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.
Staring into the abyss of the Middle East — Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7 — it feels hopeless even to mention peace. The plan unveiled this week by President Trump was devised by the conflict’s most powerful participants and presented as an ultimatum to Palestinians, whose political hopes were left unanswered. In other words, it’s the opposite of what finally worked in Northern Ireland.
There’s no perfect parallel between the two struggles, but it’s worth recalling that Northern Ireland’s conflict was also dismissed as unresolvable — too complicated, too tangled with religion, too sensitive to an important ally. The road to the Good Friday Agreement was crowded with frustrations, setbacks and perilous political gambles.
Decades of furtive and fruitless talks preceded the agreement, and some of the hardest work came after, when sworn enemies suddenly had to govern together while insurgents clung to their hidden guns. Paramilitary disarmament was one of the last hard-won concessions of trust, not the first step. (I recall this whenever I see demands for Hamas to relinquish weapons immediately.)
The lessons: Persist. Talk to people you despise. Bring international pressure, particularly from the United States. Don’t push for a military solution before attaining a political settlement; disarmament can wait.
People in Northern Ireland had to work with others they considered murderers, terrorists or bigots, and accept a settlement that was nobody’s ideal. Peacetime politics is messy. Reconciliation remains elusive. But pretty much everyone I’ve ever spoken with in Northern Ireland, from any and every background, has one firm conviction in common: We are not going back.
Long-simmering resentment and discrimination exploded in the late 1960s when Northern Ireland’s long-subjugated Catholics, inspired by American civil rights protests, took to the streets to demand equal voting rights, housing and employment. The police responded with brutal beatings; stood aside while sectarian mobs burned Catholic families out of their homes; and eventually reintroduced internment, imprisoning and torturing people without trials.
Waves of young Irish republican volunteers, outraged that nobody had defended their neighborhoods, flocked to the I.R.A., which soon grew into a deadly guerrilla force bent on driving the British out of Ireland by attacking security forces as well as civilian targets. British troops arrived, nominally to quiet the streets, and were soon shoring up a failing counterinsurgency campaign with a very dirty intelligence war. Protestant, loyalist paramilitaries — often colluding with security forces — assassinated I.R.A. fighters, politicians and community leaders, and formed death squads to hunt and kill ordinary Catholics.
The politics behind the fighting amounted to a zero-sum standoff: Nationalists or republicans, mostly Catholic, wanted a united Ireland, free from British rule. Unionists or loyalists, largely Protestant, staked their identities on their Britishness, and dreaded ending up an embattled minority in a united Ireland. Each group’s most cherished dream was the other’s nightmare.
And yet, from the earliest years of the Troubles, people were quietly looking for an offramp. In 1972 — the deadliest year of the fighting — Gerry Adams, who would later become head of Sinn Fein, then the political wing of the I.R.A., was flown to London with an I.R.A. delegation for secret talks with British officials.
It was a bust. The British wanted a lasting I.R.A. cease-fire. The I.R.A. demanded British withdrawal. The talks collapsed. Until the end, neither side ever softened this original stance; the demands just sounded more plausible as the bloodletting dragged on.
It took decades of violence before the main combatants finally grasped that neither a decisive military victory nor a return to the prewar status quo was possible. The injustices and conflicting aspirations that set off the fighting needed to be faced.
Through the years, covert talks arranged by clergy members, labor leaders and others collapsed. Brief I.R.A. cease-fires in the 1970s didn’t stick. Instead of declaring it a lost cause, intermediaries kept circling back and trying again. This wasn’t all wasted time: In retrospect, it’s clear that even failed negotiations helped lay the groundwork for the next round.
Most of the I.R.A.’s adversaries — British and Irish governments, nationalist rivals who wanted to achieve Irish unity without violence, eventually even staunch unionists — held secret talks with Sinn Fein. In public, though, Sinn Fein officials were treated as untouchables, the messengers of terrorists. British law banned the broadcast of Sinn Fein voices, creating the cartoonish spectacle of Mr. Adams jawing on television while a voice-over actor repeated his words.
