>>Good morning, an welcome to Global Perspectives.

I'm David Dumke in our studio in Orlando.

We are joined by Paul Nolan, who is an independent scholar in Belfast.

Paul has worked with the number of NGOs on the Irish peace process.

He was instrumental in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

He is the chairman of the yes campaign and he has stayed very involved in the politics of resolving that conflict ever since.

Welcome to the show, Paul.

>>Than you David.

Pleasure to be here.

>>So, Paul, 1998, seems like yesterday for those of us who remember, the troubles and the the process.

How has the process gone sinc an agreement was actually made?

There's a lot of presumptions that, you know, when a peace agreement is, is forged, that we have crossed the finish line.

But as you your work as has shown, the process continues.

Tell us a little about that.

>>Well, I often think of what Winston Churchill said when he was aske about parliamentary democracy, when he said it was the worst possible form of government.

Apart of course, from all the others.

And I would say that about our peace process.

It's going really hitting difficulties, but it's still compared to all the others, doing remarkably well.

I mean, last year, for example was a year in which we had not one person killed as a result of the political conflict.

I mean, obviously there were other homicides, but nothing that related to politics.

And that compares to, you know, in the peak in the early 70s, when it was close to 500 in 1 year.

So it feels like a peaceful society, peaceful in the sense of there being an absence of violence.

Have we achieved the sort of Promised Land that we thought we were going to reach at the time we struck the peace accord?

No.

Not really.

We still got, the basic division between Irish nationalism and British unionism.

That's still there.

So I think, David, what we could say is we're in a process.

It wasn't conflict resolution.

It didn't end the conflict.

It was a process of conflict transformation where we manage to move out of the violent phase and into this phas where all those differences can still be debated and discussed but without resort to the gun.

So, you know, two cheers.

We're doing well.

>>You see other conflicts going in the world.

And obviously the most, most prominent one at least in the media coverage, is, is what's going on in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinians.

What can you say to folks in Israel and in Palestine who feel a sense of hopelessness right now?

>>Well, I would say, first of all, I understand fully why they feel that sense of hopelessness.

The situation in Israel through Gaza is just a nightmare.

I mean, just to give it a little bit of perspective here now, we did have a conflict the did last 30 years and 3700 people were killed over that 30 year period, but more than 40,000 have been killed already in Gaza since October the 7th.

So, I mean, we have to be a little bit humble about the conflict that we had when we look at this disaster that is unfolding in Gaza.

And I can understand why people feel the situation is simply beyond hope, because the phrase is most often used is intractable, intractable conflicts.

And we wer we were an intractable conflict.

I mean, we were seen as a intractable conflict for years.

And not only were we seen as that, but we saw ourselves as we thought, this will never end.

I mean, an intractable conflict is usually defined as one where there are ethnic or racial hostilities, cros with developmental inequalities that have a long history, that go back not just years, but decades, in fact, generations.

And where there is a bleak future that describes the situation a the moment in the Middle East.

But let me say to you that I've visited the Middle East over the years, an I find that there was one thing only that united Palestinians and Israelis.

And it was the belief that their conflict would never end, that it was intractable.

But look, all conflicts and an eventually even 100 Years War.

And that's why we were able t call it the Hundred Years War.

There was a finished point, okay.

It lasts 117 years.

But what I'm saying i conflicts will come to an end.

How do they end?

What will get you out of that conflict?

Usually it's when you get to a position where it's a stalemate.

If you get to a stalemate.

Henry Kissinger said that that stalemate is the most propitious condition for a settlement.

And there's an American political scientist called William Zartman.

And he came up with this idea, this phrase.

I don't know if you're familiar with it, but they mutually hurting stalemate.

You get to a point wher both sides are hurting equally, but you can get to that point and still not be at the right moment.

And Zartman has a phrase about rightness that you need to get to the right moment.

In other words you can have the right solution, but if it's not at the righ time, nobody's going to listen.

You've got to get to a point where both sides feel there's not really anything in this for us any longer, and no one feels that unilateral action will work any longer.

