Can Ukraine learn from Ulster’s compromises?

Jonathan Lindsell, 15 April 2014

I spent last weekend in Newry, a Northern Irish city an hour up the coast from Dublin. I arrived outside the courthouse, whereupon a local cheerfully informed me, “Dissident Republicans still try to blow it up every year or so – it’s a bit of a tradition.”

Nowadays Newry is a town on the up, having benefitted from the ‘Celtic Tiger’ property boom, weathered the recession’s storm, now reaping the rewards of its location between Belfast and Dublin. Due to the Euro’s strength and the Republic of Ireland’s austerity, Newry is now a shopping hotspot with several malls, huge road tailbacks and visitors from as far afield as Cork.

None of the new wealth, though, conceals the town’s past. Straddling Armagh and Down counties, the 85% Catholic city was a Troubles battleground.  Over 50 people lost their lives. The British Army only removed its garrison in 2007. Side streets still sport posters, propaganda and graffiti (‘Iron Lady Rust In Peace’) but the people, on the whole, moved on. My hosts explained that the peace process is effective because ‘Everyone thinks they’ll win out in the end’, and recent prosperity means most are willing to await this victory. Even Republican, Gaelic-speaking Catholics think the kind of people to keep bombing Newry courthouse (possibly the Continuity IRA) are somewhere between deluded, stubborn and counterproductive. ‘Muppets’ was the precise phrase used.

It’s tempting fate to make solid pronouncements, but after 40 years of horrible violence and poverty, Newry seems to be mending. Its problems now are education access, high-quality jobs provision, and finishing building projects abandoned mid-crash.

In many ways, the situation in Ukraine resembles that of Ireland/Northern Ireland on the brink of the Troubles. One part of the country has broken away/been annexed, huge protests rock other regions, activists demand devolution or declare secession. Foreign powers are intimately involved overtly and covertly, with a history of occupations and takeovers. Most of all, the nation is split along ethnic and linguistic lines (if not religious ones), with extremists on both sides and a quiet but significant bulk of bilingual moderates terrified in the middle.

While Northern Ireland offers Ukraine lessons about the danger of lapsing into sectarian conflict, the parallels are not universal. Neither Heath nor Wilson offered the Nationalists the weighty concessions that PM Yatsenyuk announced in Eastern Ukraine. The UN never intervened so significantly in Northern Ireland, and the EU never offered billions of Euros and boosted trade to stabilise Ulster.

These are important differences: it is still possible for Yatsenyuk to seize the initiative by offering Eastern Ukrainian districts referendums while inviting international observers to ensure the votes’ veracity and safety, in numbers great enough to assuage Russian-facing activists’ fears of Ukrainians fascism, and Europe-facing Ukrainians’ fears of Moscow skulduggery.  ‘Out’ votes may be embarrassing, change the face of the country, and dislocate minorities the wrong side of a new border – but offering a safe vote is preferable to the protracted sectarian violence that blighted Newry.