It is not love of war nor my loathing of the Sinn Fein-IRA conspiracy which causes my heart to sink when I read of the "historic" Stormont settlement. Indeed, I hope I am wrong. Being wrong, with the massed jeers of the sneaking-regarders and fellow-travellers of the IRA, can be surprisingly pleasant if the outcome is the end of war.
I certainly have been wrong before. I doubted the authenticity of the desire for peace of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, and I think now that they genuinely want peace. But I think the terms they are seeking are incompatible with the terms which will satisfy the Unionists, never mind, God help us, the DUP.
False hopes are lethal things in a society as emotional and as passionate as Northern Ireland. I believe the hopes invested in these "historic" - God bless the mark - talks are gravely wrong, for the talks are proceeding on different planes, with different expectations, and with the mechanisms of deferred conflict neatly in place.
"Historic" breakthrough
The Unionists are present there because the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on the day of the "historic" breakthrough repeated his assurance that "any settlement . . . must be endorsed by the people of Northern Ireland in a referendum; and it must be endorsed by the British parliament."
Endorsed by the people of Northern Ireland? That is the very entity which is denied legitimacy by the IRA and against which it has conducted a quarter-of-a-century of war. Sinn Fein-IRA will not accept a verdict delivered from a section of Ireland which has a unionist majority. We know this. Sinn Fein-IRA regards the partition of Ireland as an illegal act of British imperialism, and it is against that imperialism, its partition and its unionist statelet that it has fought its appalling war.
Never mind that I regard the Sinn FeinIRA argument as balderdash. It's what they believe, and a lot of other people believe it too. So how can they accept a talks process which must be ratified by the people of Northern Ireland with its inbuilt unionist majority?
Presumably because there is to be a referendum in the Republic too. But this is the politics of cosmetics. What has kept the unionists happy is the promise of endorsement of any deal by the people of Northern Ireland alone. That endorsement, no other, will enable the British Parliament to put that deal into law.
Double referendum
What seems to have kept Sinn Fein happy is the promise of, effectively, an all-Ireland double referendum. But these promises are incompatible. Sinn Fein has always said, with the frankness one expects of the culture of Northern drumlinobduracy, that unionist consent is not a key to any outcome. Tell that to the unionists, the real Sinn Feiners in all this. The only verdict the unionists want to hear is their own. And in the Blair letter, they believe that they have been reassured on this score: your vote counts.
On the twin and opposing interpretations of ratification-byreferendum lies the basis for the talks; that false basis will also supply the reason for their ultimate failure and the resumption of conflict.
But, pray God, allowing that I am wrong, and that out of this gallimaufry some passing settlement will be achieved, the sine qua non of success is a split within Sinn Fein-IRA. Those who compliment the McAdams wing on the absence of a split are gravely mistaken. The belief that the entire republican movement can be taken into the tortuous transactions of talks, only to emerge transformed into a luminescent example of peaceloving social democracy is the greatest hallucination of the many in this hall of mirrors called the peace process.
The seasoned killers of Tyrone and South Derry and the Armagh borderlands, cultural descendants of the Raparees and the Defenders, will not sit still within some miraculous parity-of-esteem confection called the new Northern Ireland. Maybe the unionists will agree to, and Messrs McGuinness and Adams will accept, a twin-cultural Northern Ireland within the UK, with two flags over Royal Irish Constabulary community police stations and the promise of a United Ireland Whenever. Others have before them journeyed from the gun to the politics of deferred paradise. But in doing so they have left others behind them who would not settle for temporary compromises and a United Ireland Whenever.
Irreducible demand
The republican movement is a historical force in Irish life. Its leaders come and go, its strength waxes and wanes, and it is irreducible in its core demand: a united Ireland regardless of unionist consent. It is historically necessary for what we might call the McAdams wing to split with the irreducible rump, which can never be brought to any settlement, and which understands only the absolutist chimera of victory.
Whatever settlement there might be between the parties at Stormont - and I believe a settlement to be virtually impossible anyway - will be opposed by the twin irreducibles of ancient pedigree: fundamentalist political Protestantism and irredentist Gaeldom, which between them have a little matter of the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster to resolve. Some of elements in those irreducibles - LVF, CAC, INLA, DUP - are outside the talks anyway. For the least possibility of a settlement, they must be joined by the Sinn Fein-IRA hardliners.
What we need is a split; if we get one, then I might begin to contemplate using the word "historic".