I mean, at the moment, if we turn to another theater, if we look at what's happening in Ukraine, both sides are hurting but they're not hurting equally.

And both sides both still think that they can win this war.

So they're not suing for peace.

I mean, Russia thinks that if they get a Trump presidency in November Ukraine would fall into a slump.

So there's not any hope of Russia suing for peace in this present period.

What happened in our situation is we got into one of those stalemates where the IRA's war against the British and the loyalist involvement in that war, the three sides, we were stalemated.

I mean, there was just nowhere to go.

And rather like the First World War where people were in the trenches and year on year, month on month, a little bit of progress could be made by one side.

They might be in a mile of territory, and next year they last mile they were back in the trenches and so on.

We got to the point where all sides realized, look guys, if this ended we could all be winners.

And that was, in essence, what was behind it.

But even the people know that it's very hard to put down the weapons, because the fear is if you put down your weapons, the other guys might not.

And so, you know, the war was really rolling on year after year in the 1980s and into the 1990s.

And as somebody who lived through that, I mean, I felt that we were behind really behind the rest of the world.

Because, remember, if you look back in the early 1990s, you know, then that period sometimes described as the long 1990s, really began in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And you measure that period up to 9/11.

So that's a long 1990s.

But the early years of that 1990s period.

It's hard to bring this back, David, to remember what a hopeful time that was, because all these unconnected things were, they were unconnected but nonetheless harmonious across the world, that it was like, I guess it was like a new weather system coming in, just rolling in.

You got the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

In 1993, we got the Oslo Peace Accord.

I mean, if you look bac at the photographs of that now, it seems like a dream.

I mean, you see Bill Clinton standing there with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat and they're shaking hands on the White House lawn and as that's 1993, we felt, Why can't we catch up?

Why can't we b more like the rest of the world?

And then in 1994, we got the IRA ceasefire, and the loyalist ceasefires took another four year till we got to the peace accord.

But there was a period, a zeitgeist if you like.

And that time was was so positive.

We just felt that we were coming.

If you remember, there was a book published, The End of History, Fukuyama's book that kind of said all the conflicts they're all done with.

I mean, we're not living in a world where there's no ideological conflict.

Liberal democracy is-- >>That was news to you, I'm sure, right?

>>Everybody's in this together.

And, you know, when I look back on that, I mean, what a hopeful time that was.

But that's not where we're at now were, you know, possibly the most dangerous time since the end of the Second World War.

And we're looking to find ways in which all of these conflicts can be brought to an end.

But with some of them, like the ones we just discussed, the Gaza situation or the Ukraine situation.

I don't see that sort of balancing moment, that mutually hurting stalemate that will allow u to move towards peace accords.

But, it does make me feel.

God, I'm beginning to sound a little bit smug.

I don't want to sound smug, but our peace accord.

I'm just glad we got it.

Because if we hadn't got it at that moment, you know, we could have rolled o like that for another 25 years.

>>You Paul are talking about, you know, a process that was successfully completed in 1998 and exhaustion and all that.

But a lot of people don't understand, you know, how you do thi in terms of the sequence, you, your own career you worked in education a lot, working to resolve sectarian issues.

So my question for you is were the people ready for peace before the political leaders in in Northern Ireland?

>>Yes, I'm going to answer that emphatically.

Yes.

The people were weary, but the paramilitaries and the politicians could not get their act together.

What we were seeing were large street demonstrations, particularly after atrocities.

There would be a shooting, there'd be a bombing, and the trade unions played a very important part, because the trade unions would call mass rallies at Belfast City Hall, people would come out with their placards and called for peace.

Very important to where the kind of the the the less dramatic, the slower, more molecular processes of peace building, particularl through women's organizations.

There was a lot of cross-community contact through women's groups.

They met with each other, and they were not primarily peace building organizations.

They were groups that met to do, you know, the usual range of, recreational activities, aromatherapy and cooking and so on.

But they had shared interests that had commonality, and they could cross the sectarian divide more easily than men.

And they began building this movement for greater contact, more peace, and eventually formed.

There was a women's political party form called the Women's Coalition, which actually stood for election, got seats in the new Assembly when it was set up.

