The new year images from Holy Cross Catholic primary school in north Belfast sent shockwaves around the world. With Catholic schoolgirls crying as their parents tried to protect them from stone-throwing Protestants, with all-night rioting between Catholic estates and Protestant estates, and as loyalist paramilitaries kick off 2002 by labelling Catholic schoolteachers 'legitimate targets' and killing a postman, peace looks impossible. So what is going on?
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'All we know is that the peace process was meant to bring peace, but all we see is more division than ever before', says Dr Pete Shirlow. 'And some people can't get their heads around that.'
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Shirlow may be a previously unheard-of geography lecturer at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, but he stopped the press at the beginning of January 2002 with his research into Northern Ireland's 'geography of fear'. 'Peace but no love as divide grows ever wider' screamed the newspaper headlines, as Shirlow presented his findings on how 'segregation in Belfast has worsened since the peace process began' to the Royal Geographical Society in Belfast on 5 January 2002. 'I think my study made a big impact because it found shocking things', says Shirlow. 'Because people expect a peace process to be a happy story, not a horror story.'
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His study is anything but a happy story. Made up of surveys conducted among 4800 Catholic and Protestant households in 12 of Belfast's most tense estates, his research into 'the relationship between cultural diversity and the perpetuation of fear' found that 'there is less integration than 10 years ago' - especially among the young. Of the 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed, 68 percent claimed to have never had a 'meaningful conversation' with anybody from the other religious community. In all age groups surveyed, 60 percent said they had been on the receiving end of physical or verbal abuse from somebody of the other religion since the IRA and loyalist ceasefires of 1994.
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Shirlow points to as yet unpublished breakdowns of the 2001 census to back up his 'depressing findings' - which found that while in 1991 63 percent of Belfast's population lived in areas that were more than 90 percent Protestant or more than 90 percent Catholic, by 2001 the figure had risen to 66 percent. As Shirlow says, this might be 'no massive jump' but it shows that Belfast's dividing lines certainly haven't 'improved any' since the peace process was kickstarted in the early 1990s - when the British and Irish governments started to push for a negotiated settlement in Northern Ireland, joined by the active interest (and influence) of the US government from the mid-1990s onwards.
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According to Shirlow, it is the peace process generation itself, those in their late teens and early twenties with the 'least memory of the Troubles and the least reason to be divided', who are most likely to be antagonistic to the other community. 'We found that pensioners, who have lots of memories of 30 years of war and before, were the least sectarian group', says Shirlow, 'while teenagers had the most bigoted attitudes to those from the other religion.' Seventy-two percent of 18- to 25-year-olds think divisions between Catholics and Protestants have deepened since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and some are 'very, very open about distrusting "the other lot"', says Shirlow.
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Shirlow reckons some of Belfast's young even use the schemes designed to 'bring people together' as an opportunity to have a pop at the other community: 'Out of the 214 kids we talked to who had attacked kids from the other religion, 158 said they had recognised their victim from some cross-community scheme or other.'
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'Teenagers and those in the twenties feel the divisions quite intensely', says Shirlow. 'Previous generations had some kind of relationship with the other community - it may be a hazy memory for some, but they remember a time when relations were better. Today's young generation hardly know "the other side" at all. Older people might have been involved in violence, but it was often based on ideology - now that's gone and today it's just pure naked bigotry'.
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According to Shirlow, this 'pure naked bigotry' is 'currently being played out on the streets of north Belfast' - where clashes between Catholics and Protestants over school routes and the murder of a Catholic postman by loyalist paramilitaries have hit the headlines worldwide. 'These are not just facts and figures in a report', says Shirlow. 'They are riots and violence on the streets - it is a real thing.' So what is behind Northern Ireland's deepening divide?
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Reading recent coverage of events in north Belfast, you could be forgiven for thinking there was something dodgy in the water (or maybe in the blood) turning Belfast residents into sectarian monsters. One journalist calls north Belfast a 'ghetto of hate where conflict is a way of life' that is 'condemned to an endless cycle of violence', as if all this was just a bad case of history repeating itself - while another complains of how hard-to-defeat 'sectarian ways of thinking' pose a threat to 'the peace process itself'.
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In reality, Shirlow's 'depressing findings' and Northern Ireland's deepening divide do not show that the peace process has gone wrong, and they do not indicate a threat to British, Irish and American politicians' best intentions for stability. They are a result of a peace process that not only accommodates division, but celebrates it.
