Essay

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Politics

War & peace

30 August 2024

7 min read

What it takes to travel from ceasefire to peace

With Bertie Ahern, Kevin Hargaden explores an unlikely journey.

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

A TV graphic labelled 'ceasefire' lists bullet points

How the news was reported in 1994.

RTE.

August 31st marks the thirtieth anniversary of the historic IRA ceasefire. After decades of effective civil war in Northern Ireland, on this day in 1994, the nationalist paramilitary force announced “the complete cessation of military operations” and declared that they looked forward to a just and lasting settlement with “a spirit of determination and confidence”. While not without interruptions, that ceasefire has led to more than just a cessation of conflict. While still fragile, Northern Ireland has a functioning parliament, closer ties than ever with the Republic of Ireland, and the dissident threat – still present – is marginalised.

One of the remarkable elements of that day at the end of summer 1994 was how unlikely it seemed just a year before. The intensity of “The Troubles”, as the conflict is called, varied over the years but a series of atrocities in 1993 left an already traumatised population in a state of desperation. In March of that year, the IRA exploded bombs in the market town of Warrington. This callous attack clearly sought to strike terror into the hearts of English civilians – people who had no real connection to whatever injustices had been inflicted on the nationalist communities of Northern Ireland. Two children, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, were killed and almost sixty people were injured.

Another IRA bombing, in October of that year, caused outrage and disgust across Britain and Ireland. Again, hitting a civilian population, the Shankill Road bombing had been intended to target Loyalist leaders but ended up devastating a fishmongers. Ten people were killed.

Brutal responses followed from the Loyalist side. Five days after the Warrington bomb, the Ulster Defence Association murdered four construction workers and a week after the Shankill Road bombing the same organisation descended upon a Halloween party held in a bar in rural Derry, killing 8 people and leaving 12 with dire injuries.

Along with many other atrocities, the year ended with most people on the island dreading another generation of pointless violence. But below the surface, intense grassroots efforts and official negotiations were beginning to bear fruit.

The viewer is bound to see the peace process that emerged as a kind of miracle. How could forgiveness reign in the face of such savagery? How can a society build a future out of the wreckage of such a past?

This story is told vividly in the BBC documentary Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. Spread across five episodes, the show does not intend to offer an encyclopaedic analysis of how the Troubles emerged. Instead, it focusses on the experiences of the ordinary people embroiled – whether intentionally or not – in the conflict. The effect is deeply moving, even overwhelming at times.

So often, our culture engages with war and conflict as abstract concepts to be debated. Even in the context of active, live battle, we are typically presented with “talking heads” offering expert opinion. But in Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland you get to hear from the people who planned the attack, or who conducted the arrests, or who were just trying to buy some fish for dinner when a bomb exploded in the shop. This direct testimony from those were caught up in the Troubles allows the viewer a visceral understanding of what is at stake, without having to understand the centuries of colonialism, conflict, and oppression that generated the civil war. That human trauma, that is glimpsed in great poetry or felt as an echo in a folk song is captured in this series directed by the award-winning James Bluemel.

There is a stubborn misunderstanding that the Northern Irish conflict was “Catholics against Protestants”. Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland disposes of this myth, if in part by showing how those two groups were never distinct. It was a complex conflict fuelled by land and ideology, traumatic history and conflicting cultures. Religion was a component of course, but expressed through the lens of sectarianism, the almost racial animosity that grew up between the opposing tribes, the marker that differentiated them. When one man, named Michael, is shown tending gently to the racing pigeons he keeps, the effect is incongruous in the extreme because his story is one of unimaginable despair.

He was raised Catholic; his mother was Protestant. She had ten children. And one day, two women showed up at their home and took his mother away and she never returned. The IRA killed her. It wasn’t because of her views on Papal primacy or biblical authority. Something even more absurd and terrifying was at work here, a hatred that at some point did not even need justification.

