Mistrust’s toll

John Bradley

The violence that erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s had been building up for decades. The heavy-handed treatment by the RUC of the early civil rights protests escalated into what was, effectively, a civil war that endured for three decades until brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
The agreement negotiators designed power-sharing arrangements within which conflicting parties could work together with safeguards to protect each side from oppressive majoritarian rule. The primary aim was to end violent conflict by addressing grievances at least to the extent where all parties agreed to share governance. In this respect, the agreement was a stunning success, and its 25th anniversary is currently being celebrated for ending violence that destroyed so many lives.

Trust contaminated
In the aftermath of a civil war, economic policies play a crucial role in establishing the trust that is essential for recovery. The Good Friday Agreement brought an end to nearly all inter-communal violence, and the different communities within Northern Ireland arrived at formalised ways of living and ruling together. However, what remained unsettled was the level of inter-community trust, both within the Power-Sharing Administration (when it functioned) and within communities.
But the Good Friday Agreement also concerned the relationship between the two parts of our island, and post-agreement cross-border institutions were simply not up to the job of repairing the damage of decades of separation and distorted development.

Civil wars are difficult kinds of conflicts to bring to an end. Unlike wars between nation states, the victor or occupier does not pack his bags and leave. The legacy of mistrust left after a civil war does not depart with the victor’s forces. It hangs in the air and contaminates everything. Lack of trust delays or prevents economic recovery.
Stalled economic recovery promotes further distrust, challenges the often fragile post-war institutions, and risks creating circumstances where peace may not endure.

WWII lessons
However, maybe we can learn something from the wars between European nation states. The ending of the First World War was badly handled, and the vindictive terms set by the Treaty of Versailles led inexorably – as the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in his 1919 book ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ – to the second great European war exactly 20 years later.
These lessons were learned, and in the aftermath of World War II, the western Allies tried to create conditions where European states could live in peace and prosperity. US-financed Marshall Aid served to kick start devastated European economies. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) put the European strategic industries necessary for war preparations into the hands of shared institutions. And the evolution of today’s European Union was initiated by the Treaty of Rome in 1956.

The decades following the Good Friday Agreement were characterised by excessive optimism on the part of Northern policymakers, who believed that the ravages of three decades of violence and the destruction of much of Northern businesses could be repaired quickly.
There was much talk of a ‘peace dividend’. Investment would flow in. The underlying entrepreneurial culture of Northern Ireland would bounce back. Generous re-construction finance would be forthcoming from the UK treasury, from Europe and from America.

However, the reality was that, as a result of decades of violence, the Northern economy had become utterly dependent on the public sector, and even the business sector had become addicted to subsidies and grants.
Some inward investment did arrive, but foreign investors took a more jaundiced view of conditions in Northern Ireland, where the increasing polarisation of communities into separate areas caused serious difficulties for the operation of the labour market.
Proactive development
Nor was there much effective interest from Northern policymakers in understanding how peace was affecting different sub-regions of Northern Ireland in very different ways.
In the fraught negotiations that led to the agreement, there was unlikely to be any Irish equivalent of the ECSC, EEC or EU. There was never going to be any meeting of minds between the two development agencies on the island. There was never going to be any co-ordinated planning of island infrastructure, although some piece-meal co-operation did take place.

And the irony is that the nature of the Power Sharing Executive in Northern Ireland made it more difficult, and not less difficult, to achieve this kind of dynamic re-thinking of how the North fitted into the economies of these islands at a time when the other regions of the Britain were beginning to carve out new strategic postures.
There needs to be a radical re-think about why we need pro-active and dynamic cross-border institutions. At the time when the Good Friday Agreement was being negotiated, the role for these bodies was regarded as symbolic. But the time for symbolism is surely over. We now need reality. In a post-Brexit era, we need our own version of a European Coal and Steel Community.

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.