So you had all of those processes working from the ground up, and we had people who wer trying to generate new thinking, I mean, to generate new it's very important to change the language, to change the language from the language of war to the language of accommodation.

So we had people working on those issues, trying to think of of what are the solutions to this, instead of the usual kind of accusation and counter accusation, people trying to introduce positive thinking.

There was a process whereby, a commission was set up to take ideas on what what do you think would help?

What kind of thing would work here?

And all of those things, how they were all the yeast, you know, and the dough.

They were making this movement for peace.

Right.

So the time we got to 1994, the IRA, they they heard these voices.

They knew that people were weary of war, and they knew that the war wasn't going to get them anywhere near the end goal the same on the Unionist side.

And so the paramilitaries called a ceasefire.

But it took another four years before the politicians got that agreement.

And one of the other things that was happening in that period, I really want to make this point, since I'm speaking to an American audience, was, the role played by America.

American politicians played a hugely positive role in, you knoow, Northern Ireland peace.

I'm talking to here about Bill Clinton when he came in his visits just after the ceasefire, and Hillary Clinton and, you know, Hillary Clinton continues her involvement in Northern Ireland.

She's the chancellor of my university, Queen's University Belfast.

She puts in a lot of hours.

You know, she flies.

She knows so much air tim just coming here and handing out the certificates on graduation day all that kind of routine work.

I don't think people in America maybe appreciate what Hillary Clinton continues to do, but she and Bill Clinton were very positive and most positive of all was George Mitchell, Democratic senator who acted as chair of the peace talks, which was frankly a thankless task because every da the politicians would come in, they'd sit around, they'd have the same arguments, and he'd have to chair that same discussion day after day after day.

And what he said when he go the peace accord was, he said, you know, I had 500 bad days and one good day, and we got that one good day and thank goodness for it.

But a lot of credit was due to George Mitchell and not just the politicians that, you know, the it that was followed by investment by American business.

So America has played a really, really positive role in the Northern Ireland peace process.

>>Of course, you're talking about this positive American role.

There was trust from all sides in the American role as a honest broker.

That term is is is often used and actually not necessarily accurat in a lot of different conflicts.

Do you think the United State can still play an honest broker role in some of the ongoing conflicts right now in the in the world?

>>I think it can.

But and, you know, the situation is different, David.

And this is a problem of generalizing from one experience, to other experiences.

Ours was a very particular situation.

Remember that thing that, that sentence that starts, Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, where he says happy families are all alike.

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

We were unhappy in our own way.

And when you look at othe situations, the role of America is obviously determine by how people in those regions see America.

I mean, if America, is is actually involved in providing arms to Israel or selling arms or providing arms to Israel.

It's very hard for it to be seen as an honest broker by the Palestinians.

We just have to accept that.

I mean, likewise, Russians are not going to accept America as an honest broker in the situation in Ukraine.

So the role that Americ can play, very much determined by its existing complex of relationships with the with with the sides involved in the conflict, I mean, in the case of Northern Ireland, America didn't have a side.

It was traditionally, seen to be sympathetic to Irish nationalism, which it was, and often in a very sentimental way.

And the IRA used to do a lot of fundraising in the United States.

So American involvement, I have to say, was resisted for quite a long time by unionists who thought America is always going to be on the side of Irish nationalists.

But Bill Clinton, you know, he played it well.

And I mean, he wasn't seen as an honest broker by the British government either at one point.

And it was a very significant point.

The an IRA leader, Gerry Adams, wanted to get into the United States.

There was no visa for him.

Bill Clinton overruled his ow advisors and granted the visa.

But the British Prime Minister, John Major, was very angry about it.

Wouldn't take his phone calls for quite a while.

So, yeah, I mean, he won the trust, but you can't assume the trust.

You have to win it.

I think that's going to be particularly difficult for America in some of th theaters of war at the moment.

>>Paul, you made a good point about no two conflicts are alike, but there are a lot of lessons to learn.

And one thing I did want to ask about Northern Ireland's situation again, in addition to exhaustion of both sides with violence and conflict, there's always the theory of a peace dividend.

