I never miss an opportunity to share the words of my friend Bernadette McAliskey on important issues. With your indulgence, I post her observations on the peace process, which has come into this disscussion...
Bernadette McAliskey spoke at a local Irish Pub, Rocky Sullivan's on May 3, 2000 about the British "peace process".

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey:"A great deal has been written about the peace process and I've not written a lot, but what I've written I think has mattered and you can read it if you like. For where the peace process is, indeed what the peace process is, very much depends on yourselves and where you are.

Some people think the peace process is the successful culmination of the 30-year struggle for self-determination, sovereignty, social justice, equality-nevermind socialism and all the hard bits-and that we are looking within the peace process at the culmination of the success, at the just achievements, won again through hard struggle and sacrifice.

Other people, and here I'm talking about people on our side of the line if you want to put that at its broadest point, other people within the broad civil rights, civil libertarian, progressive democratic movement will say that the peace process is the worst thing that has happened to us since we lost the 1798 Rebellion. Others would say, well not quite, but certainly since we lost the War of Independence; and others would say, well maybe not quite, but certainly since we lost the Civil War.

So where you are in the peace process, as I say, is really a test of where your own politics lies. And that makes it quite different and quite difficult for people to address the whole process, because what ought to be an ideological, a political or even a pragmatic debate becomes very much a personalized debate. And those of us who have right from the outset warned against the dangers of embarking on this particular strategy to bring the war to an end have been on the receiving end of considerable personal animosity-based, I think, on people not being quite sure of themselves about the nature of the political debate. So I'm going to talk about things tonight and I'll be taking some questions and answers later. I would like to exclude as much as possible that kind of approach from the discussion.

I don't think anybody involved in the struggle over the past 30 years has set about consciously to betray the struggle. I don't think anybody who has been part of the struggle for over 30 years is about to trade in a good set of clothes and annual wage for their principles. I don't think that's where it is at all. I think the real issue is about the process itself. The real issue is to try and analyse and understand what exactly is happening here and whose peace it is we are currently processing. And if you look at it from that point of view, I think some very serious questions have to be asked.

At the minute, within the peace process, we're sort of at a point where the key issues appear to be things like 'decommissioning'. Decommissioning is very interesting because prior to the existence of the peace process, the word itself did not exist. Not even the process, not even the strategy, but the word did not exist. Decommissioning, like a whole lot of words, are themselves the product of the Irish peace process. There used to be commissioning, like you could be a commissioned officer in an army or you could commission services-but you either did or you didn't. So the opposite of commissioning was not to bother. You didn't actually commission and then decommission. If you commissioned something and then decided not to commission, it wasn't decommissioning, it was changing your mind and deciding not to commission after all. So when we talk about the IRA decommissioning, we're really talking about whether other people are changing their minds about whether they will commission the IRA or not. When you see it like that, you say,

'Look what has this got to do with any kind of realism?'

Decommissioning is not a real word; decommissioning is not a real concept; and, decommissioning is not a real issue.

But at the minute, people get bogged down in it because it has been a consistent pattern from the beginning of this whole process to create a situation for the simple purpose of diffusing it.

And many people, if they can move outside the complexities of the Irish situation will understand this better from the concept of their own lives. How many people, for example, have been told in their working lives, that things aren't going well, the workers will have to take a wage cut. And everybody gets ready to seek, and wish they had joined a union, and wonder how they could get into one quick, and start to worry about their wages getting cut. Now at somewhere in their heads they had been just about to ask for a wage rise; but before they got time to ask for it, the employers came along and

announced that it was going to be necessary to have a wage cut. There is a whole battle which ensues. The union leadership gets everybody to join and declares a victory-that in order to maintain the solidarity of the workforce and the recognition of the work that everybody has done, everybody's wages are going to remain static for the next three years. And, everybody thinks they have won because they haven't had their wages cut. And, everybody forgets that the discussion actually started with people being entitled to more money.

If you're merely a consumer and you've gone into the shops to buy things, the same policy works-people will tell you the cost of food is going to rise dramatically. You want to rent an apartment; rents are going to go up dramatically. And, when it doesn't happen, you think you have won something-even though they go up a bit. The whole peace process has worked on the same basis.

