4th February 2013. I fly off on a trip of a lifetime. The History School at a university in Texas. Hosted by an influential professor who was impressed by some of my writings before and after this blog (Keeping An Eye On the Czar of Russia) started in 2011.

I was asked to talk to some post graduate students on the subject of Norn Iron.

I only went to university in 2005 at the age of 53.

I am a shy reserved man. Getting a degree aged 57 in 2009 empowered me. As did this Blog. To my surprise I found that I could actually speak in public. I really enjoyed speaking to the post grads. No point in going into detail about my lecture,

But for those of you interested, there are You Tube videos of the rehearsals and if you want a link, I am happy to provide it.

Later this year, I will be returning to Texas. And of course I have been thinking how well did that lecture in 2013 hold up but more so what has actually changed …what would I say to those post grads in 2024.

Well…we have had BREXIT….both Sinn Féin and DUP have withdrawn from the Assembly/Government and yesterday 3rd February the Assembly and Executive was re-booted thanks to a deal between the British Government (Tory) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

The story of the post-Brexit years is that things have moved. And I don’t think that was supposed to have happened. For all its achievements, stagnation was baked into the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. We needed Peace and that is what we got,

Conflict Resolution happens at the end of wars. Take United States in 1865. The Peace was imposed by the Northern victors on the South and was effectively rolled back after about ten years and Reconstruction was ended. Peace came in Germany and Japan in 1945. when those nations were totally defeated.

Is Peace always imposed? Can it ever be negotiated?

The Peace on Good Friday was negotiated. We needed it. It is hard forty and fifty years after the the bloody years of 1970s and 1980s …it is very hard to contemplate just how bloody it all was…Ballymurphy in 1971 (where I lived), McGurks, Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, Claudy an arc of atrocities committed in less than a year…I was 19 and 20 years old and that arc brought me to be the person I am today.

Much has happened since 1972…at random, La Mon, Darkley, Loughinisland, Enniskillen, the Shankill Butchers, Tebane, Miami Showband, all tragedies. And the injustices, Birmingham Six, Guilford Four and Maguire Seven in England and the local calumny and perjury and collusion between so called “security forces” and sectarian loyalist killers. But nothing that has happened since 1972 has really changed me as a person.

Essentially violence…the worst of it had abated by the mid 1990s and we were inching towards ceasefires first and then Peace.

On Good Friday morning in 1998 my wife and I were going to work listening to the radio news. Would a deal be reached. About 8.45am, the local BBC said it was happening. We lived thru it…that’s what we said.

Others did not live thru it. In the mid 1960s there was no way of knowing that two classmates would die on “active service”, another from the same class would die in a drive by shooting, that my sisters schoolfriend would be tortured and killed, that my wife’s cousin (a young woman) would be shot dead. Necessarily schoolfriends are from our (Catholic) community. But later I would work with people from the Protestant community who were also killed.

No. When I say “did not live thru it”, I am thinking of my father who died in 1986, Uncle Jackie in 1985, Uncle Charlie in 1988…natural causes. But these people prayed for peace and they never saw it,

The narrative around the Good Friday Agreement was that we had all suffered and we were all to blame. It is convenient. But is it true? There is no analysis just a mathematical equation ……it was 50-50. But can that be true?.

Were Germany and Poland equally responsible for the Second World War?

The Good Friday Agreement was a victory for Creative Ambiguity. It was sold to unionists as a series of obstacles to a united Ireland and sold to nationalists as stepping stones to a united Ireland.

The vote in the 1998 Referendum endorsing the Agreement had a 75% approval. As far as can be gathered it was supported by 95% of nationalists and 55% of unionists so nationalists clearly saw the Agreement as stepping stones to Irish unity. Unionists did not buy fully into the narrative aimed at them.

But post-1998, two things happened. The first was that nationalists started to abandon SDLP party of John Hume’s successors and gradually move to Sinn Féin, unashamedly associated with IRA. And the relatively moderate UUP was overtaken by the extremists in the DUP.

Surprisingly perhaps when the DUP and Sinn Féin became the leaders of their tribes, Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness seemed to work well together and exuded a bonhomie which led detractors to refer to them as the Chuckle Brothers.

But having agreed that everyone had suffered and was to blame…the problem arises when moving beyond doing nothing…set up power sharing Executive, reform Police, Release prisoners, de commission weapons (all done)….prosecute crimes by security forces, compensate victims, deal with legacy (all parked for 26 years now).

There are three rather than two tribes.

Nationalists want to move towards a united Ireland.

Unionists want to move to Norn Iron being more part of the “United Kingdom” than it already is.

And LetsGetAlongerists ..a faux middle ground that proposes closer co-operation between unionist and nationalist but key to that is accepting a status quo that is really just a form of a better type of unionism.

Both sides were happy with Stagnation. On the unionist side, there was a feeling that better understanding of each other would de-fuse the constitutional issues. Nationalists put our faith in the Demographics.

There is an annual game…The Wall Game …played at England’s most prestigious school…Eton College. The rules are a bit bizarre but all the students are divided into two teams and push a ball along a wall. Hundreds of players are involved and nobody actually scores. The last time somebody scored a goal was in the 1920s.

And really that’s a great metaphor for Norn Iron politics. Two tribes line up and push for years. Nobody scores.

It is something I have long believed. We are in a (peaceful) conflict that Nationalists and Unionists cannot win….but one or other can lose it. All it takes is one mistake and that mistake was BREXIT

TO BE CONTINUED