Human Rights as War by Other Means: Peace Politics in Northern Ireland

Chapter 4. The Politics We Deserve

CHAPTER 4 The Politics We Deserve “Do you think we get the politics we deserve?” a lawyer asked me over coffee on a gray morning in August 2011. She leaned back and answered her question before I could reply: “I do. It’s nonsense to say that political representatives here don’t speak for people—they do it well enough to keep getting votes!” Thirteen years after the Good Friday Agreement, and four years after devolved government became functional, “Yvonne” had a bleak view of postconflict politics, as a kind of “cold peace.” A specialist in human rights, she said politicians and the electorate remain preoccupied with collective identities of unionist and nationalist and endlessly contested injustices in those terms. Social and economic rights, her professional expertise, remained secondary in the political and legal culture. Yvonne saw power sharing not merely as a reflection of ethnopolitical divisions but also as an engine for their reproduction —and as a distraction from less newsworthy yet more pervasive failures of the state to safeguard fundamental rights to education or housing. Her grim analysis of party politics saturated by sectarian struggle was bolstered almost a year later, in June 2012, when the Fair Employment Tribunal found that the former minister of regional development discriminated against a Protestant job applicant for a high-ranking position. Furthermore, the tribunal stated more broadly “that there was a material bias against candidates from a Protestant background within the DRD [Department of Regional Development]” (Fair Employment Tribunal 2012: 17).1 Although the former minister (and former Sinn Féin MLA) will appeal, the decision affirmed the view of skeptics who suspect that the new political arrangements cannot fulfill the settlement’s lofty aspirations. Indeed, the GFA’s aspirations seem less noble in hindsight. The settlement’s commitment to “parity of esteem” for two communities institutionalized the politics of collective rights. 102 Chapter 4 Yet, fifteen years before, the peace process promised a transformed political future, far from the divisions of the Stormont era. Before the 1997–1998 negotiations , major shifts in the discourse and pursuit of political rights came from people whose lives had been enmeshed with the conflict. One of these shifts entailed a more expansive discourse about and exercise of freedom of association as a fundamental political right. Extending freedom of association as an everyday practice became a means for local activists to develop new discussions and relationships, and it facilitated a transition from paramilitarism to democratic politics. In the same period, however, the logic of “parity of esteem” for two political and religious traditions became increasingly prevalent. The term “parity of esteem,” a central premise of the GFA human rights provisions discussed in Chapter 1, originated with the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights Northern Ireland.2 In 1990, the committee recommended legal recognition of two communities while, as Finlay (2010) notes, shirking the legal debate about individual versus collective rights (31). “Parity of esteem” as a state principle and practice was intended to resolve political grievances and produced the GFA’s emphasis on human rights as collectively due to “both communities.”3 In the same period, intellectuals and peace advocates also popularized the term “civil society”; the term is drawn from political theory and designates a social sphere beyond economy and state, characterized by free and voluntary associations among citizens. Theoretically , both “civil society” and “parity of esteem” originated from Enlightenment understandings of political rights. In practice, the terms had profoundly divergent consequences for securing and exercising political rights. As community activists claimed the mantle of “civil society,” “parity of esteem” operated in tension with associational practices. This theme of separate and equal was present even in the most innovative, promising practices of association and conflict transformation. The logic of collective entitlements to political rights subtly suffused grassroots work; and, in bitter and violent political conflicts surrounding parades, protests, and rights to assembly, parity of esteem overtook civil society as a dominant practical theory of rights. In the 1990s, the conflict in Northern Ireland was dramatically transformed . In 1993, negotiations among local politicians and the British and Irish governments became increasingly public, with the Hume-Adams initiative and the Downing Street Declaration outlining a possible peace process (British and Irish Governments 1993).4 In 1994, the IRA announced a ceasefire, followed by the Combined Loyalist Military Command on behalf of loyalist paramilitaries. In the years that followed, however, negotiations stalled. The The Politics...