I.R.A. fighters insisted that they were not criminals or terrorists, but soldiers in a righteous cause. Mediators tacitly bent to this view in the end, years after I.R.A. prisoners staged self-punishing protests to make the point. In the hunger strike of 1981, Bobby Sands and nine other republican prisoners starved to death demanding recognition as political prisoners. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was unswayed. “Crime is crime is crime,” she said coldly, and let the hunger strikers die.
Mrs. Thatcher’s intransigence aside, British officials eventually realized that it wouldn’t work to deal exclusively with leaders who’d forsworn violence. Pacifists couldn’t deliver a cease-fire for the obvious reason that they had no influence over the people with guns. Like it or not — and many people hated it — progress required the participation of the I.R.A. and its Sinn Fein representatives.
It took heavy international pressure to get the militants to the table. In 1994 a youthful, ambitious President Bill Clinton gave Mr. Adams a U.S. visa, ignoring his cabinet’s disapproval and enraging the British government. It was a high-risk, game-changing act of diplomacy.
When Mr. Clinton opened the door to Sinn Fein, the British realized the White House would no longer defer to them automatically. As for unionists, the sight of the loathed Mr. Adams hobnobbing in the United States drove home the point that his movement would need to be reckoned with rather than crushed.
It’s hard to imagine any post-Sept. 11 president taking such risks on behalf of insurgents who regularly bombed a U.S. ally and sniped its soldiers. But it was men called terrorists who would finally, on both sides, convince their followers to try peace.
Knowing the brief trip had bolstered Mr. Adams’s credibility back in Belfast, Mr. Clinton and Ireland’s leader, Albert Reynolds, who’d lobbied hard for the visa, informed Mr. Adams that they now expected him to get an I.R.A. cease-fire.
To test the strength of Mr. Clinton’s intentions, Mr. Adams replied that he needed a visa for Joe Cahill, an I.R.A. godfather and gun runner who had been deported from the United States. Mr. Clinton was taken aback, but he knew Mr. Adams faced a thorny task in convincing the I.R.A. army council to agree to a cease-fire. Keen to avoid an I.R.A. split, Mr. Clinton approved the visa.
“The toughest negotiations are with your own side,” Mr. Adams told me in Belfast last year. “We spent a huge amount of time — quite rightly, that was our feeling — talking to our own people.”
Not only did Mr. Clinton engage with militants, he did so in a way that strengthened Mr. Adams’s reputation among the rebel fighters. By those later years of the Troubles, a pragmatism that brushed the edge of cynicism had crept into the peace process — leaders had to be embraced by their own people, or there was no point talking with them.
The implications could be unsavory. After the I.R.A. bombed a fish shop in the Protestant heartland of the Shankill Road, for example, Mr. Adams helped carry the coffin of one of the bombers. Prime Minister John Major of Britain, who had been inching toward a British-Irish agreement based partly on points drafted by Mr. Adams, was revolted, but his Irish counterpart urged him against reacting.
“If this man didn’t carry that coffin, he couldn’t deliver that movement,” Mr. Reynolds told Mr. Major in an exchange described by both men in a 2001 BBC documentary. “He’s no good to you or to me if he didn’t carry that coffin.”
Mr. Adams made good: On Aug. 31, 1994, almost immediately after Mr. Cahill got his visa, the I.R.A. announced a cease-fire. Loyalist paramilitaries soon followed with a cease-fire of their own.
People honked car horns and danced in the streets of Belfast. They’d soon realize it was too soon to celebrate.
Having gone to the wall for an I.R.A. cease-fire, Mr. Adams expected all-party negotiations to start right away. He desperately needed to show skeptical I.R.A. fighters that the cease-fire was bringing tangible political progress.
Instead, British officials and the unionists demanded that the I.R.A. start handing over its guns immediately, before talks could begin. A furious Mr. Adams accused the British of moving the goal post.
