Madam, - As ever, your latest leader on the North (June 17th) is replete with good intentions, expressing as it does the concern shared by most citizens of the Republic about the polarisation evident in the last two Northern elections. Sadly, it is completely wrong in claiming that the Belfast Agreement was "designed to be driven by the constitutional centre" of the SDLP and Ulster Unionists. On the contrary, the "inclusion" of all protagonists became the official mantra, which had the convenient effect of allowing the core challenge of sectarian division to be ignored.
In this Dublin and London ignored all international practice of resolving ethnic conflicts. When the top civilian official with UNPROFOR in ex-Yugoslavia, Cedric Thornberry, returned to his native Belfast in October 1994, he responded to a question about the lessons for Northern Ireland by saying: "I think the lessons are extremely clear - effective human rights and politics of consensus, isolating extremists on both sides".
The two governments also ignored the accumulated wisdom of the academy. Prof Donald Horowitz of Duke University, author of the classic text on ethnic conflict, makes the obvious point that "inclusion" of all parties in government after violent conflict would imply the conflict had been miraculously magicked away. In reality, he argues, the best hope is to secure as large a coalition of the "moderate middle" as one can and appreciate one is in for a long haul.
My colleague Prof Rick Wilford and I have been leading a research team for five years in Northern Ireland monitoring the outworking of devolution, now in cold storage. In a number of aspects, most obviously the lack of collective responsibility in the devolved government and the communal registration of assembly members as "nationalist" or "unionist", we have concluded that the agreement entrenched the sectarian divide it took for granted. We should not be surprised, therefore, that it has led to a society more bitterly polarised than ever.
But nor should we throw up our hands in despair. A change of official tack towards incentivising conciliation, including vis-à-vis necessary reforms to the agreement, could reverse the process of polarisation and begin to put politics there back on the right track. - Yours, etc.,
ROBIN WILSON, Director, Democratic Dialogue, University Street, Belfast 7.