The consequences of each callous and brutal attack rippled outwards, affecting not just the victims but their loved ones and then their community. By the end of the five episodes the viewer is bound to see the peace process that emerged as a kind of miracle. How could forgiveness reign in the face of such savagery? How can a society build a future out of the wreckage of such a past?

That was their baseline assumption throughout – no one at the table was “happy with the fact that thousands of people had been killed and maimed.”

This exposes one of the limitations of the format of the series. By placing the perspectives of ordinary people at the centre of the narrative, profound truths are exposed. But the mundane details of how the peace process developed – why it was the IRA agreed to a ceasefire and how things developed from there to the Good Friday Agreement and the years since – are unaddressed. Perhaps a sequel is required where the politicians and diplomats who made that possible are given the chance to tell that story?

One of the undoubted architects of peace in Northern Ireland is Bertie Ahern, who was the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland from 1997-2008. I sat down with him to do just that – to hear his recollections of the process that brought about peace. Since his youth, he had always taken a keen interest in Northern Ireland – “I took a particular interest in the Civil Rights movement when we were in school; that was before it got into the violence.” Raised in a Republican family just north of Dublin city centre, once the Troubles began, it was hard “not to be subsumed into everything that was happening on the island.” As he became a political leader, he was keenly aware of how the violent conflict exacerbated underlying problems – even his vision for economic regeneration in the Republic was blocked because “part of the reason that it was difficult to get investment and to get people to come here was the Troubles.”

As he remembers the process, it would be misleading to think it popped out of nowhere in the 1990s. There had been attempts through the years, notably with the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, but also through less publicised conversations between the peacemakers and paramilitaries, like the conversations led by Fr Gerry Reynolds at Clonard Monastery – which began to generate movement. He attributes the ceasefire to the Downing Street Declaration that was orchestrated by the British Prime-minister John Major and Ahern’s then boss, Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, on December 15, 1993. That showed a serious willingness from London to engage, and the 1994 ceasefire was the result.

But when the ceasefire broke down in 1996, all that work dissipated. “That was a disaster, really.” With the election of Tony Blair, Ahern suggested they “take it up again”. With a concerted focus – “I was nearly doing the Northern stuff full-time” – progress was restored. He remembers that the negotiations involved ten different parties, including the British and Irish governments and the active and influential participation from the American government and “went on practically non-stop from September 1997 to Good Friday 1998.” The strategy sought to be as inclusive as possible – “we would try and get everyone in” – and “to be as comprehensive on the issues” as possible, so that no issue was off the table. Patience and resilience were central. Although there was “a huge amount of conversation and talks up to Christmas, it didn’t really gather momentum until February.”

With the “totality of all the issues out on the table”, the dialogues began to bear fruit. How draconian legislation might be rolled back, how paramilitary prisoners could be released, how demilitarization would proceed and how the police could be reformed. He remembers that negotiations on that question – the reform of the corrupt Royal Ulster Constabulary police force – went on deep into the Good Friday night, April 10th. When an obstacle appeared, the London and Dublin governments reminded people of the goal of stopping the violence. That was their baseline assumption throughout – no one at the table was “happy with the fact that thousands of people had been killed and maimed.” The second guiding principle was that “you have to try to treat everyone with dignity, regardless of what views they have.” And slowly, rapport was built up between people who had been combatants.

When the agreement was finalised, a kind of euphoria followed. “That week we were just at it night and day; we had been at it night and day since March.” But the celebrations, as intense as they were, did not linger. The agreement had to be passed by popular referendum in both the North and the Republic of Ireland. And the work continued even after that. Ahern notes that it took years to achieve an agreement “and then another ten years to implement it”.

But the effort was undeniably worth it. “I think the big success of the Good Friday Agreement was that the Troubles have by and large ended.” And the story of how that happens traces back to a cassette tape released in August 1994 announcing the IRA ceasefire.

Article

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Community

Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.