Give Ireland Back to the Irish?
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The initial euphoria over
the Northern Ireland peace agreement rapidly gave way in the British and Irish
press to fears that it might fail. In Britain, only the Independent, recently
purchased by the Irish CEO of H.J. Heinz Co., Tony O'Reilly, appeared to
discount the possibility of failure from the start. A front-page headline last
Saturday read, "Peace at last for Ulster," and an editorial gushed, "[I]t is
not naive to be optimistic about its prospects" and "we must all resist the
temptation to see future violence described as a failure of the peace process,"
although that temptation would surely be strong.
The
conservative Daily Telegraph , always deeply suspicious of any dealings between
Britain and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army,
criticized several aspects of the settlement and emphasized that it "does not
in itself mean peace in Ulster's time." It added that Ulster's unionist voters
"should not, at least as yet, feel that they are against peace by rejecting
yesterday's agreement--or be stampeded into voting 'Yes' in a referendum."
"Please make it work," begged the liberal Guardian in its front-page headline, saying in its
editorial that while failure was a possibility, so also was success. "It is a
time for gratitude, and even the odd private prayer," it went on. "For this was
a blessed Good Friday." The Financial Times said, "[W]hat has been achieved is a great new
opportunity, but it is only that. The people of Ireland, north and south, must
make up their minds to take it."
By Easter Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph was leading
with the news that peace was already threatened by Sinn Fein's refusal to press
the IRA to hand over its weapons immediately. Rupert Murdoch's Sunday
Times , on the other hand, described divisions among the Protestant
unionists as the main threat to peace. Most of the British Sunday newspapers
highlighted an agreement between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his
Conservative predecessor John Major to campaign together for a "Yes" vote in
next month's referendum in Ulster. The Sunday Mirror published an "exclusive" front-page report that Blair was going to ask the queen to confer a
knighthood on the chairman of the peace talks, former U.S. Sen. George
Mitchell.
Surprisingly, the Sunday Telegraph 's editorial was hostile to President
Clinton, who had elsewhere been garnering plaudits for his contribution to the
peace settlement. It described his intervention as "merely opportunistic" and
added: "In his intrusions into the peace process, President Clinton--a man who
took no risks last week--has tried to represent Britain as if it were a
colonial power, slowly withdrawing from a Third World 'statelet.' It is worth
reminding him that Ulster is, and remains, part of the United Kingdom and, as
such, is part of a developed democracy."
By Monday, every British broadsheet was
stressing the difficulties facing the peace settlement because of divisions
within Sinn Fein and among the unionists, while the Guardian led its
front page with a warning by Mitchell of increased terrorist violence at the
time of the referendum. Continental newspapers, too, emphasized the problems.
"The Irish peace remains to be built," said the conservative Paris daily
Le Figaro over its main
front-page story. In an adjoining comment, it described the Ulster settlement
as "typically English" in its pragmatism. "What continental jurist could have
thought up a statute which reaffirms Ulster's dependence on the crown without
excluding its eventual reattachment to the Republic of Ireland?" it asked. On
Tuesday, Le Monde carried
an article by its Madrid correspondent about intense Spanish interest in the
Ulster settlement as a possible key to solving the Basque terrorist problem in
Spain. But El País of
Madrid quoted Blair, spending Easter with his family in Córdoba, as saying
there were no comparisons to be made between the two situations.
The Ulster agreement was
greeted with even greater euphoria in the Irish press than in its British
counterpart. The Cork Examiner hailed it as the achievement of "lasting peace," and the
Irish Times compared
John Hume, the Ulster Social Democratic Party leader who played the key role in
launching the peace negotiations, to "Moses entering the Promised
Land"--though, as the Irish historian and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien
pointed out in an op-ed article in the Times of London on Monday, Moses never actually entered
the Promised Land.
But O'Brien, who has always
been opposed to making deals with Sinn Fein, noted that there was now less open
emphasis in Ireland on peace than on a breakthrough for Irish nationalism, and
he added that an article in the Sunday Business Post--the Dublin newspaper most
sympathetic to Sinn Fein--had rather given the game away with an article that
said, "[T]he IRA, which is likely to maintain its ceasefire for several months,
will almost certainly resist any attempt to accede to unionist demands for
actual decommissioning of weapons by early summer." O'Brien predicted that Sinn
Fein and the IRA would continue to operate the "peace process" as "a fertile
and rewarding field for further blackmail" and that the peace proposals "may
well be defeated" by unionist voters in the referendum.
