Ulster is all right

Leo McKinstry says that a deal between Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams should be welcomed

Sitting in a south Belfast restaurant on a crisp autumn afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I said to my wife, You know, I don't think I have tasted such a good risotto since we ate in that little café in Paris, just off the Champs-Elysees.' My wife nodded in enthusiastic agreement. But until recently the idea that an Ulster restaurant could match the standards in Paris would have been laughable. Mired in the violence of the Troubles', blighted by social division and economic decay, paralysed by sectarian bigotry, Northern Ireland was one of the most depressing places in western Europe throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

I knew that only too well from my own experience, having been born and brought up as a Protestant there. My early memories of Belfast are of roadblocks and boarded-up buildings, of armed police and armoured cars. Every night the TV news was dominated by the latest round of bombings and shootings. But over the last decade Ulster has been a land transformed. That wonderful risotto is symbolic of the renaissance. Now that peace reigns, an air of affluence and bustling excitement hangs over Belfast. When, as a child, I occasionally visited England, each time it felt like a journey from the dankness of twilight into the sunlit fullness of day. Now I almost sense that the reverse process is at work. On arriving in Belfast, I have left behind the crime-ridden, congestion-filled, downtrodden, overpriced, overtaxed, self-loathing bleakness of New Labour's modern England for a more selfconfident, attractive, prosperous part of the British Isles.

The often derided peace process is largely responsible for this change. Those interminable meetings over the semantics of decommissioning or the type of cap badges to be worn by police officers might seem tedious in the extreme, but, in the long term, this painstakingly choreographed dance has liberated Ulster from the shadow of violence. Since the Good Friday agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland has enjoyed an unbroken spell of peace, something that has not happened since the state's creation in 1921; in the 1930s, there were pogroms against the Catholic population, while the 1950s saw sporadic IRA campaigns. And now we are on the verge of an even more historic development, as Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley prepare to shake hands over a new power-sharing deal, something that even the most starry-eyed optimist would have regarded as unthinkable only a few months ago.

Yet, following the first IRA declaration of a ceasefire in 1994, there has been a continual chorus of grumbling from Unionists over the peace talks. Every twist and turn of the saga has been accompanied by anguished talk of sell-outs, betrayal, surrender. Each statement from the Republican movement has been greeted with sneering suspicion. Each release of IRA prisoners has been met by wails of outrage. And even now, as Paisley moves gingerly towards Adams, the Democratic Unionist Party proclaims, 'Would the rest of the UK accept armed terrorists in their government? So why should we have armed Sinn Fein in ours?'

Unionists — and their British supporters

in the Tory party moan that they have had to make concession after concession to the Republican movement. But what concessions do they have in mind? If they examined the peace process with objectivity rather than through the prism of perpetual grievance, they would recognise that they have won almost everything they want. Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom as long as the majority wishes it and the border remains intact. The pillar boxes are still painted red; the Queen's head is still on Ulster stamps. In reality, it is the Republican movement that has given up its most cherished goals. In contradiction of everything it has stood for since the end of the first world war, the IRA has abandoned the armed struggle without achieving its aim of the unification of Ireland. Their very raison cfe.tre, the overthrow of the British state, has been

sidelined. Sinn Fein has accepted partition, a move which is the equivalent of Unionists agreeing that Northern Ireland should leave the United Kingdom. This week Gerry Adams met the chief constable of Northern Ireland, Hugh Orde, contravening Sinn Fein's traditional principle that Ulster's police have no rightful jurisdiction over the six counties. Here again, Unionists complain about the abolition of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, hut, in truth, civilian policing in Ulster has only been brought into line with the approach taken in the rest of the United Kingdom. It would have been absurd to carry on with the same militarised, overwhelmingly Protestant force that operated throughout the Troubles.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have effectively negotiated the wholesale surrender by the IRA. Because of their innate negativity and self-pity, the Unionists are never willing to face up to this fact. And, as a result, the British security forces have never received the credit they deserve for their courageous victory over the IRA. In popular mythology, the modern history of Ulster is often seen as Western Europe's answer to Vietnam, with the IRA in the role of the Vietcong and the British army playing the bullying American oppressors. According to this version, the Brits, after becoming bogged down in the brutality of guerrilla warfare, had to seek a humiliating way out of the long military crisis they had helped to create.