Months passed in this stalemate. Even the staunchly nonviolent John Hume, a nationalist from Derry who would eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Good Friday Agreement, sensed danger. He rose from his seat in the House of Commons to accuse the British government of wasting 17 months of cease-fire. As the chamber erupted in howls of scorn, Mr. Hume snapped, with uncharacteristic bile: “I live with it. You don’t.”
Mr. Hume’s anxiety was well placed. A few weeks later the I.R.A. detonated a truck loaded with explosives in the London Docklands, killing two people and shattering the cease-fire. After the reactivated I.R.A. bombed an army barracks, killing a British soldier, a livid Mr. Major publicly denounced Mr. Adams. “Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with you,” Mr. Major thundered. “I don’t believe you, Mr. Adams.”
The Troubles dragged bleakly along until 1997, when yet another diplomatic novice came into office. Fresh off his election as British prime minister, Tony Blair dived into the negotiations, ignoring his advisers’ warnings that Northern Ireland was impossible. In just a few months Mr. Blair and Mr. Clinton got enough of the unionists to drop their demand for immediate republican disarmament, coaxed the I.R.A. into another cease-fire and brought Sinn Fein into the talks. (Mr. Blair has a role in Mr. Trump’s peace plan.)
Bucking calls for a unionist boycott, David Trimble, the head of the largest unionist party, joined the talks. (He would later share the Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Hume.) Mr. Trimble and his colleagues refused to speak directly with Sinn Fein and snubbed the republican negotiators in the hallways, but Mr. Trimble stuck it out despite vilification and harassment from his own side.
“In my mind, David Trimble was the most courageous of all the people in the negotiations,” said David Adams, a former loyalist paramilitary figurehead who worked with Trimble during the Good Friday negotiations. “He took threats. The abuse he took. Crowds outside his home. Still, he plodded on.”
The retired Senate majority leader George Mitchell, who had been sent to Northern Ireland as Mr. Clinton’s envoy, finally set a two-week deadline for a deal. The parties wrangled for hours, then days, over vexing questions about prisoners, the police and north-south cooperation, but it was I.R.A. guns that threatened to break the deal apart once again. Sinn Fein still refused to give a clear timeline for disarmament.
Finally, at the eleventh hour, Mr. Blair wrote to Mr. Trimble with an idea. Unionists should hold their noses and go into government with Sinn Fein, Mr. Blair proposed. If the I.R.A. didn’t move forward with disarmament, Mr. Blair assured unionists that he would support changes to the agreement. Mr. Blair’s backstop was just enough to placate unionists, who reluctantly made the deal.
The Good Friday Agreement created a Northern Ireland government in which unionist and nationalist parties shared power; a birthright to be Irish, British or both; the ability to reject British sovereignty and reunify Ireland by referendum; and mechanisms for police reform and paramilitary disarmament.
On May 22, 1998, voters in Northern Ireland embraced the Good Friday Agreement, with 71 percent in favor.
Seven more years passed before the I.R.A. finally put its arsenal “beyond use” and declared a formal end to hostilities.
In November 1999, a motley collection of longtime adversaries gathered at Stormont to form a power-sharing cabinet. Up stood Mr. Adams to announce Martin McGuinness for education minister. The crowd gasped and hissed. A unionist assemblyman bellowed, “I can’t sit through this obscenity!”
Mr. McGuinness was Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator and a crucial advocate for peace. He was also a swaggering former I.R.A. commander who’d extolled his secret army’s “cutting edge.”
But Mr. McGuinness, it turned out, had definite views on education. As a schoolboy, he’d failed the “11 plus” exam that decided academic advancement, dropped out and struggled to find menial jobs as a Catholic. Once in government, he announced the end of the exam and funded schools that integrated Catholic and Protestant students — a relative rarity in Northern Ireland to this day.
It’s an odd but undeniable truth that some of the most extreme figures from the Troubles became the most effective peacemakers and community leaders. Perhaps these are two presentations of an underlying idealism, or maybe, if you fight long enough, you want to build something good in your old age.
