Northern Ireland: Summit at Hillsborough Castle

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In another part of the world, it would be called tribal warfare. In Northern Ireland, the shootings and the bombings that have taken more than 2,500 lives over the past 17 years are more primly referred to as "the troubles." The spasms of killing have followed the ebb and flow of ancient hates and fears that divide the British province's Protestant majority and its Roman Catholic minority. Because so many attempts to break the deadly cycle of attack and revenge have ended in failure, it is a wonder that political leaders still have the courage to try again, when even the merest hint of change in the status quo brings threats of more bloodshed from extremists on both sides.

Late last week British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald dared to gamble again, this time on a cautious scheme devised to provide the basis for an armistice, if not a settlement, in one of the world's most tenacious conflicts. After a year of discussions between British and Irish negotiators, the two leaders flew to an Anglo-Irish summit at the 188-year-old Hillsborough Castle, twelve miles to the south of Belfast. There they signed an agreement giving the Irish government an official voice in the running of Northern Ireland for the first time. In return, the FitzGerald government strongly recognized the desire of Ulster's Protestants to remain under Britain's wing.

Specifically, the agreement will lead to the establishment of a British-Irish body to be called the Intergovernmental Conference. It is also intended to lead to "devolution," the transfer of powers from the British government in London to the elected Northern Ireland Assembly, which today is dominated by Protestants and boycotted by Catholics. The newly created conference will reinforce British-Irish efforts to combat terrorism and will attempt to improve relations between the predominantly Protestant security forces and the Catholic community. It will delve into legal matters, perhaps proposing that courts handling security cases be made up of judges from Ireland as well as Britain. It will even deal with such relatively minor but deeply emotional matters as the longstanding ban on the flying of the Irish flag in the province. Such concessions to the Catholic minority are certain to prove unsettling to the Protestants, who are skeptical about British assurances that there will be no future change in the status of Northern Ireland unless a majority of the heavily Protestant population agrees.

Though British officials had gone to considerable lengths to downplay the significance of the event, the summit agreement reverberated across Britain and Ireland like a distant explosion. The straightforward language of the accord raised as many fears as it did hopes. Said Professor John A. Murphy, a history teacher at University College, Cork: "There is no grand solution. You can only make incremental moves. This seems to be a courageous one. It's the first time a role for the south has been formally recognized [in Northern Ireland] since 1925. This has to be a dramatic development."