By Dave Riley
The restoration of the IRA cease-fire has again raised hopes of an end to 25 years of war in northern Ireland.
The previous cease-fire collapsed because no meaningful negotiations were pursued. For the 18 months of the cessation, which began in August 1994, the British government and the loyalists stonewalled on the decommissioning issue, and a unique opportunity for peace was frittered away. All the while, the unionists and then Prime Minister John Major kept Sinn Féin out of the talks.
Although the renewed cessation facilitates the start of all-party peace talks on September 15, in the unionist camp, very little seems to have changed. Angered by the IRA's cease-fire declaration, unionists rejected it as phoney even before it officially began.
Peter Robinson, deputy leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, said he would not accept the IRA announcement as a basis for Sinn Féin's entry into the multiparty talks. "There is no way any unionist is going to accept this. Without unionists you can't have talks, and under the rules that is the end of the process", he said.
Unionist intransigence revolves around their longstanding precondition that for Sinn Féin to be included in the talks, the IRA must hand over its weapons.
"But here in Ireland", said Sinn Féin chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, "We seem to put the horse before the cart. What we have to do is remove the causes of the conflict, and once we do that, it is much easier to remove the weaponry which is all around us."
Carefully ignored in the war of words is the fact that the unionists have in their possession somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 weapons, and that the unionist cease-fire has been one in name only since 1994. Arson, assassination and indiscriminate terrorist acts against the nationalist community have continued unabated.
All three unionist parties were quick to reject the disarmament plans agreed to by ministers in London and Dublin before the announcement of the IRA cessation. This was followed by a staged walkout from talks at Stormont by two of the unionist parties, even though the talks were in recess.
Responding to the walkout, McGuinness said, "If unionist parties refuse to attend negotiations, then the British government must come to the negotiating table and nationalist Ireland must negotiate with the British government the future of this entire island".
The Mid-Ulster MP said that Sinn Féin would place on any talks agenda its belief that there "must be an end to British rule on this island, that there must be a united Ireland and that the British government should accept the right of all the people of Ireland to national self-determination".
"We are not putting down a united Ireland as a precondition to talks. We are putting down quite clearly ... that before we start negotiations, we go there with a very firm political agenda to assert the rights of Irish nationalists and republicans to peace and freedom in their own country."
Between now and September 15, two separate processes are supposed to take place. The first is the six-week period over which the British government will assess the cease-fire in "word and deed".
The second process is the implementation of the plan announced on June 25 by the London and Dublin governments to establish a commission to formulate draft schemes for tackling the decommissioning issues.
Despite all the hype about peace and the formal trappings of negotiations, the British government of Tony Blair has no intention of conceding democracy. Blair stated in his Belfast speech soon after his election victory, "Not even the youngest child present here today will see a united Ireland".
With unionist intransigence already shaping the outcome of the decommissioning debate, Blair's confidence in preserving the United Kingdom intact seems, for the moment, justified.
Writing in an Irish newspaper, Mo Mowlam, the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland drew attention to the north's in-built unionist majority: "There will be no change in the status of Northern Ireland unless a majority of people there want it. Agreement between the parties, and the consent of the people of Northern Ireland and parliament, are required for any settlement. That 'triple lock' ensures that neither community — unionist or nationalist — will be forced into an outcome they do not support."
Given these conditions, designed to preserve the isolation of the north from the rest of Ireland, it remains to be seen how substantive the negotiations will be when they resume on September 15.