In his later years, Mr. McGuinness formed a staggeringly improbable friendship with the Rev. Ian Paisley. Each man epitomized everything the other reviled. A steely Presbyterian minister, Mr. Paisley had whipped up sectarian frenzy, led anti-Catholic mobs into the streets and kept up a coy closeness with Protestant paramilitaries.
Mr. McGuinness and Mr. Adams cultivated relations with Mr. Paisley after concluding that they needed him to sell the new government to skeptical unionists — just the sort of pragmatic attitude adjustment that Mr. Clinton underwent for Mr. Adams.
But political expediency wasn’t enough to explain the rapport between Mr. Paisley and Mr. McGuinness. Presiding over the Northern Ireland government together in 2007 and 2008, the two men so ostentatiously enjoyed their private jokes that incredulous reporters called them “the Chuckle Brothers.” Mr. McGuinness visited the Paisley home to grieve over Mr. Paisley’s coffin privately, and stayed in touch with his widow until Mr. McGuinness died himself.
The Good Friday Agreement did not end partition or reunite Ireland. It didn’t decree a permanent British union for the six counties. All anyone got was a process — a set of steps to follow so that people may fairly decide for themselves.
Some people on both sides felt — and still feel — sold out. The agreement created a path to the nationalist dream of a united Ireland, but only via a referendum administered by the British. Some republicans refused to stop fighting so long as the British remained in the north. The I.R.A. splintered, as Mr. Clinton had feared. But the die-hard objectors were relatively few and, occasional dissident violence notwithstanding, Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuinness carried most of the movement with them into politics.
I heard Mr. Adams speak to a crowd in Belfast a few weeks ago. He insisted that a referendum for a united Ireland was coming “in our time.” He encouraged his audience to work with rival parties toward a united Ireland, and reminded people to embrace unionists because “they’re ours — we, for all of our faults, and they, for all of their faults.”
Mr. Adams is 76 now. He often wears a kaffiyeh in solidarity with Palestinians. When I interviewed him, he warned that there had been “a lot of superficial scrutiny of our peace process,” and then started reminiscing about how difficult it was for Sinn Fein to be included in the multiparty talks.
“We had to battle long, and we had to battle hard,” he said, “and all the time people were being killed and people were being imprisoned and mistreated.”
Mr. Adams led a skeptical army into politics promising they’d get the one thing they wanted — but they don’t have it yet. His desire to push toward the final goal is palpable; a united Ireland, free from British rule, would seal in history the correctness of his choice. I asked Mr. Adams how he thought he’d be remembered, and he replied that he didn’t care, because he’d be dead.
As for unionists, they got what they wanted in the short term: Northern Ireland remains British. But they had to give up supremacy for the indignities of shared power, starting down a road that may very well lead to the one place they never wanted to go — out of Britain. Catholics now outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland, and nationalists have been working to prepare the public for a referendum on a united Ireland.
Here’s the truth: The kind of politics that bedevils places like Belfast and Jerusalem cuts deep, reaching into people’s hearts and guts, touching religion and inherited grievance, the things they tell their children, the way they imagine the world and themselves. All of that is extremely hard to face, and sometimes it’s easier to keep fighting. For those in a position of advantage, who have the most to lose once people start picking at politics, prolonging the war can feel safer than negotiating a peace.
But nobody can fight forever. I am convinced that no military campaign will ever ensure Israel’s security. As in Northern Ireland, it will be a political resolution, hashed out by the people who have to live with the results, with full rights for every human being in the territory — or war will grind on, maybe lapse sometimes, but inevitably resume.
The United States has done Israel no long-term favors by providing diplomatic impunity and a ceaseless flow of weapons. Palestinians are now enduring a degree of deadly dehumanization that utterly eclipses the violence of the Troubles. Their day of political reckoning has been delayed too long, and when it finally arrives, everyone will ask why it was so slow coming.
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Megan K. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer. She has been a correspondent in China, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan and the U.S.-Mexico border area. Her first book, a narrative account of the post-Sept. 11 wars, was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. @Megankstack
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