Even the landscape and the shape of city streets could change if a political agreement stemming from the Stormont talks turns into a solid reality. There has been quite massive distortion of both the rural and urban environments in Northern Ireland as a result of the 30 years of conflict.
The cityscapes have been distorted and disrupted by both the bombing campaigns and the need to separate warring communities.
Belfast is a city of internal borders, delineated by the permanent "peace walls" some 30 feet high running between working-class areas throughout the city. Police stations, which had previously fitted in with the largely Victorian towns and cities and the vernacular rural architecture, were transformed into steel and concrete monolithic "defensible" structures capable of withstanding IRA mortar and bomb attacks.
In the countryside, army and police barracks are even more obtrusive with high lookout towers and steel cages to protect them from rocket attack. The line of British Army lookout posts dotted along the south Armagh border and the huge security installations abutting villages and towns deform the landscape in a way that Norman and Planter fortresses did before them. This security infrastructure may not disappear overnight but would gradually do so under the historic political agreement reached at Stormont. Under the April 1996 Belfast Agreement, which anchors yesterday's agreement, both Governments promise that in the event of a "peaceful environment" there should be a "normalisation" of security arrangements and practices.
"Normalising" must mean that police stations would become places whose function is to provide a service for the public rather than simply provide protection for officers from artillery and explosives.
In a "normal" society, the Northern public should be able to walk freely into a police station the way people in the Republic do and not pass through bullet-proof man-traps with two-way mirrored glass. The police, for their part, would not have to wear body armour and carry high-powered weapons when going about their duties. The constant threat of attack while off duty and with their families from terrorist groups - likened in one study to living under a volcano - would also be lifted from their lives Also, should the agreement reached at Stormont work, the Republic and Northern Ireland could be entering an era where police "special" powers and "emergency" legislation may become a thing of the past.
????????????iochna and the "emergency" or "anti-terrorist" legislation that has permitted are institutions that predate Partition and are a response to the armed insurrection, mainly by illegal republican organisations, but also against by loyalists.
Draconian security measures have been a feature of government on both sides of the Border throughout the century. The governments of the Republic and Northern Ireland executed IRA members as late as the second World War. On its foundation, the Republic resorted to the use of military "tribunals" where those found armed and considered a threat to the foundling State faced immediate execution.
Internment - imprisonment without trial -- was used in the Republic up to the early 1960s and in Northern Ireland until 1975. Thousands were interned in places such as the Curragh in Co Kildare, Long Kesh in Co Antrim and Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast at various periods of armed insurrection.
Two commissions - one on policing headed by the former Governor of Hong Kong, Mr Chris Patten and another on the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland - are currently examining and preparing to report on ways in which both the RUC and the courts can be made more acceptable in a "normal" society. Simultaneously, both Governments are introducing parallel human rights commissions which will act as watchdogs and have power to bring courts cases on behalf of individuals who believe their rights have been abused.
The removal of the security structures and the legal apparatus that has grown up to protect the democratic structures presupposes that the terrorist organisations agree to contract themselves to the "decommissioning" terms of the Belfast Agreement. Decommissioning is described as an "indispensable" part of the process and only when it is advanced will either State feel secure in deconstructing its extraordinary security structures.
In practice, terrorist decommissioning will probably take place in tandem with the demilitarisation of the North. If the British Army, say, removes its line of observation posts and forts along the Border, the IRA could hand over its estimated two to three tons of Semtex plastic explosive. Such explosives are purely "offensive" weapons and could not be construed as having a part to play in, for instance, the defence of a nationalist enclave from loyalist attack, a function that the IRA has never realised anyway.
The IRA ceasefire, to date, has consisted largely of a decision not to take offensive action against the military or police or to attack commercial property in Northern Ireland or Britain. It has continued to recruit and train members and to build up intelligence for the purposes of attacking security force or loyalist targets. It is believed the loyalist organisations have adopted a similar stance.
Should all this fall into place, the two police forces will be faced with a greatly reduced threat from relatively small group of dissident terrorists on both sides. With the main paramilitary organisations bound to the agreement and structures of government in Northern Ireland, the dissidents will face not only opposition from the existing official security organisations but also, unofficially, from their former associates and it should become increasingly difficult for them to exist.
This process of bringing the mainline paramilitary groups "on board", in effect legitimising them, could be further compounded if even some former terrorists are inducted into a policing process in the North. Such a development, seen as anathema by unionists, could be accommodated if the Patten Commission on policing, set up under the Belfast Agreement and not expected to report until September, were to suggest a diversified policing structure rather than a single-force structure as currently exists on both sides of the Border. The Commission has examined policing in several countries where multiple police forces, many community-based, are the norm. Encouraging reformed paramilitaries to engage in some form of legitimate policing could remove the scourge of paramilitary "kangaroo courts" and punishment beatings and shootings that has continued throughout the ceasefire.