The unionists say hell will freeze over before we share power with the republicans. Now I don't recall any fundamental tenet of republicanism ever being that we would assist the unionists in sharing out British controlled power. It was never a part of the discussion, but somehow because the unionists said, they got the first blow in, they said, oh not till hell freezes over will we allow the republicans to assist us to administer British rule. Oh no we wont. Oh never, said Mr Paisley, never never never! And the republicans said, Oh yes you will. And so we had the 'Oh no we wont-Oh yes you will' debate which led to a republican 'victory'.

The republicans won the right to assist the British government in administering British rule and sharing British power with the unionists-or as much as the British would allow either of them to have. And so when we lost, we thought we had won.

And then having got the principle over, and if you go back to the beginning you'll remember it, it was John Major, who with a straight face in Parliament, said talking to Gerry Adams would make his stomach heave. His stomach had been heaving for 6 stricken years, because that's how long he'd been in discussions with the republican movement! But he said publicly that his stomach would heave if he had to talk to Gerry Adams and everybody got upset. Decent American people got upset too, and said how dare you be so rude and so racist and say that you wouldn't talk to Gerry Adams. So the republicans demanded, and the democrats demanded, that John Major talk to Gerry Adams. But of course he'd been doing it for 6 years. Now if that hadn't happened, we may all have taken a different point of view when we discovered that Gerry Adams was talking to John Major. But by the time we discovered it, we were on a whole different debate-we were on the 'right to be talked at'. As part of our human rights now, we have a right to be talked at! We have a right to be sitting at every meeting and allowed to put an opinion on every issue, none of which will be taken into account. But it is our basic human right to be there.

We all have a right-there is not a single party to be held in Washington, not a cupcake to be eaten, not an invitation to be sent out-that we have a fundamental freedom, and human rights under the United Nations Charter of Human Rights, to an invitation. And we have secured victory, because we got those things. And bit by bit, people have convinced themselves that we have won major victories.

Step back a minute and ask ourselves: what this was, what it was all about? I mean, if all we wanted was to help the unionists share power in the Northern Ireland Assembly, why didn't we democratize Ulster when Cathal Goulding asked us to? They were all there, this is not a new idea (and Cathal Goulding had better politics, if you don't mind me saying so, when he was attempting to share power!) But if that's what we wanted to do, why didn't we do it before 30 years of conflict and dying and killing and going to prison all happened? Why didn't we do it then? If that was all that we wanted-was to share power with Fianna Fáil in the South of Ireland, what was the difference between sharing the power now, Fianna Fáil now, and sharing power with Cumann na nGaedheal then? What did we fight the Civil War for, if we were prepared to administer shared power in a partitioned state within the social order imposed upon us by the British government?

So never mind what did we fight this war for, what did we fight the Civil War for? Why didn't we listen to poor old Michael Collins? Because we're not saying anything different than he said then. The freedom to win freedom, the freedom to work for freedom.

And I don't have a difficulty about people saying, 'Time goes on Bernadette, and we get older, and we get wiser, and we realize that maybe that's what we should have done'. I have absolutely no problem with that. I think that's inherent in everybody's right to say if I had it to do again, I might have done it differently. Maybe in retrospect, looking at the way things happened and looking at the forces of power that developed, maybe we should have gone down the 'democratization of Ulster' road in the early '70s. Maybe if we're in a position now, where if we really want to, at any cost, take the SDLP's clothing and be the biggest social democratic and vaguely Catholic party in the North of Ireland. Why didn't we do that in '72? In fact, why didn't everybody just join the SDLP and elbow John Hume aside years ago?

If people want to say to me, that is maybe in retrospect what we should have done, that's fair enough. What worries me is when people say no no, that's not what we're saying, what we are saying is that this is fundamentally different-ideologically, socially, politically and economically different-this is victory, this is victory for republicanism. And I have to say, right, let's go back to that very bottom point because republicanism itself is not a flawless ideology. Republicanism comes of the days of Thomas Paine and republicanism itself is being revised as we go along.

When we were coming in, just as an aside, when we were coming in to JFK, probably those of you who live here don't notice it anymore but the beginning of the American Constitution is written along the wall, and as you're going along the walkway, you can read it you know. And my husband, Michael, was suggesting, since this was his first time in through that airport, he was suggesting that of all the ideas that we get from America these days, we ought to incorporate this one so when people arrive in Northern Ireland, the Special Powers Act should be written along the wall!

