Sir, – The hard-won negotiations of the Northern Ireland peace process emerged from a long, stop-start series of difficult interactions, up to 1998, within Northern Ireland and between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. As a model of active accommodation of different identities, the peace process and the Belfast Agreement stand as examples of how violent expression of difference can be talked down and reshaped into a framework for co-existence, based on a momentum toward equity. But the underlying fault lines, never having been addressed as ideological and cultural, are still not bridged or accommodated.
The peace process is fragile because it has not yet been anchored in the cultural imagination of all the people who have to live with its consequences. Many people, including the guarantors of the Belfast Agreement, seemed to believe that the agreement, and the cessation of most of the violence, somehow marked the end of a history. Yet if the process had been read and understood culturally, as well as politically, it could have been enacted as the beginning of a necessarily cultural process of challenge and change, without threat.
The process of political accommodation remains vulnerable when tensions emerge because deep foundations have not been set in culture over the last 25 years. This is why tensions between the largest parties in Northern Ireland, the DUP and Sinn Féin, led to the collapse of the power-sharing Executive in 2017, and again now. It took until 2020 for the devolved Executive to be re-established, only to be compromised immediately, not only by the Covid crisis but also by the incremental crisis of Brexit. The Brexit debates on border controls and immigration amplified identity issues, nourished by the inability of many UK Brexiteers to think as other than colonisers.
The absence of imagination is striking. The DUP and Sinn Féin are stuck to the idea that a United Kingdom or a United Ireland is a matter of right rather than a matter of negotiation.
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Since difference in Northern Ireland is a matter of culture before it is a matter of politics, it is no surprise to anyone who was paying attention that Brexit has bred tensions between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland about what is now the only land border between the UK and the EU. The associated existential issues of identity have the potential to unravel whatever degree of accommodation has been facilitated by the peace process and the Belfast Agreement.
Unless there is a reclamation of the agreement’s momentum, with added cultural dimensions, toward equity, this unravelling will accelerate. – Yours, etc,
DECLAN McGONAGLE,
Redcastle,
Co Donegal.