THE moment of surrender of the rule of democracy to the activities of an active minority came when Bertie Ahern declared that it was the policy of the government of the Republic of Ireland to support the residents of the Garvaghy Road in whatever line they took on the Orange march on the outskirts of the estate where they live. I thought that kind of idle and mischievous prattle with regard to the North no longer found utterance. In which case, wrong again.
But if we continue to make repeat errors, is it surprising? Do we not forget each lesson we have learnt in the North within an octave of learning it? One listens to the antiphons of the journalists reporting there, all of them convinced they are reporting something new and startling, and all of them are repeating tales their fathers could have told. And their grandfathers. And their great grandfathers. You can dress this struggle up in whatever raiment of modern vocabulary you like, but what is going on is merely a re-enactment of an ancient dispute whose rules and passions are barely understood by the participants. They are not understood at all by such as Bertie Ahern.
To have surrendered authority over Northern policy to the "Residents Commitee" of the Garvaghy Road so soon after coming to power must surely set a record of ephemerality. The man had been in power for less than a month.
Abandonment of democracy
What next? Is agricultural policy to be created by a committee within the lFA? Is policy of the Department of Finance to be decided by a handful of fine fellows from AIB? Is pay policy to be surrendered to a caucus from SIPTU?
Accepting deadlines and terms for the formulation of government policy from those outside the electoral process is an abandonment of the keystone of democracy, no matter how right those outsiders might be. As it happens, the Garvaghy Road residents have some right on their side. So too do the Orangemen who wish to remember their war dead by walking along what they regard as The Queen's Highway.
No doubt Bertie Ahern, being outside the dynamics of that place, feels - as I do - that it should not be necessary for the Orangemen to walk down that road. Should is the operative word. It apparently is necessary. That this is so merely confirms what we already know. Northern Ireland is a deeply disordered place where people feel passions beyond anything the rest of us know. Outsiders trifle with those passions not merely at their peril, but at the peril of those who feel the passions.
We happen to know that the Garvaghy Road affair is not just a spontaneous rising against a Protestant intrusion into a Catholic estate. We know this because the march does not enter the estate. We also know, from Gerry Adams's only refreshingly frank words, that it took years of work and preparation to ensure that the conflict there came about. Did Bertie Ahern take that into account when he declared his support for the residents of Garvaghy Road? Did his advisers remind him?
Now we hear the clarion call of Martin McGuinness to nationalists to take to the streets, as the vehicles burn, and boys hurl petrol bombs at police and soldiers, and the mantras of joyous victimhood rise over nationalist ghettoes of the North. There is no more morally frivolous advice to give than to urge people onto those streets where IRA men are already waiting with their AKs and their AR 15s. That is the counsel from the Member of Parliament for Mid-Ulster.
Fruits of the Peace Process
We have been brought to this sorry pass by that odd vehicle called the Peace Process. Sinn Fein-IRA complained that they had been marginalised, and they had. For good reason. Like their loyalist counterparts, they had suspended their membership of civilised society and engaged in unspeakably evil atrocities in pursuit of aims - which could not and cannot be achieved by political means, never mind democratic means, and least of all by mass homicide.
There is a key lesson here which we in Ireland have had to relearn repeatedly. If you don't marginalise those who violate the rule of law and civilisation, soon they will sit in the very centre of your councils. And this is precisely what has happened and directly as a result of this vehicle called the Peace Process. Far from Sinn spokesmen calling the nationalists to the streets from the margins of a Northern nationalist society, they do so from the very centre stage. The Peace Process has transformed the dismal ventriloquist's dummy of IRA terrorism into strutting, suited statesmanlike figures who walk the world's stage, pleading a vocabulary of liberation which masks a starkly tribal dispute with starkly tribal aims.
No agreement possible
This was made possible by the intellectually feeble notion that a detailed and lasting peace is possible within Northern Ireland by conciliating extremes. It is not. I have said this so many times I am ill saying it. There is no possible agreement between the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein/IRA, none; and while they remain outside the centre of any agreement, they will tear that agreement apart. All that can be done is the imposition of a form of governance in Northern Ireland, that the fond habits of peace may in time be restored.
Many thought that they had been. The "Peace Processophiles" in Dublin and Belfast argued that peace could be got by some alchemy which would probably have to exclude the Protestant right, as if the Protestant right had not by their terrorism helped instigate these troubles 30 years ago and more. The result of this fatheadedness will be the political extinction of the SDLP and the transformation of what lived in a despised fringe into the armed and deadly expression of northern nationalist zealotry. Then shall we know the full price to be paid for permitting the difference between democrat and murderer to be muddied.
Look down at the edge of your toes. What you see is a precipice. Our own footsteps have taken us to this edge; and I do not know whether we have yet learned to walk backwards. It is time to start.