Time also to remember how close we came to the abyss

On Easter Sunday, the 61st Street Deli in the Irish enclave of Woodside in the New York suburb of Queens was selling Easter eggs imported from Ireland. The New York Times found a man buying one. He is a 26-year-old bricklayer who emigrated from Northern Ireland two years ago. Asked what he thought of the peace agreement reached two days earlier, he said: "The only thing that'll settle Northern Ireland is a civil war. Bang! Bang! May the best man win. Let's get on with it."

For days, I kept thinking of that young man with his life before him, buying Easter eggs on a gorgeous sunny morning awash with hope for the Irish everywhere. How can the simple pleasure of purchasing a gift for a loved one coincide with a relish for civil war? How can the shape of a reborn world that countless generations have imagined in the pregnant curve of an egg contain such terrible, banal stupidity? How, after Bosnia and Rwanda have been beamed by satellite into our living rooms, can any human being not know what the words "civil war" mean - murder, rape, mutilation, torture, barbarity given a keener edge by intimacy, a cataclysm in which there are no best men left and no one wins? How can the response to that knowledge be "let's get on with it"?

And then I remembered that it was an Irishman, Jonathan Swift, who reminded us in Gulliver's Travels that civil wars can be fought even over eggs. In Lilliput, the Big Endians who opened their boiled eggs at the large end fought a lasting and devastating war with the Little Endians, who opened them at the small end. Maybe, given what we know of history and human nature, we should be astonished, not that thoughts of civil war should give pleasure to an ordinary man going about the nice business of buying Easter eggs, but that most of us, most of the time, resist such thoughts.

The terrible thing is that the warm impulse that draws an exile in New York to want to buy Easter eggs from home has the same source as the cold cruelty of civil war. The sense of belonging is also what makes us want to define, in blood if need be, who belongs and who doesn't. Somewhere in whatever bundle of genes we have inherited from our ancestors the instinct for "us" is wrapped up in the instinct for "not them".

It is hard even for optimists to deny the truth so eloquently summed up by the biologist Edward O. Wilson: "The dark side of the inborn propensity to moral behaviour is xenophobia . . . People give trust to strangers with effort, and true compassion is a commodity in chronically short supply. Tribes co-operate only through carefully defined treaties and other conventions. "They are quick to imagine themselves the victims of conspiracies by competing groups, and they are prone to dehumanise and murder their rivals during periods of severe conflict. They cement their own group loyalties by means of sacred symbols and ceremonies. Their mythologies are filled with epic victories over menacing enemies."

All of this could be applied word for word to the last 30 years in Northern Ireland. Yet the conclusions from such a view are not, in relation to Ireland, unremittingly bleak. For there is another question we can ask - how come we didn't have a civil war? If we are near the end of the conflict and inching towards a point where we can look back on the mire from higher ground, we might feel free to wonder at the enormity of our escape.

It hardly seems decent to write like this, and I am fully aware as I do so that there are thousands of bereaved families and maimed people who can ask bitterly "What escape?" Yet without in any way diminishing the suffering or forgetting that the pain must be all the sharper these days when the victims wonder why the deal could not have been done decades ago, it is worth remembering that it could have been much worse. It's worth saying so because an awareness of the immense catastrophe with which we flirted is one of the things that should make us determined never to walk so close to the abyss again.

Think for a moment where David Trimble, now the essential peacemaker, was 25 years ago. He was a member - and eventually deputy leader - of William Craig's Vanguard. Craig was attracting huge crowds of Protestants to mass rallies where he spoke of Northern Ireland making a unilateral declaration of independence and speculated about a doomsday situation in which his followers would be turned on the Catholic population.

At one rally, Craig said that "we must build up dossiers on those men and women in this country who are a menace to this country because one of these days, if and when the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy." Craig assured a Conservative Party caucus meeting in London that his movement would only "assassinate our enemies as a last, desperate resort". Asked if this meant the killing of all Catholics, he replied "It might not go as far as that, but it could go as far as killing." Remember that at the same time, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, also essential peacemakers now, were up to their necks in the IRA which, to give just one example, planted 22 bombs in Belfast city centre on Bloody Friday - July 21st, 1972 - alone. Daniel Jack, an IRA man later convicted of hijacking one of the cars used for the bombs, told the police that, at a meeting afterwards, some of his comrades said the operation had been a "fuck-up" but others said it would "toughen the bastards up".

The elements of a Bosnian apocalypse - Yeats's "great hatred, little room" - were all there. Yet, somehow, they were never quite fused. There is a kind of anti-history of the conflict to be written, a history of what did not happen. One chapter in it would be the depressing story of how most of us never got angry enough, how we sank into fatalism, how we often seemed willing to do anything for peace except question our own assumptions. Another chapter, though, would be the more hopeful story of how we shrank from the apparently inexorable logic of mayhem. The forces on all sides who colluded in the attempt to create a civil war failed.

It would be grotesque at the end of such a dark period to congratulate ourselves for having discovered that the veneer of civilisation covering our social fabric is not quite as thin as it seemed 25 years ago. It would be wrong to forget that there are young people born at the height of the Troubles who can still contemplate civil war as they buy Easter eggs in New York.

But it would also be wrong to disregard the truth that, however unheroically, most people on both parts of the island found that they couldn't actually stomach the consequences of their own political ideals. A passive reluctance to stampede towards doom saved us. The job now is to make that passive instinct into an active and conscious decision.