But the truth, it seems to me, is very different. For almost 30 years, the British army, with a spirit of restraint and altruism rarely paralleled in the modern history of human conflict, held the line against the terrorists, preventing a descent into anarchy and upholding the democratic wishes of the majority of the population. Si) successful was the British army in maintaining stability, so effective was their intelligence and so determined were their ordinary soldiers, that by the beginning of the 1990s the IRA knew that they could never win the armed struggle. Their network was shot to pieces by informers. Their morale had plummeted. Their only option was to sue for peace. In the most unpromising territory, the British troops had emerged undefeated. Northern Ireland 1%9-1994 should be allowed to join the roll-call of great British military campaigns. But because of Republican sensitivities and the Unionists' agenda of despair, the army has been forced to keep quiet about its triumph.

Adams and McGuinness also deserve praise, both for recognising the futility of continuing the armed struggle and for persuading the IRA to end its violence. As a selfproclaimed Marxist outfit, it would have been easy, if far less brave, for the Republican movement to maintain its ideological purity by carrying on with hostilities. There is an interesting parallel here with Yasser Arafat, another leader of a terrorist campaign against an 'occupying' government, But Arafat,

unlike Adams, did not have the wisdom and courage to confront political realities. When offered a peace deal — which actually would have given the Palestinians far more from Israel than Sinn Fein has ever received from Britain — he turned it down. Instead, with a mixture of cowardice and nihilism, he embarked on another cycle of violence which only plunged his people into more misety.

On a personal level, Adams's and McGuinness's actions have been heroic. The last Republican leader to sue for peace, Michael Collins, was assassinated by a group of his own followers in 1922 after concluding the Anglo-lrish treaty with Britain, which created the Irish Free State. But such is the two men's authority that they have been able to carry their movement with them. Even now, as a deal with Paisley looms, there is little sign of the internecine warfare which Republican leaders of lesser stature would have engendered.

Many Unionists have argued that the peace process will only work if the IRA completely gives up all its weapons. But this eagerness to make a fetish of decommissioning is absurd. After all, even if the IRA surrendered its current arms, it could easily import more from Russia, eastern Europe or Nottingham in the event of a renewal of the struggle. The entire issue is therefore an irrelevance. Other critics claim that gang warfare and punishment beatings by paramilitaries make a mockery of the peace process. But this is equally misguided. Such assaults are just part of modern urban societies and are far less common in Ulster than elsewhere in Europe. If all violent criminal activity in England were classified as 'punishment beatings', then this country would be seen as a paramilitary hell. In truth, since 1994, Northern Ireland has been a far safer place to live than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. The recorded crime level in England and Wales is no less than 34 per cent higher than in Northern Ireland, which has a lower proportion of violent deaths for the size of its population than Germany, Scotland and Finland.

Indeed, on so many indicators other than crime, Northern Ireland has become the most pleasant part of the United Kingdom since 1994. It has far more cultural amenities, lower costs of housing, better schools, higher standards of healthcare, and a lower density of population. Nor does it have to cope with the delights of multicultural Britain which have made towns such as Burnley, Blackburn and Bradford such a joy to inhabit. For all the sectarian divisions stretching back centuries, most of Ulster has a stronger sense of community cohesion than large swaths of inner-city Britain.

It is time the Unionists started to trumpet the wonderful success story of the peace process instead of sticking with their siege mentality. But I fear that will not happen. P.G.Wodehouse wrote: 'It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.' Those words are equally applicable to Ulster's Unionists.