On a steel-skied summer day I dropped by the Northern Ireland Assembly to watch legislators discuss anti-immigrant riots, each speaker straining to upstage the last in outrage and fervor. To my eyes, though, the drama of the day’s debate was utterly eclipsed by the improbable scene itself: such a collection of people in such a place as this.
There was First Minister Michelle O’Neill, the daughter of an Irish Republican Army member and the first Catholic to lead Northern Ireland, which was carved from the rest of the Irish island a century ago as a bastion of Protestant supremacy. The deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, is the daughter of a former Protestant paramilitary gun runner. In the back rows I spotted Gerry Kelly, onetime I.R.A. bomber of London’s Old Bailey criminal court, now a blazer-clad minister representing North Belfast.
These politicians grew up in communities that battled one another bitterly for about 30 years before finally making peace in 1998. The conflict euphemistically called the Troubles still lingers uncomfortably close to the surface. Predictably, it was invoked in the debate, with the hard-line conservative Timothy Gaston suggesting that Ms. O’Neill was a hypocrite for denouncing anti-immigrant violence. Hadn’t she claimed that there had been no alternative to the armed republican uprising of the Troubles? “I hear from people regularly who see that violence has worked for others in Northern Ireland,” Mr. Gaston said darkly.
Odd as it sounds, I felt inspired watching this verbal sparring in the grand, gloomy hall of Stormont, the vast hilltop complex designed for a “Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state.” This onetime monument to perpetual sectarian supremacy is now the seat of a government in which the communities share power.
A pacified Belfast made a welcome contrast to the relentless carnage in Gaza, a place where I used to report. Here was a negotiated peace, unsteady though it may be. Northern Ireland is veined with frustrated hope and unsettled grievance, but it is also vivid proof that a dirty war fought around questions of identity can be channeled into a peaceful, albeit fraught, politics.
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