Can powersharing lead to place of through-otherness?

WorldView:'Ireland's greatest living poet, a fellow Derry man, Seamus Heaney, once told a gathering that I attended at Magee university that for too long and too often we speak of the others or the other side and that what we need to do is to get to a place of through-otherness. The Office of the First and Deputy First Ministers is a good place to start."

This provoking observation by Martin McGuinness in his speech to mark the restoration of devolved powersharing in the North on Tuesday raises a central question about the Belfast Agreement. Can it deliver a "place of through-otherness" in which community divisions are healed by common actions and identities, or will it reproduce those divisions? On the answer to this question depends the agreement's relevance as a model for other peace processes around the world.

Heaney draws the phrase from a poem by WR Rodgers called Armagh that begins: "There is a through-otherness about Armagh/ Of tower and steeple,/ Up on the hill are the arguing graves of the kings/ And below are the people."

Rodgers's father was of indigenous Irish stock and his mother of Scottish planter ancestry. He was working as a BBC producer in London when the poem was published in 1951, but had previously been a Presbyterian minister in Loughgall. He made the shift after John Hewitt lent him some contemporary poetry.

Heaney recalls that when a former parishioner asked why he had abandoned the ministry in which he had been so talented, Rodgers is supposed to have replied: "Ah well, too many books spoil the cloth".

In his lecture at the University of Aberdeen in 2001, entitled Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and Britain, Heaney suggests that in Rodgers's life, "there is something analogous to the triple heritage of Irish, Scottish and English traditions that compound and complicate the cultural and political life of contemporary Ulster". But for Rodgers, it "wasn't a question of the otherness of any part of his inheritance, more a recognition of the through-otherness of all of them".

Heaney explains that "through-other is a compound in common use in Ulster, meaning physically untidy or mentally confused, and . . . it echoes the Irish-language expression, trí na chéile, meaning things mixed up among themselves". It is probably a Scottish phrase originally.

Heaney likes it because it can accommodate the kinds of differences in Britain and Ireland that only begin to emerge when the monolithic and othering power of imperial Britain gives way to a "Britannic approach", a term used in Hugh Kearney's study, The British Isles, A History of Four Nations, to include equal status for each of them.

"In fact," Heaney adds, "one way of describing the era of devolution is to think of it as the moment when Britain went Britannic, a phenomenon which tends incidentally to hiberniorize Hibernia."

Tony Blair's presence at Stormont this week was welcomed on all sides because of his commitment to the peace process. In retrospect his role in overseeing the transition to a devolved Britain may well be seen as his most significant domestic achievement. But is it best understood as one that preserved the union, as Ian Paisley believes, or one that hastens the united Ireland McGuinness invoked in his speech?

The Scottish Nationalist victory in the Scottish assembly reinforces the ambiguity - and the necessity of a "through-other" understanding of it. This can flesh out the "mutual respect and good neighbourliness" Paisley spoke of yesterday at the Battle of the Boyne ceremony. He referred to the number of Catholics who fought with Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo - but did not mention the Te Deum held in imperial Catholic capitals in thanks for King William's victory.

In his study of Seamus Heaney's work, Eugene O'Brien examines the intellectual background to his thinking about identity. Otherness has been central to the thought of French philosophers Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida in the 20th century, and these influence Heaney's criticism and poetry.

Derrida famously remarked in his 1992 essay on Europe that: " What is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself. . . There is no culture or cultural identity without this difference with itself." He goes on to say that "a culture never has a single origin. Monogenealogy would always be a mystification in the history of culture."

In a later work he distinguishes between "an airtight, impermeable, homogenous, self-identical identity", as against a "porous and heterogeneous identity that differs with itself".

From McGuinness to Derrida is a long journey; but it is fair to ask Sinn Féin and the DUP whether they can make the transition from their politically rooted monogenealogy to a through-otherness in which their respective heterogeneities would be more mutually recognised.

In his inaugural speech, Paisley said: "At long last we are starting upon the road - I emphasise starting - which I believe will take us to lasting peace in our province." McGuinness invited him "towards the greatest yet most exciting challenge of our lives".

The Belfast Agreement is a consociational one based on the mutual recognition of separate and divided communities and their commitment to equality. Its structures are imbued with that philosophy. Those who believe it can facilitate a more common future say the separate identities must be equally recognised before they can become more fluid. This will happen though the common exercise of government.

Critics of the agreement such as the liberal Robin Walker or the socialists Eamonn McCann and Bernadette Devlin say it will be more difficult to overcome separatist communitarianism because the agreement will tend to reproduce these divisions and the conflict between them. If they are right the hopes extended to the new regime will be disappointed.

Political identities change with new circumstances. That is the historical logic of through-otherness. But a great deal depends on political leadership and activity on the ground. If more common identities are to emerge in Northern Ireland, both of these will be called for all-round.