Processed peace

SUZANNE BREEN is doubtlessly one of Ireland’s finest reporters. Her stories are impeccably researched, her sources deep and trustworthy and her recent victory against the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) struck a blow for freedom of the press. It is ironic, then, that her dogged refusal to drop the story of abuse allegations surrounding Liam Adams, brother of Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, is making it easier to sympathise with the beleaguered leader of Irish republicanism.

This is not an attack on Breen. Far from it, she is doing her job and doing it well. A few more reporters with Breen’s determination and nose for news would make the Irish press a lot more interesting.

However, the Liam Adams affair tells us precisely nothing about political matters or the state of the Northern statelet. There are questions – and potentially criminal charges – to be answered over the entire matter but let’s not confuse it with politics.

Underneath an all caps banner headline reading: “Party of sinners: Sinn Féin and the abuse allegations”, pages ten and eleven of today’s Sunday Tribune saw Breen document another two cases of alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by members of Sinn Féin.

One thing is for sure: Sinn Féin is looking decidedly ragged these days. The party’s loss of another councillor in Dublin, Killian Forde, suggests the rot that set-in in recent years has damaged the organisation to its core. Back in the late 1990s it was clear that the future of Sinn Féin was to mirror that of the British Labour Party: ditch the baggage, keep the name, soften the policies beyond recognition and smile a lot. Alas, it was not to be. When the troubles ended the party was riding high on a wave of public euphoria but within a few short years trouble really set in.

First there was the ever-collapsing Northern Assembly but the problems really started with the Northern Bank robbery, blamed on the IRA. The murder in a Belfast pub of Robert McCartney, blamed on individual IRA members if not the organisation as a whole, really began to wear the sheen off the party.

The assasination of Dennis Donaldson, now known to have been an operation of the dissident splinter group the Real IRA rather than the now disbanded Provisional IRA linked to Sinn Féin, was another low point for the party – even though it was later revealed to be unrelated to Sinn Féin, there had been suspicions that he was killed by the IRA. In addition, the very spectre of violence that had galvanised the public in favour of the peace process when the Real IRA detonated the Omagh bomb in 1998 seemed to hang around Sinn Féin in a case of guilt by association. Finally, following after the Stakeknife affair, Donaldson’s outing as a British spy deeply disturbed many in the republican community: just who can you trust?

The interminable peace process itself, however, is what has done the most damage to Sinn Féin. For the first few years fall-outs between republicans and unionist were both accepted and expected – it would take time for Northern politicians to learn to play the game together. After all, for thirty years all they had done was sling insults at one another, or so the received wisdom claimed.

But things never did get better. The institutions of the peace process, so appealing to the British and Irish elites, proved incapable of getting anything like an agreement on the ground. Talk of meeting in the middle soon dissipated and neither the press nor the politicians wanted to admit that sometimes the middle is more to one side than the other. After all, to do so would be to play into the hands of the ‘extremists’ and undermine the new narrative of the conflict, that it was a pointless violent hissy-fit with no meaning, akin to two bald men fighting over a comb.

A certain section of bien pensant opinion, particularly in the Republic, says that it doesn’t matter how appalling the Assembly is or how perverse the peace process is, so long as the guns are silent. It’s a compelling argument but it is wrong on two counts.

Firstly, there is no direct connection between the end of the conflict and the Northern Assembly. The various ceasefires held while the Assembly had fallen to bits and, more to the point, the three main armed groups, the Provisional IRA, the UDA and the UVF have all disarmed and the INLA, long thought to be the most ‘ruthless’ on the republican side, has announced it sees armed struggle as futile.

Secondly, to say that the North is better off with a dysfunctional Assembly is to deny the people real democracy. It really is as simple as that.

Building an alternative to the divisive, sectarian and ugly peace process will be a difficult task. Or at least it would be, if anyone could be bothered to even try. As things stand today no-one will and so we are left with a peace process that bores and irritates the public and, as is increasingly obvious, is incapable of delivering a lasting solution to the issue of sovereignty.

Or anything else, including the much-ballyhooed ‘bread and butter’ politics.

PREVIOUSLY ON FORTH:
James Heartfield explained why the British elite is cock-a-hoop over the Adams family and Mrs Robinson affairs, Dr Daniel Jewesbury analysed the Iris Robinson saga, Jason Walsh rued the North’s permanent provisional government, Tommy McKearney said Gerry Adams should retire and Patrick West compared Sinn Féin to Ukip.