Book reviewer overlooked my earlier critique of the Belfast Agreement

(The review can be read here: ‘The nationalist narrative on Northern Ireland is challenged by writers in this badly needed book’)

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I can sympathise, to some extent, with any reviewer who has to plough through 340 pages of yet another book on the Northern Ireland problem only to come to a final chapter which is, perhaps, out of tune with much of the book. Perhaps he was anticipating a last hurrah for unionism.

He makes two specific criticisms. He cites my comment that the UK and Ireland, “found common cause in fighting the IRA during the Troubles” as undercutting statements elsewhere that the Dublin Government provided a safe haven for terrorists.

There was considerable public sympathy for the IRA in the South in the early years, and more than that among a minority of senior politicians, and the courts did refuse to extradite. But the 1970 Arms Trial was evidence of the awareness of the threat the Provos posed to the Irish state.

From there on London and Dublin, despite many bumps in the road, undeniably found common cause in fighting the terrorists. They also, regrettably, found common cause in appeasing them in the peace process.

I am oddly taxed with failing to examine the text of the Belfast Agreement. I would refer Mr Polley to the third volume of the Barton and Roche series on the Northern Ireland Problem – The Peace Programme and the Belfast Agreement, published in 2009, in which my chapter does just that at some length..

The review ignores the substance of my chapter, which is a call to face the reality that the Agreement is not .working, has not brought us closer to a solution, and instead of strengthening a middle ground in politics has facilitated the near elimination of more moderate parties and the triumph of two ultra nationalist parties, one Irish republican, the other British far right.

I ask what and who is responsible — the agreement itself, the political parties here and the people who vote them into power, or London and Dublin for keeping up the pretence that the agreement is working, and for adopting national stances and policies which adversely impact on Northern Ireland – in Dublin the continued insistence that a violent rebellion by a small minority in 1916 was the defining act in the formation of the modern Irish state, while in London Brexit was embarked upon without any consideration of its harmful impact on Northern Ireland?

Dennis Kennedy, Belfast BT7

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