Editorial: N Ireland remains a daunting political challenge

Opinion

Whether the IRA's announcement that it has abandoned its campaign to unite Ireland through force of arms turns out to be, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "a step of unparalleled magnitude in the recent history of Northern Ireland" remains to be tested by time. The history of the peace process is littered with false dawns, broken promises and shattered hopes.

The addiction to violence by some on both sides of the poisonous sectarian divide is a habit that has proved hard to relinquish. The knee-cappings and beatings and the occasional killing have continued among those brutal men for whom the distinction between simple criminality and ideology is an alien concept.

But for some time it has been clear that there is little appetite in any section of the Northern Irish population for a return to armed confrontation, let alone to the bloody indiscriminate slaughter campaigns. When men as hard-headed as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness recognise that violence has become a crippling political liability, the game is up.

It has taken a long time. The roots of armed resistance to British rule go back centuries, and the IRA struggle to achieve a united Ireland through the barrel of the gun has gone on for 86 years.

The legacy of violence will not be quickly erased. The IRA cannot be praised for their announcement. They are not taking this step out of compassion. Their decision is a matter of pragmatism and an acknowledgment that the approach has failed, but their grim pursuit of this doomed strategy has cost an estimated 1700 deaths and thousands of blighted lives.

The reaction to their slaughter produced its own catastrophic death toll, with so-called Loyalists responsible for atrocities every bit as barbaric, and with actions by the security forces leaving them unable to claim any moral high ground. The price was paid mainly by civilians, men and women assassinated for no other reason than their religious beliefs, children blown into mangled fragments for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The campaign for a united Ireland will go on and will continue to heat emotions to boiling point. But this announcement provides convincing cause for hope that the weaponry will be words and politics, and it is politicians who will have to respond and who will have to take their constituencies with them. The IRA are surrendering one of their myths and the challenge is now upon the unionists to turn their faces to the future and abandon their delusions, including their belief that the rest of the United Kingdom is as committed as they are to their separation from Ireland. The vile sectarianism with its religious underpinning that disfigures Northern Irish society will have to be eroded.

This is a political challenge of daunting proportions and it is likely to take generations. But getting the IRA to this point has been a task of similar magnitude and it is a vindication of a succession of democratic politicians, both in London and Dublin, that it has been achieved. With an unshakeable determination not to be bombed into submitting to the moral blackmail of the bodycount, and an almost incredible persistence in living through repeated failures of negotiations, they have demonstrated a faith in peaceful processes that deserves both praise and a lasting success.

The struggle against those others who view the slaughter of the innocents as a political instrument needs the same determination and courage.