Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of the Belfast Agreement. Implementation has been as arduous a challenge as were the long drawn-out negotiations for a political settlement. Yet there are more reasons for hope than despondency, writes Martin Mansergh.
I was in Northern Ireland twice last week, as a guest speaker with Jeffrey Donaldson of the DUP at the Schomberg Society in Kilkeel, Co Down, and at Stormont as a member of the Committee on Sovereign Affairs of the British-Irish Interparliamentary Body.
Any unionist needing reassurance about the removal of what they called the constitutional claim to jurisdiction, however theoretical, would have enjoyed the spectacle of an Irish public official smoking in a hotel bar in Belfast, putting the concept of civil and religious liberty in a new light.
Plans to hold a referendum here on citizenship rights of children born to non-resident migrants and asylum-seekers arriving just beforehand on Irish soil will not change the new Articles 2 and 3 on the nation, but Article 9 on citizenship, which, as the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, pointed out in the Seanad, refers to obligations as well as rights.
The right to citizenship of those born in this State was not newly introduced in 1998. It goes back to the 1956 Nationality and Citizenship Act and beyond to Article 3 of the Irish Free State constitution, which, as it applied to this jurisdiction, was the most liberal and far-reaching of all. It conferred citizenship on those born here, on those with one Irish parent, and on those ordinarily resident for more than seven years.
The difference is that Ireland's vastly greater prosperity and EU membership and enlargement have made an easy-to-acquire Irish citizenship more prized by those coming from outside. Only a marginal correction is involved.
The constitutional entrenchment in 1998 of Northerners' entitlement to Irish nationality and citizenship on the basis of birth on the island remains intact. Post offices in Northern Ireland are doing a good business taking in passport applications, and not just from nationalists.
Travelling up over the new M1 bridge near Drogheda, which is the archstone of a magnificent contribution to North-South communications, I regretted once again the failure to allow the manned toll booths, two out of five, to take sterling as well as euro. This is a cause of inconvenience to Northern visitors, and contrary to the spirit of North-South co-operation. If cross-Border rail can manage it, why is it too difficult for a roads authority?
The bridge overlooks the battlefield of the Boyne. Some money has visibly been spent on retrieving Oldbridge House. The Government should proceed with the plans to provide full visitor facilities to a site of great Irish, British and European significance.
As has often been pointed out, the common travel area is a mini-Schengen (the agreement of certain continental EU partners to abolish frontier controls between themselves). Today, with Border posts, security checkpoints and most of the watchtowers long gone, it is as easy to cross the Irish Border as from France to Germany. The smuggling culture, by all accounts, still thrives, but time may show that if the wheels of justice grind slowly they grind exceeding small.
Carlingford Lough, where the mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea, is stunningly beautiful. At regional tourism briefings, Tourism Ireland's promotional efforts in relation to Northern Ireland are constantly stressed, and it has places of beauty and amenities equal to anywhere on the island.
If the Assembly is suspended, the activities of the North-South implementation bodies continue to everyone's benefit, albeit on a care-and-maintenance basis (i.e. no major new policy departures). Unionist fear of them is gone.
Another North-South body still in operation is the Language Body, and under it the Ulster-Scots Agency, which sponsored the meeting in Kilkeel, and which is 25 per cent funded by the Irish Government. Today, more emphasis is placed on the cultural tradition than just the language, which is comparable to Hiberno-English rather than Irish.
The agency is developing links with the Scots-Irish tradition in America. Given a choice, the emphasis on indigenous and proximate ethnic and cultural roots is preferable to the Ulster Unionist slogan "Simply British" with its arguably colonial overtones.
Ulster-Scots is promoted as a constructive channel for loyalism and orangeism. While conceived in opposition to Irish nationalism (though in the Ulster counties of the Republic the identities are compatible), it should in time broaden out to include the many links between Ulster and Scotland, not just the Lowland Presbyterian ones.
Even today, the appropriation of kilts and dancing more associated with the Scottish Highlands requires fairly strained historical argument to justify, but no matter.
If the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP are depressed by recent election results, there is a confidence about the DUP, which is committed, in so far as lies within its power, to restore devolution and to put the institutions on a firm basis in which it will be able to participate fully. Obviously, it will be not just on their terms.
In the past, John Hume has urged that PR be adopted in Northern Ireland Westminster elections. There are those in other parties who may now see more merit in this, and the British Labour government may not be as unalterably opposed as people assume.
In an agreed democratic framework, it would be a dangerous contradiction to let paramilitaries act as guarantors for the political outcomes they demand. Does Sinn Féin need the IRA? The answer I am given is No. Every other party is impatient to see democracy and the rule of law established irrevocably throughout this island with the generous time for transition now over.
The historical reputation of the Sinn Féin leadership, if they can complete their part in this soon enough for it to make a difference, will in this respect stand high, regardless of the past.