I spend yesterday in Belfast where there was much talk of new roads and soaring house prices, of social regeneration and emotional repair. More on all that to come both here and in The Guardian. But as the March 26 deadline for the return of power sharing approaches, wars of words over who should get the credit for progress towards peace and who the blame for the slowness of that progress continue. Ronan Bennett makes the case that Republican good faith has and continues to be unfairly doubted:
"When the IRA declared a 'complete cessation of military operations' on August 31 1994, the response was no less hostile. Adams in particular came in for vicious and sustained criticism, including on these pages. Gerry Adams 'is a coffin-filler strategically deciding to desist from filling coffins', wrote Edward Pearce in 1994. "Even if his heart is in peace, his words and his actions suggest a man who has neither the confidence nor the courage to drive events,' an Observer editorial claimed in the same year. Later Roy Hattersley reflected in the Guardian that 'Gerry Adams is part of the Troubles ... by treating him as if he is essential to a permanent settlement, we glorify intransigence, bigotry and extremism'. It was as though nothing whatsoever had changed from a year earlier when the Sunday Telegraph, for example, declared that Gerry Adams was "one of the ... most formidable enemies to peace in Ireland's bloodstained history".
And here are tastes of the first two reader comments.
"The 'bloody hard' people who inhabit - or rather occupy and colonize - Ireland are the Brits, whose spooks and SAS killers sponsored Unionist terrorists, placed provocateurs like Stakeknife within the IRA...and put bombs in the cars of MoD employees with which they blew up British soldiers, all in an effort to provoke and demonize the IRA. Being famous for their perfidy, the Brits naturally pretend none of this skulduggery ever happened, allowing any bits of it that surface in the news to fall into oblivion behind a curtain of deliberate, studied disregard."
While on the other hand...
"Utter bilge...Sinn Fein have been dilatory in seeking a settlement for over 80 years. To lay the blame for this at the feet of Unionism is to reveal the intent of the author. His idea of a settlement is one that is couched within the terms of Republicanism alone. His twisted view of the process fails to recognise the democratic will of the majority of people in Ulster as having any legitimacy. Our way and our way alone is what he is advocating."
There will be jaw-jaw about the Troubles for plenty of years to come. But if one thing was agreed by all the people I met yesterday, from my cab driver to a woman whose relatives fled to London after one of them fell in love with someone from "the other side", it's that they're grateful that these days there's more jaw-jaw than war-war. Happy St Patrick's Day.