So people would know where they were coming. And it would say, 'Welcome to Northern Ireland. Police may enter your house at any time, they may come and take you away. Aye, you can be interned, you will not get a lawyer. You can be shot in the street. We run a shoot-to-kill policy here. Don't send for a lawyer, we shoot them too,' and incorporate that good American idea!

But looking along, as I was looking at it, there are things we forget about flaws in republicanism itself. The words in the American constitution are actually very beautiful about equal rights and the rights of people to secure their person, and the fundamental freedoms, and the right of citizens to bear arms, and all this was written against a background of slavery. All of this was written against the background where key elements of our society got left off the equality equations. And, republicanism as a concept has moved on in it's best form to recognize those weaknesses, and then as far as it can to incorporate equality for all citizens, for all human beings. And that kind of republicanism over the years has become socialist republicanism. And republicanism in crisis has only one of two ways to go. In crisis, republicanism as a democratic ideology will move towards socialism and equality or it will move towards nationalism.

And, when republicanism is forced to move, either left or even right, the reality of our history is that Sinn Féin as an organization has never moved any way but right.

James Connolly was not a member of Sinn Féin, ladies and gentlemen, and Sinn Féin at a crucial point in their existence took their politics back into the constitutional movement. So don't be too hard on Gerry Adams; he's going the way of his forefathers. Every last one of them in the leadership of the organization went that way. And every last one of them, within the leadership of labor movement as well, can have that path laid out in front of them. I can see as clearly as they must be able to see, as anybody who wants to look at it outside of issues like trust and loyalty and pragmatism and personalities, that this is not about good men or bad men or difficult women. This is about politics.

And right through the history of our country at moments of clear crisis, the republican ideology has been submerged. The republican ideology has been abandoned for constitutional, nationalist all-class alliances.

Every single time that this new alliance has been created, the people who have suffered have been the poor in Ireland. The dissidents in Ireland. The radicals in Ireland. The women in Ireland. And at every single point, this kind of politics has been bad for the people who have always mattered to us-bad for the people that mattered to the leadership of Sinn Féin, and bad for republican politics-bad for republicanism.

You would imagine that people would approach this with due caution and care and be very very careful not to fall for any of the tricks of the trade that have been pulled out in the past. And yet that hasn't happened. The people have not staggered, they have virtually stampeded towards pacification.

Everybody knows the war is over. And that's probably the only good thing we have going for us at this point is that the war is over. Nobody likes war and nobody wants war. The war came and the war is now over, but the war is not won. And time will tell, in the fullness of time whether or not the war was actually lost. But the war is over-win, lose or draw.

The struggle continues and the struggle is immeasurably weakened by the peace process. Immeasurably weakened. When the Downing Street Declaration was first written, I wrote a small piece in response to it, and I said the purpose of the Downing Street Declaration and the peace process which it created was to demobilize, demilitarize and demoralize the republican people of Ireland-and it has done all three.

At this point, people will say to you, 'Is the peace process stalling?' No, it is not. The peace process is exactly where it is; it is exactly where those who are controlling it want it to be. It is not stalling. There is no panic here. This is just part of the choreography that has taken place. It will go on whether the IRA part with a single bullet, part with a single Armalite, part with a single ounce of Semtex-wont make any difference, the peace process will go on and Sinn Féin will continue to be drawn further and further into it. And they are now so far into it, it is highly unlikely a) that they can be got out of it and b) that even if they got out of it, its unwavering movement forward to advance the shared power interest of the British and Irish governments, and the class of people they represent, can't in the short or relatively long term, be stopped, or even be slowed down.

How do I know the peace process will continue? It is important to the Irish government that it continue. Not because their heart bleeds for me or you, for the people who went to prison-these are the same class of people who executed Joe McKelvey. This is the same class and government of people that took republicans out during the war and shot them. This is the government, the ideology and the politics that filled New York and Chicago and San Francisco with the political dissidents it wouldn't allow to earn a living at home, and with wave after wave of immigrants it wouldn't share wealth with. And now those who have made their money are invited home to join the wealthy. But let me tell you this, you see if you're not hacking it here folks, don't count on Bertie pulling you out when you get home! It will be up to Darndale, along with the rest, is where you'll be and learn to pull your socks up. These things aren't different.

