Ardoyne fuelled by politics of the Good Friday Agreement
Socialist Worker Issue 245 July 2005
There were indications over the Twelfth that the British and Irish Governments don’t want the IRA to disband. They would rather see it continue to exist and help stabilise the North under the Agreement. Two days before the Twelfth, Bertie Ahern was asked on RTE’s lunchtime news about the re-imprisonment of Shankill bomber Sean Kelly. Ahern referred to Kelly’s ‘good work’ in ‘difficult’ situations in the recent past, and to his (well founded, as it turned out) nervousness about the situation likely to arise in Ardoyne two days later.
Ahern was echoing fears expressed by Sinn Fein leaders that the removal of Kelly from the front line might discourage other ex-prisoners from playing the .important role. they had recently been filling. This role had to do with .policing. young Catholics intent on attacking the PSNI and/or Orange marchers. (.Ex-prisoners. in this context is code-language for the IRA.)
The Blair Government, too, has been increasingly explicit about its wish to see the IRA act as a restraining influence. Three days after the clashes which marked the Twelfth in Ardoyne and elsewhere, the millionaire ex-Tory MP turned New Labour minister, Shaun Woodward, was fulsome in his praise for Gerry Adams and Gerry Kelly in trying to hold the line around the Ardoyne shops. On Radio Ulster, Woodward drew particular attention to the positive role played by Martin McGuinness in Dunloy (although Woodward appeared to believe the events had unfolded in Dunloe).
The Republican leaders may be uncomfortable at praise of this sort being heaped on them. But it’s clear that the two Governments are measuring them up for an envisaged new function. The fact that the Governments think this an obvious path to go down illustrates a key aspect of the Agreement. The events in Ardoyne have been widely been reported as posing a danger to the Agreement. But they can also be seen as stemming from the Agreement. Or at least from the politics underlying the Agreement.
Socialist Worker has consistently pointed out that the Agreement is based not on challenging the sectarian nature of Northern politics but on striking a balance between Catholic- Nationalism and Protestant- Unionism. The Agreement confirms and consolidates the Green-Orange pattern. This makes it more or less inevitable that political debate about the future will be expressed in the competitive mobilisation of the two communities. The idea that people might mobilise in politics on any basis other than the community they come from isn’t admitted even as a possibility within the Agreement. Looked at in this way, the Twelfth scenes in Ardoyne, Derry and Dunloy were not the negation of the Agreement but an expression of its essence.-including its essential and much-celebrated .ambiguity. 
Nationalists and Unionists were sold the Agreement separately, and in contradictory ways. Pro-Agreement Unionists were never required to explain that the deal gave Nationalism equal status with Unionism within Northern Ireland, and that this had obvious implications for power-sharing at all levels, for the structure of the police force, the display of flags and emblems, etc. It was not spelt out to Nationalists by the SDLP or Sinn Fein that, in exchange for this formal equality within the North, the aspiration to a united Ireland would have to be put on hold until a Six County majority for unity emerged. These irreconcilable expectations made continued communal confrontation inevitable. It’s against this background that Government and security chiefs in Dublin and London have come to look to the IRA (and they’d like a Loyalist equivalent to emerge) to help hold their .own. side back.
The socialist alternative involves campaigning on a class basis on issues of policing, the rights of prisoners etc., as well as on issues such as water charges, Iraq etc. which more naturally bring the people at the bottom of the pile together, not drive them apart into communal corrals. Those who put their faith in the Agreement maintain that this perspective is .unrealistic.. But the future which they realistically offer is of continued sectarian division and front-line communal militants of the past now deployed to hold the discontented back.