Despite recent reverses, the prospects for the North are still looking bright, writes Andy Pollak.
It is not every day that one comes across a serious academic study which is optimistic about Northern Ireland. I have been reading one of those rare volumes, which backs up with opinion survey research my own belief that, despite recent reverses, the Belfast Agreement still provides the best template for allowing the Irish-Irish and the British-Irish to begin to learn the difficult compromises of living side by side with as much equality and justice and mutual understanding as a bloody history will allow.
The book is Conflict and Consensus: A study of values and attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, by Tony Fahey, Bernadette Hayes and Richard Sinnott, which is based on the authors' analysis of social survey data from the 1999-2000 European Values Surveys and the 2002-2003 European Social Survey in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
It concludes that both societies on this island have been blessed in the past decade by a combination of benevolent circumstances which make them highly unusual in European, not to mention world, terms.
They both enjoy high levels of income, welfare provision, individual life satisfaction and social capital. They are both stable democracies governed by similar legal systems which have withstood the tests of time. The old divisions based on religion seem to be fading as both societies are edging - and the authors emphasise the qualified word "edging" - towards a more secular, post-Christian future.
However, both jurisdictions continue to share more conservative views on family and sexual morality than most other parts of Europe. Finally, and most crucially, "in managing processes of conflict and consensus, both societies enjoy levels of confidence in political institutions that, relative to other European societies, could be regarded as surprisingly high".
When looked at from the vantage point of Baghdad or Sarajevo or other capitals struggling to cope with the ravages of widescale sectarian conflict based on national and religious identity, this is a hugely enviable position.
Indeed, on the basis of their examination of surveys on life satisfaction in the North, the writers suggest that "the disturbed political atmosphere in that society has not been strong enough in its effects to counterbalance the positive influence on subjective well-being of the high standards of living provided by the Northern Ireland economy and welfare state".
One of the most extraordinary findings of the study was the relative lack of alienation from the political system of Northern Catholics. Fahey, Hayes and Sinnott write: "It is particularly notable that overall confidence in political institutions and ratings of the UK system of government was higher in Northern Ireland than in Britain - and even Catholics in Northern Ireland rate the UK system of government more highly than do the people of Britain". This was, of course, based on a survey taken less than two years after the high point of the Belfast Agreement. However, if true, it is a remarkable turnaround from the Catholic alienation that was widespread as recently as the 1980s.
In over three decades of inter-communal and political violence Northern Ireland never tipped over into the kind of widespread massacres and "ethnic cleansing" of one community by another that happened in the former Yugoslavia. I have often wondered if one of the main reasons for this was the conservative, Christian values of both the Protestant and Catholic communities.
At key moments, actions or appeals by clergymen have had a cathartic effect in pulling people back from the brink - one can think of Father Alex Reid giving absolution to the two British soldiers lynched in Andersonstown in 1988, or Orange chaplain the Rev William Bingham defusing the Drumcree stand-off following the burning to death of three small Catholic boys in Ballymoney in 1998.
And I have two thoughts which are contradictory, but ironically both of which lead in a positive direction. Perhaps, as this study suggests, "secularisation could play a role in the future in creating cultural divisions that cut across the eth-no-national divide and so reduce polarisation" (the division on family and sexual issues between liberals and conservatives of all denominations, for example, that was largely absent in Ireland, North and South, three or four decades ago).
Or perhaps those conservative Christian family values which Irish Catholics and Protestants share - and which make them unlike their fellow citizens in Britain and Europe - can provide some of the basis for understandings which go beyond and deeper than those reached between unionists, nationalists and republicans in 1998. Certainly last December's prospect - tantalisingly close if we are to believe the two Governments - of Sinn Féin and the DUP sharing power would have brought the two politico-religious tribes closer to an accommodation than at any time since the foundation of the Northern state 85 years ago. As this study makes clear, we are now in a period of relative peace and confidence in political institutions, of huge prosperity, of self-confidence and pride in Irish achievements (in the South), and of significant consensus in basic values between North and South.
In the words of the authors, "the two societies and the two traditions are characterised by major similarities as well as by self-evident differences. Put another way, the grounds for consensus within and between the two societies are almost as extensive as the grounds for conflict".
This unprecedented and remarkable congruence of benevolent factors imposes a heavy responsibility on this generation. The Good Friday agreement was an admirable starting point. But we still have to make it work, and work in the face of increasing Northern Protestant disenchantment.
An IRA disbandment is only the beginning of that work. If we are not going to allow our future to be determined by the fear and narrowness of the Belfast ghettoes, with the inevitable descent into another round of communal bloodletting that will lead to, we have to build slowly on what we in the two parts of this island have in common, not what divides us.
What we have most in common - and what unites us far more importantly than any forced collective constitutional arrangements under an Irish tricolour - is that we are now both modern, prosperous, democratic societies which still adhere, to a large extent, to traditional Christian values. This fine book highlights that vital commonality.
Andy Pollak is director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin. He is a former religious affairs correspondent, education correspondent and Belfast reporter with The Irish Times.