Sean is not communion and daily mass, far from it. He doesn't remember the last time he knelt in a confessional and frowns if asked about the Council of Trent. But above his bed he has a crucifix, and the living room of his modest house on Falls Road is dominated by a photo of Pope Francis. He considers himself a Catholic to death. Billy lives on the Shankill, doesn't go to church either, and has only a very vague idea of what the Reformation was, but he'd kill to defend the Protestant faith.
Sean went out on Tuesday in the wind and rain with a little Irish tricolor flag to see Joe Biden's entourage go by on the way from the airport to the hotel in downtown Belfast where he has stayed, because he considers him a friend . Instead, Billy (whose name is not a tribute to any relative but to King William of Orange, who defeated the Catholics in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne and preserved Protestantism on the island) stayed in front of the TV. The American president is an enemy who has undermined Brexit, defended the IRA terrorists and does everything possible for the reunification of the island.
As this Tuesday and Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreements, Sean and Billy are two sides of a metaphor. Northern Ireland has been at peace for a quarter of a century, but also in a cold war. Bombings and sectarian murders are the exception, but the paramilitaries continue to control the respective communities, and “traitors” or even common criminals are punished by being shot in the knee. Young people are turning away from tribal politics more and more, and so are the middle classes (20% vote for the Alliance Party, not linked to nationalism or unionism), but the reality is that 90% of schools and a 94% of public housing and sports facilities remain segregated. One hundred "walls of peace" (barbed wire and steel barriers) separate each other. Since 1998, more than a thousand incidents of sectarian violence have been officially recorded, and fourteen terrorist groups appear on official records, chief among them the New IRA (which launched Molotov cocktails in Derry on Sunday).
Biden landed in Ulster this Tuesday with the intention of launching a speech that preserves peace and with the aim of respecting and complying with the Good Friday and Brexit agreements. Arriving in Belfast he found the streets closed to traffic for security, ahead of his meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The head of the White House has only agreed to participate in the commemorative events of the 25th anniversary after London renounced the law that would have allowed it to unilaterally violate its agreements with Brussels, and has not shown any interest in signing the commercial agreement that London yearns so much He makes it clear that his heart is on the side of Ireland, a member of the European Union. Protestants accuse him of doing everything possible to prevent suspected IRA terrorists from being extradited to the UK for trial when he was a senator.
In welcoming Biden, the British Prime Minister was expected to recall the commitment to end thirty years of violence and redouble efforts to consolidate stability.
Apart from their meeting this Tuesday and an interview this Wednesday, Biden and Sunak went their separate ways in Belfast. The president (who traveled accompanied by Joe Kennedy III, his special envoy to Ulster) will promise investment and political support to preserve peace in a speech at the university but will not visit Stormont castle, headquarters of the autonomous institutions, which have been in existence for fourteen months suspended. Meanwhile, the prime minister is going to meet with leaders of the different groups to try to get the DUP (majority Protestant force) to end its boycott of the Government and allow Sinn Fein, winner of the last elections, to do so.
Since February of last year, the province has been operating on automatic pilot, with day-to-day decisions made by officials. But no law can be approved, not even budgets, while the public deficit has skyrocketed. Unionists have put the brakes on because they feel threatened. According to the latest census, 31.9% of the inhabitants consider themselves Catholic, 29.1% Protestant and 19.8% neither one thing nor the other. And while reunification doesn't look like it could happen in the next decade, that's the direction of the journey.
Biden had originally planned to meet with the DUP leaders and pressure them to sit in government, but he does not want to suffer the humiliation of being told under his nose that no way, and his stay in Belfast is going to be brief (he is leaving tonight to the Republic) and with minimal political content. He doesn't want to get into Sean and Billy's tribal battles, he has enough with the Democrats and Republicans.
The border between north and south is open, and the British army watchtowers have disappeared from the landscape. But, as US Senator George Mitchell (who mediated the Good Friday agreements) said in his day, the confiscation of weapons is the easy part, the difficult part is the confiscation of minds. And this has not occurred at all, far from it.
London, to turn the page entirely, has tabled a bill amounting to a general amnesty for all trouble crimes, both by paramilitaries and by British army soldiers and intelligence agents. But the relatives of the dead yearn for justice, for them a quarter of a century is nothing, and reconciliation does not exist. One of the most difficult points to digest in the agreements was the release within two years of 487 convicted of terrorism, including the person responsible for the attack that nearly killed Margaret Thatcher in Brighton during the 1984 Tory congress. The independent Commission to locate the remains of the victims presses Sinn Fein to reveal where they buried the bodies that have not yet been found.
"After the cataclysm that has shaken the world, one of the few things that remains unchanged is the hatred between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster," Churchill said at the end of World War II. In Northern Ireland, peace and the cold war coexist. Everything is a question of identity, nationality and destiny.
