The peace process has brought gains, but it has not lived up to expectations. The Government needs to revisit its assumptions and recalibrate its approach, argues Dan O'Brien
The assumptions that underpin the peace process are a good place to start in any re-evaluation of current policy, not least because two of these have proved faulty and need urgent revision.
The first flawed assumption is that, given the opportunity, mainstream militant republicans would take to democracy as did gunmen-turned-constitutionalists in the early years of the State.
This assumption is wrong because the Provisional movement today differs in profound respects from the parties which emerged after independence. Most important is the depth to which a culture of violence and militarism has permeated that movement.
Most of the current Provisional leadership were involved, directly or indirectly, in the taking of human life from youth into middle age, and lived in constant fear of being killed.
Involvement in such a protracted conflict deeply embedded a culture inimical to the practice of democracy. Among others, its characteristics include: a reliance on summary justice; contempt for the law (rather than an understanding of the centrality of the rule of law); unquestioning and unbending beliefs (rather than flexibility and restraint); and sect-like secrecy and paranoia.
Owing to the short duration of the wars of 1919-23, there was no similar embedding of such a culture. This is best evidenced by how anti-Treaty forces behaved after the cessation of civil war hostilities.
Despite the humiliation of defeat in 1923 and a backdrop of ascendant anti-democratic ideologies internationally, within three years the democratically minded split from the fundamentalists, and their move to becoming fully constitutional was completed in less than 10 years.
The evolution of Provisionalism since its ceasefire has seen no such transformation.
The peace process's second flawed assumption relates to how a change in political culture can be engineered. Here, again, a misreading of history has resulted in overoptimism.
Since the collapse of communism, peace processes and democratic transitions around the world have been underpinned by a belief that, because there is no alternative to democracy as a form of government, it is an inevitability.
The policy and scholarly communities internationally came to believe that the habits of democracy would develop automatically provided the right institutional architecture was put in place (the frequently used but flawed analogy of the peace process as a train on track to a single final democratic destination reflects this inevitabilist thinking).
But even before Iraq, evidence had begun to pile up that there is no automaticity. There is also a growing recognition, not only that democratic institutions do not automatically generate democratic values, but that undemocratic values can subvert democratic institutions.
And nowhere has optimism been dashed more than in relation to peace processes in divided societies.
With the exception of South Africa, processes have either failed outright or failed to bring about the transformations envisaged. Examples of both situations include Sri Lanka, Israel-Palestine, Kosovo and Bosnia.
The latter is particularly relevant to the North. Since its Dayton peace accords were implemented a decade ago, the most extreme parties have come to dominate. By promising to protect their respective communities aggressively, they have been able to carve up power and institutionalise a system of government based on predation of their communities. This vista is not dissimilar from the North today.
Almost seven years after the signing of the Belfast Agreement it is clear that the culture of militant republicanism (and intransigent unionism) has not deradicalised and democratised as envisaged, and if this happens at all, it will take at least a generation.
This has serious implications for the Republic. For the foreseeable future, a movement that does not share the democratic values of the State will continue to use the electoral system to increase its influence. In order to prevent degradation of the quality of the Republic's democracy, the Government has a duty to put in place mechanisms to prevent contamination.
As a signal of its intent to end tolerance of any and all paramilitary activity, the Government should establish a body of respected, independent citizens to monitor and report on Provisional illegality, as the International Monitoring Committee does on all paramilitaries in the North.
And, in recognition of the threat posed, greater resources in money and manpower should be allocated to combating Provisional wrongdoing by, for instance, establishing a specially dedicated branch of the Criminal Assets Bureau.
Moreover, making it progressively harder for Provisionals to break the law in the Republic will help, not hinder, the process in the North.
Among the structural weaknesses of the process are the absence of mechanisms to incentivise compliance and punish transgression.
Because the Northern state does not have sufficient legitimacy among Catholics to clamp down without risking a backlash, it is even more urgent that the Government signal to Provisionals that the State will use all its powers to end activities incompatible with democracy.
There should be a place in the process for concessions, but their sequencing should be changed. Heretofore, concessions have been granted upfront, forgoing the leverage that backloading them would bring.
Take the proposed release of the killers of Garda Jerry McCabe. Though it is unclear what Provisionals had done to deserve this concession, it is entirely inexplicable why it was envisaged that the killers would be released immediately, rather than after a period of proven compliance.
The peace process has brought important gains, but the argument for staying the same identical course is wrong for two reasons.
First, the constant repetition that there is only one show in town signals to the extremists that they can act with impunity because the process will continue regardless.
And it suggests that sovereign governments are in some way impotent to address failings and inadequacies in a process they themselves underwrote and helped to construct. Even if there is only one show, the governments are the actors and they have scope to interpret the script.
It has become impossible to avoid the conclusion that Provisionalism as we know it today will not go away any time soon, even if the North's institutions of devolved government can be restored.
If the quality of the Republic's democracy is to be safeguarded, and if peace in the North is to be more than the absence of war, an understanding of the true nature and durability of the Provisional mindset must be central to the conduct of the process going forward.