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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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The latest volume of Alastair Campbell's diaries are another reminder of how Europe has dominated and divided British governments for decades
The latest volume of Alastair Campbell's diaries are another reminder of how Europe has dominated and divided British governments for decades. The issue at the heart of Mr Campbell's latest volume was Tony Blair's determination to keep UK eurozone membership open and Gordon Brown's equal and opposite resolve to bolt the door. Go back a decade or so, and the divisive issue would have been the Maastricht treaty. A decade before that, the European exchange rate mechanism. Before that, membership of the European community itself, in or out, would have been the battleground around the cabinet table and between and within the political parties themselves.
And now? Europe undoubtedly still dominates the national agenda. David Cameron had barely touched down in Mexico for the G20 summit yesterday before he was issuing statements about what Greece and the eurozone nations should be doing. Yet it was said more as an observer than as a participant. Publicly at least, it is taken for granted that Britain is well off out of the eurozone. The only questions that appear to matter to the political class of both right and left are, first, whether the British economy can ignore the continent's turbulence and, second, what partisan advantage can be extracted from a seemingly inevitable EU referendum.
Yet the belief that Britain is blessed by being on high and secure ground from which we can watch as the European project is washed away, and then calmly turn our backs on it without damaging this country, is a misleading one. The real question is not whether Britain has an interest at stake in the eurozone crisis or the future of the EU, but how those real interests can be best defended and promoted. Ministers know this but prefer to play to the gallery. Mr Cameron also knows there is no economic firewall protecting Britain. George Osborne warned in his Mansion House speech last week that eurozone collapse would have dire consequences for Britain. British ministers are willy-nilly players in these events, as they always have been.
At the weekend, Mr Blair told the BBC it was critical for Britain to use its influence to shape the outcome. Characteristically, he talked in terms of a grand negotiation to produce a solution based both on growth and structural reforms to which all could sign up. It is easy to dismiss such talk. Yet it is a better and more realistic strategy than Mr Cameron's ineffectual and disingenuous warnings from the grandstand. Engagement is the strategy which John Major would have followed, not just Mr Blair or Mr Brown. Mr Cameron needs to stop the sermons this week and get much more actively engaged with forging more effective solutions.
