A YEAR ago tomorrow, Bill Clinton stood in Mackie's engineering factory in west Belfast and talked of miracles, of transformations, of a new gateway to a just and lasting peace. Can it be just a year?
When you look at his rhetoric in print now, it seems vacuous and somewhat cliched, all that talk of the ship of peace being steered away from the rocks of old grudges, of twin track initiatives and sustaining the momentum. But it didn't seem so at the time.
Clinton had provided a context in which everyone in Ireland could celebrate the ordinary, in which the streets could be occupied by the people who usually stayed at home. The cameras focused on people who could not be categorised as Protestant or Catholic because it seemed enough, for once, just to be a man, a woman or a child. Ordinary life seemed, on that day, to be an events in itself.
But for the paramilitary mentality, ordinary life is too confusing. In a very fine book about Northern Ireland, We Wrecked The Place, published in the US this month, the American journalist Jonathan Stevenson reports on a series of interviews with former paramilitaries on both sides of the divide.
In one of them, Tommy Gorman, former field operations officer of the first battalion of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA, recalls his days on the dirty protest in the H Blocks, when he sat in his cell wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by his own excrement, smeared on the walls. What he says provides a far more vivid insight into the state of the peace process than anything emanating from Gerry Adams or John Major this week.
"The whole thing during the blanket," he told Stevenson, some people talk about it like a religious experience. It's this paradox - you're right here now in these clean surroundings, but your mind's full of shit in there, you're surrounded by shit but your mind's crystal clear. You were getting beat maybe three or four times a day, but you were constantly focused on what you were fighting. And the solidarity and camaraderie between everyone on the blanket was something that's never been recaptured, like, you know?"
This is why the conflict goes on for too many people, it is better to live with a bad stench in your nostrils than to give up the crystal clarity of a historic struggle. For too many people, brutal certainties are preferable to the confusions of peace. Given a choice between shit and clarity on the one hand or cleanliness and compromise on the other, too many people still hanker after the first option.
THERE is even, as Stevenson's interviews show a nostalgia for the cruel simplicities of prison. Ron McMurray, a former UVF prisoner convicted of the bombing of the Rose and Crown bar in which six Catholics died, is also sentimental in his description of the loyalist compounds at Long Kesh: "It was a very good culture, and it was a sharing culture, because kind of ironically, it was a very non violent culture - it was a far less violent place than it is out in this world."
This is the bizarre logic of the conflict. It almost seems that if only Northern Ireland could be turned into a giant prison camp with two huge segregated compounds it would be a caring, sharing place, full of clarity and camaraderie, peaceful and non violent.
Such nostalgia is, of course, not an act of memory but an act of willed amnesia. The past can be sentimentalised only by painting out the most important people in the conflict - the victims. Stevenson's subjects seem to have little trouble in doing so. A Sinn Fein activist, formerly a member of the IRA, does not even know the name of the person killed by a bomb he planted on a Belfast street, recalling only that it was "some woman". Plum Smith, now a prominent member of the Progressive Unionist Party and formerly a member of Red Hand Commando, "hasn't a clue" whether the Catholic man he and his accomplice; shot 14 times in 1972 is still alive.
It is hardly accidental that the IRA or its supporters have in recent months been targeting memorials to some of the people ft killed for deliberate obliteration. Such refusals of memory are at the core of Northern Ireland's present impasse.
The IRA carries on, not because it thinks it has much to gain in the future, but because it is afraid of losing its past. A carefully constructed memory of the conflict as a glorious struggle will be wiped out by a peace settlement. Nostalgia will be overtaken by a sense of futility.
For at the very least, everything that happened after 1973 and the Sunningdale agreement will be seen to have been pointless. In Stevenson's book, Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA man convicted of the murder of a loyalist paramilitary, says of the likely shape of a settlement that "what's on offer here is Sunningdale. Now, the problem with that would be that I went to jail in 1974 prior to the power sharing executive of Sunningdale collapsing, and my activity throughout 1974 in the IRA was a result of the IRA leadership taking a decision to resist Sunningdale."
IN A deadly paradox, the very pointlessness of the last 20 years makes it hard for the paramilitaries - particularly the IRA - to stop the killing. Making peace now means settling in 1996 for what was, in essence, on offer over 20 years before, or at best making slight improvements which could have been secured in any case by democratic protest.
It means tacitly acknowledging that all the deaths suffered and inflicted in the meantime were meaningless. And that is a genuinely difficult thing to do.
It is also harder for the IRA than for the loyalists. For the UDA and the UVF, it is just about possible to justify the past in terms of what might have happened if the loyalist paramilitaries had not butchered Catholics. Because their real focus is on what did not happen - a United Ireland, the end of the Union - rather than what did, it is possible for the loyalist paramilitaries to convince themselves that those very things would have come to pass but for their own dirty deeds.
But the IRA does not have that luxury. For it, merely to have preserved the status quo as it was in 1973 is a defeat, not a victory, since its whole raison d'etre was to overthrow it.
There is not much that anyone - the British government, the Irish Government, or the unionists - can do to help the IRA to confront that reality. There is no great simplicity that anyone can offer to its members that might compensate them for the loss of the clarity that was available in the H Blocks.
Indeed, what is on offer is the precise opposite - the mundane confusion of peace, the daily uncertainty that is called ordinary life, the hard graft of politics in a world where ideology no longer sustains the hope of an instant transformation of the unsatisfactory present into the Utopian future. But a year ago tomorrow, when people came on to the streets to have a good look at themselves and each other, that seemed like a pretty good offer.