A good Friday for Ireland? It's certainly worth a try

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): All the Irish have bats in their belfries, but even the bats in Ireland have sectarian reflexes. A recent survey of the nesting patterns of Ireland's seven species of bats revealed that two particularly like living in churches -- but long-eared bats prefer Catholic churches, while Natterer's bats like Protestant churches.

Sorry to strike a sour note amid the jubilation about the 'Good Friday agreement' in Northern Ireland, but customs are very persistent in these parts, including the custom of killing your neighbors if they go to different churches. There is cause for hope in the peace deal signed in Belfast on April 10, but the next sound we hear is likely to be a bomb, not the fat lady singing.

The 'Irish problem', as we are often told, is rooted in old and mostly irrelevant history. Today's Irish aren't particularly unreasonable people; they are just trapped by old divisions that really have nothing to do with religion. But then the divisions between bats don't have much to do with religion either.

"The long-eareds spend much of their time sleeping in the gap between the timber ceiling and slate roof of Catholic churches," explains Dr. Kate McAney, Ireland's only chiroptologist, "whereas Natterer's like the open loft spaces of (Protestant) churches."

Maybe so -- or maybe Natterer's bats hate the smell of incense while long-eareds can't stand Protestant hymns. It makes no difference: to understand the divisions is not to remove them.

Most people in Northern Ireland certainly want peace after almost 30 years of terror and 3,400 killings, but they want other things as well, and some of those things are incompatible. They could still be stampeded into rejecting the deal if they can be persuaded that the mutually exclusive things they hold most dear --a united Ireland, or a separate northern Ireland with a Protestant majority -- are jeopardized by the deal.

The fanatics still have their bombs and guns, and if they commit enough havoc they might still frighten Northern Irish voters into rejecting the deal. That's why there will be only six weeks between the 'Good Friday agreement' and the referenda that must ratify it in both parts of the island. Everybody remembers how the Hamas bus bombs in Israel stampeded Israelis into voting against peace with the Palestinians in 1996, so they're giving the killers in Ireland as little time to work with as possible.

It's the same in any civil conflict: the threat of a negotiated peace always brings the bombers and assassins out in force, as extremists on both sides try to wreck the deal made by those who are willing to quit fighting. As American mediator George Mitchell said at the end of the marathon talks in Belfast: "There will almost certainly be violence in the coming days, as those who are opposed to democracy, those who are committed to violence, try to destabilize this process."

The violence will aim for maximum shock value, with the goal of driving moderates in both communities to the conclusion that peace with monsters who behave like this is inconceivable. It may even include attempts to murder some of the eight Northern Irish party leaders who agreed to the deal (though they were spared the ordeal of actually signing the 69-page peace deal in order to minimize the offense they were giving to the 'hard men').

The Good Friday agreement will certainly be ratified by a big majority in the Irish Republic. The majority will be less generous in Northern Ireland, where many people on both sides fear a sell-out, but with the help of a visit from U.S. President Bill Clinton days before the vote, it will probably pass there too. Then what?

The unspoken and undramatic truth is that this deal only ratifies the outcome that the conflict was heading for anyway. It became clear over a decade ago that this round of the old Irish quarrel was going to end up as a scoreless draw, and at that point it just ran out of steam: the number of sectarian killings in Northern Ireland fell below the number of traffic deaths. The problem was simply how to stop the residual violence.

The Good Friday agreement is carefully crafted to recognize the reality of stalemate while saving everybody's face. If it holds, the killings and bombings will not cease completely, but they will decline more rapidly than they would have done without a deal. Even if it falls apart, the level of violence will not be much higher than it would be if the attempt had never been made, so it's certainly worth a try.

Following some dramatic short-term violence, the first hurdle will be the referenda in Northern Ireland and the Republic on May 22. If that is crossed successfully, the next hurdles will be the accelerated release of terrorist prisoners on both sides (many of whom oppose the deal), and the predictable failure of the new 'North-South Council' to produce the inter-Irish integration that the more credulous (Catholic) Nationalists have been persuaded to believe it will.

But if the settlement works in terms of getting most of the 'hard men' to lay down their weapons, then the focus will shift fairly soon to speculation about when the changing balance of the population in Northern Ireland will 'solve' the problem by eliminating the Protestant majority that resists a united Ireland.

At the start of the present 'Troubles' in 1969, only one-third of Northern Ireland's people were Catholics. By the 1991 census thanks to a much higher Catholic birth-rate and higher Protestant emigration to mainland Britain, it was down to 58 percent Protestant and 42 percent Catholic.

Current forecasts give the province a Catholic majority within its present borders by 2037, so well before that time the question of the unification of Ireland (or the re-partition of Ulster to preserve a Protestant majority in the eastern parts) will come up again in an acute form. But that is the next generation's problem.