of Unionists than Paisley's Democratic Unionist party--also employed this metaphor in his address at the Waldorf-Astoria Conference on Northern Ireland. Any metaphor for a sociopolitical reality as complicated as Northern Ireland may put too fine a gloss on the matter. That said, there is a point to the metaphor. For family therapy to succeed, all the parties in the sick family must be willing to engage one another honestly and at the deepest level of feelings that are often obscure or hidden, at least to one or another member of the family. Precisely because the process of the discovery and admission of these feelings is itself difficult, family therapy usually takes a while to be successful. The good news is that family problems are soluble not through the isolation of any one member of the family, but when all the members of the family are open to one another and have the courage to change behavior in a sincere, mutual quest for satisfactory solutions.

It is time for the people of Northern Ireland to begin this common quest to put an end to their troubles. However long it takes for all parties to drop their defenses and to learn genuine civility, we can all be grateful that most of the disputing parties have at least laid down their weapons to search for reconciliation. However long this healing process takes, we can all pray that the people of Northern Ireland will find that by confronting the pain of their past, they will at last be liberated to move confidently into the future together.