The peace process happened not on TV but long before that, in the hearts and minds of the people, writes John Waters
THERE HAVE been many books, many articles and a multitude of broadcast documentaries produced about the bother on this island over the past 40 years. But not even the best has come close to capturing the complex interflow of currents and forces, the undertows and whirlpools of this most incomprehensible of conflicts. This story is all but untellable, in part because the roots of conflict extended to so many levels of Irish society, North and South
If it can be comprehended, it is to be comprehended, surely, in the personality of Ian Paisley, and in his shifting relationships with the various political and human entities on the island. Each of us has a tale to tell about this. My own is simply summarised: I began by hating him and have grown to regard him with respect and affection, though I have never met him and would be terrified of doing so. This change of heart (never was the term more apt) did not occur for wholly political reasons, nor can its drifts and shifts be conveyed by psychological analysis. It is, in the purest sense, a drama. There is a book in it.
But it would be some book that would get to grips with Ian Paisley. He is the book. He is the drama. He belongs to a rare elite of political figures who have brought to politics the fullness of a fabulous personality and confronted history as though it were a little boy asking for more. The nearest equivalent produced in the Republic was Charles Haughey, but compared with Paisley, Haughey was that little boy.
Only by understanding how we came to love Paisley can we begin to understand what has happened to ourselves. This is not comprehensible in terms of memoranda, discussion documents, declarations, still less of bombs, bullets and kneecappings. These were but the surface events of a drama that went to the core of the identities of the peoples of this island.
The image of the Chuckle Brothers conveys something of what has happened. We watch Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in their paroxysms of mirth and something of the benign mystery of reconciliation comes across. It is beyond words. These men who used to hate, to excoriate, each other, now belly-laugh at each other's jokes.
But this is more than an image of two men. It is an image from a culture which changed because of the complex interworkings of human personality as much as by the plodding and drudgery of politics.
The Chuckle Brothers were the children of reinvented public desires, two men who stood for many more. The spectacle of their laughing heads would not have been possible unless something enormous had shifted deep in the soul of Ireland. The images were both transformative and the consequence of other transformations.
They did not happen spontaneously. For many years these two men had engaged in ritualistic disavowals of one another because that was what their respective tribes wanted to hear. The process by which we travelled from there to here did not simply happen, nor was it some maudlin reconciliation conducted for the sake of peace. It was a profound human interaction which collapsed the ideological, historical and political barriers between two men who happened to be politicians because such a collapsing had firstly been achieved at a more general level. This one-on-one human reconciliation drew its energy from a profound change in the surrounding culture, and in turn nurtured the changes that had given it life.
For the deeply rooted cultures that underpinned both sides of the conflict to be deconstructed, it was never going to be enough for various leaders to meet in a room. The peace process was not something that happened on television, but, long before that, in the hearts and minds of the people. There had to be a process of thawing, initiated by the leaderships, but incapable of being dictated or contrived.
Around the talks table, a formal method was called for: an engagement of moderates, followed by engagement of extremists. This too was a drama, vital to the unfolding of the deeper one. There even needed to be stalling and procrastination, to enable each tribe to come to terms with the concessions required of it. Thus, even the apparent opponents of settlement were vital to the final outcome.
But this was still just the formal political process, depending for its viability on a deeper process in the imagination of society, and, beneath this collective imagination, in the individual heart of every member of that society, contriving to change him - or herself - in ways that cannot be measured or discounted. Ultimately, it was not the politicians who changed Ireland, but the people, one by one, in our private hearts, allowing our deepest antagonisms and prejudices to melt away in the hope of a brighter dawn.
And yet the story is tellable, comprehensible, only as a drama in which the king, flawed, flamboyant and fabulous, was Ian Paisley. Who, while he lingers for us to comtemplate, will begin to tell that story?