So why is Bertie stuck to enacting the peace process? It gives him a stable society. It brings all the strands of nationalism back under his leadership. What is the big discussion in the revolutionary leadership of the most consistently fought struggle against British imperialism in the history of Ireland? What is the key internal debate in the organization at the minute? On what terms will they sit in government with Fianna Fáil? I have the simple answer to that for them all: Don't lose any sleep over it boys, it'll be on the terms that Bertie lets you in! That's the terms you'll sit with Bertie-on the terms he lets you in. And the terms he lets you in are that you sit in power in the North first, that you go through the cleansing ritual and be a safe pair of hands for government. And that means, whether you like it or not, there'll be less talk about socialism, unless its me that's doing the talking, there is no talk about socialism anyway. And unless you're buying Fourthwrite (second issue which will be out very shortly) there's nobody writing about socialism.

But what does it mean for the people? What does it mean for the people on the ground, apart from that the fact the war is over and that there are maybe less soldiers on the street that can be brought out. That maybe fewer people are being killed by loyalists because its not politically suitable. But there is nothing in place to stop those things from all coming back again, if and when we need to be threatened. So all that we have at the minute is the absence of war and the existence of large amounts of European money.

So what do the British get out of the peace process? The de-militarization, the de-radicalization, the de-mobilization of the resistance movement in the North. It is demoralized. The most radical thing it can do now is vote to increase the Nationalist agenda by moving 1) Sinn Féin, 2) SDLP-as if we were all mates out of the same stable or 1) SDLP and 2) Sinn Féin because there are no differences, no ideological differences between these people any more, because there's no war.

So what did the British get?

The British got, as I say, stabilizing, demilitarizing, mobilizing and caught in the expenditure of war. That has great feedback in inward American investment, which is what the Americans got as well. They got rid of the annoying and irritating insistence constitutionally by the people of Ireland that the territory didn't belong to them. It's gone.

Now we used to have these debates about whether or not you would go to the United Nations on the basis of the Constitution. That debate is no longer valid because of people of the South of Ireland, while Sinn Féin kept its mouth shut, dropped a right that they didn't even own! And, that was a right to abandon the North-but it's gone.

So if the peace process falls apart and the North's teachta go with it, and the ministerial North-South-East-West Council of something or other goes with it, and we have to go back to the drawing board, by what right is Bertie Ahern at the table? By what right, if this agreement goes by the board, and it's back to the drawing board and start again, and all the interested parties who have a right to determine the future of the North of Ireland are called to another conference? What will be on the invitation to the government of the 26-county Republic of Ireland? What will distinguish them from the French government or the German government or any other member state of the European Union to come in and mind somebody else's business? They have no standing if this agreement falls to play ball in the next round.

So Britain got pacification, got a stable society, got rid of the annoying interference such as it was or potential interference from the South. It doesn't actually have to put up with unionist rule because it may never happen. The British don't care if it doesn't happen. The place is actually cheaper to run the way it is now. Pay the secretary of state, pay the civil service. It would be a bonus if you could get somebody else to take the blame for political and social and economic weaknesses of the country. But it's not necessary. The British can run the country very easily. So it doesn't matter if the peace process doesn't move another inch, it actually doesn't matter-the British are in a better position than they were in before they started it.

Now as I say, the Irish government from our point of view is in a worse position because we don't have the constitutional position on which to push the government into constitutional action, into non-violent, political international action. We don't have it. But they may not want it-the Irish government to be able to get up the next time around and say, 'Look I'm very sorry, it's not our fault. The people voted.' And so they did; it's the people's fault, and ignorance is no defense, and stupidity is less. The people voted to abandon the North, and it remains abandoned. Now the people have to vote in a referendum to change it; but, the government has to hold the referendum first. Do you think that any government in the South of Ireland is going to hold a referendum to ask the people to allow them to get themselves into the mess it taken them all this time to get out of. So they're alright.

