The End?

By BARRY HILLENBRAND/BELFAST

Ireland is a deceptively beautiful place, soft and green, north and south. Its people, north and south, are deceptively kind and civil and wise. Deceptive, because in the hills and valleys of this island, and among its tribes and clans, vicious hatred and ugly violence have raged for centuries, inflicting unending death and suffering that have come to seem the very price of living in such a lovely place.

But last week, in one of those apparent miracles of the late 20th century--like the end of the cold war and the surrender of apartheid in South Africa--some of the awful weight of that Irish history was lifted. The governments of Britain and Ireland and the key political leaders of the warring factions in Northern Ireland, with major assistance from Bill Clinton and former Senator George Mitchell, agreed to replace terrorism with democracy and to let the people of the North decide their own ultimate fate.

The agreement, hammered out over 22 months of difficult and risky bargaining and concluded in a marathon 32-hour negotiating session captained by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose country was the source of much of the torment of Ireland, permits those who want a united Ireland to work for that goal through politics, not guerrilla warfare, and permits those who want to keep Northern Ireland part of Britain to retain that status until a majority of those in the North decide otherwise. It was not lost on the parties who signed up for peace last week that the agreement came nearly on the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising that began the first stage of Ireland's liberation from English occupation.

The decision by the factions in the North promises to bring an end to the most recent epoch of killing, which began 30 years ago and has taken the lives of 3,249 people, including 16 killed in the past few weeks as the talks inched toward success. Ten times that number have been wounded since 1968 when the Roman Catholic minority rose up against British rule and the discrimination of the ruling Protestant majority. The pain of loss of a family member is perhaps the most powerful shared memory of Protestants and Catholics in Ulster.

The key to finally forging the agreement was the intricate balancing of victories and defeats for both sides in the sectarian conflict. Protestant unionists, whose opposition to any change in the province's status as part of Britain once drove them to decorate Belfast city hall with a giant banner declaring ULSTER SAYS NO, agreed not only to share power with Catholic parties in a new Northern Ireland assembly but also to work together with ministers and politicians from Dublin in new cross-border government bodies, which look suspiciously like the first steps toward a united Ireland. And politicians from Catholic nationalist and republican parties--including Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which for years has been fighting for a united Ireland, proclaiming BRITS OUT NOW--signed a document that says that the political status of the province could be changed only by a majority vote of the people of the North. By anyone's count, that would delay a united Ireland for at least a generation, perhaps two. Why this change of heart? Why did politicians with records of spectacular intransigence finally agree to compromise?

Gerry McConville is part of the explanation. Nothing about him would indicate that he has any stomach for compromise. In school at age 10, he wrote an essay saying that his ambition in life was to serve in the I.R.A. His parents were proud. By 14, he was frequently detained by police for running guns. By 16, he was old enough to be sent to prison, charged with weapons possession and membership in Fianna, the junior branch of the illegal I.R.A. He served eight years. Now McConville, 38, wears a tie, runs an antidrug program while toiling on a master's degree in computer science. He is still active in the republican movement, albeit in its nonviolent branch. An agreement, he says, was necessary even if it brings unwanted compromises. The alternative is more violence. "Anyone who has been involved in armed struggle will do anything to avoid it," he says. McConville has five children, the oldest a 10-year-old girl who, mirroring her dad, is already politically savvy. "If this conflict does not come to an end," says McConville, "I will be visiting her either in prison or the graveyard. It has to end." He regrets nothing he has done. "It was a necessary journey," he says. "A political approach [to the problems of the Catholic community] would not have worked in 1975." Only violence, he believes, not without reason, got the attention of the British and the world.

