Sir, - Your Editorial of November 7th, "Time to move forward", reflects the satisfaction of many pro-Agreement voters, including moderate unionists, that the latest crisis has been resolved - at least for the time being! Yet there remains an uncomfortable sense of unease that the rules had to be rigged to achieve this.
Kevin Myers asks (An Irishman's Diary, November 7th) "how long. . .political institutions can survive if the rulebook. . .is regularly changed?" Since the Belfast Agreement was signed, the peace process has lurched from one crisis to another. With each short-term resolution, usually achieved through some sort of fudge or fiddle, those controlling our affairs heaved a sigh of relief, and hoped the root problems would somehow disappear without being faced up to - or so it has seemed to the public at large.
May I refer to Intertwined Roots - An Ulster-Scot Perspective, in which I follow the course of the peace process? "There is little doubt that many \moderate unionists who voted for the Agreement had grave misgivings and genuine reservations. . .There is equally little doubt that a significant number of such unionists have become deeply disillusioned since then."
Indeed, "an opinion poll in March, 1999 suggested that 14 per cent of them had by that date changed their minds and would now vote against the Agreement."
Regarding the result of the referendum, I commented: "It is fairly certain that quite a number of unionists only voted for the Agreement on the basis of the Prime Minister's pledges. However, the British and Irish governments, politicians, overseas commentators and others have tended to use the figures \of the Referendum results as a benchmark and ignore both this fact and this group, on whom the future of the Agreement might well depend, and which has become increasingly disillusioned."
Few heeded the early warning signs - and later ones have also been ignored. With each crisis the pro-Agreement UUP leadership is in danger of losing the support of more moderate unionists. While many of them welcomed the recent IRA action as a start to decommissioning and appreciate the difficulties for republicans, if what should be a "process" turns into a "one-off event", the next crisis, if not fatal for the Good Friday Agreement, is likely to prove even more difficult to resolve. - Yours etc.,
W.A. Hanna, Belfast 10.