Sir, - The Northern Ireland conflict and the present, unresolved post conflict situation has, been continuing for most of my adult life. I have felt cut off from part of the island in which I live. I'm more at home in "mainland" UK than I am in Northern Ireland.
The exclusion of women from the peace process is at last being brought home to us. Yes, women have told their stories effectively - the Peace Movement grew out of women's direct experience of the conflict but it did not survive politically.
Politics are for men only in Northern Ireland, manifested in the male nationalist tradition and in the male control of the fortress by the unionist parties. Is the lack of participation by women in the power stakes part of the exclusion culture in Northern Ireland?
The present glitch over an elected assembly, as a passport to negotiations, is predictable. Conventional wisdom in NI is that democracy is based on an elected majority. But democracy works only if the genuine concerns of minorities are respected in the context of natural justice. I do not believe that this condition is fulfilled in NI apart from the efforts of housing and job equality agencies and other mainstream British equality laws that are relevant in Northern courts. The perception is that many unionists have sat on the faces of the Catholic/nationalist population for a long time, admittedly through fear, so talking about the ballot box representing democracy is oxymoronic. Nevertheless, it is dangerous to dispense with the principle of majority voting, now more often interpreted as a coalition of parties, making up a majority. The Mitchell Commission represents relentless democratisation and if it is side tracked in Northern Ireland, it says a lot about lack of democracy there.
The ruling unionist parties know very well that Sinn Fein's politics represent the more alienated end of a much wider nationalist spectrum and to reiterate that they represent only five per cent of the electorate is disingenuous.
While the intergovernmental representatives beaver away at the complexities are bystanders allowed to say anything, or are we dismissed as not knowing anything about the "situation"? My view is, that until the nationalist parties recognise the deep feeling of insecurity felt by the Presbyterian/unionist tradition in the teeth of a confederated Ireland and until the unionist parties realise the absence of any real sense of belonging by the nationalist population, the situation will not be resolved.
If the proposed elected "body" could be combined with a written constitution for Northern Ireland in which individual and community rights are spelled out, irrespective of existing British law, it might represent one side of the equation. If citizens of the Republic could drop Articles 2 and 3 of our Constitution, maybe we'd make progress. Dublin governments effectively abandoned the nationalist population in the Six Counties after 1926 but unhappily we never told them. Perhaps it is time we did and that the Downing Street Declaration is a diplomatic vehicle for getting on with living. The British government's commitment to Northern Ireland is bedevilled by pragmatism in Westminster, so maybe we'll never get an admission from that quarter regarding the true nature of British commitment to Northern Ireland. - Yours, etc.,
Trafalgar Terrace,
Monkstown,
Co Dublin