I know that in certain areas of Belfast and of Derry there was jubilation when the IRA finally announced a complete cessation of violence last week. And I can understand the desire to celebrate and to party now that – from a Republican perspective at least – the war is over. Photographs of people clambering to the roof of Springhill Road RUC station, there to fly the tricolour, struck horror into the heart of Conor Cruise O’Brien – a man who must be deeply embarrassed by this latest twist in the Northern saga. But it was an appropriate symbolic gesture: in different circumstances, a crowd approaching an RUC station en masse would have been greeted by a hail of plastic bullets. The ceasefire had brought to the streets of Belfast a new kind of freedom. In itself, that was something to celebrate.

From the outside looking in – and anyone living in Dublin is in that position – my own response was more muted. Mixed with the sheer joy which the awareness that this might mean the end of the killing immediately invoked, was an ineffable sadness at all the horrors that people on all sides of the conflict, in which the IRA were such central participants, have been through. That thought, crystallised by the Republican decision to move the struggle in to a new phase, made it impossible to feel celebratory or jubilant. The human condition in so many ways is appalling – that is something which has been proven over and over again these past twenty-five years in the Six Counties or Northern Ireland or whatever the fuck you want to call that small arbitrary rectangle of land in the north-east of this island. Now and then, through the blackness we see a glimmer of hope. It is imperative that we reach out and touch it, that we nurture it and keep it alive, that we enable it to spread and grow till it, in turn, touches everyone. This was one of those moments. I kept thinking of a mantra straight out of Van Morrison. And the healing has begun. I repeated it over and over, knowing that it was stretching the truth. And the healing has begun. And the healing has begun. Sometimes if you say something often enough you can begin to believe that its chances of becoming true are somehow marginally increased. It’s an illusion, almost always, but a comforting one. And the healing has begun. And the healing has begun. Maybe it really is true.

There will be no better chance of attaining a genuine lasting peace. There cannot be. How often have people pleaded that the gun must be taken out of Northern politics? Sinn Féin and the IRA have done their part. It is now up to others to reciprocate. For a long time, I believe that Sinn Féin wanted out of the armed struggle – but it was not something which was easily sold to the most committed military activists in the IRA. Over the past two years, Gerry Adams and others within Sinn Féin, who themselves had become sickened by the atrocities on both sides, were engaged in a process of internal discussion and debate, designed to bring the entire Republican movement with them into this new phase. During that time, Gerry Adams in particular, together with those politicians and public figures who understood what was going on and felt it was vital to facilitate and encourage it – John Hume and Albert Reynolds, for example – have been subjected to widespread and often hysterical vilification for actions which have now turned out to be crucial to the process. I think it is time now for those responsible to own up – what was done and said was vicious, wrong and – more reprehensibly – counter-productive. The IRA’s cessation of violence has happened in spite, not because, of the mood of hatred towards Gerry Adams and John Hume stirred up in the southern media. A bitter and twisted individual would suggest that they should be force-fed on their own bile. Hopefully, however, the time for all that rancour is over.

Now the focus is on Unionism and Unionists, as it never has been before. I have said it before here but it is all the more critical than ever in this new context. The Protestant majority in Northern Ireland are desperately in need of vision, generosity and courage to step forward from among their own ranks and to begin the process of dialogue that might ultimately lead to a lasting, just accommodation between the two traditions in the North. Those of nationalist background are as entitled to the fullest expression of their identity in the structures by which they are governed as unionists are. Once that simple proposition is accepted, then everything else flows from it.

There is, of course, a long road to travel but the dividends will be enormous if the possibility of peace is now effectively pursued. Despite the horrors of the past twenty-five years, when the calm works its own restorative medicine on wounded souls, there will be an opportunity to discover what the working class people, who have most often been the fodder in the killing fields of the North, have in common, across the sectarian divide.

Maybe the healing has begun.

• Niall Stokes

Editor