Northern Ireland: Refusing to let the terrorists win

We should have expected this tragedy, said the Belfast News Letter in an editorial. Northern Ireland’s chief constable had been warning for weeks that republican dissidents were threatening violence. And then it came: On March 7, terrorists from the IRA splinter group the Real IRA murdered two off-duty British soldiers on their base. Two days later, another splinter faction, Continuity IRA, murdered a police officer. It was a stark change from the relative calm Northern Ireland has enjoyed since the 1998 Good Friday Accord brought Protestant unionists and Catholic republicans together in a power-sharing government. And it showed that “we still have evil people in our community.”

But we have many more good ones, said Ed Curran in the Belfast Telegraph. The recent tragedies have “galvanized people across Northern Ireland as never before.” Everyone stood up to denounce the cowardly killers—even former IRA terrorist and current Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, who called them “traitors to the island of Ireland.” In a stark reversal of the days when he railed against informants, McGuinness actually said that if he knew who the killers were, he would tell the police. The people of Northern Ireland will not stand for a return to “the Troubles,” the three decades of fighting that pitted British soldiers and unionist paramilitaries against republican militants. “These murders were meant to drive a wedge between us, but instead they have pulled us closer together.”

Our leaders passed this test with top marks, said Laurence White, also in the Belfast Telegraph. It would have been easy for the Democratic Unionist Party to blame Sinn Fein for the violence, and equally easy for Sinn Fein to issue one of its patented lukewarm denunciations. Instead, both of the main parties in the power-sharing government behaved like parties worthy of governing, “condemning the murders in the clearest terms and showing resolve to keep the partnership administration intact and running.” Finally, Northern Ireland’s leaders have “come of age.”

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How sweet that the politicians are all singing “Kumbaya,” said Johann Hari in the London Independent. Unfortunately, the people of Northern Ireland are not quite so ready to embrace one another. Studies done in recent years show that Catholics and Protestants live almost entirely segregated lives. Two-thirds of Northern Irish 18- to 25-year-olds have “never had a meaningful conversation with a single person from ‘the other side.’” They are even quicker with casual ethnic slurs than their grandparents were. The solution may be forced integration of the schools. If Catholic and Protestant teenagers played soccer together and had crushes on each other, they would be much less likely to hold onto bigotry. The recent violence “should lead us to a new political cry: Tear down this wall between Northern Ireland’s children.”