Gardai in Irish Republic shoot dead member of Real IRA during armed robbery

Gardai in Irish Republic shoot dead member of Real IRA during armed robbery.June: Elections to new NI assembly.July: Drumcree marching stand-off in Portadown Hundreds of violent incidents. Two Catholic men killed by loyalists.May: Agreement endorsed in referendums north and south. It is not a perfect peace: if it were, there would be no need for a peace process.A YEAR OF TROUBLESApril 1998: Good Friday agreement signed. While the peace process offers no magic solutions, it seems incontestable that without it many people who are alive today would be in untimely graves. Even if there is progress, it will provide only marginal consolation to those such as Andrew Peden who are suffering so grievously.But although violence may be endemic to Belfast, the killing rate is falling.

If it fails, nobody really knows what might happen; if it succeeds, the peace process will have survived yet another apparently insurmountable hurdle, and will move on.Either way the backstreets will continue to be the scene of barbarities. This is a difficult proposition, given his insistence that the IRA must first decommission weaponry and the matching republican insistence that they will not.The search for a middle way in all this is expected to take the form of an intensive negotiation, perhaps beginning later this month and reaching a conclusion by the target date of 10 March. On the unionist side politics can be a rough old trade, as Ulster Unionist MP Ken Maginnis and others found last week when they were kicked and punched by crowds of protesters who included members of the Rev Ian Paisley’s party.The goal of the present government is to get Sinn Fein into government, but to do so by securing the assent of Unionist leader David Trimble. One problem with such a purist approach, however, is that the previous Conservative government had protracted dealings with the IRA even as it was setting off bombs in London and in Warrington.Another is that quite a few unionist representatives have past associations with some highly dubious organisations and individuals.

Ulterior political motives do not, however, negate the heart of the issue, which is whether republicans should now be admitted into a new Northern Ireland administration.One stance is to hold that anyone even suspected of associations beyond the strictly political should be excluded from the political system. At the moment this is additionally because of an odd but highly effective tactical alliance which includes former republicans, unionists and the Conservative party. This is, however, part of the familiar phenomenon that IRA violence will always receive more attention than that from other quarters. One encouraging sign is that, since Omagh, ceasefires have been declared by three previously active groups, the Real IRA, the INLA and by the Loyalist Volunteer Force.It may surprise many to learn that loyalists have been responsible for such a high toll, and that the IRA has carried out fewer than one fifth of the killings of the last four years. But 40 were killed by loyalists, 20 by the IRA, 29 by the Real IRA in last August’s Omagh bombing, and 12 by the INLA. In the 53 months since then 115 people have been killed, a very substantial reduction.