In a few years from now, Northern Ireland could once again be like it was before the Troubles. The local news bulletins could recapture the stultifying dullness of old: jobs lost and gained; the price of beef; missing hillwalkers, planning disputes and, just once in a long while, a sad domestic murder.
The local politics would be no less banal – important, for sure, but important in the way that the internal affairs of Sheffield are. The minister for education would have to account for that crumbling school in Ballymena; the minister for health would periodically urge people (in vain) to eat less fried food; the minister for regional development would struggle to bring new supermarkets to depressed towns. Not many Nobel prizes in that.
I’m dreaming. Or perhaps I am reminiscing. Belfast before the Troubles was certainly a backwater and those news bulletins could be really something. I dimly remember, as a schoolboy, watching an item on Scene Around Six that examined at length Ulster’s largest privately held collection of clocks. Hardly the stuff of CNN.
It won’t be like that again, at least not for a long time. In one sense we should be grateful, because the dullness of the 1960s was the dullness of denial, and it concealed all those years of discrimination and resentment. People complained, and their complaints were often reported, but nothing would change. There is little prospect, under Northern Ireland’s new dispensation, of that particular slice of history repeating itself.
But the political temperature must fall. For its own sake, this little territory of one-and-a-half million people cannot go on jostling with Israel and South Africa for space in the world’s news bulletins, with American senators and Canadian generals turning up to play bit parts. For the sake of their electors, David Trimble, John Hume, Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley cannot go on being international figures; they need to become obscure, preferably turning up only occasionally in historical documentaries or quiz questions.
This will be difficult, although not because these men like the limelight; let’s give them that much credit. It will be difficult because consensus, that essential but eternally missing ingredient in Ulster life, is a hard game to learn.
How easy it is to see difficulties as issues of principle, and to decide that you have already made too many concessions so it is time to put your foot down. How normal it is in human affairs to negotiate by playing hardball, by saying: “That’s my final offer; take it or leave it.”
In Northern Ireland the pressures on politicians to do this are immense. It is not just that they have to seem tough and effective to win elections – and there is always someone in the wings ready to talk tougher – but that the whole population exists in a permanent state of heightened political awareness. There is no question of leaving the politicians to get on with it; these are people who follow the day-to-day news more closely and with a greater sense of involvement than any others in the United Kingdom. Understandable as this may be in a community that has suffered so much, it makes running the place difficult.
So, for the foreseeable future, politics in Northern Ireland will not resemble those of Sheffield and nor will the local news reports seem like letters from Lilliput. There will be grandstanding at Stormont, and walkouts. “If that’s your game,” someone will say, “then I’m off, and I’m taking my ball with me.” Power-sharing, we will be told many times, is on the brink of collapse.
But consensus can be learnt, even if it takes a long time. I once worked for Reuters in the Netherlands, and if political dullness is a virtue then the Netherlands is a country very richly blessed. To be fair, it’s not as dull as most British people seem to believe, but as a reporter accustomed to equating politics with confrontation on the British model, I sometimes felt the place was half asleep.
To take one example, I arrived there in the mid-1980s to find a debate in progress about euthanasia. An opposition bill was before parliament to legalise it and the ruling coalition was split. It was a good story, involving a lot of briefing and manoeuvring, but somehow it never reached a climax. It was all, if you will pardon a perhaps inappropriate analogy, foreplay, and by the time I left a year later there was still no euthanasia law.
There was a reason, and it was a good one. The Netherlands, though it is no longer obvious to the outsider, is historically just as divided as Northern Ireland. It has a Roman Catholic majority and a Protestant minority, and the tensions between the two have defined the country’s life and politics for centuries. As a result, they avoid confrontation.
For many years this was institutionalised: in most walks of life, including business and trade unions as well as politics, there were religious “columns”, organisational structures running from top to bottom which ensured that each religious voice was heard at every level where it mattered. People learnt, in time, that without one of its columns the building under which everyone sheltered would not stand.
Though the formal columns have disappeared and religion plays little overt part in Dutch politics, the spirit behind them persists. I suspect that this was what lay behind the endless delays and procedural shenanigans over euthanasia, an issue on which the churches certainly had their views.
It is a subtle and difficult business, anticipating and avoiding confrontation. You need an understanding of other points of view; you need to be calm and patient; you need to avoid language that will provoke and statements that bind you unnecessarily; and you need a clear and constant understanding of the price of failure. You must also learn to make the deals and compromises that are necessary for progress.
It is very different from British politics, which, having the historical luxury of relative unity, can afford a daily diet of bickering and finger-pointing. And it could not be more different from the traditional pattern of Northern Ireland politics, but Trimble and co have already taken a big step in that direction. If they can sustain it then they may get the obscurity, and the news bulletins, that they and their electors deserve.
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