Open the websites of the major Northern Irish political parties and the first thing you set eyes on is a sea of smiling Paddies, indistinguishable from one another by their looks, their clothes, their haircuts. The smiles are for the unobserved observer. They are, of course, the richly unctuous smiles of Central Casting politicians everywhere, but in Northern Ireland these insincere grins are more chilling than encouraging.
As in all polities, they are saying, ‘We are the good guys, the ones you can trust.’ They want swing voters to believe in them. The difference here, however, is that the swing voters come from their own side—the smiles are only for other nationalists or unionists. Sinn Fein tries to claw votes from the constitutional nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP); Ian Paisley’s hawkish and misnamed Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) strives to capture the supporters of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party. The factional political warfare so familiar to Australians is brought to a fine pitch in Ulster politics.
The events of September 11, 2001, swept the Irish peace process off the international pages of the world’s newspapers until the massive robbery of an Australian-owned Belfast bank and the hideous murder of a Catholic Sinn Fein supporter by drunken IRA men in a pub fight brought to life a protest movement in Belfast this European winter. Those stories are still unfolding as police investigations advance, but behind those terrible crimes lies the troubling issue of what is happening in the Irish peace process. The question must be asked whether the two sides in the North see the peace process as an end in itself, a perpetual work-in-progress, or as a route to a final resolution of four centuries of conflict.
Among the many paradoxes apparently inherent in Irish politics are the facts that, as the peace process has progressed since the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the power of the moderate parties has waned and the radical parties have achieved majority support within their own camps. If the Northern Irish Assembly, which has been suspended for about two years, was now to take control of the internal affairs of Ulster, Ian Paisley would become chief minister with Gerry Adams his deputy. Shortly before Christmas 2004, it appeared that just such a deal was about to be made. It came to nothing in a bout of hissy fits by