Can the Northern Ireland executive survive?

The last two months in Northern Ireland have had an air of unreality about them. On the one hand people have been able to experience the first faltering steps of a powersharing government in over a quarter of a century. On the other, no one can be sure that this experience will last any longer or be any more successful than that previous doomed venture. Optimists can point to the still startling presence in the government of both Unionists and Republicans and insist that the more they just get on with business the harder it will be for either to suddenly walk out. Pessimists, or plain realists, can draw attention to Unionist leader David Trimble's commitment to reconvene his party assembly in February and offer his resignation if the IRA have not begun decommissioning weapons. They can, at the same time, point out that there is very little sign that the IRA will begin disarming to fit Trimble's self-imposed timetable.

Certainly it has been possible to detect the sketchy outlines of a new political order. Martin McGuinness has used his position as Education Minister to approve two new integrated schools. The British Government has promised to implement the main recommendations of the Patten Report with the intention to reform the police force and make it acceptable to the Catholic/Nationalist community. It will become the Police Service of Northern Ireland and be reduced in size by around 50%. New recruits will be hired with the aim of creating a force in which Catholics make up a third of the members. These changes, together with some symbolic gestures like removing the "harp and crown" badge, have touched some raw nerves in the unionist community, although a good deal of that may be down to the effectiveness of the very sizeable RUC community as a lobby group.

Within the skeleton framework of the new politics, however, some very old bones continue to rattle. Ian Paisley's DUP responded to the nomination of Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness to the Education post by orchestrating walkouts by children from a small number of Protestant primary schools. This met with a hostile reaction from all but their own activists. Their strategy is to use every opportunity, however ludicrous, to expose the iniquity of giving Catholics any power. This tactic descended into farce in January when Paisley received a routine letter from a constituent complaining about the refusal of the local Education board to give her son a free bus pass.

His mother, because of bullying, had moved the boy to a new school, and the procedure in Northern Ireland is strictly to provide free passes only for the nearest school. Paisley made the case public and blamed McGuinness, alleging that there could be no hope of support from the minister since he was a well-known bully himself. The whole thing was a piece of theatre; the education minister has no role in such individual cases, and in the end the aggrieved parent condemned the DUP for the way they had used the issue.

Sinn Fein have been guilty of the same sort of antics, especially outside of Belfast where they need to convince their hard-liners that participation in the new structure does not necessarily mean any softening of 'republican principles'. Hence the headteacher of a Catholic primary school in Tyrone complained of intimidating intervention by Sinn Fein when he accepted an offer by the RUC to come in and talk to children about road safety. There has been a pretty nasty campaign against a veteran civil rights campaigner Father Denis Faul.

Faul was one of the first to raise the case of the Birmingham Six at a time when to do so meant appearing to condone a particularly brutal crime. He spoke out for years against British Army and RUC brutality against his parishioners. The trouble is, Denis Faul has been a consistent critic of brutality, and in recent years he has turned his attention on paramilitary punishment squads in the fiercely republican area of Carrickmore in Tyrone. He has also attended a local community forum with the RUC to discuss how the area can be better policed. The result is a sustained attempt to intimidate and discredit him. It isn't necessary to have any particular view of Denis Faul's work to see that he is being attacked because he poses a threat to the sort of rigid sectarian outlook offered by the local Sinn Fein.

These developments have some bearing on any assessment of prospects for the Agreement. Decommissioning continues to be decisive although it is more and more obviously a matter of symbols and trust than substance. The Sinn Fein leadership have, as a large part of their constituency, the revanchists of rural border nationalism who don't want to be "sold out". The Unionists won a fragile majority for entering office with Sinn Fein on the condition that decommissioning would start by February. They have the rabid and openly sectarian DUP breathing down their neck and waiting for final proof of republican perfidy. These two factors may not be dominant but they pull in opposite directions. One makes it unlikely that the IRA will disarm 'to save Unionism'. The other makes it hard to see how Trimble could survive if they don't.

Patrick Murphy, 20 January 2000