But if all falls through, and Sinn Féin stops jumping through hoops, what position will they be in? What of the gains that they have made for themselves or for the people will they be able to hold on to? American visas? Not a chance. They'll not be let into this country if they don't behave themselves. We've all been there, we know what that's like. They'll be no more big dinners courtesy of the Democratic Party because it will not be fashionable any longer to be seen on the arm of shinners. All that they have in this myth of American support can go like that. And of course the good people who fought the good fight to get them the visibility and get the doors opened that were opened will continue that fight. But the door will be shut.

Peter King will always be there doing what Peter King has always done, but Peter also remembers when the door was shut in his face. And that door can be shut again, and voting is a great invention.

There are people in this room and people not in this room, who want to know whoever gave the people the vote anyway, because they do the most ridiculous things with it. And, the people who have gone out in their droves and voted for Sinn Féin, who never lifted their finger for human rights. And there are many hundreds of people, thousands of people, who voted for Sinn Féin when the penalty for it was getting shot. And, there are many decent men and women standing for Sinn Féin in elections now who stood for election when the penalty for standing for election was getting shot. And there were kids and older people who went out and worked and put up posters for republicans when you got crucified for it.

But there is a new breed of voter, who used to vote for the SDLP, now they're voting for Sinn Féin-not because they had a radical change of heart, but because Gerry Adams is younger, smarter and better looking than John Hume. And he's going to be around longer. Now once he cannot deliver, once he cannot deliver, that insulting vote will walk away again-will walk away again to a safer pair of hands, and they'll be back where they started.

And so you say, how did they get in to the peace process and why don't they get out of it? At some point there is a dignity in when you can do nothing else, gathering your dignity and walking away. And even of this era, if they could do that, instead of running off to Westminster demanding that Stormont be put back together again so they can sit in it and play revolutionary politics. Why don't they just send a message to Mr Blair saying, 'look, been there/done it, when yous are serious about resolving, conflict resolving problems, you know where we live,' and then just walk away from it? They can't. They can't because so much energy has been vested in it. They can't because it's a very seductive system and far too many of their own people now like it.

When I came here in whatever it was, '94, and I said at the time where it was all going, nobody believed me. I counseled them not to be blaming Gerry Adams when it went to where it was inevitably going, because it was very clear that that's where it was going and when it would come to this point, he would have very few choices left because it's like a funnel.

There will be people in the four corners of the world in military and political academies studying the absolute genius of this British strategy. And when they get up to draw the diagram, the diagram will be the funnel. How people were got to the lip, and each option they made, and each choice they made, actively limited the number of choices then open to them, and increased the chances of them having to choose the only choice the British wanted them to make the next time around. And each time they did it, the funnel got narrower.

And Sinn Féin are now hanging by their finger nails. You know the wee narrow bit that goes right inside the neck of the bottle? That's where they are. And the slope down has got steeper. They're already inside the bottle but they're still hanging on to the funnel. And it's very very hard for them to start that climb back. If Gerry Adams, I believe, turned now, the majority of his own party wouldn't come with him because for some it's too steep a climb back and for others there's a nice warm breeze, and nice smell, and I don't know what it is in that bottle, but far too many people like it and they're happier to move on in.

The reality, however, is that it has nothing to do with politics as we know it, nothing to do with the things that those of us who are republicans believe in, nothing to do with carrying forward the ideology and the struggle and the capacity to create an independent, sovereign, free and socialist Ireland. Not even an independent, free and democratic Ireland. The game has changed. And as I said at the beginning, every human being is entitled to change their position in life. Everybody is entitled to say, 'Could you stop the bus for a moment? I want to get off here.' But nobody is entitled, and there's a man at the top of O'Connell Street who says it all the time, 'nobody even looks the road he's on.' Charles G. Parnell said, 'nobody has a right to put a halt to the march of a nation.' And Sinn Féin do not have the right, and the peace process does not have the right to say, 'this is where the bus stops, this is the terminal, this is where everybody gets off,' because this has nothing to do with the things we struggled for. This has nothing to do with equality, nothing to do with human rights, nothing with the working class, nothing to do with socialism.

This is how yet again the British buy in to constitutional politics the leadership of the revolutionary movement. Its about nothing more and nothing less. And it is a measure of the length of the struggle, the loyalty of the people and the calibre of the leadership that so many people followed them to their own destruction. Thank you."
And thanks to you all who had a moment to read this... Larry