ANALYSIS BY PETER KELLY
Assembling the might of trans-Atlantic political power-brokers for Irish peacebuilding is a gargantuan task.
Yet as a ferocious sign of loyalty to the Good Friday cause, the assembled Who’s Who were present from the big power blocs of the United States and Europe. Talk about ‘bringing out the big guns’, if you’ll pardon the irony.
Yet the analogy is fitting – for alongside the proper and deserved celebrations of that long Good Friday, a realpolitik effort of persuasion and prompting was subtly underway, for continued peace.
Each assembled dignitary and their governmental agency or civil society cause was also motivated towards the events at Queen’s University for the sake of the future and not just rose tinted reminiscing of the past.
Reminders of the same international spirit from April 10, 1998 which propelled political negotiators towards unlikely agreement, was present in Belfast amid remarkable and prestigious global consensus.
Northern Ireland’s peace process has been undoubtedly imperfect, sustained turbulence and trauma, yet has survived and is heralded on the world stage to this day.
From President Jimmy Carter’s ground-breaking interventionist statement in 1977 on the North, to President Biden’s involvement recently on his whistle-stop appearance in Belfast.
Preserving peace and promoting progress is a priority for the macro level global supremos and the institutions they represent.
It is also an extended irony that despite the kaleidoscopic array of stratospheric support for the restoration of the Stormont parliament’s institutions, and therefore the maintenance of the Agreement itself, a relatively small band of nay-sayers is capable of disrupting the traffic of consensus and providing ongoing gridlock.
President Biden’s diplomatic keynote address at Belfast’s Ulster University last week was a sensitive and persuasive overture to unionist rejectionists of the Agreement, and power-sharing itself, demonstrating the political goodwill and patience of the Oval Office.
Yet the ideological co-parents of Ulster loyalism: top figures from the British Labour and Conservative parties participating at the QUB conference, were the most vocal in their stinging criticism for DUP stonewalling.
Enter Sir Tony Blair and Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris as chief critics of Jeffrey Donaldson’s party. And in public.
The most charming of ‘charm offensives’ witnessed in Belfast was a masterclass in parallel politics. On the one hand, celebrating the feel-good successes of the past journey, and with the other, crafting a direction for that journey to continue.
With every seeming global political institution and party signed up in consensus with the British government’s Windsor Framework – bar the Paiseleyite preventers – it seems impossible that this party can sustain their boycott of Northern Ireland’s institutions and functioning government for much longer, until diplomatic patience snaps. Time will tell.