Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Despite Landmark Changes in N. Ireland, Trust in Police Still Lags - washingtonpost.com, March 9, 2008

BELFAST — The two young men, in their teens or early 20s, one of them with fresh bruises on his face, walked up the Shankill Road on a busy Friday afternoon in January, carrying placards that read, “I’m a thief and a burglar.”

For an hour, people poured out of shops and pubs to watch the young men, who had been caught breaking into an elderly woman’s house. It had been a while since they had seen what is known here as a “walk of shame,” the kind of rough justice doled out by illegal paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland’s three decades of sectarian violence.

“I would love the paramilitaries to come back,” said Julie Lester, 42, who described watching with delight as the housebreakers were publicly humiliated. “There’s a rise in crime and drugs and we have nobody to turn to. I have really no faith in the police.”

Nearly 10 years after the landmark April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland is still struggling to create a police force fully trusted by the province’s divided Catholic and Protestant communities.

AP, Paisley’s aide seen as heir in N. Ireland - The Boston Globe, March 6, 2008

BELFAST - The favorite to become the new Protestant leader in Northern Ireland is Peter Robinson, who first gained international attention two decades ago by leading a mob attack on an Irish border village.

While he since has grown into one of Northern Ireland’s most polished and formidable politicians, many people wonder whether the likely successor to the charismatic Ian Paisley will be as willing - or able - to keep governing alongside Roman Catholics in the fledgling power-sharing administration for this British territory….

Britain and Ireland devised power-sharing as the best way to bring both sides’ extremists together in compromise and consign to history the 1968-98 conflict that left more than 3,700 dead. Robinson, 59, first grabbed widespread notice in 1986 when he led a mob that smashed up an Irish village and beat up two police officers.

Era Ends in N. Ireland as Paisley Says He’ll Retire - New York Times, March 5, 2008

LONDON — Ian Paisley, the 81-year-old Protestant evangelist who spent decades in implacable opposition to a compromise settlement of Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence before agreeing last year to join Irish nationalists in a power-sharing government, announced Tuesday that he will resign in May as the province’s first minister and as the leader of the Democratic Unionist party he founded.

The resignation was not a surprise; Mr. Paisley told associates months ago that he planned to leave office sometime this year. Political commentators in Belfast, the Northern Ireland capital, said the announcement was prompted partly by the approach in May of the first anniversary of the deal that made Mr. Paisley a partner in government with Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leader who was previously a senior commander of the Irish Republican Army.

The I.R.A.’s campaign of armed resistance made it Mr. Paisley’s nemesis in the years when he barnstormed across the province condemning any deal that opened the way for power-sharing with the Catholic minority. For decades — first as the founder of a splinter evangelical church, the Free Presbyterians, and later as founder of the Democratic Unionists, who functioned as the church’s action wing — his style was characterized by his fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

But aides who have watched as Mr. Paisley and Mr. McGuinness have governed together say there has been a remarkable absence of rancor between them. Though Mr. Paisley is first minister and Mr. McGuinness is deputy first minister, they govern as effective equals under the complex power-sharing arrangements reached last March. Mr. McGuinness, 52, has taken care to show deference to Mr. Paisley, reaching out a hand on more than one occasion to help steady him on public occasions.

Mr. Paisley’s announcement brought a flow of valedictory compliments from British and Irish political leaders. The former British prime minister Tony Blair told the BBC: “In the final analysis, he made it happen. The man famous for saying no will go down in history for saying yes.”

Ironically, Mr. Paisley’s resignation appears not to have been hastened by any disillusionment with the nationalists, who he has depicted as having accepted “British rule,” but by growing fractiousness within his own Democratic Unionist Party.

Powerful elements within the party have remained unreconciled to the deal with the nationalists, and its standing has slipped among Protestant voters, who gave the Paisley party its first election victory in 2003. In January, it lost an important by-election, and there was widespread talk in party ranks of a move to oust Mr. Paisley.

John F. Burns, Man Cleared in 1998 Northern Ireland Blast - New York Times, December 21, 2007

LONDON — A judge in Belfast on Thursday cleared Sean Hoey, a 38-year-old electrician, of murder and all other charges stemming from the car bombing in 1998 that killed 29 people and wounded more than 200 in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh.

The long-awaited verdict left investigators in Northern Ireland without a single conviction in the Omagh bombing, which was regarded as the worst atrocity in 30 years of sectarian strife in the British province. Prosecutors had asserted that Mr. Hoey was the principal bombmaker in the attack, which featured a 500-pound car bomb that exploded on Omagh’s main street at the height of Saturday shopping.

The bombing came less than four months after the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998 that led, earlier this year, to the restoration of democratic rule in Northern Ireland, under a governing coalition of Protestants and Catholics. At the time, the police and politicians said the attack had been carried out by a group calling itself the Real I.R.A., a splinter group of the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republican Army, which opposed the peace agreement.

Mr. Hoey was found not guilty on all 56 charges he faced in connection with the Omagh bombing and a series of other bombings and killings involving police and military targets in northern Ireland that preceded the Omagh attack. The verdict brought cheers from supporters of Mr. Hoey, who was released after four years of pre-trial custody, but relatives of the Omagh victims, many of them women and children, appeared stunned.

Paisley Loses his Flock - TIME, September 10, 2007

The elders of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ireland aren’t usually on the streets of Belfast at 2 a.m., an hour more associated with sin than with the business of their church. So, when they emerged from the Martyrs Memorial Church after a five-hour meeting Saturday to make an announcement, the time of day alone was an indication that something unusual was afoot.

The bombshell announcement? Ian Paisley, the First of Minister of Northern Ireland, had suddenly decided to step down as moderator of 12,000-strong Protestant congregation in January, after almost 57 years in charge. Retirement shouldn’t be far from Paisley’s mind at the age of 81, but the circumstances indicated he may be jumping before being pushed by an unprecedented revolt among his most ardent followers.

CAIN: Northern Ireland Conflict, Politics, & Society. Information on ‘the troubles’
Conflict and Politics in Northern Ireland (1968 to the Present)