Key peacemakers yesterday celebrated the 10th anniversary of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace accord, a pact that spurred the Irish Republican Army (IRA) disarmament and a joint Catholic-Protestant government led by former enemies.
Several of the international figures responsible for achieving the pact shared a stage on Thursday and their memories of the day-and-night negotiations that capped a 22-month diplomatic push led by US talks chairman George Mitchell.
“I’m American and proud of it, but a very large part of my heart will always be in Northern Ireland,” Mitchell said in an interview.
PHOTO: AFP
Those taking part included Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern; Canadian General John de Chastelain, who oversees paramilitary disarmament in Northern Ireland; Nobel Peace Prize laureate John Hume, the moderate Catholic who pioneered peacemaking efforts; Sinn Fein chief Gerry Adams, who turned the IRA from war to politics; and Ulster Unionist Party leader Reg Empey.
The organizer of the event, Trina Vargo of the US-Ireland Alliance, said the discussion — involving 15 leaders on a stage labeled “Divided Past, Shared Future” — demonstrated just how much political relations had improved.
“People who clearly would have had acrimonious debates 10 years ago were genuinely happy to be together,” she said.
“There was a warmth and respect that might give hope to others in seemingly intractable conflicts around the world,” she said.
But reflecting continued political tensions in Northern Ireland, representatives of the most popular party, Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists, refused to attend the conference.
Paisley, who was in Washington on Thursday drumming up US interest for a planned Belfast investment conference next month, officially rejects the Good Friday pact as a sellout to Sinn Fein.
He did agree to form a government alongside former IRA commander Martin McGuinness in May 1997 after the IRA’s 2005 decision to renounce violence and disarm, followed by Sinn Fein’s decision in January last year to open up normal relations with the police.
But Paisley — sticking to his line that he forced Britain and Ireland to negotiate a “new” agreement in 2006 — declared in Washington that the Good Friday package was “dead and buried and not going to be resurrected again.”
Mitchell, who comes back to Northern Ireland at least three times a year in his work as chancellor of Queen’s University of Belfast, said the reduced community tensions and growing economic development that have flowed from the Good Friday pact are “obviously quite dramatic.”
“You can’t turn around in Belfast without seeing a new building, a crane reaching up to the sky,” he said.
The former US Senate majority leader — who graduated from Northern Ireland to become a troubleshooter for Middle East peace and drugs cheating in baseball — said he wasn’t troubled by the fact that Belfast today remains a deeply polarized society.
The city is scarred by more than two dozen walls, dubbed “peace lines,” that separate the most hard-line Irish Catholic and British Protestant districts. Not one has been torn down over the past decade; in fact, more have been built.
“There’s not been genuine reconciliation yet. Old attitudes die hard. These feelings developed over hundreds of years,” Mitchell said.
The peace lines would be demolished eventually, he predicted, “but it will take a very long time. You can rebuild buildings, and create new institutions of government. But the hardest thing, and the most important, is to change what’s in people’s hearts and minds. So we just need to be patient.”
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