In the small town of Armagh, near the border separating Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland, there are two cathedrals dedicated to Saint Patrick, the island’s patron saint, looking down on each other from their respective hills, and they preserve with mutual suspicion 25 years of peace and amnesia. From the urban center, two signs that the visitor must decipher indicate the direction to get to one or the other: Cathedral (COI) and Cathedral (RC). That is to say, the cathedral of the Church of Ireland (Church Of Ireland, Anglican) and the Roman Catholic cathedral (Roman Catholic).
The heart of Irish Christianity barely has 16,000 souls, compared to the almost 1.9 million inhabitants of Northern Ireland. During the three decades of that sectarian and bloody conflict known by the euphemism of The Troubles (the problems), of the 3,488 deaths that occurred, Armagh suffered 86, a more than enough proportion. This Monday marks a quarter century of the Good Friday Agreement — the Belfast Agreement, as Protestants prefer to call it — that put an end to so much violence in 1998.
“It is still necessary for some wounds to heal between the two communities. Every family has stories of someone being shot or killed by the other side, and that pain is still felt. It is necessary to cure it on both sides. But we do not live that experience. For me, sometimes, it’s like a movie. It doesn’t seem like it was real, because today we don’t feel like it is at all,” says 23-year-old Ben. He has launched Café Soujourn a few months ago, a small, tastefully decorated venue with different types of coffee and freshly made croissants, not unlike the cafes that can be found in London’s chic Chelsea neighborhood.
“It’s a good place to live, with quite a few car dealerships, with good houses that cost between £200,000 and £1 million. [entre 225.000 y 1,1 millones de euros] and a lot of schools”, boasts Matthew, 22, as he shows the client one of the two bottles of Vega Sicilia Unico, the legendary Spanish wine, that the store where he works has.
“And no memory of the sectarian violence of 25 years ago?”
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe
—”Not in my case, fortunately,” he replies.
Matthew’s father joined the UK Army and was assigned to patrol the region during the years of conflict. In the jargon of the day, County Armagh was known as the “killing mile” (Murder Mile). The members of the IRA moved at ease through a rural, winding terrain and close to the protective border of the republic. The soldiers were moving through the area by helicopter. Moving on land was too risky. There were ironic signs on the highway that said Sniper at Work (sniper working) and showed the silhouette of a hooded man with a submachine gun and raised fist.
“They have not the slightest memories left. It happens to my two children. The eldest was born in 1994, the year the IRA announced the ceasefire ”, laments Jeffrey — like many others, he agrees to speak but instinctively refuses to say his last name —, the administrator of the ulster gazette, the local newspaper with the largest circulation in the county, with just five people on staff. “They know what happened, of course, because they have been told. But they have no memory of anything… When they tried to kill that policeman in Omagh a few weeks ago and everyone was shocked, I remembered that this was everyday life when we were young ”, he reflects.
Jeffrey refers to what happened on February 22, when agent John Caldwell, off duty and in plain clothes, collected some soccer balls in the trunk of his car, after training a group of children at the sports center in Omagh, 57 kilometers from Armagh. He was shot in front of his son. He was seriously injured. Police focused their inquiries on the so-called Real IRA, a fringe splinter of the terrorist organization that remains active.
“Sure there are flashes of how easy it is to go back, we saw that in that assassination attempt,” says Sandra Peake, WAVE’s executive director. In her day, the acronym stood for Widows Against Violence Empower (Empowerment of Widows Against Violence), a group of eight women from both sides who lost their partners during the conflict. Today it is the largest support organization for victims of violence in Northern Ireland. Its Armagh headquarters are tucked away down a lane in the center, but activities and events are spread throughout the county. “It is undeniable that there have been positive changes that have had a profound psychological effect and have affected the way people feel. The Good Friday Agreement was a radical turn, because the great difficulty for many victims was that much of what happened was hidden, and only over time has it come to light,” Peake points out. “But there are still operational paramilitary groups, on both sides, that can jeopardize everything that has been achieved,” she warns.