And Northern Ireland's economy had suffered because of this conflict.

And of course, Northern Ireland still has some economic problems.

So my question to you is has there been a peace dividend for the people in Northern Ireland?

>>There has, absolutely.

But if, if, if you were to ask that question of people in some of the most deprived parts of Belfast or the other parts of Northern Ireland, they would find it hard to giv you a positive answer to that.

But look I mean, we have to be realistic.

When we got a peace deal, it ended the violence, but it didn't end unemployment, it didn't stop the rain from falling.

I mean, life goes on.

What I would sa is that the experiences we have now in Belfast are not dissimila to what people have in Glasgow or London or Birmingham or other UK cities.

I can't make a compariso with Ireland because Ireland's had this remarkable unbelievable economic success, but that's for entirely separate reasons.

Many seem to do with, investment by the American global tech companies.

But no, we didn't solve all our problems with the peace accord.

But we did get, we did get an end to violence and we did get an economic dividend.

And that dividend, it doesn't last forever.

I mean, we've had it fo 25 years, but it's become thin.

We also got it from the European Union.

The European Union poured you know, really oceans of money into this place.

And the European Union did it because it, it came to see Northern Ireland as a success story along the lines of the European Union itself, if you recall.

I mean, the European Union was set up to try to mend relations primarily in the i the early days of the European Economic Council between France and Germany through trade.

The belief was that if countries could trade together, do business with each other, normal relations would develop and Europe put money into Northern Ireland on the same basis that if we managed to get trade between Britain and Ireland, trade unionists and nationalists, peace would follow quite naturally.

And to some extent that has been true.

That has that has been the case.

>>Of course, you you mentioned the European Union's role both in, in, you know, boosting Ireland, the Republic of Ireland's growth and also pouring money into Northern Ireland.

But of course, the United Kingdom pulled out of, of the European Union, with Brexit.

How has that complicated things on the ground from Northern Ireland?

>>Really complicated and terribly.

And continues to do so.

I mean, what we hadn't anticipated, I mean, in all peace accords, you'v got to allow for the unexpected.

I mean, nobody expected back in 1998, nobody expected Brexit and nobody expected the thing that that caused Brexit, which was the rise of English nationalism, English nationalism had not been, a force.

And then suddenly we got this sort of nativist.

We are English.

We don't want to be part of Europe.

And, you know, that whole thing that began that became known as Brexit and it was incredibly complicated in the ways that the peopl who led it, like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage they didn't even think about it because they saw themselve as taking Britain out of Europe.

But they'd forgotten about that little bit of the United Kingdom, that little bit called Northern Ireland.

And we're joined and the landmass of the island of Ireland.

So trying to take us out of Europe just wasn't possible, because physically we are in a country called Ireland, which is part of the European Union.

So for a time there was a very threatening situation where it seemed it well, they were going to have to do was build a wall.

I mean, you're familiar with the phrase build a wall.

Okay.

Well, yes.

The historic building a wall between Northern Ireland and the south of Ireland.

But that was ridiculous.

I mean, physically, that just could not be done.

I mean, there are more border crossings between Northern Ireland and the south of Ireland than there are.

And the whole frontier between, you know, Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

I mean you just couldn't do this thing.

So we've ended up with a fudgy compromise where Northern Ireland is still in the single market but the rest of Britain isn't.

And it's got a lot of glitchy little small problems that go with it.

But we were left with thi dreadful situation after Brexit.

Brexit was just this, hugely disruptive and unanticipated proble that we're still wrestling with.

>>Throughout most of the troubles, Paul, of course, you know, the Republic of Ireland was relatively impoverished.

Certainly in comparison to the United Kingdom and other European nations.

But the growth has been pretty rapidly and the economic side has that lessened the fear o the people of Northern Ireland, who who opposed joining the Republic?

>>Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the reason why why was Ireland divided in the first place?

I mean, Ireland was partitioned in 1921.

