The two governments should focus on reconstructing the centre ground in Northern Ireland, writes Robin Wilson
An article in this newspaper some months after the suspension of the political institutions in the North warned that the outworking of the Belfast Agreement was not only failing to heal the divisions there, but was associated with further polarisation.
Based on a research project which Prof Rick Wilford and myself have led since 1999, it suggested that the review of the agreement should steer a path towards a more "normal", civic society. It indicated four reforms:
affirmation of the sui generis constitutional character of the North, to move the agenda beyond the continuing (indeed intensifying) unionist-nationalist antagonism
reconsideration of the assembly electoral system, to favour cross-communal vote-pooling, rather than separate intra-Protestant and intra-Catholic contests with their "ethnic outbidding"
removal of the requirement for assembly members to designate as "unionist" or "nationalist", which entrenched sectarian mindsets and de-
legitimised "others"
changing executive formation from the d'Hondt mechanism, which required no effort to build trust, to inter-party agreement and subsequent collective responsibility.
But "implement the agreement in full" remained the official mantra, though its frequent repetition made it no more effectual. Tony Blair decided (with Bertie Ahern's support) to pursue a second election to the suspended assembly in November 2003; despite having twice declared it pointless to do so ahead of the review, unless a new power-sharing administration could be formed. The predictable outcome of further polarisation duly eventuated.
When the review did take place, instead of the public process of deliberation the term implies, both governments allowed it to be reduced to another unproductive private arm-wrestle among the North's political/paramilitary elite.
Civic disillusionment there meanwhile grew. While the focus of coverage of the 2003 assembly and 2005 Westminster elections has been on the rise and rise of the Democratic Unionist Party and to a lesser extent Sinn Féin, the fall and fall of public participation has been missed.
In the latest election just 53 per cent of the voting-age population registered and voted, which means just three in 10 adults actually voted for either of those two parties, putting their preening "mandates" into some perspective.
Determined to place a Micawberish interpretation on these events, officials concluded that an agreement between the extreme parties they had emboldened would turn up, and then there would be no one more extreme to bring it down!
In the real world, however, no such "Molotov-Ribbentrop pact" has ever emerged in an ethnically divided society (the nearest approximation being when the ethnic-Albanian National Liberation Army surrendered its guns to Nato to go into government with the moderate Slav-Macedonian social democrats following the 2001 Ohrid agreement).
After months of further failed negotiations, in December 2004 the non-watershed at Belfast's Waterfront brought such speculation to an end - before the Northern Bank raid and the killing of Robert McCartney.
A statement is imminently expected from P O'Neill, which unremarkably will echo the commitment by the SF president (and army council figure), Gerry Adams, to "political and democratic" means, the language Mr Adams deployed (by no means for the first time), within 24 hours of the election being called, to distance himself from the McCartney killers.
The IRA statement will not use the words "peaceful and legal". Nor will it commit the IRA to any process less opaque than the placing of weapons "beyond use"; to anything, that is, which entails irreversible destruction or handover of the arsenal (as in Macedonia), rather than putting "the pike in the thatch". Disbandment, of course, is off the agenda in case the pike is ever needed again, as Mr Adams's colleague (in both capacities), Martin McGuinness, has confirmed.
In any event, inasmuch as those two DUP "pragmatists", Peter Robinson and Jeffrey Donaldson, respectively refuse to share power with the SDLP in Castlereagh and insist on daily flaunting of the Union flag in Lisburn, the IRA's attachment to violence and criminality (though what the IRA does is violence and criminality) is by no means alone in holding back power-sharing. The much-vaunted Northern peace process was always based on the wrong premiss: that (IRA) violence was the problem.
Everybody who has studied the situation closely, from Theobald Wolfe Tone to Prof John Whyte's unsurpassed survey of the academic literature, has concluded that communal division is the root difficulty.
The two governments need to abandon their dogmatic approach, now tested to destruction. They should focus on reconstructing the centre ground, by definition essential for any power-sharing system to work, as against the de-facto repartition in the North which Séamus Mallon has decried as "Balkanisation". This can only be done by London and Dublin agreeing on a civic-cosmopolitan vision which can transcend communal antagonism.
Indeed, there are signs this realisation is hitting home. Such an approach has already been adopted by the direct-rule administration in its recent policy framework on community relations.
A Shared Future changes the question from whether Northern Ireland exists every day to what kind of society it is going to be, insisting that it must be one in which all citizens are equal, their problems are resolved through dialogue, and public authorities address contending claims impartially.
Similarly, Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern has recently on this page challenged "the comfortable dichotomies of British versus Irish, unionist versus nationalist". He concluded: "The present situation demands a move beyond that form of politics."
The way forward is not another Quixotic tilt at the windmill of "inclusive" government on the one hand or a unionist-dominated "voluntary coalition" on the other.
The goal should be to establish an agreed coalition, which eschews ethnic domination and begins to erode division. Either SF or the DUP, or both, could take part, but only if it could persuade its counterpart(s) on the other side of its bona fides. This would end the tedious blame game played out before the international community and shoehorn the centrist parties into building their fractured relationships.
To end the suspension of the institutions it could be stipulated, as in Belgium, that any new administration should simply be the largest minimum-winning coalition that can be formed after an election, consistent with equal participation - in objective, fair-employment monitoring terms - by members of the two main ethnic populations.
It would favour the pre-election emergence of putative coalitions and eventually competing alignments on bread-and-butter issues. If the DUP didn't like it, it could face the mundane task of opposition; if SF took the huff, the IRA (post-9/11 and 11/3) could not go back to war.
To ensure enduring stability, rather than more suspensions, it could further be stipulated that such a coalition could only be dislodged before the next assembly election by a constructive vote of no confidence, ie, if there were a potential coalition carrying greater support. This mechanism was introduced in Germany after the war to prevent unholy Nazi-Communist alliances bringing down a democratic administration.
Such a reframing of the context of devolution would incentivise conciliation rather than extremism, including stimulating pragmatic voters to re-engage in elections. And it would put it up to those who vote for the True Believers that, whatever these parties say they want, their mutual antagonism merely guarantees indefinite direct rule over a dysfunctional society. This would also, of course, provide the best possible shell for pursuing the equally vital long-term task of reconciliation between the two parts of this island.
Robin Wilson is director of the think- tank Democratic Dialogue