It is good that the Queen's visit has crossed a divide. But power sharing in Northern Ireland remains inherently unstable
'Queen shakes hands with IRA' would once have caused a sensation. Today it is a happy milestone on the rocky path of Irish reconciliation. Within a year, the monarch has made the first ever visit to the Republic of Ireland and is today greeting a republican leader in Belfast. That greeting is across a political divide but also a religious one, the divide that created Irish partition in 1922 and has underlain Ulster's troubled history ever since. For a monarch to cross a divide is not to unite it, but it is better than not crossing at all.
The history of attempts to end communal violence in Northern Ireland since the 1960s is sobering for all who claim for Britain some unique genius for domestic harmony, one that it is entitled to visit on Yugoslavs, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans and others alike. At least until recently, each hesitant dawn has been followed by bloody dusk. From the collapse of power-sharing in 1974 to its stuttering resumption in Gordon Brown's "second Good Friday" in 2009, London's attempt to bring peace to Northern Ireland has demonstrated the maxim that no corner of the British empire is ruled so ineptly as one that is closest to hand.
Under British ministers, the evils of the old Protestant ascendancy were exacerbated by hamfisted security, school apartheid, state dependency and housing segregation, all contributing to a 30-year upsurge in communal division and bloodshed. Figures indicate that twice as many Ulster parishes are now more than 80% single faith as before direct rule. Each year, yet another incident of sectarian violence emanates – largely from young people educated wholly apart from half their fellow citizens. Far from being reconciled, most of Belfast has merely been segregated.
As a result, Northern Ireland had, at the last count, 80 barriers and "peace walls" dividing its urban and suburban neighbourhoods, three times as many as at the time of the partial ceasefire in 1994. Such a collapse in community concord is unknown elsewhere in Europe. It is hypocritical for Britain to lay down the law for "trouble spots" round the world when it cannot remove these social obscenities from its own backyard.
For four decades, a parallel "peace process" assumed that power to deliver reconciliation lay somewhere between London, Dublin and possibly Washington. Conferences on "conflict studies" used to lump together Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel-Palestine as if they were identical cases. A regular attender was the old IRA watcher, Conor Cruise O'Brien, who predicted that Northern Ireland would find peace not when London or Dublin ordained it but when local militants had grownup children, and craved respectability in retirement. He was right.
Peace has come to the streets of Northern Ireland crucially because the current generation of politicians, most from extremist groupings, tired of war and decided peace was in their interest. The old Provisionals, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, turned their coats and renounced the bullet in favour of the ballot. A bitterly divided Unionist majority, led by David Trimble, Ian Paisley and the current first minister, Peter Robinson, drifted hesitantly into an oligarchy of frigid and fragile power-sharing.
This oligarchy remains afloat on huge sums of Treasury cash, enough to make Greece seem a model of fiscal self-reliance. Fewer people than live in Greater Manchester are governed through 12 ministerial departments and a 400-strong first minister's office, bigger than Downing Street. The Belfast academic, Paul Bew, refers to the British taxpayer as "the great unsung hero of the Troubles".
Yet it has eventually worked. To visit Northern Ireland today is to sense a novel stability in the air. In Belfast, two separate citizenries that inhabit one city and who once never met, worked, studied, conferred, let alone governed together, now do at least some of these things. The economic problems of the Republic have halted the depopulation of the north. Security, the bugbear of divided communities, has at last come under local control, lubricated by a £1bn subvention from Gordon Brown in 2009.
That said, the future needs realism rather than hope. Ulster's present rulers, honed in a bitter struggle, have undoubted calibre, but they are mortal. They can shake hands with each other, not to mention the Queen, because they know they carry the confidence of their constituencies. That confidence may not outlive them. Northern Ireland politics is full of dark woods and frightening places. Sharing power across an ethnic or religious divide is inherently unstable. When the present generation passes, deluge may yet return.
For the old division remains. Belfast has not achieved religious reconciliation comparable with Glasgow or Liverpool. Northern Ireland was partitioned from the new Irish state to stave off the threat of armed revolt by its Protestant community. Ever since, its politics has relied on a Unionist majority wielding the power of plebiscite. It has relied on London's acceptance that whatever Ulster wants, Ulster gets. But were an Alex Salmond to emerge and demand independence or reunion with the Republic, England would be unlikely to complain.
Unionism is vulnerable to demography. The first minister, Peter Robinson, admits that it may soon need to preach its virtues to a swath of Catholic voters. The religious division is already in the region of 50-50. A recent poll had 54% of schoolchildren claiming to be Catholics, while only 35% of students now call themselves Protestant.
This "population time-bomb" was once used to explain, if not excuse, unionist paranoia. It is now inverted. Unionists will eventually lose their automatic veto on Irish reunion. They cannot forever coerce Catholics into being British, and must resort to an unfamiliar methodology, that of persuasion. Demography may yet be the greatest peacemaker of all.
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