In the small town of Armagh, near the border separating Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland, there are two cathedrals dedicated to Saint Patrick, the island’s patron saint, looking down on each other from their respective hills, and they keep with mutual distrust 25 Years of peace and amnesia. From the city center, two signs that the visitor must decipher indicate the direction to get to one or the other: Cathedral (COI) and Cathedral (RC). That is, the Cathedral of the Church of Ireland (Church Of Ireland, Anglican) and the Roman Catholic Cathedral (Roman Catholic).
The heart of Irish Christianity is a mere 16,000 souls compared to Northern Ireland’s population of nearly 1.9 million. During the three decades of this sectarian and bloody conflict, known by the euphemism of The Troubles, Armagh suffered 86 of the 3,488 deaths, a more than adequate proportion. This Monday marks a quarter-century of the Good Friday Agreement – the Belfast Agreement, as Protestants prefer to call it – that ended so much violence in 1998.
“There are still some wounds to heal between the two communities. Every family has stories of someone being shot or killed by the other side and that pain is still felt. It is necessary to heal it on both sides. But we don’t live that experience. For me it’s like a movie sometimes. It doesn’t seem like it’s real because today we don’t feel like it’s real at all,” says 23-year-old Ben. A few months ago he opened Café Soujourn, a small, tastefully decorated place with a variety of coffees and freshly made croissants, not unlike the cafés found in London’s chic Chelsea area.
Ben, owner of Cafe Soujourn, in Armagh.Rafa De Miguel
“It’s a good place to live, with some car dealerships and good houses that cost between £200,000 and £1million. [entre 225.000 y 1,1 millones de euros] and lots of schools,” boasts Matthew, 22, as he shows the customer one of the two bottles of legendary Spanish wine, Vega Sicilia Unico, which the shop where he works runs.
“And no memory of the sectarian violence of 25 years ago?”
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— “Fortunately not in my case,” he replies.
Matthew’s father joined the British Army and was assigned to patrol the region during the years of conflict. In the jargon of the time, County Armagh was known as ‘Murder Mile’. The members of the IRA moved comfortably through rural, winding terrain and close to the protective Republic border. The soldiers were flying through the area in helicopters. Going ashore was too risky. There were tongue-in-cheek highway signs that read Sniper at Work and showed the silhouette of a hooded man with a submachine gun and a raised fist.
“You don’t have the slightest memory left. This happens to my two children. The eldest was born in 1994, the year the IRA announced the ceasefire,” laments Jeffrey – like many others he agrees to speak but instinctively refuses to give his last name – the administrator of the Ulster Gazzette, who largest local newspaper circulation in the county, with just five employees. “They obviously know what happened because they were told. But they have no memory of anything… A few weeks ago when they tried to kill that police officer in Omagh and everyone was shocked, I remembered that it was our everyday life when we were young,” he recalls.
Jeffrey is referring to what happened on February 22 when Agent John Caldwell, off duty and in plain clothes, collected some footballs in the trunk of his car after training a group of children at the sports center in Omagh, 57km from Armagh. He was shot in front of his son. He was seriously injured. The police concentrated their investigations on the so-called Real IRA, a still active offshoot of the terrorist organization.
Victims and survivors of the Northern Ireland conflict at Killough on April 7th. Liam McBurney (AP)
“Sure, there are flashes of how easy it is to go back, we saw that with this assassination attempt,” says Sandra Peake, executive director of WAVE. The acronym at the time stood for Widows Against Violence Empower, a group of eight women from both sides who had lost their partners during the conflict. Today it is the largest support organization for victims of violence in Northern Ireland. Armagh’s head office is tucked away down a lane in the centre, but activities and events are spread across the county. “It is undeniable that there have been positive changes that have had a profound psychological impact, affecting the way people feel. The Good Friday Agreement was a radical change because the great difficulty for many victims was that much of what had happened was hidden and only came to light over time,” Peake emphasizes. “But there are still operating paramilitary groups on both sides that could jeopardize everything that has been achieved,” he warns.
