Madam, - Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern met at Chequers on Saturday, September 13th to sort out, once again, what they could do to rescue, as the newspapers often say, the "peace process" in Northern Ireland.
The two prime ministers, their aides and advisers, the Irish Foreign Minister and whoever happens at the time to be Secretary of State in Northern Ireland have been rescuing the Northern Ireland peace process continually since May 1998.
May 1998 was when Blair and Mo Mowlan, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Sinn Féin and diverse other small political groupings issued the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, which they all assumed would bring an end to sectarian violence in the province and restore peace.
Not only has there been no peace. There has been no such thing as agreement between Ulster unionists and Irish republicans, apart from what has turned out to be a superficial and entirely false display of occasional accord to enable the Ulster Unionist Party, Sinn Féin, the traditional enemy of Ulster Unionism, and the SDLP to set themselves up, along with an elected Northern Ireland Assembly, as the Government of Northern Ireland.
But they have governed little. The Assembly and the all-party administration have been suspended more often than they have met.
Indeed, it would now be impossible for the average citizen, or even the average political correspondent, to say how many times the Unionist leader, David Trimble, has resigned from the position of First Minister, and how many times Blair and Bertie Ahern have met in one place or another to issue yet another set of guidelines, offer new terms, concessions and cash, especially to Sinn Féin, and set down new deadlines for a resumption of the peace process.
It would also be impossible for the average citizen, and nearly impossible for the political correspondents, to list the many special commissioners and commissions appointed to promote the Northern Ireland peace process.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland, formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary, is now controlled by a committee of politicians and other people who seem to have little real understanding of how the police really should deal with an unstable, divided and violent society such as Northern Ireland.
The PSNI is also watched by a person, a commissioner of complaints, whose sole duty is to discipline the police, so to speak, should anyone complain of unfair or ill treatment. There is, furthermore, an American gentlemen whose duty is to make sure that as many Catholics as Protestants, a 50-50 quota, are recruited to the force and that "reform" of the police continues to the satisfaction of whoever thinks reform is required.
And that is not all. The Northern Ireland "peace process" is also being promoted by several other boards - a community relations council, an equality commission, a human rights commission, a civic forum, a commission to control partisan parades, along with an array of other boards and committees some of which merely encourage the prejudices of the Protestants and further alienate the Catholics.
An expensive three-man commission known incongruously as the Decommissioning Commission has been trying, since even before the 1998 agreement, to arrange for the Provisional IRA, the Ulster Defence Association, and the Ulster Volunteer Force to surrender all of their illegally held firearms and explosives. There has not yet been any surrender of any weapons by any of these violent and illegal organisations.
Nonetheless another commission has just been appointed to monitor, as they say, the day-by-day activities of the Provisional IRA, the UVF and the UDA, and presumably to issue a word or two of chastisement should their illegal activities become conspicuously embarrassing to Blair and Ahern when those two are doing what they can, from time to time to "rescue the Northern Ireland peace process". - Yours, etc.,
ANDREW BOYD, Ben Madigan Park, Newtownabbey, Co Antrim.