A number of the key men--and some of the women--who negotiated the settlement inside a mundane office building in Belfast shared McConville's journey through violence, prison and now political accommodation. In the 1970s Gusty Spence, a senior member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, an illegal Protestant paramilitary group, was so famous that after he was sentenced to prison for murder, tea towels with his picture on them were sold on the streets of Belfast. "We exorcised our ghosts in prison," says Spence, who is on the negotiating team of the Progressive Unionist Party. "We were self-questioning for the first time and concluded that we cannot go on with this ancient blood feud. Violence solves nothing." Spence, a few years ahead of his time, advocated negotiating with Catholics and for a while was shunned by his fellow paramilitaries. Gradually Catholic and Protestant parties with close links to terrorist groups began adapting a more conciliatory line. Too many lives had been lost, too many years were spent in prison, not to seek some sort of settlement. Besides, many of the hard-line leaders were moving into their 40s, with wives, children and a powerful desire to join civilized life. In a sense, violence was its own antidote.

In the search for accommodation, the parties with strong links to the paramilitaries did not abandon their long-range political goals. They only took the bold step of talking to the enemy. "I am a British citizen and will remain one," says Billy Hutchinson, leader and chief negotiator of the Progressive Unionists. "But I have the guts to face Sinn Fein." For his pains he has been called a traitor to unionism by the likes of Ian Paisley, the blunderbuss leader who has made a career of fanning hatred in the North of Ireland and who refused to participate in the talks. Paisley's recalcitrance left him with no role other than leading a pathetic midnight protest outside the gates of the final negotiations and, with luck, a permanent position on the outer fringes of Northern Ireland politics.

Getting all the parties to join in the talks--much less negotiate in seriousness--was a long and torturous process, littered with false starts and, sadly, not a few dead bodies. It was the election last year of Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair that set the peace process on the track to success. His huge majority in the House of Commons ended the unionists' ability to torpedo the British government's desire to compromise with the republicans. Blair's popularity allowed him the sort of freedom to make deals that his predecessor John Major, despite his good intentions, did not have. Blair declared that the "peace train was leaving" and urged all parties to get aboard. He said there would be a settlement by spring. And last week, when the talks began to falter under continued unionist objections, he flew into Belfast along with Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. The two of them worked through two successive nights to drive the parties to an agreement.

"I feel the hand of history on our shoulders," said Blair. "Maybe even with the best will in the world we can't do it, but it's right to try, and I'm here to try." Blair, stripped down to shirt sleeves, set up office on the second floor of the building where the talks were headquartered. Blair and his capable Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam called in various party leaders, sat them down in green leather chairs placed around a teak conference table and began bargaining. Prime Minister Ahern had his office on the first floor. Both Prime Ministers devoted full time to the project. It was slow going. "To change four words," said mediator George Mitchell, "you need to consult so many people." Mitchell emerged as heroically patient and deft in his role as moderator of the intense negotiations.

In the end, the parties agreed to a 67-page document that, most important, promised no change in the North's place as part of Britain unless a majority of voters approve. It also set up a new provincial assembly to govern Northern Ireland, replacing direct rule from London. This assembly is structured to ensure fair representation of the Catholic minority. The agreement creates a political body called the North/South Ministerial Council, with representatives of both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which will oversee all-Ireland concerns, such as tourism and agriculture. The Ministerial Council gives Sinn Fein a bit of Irish re-unification. But the agreement also calls for an amendment to the Irish constitution to eliminate the Republic's territorial claim to the six counties of Northern Ireland. Both Sinn Fein and the Protestant parties with links to Protestant paramilitary groups lobbied successfully for a provision that would secure early release for prisoners held on terrorist-related charges.

The details and wording of the document mask the risks taken by many of those who agreed to it. There are still plenty of hard men on both sides in Northern Ireland, people who have pathologically made a life's work out of hate and killing; they will be doing their very best to drag Northern Ireland back into its own bloody history, first by denouncing the peacemakers as traitors to their cause, and if that doesn't work, by the only means they know: bombing and killing. On May 22 voters in the North and the Irish Republic will go to the polls to accept or reject the agreement. The referendum will most probably affirm what is already known: they are sick of violence and of the people who believe only in violence.

They are sick of their history, and they are sick of the political leaders who, until last week, refused to notice that there was a chance to move on. Wonderfully, tentatively, and in time for Easter, last week provided a resurrection for a beautiful place.