IT would be churlish not to begin the new year in a spirit of hope. 1994 saw the most remarkable changes take place in Northern Ireland and after 25 years of war, bloodshed and strife, the paramilitary guns were silenced on both sides of the sectarian divide. The challenge now is to create the conditions where those who brokered that peace can keep the process on the rails.

In pushing them to do this, we must be realistic. On the Republican side, the laying down of arms is not a fait accompli. When the IRA ceasefire was first declared, I was baffled by the spurious demand that it should be stated to be ‘permanent’. How could Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Gerry Kelly or anyone else in the Republican movement guarantee that? This business of British involvement in Ireland has a long and tortuous history and the physical force tradition which runs like a seam through the response of Irish nationalists is in no one individual’s gift to end, permanently or otherwise.

What Gerry Adams, and the leaders of Sinn Féin could do, and did, was to convince those leading the IRA’s military campaign now that there must be a better way forward, and one which does not perpetuate the brutal litany of murder, killing and maiming and the consequent terrorising of an entire community. In this the Sinn Féin leadership were right. But to put that breakthrough at risk by engaging in hardline positions on the delivering up of arms, as the British government now seem to be doing, would be perverse in the extreme. It is time to begin the process of bringing people together, around the negotiating table, because that is where the basis for an ongoing, lasting peace must be hammered out.

Transcending mutual suspicion and mistrust between the two communities is absolutely essential. In this issue of Hot Press, there is an interview with David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party, which suggests that this may not represent quite the obstacle it did in the past when Unionism was widely equated with the arrant intransigence of Ian Paisley at worst or the smug self-interest of Ken Maginnis at best. There is evident among younger Unionists, at least, a willingness to acknowledge the utterly callous and pervasive anti-Catholic discrimination of the Northern state from its inception until the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the late ’60s. It is a starting point. In some ways, however, the interview also underlines just how far both communities will need to travel if they are ever to meet somewhere in the middle, on the notion of an agreed settlement. David Ervine generously says that there is nothing wrong with holding onto the aspiration towards a united Ireland. But it won’t happen, he says, and proceeds to talk as if it were realistic to expect Northern nationalists and republicans to accept the six county state of Northern Ireland as permanent, unaltered and unalterable. I think it is clear that the Sinn Féin leadership are prepared to try to sell something short of the united Ireland republicans have fought for over the past 25 years to the IRA. But to do that, they will need to have something substantial to offer. And whatever it is, it must involve a clear and generous recognition of the cultural identity and aspirations of those on whose behalf the IRA believed – wrongly most of the time, it is undoubtedly true – that they were fighting.

I have no impression that Unionist politicians have grappled realistically with this central question. The what-we-have-we-hold philosophy which has been the cornerstone of Unionist intransigence is evident even amid the more progressive reflections of David Ervine, Gary McMichael and, even Ian Paisley Jnr. when he was interviewed recently by Hot Press. You don’t need much of a sense of history to know that there will always be people who will want to question that right. To insist on it is to play into the hands of those who want to do so with the bomb and a gun – whereas a willingness to enter into inclusive talks without preconditions, and with the objective of coming together in a place where all the old shibboleths are abandoned for good, could silence the guns forever.

The hope for 1995 is that we can finally see real movement in that direction.

• Niall Stokes

Editor