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There have been divisions between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland for centuries. In the 1600s, Protestant 'settlers' arrived in Ireland - the vast majority based in the north - and, particularly over the past 200 years, their loyalty to Britain was used as a buffer to Irish demands for independence and as the bedrock of British rule, causing no love to be lost between Protestant and Catholic communities. With the partition of Ireland in 1921, between the formally independent 26 counties in the south and the British-ruled six counties in the north, these divisions intensified. A Northern Ireland state with a pro-British Protestant majority and a pro-Irish Catholic minority, created in the wake of the Irish War of Independence, had division built in.
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British politicians and much of the British media might have spent the 25-year Troubles from 1969 to 1994 depicting the conflict in Northern Ireland as a sectarian feud between Catholics and Protestants, fuelled by historical animosities, religious antagonism or just the inability of Irish people to get on - but the truth was that sectarian tensions were caused by the everyday reality of inequality and discrimination within Northern Ireland.
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Since 1921, Catholics in Northern Ireland suffered discrimination - first under successive Northern Ireland Unionist governments and then, after 1972, under direct British rule. So in 1983, there was 14.9 percent unemployment among Protestants and 35.1 percent among Catholics - with one 1987 study finding that 'Catholic men [are] about two-and-a-half times as likely as Protestant men to be unemployed'. Catholics also suffered discrimination in housing, education, harassment by the largely Protestant police force, and a lack of political representation. Not for nothing did Northern Ireland's first prime minister declare in 1922 that the Northern Irish parliament was 'a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people'.
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It was this kind of inequality, rather than simply history or religion, which led to the two communities being divided. The advantages of the divide for Protestants may have been marginal, but considering that Northern Ireland was the most impoverished part of the UK, such material divisions assumed a great importance. As a result of Britain's policy of divide-and-rule, Protestants in Northern Ireland tended to see concessions to Catholics as a threat to their position in society, while Catholics saw change as the only way forward. It was Catholic demands for civil rights over housing and employment that sparked the conflict at the end of the 1960s - which soon became a struggle over whether Northern Ireland was Irish or British, with Catholics putting their hope in Irish reunification and Protestants wanting to keep the Union between Northern Ireland and Britain. In short, Northern Ireland had sectarianism built in, where Catholic and Protestant interests were often at loggerheads.
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Now all that is changing, and over the past 10 years many of the root causes of sectarianism have gone - yet still sectarianism persists. Catholic inequality is becoming a thing of the past. In August 2001, an Equality Commission report found that 'the Catholic share of the workforce has risen from 34.9 percent in 1990 to 39.6 percent in 2000', and that the share of employment between Protestants and Catholics is now almost the same as the share of the population: the economically active population in Northern Ireland is 58 percent Protestant and 42 percent Catholic, while the overall composition of the workforce is 60.4 percent Protestant and 39.6 percent Catholics. Maybe not perfect, but a vast improvement on the past.
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Yet just as Catholics and Protestants move closer to being equal, the more divided they seem to become. As material divisions between the two communities start to fade into history, Pete Shirlow finds that sectarianism and bigotry is more widespread now than it was during the Troubles.
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The problem is that the peace process might have put a lid on Northern Ireland's conflict, but it is sorely lacking in any vision for the future of Northern Irish society - except for its vision of 'celebrating difference', where divisions are seen as positive signs of a healthy multicultural society rather than as a barrier to unity.
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The Irish peace process has division and instability inherent within it. With its aim of containing the conflict rather than resolving it, the peace process draws the political parties into a dialogue without resolving any big political questions or fundamental differences. And as political questions move down the agenda, so cultural and purely sectarian conflicts have risen to the fore. With the national question off the agenda, and the conflict robbed of its political content, all sides in Northern Ireland are turning to culture and identity. The peace process is not about resolving the conflict but about 'celebrating cultural diversity' - not about overcoming the divisions between Catholics and Protestants but about recognising those 'cultural differences' and respecting them.
