WorldView: At her garden party for July 12th in Phoenix Park this week, President Mary McAleese said the experience of conflict resolution on this island would provide a model of hope for areas of conflict around the world.
In this she echoed Sunday's announcement by Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern at a gathering of the diplomatic corps that the Government is to set up a conflict resolution centre "so that other countries and regions can benefit from the lessons we have learned".
In the North, a week-long visit by the Cypriot Reconstruction and Resettlement Council illustrated the difficulties involved. Ken Maginnis accused them of propagandising on behalf of the Greek Cypriots as they met Stormont junior minister Gerry Kelly.
"This exclusively Greek Cypriot delegation is here to propound misinformation and discredit their persecuted Turkish Cypriot fellow islanders," the UUP peer said. "This is part of a relentless campaign that has sought to isolate the Turkish Cypriot community for the last 44 years. They should not be given any credibility whatsoever."
But the council's chairman, Nikos Messarites, insisted they had been on a fact-finding mission to Berlin involving Turkish Cypriots and were trying to learn lessons from Northern Ireland's peace process which could benefit both communities.
Undoubtedly there are lessons to be learned from the agreement, as can readily be seen by the international attention it has attracted. But these lessons can still be actively disputed, differently interpreted or treated with various emphases as to substance and process. Different parties in the North, here and in Britain draw varying lessons from what has been involved and apply them to differing conflicts elsewhere.
Thus Dermot Ahern is in the Irish nationalist and Fianna Fáil mainstream when he says Ireland can be a bridge between the developing and developed worlds because of the transition we have made from poverty to prosperity and colonial subjection to confident independence. Ken Maginnis says partition is necessary to protect the Turkish minority in Cyprus, whereas Sinn Féin says it undermines Cypriot independence. Steven King has similarly defended partition in India and former Yugoslavia.
The leitmotif for unionist comparison tends to be the need to defend established state sovereignty against secession. They reject the influential colonial model, saying that what happened in 1921 was not decolonisation but secession from the UK by ethno-centric nationalists. In a speech last month Peter Hain spent some time wondering whether there are lessons for conflict in Iraq from the North. Such partisanship about parallels is typical of conflicts the world over.
Comparative political analysis is also to benefit from Ahern's initiative, in that an academic centre for conflict resolution will be created. Already there is a substantial body of comparative research linking conflicts in Ireland and elsewhere, drawing inspiration from various approaches such as pluralist, consociational and settler-colonial theory.
The centre's work will be helped by fourth-level scholarships to ensure a continued stream of international and national expertise. This will benefit the rapidly growing development aid budget (from which the initiative is to be funded) in that several of the conflicts concerned occur in poorer parts of the world targeted by it. To spend the budget effectively will certainly require greater expertise in and experience of these societies, by circulating researchers between them and Ireland. But a conflict resolution centre would have a wider remit than development aid, since many of the conflicts occur in other settings where aid does not apply.
Before the agreement that brought Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness to power, unionists and nationalists would often identify with opposing parties in several of the major world conflicts. Adrian Guelke from Queen's University points out that while academics took the lead in the 1980s by systematically comparing the conflict in Northern Ireland with those in Israel-Palestine and South Africa, largely because of their similar intractability and deeply divided ethnic or inter-communal basis, there has been a parallel popular political identification over the years of the Northern troubles.
Another prominent comparative researcher, John McGarry, points out that the US civil rights movement was a favourite analogy for nationalists in the 1960s. It portrayed them as American blacks struggling for rights against a unionist regime similar to the racists running the US Deep South. This effectively embarrassed Britain internationally, legitimised civil disobedience and protest marches, appealed to moderate unionists and exposed local intransigents to metropolitan liberals.
Although the US political parallel gradually lost its salience and was supplanted by the South African one, it left a lasting impression - not least on Bill Clinton in the 1990s. On one occasion he is reported to have rebuffed a request from Tony Blair to put pressure on Sinn Féin for concessions on police reform because bowing to unionist demands on the RUC "would be like leaving Alabama and Georgia under all-white cops".
Nationalists and republicans had by the 1980s shifted their main political comparison to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The dynamics of the two conflicts, including provocative protests, armed violence and their international profile tended to converge. Direct contacts between the ANC and Sinn Féin reinforced the political message that unionism denied the Irish majority their rights throughout the island, just as the white minority did in South Africa.
The solutions, too, are similar from these perspectives: reintegrating African homelands into South Africa and ending partition sooner or later. An ironic twist pointed out by Guelke was that the South African National Party representing the white minority hoped to secure a lasting consociational or powersharing deal but had to settle for majority rule after a brief transitional period. By contrast the republican movement here hoped to achieve an anti-colonial outcome but got the consociational Belfast Agreement.
Such paradoxes are partly the result of false parallels, which it is the function of policy research to explore. There has been much discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian analogies with Northern Ireland after Tony Blair's appointment as an envoy for the UN-EU-US-Russian quartet. They are certainly there, but need care and caution to interpret. This may be easier now that the settlement is bedding down.