Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre

Geoffrey Carnall writes in relation to the Antrim shootings..."Responsibility for the shooting of two British soldiers in a barracks in Northern Ireland has been claimed by the ‘Real IRA’, one of the Irish Republican groups which has never accepted the Good Friday Agreement. Politicians of all the mainstream political parties have condemned this attempt to keep alive the traditional scenario of Irish resistance to a British military occupation. And the hope is that the benefits of abandoning this scenario will be apparent enough to prevent a revival of the centuries-old commitment to heroic warfare.
In an interview on the BBC’s ‘World Tonight’ programme, Eamon McCann, a veteran left-wing journalist now associated with the Socialist Environmental Alliance, expressed the view that the shooting was unlikely to re-kindle sectarian conflict, but that there was potential for such conflict because of the continuing separation of the Protestant and Catholic communities in the province. His own party makes the erosion of this separation an issue at the top of its agenda, but it is hardly a significant player in Northern Irish politics.
When I worked in Belfast through the 1950s, while the separation of the communities was taken for granted, there were many small-scale efforts to bridge the gap. Such efforts persisted through the troubles later on, usually with the proviso ‘No publicity, please’. I remember attending the Quaker Yearly Meeting in Dublin some time in the 1970s and hearing about a variety of peacemaking initiatives – but nothing could be said about them in public, or that would be the end of them. People also deplored the fact that the media only showed interest in the bad news. I pointed out that, well, they weren’t allowed to get the good news, but my observation made no impression. However, I don’t doubt that these initiatives were crucial to the eventual achievement of the Good Friday Agreement, and that if the apparently insignificant activities of the Socialist Environmental Alliance are part of an inconspicuous effort to build bridges, then the peace process will continue.
As always, war makes a good story, has a strong narrative outline. Peace is apt to be a muddle, a bit ridiculous, the result of a variety of very mixed motives. We have to learn to shrug this off. There is life in the muddle."