The sound of gunfire has returned to the streets of Belfast, the one form of eloquence that, in the strange world of the peace process, is sure to be heard, writes Fintan O'Toole
The tedious recapitulation of blame and grievance and the low drone of prerecorded rhetoric lull us into catatonic boredom. But - and those who use them know this very well - the bullets and blast bombs wake governments from their slumbers and get their attention.
The peace process has shown that violence and the threat of violence pay dividends. If, instead of all the bluster and blowhard rhetoric about the Third Force, the DUP had actually established a paramilitary wing, would it have been left outside the gates in 1998? If the SDLP had guns, would the British and Irish governments have treated it as an irrelevance over the last two years? Is it any wonder that loyalist paramilitaries, mired as they are in feuds and turf wars, and lacking any real political strategy, have concluded that orchestrated mayhem will bring them some official respect?
Assuming that the IRA follows through on its July statement declaring an end to its war, we are almost certainly in for another long period of manoeuvring and wrangling in which the two governments try to act as marriage brokers between two reluctant partners. On the one side, Sinn Féin has no desperate need to get the internal Northern Ireland institutions re-established. Indeed, in the run-up to the general election in the Republic, it would probably welcome two years of talks, in which a rotating squad of prospective candidates gets to flank Gerry Adams on RTÉ News while he denounces DUP intransigence. On the other, the DUP itself, while it is undergoing a profound process of change, needs time to prepare itself and its voters for what it must do.
Given all of this, the prospect is that the Belfast Agreement may well reach its 10th anniversary before it is actually implemented. Over the course of that decade, however, things have changed, not least because of the successes of the peace process itself. The two governments could therefore find themselves in the odd position of insisting that everyone follows a map that, in some respects, no longer matches a changed landscape. And while they are doing so, political gangsters start fires to grab attention, sectarian divisions deepen, and the large majorities in Northern Ireland, the Republic and Britain who were once animated by the hopes of 1998 become steadily more bored, depressed and withdrawn. The peace process becomes even more exclusively the property of professional politicians.
If this is not to happen, the two governments need to rethink the process. They need to recognise, for a start, that there is not one process but two. The Belfast Agreement itself has a dual nature. It was intended to do two related but in some ways incompatible things. It was, firstly, a tool for conflict resolution, a way of getting the IRA and to a lesser extent the loyalist paramilitaries to stop killing people. In this, it has been largely successful. The formal conflict (though not of course the use and threat of violence for other purposes) is over. Positive institutional and political changes - the establishment of the PSNI, the shift in the nature of the DUP - have happened.
This aspect of the agreement, however, has also interfered with its other purpose. For as well as being a contingent instrument for ending an armed conflict, the agreement is also supposed to be a kind of constitution. It defines Northern Ireland as a political space and seeks to do so in a genuinely radical, exciting way. It is, indeed, perhaps the boldest constitutional document ever agreed between sovereign states. It creates a space that is not ultimately claimed by any state, defines national identity as potentially both mutable and multiple, and rests sovereignty, not on history or geography but on that most complex and fluent of things - the collective mind of a majority of the population.
What has happened is not just that these 21st-century notions of political belonging have been robbed of their excitement by the sheer tedium of the last seven years, but that they are being undermined by part of the other side of the agreement.
The conflict-resolution side of the agreement included a gamble that was worth trying but that has been lost. It built the internal architecture of Northern Ireland's governance on a static notion of "two traditions" which were to be appeased and given "parity of esteem". The hope was that even though sectarianism was built in to the power-sharing system by the requirement for simultaneous majorities on the unionist and nationalist sides, the experience of working the new institutions would in fact diminish it. But there has been no momentum and the divisions have been formalised, entrenched and deepened.
The governments can try to restart the process as if nothing had happened, giving us two more years of posturing in which all excitement about the agreement's radical ideals is stripped away. Or they can acknowledge the futility of trying to build shared governance on mutual hatred and begin a new political process that puts sectarianism where it should - not as a solution but as a problem.