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Date Posted: 23:12:09 08/03/05 Wed GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Northern Ireland's gasp (Boston Globe)

News > Boston Globe
THERESE MCKENNA
Northern Ireland's gasp
By Therese McKenna  |  August 4, 2005

BELFAST

Globe front page| Boston.com


THE WORLD stopped. But just for a second. One war had fizzled out while a new one raged rabidly on.
The IRA pronouncement last week meant everything and nothing, a vividly postmodern moment in the catalog of choreographed set pieces stumbling across the stage of Northern Ireland politics.
It was written. It was spoken. It was beamed across the globe.
On July 28, that hidden, disembodied man of letters, P. O'Neill, put on flesh and raised his voice, stepping up before the camera lens to stand himself down.
In the following moments we scrambled to attach meaning, to dissect the words, analyze, contextualize, and question. We scribbled conclusions from omissions, inclusions, texture, timbre, and timing. We paused to regret, resent, and to mourn. We acknowledged the futility of years of murderous mayhem done in adherence to the old lie of nationhood. We extrapolated, examined, cast eyes back, and turned thoughts to the future.
But in that very instant of disclosure, Northern Ireland took a sharp inhalation of breath and gasped -- ''wow."
Something had lifted, and in the pure emotion of that second we understood. No going back. Our stale and sickly democracy eased itself up the bed. It must get well soon. Hope burned.
After the fact, one girl, any girl, sat back and considered how this event might impact on life as she had it.
What would become of the city? Already signs of the farewell to arms flickered on the Belfast skyline as British forces met words with action high upon Divis flats in the west. Figures tiny like industrious ants chipped at the army watchtower whose grim presence alienated many in the republican stronghold.
Some cry ''capitulation," but what's to fear from normalization? The north that unionists strive to keep ''as British as Finchley" will never be so green and pleasant if it remains festooned with ugly wartime relics and over-run by more troops than Tony Blair sent to Iraq.
The people Ian Paisley and such purport to represent can only gain from the removal of coercion from the streets.
Trouble is that sectarian votes which rely on fear of the other will be strangled if this vacuum is filled. If power is the sole end, our politicians may not let the people breathe and grow. Maintain misery, maintain a mandate. Sustain suspicion, count your ballots before they're cast. But admit that things are getting better -- uncharted territory.
Strong leadership and vision are vital for regeneration of this place -- a willingness to see suffering and offer humanity, not cynicism.
Working class communities have withered under the grip of violent thuggery, and compassion wizened to bitterness through years of deprivation unnoticed by government's blind eye.
Maybe now that we have shared a moment, now that something ''big" has occurred, those who have been ignored so that their unhappiness forced them to spit fury on to the streets will see something of the mythic ''peace dividend."
While no one like me, with access to education, money, and tree-lined suburbs, has awaited with bated breath for the IRA say-so to live normally -- we have been gradually bettering our lot as cash has trickled in since the cease-fires a decade ago -- anyone not coached in the arts of getting ahead has been cast to the wolves. For those in comfort, the constitutional question is boring irrelevance or interesting diversion -- a crossword puzzle.
The money is boomeranging about Belfast. Perhaps the IRA announcement will encourage government to target it at the communities where it would not previously go.
It would be grand if last week's scene-stealing performance by the IRA were to catalyze a true revolution. If it prompted the powerful to take us forward socially and economically rather than munching on rhetoric and traipsing the interminable tribal dance staged to pass for politics.
Grand if this were the statement to end all statements -- the one after which we all got on with it and grew to be the society we could, weaned off reliance on outside help.
Grand if Sinn Fein were to give a blessing to policing, so a service at full power could really set about tackling the pervasive criminal culture of post-cease-fire Northern Ireland.
Grand because this place looks better than ever -- civic-minded architects have set public spaces in Belfast aglow of late, and attitudes are changing with the streets.
It would be grand, and since there can be no going back we may as well put our foot on the pedal and go.
Therese McKenna is a journalist with the Irish News.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

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