The breakthrough in Belfast presages a new dawn for a troubled island

By FERGAL KEANE

ever have I been so glad to be wrong. Until the very last moment I doubted that a deal could be reached. Shaped by my island's bloody history and steeped in native pessimism, I could not believe that an accommodation between Orange and Green was possible. And so when friends from abroad asked what I thought of the peace process, I would caution them against hope; there was too much bad blood from the past for this to end in smiles, I said. How wrong I was, how wonderfully wrong.

I come from an Irish generation for whom the Troubles were the defining political experience of our lives. Certainly as a southern Catholic I did not have to experience the daily round of bombings and killings. That was happening up the road, a distant menacing rumble that occasionally exploded into our lives. But like everybody else who grew up on the island-Catholic, Protestant and non believer-I felt the burden of our history. Ireland is simply too small a place to be able to escape completely the poisonous breath of the past.

From my earliest days I was taught that the English were our oppressors, that our nation was incomplete while the six counties of Ulster remained under the Union flag. My parents too had learned this tune and their parents before them. Grandparents on both sides of my family had taken part in the war of independence against the British. The prevailing political ethos told us that an Ireland divided could never be at peace. As for the Ulster Protestants who were supposed to be my fellow countrymen-I regarded them as obdurate and bigoted. I never could see their point of view.

Up north the children of Protestant Ulster were learning another tune. They were taught to fear us and regard us as foreigners. We were portrayed as citizens of a priest-ridden and backward country. To them a United Ireland meant domination by Papists and the loss of their Protestant faith and identity. The Catholics alongside whom they lived were to be despised and kept from power. Discrimination and exclusion were the order of the day. The Ulster Catholics were the enemy within, the fifth columnists waiting to open the city gates for their bretheren from the south.

And then, in the mid-'90s, I went to live in Belfast. My work took me into Catholic and Protestant ghettos, to the funerals of I.R.A. men and of police officers, to the marches of hardline loyalists and die-hard republicans. My eyes were opened to a reality that those who live outside Ulster can never really understand.

The Nobel prize winning poet Seamus Heaney coined the chilling phrase "each neighborly murder" to describe the nature of Ulster's killing. For this was a war fought out between people who passed each other in the street every day, families who had lived alongside each other for generations. This was not killing by remote control but up close and very personal. Here compromise was the dirtiest word. It meant betrayal and on both sides the traitor was the most despicable creature.

It was the funerals which put an end to any simplistic ideas I might have had about Irish unity. I soon realised that the people of the South had not the remotest sense of what their fellow islanders were suffering. The pain and suspicion and fear were just across the border from us but Ulster might as well have been another planet. After nearly three decades of violence I sensed that the two parts of the island were psychologically further apart than ever before. And so, devoid of hope, I left Ulster and went to South Africa to observe that country's remarkable transition to democracy.

While Mandela and De Klerk swept towards a new dispensation, the news from home was depressingly familiar: shootings, bombings, bigotry. Watching the South African leaders in action I despaired of their counterparts in Ireland. But living far away I did not realise that great changes were taking place in Ulster. For the first time in recent Irish history, the leaders of Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. were telling their supporters that negotiation might offer a way forward. On the Protestant side there was a growing acceptance of the need for an agreed solution. The politics of siege would no longer suffice. The ordinary people had never seemed so weary of conflict, more desiring of a settlement.

Now that the deal has been done, we know that there are dangerous times ahead. The forces of bigotry and fear will do their best to destroy our new found sense of hope. They cannot be allowed to succeed. The main political leaders have all shown exemplary courage. It is now up to the people-north and south-to support them and create an Ireland where our children can live free from the tribal hatreds of the past. The poet Louis McNeice, an Ulster Protestant, once wrote of the long struggle: "There will be sunlight later." Today I can see the first glorious rays.