Arthur Jones of the US National Catholic Reporter visited Belfast and met Fr Gerry Reynolds and Rev Dr John Dunlop.Extracts from report:
Redemptorist Fr. Gerry Reynolds said, the 1998 “Good Friday” peace settlement is well-established. His colleague, the Rev. John Dunlop, cautioned, “I have never said this was reconciliation. This is political accommodation, an extremely complicated political accommodation.”
Dunlop told NCR, “What enabled the breakthrough were a couple of different things. The Provisional IRA was concerned that their campaign was consistently resisted by the security forces — they had to reach the stage where they were persuaded they couldn’t win. Second, various channels were opened between Sinn Féin [the IRA’s political wing] and the British government. Back-passage, secret, quiet. That began to generate some element of understanding. Then you got Douglas Hurd [Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland] telling Ulster that Britain had no economic, strategic or military interest in remaining here. For me, as a Northern Presbyterian and Unionist official, it was a bit like a husband saying to his wife, ‘Well you can continue to live here as long as you like, but I’ve no interest in staying. But if you want to move in with the man next door that’s OK with me and I’ll facilitate your departure.’ That was kind of disconcerting.”
The two communities, Catholic and Protestant, operated in different ways, Dunlop said.
“There is in a Catholic community a degree of cohesiveness which does not exist in the Protestant community. The Unionist community is influenced by a kind of Presbyterianism that is inclined to split.” The difficulty on the Unionist side, he said, was trying to keep the constituency together. For the other side, “In Ed Moloney’s book [A Secret History of the IRA], the way they had to manage their internal problems was quite difficult, also ruthless, quite risky. Clearly not everybody was happy so you get a dissident crowd, but who were not powerful enough to stop it.”