The “legacy” and the protocol
A quarter of a century after the agreement, peace seems consolidated. The reconciliation of the two communities, however, never ended. And two issues —one from the past, the other from the future— have stirred up the Northern Irish hornet’s nest in recent years. The Conservative government of Boris Johnson promoted the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, with which London sought to temper judicial review of 30 years of violence, by granting immunity to defendants on both sides who collaborated with the Commission for the Reconciliation and Recovery of Information. Although the clear purpose was to protect ex-servicemen who faced criminal proceedings for their actions during the years of the conflict, the project outraged the relatives of Republican and Protestant victims.
“The Good Friday Agreement was an extraordinary achievement, but also a commitment that must continue to be worked on. Fundamental parts remain to be developed, such as everything related to human rights and equality”, explains Professor Colin Harvey, from Queen’s University Law School in Belfast, amid such enthusiasm for the anniversary. “The position that the British Government has adopted in everything that refers to the legacy [la memoria de los años de violencia y sus consecuencias] It has been profoundly counterproductive. She hasn’t helped at all,” Harvey charges. “The peace process is assured, but the anti-protocol discourse used in recent years has been profoundly irresponsible,” she recalls.
Institutional blockade in the face of “betrayal”
Professor Harvey refers to the Ireland Protocol, the treaty signed between London and Brussels to lock Northern Ireland into the post-Brexit era. That is the matter of the future —and of the present— that has shaken the stability achieved. The main Protestant party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP, in its acronym in English) considered from the outset that pact, which retained Northern Ireland within the internal market of the EU, a betrayal of the British Government (also led in that moment by Johnson). Since then, it has blocked the autonomous government institutions in the region and uses the “principle of consent” established in the peace agreement as a pressure tool. It supposes that any political advance must have the support of the two communities, although the vote in recent years has made it clear that there is a “third community”, moderate and oblivious to rancor, which mainly suffers from this administrative freeze.
“The peace agreement did not resolve a problem that has dragged on for decades, such as the existence of two communities with opposing ideas about the country to which Northern Ireland belongs. It was hoped that by enforcing peace and guaranteeing the rights of both sides, these existential issues could be set aside for a couple of generations and a more normal society could emerge in that time. And it more or less worked. Until Brexit arrived”, explains the writer Fintan O’Toole, whose book We Don’t Know Ourselves. A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (We do not know each other. A personal history of Ireland since 1958) remember that the history of the island is common to all its inhabitants.
“There was sectarianism and tension, but also a shared space facilitated by the fact that Ireland and the United Kingdom were part of the European Union,” recalls O’Toole. “The idea of taking Northern Ireland out of the EU [aunque siga dentro del espacio aduanero] against the democratic will of its population [un 55,8% votó a favor de la permanencia] it has brought all these questions to the surface. He has encouraged the unionists to return to the crudest British nationalism and the Republicans to respond with greater urgency regarding the future reunification of the island ”, sums up the writer.
He and many other observers of the Northern Ireland situation are confident, however, that the Brexit balloon will deflate and politics will regain the pragmatism necessary to provide stability to the region. The United States has been pending in recent years in everything related to the tension created around the protocol. The good offices of the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who has apparently managed to redirect the conflict with Brussels with the so-called Windsor Agreement, has ended up convincing Washington. And President Joe Biden, of Irish descent, will visit Northern Ireland on Tuesday to join in the celebrations.
Biden is not expected to set foot in Armagh, where the anniversary will not have the same relevance as in Belfast. Nor does it seem that there is much desire to remember. At Shambles Market, strategically placed between the two cathedrals, Kevin, a 60-year-old Catholic, distributes the flowers he has grown and wants to sell that morning. “There will always be people looking for a fight and rekindling old tensions. But in general everything has changed for the better.
—What is the memory of those years?
—I remember especially the way to school. Police controls. Bombs. shootings. These are all very distant memories.
While he distributes the boxes of flowers on the floor, a group of uniformed schoolchildren, noisy and fast, goes to the Colegio de San Patricio, next to the Catholic cathedral. In Armagh there are also mixed schools, to integrate students, but as in the rest of Northern Ireland, 25 years have not yet put an end to the “together but not scrambled” mentality.
Follow all the international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#Northern #Ireland #celebrates #years #peace #amnesia #shaken #Brexit