The reason why it was petitioned was because the unionist populatio in the northeast of the island, that is, the people who descended from th English and Scottish settlers, they didn't want to be joined to a countr that was, first of all, Catholic because they were Protestant and many of them, when they came over, you know, in the 17th century, they weren't just that, they were Protestant, they were vehemently anti-Catholic, and they did not want to join a country that was Catholic.

I mean, the the slogan was home rule is Rome rule.

The other thing that they didn't want was they didn't want to join a country that was agrarian, impoverished that had no economic prospects.

Because remember that, you know, Belfast was one of the engines of the Industrial revolution, along with Glasgow and other parts of the UK.

We had the largest shipyard in the world, the largest world's largest tobacco processing plant, and so on.

And that was all to do with being part of the United Kingdom.

So that was why we got partition.

Okay, fast forward a hundred years and we're in a situation wher Ireland is no longer Catholic.

Ireland is post Catholic, as you're aware of all the scandals of the Catholic Church in Ireland has now emerged as a post-Catholic country.

And it's also becomin this is the most unlikely thing, an incredibly successful economy.

So things have reversed.

The Irish government is now putting money into a program called Shared Island, where they actually fund things in Northern Ireland because we can't afford them.

I mean, we just don't have the budgets for them.

I'll just give you one smal example that will illustrate it.

One day last year, they, announced a huge, investment in a center to, Mark Seamus Heaney, a writer center in his hometown of Bellaghy.

And I remember reading that and reading in the same day that the libraries in Northern Ireland had announced they would not be able to afford to buy a single book for the next year.

So, you know, if you're living here and you see this prosperous society in the South, well, you no longer have to fear that you would be entering, you know the Ireland of the 19th century.

And you no longer have to fear entering a Catholic country.

They were the two pillars, of partition.

But here's the thing.

Even when you take them away, the border has become naturalized for unionists.

Unionists who grew up with a British identity.

It really doesn't matter what you say about a better economy in the South.

They're not interested.

They.

They like living where they live.

They don't want another identity.

They've got their own identity.

It's like if I said to you, David, look, the guy next door to who's got a better house than you, I mean, would you not want to move in there?

You might say, well, he might have a better house, but I like where I live.

I mean, I am who I am, this is my identity.

And so unionists don't feel they don't feel particularly attractive.

But but there is a problem.

And the problem is this.

I it's the demographics, David.

I mean, what's happening is that the Northern Ireland stat was set up in 1921 to guarantee a permanent majorit for the Protestant population.

So the borders were drawn in such a way as to guarantee a 2 to 1 ratio of Protestants to Catholics.

And it was assumed that would last in perpetuity.

In 2021, we did a census 100 years on, and what it showed was that actually there are now more Catholics in Northern Ireland than there are Protestants.

So for Protestants and for unionist population, they are standing on an ice floe that is melting beneath their feet.

And they have that problem.

You're familiar with in America, the problem of the vanishing majority, the majority population that feels it's gripped is loosening because they were once the dominant force, and now they see that that is changing.

And when when majorities lose their power, things can become very difficult.

>>So we got one, one final question.

We just have a minute.

Paul, when you talk abou demographic graphics and change, people who are young people of Northern Ireland were bor after a Good Friday Agreement.

They have a different outlook, it seems, from basically from my experience in talking to them.

Then their fathers and grandfathers.

Grandparents.

>>Yeah.

>>Are you hopeful, for the young people coming up with kind of a more permanent solution, a different-- >>I am hopeful.

I'm hopeful that finally we're getting a generation that is not completely within the two big frozen blocks of nationalism and unionism that are creating new identities for themselves that don't define themselves in terms of being Protestant or Catholic, union or nationalist.

I wouldn't overexaggerate this, but definitely we're seeing, a weakening of those traditional ties, and we're also seeing something else, which is new populations coming into Northern Ireland.

We've got immigration no from other parts of the world.

So it's no longer that kind of, that those frozen blocks no longer dominate the landscape in the way that they used to.

>>Paul Nolan, thank you so much for joining us today.

>>And thank you, David, a pleasure.

>>And your work has been really, commendable over the years.

So thank you for that and appreciate sharing your perspective.

>>Thank you very much.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.