The Status Quo Remains The Same

Even the Associated Press has picked up on the story. We're on the verge of a breakthrough, the reporter suggests. Sinn Fein and the DUP are going to reach an agreement and enter into government together. It's going to happen soon, this time, for sure.

If you think that history begins at the end of your nose, you might think that what is happening in the north of Ireland is ground-breaking, new and a definite improvement over the old ways. If you know much about the far distant past, say, one hundred fifty years or so, you would see the status quo being maintained in a flurry of double speak and denial.

What was called Home Rule at the time was anathema to the Protestants. They much preferred to be ruled directly by London, by the non-Catholic non-Irish, and they stuck by their position through the land wars of the Victorian era, labeling Home Rule as Rome Rule. There was no room for compromise, since any sort of agreement would involve Catholics coming to power, and that was not to be. Not ever.

Thanks to the wording of the Belfast Agreement, signed over one hundred years after the cause of Home Rule was loudly trumpeted, the people of the Six Counties are supposed to be governed by their own parliamentary body, sitting in Stormont in Belfast. Ever since the Agreement was signed, nearly ten years past, Ian Paisley and his DUP followers have been finding excuses to not carry out the tenets of the pact. Back in 1914, Home Rule was going to go into effect....just as soon as this pesky little World War is cleared up. Now, in 2006, a modern version of home rule is going to go into effect...just as soon as the IRA disarms. Oh, done that? Okay, then as soon as they accept the authority of the Police Service. Uh oh. They might agree to that as well? Fine, then the IRA has to completely disband and turn in all their members who committed crimes and pay back all the money they stole and identify the burial sites of everyone who disappeared during The Troubles and....Ian Paisley will always find another one to add to the list.

Stormont Assembly in this lifetime? Not going to happen. Didn't happen back then, won't happen now, and no one will admit that the same game is being played, year after year after year. String it along, simply don't do it, and no one has the political will to force Home Rule on the DUP. Tell a child not to take a cookie and then after they take it tell them not to take another and then after they take another tell them not to take a third, and you get the picture.

Poor Bill Clinton. What's he to do with all those lovely photos that were snapped to commemorate the landmark Belfast Agreement? It's just a ream of empty promises and unfulfillment, and that's not the legacy he expected to leave behind. Funny how the present has a way of mucking up the past. Rather like a distorting mirror, reshaping a memory into something that scarcely resembles the original.