Is it too optimistic to say that this year has seen the political, historical and cultural triumph of constitutionalism? Is it naive to acclaim the final victory of the principles of Burke over Tone, the bi-centenaries of whose deaths have passed in the last year or so? Is it simplistic to declare that we have finally entered a new epoch in which the moral and political heresies of revolutionism are perceived as such even by those who not long ago were revolution's great protagonists?
If I am right in my negative, then the year which expires today is the greatest in Irish history, for it has seen the triumph of ideas over tribalism, and the final victory of freedom over the tyranny of violence.
The ideas are those of Burke and were properly adverted to by David Trimble at the Nobel Awards. They are also those of Burke's greatest advocate in this age or any other, Conor Cruise O'Brien - and regardless of his own involvement in Northern Ireland politics, they have provided the intellectual cutting edge which has destroyed republican paramilitary pretensions. For Burke understood that not merely must order be maintained, but human realities recognised: it is a cardinal error to idealise humankind and then endeavour to create political institutions which work only for perfect persons in perfect places. That way lie the utopias of Robespierre's France, Lenin's Russia and Pol Pot's Kampuchea.
Journey to agreement
Human outcomes are never perfect. The Good Friday Agreement is not perfect, and will in detail probably prove unworkable. That is less important than the journey which has been made towards that agreement, during which the unthinkable was thought and the undoable done. This last year I sat at table with a senior Orangeman who reverently bowed his head as grace was said by a Catholic priest before dinner in a British army officer's mess in the North. This last year eminent Orangemen attended a Requiem Mass for Catholic children. This last year, the President of Ireland, a north Belfast nationalist, stood to attention as she honoured and was herself honoured by bands-men of the regiment which incorporates the old UDR. This last year Irish soldiers from the two traditions stood shoulder to shoulder to remember the hour when their precursors of those two traditions stood shoulder to shoulder in the field.
This last year the people of nationalist Ireland awoke at last to a new dawn of recognising their own history; and there was that same natural joy that mothers who have given up their children for adoption feel when they are reunited with them in adulthood. Our lost sons and daughters, the dead and the grieving who were obliterated, have come home. They are ours, and for good or evil, finally we acknowledge that we cannot disavow our past.
Cherished enmities
This cuts both ways. Truth should be told, and enmities ended, no matter how cherished that enmity was, no matter how central that hostility was to identity. For a sense of self which is based on a dislike of others must inevitably be disfigured and misshapen in the process. This does not oblige me to quell my dislike of, say, Sinn Fein's affection for aggressive victim-hood; but it does oblige me to mind my language, and to work with those parts of the Sinn Fein movement which seek accommodation and a retreat out of the historical cul-de-sac into which violence has led us. Does the drowning man spurn the hand of a man he dislikes? Or does the drowning man wait for the perfect rescuer?
At times in the past decades, it seemed as if we were going to drown in blood and misery and shame; yet out of that blood and misery and shame emerged the year of 1998. This should teach us that the principle of changing of one's mind is a public virtue and a political necessity. So, a year ago there were few people in public life I disliked more than our President; now I am sure that, despite (to my imperfect mind, that is) some early errors, she is a good woman and a very fine President indeed, right for this time, right for its mood, right for us.
Possibilities
Nothing will make me like Martin McGuinness or Gerry Adams. I am sure the reverse is true, not least for the scorn that I and others poured on them when they took great risks to achieve that which we could not see. Just as they for so long had been blinded by those many dismal hates which drive the Sinn Fein-IRA family, people such as myself were driven by an undiscriminating hatred of that family. We could not see the possibilities for peace emanating from it because we would not.
The year of 1998 has changed all that. It has not made paradise on earth, but it has created an island of vast possibilities. Violence will not end - indeed, there will almost certainly be more this coming summer. But the cause of violence is now morally exploded among its perpetrators, and only shallow, witless pretexts remain. There is an author for all this, who spoke endlessly of the need for political arrangements to reflect the reality of the flawed nature of the people who must operate them. That man is the greatest political philosopher the Irish and British peoples have produced: Edmund Burke. His hour has come.