Confident Irish easier to deal with, says envoy

Success has made Ireland "easier to deal with", the outgoing British Ambassador said last night.

In his last public speech here, Sir Ivor Roberts suggested that the continued existence of the IRA was now "the best card those whom republicans call rejectionist unionists have in their hand".

But he also lamented the lack of political development in loyalism compared with republicans, as reflected in the competing murals on the Falls and Shankill roads: "The difference in community self-portrait is stark, and reminds one of the observation that, while republican prisoners studied for PhDs, their loyalist counterparts pumped iron."

Addressing the Irish Association, Sir Ivor said he was leaving this country in the belief that relations between Ireland and Britain had never been better - "a belief that was recently described to me as a cliché". If it really was a cliché, so much the better, he said, adding: "It was not so long ago that such a belief would have been dismissed as humour."

Their closer co-operation in Europe embraced not just policy areas such as social security, tax and economic reform, but also the Convention on the Future of Europe, which was preparing the ground for the 2004 Intergovernmental Conference.

"British and Irish co-operation will be imprinted on what could, I believe, turn out to be a Treaty of Dublin. This is a far cry from the days when Irish officials were instructed to speak French at EU meetings."

Both countries had matured "in ways which are easier to see and feel than describe", he said. "Ireland is, of course, undergoing profound change. I see a modern, open economy with some of the best business brains around. I see leaders in popular culture.

"I see a country as part of the European mainstream, having made the most of European structural funds but no longer reliant on them. This country rightly grows in self-confidence by the day. As it does so, it becomes easier to deal with."

Sir Ivor said that his new job - as ambassador to Italy - would be his last in the diplomatic service. But, arguing that relations between Ireland and Britain "have been defined for far too long by nationalism", he said the subject of nationalism always brought him back to his first ambassadorial post "in the Yugoslavia of Slobodan Milosevic".

Whenever he lectured the Serbs on their offences against their Muslim neighbours, they pointed to the "two Christian sects killing each other in Northern Ireland". But both Northern Ireland and the Balkans had illustrated what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences". It was "precisely in the groups which had relatively little to distinguish each other that the jealousies, the narcissism most easily led to violent attempts to mark difference and to want to obliterate those who most nearly resembled you".

The Belfast Agreement remained a remarkable achievement, he said, but the continued existence of the IRA was an excuse for extreme unionism's refusal to share power.

"The ambiguity with which the republican movement handled the relationship between Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA may have helped oil the wheels of the peace process in the past, but it has now become the grit which has brought the machinery to a grinding halt."

Of loyalism, Sir Ivor lamented that "handing in a few pipe-bombs" did not mean a better breed of paramilitary was taking over. "I feel sorry for some of the political leaders of loyalism."

He praised Mr David Ervine in particular for his courage in trying to provide leadership. But of the paramilitaries, he added: "Most people do not see even a veneer of politics associated with the violence, and much of it has long since descended into gangsterism."