Sir - On May 22nd, 1998 the terms of an international treaty were endorsed by over 85 per cent of the people of the island of Ireland and 71 per cent of those in Northern Ireland. Prior to that vote, all of the issues pertaining to the Good Friday Agreement, including the issue of IRA decommissioning, were fully explored in televised debates between all parties, including unionists such as Robert McCartney and David Trimble. By any standards, the undertaking from Tony Blair on this matter was a sidebar with unionists and did not form part of the agreement. Consequently, the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly by the British Government has seen the triumph of short-term political expediency over legal principle.
That is not to ignore a similar act of realpolitik that led to the fictional distinction between Sinn Fein and the IRA over the past two years. But such fictions, like the denial of connections between unionists, the Orange Order and the RUC, are sometimes necessary at the beginning of a peace process.
The subsequent refusal of the UUP to form a government for 18 months was a clear breach of the letter of the Good Friday Agreement, as the refusal of the IRA to decommission was clearly a breach of its spirit.
Commentators and apologists on both sides have sought to explain the unionist insistence on IRA decommissioning in terms of either a triumphalist desire to force an IRA surrender, or an understandable desire for security. However, it is also the case that for the UUP the demand for IRA decommissioning is fundamentally about ascribing blame for three decades of destruction in Northern Ireland. It is not merely a rejection of any equivalence between the actions of the IRA and those of the British Army and the RUC (as also stated by Nigel Dodds last week); it is a denial by unionists of their own share of culpability for the mayhem of the past three decades.
The problem for progressive unionists in the UUP is that even if they themselves recognise these unpalatable facts, however obliquely, there is a large section of their own party who do not, and it is this mind-set that generates their rejection of the Patten Report as well their insistence on immediate IRA decommissioning. Nor is this mind-set confined to the rank-and-file membership.
Only last year, in an interview with the BBC's Nick Ross, John Taylor stated his view that the early Civil Rights Movement was an IRA front and that the use of the RUC against their marches was justified. But he merely represents a widespread and profound unionist refusal to look honestly at evidence of a campaign of RUC and British army violence against nationalists over the past three decades that at times amounted to state terrorism. There may not be an exact equivalence, but there are certainly similarities, in how both unionists and nationalists have experienced violence from the other side.
The last and most important stage of any peace process is honesty. The time for self-righteousness, fudges, and sidebar deals is over. The political institutions have been shown to have overwhelming popular support. If the war is indeed over, there is no need for IRA weapons or, for that matter, 15,000 British troops in Northern Ireland. All the protagonists must grasp the nettle, admit their mistakes and reestablish the political institutions in the context of dismantling all the arms in Northern Ireland - Yours, etc.,
Ciaran Byrne, Skerries Road, Balbriggan, Co Dublin.