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As a result, the conflict in Northern Ireland is no longer a political one over sovereignty and the right to rule, but has been reduced to little more than a squabble over cultural heritage, cultural difference and cultural respect. Or as Pete Shirlow says, from 'ideology' to 'pure naked bigotry'. Unionists and nationalists once clashed over the fundamental question of whether Northern Ireland was Irish or British - now they're more likely to get hot under the collar about the right to have their street signs in their own language (whether it be Gaelic or the even more obscure Ulster Scots) and that their past suffering receive the 'recognition' it deserves.
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The republican movement no longer talks about being the 'legitimate government of Ireland' with the aim of getting British forces out, but effectively accepts its position as just another political party representing Northern Ireland's Catholic minority in the peace process. Meanwhile, many former loyalist paramilitaries, who were once happy to kill for what they saw as Queen and Country, seem to have transformed themselves into community workers who want to 'protect' and 'celebrate' Protestant culture and heritage.
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By elevating 'cultural difference', the peace process has unleashed a new round of sectarianism - driven not by inequality and discrimination but by the idea that Northern Ireland has two distinct communities whose culture and interests are different, and who must be constantly policed and kept apart. Each new institution of the peace process is now built around how best to accommodate the two distinct communities.
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Take the Northern Ireland Parades Commission, whose role is to balance the rights of Protestant Orange Order marchers against the rights of Catholic residents. As well as banning Orange parades, restricting the right to protest and drafting up codes of conduct on how marchers should behave, the Parades Commission sponsors educational programmes and exhibitions to 'raise awareness' of the cultural differences between the Protestant and Catholic communities.
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Then there's the Northern Ireland Assembly, which effectively institutionalises sectarianism and freezes different identities in law. It demands that 'at their first meeting, members of the assembly will register a designation of identity - nationalist, Unionist or other - for the purpose of measuring cross-community support'. Which means that politicians and community activists are increasingly forced to stake out their sectarian positions as a way of 'being heard'. In November 2001, the Alliance Party, which claims to be 'neither nationalist nor Unionist, but cross-community', redesignated three of its members as Unionists at the assembly, so that it could bolster Unionist (or at least pretend-Unionist) support for first minister David Trimble. In a Northern Ireland where difference is celebrated, even previously non-sectarian politicians have to play the sectarian game to get what they want.
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If the New Northern Ireland merely accommodated division, that would be bad enough. But it goes further than that and celebrates it. 'Respect for difference' and 'celebrating diversity' have become mantras in Northern Irish politics, repeated by everybody who wants to stay on board the peace process. Former nationalist SDLP leader John Hume says 'the essence of unity is respect for diversity', apparently not noticing the contradiction - while the UK government's community development department encourages people to 'celebrate the diverse interests and cultures of the communities living in Northern Ireland'. When even different interests are celebrated, you know that Northern Ireland is not heading towards peace and unity.
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Then there's the Community Relations Council (CRC). Founded by a group of academics in 1990 with the aim of encouraging the 'acceptance, appreciation and celebration of difference', CRC has grown exponentially during the peace process years. It now hands out an annual £3million on behalf of the UK government to 400 groups across Northern Ireland that are concerned with celebrating diversity - whether they be educational programmes for adults, art galleries, community groups or church centres. And for those areas like north Belfast that just aren't ready to celebrate diversity yet, CRC sponsors 'Single Identity Work' - where community workers try to 'increase the confidence of a community' so that it can 'reach out' to those in other communities that it currently doesn't 'understand'. Nothing seems more likely to exacerbate division in Northern Ireland than a nationwide government-funded network of programmes designed to emphasise why it's good to be different.
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What kind of society celebrates difference and division instead of trying to overcome it? What sort of political leaders constantly remind people of the differences between them, rather than highlighting what they have in common? What kind of state builds institutions to accommodate, manage and promote divisions between communities instead of offering a positive vision of a society worth striving for? In Northern Ireland's case, the answer seems to be the same kind of society where parents scrap over school routes, postmen get murdered for being the wrong religion, and where politicians have nothing to say except admonishing the public to 'celebrate diversity'.
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It is the peace process that has failed Northern Ireland, not the people. Some might see the rising sectarianism as history repeating itself or something in the blood. Others might see it as a timely reminder that, whatever the solution is, it won't be imposed by the Whitehall, Washington and Dublin elites.
Brendan O'Neill is coordinating the spiked-conference Panic attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, on Friday 9 May 2003, at the Royal Institution in London.
Read on:
A sectarian peace, by Brendan O'Neill
spiked-issue: Ireland
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