The IRA & Surrender

[FightingFat]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4080697.stm

If anyone has been following the interesting recent developments in the Northern Ireland peace process, what do you think of the current deadlock?

Basically, Ian Paisley, the leader of the DUP is demanding photographic evidence of IRA weapons decommisioning. The IRA is saying that they will allow a clergyman, representative of both camps, so a Catholic & a Protestant, to be present, but photographs would mean submission and they will “not submit to a process of humiliation”.

Paisley says that humiliation is necessary. That ‘sack cloth and ashes’ is necessary. And so we reach stalemate once more.

The voyage to peace has been hugely interesting and significant. Truly enormous chasms have been bridged on this journey, it is hardly suprising that small problems remain as stumbling blocks.
Who would have believed 20 years ago that Ian Paisley would be entering into negotiations with terrorists? Or that the IRA would consider ‘Power sharing’ with Unionists?

What can we learn from this journey?

What is the solution to the current deadlock?

Do you think President Bush’s phonecall to Ian Paisley was offering support? What advice do you think he had for the politician?

There is a brief guide to the complicated conflict avaliable here.

 

[Cherub]

From an American perspective (just my own, very limited one at that), I can tell you that there seem to be many complicated issues twined together in this centuries-old conflict, and that I don’t begin to understand them. For one thing, I am not sure why England sent protestant English and Scots into Ulster to begin with, and why they didn’t leave as soon as it was clear they were not wanted there (and if I am historically in error, please let everyone know! I’m no scholar in this.) King Henry VIII got his eye on Ireland, then later William of Orange crushed King James --and back in the day, that was just the way things were done; you took a liking to a place, got up an army, and moved in. The protestant-Catholic issues in Northern Ireland are bitterly divisive, and I don’t believe it helps one bit that Britain still has that old law stating no monarch can either be Catholic, or even wed to a Catholic. There is just a lot of bitterness left over from a few hundred years ago, and there are a lot of things that could help ease the tensions over it all. Then again, it is easy for me to sit here in the United States and imagine these things. I understand that I have very little idea exactly what is going on.