These Men Are "Peacemakers"?  Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams make me want to spew.

I suppose I can understand why people are glad when they see Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams sitting down together and consenting to "power sharing" in Northern Irelandùand just in time for Good Friday, too, as if to consecrate a Protestant-Catholic brotherhood just on the verge of the various feasts of the resurrection. But the phony photo-op still made me want to spew. There will be no return to life for the thousands of people who were murdered in these men's quarrel, and it seems indecent to me that we should be thanking them for their mercy in calling off the bloodshed, let alone calling it off on condition that they alone are declared the winners.

What has been achieved by this cynical sit-down? An agreement to divide the spoils of Ireland's six northeastern counties and to refrain from flagrant homicide while doing so. Well, all that and more was on offer four decades ago. In fact, a better ideaùthat of a nonsectarian politics that shed no bloodùwas on offer as well. It was inscribed on the noble banners of the civil rights movement that marched in Derry in October 1968, and it was fought for in the parliaments of London and Dublin. The main force that opposed it initially was led by Ian Paisley, a brutish Calvinist street thug with covert sympathizers in the police force. The main force that opposed it eventually was the Provisional IRA, which gladly accepted the sectarian challenge and which preached the insane idea that Irish Protestants could be bombed into some deranged concept of a Fenian republic. The British laws of libel forbid me to tell what I heard when I was a young reporter in the pubs and back streets of Belfast, but I'll put it like this: Both Paisley and Adams know very well of things that happened that should never have happened. And both of them, in order to arrive at that smug power-sharing press conference, have had to arrange to seem adequately uninformed about such horrid past events. Both have been photographed carrying coffins at political funeralsùfunerals that were at one time the main cultural activity in each of their "communities." One day, their private role in filling those coffins will be fully exposed. In the meantime, they are the recognized and designated peacemakers. If you can bring yourself to applaud this, you are a masochist clapping a well-matched pair of sadists.

I will admit that there was a time when I thought that a united Ireland, or even a reformed Northern Ireland, could not be arrived at by peaceful means. For one thing, the Paisleyites seemed able to thwart every initiative for change, often by resorting to extraparliamentary and paramilitary means. It even seemed at one stage that one could define the armed Republican movement as a "response" to this. But that was over a quarter of a century ago. By the time the tit-for-tat intercommunal killings began and car bombs began to be randomly exploded in English cities, it had long become plain to everybody that no progress on these lines was even remotely thinkable.