IRA at peace, Protestants at war

The riots reflect how a decade of peacemaking focused on addressing Catholic demands has turned the world upside down for Protestants, who have rarely, if ever, been so divided — or felt so powerless.

Most people on both sides agree on one point: While the Irish Republican Army could not win its decades-long war to overthrow Northern Ireland, its Sinn Fein party is winning the peace.

A former leader of the once-dominant Ulster Unionist Party, James Molyneaux, forecast this when he said the IRA cease-fire could prove to be the most destabilising event in Northern Ireland history.

These days, as Protestant extremists attack Northern Ireland’s mostly Protestant police force in self-destructive fury over Catholic gains, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams nimbly negotiates over his Protestant opponents’ heads among powerful friends in London, Dublin and Washington.

Adams finally appears poised to play his biggest, most dearly held card — IRA disarmament.

The move, promised in the IRA’s most recent statement July 28, is certain to bring more gainsform the core of power-sharing, while hard-liners could also receive posts.

The IRA and illegal Protestant groups, in turn, would cement their cease-fires and embrace politics by handing over their weapons to a retired Canadian general, John de Chastelain, by mid-2000.

None of that happened.

Instead, Molyneaux’s risk-taking successor as Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, split his party by forming a power-sharing cabinet alongside Sinn Fein before any IRA disarmament, breaking a key campaign pledge.

Sinn Fein — which retains its long-term aim of abolishing Northern Ireland, not reforming it — left Trimble twisting in the wind on the issue, fueling Protestant fears that the IRA was willing to end its cease-fire. Power-sharing repeatedly collapsed.

By the time the IRA did give de Chastelain an unknown amount of weaponry in October 2001, Protestant voters had defected to the inflexible Democratic Unionists of the Rev Ian Paisley, who denounces Sinn Fein as "bloodthirsty monsters."

Today, the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein are the two biggest parties and growing.

Both say they are committed to forming an administration together, but it is hard to imagine such a combination working.

Just as damagingly, one rule of Northern Ireland’s peace process — to merit seats in negotiations, you must win elections — left no constructive role for representatives of two major outlawed Protestant groups: the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force.

Much more poorly armed than the IRA, these groups have traditionally exerted power by terrorising Catholics and mobilising Protestant mobs.

In past decades, such mass Protestant rebellions often forced British authorities to retreat in the face of chaos. The two groups tried again this past week, when police infuriated Protestants by blocking a parade from a Catholic area.

Mobs blocked roads, while masked UDA and UVF men burned dozens of vehicles and attacked British security forces with guns and grenades. After four nights, the rebellion petered out.

The key difference today is the police, who took heavy casualties and prevented the rioters from attacking Catholic areas. They are being profoundly reshaped in line with the 1998 accord.

The old force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was disbanded in 2001. The new Police Service of Northern Ireland is ensuring that at least half of its recruits are Catholic.

This ten-year reform project has yet to win over Sinn Fein, which still rejects police authority. But the changes have overwhelmed many Protestants, who view "their" police as biased against them.

British prime minister Tony Blair has promised to meet confirmation of full IRA disarmament with countermeasures that include closing military bases and abolishing the army’s locally recruited, overwhelmingly Protestant battalions.

But Paisley says that without photographs and a full inch suspicions ensure that whatever happens next, talks on forging a Paisley-Adams pact will take years.

This era of never-ending negotiations has done nothing to lower the walls of concrete, steel and barbed wire that since 1970 have separated Protestant and Catholic turf in Belfast. Indeed, these monuments to fear and loathing have grown over the past decade of peacemaking.