The “Inheritance” and the Protocol
A quarter of a century after the agreement, peace appears to have been consolidated. However, the reconciliation of the two communities never ended. And two problems – one from the past, the other from the future – have stirred up Northern Ireland’s honeycomb in recent years. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government sponsored the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, through which London sought to soften judicial review of 30 years of violence by granting immunity to accused on both sides, who agreed with the Commission for the Reconciliation and Recovery of information. Although the clear aim was to protect former soldiers who were prosecuted for their actions during the years of conflict, the project outraged the families of Republican and Protestant victims.
“The Good Friday Agreement was an extraordinary achievement, but also a commitment that needs further work. Fundamental parts have yet to be developed, such as everything to do with human rights and equality,” explains Professor Colin Harvey from Queen’s University Law School in Belfast, given the enthusiasm for the anniversary. “The position that the British Government has taken on everything relating to heritage [la memoria de los años de violencia y sus consecuencias] It was deeply counterproductive. It didn’t help at all,” says Harvey. “The peace process is secure, but the anti-protocol discourse of recent years has been deeply irresponsible,” he recalls.
Institutional deadlock in the face of ‘betrayal’
Professor Harvey is referring to the Ireland Protocol, the treaty signed between London and Brussels to include Northern Ireland in the post-Brexit era. This is the question of the future – and the present – which has shaken the stability that has been achieved. The main Protestant party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), viewed this pact, which kept Northern Ireland in the EU’s single market, as a betrayal of the British government (also led by Johnson at the time) from the outset. Since then it has blocked the autonomous government institutions in the region and used the “principle of consent” enshrined in the peace agreement as a means of pressure. It posits that any political advance must have the support of the two communities, although voting in recent years has made it clear that there is a “third community”, moderate and without resentment, suffering mainly from this administrative freeze.
“The peace deal has not resolved a decades-old problem of the existence of two communities with contrasting ideas about the country to which Northern Ireland belongs. It was hoped that by enforcing peace and ensuring the rights of both sides, these existential problems could be put aside for a few generations, during which time a more normal society could emerge. And it more or less worked. Until Brexit came,” writer Fintan O’Toole, whose book We Don’t Know Us, tells EL PAÍS. A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (We Don’t Know Each Other. A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958) reminds us that the island’s history is common to all of its inhabitants.
“There was sectarianism and tensions, but also a common space, facilitated by the fact that Ireland and the UK were part of the European Union,” O’Toole recalls. “The idea of taking Northern Ireland out of the EU [aunque siga dentro del espacio aduanero] against the democratic will of its people [un 55,8% votó a favor de la permanencia] it brought all these questions to the surface. It has emboldened Unionists to return to the crudest British nationalism and Republicans to respond with greater urgency to the island’s future reunification,” the author concludes.
However, he and many other observers of the situation in Northern Ireland are confident that the Brexit balloon will be deflated and politicians will regain the pragmatism needed to bring stability to the region. The United States has been in limbo in recent years on everything related to the tensions that have arisen around the Protocol. The good offices of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who apparently managed to divert the conflict with Brussels with the so-called Windsor Agreement, finally convinced Washington. And President Joe Biden, of Irish descent, will visit Northern Ireland on Tuesday to join the celebrations.
Biden is not expected to set foot in Armagh, where the anniversary will not have the same relevance as it did in Belfast. There doesn’t seem to be much desire to remember either. At Shambles Market, strategically located between the two cathedrals, Kevin, a 60-year-old Catholic, hands out the flowers he’s grown and wants to sell that morning. “There will always be people who want to fight and rekindle old tensions. But in general everything has changed for the better.
—What is the memory of those years?
— I particularly remember the way to school. police checks. bombs. shootings. Those are all very distant memories.
Kevin (left) sorts his flowers at the Shambles Market in Armagh. In the background the Catholic Cathedral of San Patricio.Rafa De Miguel
As he distributes the flower boxes on the floor, a group of schoolchildren in uniform make their way loudly and quickly to the Colegio de San Patricio next to the Catholic Cathedral. Armagh also has co-educational schools to help integrate pupils but like the rest of Northern Ireland 25 years has not brought the end of the ‘together but not mixed’ mentality.
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