Belfast Agreement @ 25: James Dingley - The deal has caused even unionists now to dance to a republican tune

​Is there anything to celebrate after 25 years of the Belfast Agreement?

Depends on who you are: If I were the IRA – yes. If you are a unionist – doubtful.

OK, it supposedly got republicans to buy into Stormont, but now we now have Stormont suspended – again! How many times? When it is recalled republicans (anyone believe they are not still closely linked to the IRA?) will be the biggest party and first minister.

How did this happen? We were told the agreement’s consociationalism (power sharing) would isolate out extremists and cement the centre ground – ho, ho!

It has given us the same system of government they have in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Belgium; study its success there. The clever academics and politicians who dreamt this one up have landed us with perpetual instability which works purely to republicans’ advantage.

The agreement was first, premised on decommissioning terrorist weapons, then the terrorists were allowed to enter political structures alongside gradual decommissioning overseen by an international commission.

Then they entered without any decommissioning and finally, long after 1998 the IRA decommissioned weapons they no longer needed. Security briefings have informed me that hey are still an armed terrorist organisation and we know from the 2015 paramilitary report that all their organisational and command structures remain intact.

My 2012 book, The IRA, estimated their global assets at £1.5 billion, which should make it is easy for their political allies to be successful.

Paramilitaries still control their communities via low-level violence, such as beatings.

Republican political success is helped by economic influence in local communities, with organised criminal assets being successfully fed back into ‘legitimate’ business and investments. Virtually none of the 2004 Northern Bank raid money was ever recovered. Republicans have also successfully eliminated the constitutional SDLP and Catholic Church’s influence in Catholic communities. The church tried to dissuade people from supporting violent extremists, and between 1981 when Sinn Fein began contesting elections and 1998 the SDLP maintained a decisive majority among Catholic voters.

Gerry Adams has just said that the IRA still had the capacity to continue after 1998, but it is widely accepted in security circles that the police and army and intelligence services were by then completely on top of loyalist and republican terrorist organisations.

Yet now those same security forces are pilloried in endless inquiries into their past actions, taken entirely out of context. Worse, they are hung out to dry by a UK state more concerned to placate republicans than defend the state forces who able to contain the terrorist threat.

It was not politicians who defeated terrorism but the police and the army who out fought them and brought peace that made the IRA want to negotiate. The UK and unionists were in a strong position at that point, but they squandered it.

Since then republicans have not been challenged in their merciless campaigned to rewrite history and portray the state and security forces as the villains. They co-operate in no inquiries into their murders and other criminal activities whilst instigating any number of complaints about security forces conduct. In fact, there are barely any inquiries into their murders.

Never forget every act of the IRA, was a criminal act in both domestic and international law, which the security forces complied fully with. The law, domestic and international, was clear and found no justification for the IRA or any other terrorist organisation.

Meanwhile, many weak politicians and politically correct media still go along with placating republicans, 25 years later. Is it because they are too embarrassed to admit the failure of a ‘peace’ they trumpeted so loudly that they dare not acknowledge its truth. The truth is that we have a form of peace but are always on the edge of breakdown.

Concurrently unionist constitutional politicians are left flat footed and unknowing how to respond to republicans’ next contrived crisis, eg parades or language act, apart from saying ‘no’ again. You have to object to things that are wrong but identify ideas that are positive and offer a genuine way forward.

The Province is in a permanent state of instability. Everyone appears fearful of not upsetting republicans because: they alone control the ‘peace process’ because alone among the major parties they have a history of links to violence and everyone is worried they might return to it.

This creates an imbalance whereby the influence of constitutional politicians is greatly diminished. Further, no one said we were voting for a ‘process’ in 1998: it was supposed to be peace in our time, the hand of history on our shoulders.

Now we have the Republic anxious over Sinn Fein coming into government there. Then we have the troubling prospect of republicans in power both North and South, with the southern leadership exercising power over its northern subsidiary, Sinn Fein being an all-Ireland party (it is highly unorthodox for a political party in one jurisdiction to control another jurisdiction, thus undermining international constitutional borders).

A major problem here is our mainstream politicians. Most try their best but all seem hampered by a lack of analysis as to what is happening in Northern Ireland, let alone how to counter it.

What is desperately needed is a clear headed vision able to challenge republican rewriting of history, identify dispassionately the major underlying causes behind the Troubles and offer a positive way forward beyond the Belfast Agreement for everyone before the republicans totally dominate the agenda.

Even unionists appear to be dancing to the republican tune, by subconsciously accepting an inevitability about an all Ireland state, and so they think they always have to concede. They almost seem to concede the republican gross distortions about past discrimination.

There is an intellectual vacuum that has grown over the years, even in academia, where much work is hampered by the current dominant ‘peace process agenda’, and a fear that in order to get research grants or other support, you might need to moderate your critical instincts.

Good people in 1998 tried their best but in their attempt to keep everybody on board they have sanitised a republican movement that wants Northern Ireland to fail.

• Dr James Dingley is a former university lecturer and Nato instructor on terrorism