Workers are re-creating the high pillars, ornate ceiling and long wooden benches of the House of Commons at Stormont, which was destroyed by a fire in 1995. This might be the only seat of government ever built on spec.
For now, there is no government of Northern Ireland to seat. It was dissolved a quarter-century ago when Britain asserted direct rule. Yet some people think, hope, that come next year when the construction work is done, there might be a parliament to use the new room.
Sinn Fein, the political arm of the terrorist Irish Republican Army, is finally at the negotiating table. Peace talks began a few weeks ago, after the British government declared it was satisfied that an IRA cease-fire declared in July was holding.
Here is what passes for progress on peace in Northern Ireland.
Negotiators for Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest party in Northern Ireland, refuse to talk to each other, even look each other in the eye.
Leaders of the UUP reserve nearly as much animosity for the British government as they do for Sinn Fein.
“The talks were rigged from the beginning by the British government,” grumped John Taylor, the deputy leader of the UUP. “We are pretty well out-talked at the table because all those other people are against us.” Taylor, one of the UUP’s three negotiators, was shot in the jaw by an IRA gunman in 1972.
“There is no peace here. I live in the real world,” said Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, who met this week with newspaper editors at the Felon’s Club, a Falls Road hangout where members are required to have served time for an IRA crime and where the artwork was crafted in prison.
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Three months of peace can be measured this way: 17 bomb attacks, 39 shootings, 45 beatings, 3 deaths. They are attributed to splinter groups on both sides that want to subvert the negotiations.
And yet, Belfast is edging toward a sense of normalcy. For the first time in 30 years, shoppers can walk into a store without having their bags searched for weapons. The police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, are no longer routinely escorted on patrol by British troops toting automatic weapons.
Merchants and community activists organize more cross-religious exchanges, cordial and cautious affairs. Several business leaders gathered at The Strand restaurant this week in a luncheon that, on the surface, resembled a Kiwanis Club meeting for all its cheery talk of commercial progress in Belfast. “See the woman with dark hair at the end of the table” whispered a Belfast city councilman. “She was one of the most formidable terrorists in Northern Ireland. They’ve recycled her as an economic development officer.”
In that uneasy peace, eight political parties and the British and Irish governments meet two days a week in negotiations to solve the Troubles.
Asked for signs of developments, all the players point out that everyone is at the table, save for two unionist political parties that boycotted the talks when Sinn Fein was admitted. In other words, there has been no measurable progress since they came together weeks ago.
Still, there might be the whisper of what could be the framework for a compromise.
It is likely to mean the end of a quarter-century of direct rule by the British government, with the creation of an assembly in which the Catholic minority political parties would have a share of power.
Leaders of the Republic of Ireland have suggested they are open to loyalist demands that Ireland’s constitution be amended to remove language that calls for a united Ireland. The constitutional demand for one country is viewed by unionists as a threat.
Agreement would mean removing, all or in part, the 17,000 British troops that still are barracked in Northern Ireland, and whose patrols, while less frequent, still are seen as a daily affront to Catholics.
Perhaps the most important change is the rhetorical shift of Sinn Fein, which has historically demanded nothing less than one Ireland, something it will not achieve in these talks.
“Our political goal is Irish unity. Our strategic objective is a demonstrable resolution of the conflict,” said Adams. “We all the time move on for our strategic objective guided by our political goal.”
A unified Ireland is not in the cards, if for no other reason than that in Northern Ireland virtually the entire Protestant majority, and a fifth of the Catholic minority, don’t want it.
A more independent Northern Ireland, however, is being pushed by the British and has the grudging acceptance of many unionists. That will require nothing less than creating a government that can accommodate, in one soon-to-be finished House of Commons, people who have been fighting a bloody religious war for decades.
The goal is an agreement that can win dual ratification by separate referendums in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The chances of that, said John Taylor, are no better than 5 percent. And while others are more optimistic, they aren’t giddy. Northern Ireland wants peace, but much of Northern Ireland wants peace only on its own terms.
What might propel the talks is the prospect of what might lay beyond yet another defeat for peace.
“If it weren’t for the work of the police and government, we would have had another Bosnia here,”said Taylor. “And the potential for that is still there if these talks fail.”